The Dark Lord: H.P. Lovecraft, Kenneth Grant, and the Typhonian Tradition in Magic - Peter Levenda 2013

Gods, The Beast, and Men

A church of magic does not exist.

—Emile Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life, p. 43 (emphasis in original)

ONE HESITATES TO REFUTE or contradict the father of modern sociology, but at the time the above classic was published—in 1912—there already was a church of magic. In fact, there were several. Durkheim's statement reflects his understanding that magic is not amenable to rituals of group worship, since the approach to the sacred that is undertaken by the magician is a “delicate operation that requires precautions and a more or less complicated initiation ...”⁴³ This did not stop the French magicians Jules Doinel (1842-1903) from creating (in 1890) and Papus (Gerard Encausse, 1865-1916) from joining (in 1892) a “Gnostic Catholic Church”; nor did it stop Crowley from using a version of the Gnostic Catholic Church as his vehicle for Thelema, writing a Gnostic Mass in 1913 (a year after Durkheim's work was published). Whether or not such a church is an effective tool for magic and the goals of magic remains to be seen, however. Anyone witnessing some of the celebrations of the Mass by members of the Gnostic Catholic Church at various times over the previous five decades or so would have recognized obvious differences in style from those of normative Christian denominations. It may be argued that magicians are not priests by nature—they are individual, solitary persons devoted more to their own spiritual development than to the spirituality of a group. Further, a magician's approach to a public, communal ritual may leave something to be desired, particularly when the magician takes as his or her template an established ritual like the Catholic Mass with nearly two thousand years of history behind it and its celebration and then proceeds to alter it considerably to suit what can only be described as an opposing theological weltanschauung. At best, you have an imitation of the original, a kind of “cover” version that may leave one yearning nostalgically for the original. At worst, the results can range from the scandalous to the hilarious ... to the just plain sad. Given the options, one easily prefers the scandalous.

The scandalous might have been Crowley's intent in the early days of the twentieth century but now, in the early days of the twenty-first century, what Crowley saw as challenging and provocative hardly constitutes cause for censorship or suppression (except perhaps by the religious Right, but they are easily inflamed). Crowley wanted to institutionalize (and make popularly accessible) the religious and philosophical precepts underpinning his new faith of Thelema. He saw the Mass—and the Gnostic Catholic Church—as the vehicle for doing this, much in the way the Catholic Mass can be seen as the vehicle for proclaiming and celebrating the doctrines and theology of Roman Catholicism. But Crowley was a magician, first and foremost. His teachings are couched in magical language and magical references. Virtually all of his writings were designed for those belonging to one or both of his most important magical societies, the AA, and the OTO, neither of which were designed with communities of worshippers in mind but which are predicated on the idea of individual (not group) attainment.

His theology is easily summed up in the familiar “Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law” and “Love is the law, love under will.” It was antinomian, authoritarian, and transgressive. After one exhorts everyone to do their will, that every man and every woman is a star, there is not much else to the theology or the doctrine. The core of Thelema is in the work itself, the Great Work of uniting oneself with one's Holy Guardian Angel (to use the Golden Dawn and AA terminology), and that is an individual and not a group endeavor.⁴⁴

The famous Biblical Ten Commandments—handed down to Moses from God—consists of three commandments concerning sins against God and seven commandments prohibiting sin against the community. There is no identification of sins against one's self. It is as if God and community were all that mattered spiritually; that if one abides by the rules of God and family then one has already avoided sin against one's self. What Thelema does is question that assumption: in other words, is it possible to sin against one's self? The Thelemic answer is a definite “yes.” If one obeys the commandments concerning God and community to the detriment of one's self then one is sinning against one's self. What Crowley does is turn the assumptions implicit in the Abrahamic religions on their head by insisting that the individual matters more than the community or, to be more precise, that the salvation or preservation of the community is dependent upon the spiritual growth of its component individuals. This, of course, is the magical worldview and always has been, ever since the bifurcation between the needs of the individual and the state took place sometime in misty antiquity.⁴⁵ What Crowley had attempted to do was to codify the magical worldview as a religious worldview, applicable to all.

Thus the tension between the magical worldview and the requirements of an organized church contributes to confusion concerning the liturgics. Crowley's religion has sexual mysteries at its heart, and Crowley—as a magician—was devoted to its prosyletizing. He understood the sacrament of the Mass—and most especially the rite of transubstantiation—as a Gnostic rite of transformation, and it can be argued that this is so, or certainly can be interpreted that way. The problem remains, however, how to teach this concept to the general public if it has no background in religious studies, Gnosticism, or Tantrism, much less Kabbalah or ceremonial magic?

A further difficulty is raised by the unitary form of the Catholic Mass and its single priest-celebrant. This dynamic was transformed by the Crowley church into a dual priesthood of a man and a woman, a priest and a priestess. On a very basic liturgical level this presents problems in conceptualization, but most importantly, in the identification of two individuals with the appropriate transformative Power which must take place simultaneously and in harmony. There are other, more easily organized, rituals that involve male and female participants which could have been used instead (or simply invented), but it was Crowley's intention to use the Catholic Mass as the basic structure, possibly with a view towards forcing the public to understand the sexual component of a rite with which they were already familiar—albeit in a different context—and thus providing a kind of legitimacy of lineage, much in the same way pagan shrines in Europe were converted into Catholic holy places by the building of churches on the same spots.

All of this, however, is predicated upon Crowley's religion and its understanding of the nature of the Gods.

Central to most descriptions of religions is this concept of a God or Gods. While the word “religion” is relatively new, and is in fact problematic in some cultures which do not recognize this artificial distinction between spirituality and other areas of culture, we can assume for the sake of this essay that religions (popularly understood) rely upon the existence of some kind of supernatural Power, Creator or Cosmic Judge we call a God.

One of the most bewildering aspects of Thelema to outsiders is the near-chaotic assembly of gods, goddesses and techniques from religious traditions spanning the globe and the centuries. We have seen some of this in the previous chapter. While the Book of the Law is focused on Egyptian gods, by the time one is finished with even a cursory look at Crowley's writings, one realizes that Egypt is not the only cultural touchstone for the movement.⁴⁶

Crowley's own self-identification with the Beast of the Book of Revelation—and his soror mystica as the Scarlet Woman or Whore of Babylon (Babalon, to use his spelling)—seems at first glance to be out of synch with the rest of his philosophy. After all, the Beast 666 and the Whore of Babylon are characters specific to the Christian Bible. How does one rectify the Biblical personalities with ancient Egyptian or Sumerian archetypes?

Crowley's early childhood was spent in the somewhat lethal embrace of a Christian sect called the Plymouth Brethren. In fact, he attended schools run by the Brethren for most of his childhood and adolescence, only escaping the denomination by the time he enrolled at Trinity College, Cambridge in 1895. As a child, his mother would refer to him as “the Beast” with its obvious Biblical connotations and it seems Crowley took the appelation to heart, particularly as he got older and began to question Christianity. He never abandoned the Beast nomenclature, however, for he seemed to feel that this was an aspect of his identity—not only as a human being, as his mother's son, but—as a magician and a prophet of the New Age. Thus, in order to overthrow the Old Age he came to identify himself with its anti-god, the Beast of Revelation. This would predate any exposure Crowley had to the rich fabric of Egyptian spirituality.

It was most likely his introduction to the Golden Dawn that gave Crowley his background in Egyptian religion and in the names of their gods. As we have seen in the previous chapter, he took those names to heart and they resurfaced in his Book of the Law and in the Holy Books: names such as Hoor-paar-kraat, Ra-hoor-khuit and Thma-est (which spellings are not found in popular works on Egyptology) make their way into Crowley's religion, as well as the concept of the Equinox of the Gods and the associated rotation of its divine officers throughout the year.

But he also added a liberal dose of Greek and Roman concepts as well as some Asian ideas. While the Golden Dawn had a few Asian-inspired documents—such as instructions concerning the tattwas (Indian elemental forms) and some basic yoga exercises—it was rather more focused on western esoterica than “Orientalia.” This may be due to the example of the Theosophical Society, which began as a repository ofwestern occult and hermetic ideas but which rapidly switched its focus to India and to Buddhism and indigenous Indian religions (normally grouped under the rubric “Hinduism”). Blavatsky's growing obsession with India and Tibet changed the characteristics of the Theosophical Society to such an extent that there was really very little room for Hermetica or western esoterica in general. Kabbalah was ignored, as was ceremonial magic. These were areas that were picked up and developed to a greater degree by the Golden Dawn and its Masonic creators, thus filling a void that had been created by the Theosophical Society's abandonment of its western esoteric roots.

Crowley, therefore, represented a bridge between both societies. While his initiations and instruction in spirituality began with the Golden Dawn, and he never really left the embrace of its initiatic structure,⁴⁷ he did absorb some of the Asian techniques that were the focus of the Theosophical Society. He advocated practices such aspranayama (breath control), asana (yoga postures), and the attainment of samadhi (a higher state of consciousness reached through intensive meditation, analogous to a non-dualist state of awareness in which subject and object are one).⁴⁸ He recognized samadhi as an essential element of his own personal development and encouraged the pursuit of this enlightened state of consciousness among his followers.⁴⁹

But this did not mean that he was a Buddhist or a “Hindu” by any stretch of the imagination.⁵⁰ In fact, he broke with his good friend Alan Bennett (the Bhikku Ananda Metteya) over this issue. He was more than willing to take what he could from the supermarket of religious ideas, but he was not loyal to any one brand. In this, perhaps, he was typical of the stereotypical New Ager, who is a spiritual dilettante and who picks over ancient religious traditions like a shopper in a fruit and vegetable stand ... but with one important and crucial difference: unlike many of today's New Age spiritual seekers, Crowley did not skim the surfaces of the traditions he investigated but dived in completely. He had to know and to experience what these traditions offered, and he subjected himself to strenuous physical and intellectual pursuit of this knowledge. The fact that he was at leisure for much of his early life, due to an inheritance from his father's estate, contributed to his ability to wander the world and devote himself to spiritual pursuits. He would incorporate significant amounts of these traditions into his own occult orders and into his religion of Thelema, and while we may argue about his selection process or question the assumptions upon which some of the intellectual material is based, there can be no doubt that there was a strong element of sincerity in Crowley's approach.

Crowley believed in his own system, in his role as a prophet, and in the Book of the Law. There can be no other explanation for his life's work than this. Thus, in order to comprehend the ramifications and implications of Thelema—particularly as represented in the Typhonian Tradition—we need to understand Crowley's concept of the Gods.

