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!

Liber 821 or How I Found the Goddess and What She Did to Me When I Found Her Part 1

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

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

Should you find that your own revelations of The Goddess become substantially different than the revelations of Mal-2, then perhaps The Goddess has plans for you as an Episkopos, and you might consider creating your own sect from scratch, unhindered.

                                                —from  Principia Discordia or How I Found the Goddess

                                                   and What I Did to Her When I Found Her.

I had been dedicated to the goddess Durga for very many years.  I was not doing the “eclectic” neopagan thing of adopting a mishmash of foreign deities and making spiritual-practice stew out of them. I was (and continue to be despite my immersion in Western occultism and contemporary Paganism) a long-time adherent of reformed Advaita Vedanta.  I became dedicated to a certain important scripture dated to about the 3^rd century called the Devi Mahatmyam, or “Glory of the Goddess.” It is a trilogy of mythologies in which the Goddess, personifying the combined power of the gods, defeats various demons in battles and, thus, restores the order of the Universe.

The full scripture, which takes more than an hour or three to recite, is chanted in the context of devotional ritual (puja) and is prefaced and followed by several auxiliary prayers, chants, mantra, and ritual gestures. I took to performing a much abbreviated version of the ritual, in accordance with guidelines given to me by a senior swami of the Ramakrishna Order of Vedanta. I performed the ritual once weekly for about a year after many years of working with the text. At this time, I also was immersed in disciplines related to Kundalini yoga and had recently removed myself from association with a Nygmapa (Dzogchen) Buddhist sangha where I was being groomed to become a lama.

The ritual and contemplation or chanting of the Devi Mahatmyam is generally done as an exercise in which the Goddess is thought of as a beneficent entity who is being addressed for the sake of gaining favors and for protection from both supernatural evil and the nasty world-at-large. I ultimately took a more Gnostic and literal approach. After all, Advaita Vedanta is jnana yoga, the discipline of spiritual integration through gnosis. In addition, the translations of the names of the demons that the Goddess is battling in the Devi Mahatmyam include The Great Deceiver (Mahahanu), The Aimless One (Parivarita), The Hypocrite  (Bidala), Anger (Kruddha), The Savage (Ugrasya),  He Who Gives  Way to Temptation (Durdhara), The Vicious (Chanda), The Malicious (Munda), Conceit (Shumbha), and Self-deprecation (Nishumbha). And the most famous demon celebrated in the scripture is Mahishasura—the “Buffalo demon” of egoism, the depiction of the slaying of which is an important piece of Hindu iconography.

So, these demons that The Goddess is protecting you from are not oogah-boogah things “out there”; they are negative qualities within yourself. How does The Goddess protect you from them? She rips you apart over and again with a barrage of weapons: the sword of discrimination, club of articulation, bow of determination, arrow of penetration, pike of attention, rod of restraint, axe of right action, net of unity, trident of harmony, and discus of revolving time. Then she cuts off your head and totally obliterates you in a confounding mush of ego dissolution that you ideally recover from changed.

So, a few years before I began to shift gears and look to Western occultism for empowerment and insight, and before I knew anything about Cabala or Crowley or the Abyss, I found myself returning to a particular difficult mind state in my meditation practices. What I would feel enveloped in would be a dark, abysmal space. In it, I would receive impressions of how I became who I am. I would receive visceral sensations and memories harkening back to earliest childhood. As a Tantric Buddhist and Yoga practitioner, I had been trained in how to maneuver such experiences. Nevertheless, and perhaps aggravated by volatility in my personal life, I slipped over the edge and plummeted into the core of a chasm one morning.

I looked and saw a great abyss and a dark funnel of whirling waters or fixed airs, wherein were cities and monsters and trees and atoms and mountains and little flames (being souls) and all the material of an universe.

And all are sucked down one by one, as necessity hath ordained. For below is a glittering jewelled globe of gold and azure, set in a World of Stars.

And there came a Voice from the Abyss, saying: "Thou seest the Current of Destiny! Canst thou change one atom in its path? I am Destiny. Dost thou think to control me? for who can move my course?"

                                                            —From The Cry of the 29th Aethyr in The Vision the    Voice attributed to Aleister Crowley   

I experienced profound ego-dissolution and it was no freaking way like the sunshine and moonbeams of an Eric Tolle New Age best seller. Whereas it was kind of like an “enlightenment” experience, it also was the antithesis of what I’ve ever read about such things.

I realized in that moment in a way that cut far deeper than mere intellection that I was not a person. I was a mask, an automaton, a provisional being not of my own making. Unconscious and automated.  I was a composite of experiences and perceptions, habits, and conditioning that were not necessarily my own. Mere non-conscious karmic momentum of an interdependently arising neurotic fiasco called nature and nurture that stretched back to beginningless Time. 

My spirit is no more; my soul is no more. My life leaps out into annihilation!

                                                            —From The Cry of the 2nd Aethyr

In that moment, to borrow words from Kshemaraja’s commentary on the experience of enlightenment in the Spanda Karikas, “all my thought-constructs were split asunder by the recognition of [my] true essential nature.” The event indeed “surpassed common experience” but was anything but “replete with unprecedented bliss.”  My reaction was rage. Life appeared to be an oppressive lie foisted on me by others who themselves were utterly in the grip of the same lie. I was mostly angry because the way I felt about myself for so long—the way I persistently operated and struggled—didn’t have to be as it was. Everything was mere fabrication born of a delusion about Reality that I was force fed from the doomed moment that I took my first breath.

