Liber 821 or How I Found the Goddess and What She Did to Me When I Found Her Part II

by Zoe-Sophia-Dione (= 821, “Babylon the Great” :-P)

 23 (=Zos/life [ChiH]; Kia/joy [ChDVH])

Numerous paeans from more ancient times exist that extol the Goddess.  Apuleuis in The Golden Ass (11.25) says of Isis:

You rotate the globe. You give light to the Sun. You govern the world in time and space. You tread down the powers of Hades. By You the seasons return, the Planets rejoice, the Elements serve. At Your command the winds do blow, the clouds do gather, the seeds prosper, and the fruits prevail. The birds of the air, the beasts of the hill, the serpents of the den, and the fish of the sea, do tremble at Your majesty.

                                                           

The Devi Mahatmyam is chock full of statements such as:

You are the sovereign Goddess of all that is moving and unmoving. You are the sole substratum of the world, existing in the form of Earth. Existing in the form of water, the Universe is nourished.  You are pure, limitless courage, the power of the All-Pervading Lord. You are the Manifesting and Limiting Principle, the primordial seed of the Universe. Goddess you have created this living dream that we mistake for Reality. Through your grace we are redeemed from it. (11:3-5)

                                                           

We also find this passage within the very last piece of scrying work that Edward Kelley (1555 –1597) did with John Dee (1527–1608): 

I am the daughter of Fortitude, and ravished every hour, from my youth. For behold, I am Understanding, and Science dwelleth in me; and the heavens oppress me. They covet and desire me with infinite appetite; few or none that are earthly have embraced me, for I am shadowed with the Circle of the Stone, and covered with the morning Clouds. My feet are swifter than the winds, and my hands are sweeter than the morning dew. My garments are from the beginning, and my dwelling place is in my self. The Lion knoweth not where I walk, neither do the beasts of the field understand me. I am deflowered, and yet a virgin; I sanctify, and am not sanctified. Happy is he that embraceth me: for in the night season I am sweet, and in the day full of pleasure. My company is a harmony of many Cymbals, and my lips sweeter than health itself. I am a harlot for such as ravish me, and a virgin with such as know me not: For Lo, I am loved of many, and I am a lover to many; and as many as come unto me as they should do, have entertainment. . . .

                        —From A true & faithful relation of what passed for many years                                                          between Dr. John Dee and some spirits

Dee, a mathematician and prodigious Renaissance man who was an advisor to Queen Elizabeth I, having become immersed in angelology and evocation magic, produced, with scryer-side-kick Edward Kelley, the foundation for Enochian magic. By gazing into a shewstone/black mirror (akin to crystal-ball gazing), Kelley pulled out of the aethers a unique, “angelic” language and Dee and Kelley were given elaborate instructions by presumed angelic entities  about ritual set up for practices; coded, politically charged messages; and a method to “ascend” through angelic planes. But for all the glorious effort, neither Dee nor Kelley had very good luck in the aftermath of their workings. Did they barge head-first through a door behind which was the Goddess practicing katas with her swinging saber?

Immediately following this oft-quoted material (above) scryed by Kelley and Dee on May 23, 1587 (their very last scrying session by the way, occurring about a month after the archangel Uriel allegedly told the men to wife-swap), the Divine-Feminine entity evoked  explains that “Wisdom is a piercing beam, which is the center of the spiritual being of the Holy Spirit, touching from all parts from whence the Divinity sendeth it out . . .” It continues, saying that Wisdom is inherent in what is immortal, including the human soul, and not in things that have an end.  This is standard Hermetic/Gnostic/Cabalist jargon in which Wisdom—the Sophia or Sapientia —transforms soul (psyche) to spirit (pneuma) via the path of the Secret Fire. Further, the patent medieval Hermetic content in the longer citation about the Daughter of Fortitude is rather conspicuous.

Cybele (Roman Magna Mater), who  Revelations is really referring to (her and Rome) when it talks about The Lady Riding the Beast, the Beast being Emperor Nero) .

