The Dark Lord: H.P. Lovecraft, Kenneth Grant, and the Typhonian Tradition in Magic - Peter Levenda 2013
Unspeakable Cults
“But look there,” he continued, “there, sandwiched between that nightmare of Huysmans', and Walpole's Castle of Otranto—Von Junzt's Nameless Cults. There's a book to keep you awake at night!”
“I've read it,” said Taverel, “and I'm convinced the man is mad. His work is like the conversation of a maniac—it runs with startling clarity for awhile, then suddenly merges into vagueness and disconnected ramblings.”
Conrad shook his head. “Have you ever thought that perhaps it is his very sanity that causes him to write in that fashion? What if he dares not put on paper all he knows? What if his vague suppositions are dark and mysterious hints, keys to the puzzle, to those who know?”
“Bosh!” This from Kirowan. “Are you intimating that any of the nightmare cults referred to by Von Junzt survive to this day—if they ever existed save in the hag-ridden brain of a lunatic poet and philosopher?”
“Not he alone used hidden meanings,” answered Conrad.
—Robert E. Howard, “The Children of the Night” (1931)
ROBERT E. HOWARD WAS ONE of the circle of fantasy authors around H. P. Lovecraft sometimes referred to as the Lovecraft Circle. He contributed to what has become known as the “Cthulhu Mythos” by writing stories such as the one excerpted above which referenced Lovecraft's Cthulhu, the Necronomicon, and other motifs. One of his contributions to the Mythos was the fictional Nameless Cults by Von Junzt, which became the awkward Unaussprechlichen Kulten89 in Lovecraft's German rescension and from there into “Unspeakable Cults.” Howard's most famous creation, however, was Conan the Barbarian, the fantasy character made even more famous by the actor Arnold Schwarzenegger. In 1936, at the age of 30, Howard committed suicide. He was not the only member of Lovecraft's inner circle to do so. In 1951 he would be followed by Robert H. Barlow, the noted anthropologist of ancient Mexico, expert in the Nahuatl language, and the literary executor of Lovecraft's estate. He committed suicide in Mexico at the age of 32.
One of the prevailing themes in Grant's work (and especially in that of Lovecraft and his circle of fellow gothic horror writers) is of cults that are either African, Afro-Caribbean, Middle Eastern or Asian. In other words, cults that could be defined as non-Western. While Crowley speaks of these cults in passing, he does not focus on them to the extent that Grant does, and Grant does so because he feels that the practices and beliefs of these cults hold keys towards understanding underlying themes and techniques of occultism in general and Thelema specifically.
Thelema's origins, as described in the previous two chapters, can be found in the interpretation of Egyptian mysteries by the British organizers of the Golden Dawn, the secret society in which Crowley was initiated, and their reevaluation and re-imagination by Crowley himself. Most of the religious references in the Book of the Law are to Egyptian god forms familiar to anyone who had been through the initiatory system of the Golden Dawn.
But there are tantalizing references to other schemes of initiation in AL, and while Crowley did immerse himself for awhile in Asian methods of magic and mysticism his focus always remained on those systems that were most familiar to Westerners, and those elements of Asian systems that were already in translation in English. He had virtually no background in African or Afro-Caribbean systems. He was thus limited in his ability to draw the same inferences and conclusions of later occultists who had access to greater resources, either in translation or through direct experience of the non-Western systems.
This is beginning to be rectified, and it is largely to Grant that we owe this expansion of Thelemic ideas, methods, and practices into non-Western systems of initiation, and vice versa.
However, while the intellectual composition of Thelema has been extended greatly through Grant's work, it is through the creative and visionary accomplishments of H. P. Lovecraft that we owe the emotional content, albeit in ways the horror writer never consciously intended.
“Weird fiction seems to vie with works on witchcraft, voodoo and dark magic.”
—Robert E. Howard, “The Children of the Night”
It is the contention of this writer, as well as of Kenneth Grant, that Lovecraft in some way—unconsciously, probably—was in touch with, or otherwise aware of, the same spiritual material that informed Crowley's contact in Cairo in 1904. We have seen in the previous chapter how closely events in Lovecraft's “Call of Cthulhu” mirrored Crowley's Holy Book revelations. There are other parallels, and other synchronicities, between the two writers and as we proceed with this investigation we will look at some of them. What is compelling about these correspondences is that the one amplifies and explains the other. Grant's genius lay in making those initial connections between the horror writer on the one hand and the Prophet of the New Age on the other. It was a bold contention, for it was in danger of making modern occultism look like some kind of role-playing game, a sword-and-sorcery affair replete with scary monsters and secret books.
Several of the cults most important to Lovecraft's stories are precisely those that intrigue both Crowley and Grant. These include the Haitian religion of Voodoo (also spelled variously vodou, vodun, etc.) and the Mesopotamian religion of the Yezidi. “Voodoo” makes its appearance in Lovecraft's “Call of Cthulhu” as well as throughout Grant's published work. Grant's interest in this Afro-Caribbean religion was intensified through his relationship with Michael Bertiaux (b. 1935) of La Couleuvre Noire (the “Black Snake”), an occult order based on Haitian Vodou with ideas and methods derived from the Western mystery traditions as well as Lovecraftian and Thelemic elements.
