MYSTERY AND REGENERATION

Tag: magic

No Part of Me That is Not of the Gods: A Memory

I’ve been thinking about this tweet since Jack Chanek sent it the other day. (I don’t know his work, but I’ve been dipping my toes into the world of online occultism for the first time in a decade, and so discoveries abound.) I said in reply that I don’t think the gods necessarily perceive us temporally, at least in the way we do. I’m sure the observation was prompted by the fact we’re entering the dying end of the year, and one of the things I had in mind happened around this time of the year too. I thought it worth remembering.

I’ll leave the people I’m talking about anonymous, though anyone who has been around London occultism for a while will probably recognise it. The story isn’t about the personalities, though, really – whether important or little-known – but about what ritual can do.

It’s just a house, I tell myself – one of those tall, imposing Victorian affairs in North London. It’s 2004 and I’m nervous. It’s before Google Maps – I used to carry around a pocket A-Z and addresses scribbled on scraps of paper – and I’m early. I’d been invited, along with my initiators, to a Gnostic Mass to be held at the home of a well-known but discreet couple who had been performing it privately for many years; both would at that point already be over seventy years old. I like to be on time: it’s courteous, and respects other people’s time as equally important to your own. (It is also a rare quality among occultists.) In fact, because I’m nervous, I’m early, which is nearly as bad as being late. Knowing where the house is, I find a place nearby to sit and drop into some meditative breathing, the anchor of my daily practice then and now. Despite the chill in the air I can feel my shoulders relax, smell the woodsmoke on the breeze.

Yes, it’s just a house. Writing nearly two decades later I’m more aware of how much postwar occultism depended on domestic spaces like that: detached, or with thick enough walls and big rooms, which might be given over, semi-permanently, to ritual work. Twist the perspective a bit and it could be something out of a horror flick, or a Sunday tabloid exposé: the ingenuous neophyte lured into obscene rites hidden behind the doors of a house just like yours – or your neighbours’. So many magical groups owed their persistence to the simple fact they had somewhere suitable and guaranteed for regular meetings – it’s hard to resist a comparison between witches’ covens and ancient clandestine house churches. (You might write a parallel history of chaos magic and squatting, too.) Some of the initiations I would take in the following years would be in very grand settings, or outdoors in some secret place, but by far the majority – and some of the most significant – would be conducted behind unassuming doors like this.

Nervousness is often excitement wedded to risk. To understand why I was excited you have to understand something of the way the occult community in Britain worked back then: a variety of public or semi-public discussion groups, social events or beginners’ classes with various groups – publicly admitted and less so – hovering in the background. There was an elaborate dance of hinting and nudging, of feeling out and testing, and (sometimes) waiting for someone to have the courage to ask. It gave the sense that there was a lot going on behind the curtain; I’d say in retrospect that perception both was and wasn’t true. I was very young, but assiduous in my own personal work, and I had taken my first initiation; I was active in lots of the public email groups and social ‘scene’ – but this felt like the first invitation into a more guarded and trusted part of the community. I wanted to be worthy of it, and I wanted to impress; that was the risk. Thus the nerves.

Max Ernst, Rose de Noël (c. 1965)

I’d also been intensely interested in the Gnostic Mass itself for a couple of years, though I had no interest in the OTO. It is a beautiful and powerful ritual, subtly patterned and constructed. I’d used portions of its invocations in other rituals, meditated on its structure to try to understand it better. I though I knew and understood the powers involved, but I would be surprised that evening.

It turned out I didn’t have to go in alone: I met my initiators (through whom the invitation had come) just down the road from the house. Here’s a measure of how much I wanted to make a good impression: I’d been told to bring a robe, but the instructions were otherwise vague. So – in a move almost parodically in keeping with my Virgo ascendant – I’d hand-washed and ironed both my black and my white robe, and folded both carefully in my bag. (It turned out black was the order of the day.) A benefit of long spiritual practice has been to ease, even if only slightly, this somewhat neurotic tendency to overprepare; it is also why I had to spend a bit longer than most novices mastering the apparently elementary practice of relaxation. We robed and we were led into the temple.