Fortitude from the Cary Yale Visconti Tarot deck (circa 17th century). The trump cards of Italian Tarot decks may have originated from a philosophical tract called the sermones de ludo and related pageants that were reflections on the meaning of life and death and drew on images familar to early  medieval-era Italians)

The text then goes into doomsday jargon that either could be taken as a prediction about political upheaval or else a veiled way for an affected Kelley to express how really fed up he was with the whole Kelley/Dee trip, as has been speculated by researchers and autodidacts on the subject such as the person who maintains this blog: http://myfavoritemonsters.blogspot.com/2009/07/john-dee-edward-kelley-spirit-world-pt_28.html .

The story goes that Kelley, acquiring fame and fortune as a celebrity alchemist, abandoned Dee and fell in and then out of favor with King Rudolph II (1552 –1612), who imprisoned him for not appropriately proving his prowess as an alchemist. Kelley ultimately died of injuries sustained during a prison breakout—a rather pathetic end to someone who “channeled” such profundity as what is quoted above. But one could suppose that this illustrates the “‘get it’ or get a kick in the head” and “don’t fuck with me” kind of tough love that The Goddess seems to be into.

From here, my mind segues to veritable, no-joke rocket scientist Jack Parsons (1914 –1952) :

The catastrophic trend [the Age of Horus] is due to our lack of understanding of our own natures. The hidden lusts, fears, and hatreds resulting from the warping of the love urge, which underly the natures of all Western peoples, have taken a homicidal and suicidal direction.

This impasse is broken by the incarnation of another sort of force, called BABALON. The nature of this force relates to love, understanding, and dionysian freedom, and is the necessary counterbalance or correspondence to the manifestation of Horus.

            —from the Introduction of Liber 49, The Book of Babalon, by Jack Parsons

Yes, but if I remember it correctly, Jack, even though you were incredibly eloquent, dedicated, waaay ahead of your time, and now are bestowed god-like reverence, almost everyone you knew, loved, revered, and trusted totally dissed and screwed you over. Then you got blown up moments before you were going to run away and live happily ever after with your conjured Babalon-Incarnate Scarlet woman witchy-chick, artist/occultist Marjorie Cameron (1922 –1995).

Yet shalt thou not be therein, for thou shalt be forgotten, dust lost in dust.  Nor shall the æon itself avail thee in this; for from the dust shall a white ash be prepared by Hermes the Invisible. 

And this is the wrath of God, that these things should be thus.  And this is the grace of God, that these things should be thus.

                                                            —Liber Cheth vel Vallum Abiegni, 15-18

But then one could point the finger at dozens of high-profile occultists, “crazy wisdom” teachers, saints, philosophers, and godmen/women through the ages who came to less than beatific endings.

This is the way the world ends. Not with a bang but a whimper.

                                                           

                                                            —From The Hollow Men, T.S. Eliot

One would say that their legacies and legendary statures compensate, but I say not. How can such things serve the dead? Such things are more bread and circuses for the rest of us and often the tool of one or another aggrandizing opportunist. At best, they can be catalysts of insight and transformation for us. Or else, they can be blinds, glamours, and pretentions that complicate our ride through the gastric tube of the Ouroboros. Both options are the purview of The Goddess.

And in the end, the Mysterium Tremendum, for those who are interested, is not about pleasure or pain, suffering in penance or atonement, redemption, the satiation of desire, or the assertion of will. It is about crossing over the Abyss and parting the veil between the Real and the Unreal. 

This Mahamaya [“Grand Illusion”; “Great Measurement”] is the Yoganidra [power of stupor] of Vishnu, the Lord of the World. It is by her the world is deluded. Verily she, the Sovereign Lady, forcibly draws the minds even of the wise into delusion. She creates this entire universe of both moving and unmoving things. When favorable, she proffers boons to human beings for their final liberation. She is supreme knowledge, the cause of final liberation, and eternal; she is the cause of the bondage of transmigration and the sovereign over all lords.

                                                                        —Devi Mahatmyam, I:54-58

But for my final word on all this Babalon and Goddess-mystique stuff, I quote Austin Osman Spare from the Anathema of Zos:

Is there nothing beyond entity? No purchase beyond sense and desire of God than this blasting and devouring swarm ye are?

Oh, ye favoured of your own excuses, guffaw between bites! Heaven is indifferent to your salvation or catastrophe. Your curveless crookedness maketh ye fallow for a queer fatality! What! I to aid your self-deception, meliorate your decaying bodies, preserve your lamentable apotheosis of self? The sword-thrust not salve I bring!