Syncretisms, Orientalisms
Bertiaux had spent some time in Haiti before embracing his own particular occult path, and became a member of a society—the Ordo Templi Orientis Antiqua or OTOA—allegedly created by a mysterious and possibly non-existent Haitian occultist Lucien-François Jean-Maine (1869?-1960) of whom there is very little hard information. The OTOA was evidently a mixture of quasi-Masonic ritual and initiation and traditional Vodun, forming a bridge between European-style ceremonial magic traditions and the Afro-Carib-bean Vodun cultus. Jean-Maine was allegedly the inheritor of an ancient Haitian occult lineage that numbers among its lineage-holders the venerable Ordre des Elus-Cohen which had a branch in Leogane, Haiti. This is not the place to go into the history of the Elus Cohen (or “Elect Priests”), so suffice it to say that it was a branch of the eighteenth century Martinist order and the branch most closely concerned with ritual magic. Martinism began as a Masonic-type society in pre-revolutionary France but its founder—Martinez de Pasqually—died in Haiti in 1774. Haiti at that time was a French colony. Hence the suggested French Masonic-Haitian Vodun connection.
Bertiaux worked and expanded upon the system he inherited, and brought it into line with Thelema by 1972. His Vodoun Gnostic Workbook became quite well-known for its imaginative combination of western esotericism, Afro-Caribbean concepts and terminology, and sex magic. Kenneth Grant saw in Bertiaux's work a verification of his belief that the Thelemic magical current had to be allinclusive if it represented a genuine change of Aeon. That meant that analogues had to be found in African, Latin American and Asian traditions as well as the more familiar European and Middle Eastern practices. Not only that, but these traditions would also hold keys to the full implementation of the current, based on their knowledge of occult matters and technologies stemming from their own environment, culture, and history and which might be either ignored or missing in western systems. Knowledge, to Grant, is power.
As we mentioned above, Crowley's own knowledge of these practices was thin. This is not to criticize Crowley, for deep understanding of these mystical technologies had always eluded Western observers and there were few who had the requisite background in the languages and rituals of India, Africa, and the indigenous cultures of all continents in the early twentieth century. That would gradually change, and by the beginning of the twenty-first century a growing number of religious studies and anthropology scholars have made tremendous inroads into Chinese, Tibetan, Mongolian, African, and Afro-Caribbean languages and scriptures, both written and oral. Grant's contribution was to make as much use as possible of the growing body of esoteric literature in translation from Asian and African sources in order to elaborate upon Thelemic themes and to create a more powerful ritual machinery for probing the darker side of occultism.
Thus, not only the Haitian religious system known as Vodun but also primary source material on Tantric practices make their way into Grant's grand design. These elements were always there in Crowley's writings and even in Liber AL itself, of course. But before Grant the focus primarily had been on the Egyptian, Kabbalistic and to some extent alchemical characteristics of Thelemic ritual and concepts. Bertiaux—and the Tantric expert David Curwen—were able to contribute to Grant's knowledge of non-European occultism in important ways.
Heretofore, the occult or esoteric practices of any culture were basically consistent with that culture and it's religious and magical ideas. This was the case even when there was obvious borrowing, such as within the syncretic faiths (such as Santeria, Vodun, etc.) where there was an admixture of foreign components with an indigenous belief system. The power of magic rests, however, in its antinomian nature: it lives on the outer limits of what is traditional, acceptable, “normal,” and legal. While Gnosticism, for instance, can be understood as a kind of Christian esotericism, it borrowed heavily from Egyptian and Platonic sources, sources that would have been anathema to orthodox Christians.
But this type of syncretism was a result of neighboring cultures meeting each other and borrowing from the religious and esoteric practices of the other. What is proposed in Grant's project is nothing less than a borrowing from whatever source, wherever in the world, and whenever it existed. There is no sense of geographic proximity resulting in adulteration of one method or another, but of the deliberate search through the world's religions, esotericisms, mysticisms and magics for methods that can be adapted to the overall agenda of Thelema. While this seems to have been Crowley's original intention—as reflected, for instance, in the tables of correspondences between the world's religions that can be found in Liber 777, a project begun by members of the Golden Dawn and greatly expanded by Crowley—it would be Grant who would make this type of deliberate and conscious syncretism a cornerstone of his cult.
Leaders of religions may quarrel with each other over beliefs and dogma; devotees of religions may fight and kill each other over their differences; but mystics understand each other, regardless of their formal affiliation. Mystics are interested in techniques for achieving altered states of consciousness that can lead them to greater and deeper understanding. The attempt by some in Thelemic circles to forge bonds between Tantra, Vodun, Kabbalah, ceremonial magic, and alchemy represents this point of view. This is not—and should not be—an attempt to find justification for one particular dogma over another, or to prop up one particular interpretation over another. It is, instead, a quest for truth in the discovery of workable techniques. Magicians are interested only in what works. Like scientists from both sides during the Cold War, there is curiosity and a willingness to learn from potential enemies as well as from friends.
The danger in this approach lies in the facile comparisons made between different cultures as if their gods and rituals had exact equivalents among those in another completely different culture. There is evidence of this in Liber 777 and the tables of correspondences which demonstrate the creators were often too quick to make associations between deities that may or may not have much in common. This tendency has been called “universalism” by the post-modern critics who instead emphasize ethnic and cultural originality and uniqueness. Both of these approaches—in their extreme manifestations—are equally erroneous, in my view.