Have you ever had your consciousness changed just by walking into a room? It happens. Some of it is just what the psychonauts call ‘set and setting’, sure: the rising haze of incense smoke, the light of candles, the two pillars and the diaphanous veil hanging between them. But sometimes walking into a room in which magic has been practiced regularly can be like opening the door on a hot oven. Do magic in a room for long enough and the brickwork gets haunted. You might have felt like that when someone starts an invocation and something plunges through the long run of your spine, and pulls at the back of your neck. It was like that that night.

Before that evening a friend had said to me ‘well, they’re getting on a bit – don’t be surprised if they can’t quite pull it off any more.’ How short-sighted and arrogant youth can be. At the start of the ritual, the priest comes forth from the tomb, as if dead: it is the priestess who will restore him to life. He says: ‘I am a man among men. How should I be worthy to administer the virtues to the Brethren?’ Those words have particular resonances in Crowley’s magical system, but they chime differently when spoken by a man in his mid-70s emerging from the grave – called out of the tomb by the voice of a priestess with whom he has built a practice over decades, whose voice must be more familiar to him than his own. Age makes the combination of frailty and strength in that question more apparent. Just the length of any life, with its inevitable alloy of failure and success, adds gravity to its simple premise: I am a man among men. True rituals, you might say, make meaning in excess of their authors’ intentions. 

Participating in a ritual in which one has, apparently, nothing to do can sometimes be difficult. It requires cultivating generous and absorbed attention to the action, a ‘presentness’ that almost every contemporary cultural imperative pushes against. I found no difficulty, though, because I was transfixed by the priest and priestess: the Mass depends on that current of intensity between them, a basis, a kind of tuning note for the powers they are bringing down. But I was also seeing something else, an intimacy at once public and yet inaccessible to anyone else in the room, at times as if there was no-one else in the temple.

Crowley doubtless envisaged his priest and priestess younger, perhaps more obviously virile or stereotypically buxom. His erotic imagination tended toward the cliche. As the ritual continues, the priestess is seated on the altar behind a veil – in this case a sheer gauze – and she disrobes as the priest makes his invocation, justly famous and beautiful:

O circle of Stars whereof our Father is but the younger brother, marvel beyond imagination, soul of infinite space, before whom Time is Ashamed, the mind bewildered, and the understanding dark, not unto Thee may we attain, unless Thine image be Love. Therefore by seed and root and stem and bud and leaf and flower and fruit do we invoke Thee. 

It’s hard to account for the sublimity of that moment. She was regal behind the veil, absolutely beautiful, and I was absorbed, certain I was in the presence of a mystery. We use words that aren’t really precise to describe that moment – overshadowing, presence – but as she recited the exultant invocation in reply I found myself profoundly moved: ‘I am the blue-lidded daughter of sunset; I am the naked brilliance of the voluptuous night-sky. To me! To me!

Part of what moved me was the age of her body: marked by time and age and work, the kind of body usually invisible, disliked, undesired enthroned on the altar. It recast all those words of sensual ecstasy – the naked brilliance, the voluptuous, the daughter, all pleasure and purple – which alway risk being bywords for instrumental personal gratification. I felt afterwards like a constellation of words and their meanings had slipped their shackles, expanded and rearranged themselves.

I want to be precise, because it was this moment that has been on my mind. The divine beauty I perceived was not a brief image of the beauty of youth emerging as a trace through an aged body, as if to redeem the fact of age. It was instead a beauty particular to, constituted by, age, and – importantly – no less sensual because of it. As a very young adult, it displaced and refashioned what I thought about beauty and the body, a matter of particular struggle for a young gay man. All that stood unrealised and unexpressed but dawning when I stood before that altar just a little later and declared, feeling the depth of the words with new meaning: there is no part of me that is not of the gods.