The New Aeon, Immanentizing the Eschaton, and Slouching Toward Liberation of Consciousness in Two Parts (Part II)

No one likes being told what to do, but civil anarchy also sucks and has proved itself untenable. Liber Oz, referenced in Part 1 of this essay, is not talking about anarchy; it is challenging Piscean-era Judeo-Christian moral relativisms that double as straightjackets. Even the post-modern occultist slogan “Nothing is true, everything is permitted” is not an anarchistic war cry; nor was it ever uttered by an 11^th century ascetic Islamic fundamentalist mystic/jihadist named Hassan ibn Sabbah. The slogan was penned by William S. Burroughs. Sabbah only became noteworthy because the Discordian authors of The Illuminatus! Trilogy worked fanciful conspiratorial ideas about him into their novels. It is a tip of the hat to how malleable and provisional ideas and systems are. The New Aeon is expected to be an era when this is acknowledged and done so in power-conferring freedom rather than fear. And anarchy is not to be conflated with Chaos, which is what post-modern occultists propose is at the root of the New Aeon:

Etymology: Middle English (15^th century), formless primordial space, from Latin, from Greek khaos.

Chaos is defined, by standard American dictionaries as “the disordered state of unformed matter and infinite space that existed before the ordered universe [the Cosmos].”

The Concise Encyclopedia of Science and Technology (5^th edition, McGraw Hill Publishers) defines Chaos (Chaos theory) as a “system behavior that depends so sensitively on the system’s precise initial conditions that it is, in effect, unpredictable and cannot be distinguished from a random process, even though it is deterministic in a mathematical sense.” The theory observes that Chaos only seems chaotic but is rather elegant design, and besides all the esoteric mathematical jargon, it is tied in with concepts about environmental adaptation and interdependent arising.

        

Chaos is the hypostasis—that is, the Divine Ground—of Cosmos. It can be said that Cosmos is continually reasserting itself by drawing from its matrix. Chaos and Cosmos are two sides of the same coin: numinous and immanent Existence. The Boundless and the Measurable. Thus, Cosmos is a place where everything that can happen does happen whether or not it is someone’s idea of permissible. It is not a new concept by any means, it’s just not cool to glorify Chaos in a World where the overwhelming majority of people need structures, blinders, and neat answers to tranquilize them while being herded through cattle stalls and gauntlets toward a meat grinder.
           

Literary dystopias aside, the Age to come is often thought of as a “Golden” one. And that proverbial Golden Age is a revisiting of a time when everything was everyone’s idea of perfect. The kicker is that the Golden Age redux is an era in which everyone is perfectly conscious, willful, and complicated, instead of automatons like they were when things were perfect and simple.  Underlying the concept is the kvetch that consciousness got us into this mess, and consciousness will get us out—once consciousness evolves beyond the limitations of the human-animal nervous system. How to imminentize it into immanence is the question and is in the realm of mysticism and occultism, not social politics.

        

The truth of the matter is that the Golden Age of a past or future doesn’t occur in Time or culture. It is the phenomenon of self-actualization. It occurs in select persons and has done so since hominids became self-conscious and thus were evicted from Golden Age National Park and cast adrift in the Sea of Samsara. Being a potential and a continuum, it is always now or never. There is no place to go to retrieve the Golden Age either in memory or expectation.

        

The New Aeon, thus, is not a time but an idiom that promotes the aspiration of self-actualization. In the context of occultism and mysticism, it is the glorification of Personal Gnosis, which is a recurring and subversive act in the annals of history.  It is an ideal, which is the liberation of consciousness.

        

It is not necessary to deny anything. It is only necessary to know ourselves. Then we will naturally seek that which is needful to our being. Our significance does not lie in the extent to which we resemble others or in the extent to which we differ from them. It lies within our ability to be ourselves. This may well be the entire object of life; to discover ourselves, our meaning. This does not come in a sudden burst of illumination; it is a constant process which continues so long as we are truly alive. The process cannot continue unobstructed unless we are free to undergo all experience and willing to participate in all existence. Then the significant questions are not “is it right” or “is it good” but rather “how does it feel” and “what does it mean.” Ultimately these are the only questions that can approach truth but they cannot be asked in the absence of freedom.