What Grant has done is to cull these different techniques and approaches in order to discover knowledge that cultures other than his own had obtained through the use of methods that might have been neglected in the West due to ignorance or tabu. This is especially true when it comes to occult or esoteric techniques that are sexually-based or based upon a knowledge of human anatomy and physiology that has been put to use by those who perceived a spiritual analogue to physical properties and functions. While a Western bias has been to downgrade the importance of the human body, or to see the human body as a potential source of sin and transgression, the Asian and African viewpoints reflect a respect for the body and an interest in examining biological functions in terms of their spiritual potential, or their potential for attaining higher—or simply altered—states of consciousness.
Thus, sexuality and drugs became the province of non-Western esoteric practices after the rise of Christianity in Europe repressed and suppressed these ideas. While there is much more to Asian and African forms of spirituality and esotericism than sexuality and drugs, these represented the missing pieces in the Western repetoire.
The story of the OTO has the founders traveling to the Middle East to obtain initiations in “sex magic” and related methods. Pascal Beverly Randolph (a major influence on modern Western esotericism) also claimed Middle Eastern initiations, and Aleister Crowley himself traveled through North Africa and India—as well as Ceylon—in search of African and Asian wisdom.
Grant, however, took a more organized approach to the subject and began collecting previously-unknown or untranslated esoteric texts from these cultures as well as building relationships with those who had already been initiated into those traditions. This included Michael Bertiaux and David Curwen, as we shall see. But Grant did not stop there.
Other forms of creative spirituality were not immune to Grant's all-inclusive approach. Art and literature represented, for Grant, additional avenues to explore for greater understanding of the Thelemic project as well as a source of other technologies that could become part of the magician's arsenal.
Thus, the art of Austin Osman Spare (1886-1956) was given as much regard in Grant's cult as the writings of H. P. Lovecraft. While Lovecraft described the “hideous” practices of Asian and African cults in words, Spare canonized them in his art and his magical system. Grotesque human forms engaged in obscure ritual are powerful images in Spare's magical worldview, just as grotesque alien beings hold blind, omnipotent sway over humans in Lovecraft's world. Even more to the point, Spare understood that words—Lovecraft's metier—have intrinsic magical power as well, and could be manipulated in such a way that the physical representation of a word or phrase could acquire occult potency. It was an attempt to use words as art forms, to reduce words to the ideas they represent: to bring them back to their original status as symbols, as hieroglyphics. Spare's system was atavistic: a going-back in time to the period when writing was first being invented, a time when the written word held tremendous magical power and could be interpreted only by the initiates, the priests.
In this, Spare's system was as much a reference to ancient cults as it was an idiosyncratic occult method of his own devising. This was probably what attracted Grant in the first place, for Spare was a unique individual with a non-denominational approach to occultism. There was no formal Kabbalah in Spare's system, no nod to Jewish or Christian contexts. Instead, it was a kind of orientalist fantasy of occultism and acted as a reach beyond texts as such to the deeper layers of consciousness where our fears and our anxieties (and our sexuality) are located ... somewhere in the limbic brain, perhaps, curled around itself at the top of the spinal cord.
One of the iconic forms of this type of “orientalist fantasy” is the emphasis given to the Kurdish cult of the Yezidi. Since Grant devotes an entire chapter to the Yezidi in his Outer Gateways, it behooves us to investigate this religion further and to try to separate the wheat from the chaff.
The Cult of the Peacock Angel
I read of it first in the strange book of Von Junzt, the German eccentric who lived so curiously and died in such grisly and mysterious fashion. It was my fortune to have access to his Nameless Cults in the original edition, the so-called Black Book, published in Dusseldorf in 1839, shortly before a hounding doom overtook the author.
—Robert E. Howard, “The Black Stone”
... he thought the ritual was some remnant of Nestorian Christianity tinctured with the Shamanism of Thibet. Most of the people, he conjectured, were of Mongoloid stock, originating somewhere in or near Kurdistan—and Malone could not help recalling that Kurdistan is the land of the Yezidis, last survivors of the Persian devil-worshippers.
—H. P. Lovecraft, “The Horror at Red Hook”
The Yezidis and the Tibetans. This same comparison would be made by Kenneth Grant decades later, and not in a fictional sense but entirely seriously. While rumors of the Yezidi made their way into European travelogues and archaeological literature in the nineteenth century,90 it wasn't until the early days of the twentieth century that they became better known and the subject of one book that set the tone for so many future “revelations”: Isya Joseph's Devil Worship: The Sacred Books and Traditions of the Yezidiz. Published in 1919, Joseph's book contained the first English versions of the Black Book and the Revelation: two previously secret and unpublished texts said to be the core scriptures of the Yezidi faith and which, according to Joseph, were translated from the Arabic. These texts are referenced in Grant's books and in other occult and esoteric works that touch on the Yezidi cultus.
Recent scholarship, however, has shown that these two texts are most likely the result of a hoax perpetrated by a well-known antiquities dealer and forger of documents and are not actual Yezidi texts.91 The Yezidi are said to possess what is largely an oral tradition, composed of many disparate elements including—but not limited to—those of Christian, Islamic, Jewish and possibly Gnostic and Zoroastrian beliefs and practices. While they do speak of a “Black Book” that was written in heaven, their religion is based less on doctrine and more on the correct observance of ritual. That said, it is also generally agreed that the texts of the published “Black Book” and “Book of Revelation” do accurately reflect the basic beliefs of the main Yezidi clans even though they are not genuine Yezidi scriptures.
