Thelema Lodge Calendar for October 2002 e.v.
Thelema Lodge Calendar
for October 2002 e.v.
The viewpoints and opinions expressed herein are the responsibility of the contributing authors and do not necessarily reflect the position of OTO or its officers.Copyright © O.T.O. and the Individual Authors, 2002 e.v.
Thelema Lodge
Ordo Templi Orientis
P.O.Box 2303
Berkeley, CA 94702 USA
October 2002 e.v. at Thelema Lodge
Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law. Announcements from
Lodge Members and Officers
25th Anniversary Crowleymas
We celebrate twenty-five years of thelemic fraternity this month as the
oldest continually operating official body of Ordo Templi Orientis, gathering
on Crowleymas evening, Saturday 12th October, to feast in honor of our silver
anniversary at Thelema Lodge. Dinner, which we will serve communally to each
other, begins at sunset; all attending please bring prepared entrees, salads,
or desserts, along with drinks to share. Reminiscences, photographs, and
other mementos will also be most welcome, and we especially hope that some of
our longstanding (or former) participants will be on hand to share their
stories of Thelema and of the O.T.O. in the Bay area.
By the time it was made official, Thelema Lodge had "been in operation
informally" in Berkeley for six months already, beginning with eight Minerval
initiations on 19th April 1977 e.v. and continuing through that spring and
summer until the Order had about fifty active initiate members (and almost as
many associate members). When plans were made to formally charter the new
Grand Lodge just "as the Sun emerges from partial Solar Eclipse on Crowley's
birthday," and on the same date to inaugurate weekly celebration of the
gnostic mass, it was the culmination of years of dedicated effort by Grady
McMurtry and his supporters. On 12th October 1977 e.v., the 102nd anniversary
of the Prophet's lesser feast, Aleister Crowley's Ordo Templi Orientis was
reactivated by his designated Caliph. "Thus again the phoenix rises!"
Reports of the event afterwards called it "a resounding success!" At the
height of that afternoon's partial solar eclipse, "Crowley's seal ring was
pressed into the wax" on the ornate vellum charter, and a hexagram thrown from
the I Ching (Kwai/43) using Crowley's own set of sticks. Afterwards, as one
participant said later, "We had one hellova party!" (Quotations in this
paragraph are from issues 2 & 3 of the The O.T.O. Newsletter, published from
Berkeley in 1977 e.v.)
Number of the Beast
Throughout the apocalyptic Book of Daniel, the word chioh (
= 25)
is used to mean "beast of the field" and to indicate the four symbolic beasts
in the old prophet's vision. This spelling of the word is unique to Daniel,
but the Torah makes frequent use of the same word in its older form (
= 20). Daniel, however, is the outstanding literary influence upon the Greek
writer of the Book of Revelation, traditionally identified as John of Patmos.
It is unquestionably the symbolic significance of the "beasts" in Daniel which
provided a context for the use of related symbolism in Revelation, and where
John wrote "therion" in Greek, he echoed the "chioh" of the Hebrew vision.
(The Book of Revelation also employs the alternate term for creature, "zöon" --
= 927 -- but "therion" --
= 247 -- occurs in that text nearly twice
as often, with the two terms seemingly used interchangeably.)
The Radix of Vibration
Our cycle of Crowley's Rites of Eleusis (Liber 850) concludes this month
with performances of the two final acts in the great planetary drama. The Rite of Mercury will take the form of a dance rave, with the dramatic portion
of the ritual opening the evening at 8:00 and lasting only half an hour or so
(this being a very quick sort of god) to free our space for a night of free-
moving ecstatic dance-worship into which all may join for as little or as long
as they care to keep it up. Mercury will be held at a changed location (not at the Labyrinth); for further information contact Paul at (510) 295-1883.
Purity of Liberty
The Rite of Luna brings our twenty-third Rites cycle to a close on Monday evening 21st October, beginning at 8:00 at Cafe de la Paz, 1600 Shattuck Avenue (at Cedar Street) in Berkeley. Come see the summation of our entire chronicle of descent through the spheres of the planetary powers, which Elton has dramatized as a controversy about bringing the nation into the hazards of foreign war after a shocking sneak attack. "Bear the bowl of libation" through the rounds at this ceremony of dissolution, and after the carefully calculated sequence of nine planetary drinks you'll be able to sit back and feel within yourself the energies of each of the divinities dissolve down through their spheres into your own great vital figure of Pan. To know more about this event before attending, contact Elton at (510) 652-9986.
Thelema Obtentum Procedero Amoris Nuptiae
The lesser feast of John Whiteside Parsons will be celebrated with a
gathering of magicians on Wednesday evening 2nd October at Thelema Lodge. We
will be reading from some of Parsons' writings, and amplifying the importance
of Frater 210 for the establishment of Thelemic culture in California. We're
celebrating our twenty-fifth anniversary here this month, but Thelema Lodge
was first planned and given its name more than twice as long ago, when Grady
McMurtry got back from his European service in the second world war. In 1946
e.v. when Grady began planning to get a lodge started in San Francisco,
including a temple for the gnostic mass, he was thinking along the lines of
Agape Lodge, as he had known it in Hollywood before the war under the
leadership of Wilfred Smith, or as he had just visited it in Pasadena under
the new mastership of Jack Parsons. Jack had been the one who introduced
Grady to the O.T.O. in 1940 e.v., and it was he who later suggested the name
for Thelema Lodge, as a counterpart to Agape in Southern California. Within a
year, however, Grady had moved to the East Bay and was beginning a family as
he completed his degree on the G.I. Bill and prepared for graduate school at
Berkeley, with hardly a moment to spare for O.T.O. organizing. Meanwhile
Parsons left the Order to concentrate on his own magical work, and Grady was
fighting in Korea when he read of his friend's death in 1952. It would be
another twenty-five years before Thelema Lodge became a reality.
