by Marcus Katz
There is an oyster and pearl on the altar, reflecting Crowley’s notes from The Book of Lies, of a sexual magick nature: “This is the Love of These; creation-parturition is the Bliss of the One; coition-dissolution is the Bliss of the Many.”[130]
I also like the idea that Crowley gives of the Crossing of the Abyss - that each traveller crossing that desert drops a drop of water, until eventually the whole path is irrigated and blossoms with life. He also alludes to the ‘five footprints of the camel’, V.V.V.V.V., which should be on the card.
So we have a great sea (Binah) and a desert, the oyster with a pearl like the Moon, five drops of water, forming five Vs. The Upper High Priestess figure is in the posture of the Greek maiden. Her left hand is bunching up the skirts / robe, as if about to mount stairs.
The scroll is replaced by the oyster and the mirror as far more appropriate representations of the type of law of The High Priestess. The pillars are modified, and the veil is shown on two levels; the veil of light above and the veils in the temple below. The Abyss and its journey are depicted on the Masonic stonework.
Your Magical Journal and Dream Diary
“From one point of view, magical progress actually consists in deciphering one’s own record.”
— Aleister Crowley, Magick[131]
Although the keeping of a diary is a reasonably mundane activity at heart – a mere recording of the day’s events – taken as part of a magical life it has a cumulative effect and proves an increasingly powerful tool in the magical toolkit.
In conjunction with the technical work that the student is required to conduct in the Crucible Club (the solar observations) the first month of your journal will record this work, and your success or otherwise in maintaining this regular practice. You may also choose to record the general events of the day, and any other magical work in which you are currently engaged. The diary entries should be succinct and not overly-analysed. Here is an example from my own diaries, dated Friday 17 June 1983:
I received The Practice of Ritual Magic by Gareth Knight today in the post. I used an exercise in the book and meditated to the East on the balcony, in the light of the rising sun. I sat in the Sankhya-yoga position. East: Sword, Air, Yellow, Dawn, Spring, Life, Faith, Childhood, IHVH, Raphael, Paralda (Sylphs). What came to mind mostly was the idea of ‘birth’.
At noon I did likewise with the Fire (South) correspondences. South: Wand, Red, Noon, Summer, Light, Hope, Youth, ADNI, Michael, Djinn (Salamanders). A dominant image arose of ‘Power’. Shortly before dusk I tried the Water (West) correspondences. West: Water, Cup, Blue, Dusk, Autumn, Love, Charity, Maturity, AHIH, Gabriel, Nixsa (Undines).
Concentrating on the idea of a Keatsian [John Keats, the poet] ‘autumnal ripeness’ helped, as it was difficult to hold the ideas. [It was June, so Autumn felt distant].
Finally, not at midnight [I tended then and still do, write the journal at the end of the evening] went through the Earth (North) set: Disc, Green, Midnight, Winter, Law, Understanding, Old Age, AGLA, Auriel, Ghob (Gnomes). This gave me a very cold feeling, eventually, and the arising idea of ‘stability’.
I finished by practising some vocal vibrating exercises, counting letters and numbers.
By the following year, the entries were becoming far more esoteric and obscure, as the frequency of practice and the breadth of reading expanded, incorporating tarot, ancient Egyptian mythology, the I-Ching, astral projection group exercises (I had found a few people with whom to work), and correspondence with other occultists.
May 17th 1984. Day of Maat.
9:21 am. Last night, the LBRP was very clear. I actually saw a yellow figure outlined in the East. The Astral was very busy on retiring. At home today, cannot get into college. I tried a couple of Tarot readings as usual, but didn’t feel right today.
11:00 am. Roughly designed a pack of ten Egyptian Cards, based on the Tree of Life. I spread four in a Cross shape, making both an Ankh and Scales, after invoking Maat. The top position
(1) is the Spiritual Aspect, the left position (2) is What Aids, right (3) is what opposes, bottom (4) is the Resources / Material aspects. I shuffled and drew:
1: The card of Isis (3) – things will develop naturally. A good card here for she is Magick.
2: The card of Thoth (2) – what assists is learning and wisdom.
More study!
3: The card of Pthah (1) – what opposes, so stop, wait. 4: The card of Maat (4) – Truth. Keep to what is right.
Note the cards, even though shuffled, the first 4 of 10! 1+2+3+4
= 10 = 1!
11:20 am. Phoned the Sorcerers Apprentice [a mail-order shop in Leeds] to ask about Lamp of Thoth #14. They have my order OK. 1:20 pm. Went out and posted two letters to S [a Satanist]
and CP [Chaos magician].
11.36 pm. Been out at S’s all evening. M is very ill, and K has left the house because she is pregnant (!). The results of the Osirian Ritual have not yet come to pass. Nothing conclusive anyhow. We compared notes for the astral working. Did some work with Kabbalah from A.C.’s Diaries.
Midnight: Interruption to this writing. Hail Khephra! Must strengthen Aura.
With regard to your journals, they are mainly for your own use to discern patterns in retrospect and partially to advise any supervisor or teacher as to how your practices are progressing.