Grant first mentions the Yezidi at the very outset of his nine-volume series on Thelemic magic, in The Magical Revival first published in 1972. It is clear from this book and virtually all his subsequent works that he considered the Yezidi a core influence and an important spiritual tradition with links to Thelema and specifically to Crowley and Aiwaz. However—except for a single chapter in Outer Gateways—he repeats himself on the subject without adding any new material or justifying his concentration on the Yezidi. Much of his information is taken either from Joseph's work or from stray remarks by Massey, etc.
The basic ideas are these:
First, the whole attraction of the Yezidi for both Crowley and Grant is the idea that they are devil worshippers. If not for this, they most probably would have been ignored—not only by Crowley and Grant but by a number of nineteenth-century explorers who mention them in travelogues on the Kurdish tribal areas. If there was an ancient sect in the Middle East that had been worshipping the devil since time immemorial, it would be an important element of fin-de-siecle orientalist fantasies about the Black Mass, satanism, and witchcraft.
Second, Grant has the idea—an echo of references found in Massey—that the Yezidi are descendants of the ancient Akkadian and Sumerian cultures that represent some of the oldest (if not the oldest) civilizations in the world of which we have any written record, predating even the Egyptians. This fascination with “origins” is one of the hallmarks of the universalist approach to the study of religion and culture, and is also a component of ideas concerning spiritual succession and lineage (i.e., spiritual authority).
The first of these ideas—that the Yezidi are “devil worshippers”—is connected to the fact that Shaitan is an important element of the Yezidi belief-system. Shaitan—or “Satan”—is the Fallen Angel who rebelled against God when humans were elevated in importance above the angels. To the Yezidi, Satan will be the first of God's creatures to enter heaven as he will be the first to be forgiven. This reverence for Shaitan is reflected in the tabu associated with the sound “sh” with which the word Shaitan begins. Yezidi avoid using that sound as much as possible because of its connection. This has led to the misunderstanding that the Yezidi actually worship Shaitan, or Satan. Yet, another point of view on the subject is that the name Shaitan is so sacred—and therefore unpronounceable by the pious—that another form of address and identification had to be created to take its place in normal conversation. While it seems likely that the Yezidi do worship (or at least reverence) Shaitan, and are aware of his demonic associations, they do not associate Shaitan with evil. Shaitan's “sin” was in refusing to bow down before Man, claiming that he would bend the knee to no other but God as that is what God had commanded from the beginning. So God punished Shaitan for disobeying his second command while honoring him for his commitment to obeying the first command, thus ensuring that Shaitan would be the first creature to be redeemed.
The chief (pronounceable) object of worship among the Yezidi is known as Melek Ta'us,92 the so-called “Peacock Angel,” and has become another focus of Grant's work—as he associates the peacock with a host of entities and ideas that reinforce his overall concept of a Dark Lord. This is a subject we will examine shortly, but some observers have claimed that Melek Ta'us and Shaitan are one and the same. Indeed, the cosmologies and creation stories of the Yezidi tend to support this idea at times, and to contradict it at others. In the absence of a written text, this confusion (at least to outsiders) is inevitable.
The second issue of importance to Grant is the idea that the Yezidi are somehow descendants or survivors of the Sumerians. Grant's equation can be summarized as: Sumer = Yezidi = Satan = Aiwass. In order to address this idea we have to ask: who are the Yezidi, and where did they come from?
This is a controversial area for ethnologists, politicians, anthropologists and historians of religion alike. The Yezidi themselves claim an origin variously in India or in Sumer; to split the difference, there is a claim that they came from India to Sumer, and are descendants of the Sumerians themselves.93 That they are presently considered a Kurdish clan is based mostly on their language—most Yezidi speak a form of Kurdish known as Kurmanji—and upon the fact that their tribal lands are within Kurdish territory in northern Iraq and are often counterminous with Kurdish lands in other areas in Syria, Armenia, Azerbaijan, etc. This connection may also be due to the fact that the Kurds in general are subject to varying degrees of discrimination and outright genocide (such as under the regime of Saddam Hussein in Iraq) and the Yezidis are easily one of the most discriminated-against clans in the world.
The problem of the origins of the Yezidis as well as the nature of their religious philosophy is compounded by the fact that their leaders seem to say different things to different people, as is evidenced by the wide variety of academic and journalistic sources that all seem to contradict each other on essential points. The lack of a definitive written scripture only adds to the confusion among outside observers. Combine this with the violent upheavals to which the Yezidis have been subjected over hundreds of years and which entailed the loss of land, documents, and the near genocide of their people on religious and political grounds, and it is a wonder that they have survived as long as they have and that their sacred shrine of Lalish—believed by them to be the center of the universe—still stands in northern Iraq, near the Turkish border.
For our purposes, however, there are actually several pieces of circumstantial evidence that indicate the Yezidis are closer to Grant's concept of them than first appear. In the first place, we remember from the previous chapter that the Egyptian god Set was fond of lettuce and that is how he was tricked into consuming the semen of Horus. Oddly, the consumption of lettuce is tabu among the Yezidis. The “exoteric” explanation for this is that the word for lettuce sounds too similar to the name of one of their prophets. But if the name Shaitan is indeed a version of the Egyptian name Set, then the lettuce tabu makes perfect sense.