Even before he requested initiation, the O.T.O. recognized in Parsons a
powerful magician and an extraordinary Thelemite. "I see him as the real
successor of Therion," Jane Wolfe wrote of Jack in late 1940 e.v. not long
after they met, and soon he and his wife Helen were initiated at Agape Lodge,
of which they became active members. Crowley himself (by report and in
correspondence) was likewise impressed with Parsons, and lodgemaster Wilfred
Smith also got along especially well with this large, handsome, well-spoken,
energetic, skillful young man, who was working at Cal Tech for the government
as a rocket fuel designer. In his O.T.O. work Parsons took the motto of
Thelema Obtentum Procedero Amoris Nuptiae (
= 210), by which he seems to
have meant that Thelema will be established by means of ritual copulation.
Over the six years of his participation with the Agape community Parsons rose
to be master of the lodge, which he relocated to his mansion "the Parsonage"
at 1003 S. Orange Grove Avenue in Pasadena. But then, during a period of
personal instability and ritual experimentation beginning after the war with
his Babalon Working, Parsons left the O.T.O. to work out some even more
radical religious principles. Elaborating upon imaginative archaic traditions
partly drawn from occult novels, he declared a new Thelemic cult called the
Witchcraft, and assumed the name Belarion Armiluss Al Dajjal as a its
prototypical priest. He then set about declaring scriptures, rituals, and a
philosophy for the Witchcraft, but had not got very far when his life ended
abruptly in a workshop explosion.
Freedom is twofold; there is the freedom within, and the freedom without, and, like all things, the first freedom starts at the home plate.
The mainspring of the individual is his creative will. This will is the tone of his tendencies, his destiny, his inner truth. It is one with the force that makes the birds sing and flowers bloom; as inevitable as gravity, as implicit as a bowel movement, it informs alike atoms and men and suns.
To the man who knows this will, there is no why or why not; no can or cannot; he is!
There is no known force that can turn an apple to an alley cat; there is no known force that can turn a man from his will. This is the triumph of genius, that, surviving the centuries, enlightens the world.
This force burns in every man.
| ---- Jack Parsons, "Living Thelema,"
published in Christopher S. Hyatt, ed., Rebels and Devils:
The Psychology of Liberation (Tempe, AZ: New Falcon, 1996), page 87 |
Founder's Day
There will be a gathering of lodge members and local Thelemites in Berkeley
to honor the lesser feast of Grady Louis McMurtry on Friday evening 18th
October. Hosted for us by Leigh Ann at Ashby House beginning at 8:00, this
celebration will include a communal feast to which all are invited to bring
food and drink as well as stories and readings to share. (For material to
read, check any past issue of this newsletter, or almost any of the preceding
Thelemic publications issued from this area during Grady's life.) As Caliph
Hymenaeus Alpha, Grady had the initiated inspiration, the organizational
experience, and the Prophet's warrant to revive the O.T.O., and this lodge was
the headquarters he established from which to get that work done. For
precisely 93 months (exact very nearly to the hour), from the chartering of
the lodge in Berkeley on 12th October 1977 e.v. until his greater feast on the
afternoon of 12th July 1985, Grady led Thelema Lodge as Grand Master. Now
that his Order has grown much bigger and stronger than he ever got to see it,
and now that our lodge has continued much longer as a local body of the Order
than it did as his international administrative center, we continue to
celebrate Grady's great work, and to keep alive the heritage of his community
here.
Fumbling for the Reality Switch
The speculative fiction of Philip K. Dick (1928-1982) is our subject this
month for the Section Two reading group, meeting in the lodge library with
Caitlin from 8:00 to 9:30 on Monday evening 28th October. An ambitious writer
who did not begin with genre fiction (and who certainly would have preferred
to be taken as the Virginia Woolf of his generation rather than its Jules
Verne), Dick spent much of his life here in the Bay area, living in Berkeley
and in Marin County through the 1960s e.v. He learned to make a living
writing stories for science fiction magazines and novels for Ace Publications
sci-fi paperbacks. Brimming with concepts and ideas, Dick was eager to
attempt all kinds of literary stunts and unexpected manipulations of his plots
or characters; he also wrote very quickly, completing (for example) ten novels
in less than eighteen months during the middle '60s. In all, with a career
limited to only thirty years, he published forty novels and well over a
hundred stories. Naturally there is a certain amount of overlapping among
these works, and his plots often seem imperfectly constructed, or his
characterizations somewhat repetitious. Nevertheless Dick has such a strong
sense of honesty with regard to his characters, and such a wise sense of fun,
that the reader can accept and question nearly simultaneously the plausibility
of his situations.
Many of Dick's characteristic ideas have over the twenty years since his
death become entrenched in popular culture through appropriation in the movies. One example is the notion of programming motivation and personality
and even contrived memories into persons or artificial constructs. Others
involve the corporate manipulation of society, the post-atomic devastation of
a world substantially destroyed by futuristic warfare, the building of an
artificial town to subvert the lives of its selected inhabitants, or Dick's
wonderful flying cars which drive themselves and give good advice to their
passengers. Repeatedly Dick will bring his subject around to the fundamental
challenges of how we establish reality for ourselves, how we share it, and how
we can learn to alter it and manipulate the principles upon which we have
constructed it. Several of his novels are overtly gnostic, either in their
mythologies of interplanetary or preternatural invaders, or else in the
concern of their ordinary characters with gnostic writings and ideas. Dick
was also (along with Aleister Crowley) one of the twentieth century's greatest
writers on the subjects of intoxication, substance abuse, and drug addiction.
Dick tended to anger traditional sci-fi editors by setting some of his
interplanetary situations only a few decades in the future, in years which
(had he lived to be old) he might have hoped to see for himself. Thus in
Martian Time-Slip (1964), perhaps his finest novel, the mental health problems
of human settlers in the first towns on Mars (with its dry, thin, but still
breathable atmosphere) are dated to the late 1990s, in a way which some
readers find subversively unrealistic, and others see as boundlessly
optimistic. Dick's novels are all short, and may be read quite rapidly;
participants are encouraged to read or review a few of them for our
discussion. Also recommended especially are The Man in the High Castle (1962)
about a Japanese occupation of San Francisco, Now Wait for Last Year (1966)
with designer drugs in the corporate future, the classic novel of artificial
reality Time Out of Joint (1959), the hilarious and heartbreaking addiction
novel A Scanner Darkly (1977), The Game-Players of Titan (1963) with its
fellowship around the boardgame in a depopulated near-future, or The Three
Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch (1965) with its gnostic nightmare vision.