Crowley idealises the writing of the journal in Chapter 13 of Magick in Theory and Practice. His own journals and diaries are usually a far cry from his requirements of “virgin vellum, made from the calf which was born by Isis-Hathor” and written in a pen which is “the feather of a young male swan.” However, in terms of the symbolism, ideally the diary should be the perfect representation of the world, and one’s experience and relationship to it – for it is truly then “a book of incantation.”[132] A selected collation of Crowley’s voluminous journal entries and diaries is made by James Wasserman in Aleister Crowley and the Practice of the Magical Diary, mainly drawing upon ‘John St. John’ and ‘A Master of the Temple’, two of Crowley’s more significant magical journals.[133]
The basic purpose of the journal is to provide a form of enquiry which matches your belief structure to your recorded actions. There is always going to be a ‘creative tension’ to choose the content and style of your writing, and this tension is an outer sign of the alignment between Will and Action. If all is well, there is no specific thought that goes into the ego-less record; Will, Belief and Action are in accord and aligned, there is no problem! However, until that state can be attained, the action of writing an external account serves to drive out the demons that lurk in the buffers between our beliefs.
The journal may also provide assistance to those who follow in the ‘golden chain’ of initiation, providing them with useful information on the short-cuts and dead-ends in the labyrinth.
Edward Hoffman also comments on the kabbalistic references to both the ‘Recording Angel’ and ‘The Book of Life’ that records our deeds for later judgement.[134] He goes on to explore the technique of ‘reviewing’ the day advocated by Rabbi Nachman, which is actually a common technique taught to Neophytes. You do not need to specifically carry out such a review, as your Liber Resh practice, meditation and maintenance of a journal provide the same result – teaching you that you can ‘rise’ outside of yourself and judge your actions from a detached viewpoint. This is the secret teaching that is actually being communicated by this practice – the journal and the meditations are only means to that end. As such, the significance we place upon them is later abandoned.
Optional Journal Practices
“This life of ours is like a journey undertaken by the soul for the study of Divine Aspects, and of these is the pageant of the cosmos”[135]
The Book of Light and the Book of Night: Take two pages of your diary and label one Liber Lumen, the ‘Book of Light’, and one Liber Nocte, the ‘Book of Night’. In the former, maintain a list of your positive qualities and actions taken; in latter maintain a list of y
our negative qualities, limiting beliefs and unwanted behaviour.
The Book of the Unbound: On a page of your diary, start an entry which commences “If I could not fail at anything, I would …” and complete it in as much detail as possible.
The Book of Belief: Take a page of your diary and list your beliefs in the form, “I believe …”
The Thread: Write in your journal, on the top of an empty page: “Every time I see this page I will write the date below, and my feelings about the purpose and usefulness of keeping a magical diary.” As the years go by, you may need to add a new sheet into this page.
The journal provides a ‘thread’ to your everyday activities which, like the practice of Liber Resh, begin to consolidate your Will towards a singular aim. Crowley once said that the magician’s sole aim was to interpret his own magickal record, and after many years I have come to agree with him.
Most people’s activities are disassociated, so their accomplishments are minimal and serve no aim; their light is diffuse. We are aiming to be focused like a laser beam, which is sometimes referred to as ‘coherent light’. You are to make your life a coherent light.
Rare Magical Book (Private Collection)
The Dreaming Mind
It is important to realise that imagination has become a misused word in Western society and it is part of our work to reclaim its importance in our life.
It is to the author and philosopher Henry Corbin that we turn to remind ourselves of the importance of imagination. In Corbin’s perspective, imagination is an act of thought not grounded in Nature, but rather a divine act and knowing of the divine mind. It is the manner in which we participate in the mundus imaginalis – the world of imagination – which is no less real than the apparent world of the senses.
It is in this world, through a hierarchy of levels and intermediaries, that the magician operates. We recognise that the world is composed of the imagination in its true sense; a living interpretation of whatever reality may be, re-visioned by our own perception into our own universe. As such, we choose to engage with our imagination through dream, vision, ritual, and symbolism as a profound encounter with reality and all that may be.
Many magical techniques incorporate an element of imagination or, more specifically, methods of visualisation. It must be remembered by the student that we are here teaching such methods not as means in themselves, but as preparation and practice for higher states. We are exercising our faculties (of imagination, will, discipline, etc.) and installing new perspectives and appreciation by our techniques. As such they remain rungs on the ladder, not the space into which we are ascending.
The techniques of the magical system are tools of transcendence in a technology of transformation; they are not to be dropped into our imprisoned world-view, but better seen as means of escape and sign-posts of our way home. In this light, we do not argue better methods one against another; we do not debate variations of practice; we do not engage ourselves in discussion of pronunciation and effect – the worker remains hidden in the workshop.
Zosimos of Panopolis
Zosimos was a Greek-Egyptian alchemist and Gnostic mystic from the end of the 3rd century and beginning of the 4th century, who was born in Panopolis. His most famous work, also referenced by the psychoanalyst Carl Jung, is the Vision. In this vision, Zosimos describes an alchemical process which he sees in a dream. He then returns several times to the dreaming state and receives a series of visions.