*

After the rite, we ate and drank together, with much conversation among longstanding friends and – yes – some occult luminaries. I’m sure I was intensely earnest as I often was back then. I was so worried, so often, that people wouldn’t see how seriously and sincerely I took things. Though I didn’t know it at the time, I was also in the foothills of a serious spiritual crisis of the kind sincere young people sometimes go through. Part of that was wondering how to do what I wanted to do in the world, while also maintaining a spiritual life – given the social and professional taboos involved in open practice. Another part was the realisation – which I was running from – that the initiatory route I was taking was one I didn’t want. That what was calling me was elsewhere. There were other contingent factors, too boring and personal to write about here.

I don’t know whether the priestess saw this in me, intense and serious as I must have been. I know now that these things are often more visible to others than one expects. Later in the evening, she took me into the temple and put into my hand the sword that had been used in the ritual, one that had been passed down from a founder of one of her magical traditions. It is again hard to describe the meaning of that small gesture, which was one of trust and kindness, freely given. I realised then, and it remained true in all the consternation of the following years, as now, that my commitment to the mysteries was absolute. That remained true even when doubting my place in them, or the tradition I found myself in. That there was nowhere I would rather be, that it felt as right, as familiar and solid, as that sword in my hand.

I never got to thank either priestess or priest properly for that evening. Both now are dead, though their legacy continues. It’s hard, really, to know how I could have done so adequately. I hope this short note also goes some way to conveying my gratitude.

Silence and Secrecy: On Oathbreaking

This little essay is prompted by a discussion with a friend about the seriousness of magical oaths and obligations, the duties they entail, and when – if ever – it’s permissible to break them. This is a funny area. It’s the sort of thing practitioners occasionally speak about with each other but which less often makes it into the books, unless to burnish one’s own credentials by insisting everyone else is a terrible, illegitimate oathbreaker. I think it worth writing a little about, though, because a number of interesting questions – about magic, about spiritual change – come into focus through it. I will return to the ‘steps of the foundation’ series very soon.

Some context and definitions: said friend and I both have wide and varied experience in traditions that teach practical magic, but which also teach the use of magical techniques for spiritual development, and put candidates through initiation ceremonies which (when worked correctly) induce new states of consciousness and help accelerate that change. These span ecstatic witchcraft and formal – if at times no less ecstatic – ceremonial. Beyond my consideration are the oaths and pacts individual magicians might make with spirits, but some parallels will be obvious. When I talk about the ‘magical community’, I mean everyone engaged in magical practice who is also connected in some way – however slight – to others doing the same. (This includes, for instance, just reading their output, or lurking on an email list, as well as participation in covens, groups, or orders.) 

Silence and Secrecy

Magicians are terrible at keeping secrets. Which is to say several things: first, that the ‘magical community’, which has no central authority, functions by exchange of gossip and stories, and like any other human community prurience and strategic misrepresentation are rife. Second, there are rewards – sometimes monetary but more often prestige and social power – for seeming in the know. Third, magicians are nosy: we’re typically curious about how other people do things, some of us because we get off on telling people they’re wrong, others because we like stealing things that work. Fourth, magicians are inveterate teachers: we like passing things on, and we like keeping things alive. Combine all these and you get a community which values secrecy rhetorically but delights in its breach.

Motives are mixed, as separating them out thus shows us. The historical study of magical traditions and the great wave of publication of occult material in the 20th century brought many benefits, not least of which it is much harder to trade on ancient and secret lineages to profit from or abuse a sincere but naive seeker. But the power of silence is still taught as one of the cardinal virtues of magical practice. (In one tradition of ceremonial magic, the candidate is supposed to meditate daily on the four powers of the magician – to know, to dare, to will, to keep silence – in turn for the four weeks prior to their first initiation. It is no accident that silence is the theme of the week preceding the ceremony itself.) Why do we still value silence and secrecy?