Another strange coincidence lies in the fact that the Kurdish word for “God” is Khudâ or “Lord.”94 We cannot help but recognize the similarity between Khudâ and Kutu, the Sumerian word for the Biblical city of Gudua or Cutha, which—according to the Schlangekraft recension of the Necronomicon—is the basis for the name of Lovecraft's Cthulhu or “Man of Cutha” or “Man of Kutu”: Kutulu. Cutha was ruled by the Sumerian god Nergal and was believed to be the gate to the Underworld, which once again supports a Sumerian or Babylonian connection to the Yezidis who do, after all, live in a region that was once part of the Babylonian empire. Indeed, the ancient site of Nineveh95 is not far from Lalish and the modern Iraqi city of Mosul.
All that said, while there is no proof that the Yezidis are descendants of the Sumerians or even from another migrating tribe from northern India or Persia, their religion and culture is distinct from Islamic, Christian, and Jewish practices and theologies. One of their most revered leaders—Sheikh Adi—was by most accounts a Sufi mystic. While many observers agree that the Yezidi religion is syncretistic—a combination of various elements from other religious practices including most probably Persian Zoroastrianism, in some ways like Santeria and other Afro-Caribbean religions that mixed Roman Catholic iconography and ritual with indigenous African belief systems—the Sufi element is one that probably encouraged the incorporation of antinomian and even transgressive beliefs, such as the idea that the Fallen Angel will be the first to be redeemed along with the Yezidis. It was after all Sufism that was the first Islamic presence in the islands of Java and Sumatra in the fifteenth century (and earlier) and its influence can be seen there today in such practices as visiting graves, reverencing saints, etc. which are also hallmarks of Yezidism but which are not accepted Islamic practice. In fact, Grant himself seems to make the connection between syncretistic forms of religion, expanded consciousness, and contact with supramundane entities when he writes:
The Amenta of the Egyptians is identical to the Agharta of the Mongols. The latter with their pre-Buddhistic Bön complex, and shamanistic rites with Tantric implicits, produced a weird combination of savage grotesquery and the profound metaphysical adumbrations of the SÛnyâtavâda. ... It is therefore in the Eskimo-shamanistic and the Bön impregnated Buddhism of Tibet, Mongolia, Java and Sumatra, that the fundamental tenets of the Madhyamaka—as permeating the Nyingmapa and Drukpa Cults—are relevant to the Necronomicon Gnosis.96
Without going into detail on the definitions of the Buddhist terms, the first impression one gets from that passage is that Grant is playing fast and loose with his attributions by linking Amenta (the Egyptian land of the Dead) to Agharta, the fabled underground city believed hidden somewhere in the Himalayas.97 That there may be a close connection between the indigenous Bön religion of Tibet and Tantric practices is being debated by scholars of the literature; as is the idea that Bön is a survival of an older, shamanistic cult which certainly seems to be the case. Grant's boldness, however, lies more in making the case that Tibetan Buddhism (which is primarily Tantric) is somehow cognate with Egyptian mysteries and the Necronomicon; and that “savage grotesquery” and “profound metaphysical adumbrations” can combine to form a new kind of spiritual methodology. But this is Grant's forte.
Modern western magic is a refusal to accept the position of post-modernism that each culture is unique and owes nothing to other cultures, even when similar ideas, symbols, and rituals are involved. As a magical operator in the modern world, one has to embrace a kind of neo-universalism in which one recognizes the existence of a symbol structure representing an underlying reality behind all observed phenomena. The expert manipulation of these symbols results in changes in phenomena. The magician is thus sensitive to the power and nature of symbols—including symbolic action, symbolic sounds, smells, etc.—and can draw inferences across diverse cultures and times. Just as human biology is the same whether one is a native Tibetan or African or European, etc.; and even though there may be many superficial differences and variations in language, food, and so forth; the symbol systems of different cultures may reveal superficial differences as a result of geography, history, and even religion, but the states of consciousness represented by these symbols are identical or nearly so. There would be no syncretic religions if this were not the case, for if each religion was sui generis it would be impossible to incorporate alien gods, rites, and beliefs. Of course, this is not the case with religious dogma which fundamentally resists attempts at syncretism; but it is the case with religious praxis, which is the only form of religion that interests the magician. As noted previously, the magician is not a member of the congregation of any religion: the magician is a priest and an independent spiritual specialist whose interest solely resides in effective methods (rituals) and convenient modes of analysis (symbol systems). Thus the emphasis on cults versus religions, for a cult is a laboratory of ritual and dangerous practice. It may be a matter of opinion as to whether the ritual came before the dogma or vice versa; but it has been demonstrated in the case of religions as disparate as The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints and Scientology that their origins are to be found in magical—that is to say, occult—ritual. The dogmas came later.
Thus when we speak of the Yezidi religion we are struck by the fact that the emphasis seems to be on correct ritual practice rather than doctrine. There is controversy over whether or not the Yezidi have a written sacred text; their scripture seems to reside in the chants, songs, and prayers that are memorized by the faithful and by their ritual specialists. There is also an emphasis on genetic purity: a Yezidi may not marry outside the faith, and there is no possibility of an outsider converting to Yezidism. This association of the body—the blood, the flesh—with religious purity and acceptability is an echo of the occult preoccupations of many different cultures and religious affiliations. It is also a hallmark of cultic practice: the desire to cut off a group from the outside world in order to maintain the group's physical, emotional and spiritual integrity is (among other things) a form of distrust of the “Other” but it is also a way to switch tables by making the mainstream group the “Other.”98
In the case of the Yezidi, this is taken a step further when they identify themselves with the supreme icon of the Other in the western world: the Fallen Angel, Shaitan. Their relationship to this form of the Dark Lord is complex. On the one hand, Shaitan is an emblem of bad luck that inspires fear. On the other hand, he is the Lord of the Angelic Hosts and is also known as the Lord of Power.99 This rather schizoid construct is so reminiscent of the way the Egyptians considered Set as to be virtually identical.