Apocalypse Now

As mentioned, Crowley's first exposure to religion was in a Christian fundamentalist household, whose members belonged to the sect known as the Plymouth Brethren. Like many Protestant denominations with an extreme view of scripture, this one placed an emphasis on the Book of Revelation, also known as the Apocalypse. This is a controversial text, dealing with the End of Days and the Final Judgement. It is couched in esoteric symbolism, more than any other Biblical text, and defies easy interpretation, but it is within its pages that we come across such famous concepts as the “number of the Beast” which is 666, as well as the Beast himself, and the Whore of Babylon. It is a book that foretells the fall of Rome and/or Jerusalem, and a final, cosmic battle between the forces of Light and Darkness. There are dragons, trumpets, and angels galore and it is beyond the scope of this (or most any) book to give a full and coherent description of its contents or to analyze its meaning.⁵¹ Rather, we shall focus on the handful of elements that meant most to Crowley and which surfaced so prominently in his cultus.

The Book of Revelation virtually overshadows the rest of the New Tesament due to its surreal, cinematic imagery and its prophecies of doom. Those who focus on this text tend to neglect the message of the Gospels in favor of the more drastic condemnations of the Church's enemies.

One of these enemies is the Beast. According to many theologians, this particular Beast symbolizes Rome and the persecution of Christians by the Roman emperor. The number of the Beast is 666, but no further clarification of this number is given in the text. Some believe it is a coded reference to the emperor Nero. In any event, that number has come to be synonymous with evil incarnate and is frequently cited as a reference to the Devil itself.

It is important to note that there are two beasts mentioned in Revelations. The first comes out of the sea—the abyss—and the second from out of the earth. They are each empowered by the Dragon, to whom they evidently owe their allegiance. Thus, there is some confusion in Thelemic circles as to just what Beast Crowley was referring to, and why. Of course, he favored the 666 designation, making him the Beast of the Earth, known to readers of the Bible as the “False Prophet.”

Crowley would adopt the number as his own, and offer pages of Kabbalistic-style analysis of its meaning. He was able to show that the Greek term To Mega Therion or “the Great Beast” added up to 666 when using Greek numerology, or gematria.⁵² Gematria is a system of numerology in which letters (of the Greek or Hebrew alphabet) equal numbers. When a word has the same numerical value as another word, then a relationship between them both is assumed to the extent that one word may clarify or justify the other. (This fascination with gematria has bedeviled Thelema for much of its existence to date; it became a focus of Frater Achad's symbol system and, later, of Kenneth Grant's analysis of Thelema which would take gematria to near ridiculous lengths. The idea that the Bible contains coded information is central to Kabbalistic exegesis as well as more recent textual analysis such as The Bible Code and its heirs. It is by no means unique to Thelema.)

The fact that there are two Beasts in Revelation, plus one Dragon, begs the question: could there be, or have there been, other contenders in Thelema for these available designations? Was there a human Beast of the Abyss? More importantly, perhaps, was there a physical/biological Dragon in a Thelemic context? The answers to both of these questions has to be a somewhat qualified “no.” Crowley was not taking the entire text of Revelation as a blueprint for his own religion, but only that section of it that he believed seemed to refer to himself. But one has to wonder if Crowley ever considered that there might be another human manifestation from Revelation. This will lead us to the example of Jack Parsons, who famously identified himself with the Anti-Christ, and we will look at that in another chapter.

Why Crowley would identify himself with the Devil is an important point and one which will lead us directly to the concept of the Dark Lord. For Crowley, the Devil is something more ancient and more respectable than the caricature we come across in normative Christian imagery. The Devil represents everything the Church wants to suppress, and this includes most especially expressions of human sexuality.

Crowley's view of Satanism and Devil-worship would have been colored by the Continental obsession with the Black Mass. This ritual famously blasphemes the Catholic Mass, but in order to do so makes use of sexual elements. Thus, a woman is used in place of the altar; coitus is performed on the woman in place of the transubstantiation of the bread and wine.⁵³ These are all the scandalous aspects of the Black Mass as it was popularly understood through such vehicles as J. K. Huysmann's best-selling novel, Là-Bas or “Down There.” In this context, sexuality is transgressive. It is used to attack the Church at its most delicate and important point: the sacrifice of the Mass itself, the central ritual of the faith that is normally celebrated by celibate priests. Crowley would take up this theme in his own Catholic-inspired Gnostic Mass in which the sexual elements are once again represented, albeit in a more sedate way than in the rapacious rituals of the nineteenth-century French esthetes.⁵⁴

To Crowley, the restrictive attitudes of the Church were themselves sinful. As it is written in the Book of the Law: “The word of Sin is Restriction” (AL I:41). This is a subtle play on words, for the exact meaning of the term “religion” is derived from the Latin religio, itself probably derived from the verb ligare which means “to bind” (as in the modern English ligature). The meaning of the sentence to a Thelemite is clear: it is religion that is sinful, religion that “binds.” Such restriction is anathema to a doctrine whose central affirmation of faith is “Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law.” Thus Crowley, by identifying with the great enemy of the Church—the Beast 666—is aligning himself with the enemy of restriction, and therefore with the free expression of all forms of human sexuality: the ultimate example of sin and an important target of the Abrahamic religions. This is emphasized by the rest of the verse quoted above:

The word of Sin is Restriction. O man! refuse not thy wife, if she will! O lover, if thou wilt, depart! There is no bond⁵⁵ that can unite the divided but love: all else is a curse. Accurséd! Accurséd be it to the aeons! Hell. (AL I:41)

This emphasis on love rather than law as the touchstone for human relationships is one element of Thelema that sets it apart from mainstream religion. When love goes, according to the verse, then so should the lover. This dissociates the act of love from legal considerations, whether of religion or of secular government. It is most especially—given the context—an attack on the sacrament of matrimony and on religiously-sanctioned marriage. If marriage is subtracted from the equation, what is left? Either pure eros—sexuality as a form of human relationship—or something even deeper: a relationship based not only on sexuality popularly understood, but on emotional attraction and attachment the way many adolescents experience it—without a legal or a religious context, something approaching Jungian ideas of archetypes or Freudian ideas of repressed erotic feelings for one's parent. As Crowley himself is known to have had both male and female lovers, married and unmarried, this seems consistent with his worldview. But it is inconsistent with the mainstream religions of his time, and he would be moved to see in the Beast a force of resistance against the strictures of the establishment, of the status quo, because he perceived them as obstacles to a fuller knowledge of the Self. It is this tension between the Self and Community (particularly in the sphere of sexuality and human relationships) that is the focal point of Thelema, at least as understood by some of its most prominent apologists such as Kenneth Grant. It is also the point at which Lovecraft balks, pointing to the transgressive magician and sorcerer as the cause of the community's vulnerability to forces from Outside.

By identifying himself—in a positive way—with the Beast, Crowley was performing a kind of self-therapy. He was taking the suppressed and repressed elements of a personality that had been molded by a normative and restrictive Christian sect and liberating them by means of re-characterizing them as positive values and not negative impulses.⁵⁶ It was perhaps more important for Crowley to self-identify this way than it was for his followers, for whom the Beast of the Book of Revelation might have less powerful (even confusing) associations. It marked his independence from Christian—and hence English—society and its expectations of conformity. It was dramatic, certainly, especially for the time. But was there more substance to the image than that?

To answer that question we must visit another powerful image of the Book of Revelation, the Whore of Babylon.

This personality is as complex and mysterious as the Beast. It is obviously a coded reference that made a lot of sense at the time, and in the millenia since the Book of Revelation was written there have been numerous attempts to analyze and identify the Whore in contemporary contexts. Where Crowley was concerned, the Whore of Babylon could only be a reference to his Consort, of whom he had quite a series that he called “Scarlet Women.”

In the Book of Revelation the Whore of Babylon is referred to as “Babylon the Great, Mother of Harlots and Abominations of the Earth” (Revelations 17:3-6). Babylon was a reference to the alien culture that had crushed the Israelites and destroyed Solomon's Temple, and which thus became a code word for the Roman Empire that was the object of scorn of the writer of Revelations. Like Rome, Babylon was viewed as an “evil empire” bent on destroying God's people. At the time the Book of Revelation was being written—about the first century CE—the land of Israel was under Roman domination. Both Christians (at the time little more than a Jewish sect) and Jews were being persecuted as a result of their refusal to obey the edicts of Emperor Domitian, who demanded that everyone in his empire worship him as a god ... or be executed.

The Whore of Babylon is depicted as wearing purple and scarlet robes, and holding a golden cup filled with “the abominations and filthiness of her fornication.” She sat on a scarlet beast with seven heads and ten horns, and was drunk on the blood of saints and martyrs. (Purple was the color of Roman royalty and was forbidden to the average citizen, so its inclusion here is instructive.)

Crowley incorporated this personality—one is hard-pressed to refer to her as a god, at least not in her Biblical persona—into his religion as the personification of the female principle of the universe, as Shakti: the female partner to the Beast, who represents the male principle, or Shiva. The cup of “abominations” is an analogue of the commingled male and female essences that are known as amrita in the East. And, just as in Revelation the Beast was subordinate to the Dragon, in Crowley's theological structure the Beast is subordinate to other powers.

In order to clarify these admittedly bizarre relationships it is worthwhile to have recourse to the Thelemic Creed as offered in the liturgy of the Gnostic Mass, written by Crowley:

I believe in one secret and ineffable LORD; and in one Star in the company of Stars of whose fire we are created, and to which we shall return; and in one Father of Life, Mystery of Mystery, in His name CHAOS, the sole viceregent of the Sun upon Earth; and in one Air the nourisher of all that breathes.

And I believe in one Earth, the Mother of us all, and in one Womb wherein all men are begotten, and wherein they shall rest, Mystery of Mystery, in Her name BABALON.

And I believe in the Serpent and the Lion, Mystery of Mystery, in His name BAPHOMET.

And I believe in one Gnostic and Catholic Church of Light, Life, Love and Liberty, the Word of whose Law is THELEMA.

And I believe in the communion of Saints.

And, forasmuch as meat and drink are transmuted in us daily into spiritual substance, I believe in the Miracle of the Mass.

And I confess one Baptism of Wisdom whereby we accomplish the Miracle of Incarnation.

And I confess my life one, individual, and eternal that was, and is, and is to come.

AUMGN, AUMGN, AUMGN.

Readers who were brought up Roman Catholic—like the present author—may be forgiven if they recognize what seems to be a travesty of the Apostles' Creed of their youth. The basic formula is the same:

I believe in God, the Father almighty, creator of heaven and earth.

I believe in Jesus Christ, His only Son, our Lord.

He was conceived by the power of the Holy Spirit and born of the Virgin Mary.

He suffered under Pontius Pilate, was crucified, died, and was buried.

He descended to the dead. On the third day he rose again.

He ascended into heaven and is seated at the right hand of the Father.

He will come again to judge the living and the dead.

I believe in the Holy Spirit,

the holy catholic Church, the communion of saints,

the forgiveness of sins,

the resurrection of the body,

and life everlasting.

Amen.