—Jack Parsons,  Freedom is a Two-Edged Sword:

Selected bibliography

Peter Carroll. Liber Null & Psychonaut. San Francisco: Red Wheel/Weiser, LLC. 1987.

Aleister Crowley. Liber Oz. http://www.hermetic.com/crowley/libers/lib77.html. Accessed June 17, 2013.

Jack W. Parsons. Freedom is a Two Edged Sword.  Reno, Nevada: New Falcon Publications, 2001.

The Principia Discordia. http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~tilt/principia/body.html#greyface. Accessed June17, 2013.

Wikipedia entry on Eric Voegelin. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eric_Voegelin.  Accessed June 17, 2013.

Excerpt from Chapter 20 A Snake in the Grass from The Savior at the End of Time Book 3 in the Sorcerers and Magi Series

About 42 days after his confrontation with Lord Consul Tau-Bridge, Zosi began to be spotted in flamboyantly full ceremonial regalia within the Mercury Gardens. He would wear a tunic of thick raw silk and tightly fitted, black leggings that were made of tanned leather and full of straps and whips of lacings. Over this, he would wear high boots that matched a mottled, purple-black tanned leather cope embossed with images of ourobori, moondragons, and griffins. His hair was meticulously plaited and decorated with pins and ribbons. His head was topped with a black double-cone hat that was rakishly crimped and folded over so that the tips of the horn-like cones, embellished with opalescent jingle bells, menacingly flounced and jangled in front of his face. He wielded a rather large and tall staff, the core of which was made of slender poles of cedar and fennel stalks. It was wrapped in embossed leather that matched his ensemble. Like a sinister maypole, the staff’s leather sheath was itself wrapped in a filigreed design of cords and leather straps on which gadgets and flotsam were affixed and that dangled, flail- and cat-o-nine-tails-like, from the staff’s finial, which was a gold spearhead in the shape of a fish with an acorn protruding from its mouth.

Like that, he would stroll about the Gardens and then stop here or there to deliver a sermon that attracted larger and larger crowds as word of the spectacle grew.

He would begin the rant in a gentle voice with the words, “See the illumination at the center of being,” and materialize some small sparkly object that would fascinate and mesmerize onlookers.

“The body and all phenomena arise causally and provisionally within absolute being,” he would continue, yet still in a very meek and quiet voice. It would be trembling and barely audible despite his ferocious appearance. “There is no time and no dimension to space, both being mere adaptive projections of mind. The personality is an interdependently arising construction of circumstances and experiences, driven by reactivity bred by conditioning devoid of awareness or true will. What is it to wake up from the idea of yourself? Heaven, hell, God, the Adversary, pleasure, pain, and all the pairs of opposites are projections of your own consciousness. You project ideas out of yourself. Treating them as independent entities, you go into them, fear them, and allow them to have power over you although they are your own creations. No one is there to deliver you; you must deliver yourself. Glimpse self-effacement and the root of your existence. Reality is silent, blissful, self-composed Being. This is the Redemptive Principle, the Christos, the Ground, and the Life beneath the mechanism.”

Then he would walk off to another part of the Gardens and say it again even though people weren’t really listening and hardly understood him; they were just grooving on being part of the show and the very groovy euphoric feeling Zosimo’s magical words incited in them.

But finally, one day, in a rather ballsy display, Zosimo materialized several wheel barrels of fried cod fish and sugar-dusted zeppoli, which his Inchaote acolytes distributed throughout the Gardens.

The spectacle drew a multitude of gawkers, most of whom very festively reveled in being part of the scene. Few in authority were much concerned with Zosi’s banter—quasi-Buddhist transcendent drivel that would awe the needy masses and teach them to be resigned and endure circumstance, but philosophically so. The fried fish and dough balls catering endeavor was a weird Discordian metaphor.

Toward the latter part of the day, however, an outbreak of explosive diarrhea hit every Senate member who had not earlier partaken of fried fish and dough. And it was no silly prank but a violent attack, lethal in nature, leaving several magistrates—including Tau-Bridge—with shit extruding from every orifice: blind, deaf, choked, tortured, and incapacitated in stink and waste.