Previous Section Two Next Section Two
Rites in Review
This text is the result of editorial distillation from about twenty minutes of an audio tape recording in which Leigh Ann discusses her participation in The
Rites of Eleusis at Thelema Lodge over the past seven annual cycles. When asked at the end if she had any advice for the audience presenting themselves as candidates for initiation in The Rites of Eleusis, Leigh Ann considered a moment, and replied "be still, and let them speak to your psyche."
Getting the Rites Right:
Some Thoughts on Crowley's Eleusis
by Leigh Ann Hussey
recorded 16 August 2002 E.V.
What is the Rite of Luna about? Well, Luna is about dissolution. There
are two ways that you can say it: dissolution can mean dissolving, or you can
say a person is dissolute, as in "gone to drink," or "Bear the bowl of
libation!" This is a conception that I came up with over the course of
finally looking back over all the Rites and giving them a coherence. Each one
of the rites is its own thing, but there's an over-arching theme which is
delivered in the beginning at Saturn, and that is: "There is no god in the
shrine." What you're looking for is not here, and when you get where it is,
you won't need it anymore. So that each physical god -- each god we can see
and look at and touch, and conceive of -- passes on to the next one. That is
not god, and so it passes on to the next one. Finally we get to Luna, and
there's no place for Luna to go. There is no god that Luna can dissolve into,
because we're done. There are only seven classically visible planets, so we
can't go any further than that. Well, we can go into the manifest, into Malkuth, if we feel like it, but that's not part of what this is about. So
what Luna does -- where she goes -- is, she dissolves into the all.
All Luna really is is the reflection of the brilliance of the Angel; she's
the reflected sun. That's why her King Scale color is purple, which is the
complementary color of Tiphareth's yellow. She is the reflected sun; she is
the Angel seen through a glass darkly. Or, "in a glass darkly," as in a
mirror. A lot of people, when they say "through a glass darkly," they think
through as in through a pane of glass; it's actually through (as in "by means
of") a mirror. So she's the mirror image of the Angel. And where is there to
go from her? Well, out into the universe. And in fact, come to think of it,
that's totally right, because to get to Malkuth in the first place you have to
go through Tau, which is the Universe.
The gist of it is, you're going through this cycle, and each one of these
faces -- each one of these mirrors -- is falling away. That's where I got the
whole conception of the mirror falling away, for the Rite of Jupiter last
year. The walls are there; the walls signify Saturn. In my design for the
Rite of Jupiter, you've got the prisoner in his walled cell, you've got the
nun in her walled cloister, you've got the academic in the walls of his
university. You've got these walls, and this structure, and this restriction.
That's the Saturn part; and it falls away, then you have this mirror. So each
one is seeing this amazing being -- this beautiful thing -- and that's when
they start to begin to talk to each other, because before this they haven't
had any kind of consciousness of each other. They start to talk to each
other, and they start to turn, and to see if they can see what the other
person is looking at. That's how I got the part about going around the wheel,
which is important for Jupiter. They turn around and look in the next mirror,
to see if they can see what the other person is seeing. When the Prisoner
looks at himself, and sees his perfect self. When Typhon (the passion guy)
looks into the mirror, he sees his passion made perfect. He sees the Angel,
strong and perfect in love, and falls in love with it. When Hermanubis looks
in the mirror and sees his reflection, he sees his knowledge made perfect.
"Certainty, not faith;" he sees the transformation of his dry academic
knowledge into the supernal knowledge. And when the Sphinx looks into the
mirror, she sees the one that she's always been wanting to see in the first
place; the vision that she's wanted to have. She has been dry -- she's been
in her dark night of the soul and her dryness and darkness -- and not able to
see. She's been yearning for this light, and getting only darkness. When it
falls, then she sees herself. So each one of them is seeing themselves. Then
they start to interact with each other and say, "Well, let me see if I can see
what you're seeing." They go around, and so each one of them sees: I see the
scholar's god, and it looks like me. I see the nun's god, and he looks like
me. But you've still only got mirrors, and so all you're seeing is the
reflection. And then that falls, you have Jupiter, the expansive, the "hi!
I'm going to give you everything you want!" Actually it's kind of interesting
about that; during that year I found myself really seriously burning out in
many ways, and spending myself to make things happen.
So that falls, and you have, again, a visible image, a tangible god you can
look at and see and discourse with, or whatever. At the end of it -- and here
is how you see that I was beginning to realize what was supposed to be going
on with the Rites as a whole -- Jupiter says "I'm finite. I can spend myself
empty." And Mars says, "Right; and that's not what I want. I want the
infinite." And Jupiter says, "Go find it yourself." So that's what's
happening; each one of these masks, each one of these mirrors, falls away.
And it's like an onion. You know, with a hailstone, or a pearl, you take the
layers away and there's a thing in the middle of it -- the dust, or some
irritant -- the thing that the pearl or the hailstone is built out of. With
an onion, you peel the layers away, and you finally come to the middle of it
-- there's nothing! There's just the mysterious life, that you can't see or
touch, that made it the alive thing. So when Luna finally falls away, there's
nothing -- there's everything -- there's Pan. That's how I came to conceive of the Rites after seven years of doing them, and looking at the small picture,
and gradually having my sphere of vision expand. I was using more peripheral
vision, and even as I was focusing on individual rites, I was thinking about
the larger arc. So it became harder, of course, to try and set it up, for the
people who would come after, because I was getting closer and closer to the
beginning of the cycle. I had a twofold goal, with this year, which was to
give the year's cycle a really good kickoff, and at the same time to give my
personal cycle a really memorable closing. And everyone seems to have liked
it. Sam Webster said an interesting thing when we were in rehearsal. He said
that the Buddhists say, when you complete a great big cycle like this, it is a
store up in your karma bank. The completion mirrors your eventual completion,
as a perfected being. While everything you leave undone is a mark against
that. So it's kind of cool, because I have a lot of little unfinished
projects; it's kind of cool that I've finished one humungous project.
