Archive for the ‘Seekers’ Category

Faust and links

BY: Mark

Following a previous about the Praxis Magica Faustiana and the subsequent realization that I knew very little about Faust, both historically and in literature, I’ve been working on getting educated. It’s a humbling process that dovetails with some of my long-standing embarrassment about the focus of this site. I have wanted DARKLINE to be about esoterica and the strange occult world we live in, but I’m constantly faced with the fact that I know very little of these things. I suppose one should consider oneself a life-long student, but the depth of my ignorance is, well, exceedingly deep. The default solution has been to hunker down and do nothing, which serves no one, especially myself. It is time to shake off that fear, and get on with the enlightenment. The point isn’t to build a platform to display my erudition (which this clearly isn’t), but to provide a forum for discussion and learning. I just get to be the guy providing the general direction of the rubric.

To that end, here’s the current state of my Faust education.

If one is to believe Wikipedia, Goethe’s Faust has, as one of its inspirations, Jacob Bidermann’s play Cenodoxus, though without digging into the text, it is hard to say where the inspiration lies, as Cenodoxus appears to dance around the question of the price of secret knowledge rather than addressing it directly. Goethe’s Faust, even, does not appear to be as dark and as much as a morality tale as the myth that is burned in my brain–the random bits of literary mythology one picks up in course of an classical education. Faust, the man–notably one Dr. Johann Georg Faust–appears to have been a 16th charlatan of the classic sort: a racounteur, a traveling alchemist, a magician, and a scoundrel. Exactly the sort of man that would be a perfect source for the hubristic hero of the tragic plays.

Christopher Marlowe wrote a play about him within fifty or so years after he supposedly died, and I find it almost most interesting than the play itself that Marlowe wrote a play about a man’s pact with the Devil–a suspiciously Christian theme, and I’m hard pressed to think of a Shakespeare play which has a similar theme. Old Bill relied on much more pagan sources for his fantastical elements. Odd, don’t you think? Or was it simply a matter of Shakespeare knowing who his real audiences were and playing more readily to them?

Anyway, Faust the charlatan was purported to be sort of man who would have dabbled in the Black Arts, which makes the historical provenance of Praxis Magica Faustiana certainly easier to swallow. And given the subject material of the text, it follows that this could be source of that type of grimoire known as ‘Faustian.’

Dan Harms has posted a link to a digitized version of a 18th century German grimoire, which falls under the category of Faustian magic. Of course, the comments are insightful and filled with smart people talking all manner of things that will send you spiraling off into other corners of the occult world. Including Dan’s original commentary on the idea of the liber spirituum, the type of book that this MS. purports to be.

According to the commenters, the Herzogin Anna Amalia Bibliothek is a hothouse of Faustian magical documents. Who knew there were enough of these that a library could specialize in them? The digitization of the Liber Spirituum Potentissimorum is of exceptional quality, and it makes my fingers tingle as I look at it.

I suppose any magician who seeks knowledge from spirits is engaging in Faustian Magick, though I wonder about the veracity of that statement. Dee, Crowley, and so on sought to communicate with otherworldly creatures in order to gain knowledge. Was Faust, in the 16th century, the first one to do this? Or was his story simply the most readily available and comprehensible to the masses? There certainly had to be other seekers before Faust . . .

Today’s Readings

BY: Mark

In the beginning there was one. From this came two and three. Two and three were polar: yin and yang. As they came from one they were the energetic expressions of the creative force, perpetually changing into each other and, through change, evolving. However, their changes needed to be controlled by some higher consciousness. Looking closer at the yin and yang symbol it is evident that its dynamic form is kept in place by a circle. This circle represents the first idea–the prima materia, the word, the origin of duality, the source of creation yet also the limitation of creative expression.

- Dr. Josef Margraf “Morphogenesis and Plant Signature: The Tao of Connectedness” (Alchemy Journal, vol. 11, no. 1, p. 8 )

The grimoire is a palingenesis. The hack and paste of overlapping ages. Some made to look old, others seeming younger in candlelight than the centuries make them. These texts are the lost, the rediscovered, the rescued from flames, and the outright invented. It is a dog-eared tarot gallery.

- Peter Grey, from his Introduction to Howlings [Scarlet Imprint]

Scarlet Imprint is putting on an event called the Summer of Love. In Brighton, on August 20th. In case you were wondering what to do on a summer evening while in the UK.

On the second night, I called out to my soul.
“I am weary, my soul, my wandering has lasted too long, my search for myself outside myself. Now I have gone through events and find you behind all of them.”