  1. Social prudence: even if you are able to be open about your practice, others that you meet in magical groups will not be. Although some parts of Europe and America pay lipservice to a distinction between personal belief and public or professional life, in reality there are unpleasant consequences for an interest in the occult. In Britain, the tabloid press remains hungry for stories which expose witches and magicians, as happened sporadically to members of Gardnerian and Alexandrian covens in the postwar decades. Such exposés are frequently devastating for people at their centre. I also expect the social penalty for interest in the unorthodox to increase as this century unspools. 
  2. Psychological commitment: a commitment to remain silent about magical work frees the magician in two ways: freedom from the interest of others and thus the human need to impress, and freedom to be honest about and absorbed in the work itself. This is especially important in the early days of building magical discipline, and unlearning the common compulsion to show off or brag. 
  3. Magical efficacy. This can also be split into two branches. It is generally helpful to remain silent about practical magical workings (at least) until they have achieved their ends, partly because the knowledge someone is working magic to a particular goal might trigger unwanted complications. But theurgic magic directed towards personal transformation, vision, or ecstasy also benefits from silence: an urge to communicate these experiences too quickly can cause us to too readily ‘fix’ them, rather than allowing them to properly transform us and unfold their deeper implications. (The consequences of these experiences – ‘initiatory’ in the fullest sense, but only sometimes taking place in rituals of initiation – can take years to fully unfold.)

The association of secrecy with magic and the mysteries is ancient and venerable. In one of the surviving fragments of On Philosophy from Oracles, Porphyry warns against too easily publishing mystical secrets, and specifically pays attention to the motives for doing so: “do not […] cast them before the profane for the sake of your reputation [δόξες] or for the sake of gain [κέρδους] or for the sake of any other unholy flattery [κολακείας].” (in Euseb. PE IV.8) So specific a list of motives has the odour of experience in it. It is usually argued that the ancient Mediterranean observed the taboo on disclosing the mysteries very closely, given how little evidence survives of their content: perhaps here we see a record of a more complex story. These three motives remain useful goads to self-examination – and to bear in mind when reading other authors.

It’s well known that the ancient world made a distinction between two different kinds of occult secrecy: aporrheton, a communicable secret which it is forbidden to communicate, and arrheton, a secret of the mysteries which can only be experienced rather than directly communicated in language. Porphyry, in fact, uses the latter term immediately after the passage I quoted. This distinction persists: you can sometimes hear occultists claim the only real secrets are the latter kind, or even that these are the only secrets they are obligated to keep. (An easy job, if they’re not linguistically communicable.) But aporrheta can include a vast amount of information – the identity of participants, ritual content, magical records, methods and techniques, recipes – and this is what is usually guarded by oaths of secrecy. One of the word’s other applications in antiquity provides a suggestive metaphor: it sometimes referred to commodities forbidden from export, essential to the functioning of the city. The circle of trust formed by magical secrecy is as important as a city’s supply of grain.

The Obligation: Why do we swear oaths?

Although it has some arguable ancient analogues, and writers on witchcraft in particular claimed that witches swore dire oaths to conceal their Satanic gatherings, the modern magical oath ultimately springs from Freemasonry. Typically it contains a commitment to keep secret all the secrets of the group, a commitment to magical work (often replacing the social commitments of the Masonic oath), and a section committing oneself to various grand guignol punishments should that oath be broken. In consonance with its Masonic origins, it is also sometimes called ‘the obligation’, and this is a useful way to think about it: it is a series of commitments made, with utmost seriousness, to one’s own spiritual development, and to the people in the group and tradition in which one works – including the chain of dead magicians who preceded you. ‘Obligation’ shares with ‘religion’ a root meaning ‘to bind’, and to take a magical oath is to voluntarily bind yourself to something greater than yourself. It ought to represent a serious commitment of time and energy. It is not a light matter, though oaths are sometimes made lightly. There are many wise folk tales which should warn us about lightly-made oaths.