N.R.O.O.G.D. does, annually, their own Eleusinian mystery. They always do
it in September, at the equinox. It has often been Aidan Kelly's script,
which I modified at least once, and which Magical Acts (which is the people
who put on the Midsummer Night's Dream production this summer), did last year
as the classical Eleusinian Mysteries. They had the chorogogue, and they had
the basket and the showings, and all the foo that they could reasonably
research out. This year, apparently, they're doing a play which Kate (the
director) has written, that I've seen bits and pieces of the script of -- it's
kind of interesting -- not quite the same thing. But when I did the
Eleusinian Mysteries, I also tried to move to the classical idea in the
strongest possible way. Aidan's was fairly loosely taken from that, using
such information about the mysteries as could be had in nineteen-sixty-god-
knows-what, when he wrote it. There's a lot of cool stuff that's been
researched out about the mysteries since then, but it's a very very different
thing, because they're approaching the Eleusinian mysteries as the classical
Greek tradition. And again, Crowley's Rites of Eleusis were a very different
thing. To do Crowley's Rites, I had to make that awareness of the historic
tradition and my N.R.O.O.G.D. experience check out, so that I could deal with
this new thing. And on the whole, I think we do a better ritual. As to
whether the experience itself is initiatory, I never found it so as an
audience member. I tried to make mine be. The one that Magical Acts did last
year was deliberately, specifically, intentionally initiatory for the
audience, which I thought was very very cool. They went up to Bort Meadows,
which is a big old park up in the Oakland hills, and they laid out pieces of
the park as areas of Greece. They actually walked people around in the park
to make the pilgrimage to Eleusis -- it was really great! And it was all done
with spiffy lamps, and it was very very cool. A big big dog and pony show,
and you know how I love a dog and pony show!
I don't think we'll ever get tired of these rituals, because as long as
there are people who are going to come to the Rites with a fresh perspective,
there will always be somebody who has something new to tell us. It's the same
thing about the mass; I am never ever going to learn all there is to know
about gnostic mass. Every time I do mass I learn something new; almost every
week I learn something new about mass that I didn't know before, or I make a
realization about mass. For an example; last night we were at Nathan's class,
and we were talking about the Star trump, and he was saying that Ebony had
this conception that Babalon was, as it were, an emanation of Nuit; a more
accessible microcosmic version of our Thelemic goddess, one who is more
accessible by invocation. Nathan said that Thelemic magicians tend to invoke
for themselves (and to wear as an "over-personality") Therion and Babalon,
more than they attempt to invoke Nuit and Hadit. I had this sudden brain-
fever about mass: when the priestess comes out, she's dressed in blue; she is
Nuit; she's veiled, she's mysterious, she's not accessible. She's even called
"The Virgin." She comes out, and it is as Nuit that she draws the dead guy
out of the tomb, and he says: "I'm born; I live; I die. I'm just a regular
schmo." And so, as Nuit, as the supernal goddess, it's she who vests him as priest and king -- transforms him from an ordinary guy into the priest and
king. They head back up the tree, she goes behind the veil, and when she
appears again, it's as Babalon. It's as the accessible, emanated goddess,
compete with chalice and everything. Nathan had an interesting point on
Sunday about the whole idea that taking the gifts from the priestess --
whether or not you actually take them from her, you think of them as coming
from her. (It's kind of like darshan, where you go to the guru and you hand
the guru a flower or something basically worthless that signifies your ego,
that you are surrendering; and then he in turn gives you a fruit or something,
that is the sign of the grace that you get.) It's kind of the same flavor of
thing (if that makes any sense), which I thought was kind of an interesting
point. So, today, I'm thinking about the primary colors, and the paths. All
of the yellow paths on the King scale are above Tiphereth; all of the red ones
are below. And then, two of the three blue ones go straight up the middle,
and -- you know -- I went, "check it out!" Will inspires Love; Love comes down
and draws Will up into the higher knowledge.
So, you know, I realize, or learn, or come up with something new about
gnostic mass all the time. Because any more, gnostic mass is about the most
meaningful ritual I know. There's just no mining the depth of its riches.
I'm pretty sure that A. C. had no idea -- well, maybe he did have an idea, but
I know that he wasn't consciously thinking about all of the parts when he was
putting it together. He was just basing it on the ritual he already knew, and
setting it up so that we could have public sex magick for our central ritual
of the O.T.O. I don't think he was fully cognizant when he composed it, of
exactly how full of wealth it is. I'm a big believer in gnostic mass, anyway.
People can say anything they like about it being sexist, and blah-blah-blah;
they're just failing to see the point. All they're seeing is the words:
they're not seeing the action, they're not seeing the alchemy, they're not
seeing the transformation; they're just not seeing. All they're seeing is the
same thing that an outsider sees when he looks at Crowley and sees the
degenerate, druggy guy who did his very best to scandalize English society and
make everyone think that he was the devil incarnate. The guy who basically
wanted to fuck with everybody, and fuck everybody! The insider looks and sees
the prophet, and the poet. I mean, not the doggerel poet of "Sweet, sweet are
May and June, dear," but the poet of The Book of the Law, and the brilliant
beautiful Liber Cordis Cincti Serpente, which is my absolutely favorite holy
book, bar none! I mean, I know it's probably sacreligious to say, but I love
it better than I like Liber Legis. I don't think that we'll ever run out of
space for the Rites to tell us something, as long as we have people to figure
out what it means to them, and try to declare it to somebody else.
The more I learn about magick, the more I see in the mass. But just
coming from the pure perspective of my original me, I could see symbolic sex
magick and the basic god/goddess kind of interaction going on. Not
coincidentally, it's the same flavor of mystery going on that first really
struck me about the Catholic mass. I didn't grow up Catholic, but I went to a
Catholic high school, and was seeing masses every week, because we had them at
school. And to me, the non-initiate of the mysteries, the miracle of the mass
was a serious miracle; there was magic going on. There was something cool and
inscrutable going on that I could not see, because I was not an initiate. And
there but for the grace of testicles go I, because, had I been a boy, I would
probably be a priest now, except possibly for the liking sex too much. (I
would probably still have liked sex too much if I were a boy.)