To Grant, the peacock symbol is particularly important for he sees in the rainbow-hued spread of feathers a reference to the kalas: the spiritual essences secreted by the female partner in Tantric rituals. While it is possible that the Yezidis have their origin in India—as has been claimed—there is no indication at the present time that anything resembling sexual rituals or Tantra is known among them. Yet, the peacock itself is a curious emblem for a Kurdish clan in northern Iraq to worship for peacocks are not native to that country while they are more common in India.
The portals that lead to the inner chambers of Yezidi shrines are usually adorned with carvings of snakes. The snake is shown as rising up from the ground and appears as a vertical decoration on the right-hand side of the entrance. The appearance of a snake in this context further led observers to believe that there was something vaguely satanic about the Yezidis, since the serpent is a symbol of evil and of the Devil in Judaeo-Christian religions. It was the serpent who tempted Eve in the Garden of Eden, leading to the fall of humanity from paradise. In Egypt, of course, it was identified with Apophis, the evil creature intent on devouring the barque of Ra; but in Indian yoga and Tantra, the serpent represents the coiled energy at the base of the spine known as Kundalini. The fact that the Yezidi serpent is depicted vertically alongside the entrance to the sacred shrine may be further—circumstantial—evidence of a connection with Indian beliefs, as a vertical serpent would be an obvious reference to the raising of Kundalini which is the goal of Kundalini yoga as it is of some forms of Tantra. However, there is no evidence for the existence of a “Yezidi Tantra.”
One of Aleister Crowley's associates during his sojourn in the United States in 1919 was the noted author and adventurer William Seabrook (1884-1945). Fascinated by the occult and foreign locales, Seabrook had written a number of popular books and magazine articles on his travels in Africa, the Middle East and the Caribbean, and even claimed to have eaten human flesh on at least one occasion.100 Seabrook's works have been criticized by anthropologists who doubt his ability (or his desire) to separate reality from fantasy, but he stands at the crossroads of the topics that so fascinated Kenneth Grant: the Yezidis, witchcraft, and Vodun. In addition, as a friend of Crowley he seems to be excellently positioned as a source for the beliefs and inspirations behind Grant's overall thesis.
When it comes to the Yezidis, Seabrook claims that these “devil worshippers” maintain a network of seven towers across the Middle East, and Central and East Asia:
Stretching across Asia, from North Manchuria, through Tibet, west through Persia, and ending in the Kurdistan, was a chain of seven towers on isolated mountaintops; and in each one of these towers sat continuously a Priest of Satan, who by “broadcasting” occult vibrations controlled the destinies of the world for evil.101
There is no further evidence for this claim other than Seabrook's own statements, and it is possible that the towers one sees at Kalish and at other Yezidi shrines were the inspiration for this idea. Yezidi sacred architecture is unique: their shrines are in the shape of fluted cones surmounted by a golden ball that is said to represent the sun. At the base of the cone is an opening through which one can see a fire burning. The fire is an eternal flame, tended by the Yezidis, and is thus reminiscent of Zoroastrian practice.
If the Yezidi faith truly represents a survival of Persian Zoroastrianism, then there is some truth to Seabrook's statement that their “towers” extend through Asia, for the Zoroastrians themselves have survived in India and Pakistan where they are known as Parsis. Forced to flee Persia (Iran) rather than convert to Islam in the eighth and ninth centuries CE, the Zoroastrian community found themselves in Pakistan (near Karachi) and in India in the Gujarat region in Mumbai, the former Bombay. There are several fire temples in the Mumbai area where the Zoroastrians—now known as Parsis from the word for “Persian”—have become pillars of the Indian community, well-known for their charitable works. They also practice a form of “sky burial” known as the Towers of Silence.
Because the elements are considered sacred, the Parsis leave their dead on top of these towers as food for vultures. To bury a corpse is considered a defilement of the earth, and to burn a corpse is considered a defilement of fire (which is a sacred symbol in Zoroastrianism). In Mumbai, these towers are located on Malabar Hill in what is now an upscale neighborhood where they have become controversial due to the fact that the vulture population is declining and the presence of certain antibiotics in the dead bodies results in the corpses taking longer and longer to decay. It should be noted that “sky burial” is also a feature of Tibetan religious and cultural practice, where the dead are left in the open air as food for carrion birds.
It is possible that the unique tower architecture of the Yezidis was conflated with the Towers of Silence in Mumbai to give Seabrook the idea that there was a network of Yezidi towers stretching from Kurdistan to Tibet and Manchuria through Persia. Further, there are still Zoroastrians living in Iran, especially in the city of Yazd which boasts a fire temple whose flame has been burning steadily since the fifth century CE. (The similarity in name between Yazd and the Yezidi has been noted by several authors, but there is no consensus of opinion as to where the name Yezid or Yezidi originated or even what it actually means.) However, there is no evidence that there are “Priests of Satan” who sit atop these towers broadcasting “occult vibrations” for evil purposes.