(In many traditions, the seriousness and scope of the oath changes by degree, as the candidate is woven deeper into the mystery and takes on more responsibility for it. It is also useful to stress the obligations ought to be two-way: if a candidate takes on duties, he or she is also entitled, for instance, to clear instruction, attention to his or her development, and good and thoughtful supervision. None of this need be arduous, but this is one reason some traditions are cautious about hurrying people towards initiation.)

The magical component of the oath is also worth mentioning very briefly. Oaths of magical commitment are often made by solitary practitioners, classically as part of the pursuit of the Holy Guardian Angel. (Some traditions, including some branches of the A∴A∴, associate an oath to complete a particular magical work with each grade.)  When these are included in initiatory oaths, they can be thought of as swinging the group’s egregore behind that work, but also as demonstrating that the group’s rituals, rules, workings – much of its aporrheta, that is – exists ultimately to further that goal. 

There is also a much more down-to-earth reason for combining magical and initiatory oaths. Oaths are not especially important in periods where everything works, for the initial burst of enthusiasm, where one can’t wait to get in the circle. They matter in the dry and dark periods because they are commitments to other human beings as much as commitments to spiritual development – and it is those commitments which can bring us through the fallow. Often periods of magical difficulty can be akin to feeling overwhelmed with responsibility, of truly being responsible for one’s own life with everything that entails: one of the functions of the oath is to establish a bedrock for those periods, one decision which you have already taken out of your own hands.

Wallace Berman & Jay DeFeo, Untitled, 1959.

Of Oathbreaking

The development of magic in the 20th century owes a great deal to oathbreakers. The shape of western magic was changed profoundly by Aleister Crowley and – far more so – Israel Regardie’s disclosure of the materials of the Golden Dawn. (Many others have disclosed previously private material with varying degrees of legitimacy, but those two stand apart simply for the breadth of their influence.) Regardie is the more interesting case than Crowley, whose disclosure owed as much to his titanic narcissism as it did a serious esteem for the GD corpus. Regardie narrated his experience of the order, and his rationale for breaking his oath of secrecy in What You Should Know About the Golden Dawn. The book is still worth reading as an account of a moribund magical order, and for the obvious admiration Regardie had for a magical system ill-stewarded by the ‘inepti’.

Regardie took his oaths seriously, but believed he was in an emergency. Faced with a choice between allowing the system to die out and publishing its papers to allow it to be reborn, he broke his oath for a higher end. The many groups and individuals who drew from that treasure house – some tacitly, some openly – testify that his judgement was correct. (I am aware of one British Golden Dawn group which disparaged Regardie as an oathbreaker but used his books extensively. They will not be alone in that.) More than simply making material available, Regardie’s other work significantly changed how it was received: it encouraged people to pick it up and work it, with the result that almost every candidate seeking initiation in a magical group today will have had far more magical experience that their Victorian equivalents. Arguably it is this experimental attitude which led many of his readers to generate new approaches to ritual magic, like shedding its masonic accoutrements or the generation of entirely new systems. (The approach of the OSOGD, now sadly closed, is also worth highlighting.)

Regardie is an interesting case of more fundamental obligations prevailing over oaths, and he was clear about his motives. Even administered half-heartedly, the vows Regardie would have made in his Adept initiation – while strapped to the cross of obligation – could not fail to strike him as serious. It’s clear he took the ethical problem seriously. It is all the more striking, then, that he took the decision to publish the GD papers fully, rather than circulate them in private. There’s much to reflect on in this decision: publishing opened the material out to many more interested parties than could ever be part of private networks, allowing greater experimentation, and guaranteed preservation of the material – allowing it to be rediscovered. It also perhaps reflects how few – even among interested parties – are interested in really pursuing the work. Appearing to break his oaths, Regardie instead sparked a magical renaissance.