It was really funny; we took these vocational aptitude tests, as one does
in high school, and even then I knew kind of how to swing it. I was intending
to be a veterinarian, so when veterinarian came out on top I wasn't surprised.
Even the second one didn't surprise me, and that was musician, because I was
doing music at the time. The third one really knocked me blindside: it was
"religious." I had an aptitude to be a religious. Everybody in my school
thought I was going to be a nun, except me. It wasn't until I was getting out
that people were saying to me that they thought I was going to join holy orders. Oddly enough, as time has gone on it has proved to be so. Originally
coming to Liber XV, our gnostic mass, I saw a little bit of the same flavor of
mystery going on that goes on in the Roman mass. But the more that I have
educated myself about the kinds of things that Crowley might have had in mind
while he was composing the mass, the more I see in it. Whatever that may be
worth.
Crowley Classics
These articles were part of the extensive study of astrology which, in 1915 and 1916 e.v., Crowley was hired to write for the popular American astrologer Evangeline Adams. More than a decade later, after Adams and Crowley lost contact, she published the material under her own name in two volumes which bore no mention of their true author. These books sold quite well, remaining in print for more than twenty years, and on the basis of their success Adams became one of America's most celebrated astrologers. This material is reprinted from the text published by Adams in 1930 e.v. as Astrology: Your Place Among the Stars. "The Problem of Death" is a good example of Crowley's scientific approach to the interpretation of horoscopes. Because it was for obscure reasons excluded from the wonderful new edition of Crowley's General Principles of Astrology (Liber 536) we present it here as both an appendix and an advertisement for that book (Boston, MA & York Beach, ME: Weiser Books, August 2002), which does include the material pertaining to Luna also reprinted here.
Two Notes on Astrology
by Aleister Crowley
(with Evangeline Adams)
I
The Problem of Death
Astrologers have often been reproached with their comparatively frequent
failures to predict the time of death. The reason has never been made clear;
for the problem has never been properly understood.
Let us consider how it has been treated. For example, the astrologer has
looked at the Sun, or the Moon in the case of a woman, and at the eighth
house, and the Lord of that house. From the radical afflictions of those, and
from their afflictions by direction or transit, he has formulated his
judgment.
Now the reason of his error is a fundamental one. Except in the case of
violent death, by accident, suicide, or assassination, death is not a single
isolated phenomenon but the culmination and climax of a long series of
phenomena. When St Paul said "I die daily," he was speaking literal truth.
All life involves metabolism, and the asymptote of the metabolic curve is
called death. Death is the physiological goal; and pathology is only the
history of short cuts upon the path.
Now when a child is born into the world, its hold on life is of the
weakest. Very small accidents can cut short that life; and so frequently does
this occur that until recently infant mortality was the standing shame of our
race. But as a child grows, if it is healthy, this grip of life increases
daily. It is well known what extremities of exposure, hunger, and other
trials may be endured by a strong man without the slightest permanent injury.
Even self-inflicted wounds such as the drink and drug habits are borne by many
for years before any visible damage to the physical constitution becomes apparent. In old age this hold again weakens, and is ultimately so tenuous
that the cord snaps at an almost imperceptible strain.
The astrologers of the past have unaccountably neglected to make these
considerations, obvious as they are. It is not the fault of the science. So
slight a matter as the opposition of Mercury to the Moon may kill a girl baby
outright; so serious an affair as the transit of Uranus over the Sun may leave
the native apparently untouched. It is obvious that Mars either passes over
the radical Sun, or squares him, or opposes him several times in every year.
And what with the other malefics, and directions, and so on, one might well
exclaim: "In the midst of life we are in death." Some of these attacks will
be weak through being far out of parallel aspect; others will be mitigated by
counterbalancing good aspects; but on the whole one may say that such caveats
can only be entered against about one-half of the threats of life. It is
moderate to say that, on the old astrological theories, it is a very good year
when the native might not die at least three times. There is certainly never
any difficulty in discovering why he did die after he is comfortably buried.
Then why are these aspects inoperative? How is it that a man can survive a
series of bad afflictions to succumb later to a trifle? The answer is, first,
that it depends on his general vitality, and, second, we deny the fact. Death
itself does not occur visibly; but something in the nature of death may occur
invisibly and insensibly in the organism. Who can say what is the true birth-
hour of a cancer or diabetes? At what moment does that first degenerative
change in the supra-renal capsules take place which is recognized much later,
and always too late, as Addison's disease?
Such diseases, and there are very many such, have no symptoms discoverable
(in the present state of medical knowledge) until the mischief is done. Here,
then, astrology may render priceless service to the native. It can warn him
of the time of the threat and its nature, so that at that particular time he
may take some special precaution. The weak part of the body is indicated by
the sign involved, and the type of disease threatened by the planet which
menaces the mischief. The native can therefore take measures to obviate the
peculiar risk to which his attention is thus drawn.
Forewarned is forearmed nowhere more than in astrology. The proper degree
and quality of mental and moral action can take a most evil aspect and
transmute its action, transform its character, and deflect its issue to a
plane where all things visibly and unmistakably "work together for good to
them that love God, and are called according to His purpose."
II
The Moon Symbolically Considered
Selene, or Diana, or Luna, is the twin sister of the Sun. She is complete
woman, in all phases, untouched by male caresses.
The Moon in her increase is the child, innocent and receptive, smiling
above the sunset; nightly we see her grow, nearer and nearer to her triumph
over darkness, queen of heaven! It is this Moon that gleams so phantastically
yet so candescent, a motive repeated again and again in the hymns of every
poet. Keats was a mere nympholept to the Moon, like his own Endymion. In the
pages of Swinburne, her lustre lamps fitfully his verse. Baudelaire, one of
the greatest of all poets, seems rather of the moon than of the earth. The
Indian lyrists chant her beauty in unnumbered songs, and the priests of all
nations have done worship to her on hidden altars. She has been incorporated
in all religions as the symbol of woman at her highest.
Yet she is also huntress like her brother Apollo; she is to be seen in dim
woods with her maidens and her hounds. Woe to him who, not being utterly
chaste, surprises her! Her arrows are barbed with silver as his with gold;
and if his are dipped in death, so are hers poisoned with madness.