In both versions—Thelemic and Roman Catholic—the emphasis in the first lines is on a profession of faith in a creator God, termed a Father. That this is different from the “ineffable LORD” in the Thelemic Creed seems clear from the text. Here, the Father is the “Father of Life,” and is the vice-regent of the Sun on earth. And, somewhat disconcertingly perhaps, his name is CHAOS. Chaos was, indeed, one of the appelations of the Egyptian god Set and he is referred to as such in the Greek magical papyri.⁵⁷ A god with the name Chaos would not be a reference to Osiris, or Horus, or Thoth, or Ra or any of the other more popular deities. Chaos is associated, in Egypt and in the Near and Middle East of the period (first century CE at the latest), with Set and with Set-Typhon. And the Star to which the Creed refers could only be—for Grant and the Typhonians—the Pole Star with its seven circumpolar attendants the Big Dipper (or, as it was known in Egypt, the “Thigh of Set”). The very important statement concerning “one Star in the company of Stars of whose fire we are created, and to which we shall return,” implies the extra-terrestrial origins of humanity and by extension its ultimate destination. This “Star” has been identified as the Sun, of whom the Father is the sole vice-regent, but I believe this is a blind (as were the seven “planets” in Mithraism⁵⁸) for the “real” Sun, which is the immortal Pole Star, a sun that never rises or sets but which sits unmoving directly overhead.

The name CHAOS has been interpreted to mean Air and Gas. The first statement of the Thelemic Creed ends with “Air, the nourisher of all that breathes” and is thus connected with CHAOS, the Star, and the Father.

The very next doctrinal statement in the Creed identifies BABALON as “the Mother of us all” and as the Earth itself. We therefore have the Sky and the Earth—Air and Earth—CHAOS and BABALON as the first divinities enumerated in the Creed. This is followed by BAPHOMET, which was Crowley's name in the OTO.

Thus, we have two Ur-gods—CHAOS and BABALON—followed by the name of the Prophet of the New Aeon, BAPHOMET or Crowley himself. This requires us to look more closely at BABALON since Crowley was fixated on her and on what she represented, clarifying that his succession of (female) magical partners—the Scarlet Women—were but avatars of Babalon.

The three Abrahamic religions—Judaism, Christianity and Islam—do not elevate the female principle to the level of divinity. For that reason they are often referred to as “patriarchal” religions. From the previous chapter, we remember that Crowley—like some of the anthropologists of his day—believed that the patriarchal era was preceded by a matriarchal one. While this theory has largely been disproved on the basis of archaeological and other evidence, it nonetheless remains a strong concept among those professing a New Age worldview. One is tempted to imagine what the world would look like if matriarchal—as opposed to patriarchal—religions were the dominant force in the west.

In the east, however, women—and female representations of godhead—are more common. In India, goddesses are of supreme importance especially among specific sects that worship Kali, Durga, Shakti, etc. In China, among the Daoists and the Buddhists, Quan Yin is an extremely important goddess and believed to be the Chinese version of the Indian Avalokitesvara, the (male) God of Compassion. Even in predominantly Muslim Indonesia, the goddesses Sri, Lara Kidul, and Durga are still important and still reverenced.⁵⁹

Thelemic documents, including the Book of the Law and the Gnostic Mass, reveal the desire to reinstate awareness of the feminine aspect of divinity. Conscious that this is an antinomian position to take, the feminine aspect that is most identified and cherished is that of the Whore of Babylon, perhaps the most transgressive female image in all of Christendom.

As Gail Corrington Streete has discussed at some length⁶⁰ the Whore of Babylon (porne megale) is but one iteration of the “foreign woman” of the Bible, the seducer of Israel who tries to tempt men away from the True Faith. But the “foreign woman” is also the Queen of Sheba, who tempted Solomon himself with the worship of foreign gods; she is Jezebel; and so many other strong yet strange women in the Bible who represent not only “woman” in general but ideas related to foreign-ness, to the alien, and the Other. Like Set, Babalon is a foreign deity. Set may represent ideas of masculine or male chaos where Babalon represents the feminine or female aspect of chaos. They are the Yang and Yin, respectively, of every antinomian and unorthodox belief and practice.

But there is another possible motive for this idealization of the Whore of Babylon and it may rest in the sexual mysteries themselves, the ones that Crowley learned from the OTO of Karl Kellner and Theodor Reuss, which placed an emphasis on the mingling of both male and female sexual excretions. This “sex magic” at the heart of the OTO mysteries is what has been elaborated upon at great length by Kenneth Grant and it forms the initiatic process of the Typhonian Current. In this context, a “whore” is a sexually-promiscuous woman, a woman who has sex for money or other favors, and as such is a threat to other women because of the implied devaluation of sexual intimacy between husband and wife: the characterization of sexuality as a biological function that can be bought and sold like food or water or manual labor rather than as the seal of an emotional and spiritual contract. The whore exists outside of the community of married men and women, of householders, and of upholders of the government, the church, and even of consensus reality. The relationship with a prostitute is a secret relationship; few men boast of going to prostitutes or of having any sort of relationship with them outside of the sex act. In fact, the more established a man is—the more respected in his community, his government, his religion, his business—the less likely he is to admit to such a relationship in the public forum. He may go to great lengths to conceal it, to keep it secret, hidden, and entirely personal. It is, in a sense, an “esoteric” or “occult” relationship.

In the Book of Revelation, the Whore of Babylon represents not only the ultimate Prostitute and sexually active Woman, but also signifies an enemy of the Church. It is in this dual role that she is important to Thelema; for even as sexual mores have changed considerably since the Victorian era when Crowley was a youth, Church and the State are still viable targets for a religion of liberation and freedom.

There is one more aspect to the Whore of Babylon that must be considered, and that is her stated origin: Babylon. The implication is clear: a connection, however tenuous, not to Egypt but to Sumer, Akkad and Babylon itself. The Whore of Babalon (to use Crowley's spelling based on his rendering of the name to satisfy a gematria of his own) is thereby a link to the most ancient of the known western religions, the one that is the focus of Grant's work and one that is referenced by Crowley, Parsons, and other Thelemic authors and personalities, and enshrined in the Schlangekraft recension of the Necronomicon: the Sumerian tradition.

While Crowley's fixation on the Beast and the Whore of the Christian Bible may have been motivated originally by a desire to be a “bad boy” and outrage the adults around him, the adolescent fantasy of transgression became enshrined in a doctrine. The Whore was lifted out of its Biblical context and re-imagined as “the Mother of us all” and as a Mesopotamian deity (as was Aiwass). It should be acknowledged, however, that this theme of transgression applies not only to the Christianity of the Book of Revelation, but—because of the destruction of Solomon's Temple by the Babylonians—to Judaism as well. Crowley's alleged anti-Semitism has been the subject of several investigations and we won't belabor the point here. It may be sufficient to state that Crowley's philosophy was deliberately provocative and anti-establishment in nature to the extent that he ridiculed most human institutions and therefore treated most people with contempt if they were not converts to his new faith. This might not have been the result of deep feelings of genuine racism, sexism, etc. but was rather what one would expect of someone who set himself up as the Prophet of a new Age, much in the same way that Moses and his followers rained death on their enemies, or the Church in its many inquisitorial purges and crusades, or the anti-Semitic remarks that can be found in the Qur'an and the military actions that took place against non-Muslims during the Prophet's life and those of subsequent caliphates. This is not to say one should enshrine these ill-advised declarations as statements of doctrinal authority, however. They need interpreting; yet a key point of contention in this case is that no one is supposed to interpret Crowley's writings but Crowley himself.⁶¹

This is one of the inherent contradictions in Thelema, for while Crowley insisted that he be the arbiter of all things Thelemic, his slogan was quite different: “Our method is science, our aim is religion.” The “our” is understood not as the editorial or Papal first person plural, but as encompassing all Thelemites. If the scientific method is indeed the cornerstone of Crowley's occult praxis, then it behooves Thelemites to undertake independent experimentation and discovery.

This is precisely what the late Kenneth Grant set out to do, and in the process he made some interesting and possibly crucial discoveries. Among these was the value of different sets of god-forms from different cultures, in particular those with which Crowley himself was not as familiar. While his incorporation of genuine Tantric and Afro-Caribbean data makes his writings worthwhile for anyone interested in what an expansion of Crowley's basic themes would look like—and in particular Crowley's magic—it is Grant's willingness to look beyond religion and spiritual techniques to other sources of information that place this British occultist upon an entirely different plateau. If Crowley was committed to having his philosophy embraced by the masses—and used every means at his disposal to ensure this, including public performances of his rites, publishing occult novels, and attempting to influence famous celebrities—then Grant's discovery of Thelemic themes in the fictional writing of Howard Phillips Lovecraft should have been welcomed by Crowley's followers enthusiastically, especially as Lovecraft's imagined cultus reflects so deeply Crowley's own revealed religion.

The Beast in the Cave

In 1907, Crowley was writing some of the works that became seminal to the doctrines of Thelema, known as The Holy Books. These include Liber Liberi vel Lapidus Lazuli, Liber Cordis Cincti Serpente, and other works written between October 30 and November 1 of that year, and Liber Arcanorum and Liber Carcerorum, written between December 5th and 14th that same year. Lovecraft would have had no knowledge of this, as he was only a seventeen-year old recluse living at home on Angell Street in Providence, Rhode Island, dreaming of the stars. Instead, he later would write of an orgiastic ritual taking place that year in the bayous outside New Orleans, Louisiana, and on the very same day that Crowley was writing the books enumerated above.

The story Lovecraft wrote is entitled “The Call of Cthulhu” and is arguably his most famous work. He wrote the story in 1926, in late August or early September, but placed the action in New Orleans in 1907 and later in Providence in 1925. How is this relevant?

Lovecraft's placement of the orgiastic ritual in honor of the high priest of the Great Old Ones, Cthulhu, and the discovery of a statue of Cthulhu by the New Orleans police on Halloween, 1907 coincides precisely with Crowley's fevered writing of his own gothic prose. In the Liber Liberi vel Lapidus Lazuli, for instance, Crowley writes the word “Tutulu” for the first time. He claims not to know what this word means, or where it came from. As the name of Lovecraft's fictional alien god can be pronounced “Kutulu,” it seems more than coincidental, as Kenneth Grant himself noted.

However, this is only the tip of an eldritch iceberg.

In Crowley's Liber Cordis Cincti Serpente—or “The Book of the Heart Girt with a Serpent”—there are numerous references to the “Abyss of the Great Deep,” to Typhon, Python, and the appearance of an “old gnarled fish” with tentacles ... all descriptions that match Lovecraft's imagined Cthulhu perfectly. Not approximately, but perfectly. Crowley's volume was written on November 1, 1907. The ritual for Cthulhu in New Orleans took place on the same day, month and year.