There are, however, certain sites sacred to the Yezidis which have, for Grant, occult significance. Basing his information on Isya Joseph's The Devil Worshippers (but without attribution) he mentions five cult zones, one of which is Lalish (the center of the Yezidi religion already mentioned) and another which is called variously Weran Šahr or Goran Šahr:
... meaning the ’sunken city’, which recalls the sunken city of R'lyeh where Great Cthulhu waits dreaming.... We are now in a position to appreciate Crowley's claim to have continued, in and through Thelema, the major tenets of the Yezidic cult.102
As mentioned previously, Crowley believed his supramundane contact and Holy Guardian Angel Aiwaz to have been a god of ancient Sumer.103 The Yezidis claim a Sumerian ancestry for their people and their religion and, indeed, reverence a form of Shaitan or Set. Further, the official seal of the Yezidi clan depicts not only the peacock of Melek Ta'us,104 but also cuneiform inscriptions plus the ancient Sumerian cuneiform symbol for “god,” the eight-pointed star,105 thus showing their insistence on an ancient Mesopotamian origin for their faith. All of this data is consistent with what Grant calls the “Necronomicon gnosis.”
The only lengthy examination of the Yezidis in Grant's works appears as a single chapter in Outer Gateways: “The Magical Significance of Yezidic Symbolism.” In that chapter, Grant associates the Yezidis with a number of other religions, cults, myths, practices, etc. with a heavy reliance upon coincidences in numerology, similar-sounding words, etc., all with a view towards demonstrating that the Yezidis are the inheritors of an ancient magical Typhonian current that erupted in the system of Thelema as preached by Crowley. Crowley himself implies as much, of course, but Grant attempts to “prove” this connection and elaborate upon it. The problem with his approach is that it is based almost entirely on the few scraps of information available on the Yezidis in a handful of outdated and unreliable sources (such as Seabrook), which are then tied into the grand design using the most tenuous of associations. Thus, for Grant, the peacock is a phallic symbol because the eyes on the peacock's feathers represent the “meatus of the phallus, which is why the cock was typical of Yezid”106 and:
The eyes in the tail of the peacock, or the meatus in the phallus of Yezid are equally connoted, and are resumed in the glyph of the Eye in the Triangle which forms part of the emblem of the O.T.O. Kaph signifies both the palm (of the hand), and the kaf ape, which typified among other things the open eye or the exposed meatus of the circumcised penis in a state of erection, thus denoting the ever wakeful one.107
One is tempted to say that sometimes a cigar is just a cigar. However, we begin to realize that virtually everything in the cosmos can be interpreted sexually, or using sexual metaphor, and that this is a hallmark of the “twilight language” used by occultists, alchemists, and mystics as a kind of meta-language for discussing otherwise ineffable—or “unspeakable”—concepts. There is only one process in the universe, and every science, every art, every religion, every field of occult knowledge can be discussed and investigated using the language of that process. Thus, using sexual metaphor, one can describe ecstatic mystical states as well as the transmutation of lead into gold.
Crowley himself makes this point when he writes:
I have myself constructed numerous ceremonies where it is frankly admitted that religious enthusiasm is primarily sexual in character.... I have insisted that sexual excitement is merely a degraded form of divine ecstasy.108
This divine ecstasy is still only a means towards an end. Ecstasy can be chemically induced, or brought about by various other means, none of which would necessarily result in spiritual illumination, acquisition of occult powers, etc. Intensive meditation, of the type enjoyed by anchorites and hermits of various disciplines, also results in divine ecstasy, minus the overtly sexual components. The magical path represented by Crowley and by his mentors in the Golden Dawn, however, sees emotional and psychological states as reflective of spiritual qualities that may or may not be perceived as good or evil in and of themselves: these states are only levels of understanding, of types of experience that do not carry moral loads but are informational. They are interpreted within a specific cultural context such as the Kabbalistic Tree of Life or any other complete cosmological system that makes a space for all forms of human experience, including the divine and the demonic. In order for Crowley's system to be the complete cosmology that any magical practice demands, it must make room for what Western spiritual experience would consider demonic, satanic, etc. There are, after all, two “Keys of Solomon” in the repetoire of the Golden Dawn: the Greater Key, which is concerned with angelic and planetary magic, and the Lesser Key, or Goetia, which is wholly involved with the raising of demons. Both are necessary. And it is the peculiar characteristic of sexuality that it can be a “Greater Key,” an expression of love, respect, fidelity, a means of reproduction and the survival of the species, a symbol of union with the divine ... and a “Lesser Key,” an avenue for the manifestation of the darkest desires of a human being, of sadism, masochism, and all the demons of a Krafft-Ebing grimoire:
Sexual feeling is really the root of all ethics, and no doubt of aestheticism and religion.
The sublimest virtues, even the sacrifice of self, may spring from sexual life, which, however, on account of its sensual power, may easily degenerate into the lowest passion and basest vice.
Love unbridled is a volcano that burns down and lays waste all around it; it is an abyss that devours all honour, substance and health.109
Thus at its core sexuality is as pure as atomic energy: it can be used for peaceful purposes, or for creating weapons. The irony lies in the fact that it may sometimes be necessary to have an atomic bomb, i.e., that for the species to survive a means of protection is often required. This is the basis of Tantra, which sees sexuality as a metaphor, as the creative process, as a means of uniting with the divine, and as a means of acquiring occult powers. It is also as good a description as any of the double nature of Set in the Egyptian context, and why Set is associated with sexual ritual and magic by Grant.