Restlessness, hunger for the unattainable, seeking after strange pleasures,
such are some of the lesser signs of moon-infatuation.
It is noticeable how small a section of poetic attention is given to the
gracious childhood of the Moon. For at first she is asleep in the arms of the
Sun, and almost before we are aware she springs to fullness.
But glorious is that fullness. She is now Sophia, the Virgin Wisdom of the
Father. It is she that appears in the gloom of the threshold, and leads us
into the Temple. She is our pure aspiration to things high and holy, the
triple cord that binds us to the stainless unity beyond all. She is the veil
upon the sanctuary, the mist of tears before the eyes of the penitent. She is
sorrow, and pure love that burns up sorrow! She is the lustral water, and the
mystic bearer of the Holy Grail. It is she who will clothe us about with all
purity and all perfection; it is she who will give us to drink in the House of
the Father.
Gaze upon her splendour, gaze not only with your eyes but with your heart;
follow her in dreams with such strength that dream becomes reality. For the
Moon is in heaven what the sea is upon earth; and what that is, only they know
who truly love the sea.
For so do we gain life most, when most absolutely we surrender it; the goal
of our existence is not on earth. Life is but an ordeal; let us manfully pass
through it; but whatever its rewards may be, it is not on earth but in heaven
that we come to the understanding of ourselves. That is the End of the Quest.
The Moon
It is by no accident that the Moon is the only one of the heavenly bodies
which revolves around the earth. In the nativity, the Moon is not really part
of the character in the same way that the planets are; she is however, of
extreme importance, because she represents the sensorium.
The Moon has, by far, the most powerful influence on destiny, although its
influence is not so direct; it never produces clear, traceable events in life,
as do the major planets. Its effect, however, is steady, permanent and active
at all times, because the Moon is the ruler of environment.
Our destiny comes first of all out of our environment, and viewed from this
standpoint, the Moon is most important. As an illustration, suppose we find
the Moon greatly afflicted in the nativity of a male, and so placed as to
affect the first four years of his life in his mother relations, and later to
affect his marriage relations. He will be in danger the first four years of
receiving from his mother what might be called the "Oedipus complex"; in other
words, he may get such a violent modification of his character because of an
abnormal attachment to his mother that he becomes a timid, repressed
character, lacking initiative and personal force. As the result of this
repression of the self, a whole line of unfortunate, malefic events will
inevitably follow in his life. A man having received such a restricting
complex is seldom happily married, is rarely, if ever, happy in social
relations; the results upon his destiny are here clearly marked.
It is from this point of view that we have traced the various spheres of
human interest and activity which follow the force of the Moon's position as
it may affect personal initiative, money matters, business, success, marriage,
friends, and so on. This is because of its modifying force upon the most
intimate and personal qualities of life, and its effect upon the instinctive
plane or subconscious mind of the human being.
One has only to look at an ephemeris to see that the Moon is afflicted by
one planet or another almost every day of the week. Some afflictions will
naturally be more serious than others, but the way to consider the problem is
to recognize that, in the majority of horoscopes, there is affliction at one
time or another, and that it is a rare and happy circumstance when none of
them are serious enough to prevent the full maturing of the good aspects.
We may not proceed to consider in more detail the action of the Moon. Her
aspects will naturally show the particular development of sense instruction
which will occur in the native. Thus, for example, the opposition of the Sun
usually means romance, but frustrated by circumstances over which the native has little or no control; the rays of the Sun falling full upon the disc of
the Moon thrill her with all the glow and warmth of creative life. A trine of
Jupiter, on the other hand, will cause the senses of the native to be
impressed strongly by the qualities of Jupiter. As an illustration, imagine a
man born with a very strong combination of Saturn and Mars, giving him great
selfishness and great executive power. Let him have also a trine of Jupiter
and the Moon, and we have at first sight, a rather contradictory situation.
But the harmony is easy to find. Such a person will be impressed by
altruistic subjects like religion, and, therefore, religious channels will be
those through which his selfishness and power can best operate. We may,
therefore, find him develop into an ambitious and intriguing ecclesiastic. It
is by the consideration of the many different aspects that the astrologer is
able to determine the facts of any given case with such wonderful accuracy.
It is probably fair to say that any serious affliction of the Moon dulls the
acuteness of at least one of the senses. Philip Bourke-Marston's blindness
was evidently caused by the approaching opposition of Saturn and exact
opposition of Uranus. Byron's clubfoot may have been due to the conjunction
of the Moon, rising below Mars, square to Neptune and probably assisted by a
conjunction of Saturn and Venus close to the cusp of Pisces. Probably the
conjunction of the Moon and Mars, and squared by Uranus, had something to do
with Edison's deafness, though the affliction of Jupiter by Saturn, which
planets are square, is a contributory cause. Perhaps, however, it will be
more exact to say that the affliction of the Moon enabled the affliction of
Jupiter to manifest itself in this form. As a general rule, a single minor
affliction produces only minor consequences. There is analogy for this theory
in other branches of science. In chemistry, for example, even such highly
exothermic reactions as the combination of hydrogen and chlorine, or ammonia
and carbonic acid gas cannot take place without the presence of some third
body. If these gases are prepared in a state of absolute chemical dryness and
purity, you can pass the electric spark through them indefinitely without
causing their combustion.
It seems possible, therefore, that in many nativities where we see a threat
which does not materialize or a promise which is not fulfilled, the cause is
due to the absence of a starting impulse. The rifle may be loaded, but unless
the trigger be pulled, there will be no explosion. In determining, therefore,
whether any given configuration of the heavens will or will not produce its
result, we must look to some other point apparently unconnected with it.
Imagine, for example, a case of a man from whose horoscope we should expect
death by drowning. The position which shows us this does not show us whether
he will be forgotten in his tub by his nurse or be shipwrecked at eighty. It
is possible that the fatal direction or transits may not occur for a very long
time, while in another case, it may be in operation within a few hours of
birth.
Many of these remarks have been in the nature of a digression, yet, if
properly considered, they would be seen to have a bearing upon the limitations
and aptitudes imposed by the position and aspects of the moon.