At the same moment, every locked-in person across five sovereignties within Terra Novit woke up. Both meek and menacing, novice and adept, innocent and fiend, without judge or judgment, merit or demerit, without any distinction or categorization, they woke up and were tasked with helping each other break out of the places in which they had been confined.

                       

If you would like a free ebook when this comes out later this summer, email me at sororzsd23@gmail.com

Follow me on Facebook https://www.facebook.com/SororZsd23

The New Aeon, Immanentizing the Eschaton, and Slouching Toward Liberation of Consciousness in Two Parts (Part I)

“It was the year that they finally immanentized the eschaton . . .” the famous opening of The Illuminatus! Trilogy by novelist Robert Shea (1933-1994) and counterculture philosopher Robert Anton Wilson (1932-2007). Having been absorbed into the underground dictionary of postmodern counterculture, the term “immanentize the eschaton” got the privilege of being uttered with a wry smile and a flippant wink. If nothing else, it sounds cool even if the word “immanentize” is  jargon that kind-of –sort-of combines “imminent” (meaning about to occur) with  “immanent” (meaning all-pervading) and twists adjectives into verbs.  In context, “immanentize the eschaton” means “to create heaven on earth” and/or hasten the end of the world or at least the end of a consensus paradigm.

 Sociopolitical commentators use the term in tracts that criticize agendas that seem idealistic, romanticist—or “liberal.”  That is, the phrase is meant to be read dripping in sarcasm and ridicule of those whose agendas slouch toward social utopias.

 Among Christians, the term denotes bringing on the apocalypse—the end of this world and its transfiguration into an idealized one for the Christian elite. The signs of imminence are usually immanent to certain Christians although the actual event (inferred from interpretations of Revelations) keeps receding into the future. Never mind that these Christians are anticipating something that was supposed to happen 2000 years ago. Bible scholars have pointed out that early Pauline Christianity was an end-times cult that changed its tune when the Parousia (Second Coming) didn’t occur in 70 CE when the temple in Jerusalem was destroyed. Furthermore, the Beast mentioned in Revelations probably refers to Nero (37-68), and the Whore that the Beast rides is probably ancient Rome and/or the Magna Mater cult (and, no, it’s not Aleister Crowley). Still, Dispensationalist Christians, and a host of other thanatericist menaces masquerading as transcendentalists, remain undaunted.

Among counterculture occultists, the slogan “immanentize the eschaton” is associated with rhetoric about the epiphany of a New Aeon, an era of Deconstructionism and attendant ideological scrutiny and intellectual freedom. It is the end of the world as we know it . . . or as we are accustomed to it being . . . or as we are deluded and conditioned into thinking it is or is supposed to be . . . .  It is not a cataclysmic conflagration as conceived by religious fundamentalists, nor is it an “ascension” to a “higher vibrational frequency” as touted by New Age gurus. It is the page turn into another era . . . the next one within the Time-Space continuum of the original long-running smash hit series As the World Turns, to be confused with the soap opera of the same name but only metaphorically.

It is gnostic in that it is viewed as a paradigmatic shift in thought but it is not associated with sociopolitical, philosophical, or spiritual utopian visions.  It is hard to say whether its perspective is jaded or enlightened. It’s a little bit mongrelized Zen or Dzogchen, a little Gestalt Therapy, more than a little bit of Deconstructionism, and an interface for Hermeticism and Existentialism where the realization that nothing and everything is True may possibly confer spiritual liberation and mystical empowerment if not true civil liberties.

The term “Immanentization of the Eschaton” was coined by political philosopher Eric Voegelin (1901-1985) who used it in a tract that conflated certain sociopolitical ideas (such as Nazism and Communism) with his incomplete and biased understanding of Christian Gnosticism. He warned of the folly and danger of trying to create heaven on earth. One can strongly argue that creating heaven on earth as history is unfeasible, considering that one person’s heaven is another’s hell in an ecosystem where one’s pleasure is predicated on another’s pain

 A passage called The Gospel According to Fred, 1:6 in the counterculture classic The Principia Discordia about who should and shouldn’t be immanentizing the eschaton gives oblique insight into what New Aeon zeitgeist is.