Obligations to others

What about our other obligations? In Regardie’s case, obligation to the tradition itself prevailed over the formal vow. There are, conceivably, situations where somebody’s partial disclosure and profit from secret materials (or careless publication of techniques without safeguard or context) might prompt others to publish. There are also, sadly, situations where abuse inside a tradition may confront us with the need to disclose not only material but identities. Both cases can be understood as acts of greater fidelity to the tradition itself.

The other major obligation many feel is historical. This includes professional historians who are also initiates, but also initiates who feel compelled to work with interested historians. Reasons for such collaboration are manifold, but include: desire that magic should take its proper place in western culture, revisionism of inaccurate history, a hope that truthful magical history might help us to avoid some of the mistakes our predecessors made, a kind of ethical obligation to history itself. It’s a commendable desire to want to know more about where we come from, and to insist on those answers being true. In general, proper historical attention to magic is a boon: it’s dispelled harmful myths, mostly rid us of the worst excesses of lineage-mongering, and gone some way to demonstrate the breadth and persistence of magic in western culture. Much of this has been accomplished by careful textual and archival work, but has also relied – especially in the history of witchcraft – on disclosure by initiates, particularly of the names and identities of dead (and, less often, still-living) practitioners.

For many, those disclosures have become very easy to make, even to the point that I’ve met initiates who very freely disclose who’s involved in what, even in fairly public settings. (The borders between knowledge, gossip and rumour are not well-policed here, either.) Public magicians, or those who are generally open about their practice, sometimes fail to remember their ethical obligations to others who do not have that luxury. This touches directly on the third component of magical oaths: not about personal practice, not about secret material, but about personal identity. Even in close-knit magical groups it is hard to gauge what consequences someone might suffer as a result of their practice being made public – familial, social or professional. This goes doubly so for people to whom we are less intimately connected. People are rarely killed for an interest in magic, at least in Europe and North America, but lives are still blighted, careers ruined and families torn up for it – more so than might widely be known.

There’s no point in pretending the ethical issues here aren’t real, or are easily solved. Like many others, I am eager for better-sourced, clearer histories, especially of postwar British occultism. But in deciding if, and what, to disclose, perhaps we ought to return to our oaths rather than simply shrug them off. Nothing in any magical oath says it is purely context-dependent, something that somehow doesn’t apply simply because you’ve decided to write a book. Our obligations to others do not disappear simply because we have decided they are now too cumbersome. The point of any oath is that when we feel it chafe, we are reminded of the commitments and high intentions we made when we took it. To shrug it off isn’t a neutral act, especially when undertaken without consultation with others – what does it suggest you think about the people and powers with whom you stood when you took that oath? About how reliable your word is? Group magical work also depends on trust: to damage it needlessly is an act of spiritual vandalism.

But there are times when disclosure of the identities of past initiates is either unavoidable or even desirable. Some useful questions to ask in that situation include: is this my secret to give away? What do my oaths say? What good comes of disclosing this identity? What harms? What did this person want while they were alive – and do they have any surviving magical colleagues I can talk with about it? What about their surviving family? Do they know – and would it harm them for it to come out? Can we use pseudonyms and achieve the same end? What do others think? It is no accident that these are all ethical questions, which should focus us on our obligations, remind us of our involvement in a community, and involve us in thinking about others’ comfort as well as our own. Incorporation into the historical record is not the sole good, impossible to gainsay.

Jay DeFeo, Jewel, 1959

Magical ethics and spiritual athletics

This is one area where magical practice brushes up against worldly concerns, and prompts ethical problems. It’s far from the only one. It’s a different category of ethical problem to, for instance, whether it is a good idea to work magic for someone without their knowledge, or the justifiability of curses. It’s far closer to questions like how one handles an initiate who has recently taken an initiation and then decides it is time to quit everything, leave their partner, sell their possessions and live in a cave – or how one recognises such crises in oneself. These are questions experienced magicians ought to talk about among themselves more often than we do. It is my contention that the western esoteric tradition – patchwork, rickety and ill-transmitted though it can be – contains many resources for answering these questions within it.