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from the Grady Project:
This essay is preserved in six pages of neat typescript above the typed byline "Grady L. McMurtry," found amid other essays which date from Grady's senior year at UC Berkeley on the G.I. Bill, circa 1947 e.v. The papers with it were mostly written for submission in classes Grady was taking, mainly in the Political Science department. This one, however, has no such designation, and was perhaps intended for oral delivery at a meeting or some special event. "Space Tides," the title of the imaginary Hollywood production that Grady outlines here, takes its name from one of Grady's own science fiction poems, a long ballad about service aboard a deep space vessel. (Grady's "Space Tides" is not dated, but his mention of it as "my latest effort in the line of poetry" in a letter to Aleister Crowley on 12th May 1946 e.v. -- see TLC June 1992 -- associates the poem with the middle of that spring.) The argument in favor of big budget serious science fiction cinema for adults was often voiced (especially by some of the writers associated with Grady in the Los Angeles Science Fiction League and other informal discussions) during the postwar years, a time when the graphic and literary modes of speculative culture had far outpaced the cinema in depicting images of scientific progress in the future. Not until the 1960s and '70 e.v. did the imaginations of science fiction writing and illustration begin to seriously influence television or movies. (Both Star Trek, of 1966 et seq., and Star Wars, of 1977 et seq.,
appealed directly to the possibilities Grady anticipates here.)
One World or None
by Grady L. McMurtry
The craters on the other side of the Moon have become vast, teeming
arsenals. On their flame seared firing grounds stand rows of gleaming
projectiles poised to blast high into space and then to come rocketing down
through the night sky of Earth like a shower of vengeful meteors. Their
objective is a point deep in the crust of the planet where the simultaneous
fission of their atomic war-heads will cause earthquakes that engulf the
subterranean cities of warring nations. Thus vengeance follows retaliation
until the very air of our little world has become so radioactive that nothing
can live and, as the last strongholds of our boasted civilization crumble into
dust, so does Mankind become only a promising memory on the dark scroll of the
ages. Wars have always been destructive but never before has the future of
our race been threatened. We can meet this menace in two ways; we can fight a
war, and die in the atom shattered wrack of an insane world, or we can fight a
peace. When we mobilize for war we throw everything we have behind our
effort, and no nation can stand against us. Let us mobilize for an aggressive
peace and no nation will stand against us.
The weapon of War is Ordnance; the weapon of Peace is Education. We must
educate. The film industry is our secret weapon in the arsenal of peace. By
means of their productions men of all languages can visualize the effects of
an atomic war, and equally they can see the effects of an atomic peace. It
must be understood by everyone that atomic fire is a slave as well as a
tyrant. Like Alladin holding the power of the Genii in a Lamp, so will the
engineer of tomorrow hold the power of the atom in nuclear energy plants.
To explore the possibilities of atomic power for peace let us suppose that
one of the major Hollywood companies has released a production, Space Tides,
which we are previewing. As the scene opens we find ourselves standing on the
flight deck of a great space ship that is driving into the scattered edge of
the galaxy. The myriad stars are cold and diamond hard against the black
emptiness of space. Streaming out behind us come other speeding ships, sleek
greyhounds of the stellar deeps. Our destination: Polarion, last outpost of
the Galactic Fleet, to which this expedition is returning with a report on the
"weather" conditions in those immense empty reaches between the galaxies.
Space ships that travel at the speed of light are subject to the great
gravitic storms that roar between the suns as the galaxy slowly wheels across
the heavens. Polarion is a city with a crystal dome, one perfect jewel set on
the rim of a black, airless rock revolving around a giant red sun. Through
its cargo ports pass the merchant argosies of many worlds laden with the
commerce of the suns. Here we see the space-tanned mariners of many races
stretching their legs as a change from the more confining metal decks of their
ships. In air conditioned vaults far below the city giant banks of calculating machines have integrated the meteorological report, and now a
solitary cruiser slides out through the air locks and sweeps majestically
upwards and out. The pilot caresses the keys of his console control board;
the navigator feeds the course data into the sidereal computer; the engineers
stand by the atomic pile in the engine room, and, when all is in readiness,
the Captain of the ship pushes the little metal stud on a small black box
prominently stenciled INFINITY DRIVE. The men at their posts feel a twisting
lurch as the ship wavers and then streams out in a vast arc that will
intersect the course of the nearby galaxy somewhere in the depths of space.
For our purposes this movie can end right here for it has illustrated the
point. The conquest of space must be a common effort. No one nation can
raise Mankind to such a peak of achievement by its own genius. We have only
this one planet from which we can send our space ships rocketing out to the
Moon, to Venus, Mars, Mercury, Neptune, Saturn, Jupiter, and when we have
exploited the resources of this planet we must turn elsewhere for our raw
materials. We must mine the red deserts of Mars for iron; we must survey the
tidelands of Venus for oil; we must colonize the planet-sized moons of Jupiter
when the Earth has become too crowded. We can only do this if all nations are
united in a common government with sovereignty for none and freedom for all.
As long as we have the projector set up we might as well run off another
reel, another visualization of the progress possible under the Pax Atomica.
This time our scene of action has rolled back from the rim of the galaxy to
the family of stars nearer Earth. Our immediate interest is a group of young
colonials inbound from Fomalhaut aboard the Shuttle. For two weeks they will
be soaking in the golden sunlight of the blue skies and green hills of the
Mother Planet. When Sol himself is a blazing glory against the diamond dust
of the Milky Way, the vacationers step into the small escape craft that will
ferry them to Earth, for the Shuttle is merely a series of gigantic space
barges that has been set in vast, looping orbits between certain of the nearer
stars as a convenient schedule for passengers and freight. As they come
racing in under the Moon the visitors have time for a quick glimpse of its
ancient, pockmarked face before the great, green Earth comes rushing up at
them and they find themselves suddenly slicing in through its atmosphere.