THE FIVE ORDERS OF DISCORDIA (“THEM”)

Gen. Pandaemonium, Commanding [. . . ]

The Orders are composed of persons all hung up on authority, security and control [ . . . ]

1. The Military Order of THE KNIGHTS OF THE FIVE SIDED TEMPLE. This is for all the soldiers and bureaucrats of the world.

2. The Political Order of THE PARTY FOR WAR ON EVIL. This is reserved for lawmakers, censors, and like ilk.

3. The Academic Order of THE HEMLOCK FELLOWSHIP. They commonly inhabit schools and universities, and dominate many of them.

4. The Social Order of THE CITIZENS COMMITTEE FOR CONCERNED CITIZENS. This is mostly a grass-roots version of the more professional military, political, academic and sacred Orders.

5. The Sacred Order of THE DEFAMATION LEAGUE. Not much is known about the D.L., but they are very ancient and quite possibly were founded by Greyface Greyface [an 11^th century malcontented hunchback] himself. It is known that they now have absolute domination over all organized churches in the world. It is also believed that they have been costuming cabbages and passing them off as human beings

[ . . . ]

        

Don’t let THEM immanentize the Eschaton.

It goes on to quaintly discuss The Curse of Greyface—that is, the plight of mankind.  The Principia Discordia says:

Greyface and his followers took the game of playing at life more seriously than they took life itself and were known even to destroy other living beings whose ways of life differed from their own. 

The unfortunate result of this is that mankind has since been suffering from a psychological and spiritual imbalance. Imbalance causes frustration, and frustration causes fear. And fear makes for a bad trip. Man has been on a bad trip for a long time now.

The take-home message: People like Greyface have already immanentized a paradigm. Don’t extend a subscription renewal to their ilk. Those who seek to make an unwieldy world safe for themselves by self-righteously containing and controlling others, generally in the form of thought-policing . . . well, just don’t go there, Man. It’s a recipe for disaster if not business-as-usual.  Vote No on Proposition Brave New World. K?

 A more serious and confrontational stance on this theme is reflected in a manifesto called Liber Oz, attributed to Aleister Crowley (1875-1947). It pronounces that “There is no god but man” and that persons, therefore, are free to live, work, eat, create, love, think, speak, and die as they choose and have a right to defend these rights even unto the death (of the oppressor).  The penultimate line in the manifesto, which is embellished with quotes from Liber Al vel Legis (AL; “The Book of Law”), concludes with “the slaves shall serve.” –AL. II. 58. That is, either “get it” or be mill grist. Or as Thelemic occultist/veritable rocket scientist Jack Parsons (1914-1952) said: “There is not further evasion of nature’s immemorial ultimatum: change or perish but the choice of change is ours.”

Selected bibliography

Peter Carroll. Liber Null & Psychonaut. San Francisco: Red Wheel/Weiser, LLC. 1987.

Aleister Crowley. Liber Oz. http://www.hermetic.com/crowley/libers/lib77.html. Accessed June 17, 2013.

Jack W. Parsons. Freedom is a Two Edged Sword.  Reno, Nevada: New Falcon Publications, 2001.

The Principia Discordia. http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~tilt/principia/body.html#greyface. Accessed June17, 2013.

Wikipedia entry on Eric Voegelin. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eric_Voegelin.  Accessed June 17, 2013.

 Excerpt from Chapter 18 The Wheel of the Ouroboros from The Savior at the End of Time Book 3 in the Sorcerers and Magi Series

“Is there virtue in ‘immanentizing the Eschaton’? Forcing change,” Lumie asked.

“To immanentize the Eschaton means to bring about an end to all things to allow for the emergence of a new, improved aeon. It is a theoretical goal of Inchaotes: to reduce everything to pure and sublime Chaos where nothing is true and every conceivable thing in its splendorous potentiality is permitted by intention rather than by neurosis, automation, or accident,”de Lux said, as if to show that he was hip and well informed.

“Can the Chaos Principle be transcended and is this is your goal, Lord de Lux Sortiar?” Lumie asked.

de Lux grinned as if deeply satisfied and perhaps even aroused by her question. “Yes,” he said. “Immanentizing the Eschaton.” He wearily sighed on the hackneyed phrase. Then he smiled and nodded at the young couple. This gesture made Dade feel relieved. Indeed, he was stricken by an enthusiasm that he wasn’t sure was authentic or imposed by spellcraft waged by de Lux.