Here are the relevant passages:

From Liber Liberi vel Lapidus Lazuli:

1. By the burning of the incense was the Word revealed, and by the distant drug.

2. O meal and honey and oil! O beautiful flag of the moon, that she hangs out in the centre of bliss!

3. These loosen the swathings of the corpse; these unbind the feet of Osiris, so that the flaming God may rage through the firmament with his fantastic spear.

4. But of pure black marble is the sorry statue, and the changeless pain of the eyes is bitter to the blind.

5. We understand the rapture of that shaken marble, torn by the throes of the crowned child, the golden rod of the golden God.

6. We know why all is hidden in the stone, within the coffin, within the mighty sepulchre, and we too answer Olalám! Imál! Tutúlu! as it is written in the ancient book.

7. Three words of that book are as life to a new æon; no god has read the whole.

8. But thou and I, O God, have written it page by page.⁶²

And in Liber Cordis Cincti Serpente:

Then was the Adept glad, and lifted his arm. Lo! an earthquake, and plague, and terror on the earth!⁶³

And:

Behold! the Abyss of the Great Deep. Therein is a mighty dolphin, lashing his sides with the force of the waves.⁶⁴

And:

Thou art Sebek the crocodile against Asar; thou art Mati, the Slayer in the Deep. Thou art Typhon, the Wrath of the Elements, O Thou who transcendest the Forces in their Concourse and Cohesion, in their Death and their Disruption. Thou art Python, the terrible serpent about the end of all things!⁶⁵

And finally:

I trembled at Thy coming, O my God, for Thy messenger was more terrible than the Death-star. On the threshold stood the fulminant figure of Evil, the Horror of emptiness, with his ghastly eyes like poisonous wells. He stood, and the chamber was corrupt; the air stank. He was an old and gnarled fish more hideous than the shells of Abaddon. He enveloped me with his demon tentacles; yea, the eight fears took hold upon me.⁶⁶

Compare with relevant passages from Lovecraft's “Call of Cthulhu”:

Above these apparent hieroglyphics was a figure of evident pictorial intent, though its impressionistic execution forbade a very clear idea of its nature. It seemed to be a sort of monster, or symbol representing a monster, of a form which only a diseased fancy could conceive. If I say that my somewhat extravagant imagination yielded simultaneous pictures of an octopus, a dragon, and a human caricature, I shall not be unfaithful to the spirit of the thing. A pulpy, tentacled head surmounted a grotesque and scaly body with rudimentary wings; but it was the general outline of the whole which made it most shockingly frightful. Behind the figure was a vague suggestion of a Cyclopean architectural background.⁶⁷

And:

The figure, which was finally passed slowly from man to man for close and careful study, was between seven and eight inches in height, and of exquisitely artistic workmanship. It represented a monster of vaguely anthropoid outline, but with an octopus-like head whose face was a mass of feelers, a scaly, rubbery-looking body, prodigious claws on hind and fore feet, and long, narrow wings behind. This thing, which seemed instinct with a fearsome and unnatural malignancy, was of a somewhat bloated corpulence, and squatted evilly on a rectangular block or pedestal covered with undecipherable characters. The tips of the wings touched the back edge of the block, the seat occupied the centre, whilst the long, curved claws of the doubled-up, crouching hind legs gripped the front edge and extended a quarter of the way down toward the bottom of the pedestal. The cephalopod head was bent forward, so that the ends of the facial feelers brushed the backs of huge fore paws which clasped the croucher's elevated knees. The aspect of the whole was abnormally life-like, and the more subtly fearful because its source was so totally unknown. Its vast, awesome, and incalculable age was umistakable; yet not one link did it shew with any known type of art belonging to civilisation's youth—or indeed to any other time. Totally separate and apart, its very material was a mystery; for the soapy, greenish-black stone with its golden or iridescent flecks and striations resembled nothing familiar to geology or mineralogy. The characters along the base were equally baffling; and no member present, despite a representation of half the world's expert learning in this field, could form the least notion of even their remotest linguistic kinship.

In Liber Liberi vel Lapidus Lazuli, Crowley refers to several of the images with which Lovecraft would be consumed in his stories, but especially in “The Call of Cthulhu.” Here we have a buried god that is awakened from a stone, in a coffin, in a sepulchre, and mysterious words written in an ancient book, including Tutulu. And “of pure black marble is the sorry statue” resonates with the black stone on which the statue of Cthulhu squats.

In Liber Cordis Cincti Serpente we have an expansion of this theme, beginning with an earthquake (Lovecraft's story is centered around an actual earthquake that took place in 1925), and extending to an Abyss of the Great Deep, the Slayer in the Deep, a Death-star, and the “fulminant figure of Evil” (a stinking, fish-like creature with tentacles). This figure is a messenger of the Gods and, indeed, Cthulhu is not only a god itself but a high priest of the Great Old Ones who will return to earth when “the stars are right.” A more paranoid observer than your author may wonder if the statement in Liber AL—“Every man and every woman is a star”—is a decoding of the famous Lovecraft quotation “when the stars are right.” It would imply that when the followers of Thelema (the “stars”) are powerful enough, or numerous enough, then the Great Old Ones will return.

This was certainly Crowley's objective, as understood by Grant and as revealed by these excerpts from Crowley's Holy Books of Thelema. Crowley believed that the first two books mentioned above were not his writing, but were inspired works dictated to him by his Holy Guardian Angel, the ancient Sumerian personality Aiwass, after Crowley had attained samadhi during a course of rituals he undertook with his colleague, George Cecil Jones, in England.⁶⁸ Even the undecipherable language of “Olalam Imal Tutulu” has its counterpart in the enigmatic hieroglyphics of the Cthulhu statue and the ecstatic, glossolalia-like cries of the worshippers in the Louisiana swamps.⁶⁹ Both men—the American author and the English magician—were dealing with the same subject matter, and indeed Lovecraft had dated the first appearance of the Cthulhu statue to the same year, month and day that Crowley began writing these sections of the Holy Books.

There is no hard evidence that either man knew of the other, although the author believes that references to an English satanist in Lovecraft's “The Thing on the Doorstep” could be an allusion to Crowley. In any event, to suggest that these two men cooperated or collaborated in any deliberate way would be the height (or depth!) of conspiracy theory. It may actually be more logical to suggest—as an explanation for some of these coincidences—that darker forces were at work. In fact, it is possible that the same forces of which Lovecraft himself writes—the telepathic communication between followers of Cthulhu and the Great Old Ones—was what prompted him to write these fictional accounts of real events. Either Lovecraft was in some kind of telepathic communication with Crowley, or both men were in telepathic communication with ... Something Else.

This Dark Lord of the Holy Books is one of the gods—perhaps the most important god—of the Crowley pantheon. In the Crowley line of succession, this god is at the juncture of Egyptian and Sumerian religion and is thus pre-Judaic. In Lovecraft's succession, Cthulhu is a high priest of the Great Old Ones who came to the planet from the stars aeons ago, long before humans walked the earth. Although dead and buried deep beneath the earth or under the ocean, he can rise again once the “stars are right” and his followers assist in calling him up, in resurrecting him.

This leads us to a slight detour into the Tibetan language.

The word ku su lu in Tibetan⁷⁰ evokes for us another coincidence, for it refers to a shaman (i.e., a kind of priest) but also to one who was once dead but who has come back from death.⁷¹ This meme—the shaman who has come back from the dead—is a perfect description of Lovecraft's Cthulhu and may provide a means of understanding Crowley's Tutulu as well. According to Kenneth Grant, one possible translation of the word Tutulu can be “Who will attain.” These are all consistent with the idea presented by Lovecraft of a high priest of the Great Old Ones, dead but “dreaming,” who will resurrect from his watery grave to take charge of the earth once more. As noted in the Schlangekraft recension of the Necronomicon, Cthulhu can be rendered in the Sumerian language as kutu lu or “the man from Kutu” or “the man from the Underworld.” Kutu—the Biblical Gudua, sometimes rendered Kutu or Kuta—was the ancient city of Cutha, sacred to Nergal and the entrance to the Underworld in Sumerian religion. It was also the city in Mesopotamia with special relevance for Islam, for it was the city where the Qureish were from. The Qureish are, of course, the tribe of the Prophet Muhammad, the tribe in charge of the pagan shrine in Mecca known as the Ka'aba or the Black Stone. This was the shrine containing 360 idols, probably of the Moon God Hubal, that the Prophet dismantled and replaced with a shrine sacred to his new religion of Islam.

The death and rebirth theme that is central to Siberian shamanism was also a crucial element of Sumerian and Babylonian religion. The famous narrative of the descent of the Sumerian goddess Inanna (Ishtar) into the Underworld, and her rescue and resurrection three days later, is one of the legends that helped form the Sumerian Gnosis. Indeed, she has sometimes been identified with the Whore of Babylon. When she finally ascended the seven levels of the Underworld to reappear in the world, she was accompanied by a host of demons who had previously been restrained in the Underworld, and who took advantage of her defeat of death to flood out of their subterranean prison and populate the earth. This bears some resemblance to Lovecraft's fictional Cthulhu who is dead but who will be reborn “when the stars are right” and at that time bring his alien gods to the earth to rule it once more. In both cases—the Lovecraft scenario and the Sumerian prototype—the dead require the assistance of the living to effect the resurrection.

This complex narrative is reprised in the Christian example of Jesus who, after his crucifixion, “descended into hell” and rose on the third day. His descent into hell was for the purpose of releasing from the Underworld all those noble souls who had died before he appeared on the earth to redeem humanity from original sin. In the Christian case, the souls that were released were those of the righteous dead; in the Sumerian case, the souls that were released were demonic forces. In the Lovecraft scenario, the gates are opened to hideous alien beings from outer space. Either the Christian case is mere wishful thinking, or a deliberate gloss on the older traditions of the region, or is it something else?

Much has been written in the past hundred years or longer on the subject of the “dead and resurrected god,” referencing a whole category of such deities ranging from Osiris to Tammuz, Mithra, and others in the Middle East and North Africa. It is often characterized as evidence of an agricultural society in which seeds are planted (i.e., “buried”) in the ground and then “resurrected” in the form of new plants. However, this process could just as easily be the basis for any of a number of sexually-oriented fertility cults as well, and not necessarily the basis for a dead and resurrected god (or goddess, as in the case of Inanna).

Unless, of course, there is a relation or connection between the idea of death and resurrection on the one hand and sexual intercourse and reproduction on the other. In the Gnostic Mass as revised by Crowley, we have the template of a celebration of Christ's Last Supper and the consumption of his flesh and blood by the faithful over which is applied the sexual components of Crowley's cultus. While the sexual aspect of the Gnostic Mass is the most obvious one and the aspect that gets all the attention, the death and resurrection foundation of the Mass is still present and is in disguise. Crowley might have said that his Mass was the “reveal” of the innate sexual message of the original Mass, while the original Mass can be interpreted as the “reveal” of the primary death and resurrection message hidden within the Crowley version. They can be seen as mirror images of each other, if one views them both from an angle slightly off-center, from—as Lovecraft would say—a “space between the spaces.”