But what was worse than realizing the prosaic blather that Life Is but a Dream was the notion that the oppression of the illusion would continue to be suffered despite my new insight about it; I was not something other than this inexorable composite of karmic momentum. It was my ways of thought, my emotional responses, my personality, all the structures and nuances of my physiology. 

The Bengali mystic Sri Ramakrishna was known to say, “God is real; the world is illusory.”  I understood what that meant in that moment of crisis because I experienced the profound difference between myself as a personality construct and this organism called Reality.

Herein no forms appear, and the vision of God face to face, that is transmuted in the Athanor called dissolution, or hammered into one forge of meditation, is in this place but a blasphemy and a mockery.

And the Beatific Vision is no more, and the glory of the Most High is no more. There is no more knowledge. There is no more bliss. There is no more power. There is no more beauty. For this is the Palace of Understanding: for thou art one with the Primeval things.

—From The Cry of the 14^th Aethyr

Prior to this episode, I had been an “insufferable know-it-all.” In a moment, however, the value of all concepts shattered. It was all vain blather, “sound and fury signifying nothing.”

I was “out-of-it” for several days, weeks perhaps. Humbled, humiliated, and feeling gyped and screwed about life. But when the dust settled, I felt free. Relieved. Off the hook. Nothing was true; thus, everything was permitted. I became relaxed. I put away my beliefs, books, and allegiances. I also arrived at a new sense of compassion, having glimpsed the roots of happiness and suffering concerning the human condition. There was no place to put blame; the cause was an interdependently arising phenomenon that drove the World Machine.

Yea! verily this is the Truth, this is the Truth, this is the Truth. Unto thee shall be granted joy and health and wealth and wisdom when thou art no longer thou.

                                                            —Liber Cheth vel Vallum Abiegni, 13

But, actually, life went on with its twists and turns, joys and disappointments, peak experiences and hard lessons.

There have been other instances in my life in which the end result of fervent goddess work has been crisis: upheaval, pain, loss. Even though things turn out “all for the best” in the end, the pattern has made me skittish about working with goddess energy. So I wince at folks who look to the Goddess for a kinder, gentler kind of spirituality, who look to the self-effacing, ever-doting mother or else the ever-accommodating and never-clinging lover. The contemptible idealized woman. The Goddess is not this. Rather, she is the maw and secret of creation, sustenance, dissolution, and transformation.

O Circle of Stars,

Whereof our father is by 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,

O Queen of Space, O Jewel of Light,

Continuous one of the heavens;

Let it be ever thus

That men speak not of Thee as One, but as None;

And let them not speak of Thee at all, since Thou art continuous.

                                                            —From Liber XV (Thelemic Gnostic Mass), Aleister Crowley 

 

 

***

This essay appears here:

 

Available in Kindle format at this amazon.com page

 

Leonard de Lux --the Young Hero of Novel 1 of the Sorcerers and Magi series

Leonard had been fantasizing about being Sofia La Maga’s apprentice. It was an absolute impossibility, of course. He felt increasingly bitter about it, but who could he blame? He was a fuck-up after all—but so was the professor, according to his father.

Impossible fantasies about becoming her apprentice gave way to dreams about being her sexual friend. How weird to have a crush on that woman, but, man, was he filled with a strange fire when he jacked off to the thought her. Part of the thrill was desiring someone who his father hated.

Now Leonard would have to slither home and wait for his father to notice that he had gotten in trouble at school again. The wrath that de Lux junior would incur from de Lux senior would be silent and seething. Leonard was trying to figure out how the rigmarole would go without admitting that his “crime” was related to a dispute about participating in an illicit Phaeton maneuver match. That would be a monster. That would be a lot more than what his father could endure, even if the moral of the story was that Leonard had come to his senses about it.

Leonard didn’t go home after the codes and keys class. He did not leave the school premises. Rather, he skulked around the second floor corridor, keeping clear of hall guards and teachers—especially Professor Lossius whose classroom was at the far end of the floor.

He was waiting for Professor La Maga to wander by in her usual way, limping along with a burden in her arms. He was braced for a bold act, considering that he would not be able to see the professor for another two weeks. Or perhaps he would never see her again, depending on what his father did to him when he found out what had happened and why. So it was important for Leonard to find the professor and make an impression on her before departing to be crushed by fate.

At about a quarter past three, moments before the close of school, Leonard caught her. She was carrying a huge stack of overstuffed hanging file folders and limping along as if hoping that the awkward toting of heavy, slippery things would at last lead to calamity. Leonard emerged from a hiding spot in an alcove and sidled beside her.

“Professor La Maga!” he uttered robustly. She turned slightly. The folders flipped out of her grip and splattered yards across the floor. Both he and she placidly watched this occur. Leonard even slightly nodded when his gaze met the professor’s. 

“You do this on purpose, don’t you, Professor?” Leonard said.

The professor looked away at the mess and seemed to distantly smile. What folks around her—even other professors—were too dumb to see, was that she was engaged in a magical act. It was a set up—this behavior in the halls.  It was a deliberate link in a chain of events related to the activation of a magical spell. That’s what Leonard thought. He had helped her accomplish a magical act. That must’ve been worth something to her.

Available from amazon.com.  See tab at the header of this page.