One reason these are overlooked is because oaths are sometimes made in the heat of the moment, during an initiation, with very little preparation of the candidate. Of course, this is sometimes just initiators passing on what was done to them: one of my very first initiations was done this way. But it would be helpful in building a firm foundation if initiators encouraged their candidates to think about commitments, oaths, obligations – even if in general terms – before the ceremony itself.

My above emphasis on magical oaths – and the four powers of the magician – means to stress the resources the tradition offers us. Meditation and reflection on them will reveal great and unexpected depth. Western magical traditions sometimes portray the practitioner as a kind of spiritual athlete, honing common capacities to unusual levels. There is, of course, a lot to that: magic arrives through unusual means, entails strange practices, and transforms the practitioner in unexpected ways. This can at times be daunting or seem isolating. The oath – the ligatio, and the obligation it entails – reminds us that we do not do it alone. It reminds us that in our quest to be more deeply and more fully human, we do not cease being human in every other respect, in need of others and needed in our turn. Our discipline is not always easily attained. To make time on the anniversary of an initiation to reread one’s oaths is an askêsis, not in the sense of mortification or self-denial, but of personal discipline and self-fashioning. Given those oaths often contain some of the very highest aspirations of western esoteric tradition, perhaps we could do with reminding of them more often.

Pour Out the Sun!

Olafur Eliasson, Tate Modern, 2003

The first practice a student of the Ogdoadic tradition undertakes is that of solar adoration, preceding even the banishing rituals and middle pillar-style rituals one might expect to form the foundation of a magical curriculum. The adorations are not unique to our tradition: even strictly within the ambit of occultism, Crowley commends the same practice in Liber Resh, though he prefers a pattern of four adorations, adding the sun at noon and midnight to dusk and dawn. But the practice of marking the beginning and end of the day’s light with a prayer, sacrifice or adoration extends across all religious traditions. Why is it the first thing we learn?

There are obvious answers: it is useful for the student of magic to become acclimatised to regular, daily ritual practice, and the adorations are relatively simple, easily memorised and adopted into daily use; at the same time, structuring them into the rhythm of the day, beginning and ending with the adorations, embeds spiritual practice into everyday life. Their ever-shifting times give the practitioner the bodily experience of the days lengthening and contracting – the year’s breathing, like our breathing in meditation; they allow us to begin and conclude the day turning to the symbol par excellence of our spiritual ideal. And, of course, the Sun is at the centre of the mysteries celebrated in the A∴S∴’ initiation rites.

The texts given by Denning and Phillips include options for adoration in the Egyptian style (perhaps an echo of Crowley’s preferences, though these hew more closely to Wallis Budge than his neo-Egyptian pantheon), and an adoration loosely derived from the Īśa Upaniṣad. I use a version of the latter. The text as given in Denning and Phillips is as follows:

‘Salutation and praise unto thee, O life-enkindling sun, child of creation’s lord!

O thou lone, all-seeing eye of the vault celestial, extend thy light that I may see, but dim thy glory that I be not blinded.

Unmask thy countenance, O God of light, for I am a lover of truth and would behold the spiritual essence concealed by thy golden disk.

So reveal unto my perception thy shining and inmost nature, even that high spirit which infuses thee and is one with the primal flame of mine own being.

O life-enkindling sun, child of creation’s lord – salutations and praises unto thee!’

That text is perfectly serviceable, if a touch too consciously archaic for me – ‘mine own’ especially – so after much use I decided to refresh and edit it a bit, which involved looking at some translations of the source. Here, for reference, is Olivelle’s in The Early Upaniṣads:

 The face of truth is covered
with a golden disk.
Open it, O Pūṣan, for me,
a man faithful to the truth.
Open it, O Pūṣan, for me to see.

 O Pūṣan, sole seer!
Yama! Sun! Son of Prajāpati!
Spread out your rays!
Draw in your light!
I see your fairest form.
That person up there,
I am he!