- Carl Jung, The Red Book, Liber Primus, folio ii (r).

I really need a second desk, just so I can leave The Red Book out. Let myself get lost in it a few times during the course of the day . . .

The Great Work-in-Progress

BY: Mark

Visualization, or using the power of your imagination creatively, is a very important part of magick. We are generally brought up in this society to ‘look down’ on the imagination; imagination is somehow thus removed from reality and not very useful in daily life. Nothing could be further from the truth. I have often heard people say, ‘Oh, it’s just imagination.’

Just imagination! The imagination is the most powerful faculty we possess. We are taught to believe that there is only one ‘real’ reality and that the imagination is removed from that reality; but everything that human beings have created in the world existed first only in the imagination of one person. In order to create something in this outer reality, it first must take form in your own inner reality, then be made material through the application of your Will.

- Rodney Orpheus, Abrahadabra, p. 29

In consider issues of ‘reality’ and ‘being,’ I am reminded of Chapter One, Verse One of the Gospel of St. John: ‘In the beginning was the word, and the word was God.’ The act of naming something–providing the word–is more than just a way of distinguishing it from something else; it’s a creative act, and in a sense anything that has a name has an existence, even if it is a ‘subjective-objective’ one.

- Jonathan Back, Spirits Walk with Me, p. 5.

Mr. Kargel: Fellow Seeker

BY: Mark

Ryan Kargel thinks about trees, and sometimes he thinks about faith, and sometimes he thinks about our faith in trees. Or lack thereof. His twitter bio reads: Gentleman ecologist, writer, member of the Sans-Beard Mennonites.

I officially met Ryan a few months ago when he and I and our respective wives took a road trip to Ashland, OR, to cram as much Shakespeare into our bodies as possible over three days (where, among other things, we saw the world premiere of the stage production of Throne of Blood; yes, a theater production of a Kurosawa movie that, in turn, was based on a play–it is as recursive as it sounds). During the drive, Ryan and I discovered that we shared a sense of curiosity about the world and how it works. What makes talking with Ryan fun is that he’s got a name for the Divine Instrument and I don’t, and yet, it doesn’t seem to get in the way of our conversations.

Sometimes it feels good to be ignorant.  It’s easier, because you aren’t aware of potential flaws in your beliefs. You aren’t aware of how relatively small you are, and feeling small is hard to distinguish from feeling unimportant.  That may be why it was so difficult in the 17th century for government and church to accept the Copernican astronomical model, which placed the earth in orbit around the sun.  Surely God made the universe at human scale.  We were meant to subdue it.  It says so in Genesis.  If the earth isn’t the center of the universe and if the universe is much larger than we thought, maybe we ourselves are less central than we thought.

He blogs at http://ryankargel.typepad.com/. The above quote is from his entry of November 14th, 2010, entitled “Almost There.”

The Awareness Ritual

BY: Mark

( 3 – 5 – 3 )

Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law

What is thy will?

To focus the spirit.

To what end?

To master my will.

To what end?

That I may accomplish the Great Work.

Love is the law, love under will.

(1)

Fall to!

Esoteric Book Conference

BY: Mark

I only managed to make it to the first day of presentations at the Esoteric Book Conference in Seattle. Held at the Northwest Rooms of the Seattle Center, it’s a quiet little arrangement of a book fair, a room for presentations, and a small art show. Somewhat of a blink-and-miss-it arrangement, and if you wander too far, you end up in a much larger ballroom where the Seattle Miniature Dollhouse show was going on.

As one can imagine, it was pretty easy to tell the difference between the two, and not just from the general wardrobe difference between the patrons of each. Still, an odd little juxtaposition on a somewhat rainy fall day.

Hosted by William Kiesel (proprietor of Ouroboros Press), Michael Kolson (of Night of Pan Books), and Catamara Rosarium (who unveiled Rosarium Blends, an alchemical endeavor that is concocting ways to enrich our sensory lives), the Esoteric Book Conference is in its second year, and from the outset, it was clear that the participants were eager to dive into two days of esoteric book talk. Last year, attendance at the lectures seemed to creep up to a reasonable level–a number that was clearly matched in the first lecture this morning. People were ready to talk about the occult today.

The first presenter was Debra Chesnut, and her topic was the spoken aspect of rituals from the ancient mysteries to modern occult societies–the legomena. No one would argue with her about the idea that words have power, and she quickly dove into the practical application of that concept: how you say the word is almost as important as the word itself. The Greek language, she notes, was not meant to be read, it was meant to be spoken aloud. The written word was only meant to guide the speaker, and most Greeks never read silently. She cites Plato’s dialogue Cratylus as being not only about the meaning of language, but also about how to speak properly.