As in the Catholic Mass, the gods are present in the Gnostic Mass. They are classified differently, of course, with a totally different emphasis. The reason this much time has been taken for a look at the Mass, its Credo, and its transgressive characteristics is because it is the formula that most clearly represents the coherence of the Thelemic message. That is not to say that the Mass is perfectly coherent, of course (but, then, neither is the Catholic Mass). But it can be viewed as a kind of wayang kulit, a shadow play conducted behind a curtain in which the actors are flat, two-dimensional puppets standing in for three-dimensional gods but which—in the case of the Gnostic Mass—are replaced by three-dimensional human beings standing in for extra-dimensional entities: those described at some length by Kenneth Grant, H.P. Lovecraft, and the Typhonian Tradition of magic.

Like, for instance, Set.

Set-Typhon

Crowley's Liber XXXVI⁷² contains a formula for establishing contact with the Old Ones through the invocation of Set, son of Isis and brother of Horus.

—Kenneth Grant, Beyond the Mauve Zone, p. 123

As must be obvious by now, Grant's focus throughout his aptly-named Typhonian Trilogy as well as in the construction and organization of his Typhonian Order always has been the composite figure of Set-Typhon. Set is the ancient Egyptian god that has long been associated with chaos, with the desert, with storms, with foreigners and foreign lands (i.e., the “Other”), and with the murder of Osiris and the ongoing struggle with Horus, the son of Osiris. Typhon, on the other hand, is a Greek god who has many of the same attributes of a god of darkness, storms and chaos. Typhon, like Set, was born unnaturally from his mother and, also like Set, was the enemy of the pantheon. Thus, it was the Greeks who identified Set as a version of their own Typhon and the form Set-Typhon came to be known in the Mediterranean. There has been much speculation in academic circles that the legends surrounding Typhon are derived from those of ancient Sumer, specifically the creation epic known as Enuma Elish and the episode of the serpent monster, Tiamat, who is slain by Marduk in battle.⁷³ As we have seen, Grant identified Set-Typhon as a form of Crowley's supramundane contact, Aiwass, as well as of the Shaitan of the Yezidis, and linked it all to Sumer.

Oddly, however, Crowley himself did not seem to focus on Set-Typhon to the extent that his disciple would, except as a kind of twin to Horus as we have seen.⁷⁴ Crowley's attention was taken by Horus in his various forms as Hoor-par-kraat and the composite Ra-hoor-kuit, among others. Crowley identified with what he saw as the “solar phallic” nature of Osiris and Horus and, indeed, neither Set-Typhon nor Set himself were major figures in the Egyptian pantheon of the Golden Dawn—where Set appears as the personification of evil in the rituals associated with the idea of the Threshold and represents the “Averse Sephiroth” and the Qlippoth.⁷⁵ In this instance, Set would not be identified as a being to whom worship would be directed. One gets the sense that if a member of the Golden Dawn were to construct rituals intended to invoke or evoke Set that it would be considered an act of “black magic,” i.e., a harmful or wholly negative act.

To Grant, however, the character of Set is a rich vein of cosmic importance and Grant expands on this theme considerably, to the point that Set—in Grant's scheme of things—overtakes Horus and Osiris in relevance to the ideas embodied by Crowley's doctrine of Thelema. Where Osiris and Horus represent the solar aspect of Egyptian religion, Set and Set-Typhon represent the stellar aspect. Osiris and Horus can be identified with the rising and setting sun—and thus with the east and west respectively—but Set is identified with the circumpolar stars (in particular with the Great Bear or Ursa Major) and the north, the direction of the sun's nadir beneath the earth and the realm of Amenta: the Abode of the Dead. The author has elsewhere shown that the asterism known to us as the Big Dipper was identified with Set in the Egyptian text popularly known as the Book of the Dead, specifically with the “thigh” of Set in the crucial Opening of the Mouth ceremony.⁷⁶ The Big Dipper is also a critical asterism in the Necronomicon Gnosis, as the Gates between this world and the transdimensional realm are opened “when the Great Bear hangs from its tail in the sky.”⁷⁷ Grant discovered the close association between the Egyptian Set and the Necronomicon, which further reinforced his theory concerning the Tunnels of Set. These tunnels are hidden pathways on the “nightside” of the Kabbalistic “Tree of Life”—known to Kabbalists as the Sitra Ahra, or “Other Side”—that he associates with the Qlippoth, the “shells” of a previous creation that was destroyed due to imbalance resulting in shattered or broken sephiroth, specifically the sephira Gevurah or “Severity.” These shards of an Elder Creation roam the cosmos as evil spirits or demonic forces, but to Grant these are value judgements made by pious monotheists who ignore their true nature.

But there is more to Set than even all of this. A close examination of Set's importance and character in the ancient Egyptian texts reveal that there is a close correlation between how the Egyptians understood Set and the initiatory process of Crowley's OTO as well as the central thesis of Grant's ouevre.

In recent years there has been much academic investigation and discourse on the nature and identity of Set. This discourse has ranged from the fields of pure Egyptology to studies of Gnosticism and the Kabbalah. Set remains an engimatic figure, a stranger to the rest of Egyptian religion in so many ways. Indeed, the identity of Set's “animal” (the totemic creature or zoötype with which Set is identified in hieroglyphics and Egyptian art) remains unidentified, and even the etymology of Set's name is a source of controversy. While there is no space to go into all of this here, relevant topics will be highlighted so that the reader can appreciate the extent of the Crowley-Grant-Lovecraft concept, characterized by Grant as the Necronomicon Gnosis.

Who is Set?

There are two basic schools of thought concerning the origins of Set. One school claims that Set represents an ancient ruler of Upper (i.e., southern) Egypt who came into conflict with a ruler represented by Horus of Lower (i.e., northern) Egypt. It is this political and military conflict that led to the myth of the warfare between Set and Horus.

This idea has been criticized as there is no historical evidence to support it, although it is true that pharaohs considered themselves rulers of both Upper and Lower Egypt, and that their double crowns were references to the union of Set and Horus.

Another school has it that Set represents a foreign god, and hence a foreign tribe, race, country. This foreign deity eventually became incorporated into the overall religion, representing all those concepts that were considered antinomian, transgressive, and “other.” There is some support for this interpretation but it is by no means conclusive.

The name “Set” defies translation, just as his totemic animal defies identification. The hieroglyphic representing the word for Set can be pronounced in various ways, depending on the area of Egypt (Upper or Lower) and the relevant dynasty.⁷⁸ Variations such as “Setah,” “Sut,” “Seth,” and of course “Set” have been put forward as alternatives.⁷⁹ The determinative form has been used in words denoting storm, thunder, roaring, chaos, illness, nightmares, darkness, and a host of other dangerous phenomena. One theory is that Set represents that which separates or divides. Set is the god of alien lands (alien to Egypt and thus, by extension, the “Other”) and the desert, and as such is a liminal figure, a god of the Threshold, the guardian at the Gate to the Underworld as the Golden Dawn rituals testify.

This may be due to (at least in part) the identification of the Set “animal” as an ass or donkey, specifically Equus africanus or the African wild ass, a species that is today nearing extinction but which still survives in the deserts of Somalia and Ethiopia having once been common in the Egyptian desert as well. This species thrives in desert places and is largely identified with the sere wastelands outside of the ancient Egyptian cities. (Indeed, one of the magical spells that appear in the Papyrus London-Leiden magical manuscripts specifically instructs the magician to use the blood and head of a donkey in order to evoke Set-Typhon.)⁸⁰ It is claimed that the sound the donkey makes—its peculiar braying—gave rise to one of the most common utterances to be found in Crowleyan (and, indeed, most Gnostic and Greco-Roman occult) literature: Iao or Io, both of which were considered names of the Egyptian god Set in the Greco-Roman literature and serve as invocations of that god.⁸¹

Set has been associated with foreign countries and their inhabitants. Thus, the peoples of Libya in the west were considered (by the Egyptians) to be followers of Set. The Semitic peoples of Mesopotamia in the east were also considered to be Set-worshippers and their god, Baal, was identified often with Set. Crowley's prime female deity, Babalon, also is obviously Babylonian and authors have tried to identify the famous “Whore of Babylon” of the Biblical Apocalypse as the Babylonian Ishtar (Sumerian Inanna). This would seem to justify to some extent Grant's (and Crowley's) insistence that the source of the Thelemic testament, Aiwass, was Sumerian and that he might have been a priest of an Ur-form of Set-Typhon. If this could be supported by other evidence, then it is clear that Thelema owes a great deal of its identity to the influence of that exemplar of the transgressive forces of the universe ... and that Lovecraft's horror of the high priest of the Great Old Ones, Cthulhu or Kutulu, was at least in some measure justified!

In addition, it is tempting to see the Semitic word satan as a form of the Egyptian Set. They have the consonant sounds “s” and “t” in common, and they both seem to represent evil beings. Actually, while the relationship is hypothetical at this point, the two words do have a lot in common. Add to that the general reluctance of Egyptian scribes to write out the name of Set phonetically⁸²—but who instead chose to use his hieroglyphic signifier in texts—and you have an apt comparison to the avoidance of pronouncing the initial consonant of Shaitan's name by the Yezidis. Both, incidentally, begin with the same consonantal sound: the initial or sound used for the name of Set in transliterated Egyptian is believed to be identical to the sound s in Satan and sh in Shaitan, respectively.

The Hebrew word satan comes from a root meaning “adversary” or to “resist” as well as “enemy”, “obstacle”, or “obstruction”, depending on whether the word is used as a noun or a verb. It may come from the word sut which means “to fall aside or away,” or the word set which means “one who revolts.” The final “n” in the Hebrew satan indicates an emphasis on the root for the purpose of personification, and thus “he who falls aside,” or “he who revolts,” or “he who obstructs.” We remember that one of the earliest suspected pronounciations for Set is indeed Sut.

If it can be shown that Semitic ideas of Satan derive from the ancient Egyptian god Set, then Grant's hypothesis that Set-Shaitan-Typhon are one and the same takes on increased importance. By identifying Aiwass with this signifier we may understand the Book of the Law a little better, particularly its controversial third chapter which sets the New Aeon in complete opposition to the world's religions in a dramatic and even violent way. The message of Liber AL then becomes a message consistent with the personality and objectives of Set, the Dark Lord.

On the other hand, there is a scene from the Book of Coming Forth by Day (more commonly known as the Egyptian Book of the Dead) in which Set is shown at the prow of Ra's barque, fighting the serpent god Apophis. In this setting, Set is protecting the Sun God, Ra. If Set is “evil” as is often claimed, how is it that he also can be depicted defending the pantheon? Indeed, some pharaohs even took the name Set as their own or added it to their titles.