 The never-resting is the wind,
the immortal!
Ashes are this body’s lot.
OM!
Mind, remember the deed!
Remember!
Mind, remember the deed!
Remember!

O Fire, you know all coverings;
O god, lead us to riches,
along an easy path.
Keep the sin that angers,
far away from us;
And the highest song of praise,
we shall offer to you!

(vv. 15-18)

All of the elements of the other version are here, but very much shorn of elaboration. The two things disemphasised in the A∴S∴ version are the strange apostrophe to Yama, and the emphasis on memory in the rather knotty and difficult third verse. About the latter I don’t have anything conclusive to say, save that the command to remember occurs throughout religious traditions and can perhaps be thought of as a healing act (literally re-membering) – and we might hear an echo of the chain of regressions through forms of knowledge and cosmic principles which shroud ātman in the Chāndogya Upaniṣad. The reference to Yama, the Lord of Death, is more explicable: often in the Vedas, the identity of Yama and the Sun is asserted, usually with a suggestion that this identity will help the devout pass beyond the Sun. And this identity is explicitly linked to the simplest rite, performed at dusk and dawn, in an endless link – the agnihotra, the libation of milk into the fire – and the suggestion that this rite helps transcend death.

What is a libation? It is a gesture which connects all Indo-European cultures, the pouring out into a fire or on the ground, some ordinary liquid, milk or wine. Homer’s characters offer libations, so do figures in Minoan art, they are mentioned in Ovid, left untheorised and unexplained, so ordinary they escape notice. Even the gods, on many vases, themselves offer libations. (No-one knows why they do this.) Libations are preludes to sacrifices and the simplest sacrifices in themselves. The flowing liquid is the closest ritual analogue to the passage of time: the libation is a gesture of loss, pure and irrevocable, a gesture of yielding.

In the Fasti, Ovid attributes the habit of making offerings at altars to Dionysos, as a god of the orient, before whose advent no offerings were made at the hearth-fires of the Greeks. Hesiod commends the practice of libation at dawn and dusk. So our classical antecedents and authorities. But only with regular practice do all these references come together in the body: anyone who has traced the course of the sun through the heavens over a year will know not only the way ritual repetition creates something indivisible, but the sense of the fragility and mutability of the body, its architecture of sometimes-stiff or tired muscles as the sun creeps above the clouds or sinks on the horizon; will feel the temporariness of the body as the breath rushes through it; will feel too the ecstasy of identity between the great golden disk and the self. All these things together.

Our libation at morning and evening is a libation of words, not even of water or milk or blood. We pour out our words as the Sun pours out its light upon us. And it is a gesture of libation in the pure sense, an acknowledgement of loss, a yielding to the absolute, a grasping by not-grasping as the riddling, punning Brāhmaṇas suggest. It is as if it contains in nuce the core of the advanced and elaborate rituals of spiritual development we encounter much later in our training.

Here, in quite another form, is a record of one of the mystical realisations of solar adoration, in its curious physicality and transcendence. It was written by the poet and Buddhist Allen Ginsberg as a record of a profound spiritual experience had while on a train between Kyoto and Tokyo in 1963. Its conclusion:

‘…In this dream I am the Dreamer
and the Dreamed I am
that I am Ah but I have
always known

[…]

Let the dragon of Death
come forth from his
picture in the whirling
white clouds’ darkness

And suck dream brains &
claim these lambs for his
meat, and let him feed
and be other than I

Till my turn comes and I
enter that maw and change
to a blind rock covered
with misty ferns that
I am not all now

but a universe of skin and breath
& changing thought and
burning hand & softened
heart in the old bed of
my skin From this single
birth reborn that I am
to be so—

My own Identity now nameless
neither man nor dragon or
God

but the dreaming Me full
of physical rays’ tender
red moons in my belly &
Stars in my eyes circling

And the Sun the Sun the
Sun my visible father
making my body visible
thru my eyes!’

© 2024 Eightfold

Theme by Anders NorenUp ↑