From there she progressed to the Chant of the Seven Vowels (see Joscelyn Godwin’s book The Mystery of the Seven Vowels for much more detail). The vowels invoke power; the consonants are the container. How you contain and direct the vowels via consonants is how you manifest power. The Tetragrammaton is nothing more than a series of vowel sounds; IAO–which shows up on amulets in the Middle East, is the Greek spelling of the Tetragrammaton, and is the name of a valley on Maui–is clearly a resonance of vowel sounds that transcends cultures and regions. Chesnut walks through examples found on gold tablets in Greek burial sites, within the Corpus Hermeticum, the Mithraic Liturgy, and Zoastrian Hymns to Mithras.

She closed with a quote from the Chaldean Oracles of Julianus.

Never change the barbarous names;
For there names in every nation given from god,
Which have unspeakable power in rites.
When thou seest a sacred fire without form,
Shining, flashingly through the depths of the world,
Hear the voice of fire.

The next presenter I had a chance to hear was David Beth of La Société Voudon Gnostique, who was celebrating the release of a new edition of his book, Voudon Gnosis. His presentation was on the Qliphoth and Nightside Gnosis, two things very near and dear to my heart. He began with a bit of a poke at the “fluffy” groups who look upon Qliphotic pathworkings as their “kink.” Western students of the spiritual arts tend to have a consumerist attitude; they expect answers to be served to them in easily digestible chunks, and when those aren’t offered, they get petulant. “Well, if you don’t give me what I want–” (insert outraged foot stomp) “–then I’ll take my business over here, and boy, won’t you be sorry!” (aka The Supermarket Model of New Age Spiritual Seeking) As a result, some groups look to Qliphotic workings as the off-the-beaten-path material that will keep their fussy constituents happy and engaged.

This is not the Voudon Gnosis model, obviously.

The Qliphotic workings are an inverse way of examining reality, and Beth made the comparison that if study of Universe A was ontological, then study of Universe B was meontological. A lefthand adept understands that bliss cannot be truly received and comprehended if it is not relished. One must be cognizant of what one is experiencing–i.e., maintaining their individuality as a perceptive point–in order to know it. Individuality is not relinquished during gnosis. Working through the Qliphotic Tree–along the Pathways of Frustration–is to be able to understand a synthesis with everything without extinguishing the distinction between the perceived and the perceiver.

It’s a highly individualized process. “The Law may be for All,” Beth says, “But the Gnosis may not be.” When gnosis is attained, there is a reversal of energy within the adept. No longer is he or she nourished by the Golden Light, but he or she will be powered by the Black Sun, the Cosmic Luciferian Manifestation.

His presentation offered a great deal of food for thought, and it certainly dovetails (with less terminology) with the course of thought I’ve been exploring. An underlying precept of the Codex of Souls is the individuation of enlightenment, and I can see that I’ve got some more reading ahead of me, which is perfectly timed as I should be starting Book 3 fairly soon.

Finally, Daniel Shulke have a presentation on the newly released Occult Reliquary, a collection of material from the Richel-Eldermans Collection in the Museum of Witchcraft in Boscastle, Cornwall. The Occult Reliquary is a large-format book containing more than 250 illustrations (many of them in full color) from the collection, and Shulke pointed out that the material in the book is around 10% of the collection. There is a tradition among secret societies and occultists that libraries and artefacts be destroyed upon the death of their holders (though, in many cases, “destroyed” may simply mean “removed from the public’s conscious awareness”), and to have such a collection preserved for public viewing is somewhat miraculous. Though, there is speculation that the entire collection may have been 10X larger than what was preserved.

The collection of charms, images, magical seals, and other ritual objects stem mainly from the workings of Ars Amatoria, a European magical order that–perhaps not surprisingly, given the antecedent of their name–employed sex magic in their workings. There are also some material relating to the M∴M∴ and the A∴A∴ (again, the whole sex magic angle).

It’s a gorgeous book (as are all the books produced by Three Hand Press), and Shulke’s discussion of the history of the collection (received from the Dutch collector, Bob Richel, who, in turn, inherited much of it from his father-in-law, Mr. Eldermans) was a welcome insight into the secrecy–and controversy–surrounding the legacy of occult collections.