Set as Tantric God

A recurrent theme in all of Grant's work is that of sexuality, especially within a ritualistic context. The OTO is said to be a repository of the sexual secrets discovered by its German founders a century ago, and the OTO's debt to the sacred spirituality advocated by the African-American mystic Pascal Beverly Randolph has been detailed elsewhere.⁸³ Tantra forms the main context for Grant's elaboration of the sexual mysteries at the heart of Thelema and Thelemic magic, and indeed Grant went much further than Crowley in his description of these mysteries and their relevance to Tantra and in particular to Vama Marg Tantra or “Tantra of the Left Hand Path” as it is often—erroneously—characterized. Grant's Tantra is not the New Age, feel-good, Tantra of the West, but the transgressive Tantra of the Nath Siddhis, the Kaula circles and other traditions that view the human body—male and female—as both laboratories and temples combined. Tantra according to this approach is a technology of spirituality, spiritual power, and tremendously altered states of consciousness which has as its goal communion with supramundane beings ... in other words, precisely what Love-craft described when he depicted the orgiastic rites in the swamps outside New Orleans in his short story “The Call of Cthulhu.”

While many readers will be familiar with the legend of Set murdering Osiris, and Isis giving birth to a child, Horus, who will avenge his father's death in battle with Set, what is not so well known is the sexual component to the myth. For decades this aspect has remained somewhat hidden from the non-academic world and buried in obscure Latin phrases and euphemisms and generally ignored. That Set was understood to be either homosexual or at least bi-sexual will seem strange to those who have always believed Set to be the personification of pure evil and murder, a kind of Jungian “Shadow” archetype. But Set as representative of “the Other” in almost everything also represents sexual transgression, the perhaps ultimate expression of “Other-ness” and a natural characteristic of the type of Tantric sexuality that is the focus of Grant's thesis.

To understand this—and its relevance to Grant's Typhonian magic—it is necessary to know how Egypt described the origins of Set.

According to one of the cosmological systems of the ancient Egyptians, the supreme or eldest god, Atum, gave birth to the world by self-propagating his two children, Shu and Tefnut, who in turn gave birth to Geb the earth god and Nut the sky goddess. These in turn gave birth to Osiris and Isis. However, they also gave birth to Set and Nephthys, which disturbed the order of the cosmos as, until that time, the system had been established whereby one male-female pair gave birth to only one other male-female pair, essentially what the Gnostics would refer to as syzygies. Further, it was claimed that Set was not born via the usual method but essentially tore out of his mother's side on his own volition in an untimely season and violent manner. Thus it appears—though is not specifically stated—that Set did not have a childhood per se but entered life fully-grown. Even the word for “birth” is not used in the Egyptian texts in connection with Set's origins. Indeed, his own mother refused him and his sister/wife Nephthys was also in horror of him. Isis, whose brother/husband Osiris was slain by Set, lived in fear of him as well, especially during her pregnancy with Horus. It was believed that Set (due to his unnatural birth) caused abortions and that he would “open the womb” of pregnant women so that they would miscarry or abort. And even though each of the male-female pairs of gods would go on to beget other male-female pairs, Set and Nephthys did not have children and Nephthys was characterized vulgarly as the one with the “useless” vagina. Nephthys runs to Isis in fear of Set, or to console Isis after the murder of Osiris, a situation more fit for a telenovela than the gravitas of Egyptian religious mysteries. Thus the Set and Nephthys couple or dyad represent the disorder of the universe; evil enters into the cosmos through their unnatural entrance into the pantheon and the carefully-crafted structure of the created world is ripped apart.

Thus Set is the ultimate (and perhaps the original) anti-hero. His birth and early years are models of rejection, abuse, and violence: rejected by his own family, he turns to the abuse of them and their offspring and violently attacks and kills Osiris and then waits to do the same to Horus, his biological nephew.

But not before sodomizing the Crowned and Conquering Child.

There is little doubt today among Egyptologists that Set was characterized as a homosexual god, and that the famous “Contendings of Horus and Set” contain an account of Set's attempt to sodomize his nemesis. In fact, this attempted act of sodomy is the foundation for such an iconic Egyptian motif as the Eye of Horus. These associations were not generally known in Crowley's time outside a small circle of specialists. Had they been familiar to Crowley, they might have elicited a great many more musings on such themes as sexual magic, the mysteries of the Aeons, and the degree structure of the Ordo Templi Orientis. They certainly do lend support to such claims by later Crowley devotees that the New Aeon would be a “homosexual” Aeon, the males under the aegis of Typhon and the females under Maat.⁸⁴

It was the mother of Horus, Isis, who suggested to her son that he avoid penetration by Set through the use of his fingers to cover his anus, thus capturing Set's semen in his hand whereupon he flung the seed into a river. Set believed he had sodomized Horus successfully, and in a strange turnabout Horus deposited his own semen on a leaf of lettuce (Set's favorite food). Set ate the lettuce and thereby was “penetrated” (orally, we observe) by Horus.

When Set bragged to the gods that he had sodomized Horus, the semen that Horus had thrown into the river spoke out and denied Set the satisfaction of his boast. At that time, Horus claimed that he had penetrated Set, and to prove it the semen that Set had consumed issued forth from Set's forehead as a white disk.

Before the enraged Set could grab the disk it was seized by Thoth, the god of Wisdom, Magic, and Writing, and placed in the sky as the Moon.⁸⁵

While this episode certainly shows Set as an aggressive and violent being with homosexual attributes, it is not the whole story. In other legends, Set is still violent sexually but in heterosexual as well as homosexual situations. It could be argued that Set represents desire or sexuality per se. While Isis may be a symbol of love, especially maternal love, she is not usually identified in terms of pure sexuality. Set, on the other hand, seems to embody lust unrestrained.

If we understand Set to represent raw sexuality we can realize Set's place in the Egyptian cosmos. Set is power, at its most primal and basic (“uncivilized”) human level. Unrestrained, it results in rape and pedophilia among other depravations. Restrained, it can be a potent source of protection and occult power. But this power lives in a wild and uninhabited place, outside of society, a wasteland of invisible winds and unseen beasts. Society uses this power when the need arises; at other times, it wants it to go away, to disappear—which is as good a description of modern humanity's relationship to sexuality as any.

It could be argued that our reaction to the concept of sexuality is based upon its more controversial aspects. From teen pregnancy and pedophilia to rape, adultery, abortion, pornography, prostitution, sexually-transmitted diseases, and even gay marriage ... sexuality to the modern mind (West and East) is a minefield of dangerous associations. Crowley himself has the reputation of being a polymorphously perverse libertine who engaged in virtually every form of sexual expression during the course of his lifetime and who had many multiple male and female sexual partners covering the entire spectrum of human society, from street corner prostitutes to celebrities, artists's models, poets, actresses, and wealthy matrons. This was Set, the Dark Lord and God of the Midnight Sky and the circumpolar stars of True North in eternal struggle with Horus, the Lord of the Sun, the East, and the ecliptic. Crowley, like Jacob before him, wrestled with an Angel on the Ladder leading up to heaven, only in Crowley's case it was the Egyptian god that the Golden Dawn had taught him to fear and distrust, a god that represented the very sexuality that Crowley championed as being the vehicle for attaining the True Mysteries. It was the god of the Black Mass, and the witches's sabbat.

It was this type of sexual expression that so horrified H. P. Lovecraft to the extent that he never actually wrote about sexuality except in terms of disgust at the “orgiastic rites” of those worshipping the Ancient Ones. Lovecraft instinctively understood that extreme or at least non-traditional forms of sexuality were somehow linked to magic, occult power, and contact with supramundane entities. Lovecraft's instincts thus are linked to Crowley's magic and revelations to form Grant's Necronomicon Gnosis. Set, as the Lord of sexual transgression—which means any sexual activity outside of lawfully-permitted reproductive sex—is a Tantric Lord as well in the broadest sense of that term. Grant claimed that Set offers access to other dimensions, and that a deep understanding of Tantra—coupled with western magical practice and analysis—would lead the magician to the dark side of the Kabbalistic Tree of Life.

This “Setian” Tantra would re-interpret Set's infamous sexual acts as ritual requirements designed to plunge the operator into a dangerous realm of consciousness below that (or beyond that) of the waking world. These acts would include everything from solitary sexual practices to various types of hetero- and homosexual acts, including oral and anal sex. While Grant has argued that the enigmatic XIth degree of the Ordo Templi Orientis did not involve anal penetration—insisting instead that the per vas nefandum (the “unmentionable vessel”) requirement in Crowley's allusions to the ritual refers to the vagina of a woman during her menstruation, rather than to the anus, giving new meaning to the term “Scarlet Woman”—there is precedence for believing that many other forms of non-reproductive sex do have relevance for modern tantric practitioners. Shiva copulated extensively with his wife Parvati except that he did not impregnate her in the usual way but ejaculated either in her hand or her mouth. These (and many other) episodes from both Egyptian and Indian religion would seem to indicate that forms of sexuality other than those intended for reproduction are being implied, and to many mainstream religions any sexual act that does not have as its intention the reproduction of the species is, by definition, evil and forbidden.⁸⁶ Thus, what we may call “sacred sexuality”—whether the pale and pastel mysticism of right-hand Tantra with its hours of silent and motionless meditation on the Shakti yantra, or the red meat rituals of the Black Mass replete with bodily fluids and loud fornications, and everything in between—is transgressive by its very nature and belongs to the realm of the Dark Lord.

This leads us into another ritual developed by Crowley and based, once again, upon the rites of the Golden Dawn into which he had been initiated and which continued to influence his magical worldview his entire life. This is the Ritual of the Star Sapphire, known as Liber XXXVI (or “Book 36).

First appearing in Crowley's Book of Lies, this ritual was designed to replace the Golden Dawn's Ritual of the Hexagram. The Golden Dawn had two foundational rituals that everyone was expected to learn and to perform: the first of these being the Ritual of the Pentagram which was used to invoke or banish—depending on the direction the pentagram was drawn—the four “Platonic” elements (earth, air, fire and water) plus “spirit.” Each of the five points of the pentagram was assigned to one of these elements. It is the basic circle casting ritual of the Golden Dawn and versions of it have been used widely in occult groups and practice for more than one hundred years. This includes Wiccan groups, whose members often are not aware of the origins of their rite which is sometimes called invoking the Watchtowers (a direct reference to the Golden Dawn ritual, which was itself based on the Angelic Magic of Elizabethan magician John Dee and his medium, Edward Kelly—of whom Crowley believed he was the reincarnation).

The other, more complex, ceremony is known as the Ritual of the Hexagram. In this ritual, each of the six points of the hexagram is assigned one of the six visible “planets,” with the center of the hexagram representing the sun. Thus, depending on how the hexagram is drawn, one is invoking or banishing the influences of one of the planets.