After circling the plant once they come skimming in for a landing at the base
of a mountainous skylon, a gigantic cylinder of a city thrusting its great
domed head up into the lower reaches of the stratosphere. Overhead pass
streams of traffic as the commuters from the surrounding countryside and the
flagships of many nations pass to and from this great center of commerce that
men call Nuyork. Some of these skylons are centers of government, other
specialize in education, research, and entertainment. All of them are self-
sustaining units in the atomic powered economy of Imperial Earth. All of them
have been made possible by a combination of electron strengthened metal and
gravitic nullification support, the products of atomic science applied to
engineering physics.
Peace, as a concept, is entirely negative since it merely implies the
cessation of action. The positive approach to Peace is to establish a
definite goal, the attainment of which will insure a period of tranquility.
Unity was achieved when the United Nations had a common enemy, and was lost
when that enemy disappeared. Unity will be regained when the United Nations
again have a common goal. This goal must be extra-terrestrial in nature,
because as long as we have only this one small world to fight over, we will
fight each other. It is perhaps unfortunate that one of the other planets in
the solar system is not inhabited, for alien hostility would be a more than
adequate incentive to unification. Since this incentive which would assure a
world government is not available, an adequate substitute must be found. The
conquest of space is the only common goal in which all men can submerge their
differences. "To unite a divided nation, invoke an outside power" is one of
the oldest axioms of statecraft. Our world is like that divided nation today,
and we must have an enemy that is outside our own petty interests before we
will unite to conquer. The rewards of this conquest will be twofold, the consignment of the material wealth of the other planets to Earth, and the
union of all nations under one flag, that of the United Nations.
Before such a goal can be agreed upon, however, it must be presented to
these nations of the world, and the best method of presentation, one that
everyone understands, is that of visual representation, i.e., the motion
picture. Nor is this contemplated as a gift for sweet charity's sake. It
need hardly be mentioned here that people will pay, and pay well, for the
privilege of being educated in this manner if the emphasis is on producing a
good picture. As for source material, the subject matter is not even limited
by the sometimes stereotyped imaginations of script writers. We can start off
with the war films; rocket bombs, submarines, desolated cities, and great
clouds of radioactive gases that destroy all life as they swirl and drift
across the continents. These should be followed by the films depicting the
glories of peace, with giant skylons for commerce and trade, the open
countryside for homes and parks, the Lunar bases with great space ships taking
off for the far planets, the colonies on worlds that circle the nearer stars,
and the outposts on planets halfway across the galaxy. This is the broad,
general outline. We must first convince those nations who are politically
aggressive that no one can win an atomic war; we must then give them an
incentive to unite for an atomic peace.
There is no reason to suppose that any of this will be less lucrative than
Hollywood productions usually are. The old formulas that have made money for
years are always applicable: the war theme, exploding comets in the deep night
sky as space-borne fleets maneuver; the adventure theme, exploring the lost
cities of Mars, or building pressure domes under the sea-thick atmosphere of
Jupiter; the triangle theme, boy meeting girl on a vacation cruise around the
rings of Saturn; the gangster theme, piracy in high space, or smugglers trying
to run the Space Guard blockade; and the murder mystery -- who left Mr X to
fry like a mackerel on the sunward side of Mercury? All of these are merely
the old stand-bys transplanted to new backgrounds and therefore capable of
much greater variety in presentation. In one respect the only real difference
between the old and the new is this new background. The mere visualization of
the riches to be had for the taking by those who have the courage to pioneer
the way should be a powerful inducement to the conquering of the space
barrier. California's Gold Rush will look like a gathering of the clan
compared to the scramble to stake out the uranium mines of Mercury unless we
have a unified form of control.
Our purpose must be to bring the glory of the stars into the hearts of men,
not to produce a few shoddy pieces of glitter and tinsel. The films that are
to sell the idea of world unity through concerted action towards a common goal
must be the best that can be produced. Hollywood has the industrial capacity
and the film making technique for such an assignment, but whether or not it
has the imagination and the moral integrity that is necessary to complete the
job remains to be seen.
The nations of the Earth must have an incentive to attain unity. This
incentive can be supplied only by a common goal, not some undefinable idea of
Peace, and this common goal can be best presented through the medium of motion
pictures. Whether from the point of view of making a profit or from the long
range concept of Peace for ourselves and our posterity, it is definitely good
business for private enterprise to sell the idea of world unity. We must have
One World or we will have none.
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Thelema Lodge Events Calendar for October 2002 e.v.
10/2/02 | | Lesser feast of Jack Parsons 8:00 PM in the library | | (510) 652-3171 | | Thelema Ldg. |
10/6/02 | Gnostic Mass 8:00PM Horus Temple | (510) 652-3171 | Thelema Ldg. |
10/9/02 | The Rite of Mercury at a changed location. Call for information | (510) 295-1883 |
10/12/02 | 25th anniversary feast of Crowleymas 7:00 PM | (510) 652-3171 | Thelema Ldg. |
10/13/02 | Gnostic Mass 8:00PM Horus Temple | (510) 652-3171 | Thelema Ldg. |
10/18/02 | Lesser feast of Grady McMurtry party at Ashby House in Berkeley 8:00 PM | (510) 849-1970 |
10/20/02 | Gnostic Mass 8:00PM Horus Temple | (510) 652-3171 | Thelema Ldg. |
10/9/02 | The Rite of Luna at Cafe de la Paz 1600 Shattuck in Berkeley | (510) 652-9986 |
10/25/02 | Pathworking with Paul 8:00PM at Horus Temple | (510) 652-3171 | Thelema Ldg. |
10/27/02 | IIIrd degree Seminar 2PM | | Sirius Camp |
10/20/02 | Gnostic Mass 8:00PM Horus Temple | (510) 652-3171 | Thelema Ldg. |
10/28/02 | Section II reading group with Caitlin: science fiction of Philip K. Dick 8pm in the library | (510) 652-3171 | Thelema Ldg. |
The viewpoints and opinions expressed herein are the responsibility of the
contributing authors and do not necessarily reflect the position of OTO or its
officers.
Thelema Lodge
Ordo Templi Orientis
P.O. Box 2303
Berkeley, CA 94702 USA
Phone: (510) 652-3171 (for events info and contact to Lodge)
Internet: heidrick@well.com (Submissions and internet circulation only)
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