John Griogair Bell Offers Insight Into Free Thinking

BY: Mark

John Griogair Bell (curator of hermetic.com), offering commentary on the nature of paradigms and the perils of binding oneself to one above all others.

The notion that all paradigms have limited boundaries of applicability, that they contain their own sets of inexplicability, means that the activity of defending a paradigm as one true anything is inherently nonsensical and illogical and unscientific. And, vehement hatred of other paradigms, or those operating within different paradigms, is bogglingly, self-evidently, torturously backward to the very idea and philosophy of science. It seems to me, that kind of vehement hate is a failure of humanity to live up to the potential afforded by the idea and philosophy of science as a function which liberates them from tyranny of form determined for them by faith.

The full post is called “Paradigms”, and it is a delightful analysis on what it means to be an occulture critic.

Blair MacKenzie Blake on Collecting Crowley

BY: Mark

I recently acquired a copy of Blair MacKenzie Blake’s The Wickedest Books in the World (Confesssions of an Aleister Crowley Bibliophile), and while I don’t suffer from the same desire to aquire first editions like Blake does, I found the book to an engaging and entertaining read. Especially the section near the end where he described his vision of turning Boleskine House into “Crowleyland.”

(Blake, as he notes more than once in the book, is still under the influence of his desire, needing on a copy of The Book of Thoth, one of 200 copies produced in 1944, right at the height of British wartime restrictions on making such extravagances. It’s printed on Arnold unbleached handmade paper (from the Chiswick Press), bound in half-russet morocco leather, raised bands and gold-blocking on the spine, Egyptian-themed boards, and illustrated throughout with both colored and black and white images of the tarot deck as designed by Crowley and painted by Lady Frieda Harris. In case you have a copy lying around, and are wondering what to do with it.)

The Wickedest Books in the World is an oversized volume filled with gorgeous pictures of the first editions (photographed by Duncan Blake), and Blake’s fervent enthusiasm for his bibliophilic condition becomes infectious. By the end of his confessions, I was looking dismissively at the two shelves of Crowley books I have. All reprints. Nothing remotely close to a first edition up there. I was such a dilletante.

Blake clearly recognizes the allure that collecting something that is quantifiable rare, and he doesn’t dwell overmuch on the psychology of the collector. Though he does touch on the myth that Crowley firsts—because of the exacting publication specifications on some of them—still bear an imprint of the Great Beast himself on them, making them more like talismans than bunch of pages stuck together with glue and possibly more unsavory things. Blake’s focus is more on the linguistic fever and mania that comes over those who obsess over Crowley’s output. It becomes so easy to slip into a world populated by esoteric symbols.

Although the proprieter didn’t wear a Phrygian cap, Sanka, and a tourmaline ring seemed promising. Let’s have a look at those worm-eaten grimoires and dusty alchemical tracts—their moldering pages copiously illustrated with a mythic zoology, abtruse glyphs, and occult heraldry. Where were the peacock tails, emblematic paintings of the mystic marriage/conjunctio, and resplendent phoenixes? Further exploration of the place revealed no alchemical menagerie. Not even a tiny back room containing the revolving wheel of the zodiac, celestial-astral liquid in copper vessles, flaming athanors, curcurbites, or the prism of sorcerer’s bottles filled with the frozen flow of silver. Our pockets were filled with francs and bezants, and we damn near had the effluvium of Babalon tucked in our wallets. If nothing else, that ought to put us in a priveleged position in the multiverse.
    —(Blake, reminiscing about Parisian bookstores, p. 42)

I wish my local bookstores were more like this.

Giovanni Pico della Mirandola

BY: Mark

Giovanni Pico della Mirandola was an Italian philosopher and scholar who lived from 1463 until 1494. During his short life, he studied theology and philosophy, dabbled in the Cabala, wrote an extensive series of treaties on all possible subjects (900 in all, collected as Conclusiones philosophicae, cabalasticae et theologicae in Rome). While some were vaguely heretical, they realistically just pointed out the lack of theological enlightenment of the era. He sought a synthesis of religion and philosophy, attempting to counter the spread of pure humanism with a bit of critical thinking. He saw Hebrew and Talmudic sources as viable texts and generally got into trouble over his eagerness and willingess to be a free thinker. His piece, “Oration on the Dignity of Man,” is one of the landmark pieces of the Italian Renaissance (some go so far as to call it a “manifesto”).

Parts of his Oration can be found here in Latin, Italian, and English. A complete translation can be found here.

Walter Pater’s history of Pico in context of the Renaissance can be found here.