Crowley replaced both of these rituals with his own, Thelemic, versions. The Pentagram ritual was replaced by the Star Ruby ritual whose original angelic beings—Michael, Raphael, Gabriel and Uriel—were substituted with godforms more appropriate to Thelema: Therion (the “Beast”) Nuit, Babalon and Hadit.⁸⁷

However, when it came to the Hexagram ritual, a fundamental change took place, one that may not be particularly obvious at first glance. This was the ritual that attracted the attention of Theodor Reuss, one of the founders of the OTO, who visited Crowley in London and accused him of publishing the secret of the IX° of the Order in his 1912 book The Book of Lies, a situation that led to Crowley's receiving the IX° from Reuss on the spot—and the rest, as they say, is history. Crowley had already received the grades up to and including the VII° from Reuss, but had no idea that the higher grades consisted of the sexual secrets that he had published. Crowley, in writing out these sexually-charged texts, was just being Crowley; he claimed that Star Sapphire came to him in the same sort of heightened state of consciousness that brought forth the other Holy Books that we have discussed, above. It was Reuss who revealed to him what has become the biggest “secret” of western occultism, that the core of the practices—from alchemy to ceremonial magic—are sexual in nature, and that the iconography of occultism (including Rosicrucianism, alchemy, mysticism and magic) conceal sexual (or, at least, psycho-biological) secrets.

Crowley went on to rewrite many of the OTO rituals, to become head of the Order in the English-speaking countries, and eventually head of the Order itself after the contentious Weida Conference in Germany. Thus, this particular ritual deserves close scrutiny as it was the catalyst that propelled Crowley to the headship of the OTO; it is also, according to Reuss himself, the secret of the IX° in printed form. In addition, and most importantly for this study, it is a ritual that puts Set—the Dark Lord—front and center.

An entire book could be written on the Star Sapphire, as simple as it seems to be, and we will not explore all its implications and ramifications here. What concerns us directly is how Crowley perceived Set in his own Thelemic context.

The ritual begins with the key phrase, “Let the Adept be armed with his Magick Rood (and provided with his Mystic Rose).” This is the phrase the caught the attention of Theodor Reuss. A “Magick Rood” of course is a rod or wand, and specifically refers to the cross on which Christ was crucified, the “Holy Rood.” Thus this first sentence tells the adept to be armed with a cross and a rose, which is the symbol of one of the most famous European secret societies, the Rosicrucians (which name means, of course, Rose Cross or Rosey Cross). A rose and cross emblem was also the coat-of-arms of the man who ignited the Reformation, Martin Luther. Thus, we can see this instruction as being, if not wholly innocent, at least bereft of any overtly sexual connotation if taken in the context of seventeenth-century European occult societies.

However, the rest of the ritual puts this initial phrase into a completely different context.

After giving a number of quasi-Masonic gestures—the L.V.X. signs or the N.O.X. signs both of which have their origins in the Golden Dawn—the adept is then instructed to go to the four cardinal directions, beginning with the East and proceeding clockwise to the other quarters, uttering a series of Latin phrases and drawing a hexagram in each direction.

The Latin phrases are instructive. Translated, they are:

Father and Mother, One God, ARARITA.

Mother and Son, One God, ARARITA.

Son and Daughter, One God, ARARITA.

Daughter and Father, One God, ARARITA.

Ararita is the same word that appears in the original Golden Dawn version of the Hexagram ritual, and is an acronym for a Hebrew phrase that means “One is his beginning. One is his individuality. His permutation is One.”

At the end, the adept returns to his original position in the center of the circle thus made, and “making the sign of the Rosy Cross” he then repeats the word ARARITA three times, after which he makes:

“... the Sign of Set Triumphant and of Baphomet. Also shall Set appear in the circle. Let him drink of the Sacrament and let him communicate the same.”

There are further Latin phrases after this, which translated read:

“All in Two; Two in One; One in none; these are neither Four nor All nor Two nor One nor None.”

Followed by:

“Glory be to the Father and the Mother and the Son and the Daughter and the Holy Spirit without and the Holy Spirit within which was, and is, and is to come, for ever and ever, six in one through the seven in one name ARARITA.”

The emphasis in these phrases seems to be the reduction of all dualities to a singularity, evidence of Crowley's fascination with the Indian concept of advaita or non-duality. Yet, duality is at the heart of the ritual, so it is worthwhile to pause here to contemplate its intention.

In the first place, remember that Crowley himself insisted that he did not realize that this was the IX° secret until Theodor Reuss pointed it out to him, and told him that it was the secret behind all of western occultism. Crowley wrote it as a sexual rite and expanded upon this intention in a later chapter⁸⁸ of the Book of Lies, but was unaware of what he had stumbled upon. It may be that Crowley felt he was simply re-interpreting the rituals in sexual terms rather than discovering the real basis behind them. But what does Set have to do with any of this? And why is Set “Triumphant”?

If this ritual is interpreted in sexual terms, as was the intention, we are left with the uncomfortable realization that three of the four “pairings” are incestuous in nature: Mother and Son, Son and Daughter, Father and Daughter. Crowley was delicate enough, or pragmatic enough, not to have included “Mother and Daughter” or “Father and Son” most likely since heterosexual couplings would be necessary in a ritual of the IX° in which both male and female fluids are required for the creation of the Sacrament. This Sacrament is to be consumed by the operator and “communicated.” The last word comes from the Latin Mass, and indicates that the Sacrament is to be shared, so that those sharing “commune” with the spiritual force invoked. In the Latin Mass this is done with the sacred Elements—the bread and wine that have been transubstantiated into the body and blood of Christ—so that all those who communicate (i.e., take Communion) share in the experience of contact with Jesus, the slain and resurrected God.

In the case of the Star Sapphire, since the ritual is patently sexual, the Sacrament is composed of the male and female sexual fluids and is a form of the Gnostic Mass in miniature, as it were. What Grant points out, again and again in his Typhonian Trilogies, is that these are not simply the gross fluids in and of themselves, but have been transformed through correct performance of ritual. They thus contain occult qualities which normal semen and female secretions (whether menstrual blood or the secretions of the mucus membranes of the vagina—which are carriers of special essences known as kalas to Tantra and to Grant) normally do not possess. These qualities have nothing to do with the process of physical reproduction; they are obviously not necessary to facilitate the conception of a human child. An essential element of this ritual (and, indeed, of all sexual magic) is contact with other forces, those beyond the physical world, so that all the grosser physical aspects of sexual intercourse (from desire, to arousal, to intercourse, to orgasm, to the fluids that result) must be re-imagined, transformed, and transcended.

As a ritual of transgressive sexuality, it would be appropriate for Set. Set is “triumphant”—according to the Egyptian texts so far deciphered—in situations of murder, rape, sodomy, etc. In Set's defence of Ra's solar barque, his violence is put to good use in service of the pantheon, and he is triumphant there as well: he destroys a serpent god, Apep or Apophis (with whom, paradoxically, he is sometimes identified). In the Star Sapphire ritual, it may be that the transgressive powers of Set are first identified and then employed in an act designed to bring the adept into contact with his Holy Guardian Angel (as Crowley himself seems to suggest in Chapter 69 of the Book of Lies—where the subject of the Hexagram is discussed in terms that are patently sexual and obvious, including an explicit reference to the sexual position known as “69” or mutual oral sex).

The Golden Dawn instructions concerning the Hexagram ritual make it clear that this is a ritual of the macrocosm (the seven planets, seven of the ten sefirot on the Tree of Life), as opposed to the Pentagram ritual which is a rite of the microcosm (the four elements plus spirit, or the five Indian tattvas). We may say, then, that the Hexagram ritual (both the Golden Dawn original and Crowley's reworking of it in the Star Sapphire) is a ritual of the heavens, the sky, and the Pentagram ritual is of the earth.

Therefore, the invocation of Set Triumphant at the climax of the rite indicates the unlocking of a Gate between this world and the next, a Gate that is not quite the same as that which Osiris would have unlocked. It has nothing to do with death and resurrection, per se, but of opening a portal to the Nightside of the Tree of Life, to what Grant refers to as the Tunnels of Set. Here once again Crowley has demonstrated the true nature of his mythos, moreover in a ritual that was written in a heightened state of consciousness similar to that which gave us the Book of the Heart Girt with a Serpent: the book that formed the link between Crowley the magician and Lovecraft the seer. That there is the performance of a sexual act in the center of the ceremony and the consumption of the “Elements” thereafter is only another piece of evidence that Grant's understanding of the Thelemic praxis as representing contact with the Dark Lord is the correct one.

In religion, humans are subservient to God or the Gods, especially in the Abrahamic, monotheistic religions. In Thelema, the emphasis is reversed with all the focus on human potential. There is no religious dogma in magic, as much as it might seem to be implied. Magicians dare to do what religious, pious human beings do not: to actively approach the Thrones of the Gods using whatever means are available, even the most blasphemous. The Gods may be more powerful, and even dangerous, but the properly trained human being can navigate the heavens and the hells with impunity.

Chaos and Babalon—we might say Set and Ishtar, Dumuzi and Inanna, Shiva and Shakti—represent the deepest occult processes that lie beneath the play of Maya, of the Illusory World of Creation. Chaos and Babalon are also the gateways to the Dark Side of Creation, just as human sexuality is a gateway to deeper unconscious processes that function—powerfully—below the horizon of conscious thought, calculation, and conjecture. They are irrational forces, which is the characteristic that alarmed Lovecraft the most: they were immune to sober, scientific understanding just as the immense vastness of deep space lies outside the ability of the human mind to contemplate.

The other Gods—Isis, Osiris, Horus, Thoth, Anubis, the list goes on and on and not only for Egyptian deities but also the Greek, Roman, African, Indian, Chinese and so many other pantheons—are aspects of the basic and fundamental two, of Chaos and Babalon. For convenience, they can be considered refinements of specific aspects, points of view, chemical components, psycho-biological qualities—but that is not to denigrate their importance or value to the magician. Any one of these deities is a potent force far in excess of any human capacity to contain completely.

The Typhonian Tradition—according to Grant's thesis—is the most ancient of all religious and occult traditions. Its origin is in the stars, and it lies at the base of all later cults. That would indicate that its gods are the basis for all later gods, its rituals the purer forms of all later rituals. But that would be to deny that human beings are capable of refining those ancient rites from time to time, of fine-tuning the original processes for reasons of self-preservation, if nothing else. For Grant is not entirely optimistic concerning the designs of the ultramundane, extraterrestrial forces of which he writes so eloquently. His works are not only guides through the Tunnels of Set to the Dark Side of the Tree of Life: they are also warnings, warnings as sincere as those of Lovecraft were fanciful.