We have chosen this work in its entirety as, much like the Emerald Tablet, it is worth ongoing contemplation and reflection. It is an important foundation in our Western esoteric tradition, and Zosimos was also one of the earliest writers to define alchemy, which he described, c. 300 A.D., as “the study of the composition of waters, movement, growth, embodying and disembodying, drawing the spirits from bodies and bonding the spirits within bodies.”
The Vision of Zosimos
The composition of the waters, and the movement, and the growth, and the removal and restitution of bodily nature, and the splitting off of the spirit from the body, and the fixation of the spirit on the body are not operations with natures alien one from the other, but, like the hard bodies of metals and the moist fluids of plants, are One Thing, of One Nature, acting upon itself. And in this system, of one kind but many colours, is preserved a research of all things, multiple and various, subject to lunar influence and measure of time, which regulates the cessation and growth by which the One Nature transforms itself. And saying these things, I slept, and I saw a certain sacrificing priest standing before me and over and altar which had the form of a bowl. And that altar had 15 steps going up to it.
Then the priest stood up and I heard from above a voice say to me, “I have completed the descent of the 15 steps and the ascent of the steps of light. And it is the sacrificing priest who renews me, casting off the body’s coarseness, and, consecrated by necessity, I have become a spirit.”
And when I had heard the voice of him who stood in the altar formed like a bowl, I questioned him, desiring to understand who he was.
He answered me in a weak voice saying, “I am Ion, Priest of the Adytum, and I have borne an intolerable force. For someone came at me headlong in the morning and dismembered me with a sword and tore me apart, according to the rigor of harmony. And, having cut my head off with the sword, he mashed my flesh with my bones and burned them in the fire of the treatment, until, my body transformed, I should learn to become a spirit. And I sustained the same intolerable force.”
And even as he said these things to me and I forced him to speak, it was as if his eyes turned to blood and he vomited up all his flesh. And I saw him as a mutilated image of a little man and he was tearing at his flesh and falling away.
And being afraid I woke and considered, “Is this not the composition of the waters?” I thought that I was right and fell asleep again. And I saw the same altar in the shape of a bowl and water bubbled at the top of it, and in it were many people endlessly. And there was no one whom I might question outside of the bowl. And I went up to the altar to view the spectacle.
And I saw a little man, a barber, whitened with age, and he said to me, “What are you looking at?”
I answered that I wondered at the boiling water and the men who were burning but remained alive.
And he answered me saying, “The spectacle which you see is at once the entrance and the exit and the process.”
I questioned him further, “What is the nature of the process?”
And he answered saying, “It is the place of the practice called the embalming. Men wishing to obtain virtue enter here and, fleeing the body, become spirits.”
I said to him, “And are you a spirit?”
And he answered, saying, “Both a spirit and a guardian of spirits.”
As he was saying these things to me and the boiling increased and the people wailed, I saw a copper man holding a lead tablet in his hand. He spoke aloud, looking at the tablet, “I counsel all those in mortification to become calm and that each take in his hand a lead tablet and write with his own hand and that each bear his eyes upward and open his mouth until his grapes be grown.”
The act followed the word and the master of the house said to me, “Have you stretched your neck up and have you seen what is done?” And I said that I had and he said to me, “This man of copper whom you have seen is the sacrificial priest and the sacrifice and he who vomited out his own flesh. To him was given authority over the water and over those men in mortification.”
And when I had seen these visions, I woke again and said to myself, “What is the cause of this vision? Is this not the white and yellow water, boiling, sulphurous, divine?”
And I found that I understood well. And I said that it was good to speak and good to hear and good to give and good to receive and good to be poor and good to be rich. And how does the Nature learn to give and to receive? The copper man gives and the water stone receives; the thunder gives the fire that flashed from it. For al
l things are woven together and all things are taken apart and all things are mingled and all things combined and all things mixed and all things separated and all things are moistened and all things are dried and all things bud and all things blossom in the altar shaped like a bowl. For each, by method and by weight of the four elements, the interlacing and separation of the whole is accomplished for no bond can be made without method. The method is natural, breathing in and breathing out, keeping the orders of the method, increasing and decreasing. And all things by division and union come together in a harmony, the method not being neglected, the Nature is transformed. For the Nature, turning on itself, is changed. And the Nature is both the nature of the virtue and the bond of the world.
And, so that I need not write to you of many things, friend, build a temple of one stone, like ceruse, like alabaster, like marble of Proconnesus in appearance, having neither beginning nor end in its building. Let it have within, a pure stream of water glittering like sunlight. Notice on what side the entry to the temple is and take your sword in hand and seek the entry. For thin-mouthed is the place where the opening is and a serpent lies by it guarding the temple. First seize him in your hands and make a sacrifice of him. And having skinned him, cut his flesh from his bones, divide him, member from member, and having brought together again the members and the bones, make them a stepping stone at the entry to the temple and mount upon them and go in, and there you will find what you seek. For the priest whom you see seated in the stream gathering his colour, is not a man of copper. For he has changed the colour of his nature, and become a man of silver whom, if you wish, after a little time, you will have as a man of gold.