“Transcending the Chaos and Clarus Principles, busting the paradigm, bringing on the New Aeon,” Dade muttered. “How can that happen without peril to Zosimo Sortiar or us?”

“Well, it can’t, “de Lux flatly replied. “But my wife likes to say, ‘Nothing bad is happening.’ This is always so but only relevant in regard to the Grand Scheme of Things. As for ordinary individual entities in consensus reality, bad things are happening constantly, consistently, and predictably. But what is ‘bad’ and what is ‘good’? Qualifiers related to our very puny need for comforts and threats to gaining or maintaining those comforts. But in the denser Planes—as the one’s in which we now traverse—one’s good fortune is another’s ill. The Grand Scheme of Things is sustained through self-consumption, symbolized by the ouroboros. The eater and the eaten. “May that I be an eater and not the eaten.” de Lux quoted from an antique Hindu scripture called the Taittiriya Upanishad.

“Your quaint Inchaote rhetoric and rebel fantasies about subverting the paradigm are like the ramblings of a cartoon mad scientist of Outer-Plane science-fiction kitsch,” de Lux said. “Do you really understand the price of stopping the world and making it spin in the direction opposite the one it is accustomed to? Or have you ever imagined what would become of you if this Universe were sucked through a black hole into another dimension in which its remnants would be recycled into some other configuration?”

Dade argued that he and his inner group were not in the habit of bantering on such things—nor was Zosi. It was just—as de Lux had said—rhetoric and role-playing among young Inchaote sorcerers and magi. Lumie added that for some, it was a launch pad to go deeper and understand the real sense of self.

“Mmm,” de Lux grunted again. He reached behind him and with a pointed finger, drew a small, green and purple flashing object toward him. It was one of Zosi’s Gadgiwudgets. It had been hovering near the ceiling in a corner of the room. de Lux poked it a few times to get the shy widget to do its thing, but Dade and Lumie already knew what it was supposed to do.

After some jostling, it took on the form of a fluorescently luminous green, purple, and gold ouroboros that had a mirror in its center that always only reflected the person who was looking at it no matter how many people were gazing upon it at the same time; they all only saw a reflection of themselves and not each other. The mirror flashed like a beacon as the hologram whirled and rapidly shot through a series of transformations accompanied by a range of sounds, including the voices of parrots chirping “what the fuck” in the background.

The ouroboros object would then regurgitate its tail with the aack sound of a hairball-spewing cat. Following this, the squeaking sound that tube balloons make when twisted into shapes would resound while the ouroboros folded itself into a figure-eight and then back into a circle before snapping apart, spewing sparks like a Chinese fire-cracker. Then the sequence would repeat itself.

“That’s an adorable one, don’t you think?” de Lux said and mentioned that it was one of La Maga Magus’s favorites. “She laughs for hours on end with this thing,” de Lux remarked. “It makes a great sex toy—if you like the sound of women laughing instead of yowling, that is.” Then he soberly told them something using Zosi’s near exact words:

“You have to pull the tail out of the mouth of the ouroboros or else hack it in two so that the enclosed space and all-around space are indistinguishable. There is no finitude there, no boundaries and so there are no thoughts, judgments, or expectations. Then things are just as they are. They are real and boundless and not projections of thought, which are illusions. And also,” de Lux said, “It’s not enough to avoid a dragon; you have to kill it. Something I believe you recently received instruction about, Lady Illuminata Sofiel Magus,” de Lux said.

“A hard lesson about not being squeamish,” Lumie uttered.

“That’s it exactly,” de Lux announced. “When you’re in a period of transition, or any time for that matter, and you see the thing that is suspect and courts your fear, rush to it and embrace it as if in ardor,” he said and continued. “Claiming it as your own, it will fully surrender and return to its true nature within you. Heaven, hell, darkness, light, and all pairs of opposites are illusions and artificial constructs. They are projections of thought. Forgetful of this, the thinker experiences phantasms in the plane of duality and allows those phantasms an advantage, forgetting their source. Do not do this. This is what makes the wheel of the ouroboros go round.” –zsd23


If you would like a free ebook of this title or book 1 or 2 for email me at sororzsd23@gmail.com

Follow me on Facebook https://www.facebook.com/SororZsd23