And in order to understand those forces, it is necessary to see how they were invoked by a plethora of “unspeakable cults” around the world, in rituals secret and at times profane.

43 Durkheim (1912) p. 39

44 There are other attainments beyond the Knowledge and Conversation of the HGA, and they will be discussed as they come up.

45 Evidence for this may be found in the Sumerian Maqlu text, the “Burning” grimoire that consists of spells against “witches” which may be taken to mean independent spiritual experts who work on behalf of individuals—for love, money, power, etc—rather than for the group. An abbreviated form of this text appears in the Schlangekraft recension of the Necronomicon.

46 Crowley's approach can be characterized as bricolage, after its use as a term of art in cultural studies and anthropology, notably by Claude Levi-Strauss (The Savage Mind, 1962). This refers to a method of taking whatever is useful at the time from whatever source and building a system or a philosophy out of the assembled parts. Anyone reading Crowley's vast published work will readily come to the conclusion that Crowley indeed was a bricoleur par excellence. Of course, central to the ritual environment of the Golden Dawn—the occult society that gave Crowley his first initiations—was the doctrine of correspondences, in which disparate religious and spiritual elements were given equivalence through the medium of the Kabbalistic Tree of Life. This, in a sense, was a systematized form of bricolage.

47 He used the Golden Dawn grade system as the template for his own AA Both degree systems are based on a version of the Tree of Life of the Kabbalists.

48 Crowley's instructions to his disciples on these techniques form the substance of his Book Four which is completely focused on yoga and which—in Crowley's system—became an important adjunct to the more western ceremonial practices of the Golden Dawn. Along with Book Four were his Eight Lectures on Yoga in which he develops these ideas even more specifically. In a sense, the yogic methods were the missing element in the grimoires which simply gave the rituals as recipes to be followed by those already trained in yoga (or in some corresponding form of mental and physiological control represented in the western, European systems by fasting, celibacy, prayer, etc.).

49 This may be due to the emphasis put on samadhi in The Yoga Aphorisms of Patanjali, a Hindu text of which Crowley was fond and which he recommended to his followers. It is also an essential aspect of Buddhist meditation, and references to it can be found in the Sikh religion as well.

50 This excerpt from Crowley's Book Four is illustrative of his contempt for Buddhism: “The vulgarism and provincialism of the Buddhist canon is infinitely repulsive to all nice minds; and the attempt to use the terms of an ego-centric philosophy to explain the details of a psychology whose principle doctrine is the denial of the ego, was the work of a mischievous idiot.” (p. 80, footnote)

51 One can compare the Biblical Book of Revelation (Apocalypse) with documents discovered at Qumran, such as the Song of the Sabbath Sacrifice, for similar predictions of a great cosmic battle and the loss of the Temple of Solomon in Jerusalem.

52 More properly referred to as “isopsephy” when applied to the Greek language and alphabet.

53 This idea would be adopted and elaborated upon by the cult around Crowley's contemporary, Maria de Naglowska (1883-1936) in Paris, as well as by the German offshoot of the original OTO, the Fraternitas Saturni and even the groups around the Italian mystic and fascist ideologue Julius Evola (1898-1974). The influence of these groups on the OTO and eventually on Thelema cannot be discounted or ignored, and even may contribute to a fuller understanding of Thelema, as well as an expansion of its major themes. See Chapter 5.

54 Another French depiction of a Black Mass can be found in the twentieth century novel by Georges Bataille, L'histoire de l'oeil—“The History of the Eye”—which is concerned with sexual as well as religious transgression. It was published in 1928, and contains scenes in which sexual fluids are intermingled in such a way as to suggest some of the deeper mysteries of the western Tantric-influenced cults.

55 The word “bond” in this context expands upon the definition of religio and ligare, given above, but more importantly it may reflect a modern iteration of Giordano Bruno's revealing text, De vinculis in genera (“Of Bonds in General”). Here Bruno identifies the “bond” as love or eros, and especially in a magical context, thus agreeing completely with AL I:41 in which “bond” is equated with “love.” Bruno was burned at the stake by the Catholic Church in the year 1600 for heresy.

56 In this Crowley was anticipating the revolutionary psychological theories of Deleuze and Guattari in their Anti-Oedipus, where they argue that families and society at large conspire to repress desire and act as vehicles of neuroses which are necessary to the smooth functioning of capitalist society. In such a situation schizophrenia is the only logical outcome. See also R. D. Laing, The Politics of Experience.

57 See Jacco Dieleman, Priests, Tongues, and Rites: The London-Leiden Magical Manuscripts and Translation in Egyptian Ritual (100—300 CE), Brill, Leiden (2005) p. 134: “The Greek invocation develops the Sethian elements of the rite further by calling the deity the god of cosmic upheaval, who is hostile to the social order and dwells in foreign countries.”

58 Levenda, Stairway to Heaven, pp. 135-145.

59 See the author's Tantric Temples: Eros and Magic in Java, for many examples of this meme.

60 Gail Corrington Streete, The Strange Woman: Power and Sex in the Bible, Lousiville (KY), Westminster John Knox Press, 1997.

61 Naturally, this present volume ignores that stricture! To do otherwise would be, in the words of Liber AL, a “sin.”

62 Crowley, Liber Liberi vel Lapidus Lazuli, Chapter VII, verses 1-8. Verse six mentions Tutulu and states that it is written in an “ancient book”: Tutulu in an ancient book, and Cthulhu in the Necronomicon.

63 Crowley, Liber Cordis Cincti Serpente, Chapter I:57. The earthquake is an important element in the Lovecraft story.

64 Ibid, II:37. Cthulhu is a monster of the Abyss of the Great Deep.

65 Ibid, III:30

66 Ibid, IV:33-35. These verses could just as easily be descriptions of Cthulhu.

67 H.P. Lovecraft, “The Call of Cthulhu,” from the first section sub-titled “The Horror in Clay.” A “pulpy, tentacled head” seems to recall Crowley's “He enveloped me with his demon tentacles ...” The term “Cyclopean architecture” is one we will come across again in Thelemic literature.

68 “After returning from Morocco, the spirit came upon me and I wrote a number of books in a way which I hardly know how to describe.... The prose of these books, the chief of which are Liber Cordis Cincti Serpente, The Book of the Heart girt with the Serpent, and Libri vel Lapidis Lazuli, is wholly different from anything that I have written myself. I cannot doubt that these books are the work of an intelligence independent of my own.” Aleister Crowley, Confessions, Chapter 62, p. 558.

69 The following year—1908—the word “Tutulu” would reappear as Crowley was involved in evoking the Aires or Aethyrs of the Enochian system in North Africa at the time. The word was heard during the invocation of the 27th Aethyr. At that time Crowley admitted that the word was untranslatable. See Crowley, The Vision and the Voice.

70 Accessed from Rangjung Yeshe Tibetan-English Dharma Dictionary.

71 This is a theme familiar to anyone who has studied Siberian shamanism, and reference to this concept can be found in the works of Mircea Eliade (especially his magnum opus Shamanism) as well as in books by the present author, such as his Sinister Forces trilogy. In this tradition, a shaman is one who has undergone the death and rebirth experience after a long period of meditation and solitary ritual in the forest. The death and rebirth formula is also an integral part of the initiation structure of the Golden Dawn and of Aleister Crowley's AA, as well as of the third degree of Freemasonry. In that sense one could say that anyone who has gone through these systems can be called a “kusulu,” but there is a difference between the formalized rituals of the western esoteric tradition and the intense psychological experience of genuine Asian shamanistic initiation.

72 Liber XXXVI is also known as The Star Sapphire, see below. Kenneth Grant, Beyond the Mauve Zone, London, Starfire Publishing, 1999.

73 See, for instance, Jean-Pierre Vernant, The Origins of Greek Thought, Ithaca, Cornell University Press, 1982, pp. 110-111.

74 One notable exception is his Liber XXXVI or Star Sapphire, which is a reworking of the Golden Dawn Ritual of the Hexagram, to be discussed below.

75 This is particularly evident in the Golden Dawn's document entitled “Z.1, The Enterer of the Threshold” which is an analysis of the Neophyte initiation ritual. Set-Typhon occupies one of the Invisible Stations in this ritual, where he is described as “Omoo-Sathan, Typhon, Apophis, Set. The Evil Persona is a composite figure of the powers arising from the Qlippoth...” The other two stations on this Path—on the Middle Pillar of the Tree of Life, the segment named Samekh after the Hebrew letter—are Hathor and Harparkrat. Hathor is sometimes considered a consort of Set and a partner in his drunken revels; the presence of Harparkrat (Harpocrates or Hoor-paar-krat, the child form of Horus) along with Set and Hathor is a dead give-away as to the true nature of the Aeon of Horus. See Regardie, The Golden Dawn, St. Paul, Llewellyn, 2005, pp. 356-357.

76 See his Stairway to Heaven, New York, Continuum, 2008, pp. 16-18.

77 Necronomicon, Lake Worth, Ibis Press, 2008, p. 124.

78 For this and most of the other references in this chapter to Set's origins, names, etc. see H. Te Velde, Seth, God of Confusion: a study of his role in Egyptian mythology and religion, Leiden, Brill, 1967.

79 Ibid., pp. 3-7.

80 As shown in Jacco Dieleman, Priests, Tongues, and Rites: The London-Leiden Magical Manuscripts and Translation in Egyptian Ritual (100-300 CE), Leiden, Brill, 2005, pp. 130-138.

81 For this rather startling revelation, see Jarl Fossum and Brian Glazer, “Seth in the Magical Texts,” in Zeitschrift für Papyrologie und Epigraphik 100 (1994) 86-92.

82 H. Te Velde, op. cit., p. 4.

83 See Joscelyn Godwin, Christian Chanel, and John P. Deveny, The Hermetic Brotherhood of Luxor: Initiatic and Historical Documents of an Order of Practical Occultism, York Beach, ME.: Samuel Weiser, 1995 and T. Allen Greenfield, The Story of the Hermetic Brotherhood of Light, Beverly Hills, Looking Glass Press, 1997.

84 From a letter written by Michael Bertiaux dated October 10, 1987 and cited in Peter Koenig, “XI—Per Aftera Ad Astra, Anal Intercourse and the O.T.O.”

85 This episode is discussed in some detail in H. Te Velde, op. cit., pp.32-80.

86 See, for instance, the Papal Bull Humane Vitae.

87 The original text in the Book of Lies has, instead, Chaos, Babalon, Eros and Psyche, in line with the Greek motif of the ritual which is entirely in that language, as the Star Sapphire is in Latin. Crowley changed the Star Ruby sacred names to the more overtly Thelemic nomenclature evidently out of a need to bring it more in line with his doctrine. However, Chaos and Babalon seem more appropriate, especially in light of the Creed of the Gnostic Mass, discussed above.

88 Chapter LXIX, or “Sixty-Nine.”