While many of the rituals of the Yezidi are largely secret to which outsiders are rarely, if ever, invited there is still no evidence that they engage in sexual ceremonies or elaborate, Tantric-style magical procedures. They may satisfy the requirements of Crowley and Grant that they represent a connection with ancient Sumer and with the worship of the Old God, Shaitan or Set, and while such may be romanticized projections by orientalist observers what is to be respected is that they have not abandoned their faith, even under dire oppression by a host of hostile entities. They maintain their ritual purity, their sacred calendar, their beliefs, and their rites in the face of Iraqi, Russian, Muslim and even Kurdish opposition. They refuse to intermarry, or to accept outsiders into their religion, a religion that is identified not only with their beliefs but with their ethnicity as well. It is the mere fact of their existence that has intrigued and excited European and American occultists, for here is a clan whose religion is so far removed from anything else in the region as to appear bizarre to outsiders and who claim an origin in the vanished civilization of Sumer ... and who worship a god that some insist is the Dark Lord himself.
Obeah and Wanga
On November 1st, 1907, there had come to the New Orleans police a frantic summons from the swamp and lagoon country to the south. The squatters there, mostly primitive but good-natured descendants of Lafitte's men, were in the grip of stark terror from an unknown thing which had stolen upon them in the night. It was voodoo, apparently, but voodoo of a more terrible sort than they had ever known. ... There were insane shouts and harrowing screams, soul-chilling chants and dancing devil-flames; and, the frightened messenger added, the people could stand it no more.
—H.P. Lovecraft, “The Call of Cthulhu”
Also the mantras and spells; the obeah and the wanga; the work of the wand and the work of the sword; these he shall learn and teach. (AL I:37).
When we discuss the Yezidis, we are faced with very little accurate and reliable information and a lot of speculation. When we come to the Afro-Caribbean aspect of the Necronomicon Gnosis, we are in a somewhat different position.
While Haitian Vodun (commonly spelled “voodoo”) was just as vulnerable a hundred years ago to wild speculation and hysteria as the “devil worshipping” Yezidis, we have a greater store of solid information and documentation about Vodun and other Afro-Caribbean religions due to the intense interest shown by anthropologists and historians of religion in recent years. In addition, the presence of African-origin populations in the Caribbean and large communities of Afro-Caribbean origin in the United States has made Western access to these cultures easier than it is where the Yezidi clans are concerned, since the homelands and central shrines of the latter are scattered largely through the Middle East and Central Asia in war zones and areas hostile to outsiders.
Vodun, Santeria, Palo Mayombe, and Lukumi share some elements in common with the Yezidis. They do not have a written scripture, per se. They frequently have been confused with devil worship. And they represent a survival of ancient forms of religious experience, in this case from Africa: a continent that they share with Egypt.
They have also been exploited to some extent by non-African occultists who see in their rituals methodologies of magical practice and the acquisition of altered states of consciousness that lead to greater spiritual power and abilities, especially when re-interpreted within European and American (i.e., non-African) contexts. Probably the premier exponent of this type of synthesis is Michael Bertiaux, an important source for Grant.
Bertiaux came to the attention of the broader occult community in the United States through his massive, 600+ page Voudon Gnostic Workbook (New York: Magickal Childe, 1998), but prior to the book's publication he was already a subject of Grant's Typhonian Trilogies. The first mention of Bertiaux and his unique form of Thelemic-Gnostic-Vodun appears in two chapters of Grant's Cults of the Shadow (1975) which explain Bertiaux's system in terms that are both Thelemic and Lovecraftian. Indeed, Bertiaux deliberately uses terminology and ideas from Lovecraft in his occult work, as well as terms and concepts that are uniquely his own. But Grant's initial fascination with Bertiaux's work seems to be the fact that both he and Bertiaux explored the “nightside” of the Tree of Life, the realm of the Dark Lord. In Bertiaux's case, he connected the Dark Side of the Tree with some of the Vodun cults and practices that would be considered “black magic” in contemporary parlance. This, coupled with the Crowley and Lovecraft references in Bertiaux, ignited a stream of consciousness in Grant that would heavily influence his later work. Bertiaux acknowledged the importance of sexual ritual, including Tantra, and associated it with various types of Afro-Caribbean practice, and all within a Thelemic context. This was the Obeah and the Wanga, the missing elements from the Thelemic arsenal of occult methods and systems.
Obeah is a form of Afro-Caribbean magic, what is sometimes called “hoodoo” in the South. The practice as it is known today has its origins in Jamaica and consists mostly of casting spells as opposed to the more religious aspects of Haitian Vodun. There is evidence that the term comes from an Ashanti word—obayifo—meaning “witch” or “wizard” or even “vampire.”110 Thus it has a negative connotation. Wanga (sometimes spelled ouanga) on the other hand refers specifically to a small bag used to hold charms, sometimes worn around the neck or kept in a safe place, similar to the Native American “medicine bag” except that the latter is usually worn or carried by the medicine man only, whereas the wanga may be prepared for anyone to wear and usually for a specific purpose, such as love, money, health, etc. and dedicated to a specific loa (lwa): one of the Afro-Caribbean gods. However, both obeah and wanga are sometimes used as terms denoting Afro-Caribbean occultism in general. Wanga is sometimes thought to refer specifically to works of “black” or negative magic.111
What, then, is the meaning or intent behind the exhortation in the Book of the Law that one should “learn and teach” the “obeah and the wanga”? Why did Aiwaz use these terms and avoid using, for instance, “Voodoo and Santeria”?
The two latter are religions which have internally-consistent cosmologies, pantheons, and rituals. Obeah and wanga are somewhat looser in their definitions, but more importantly, do not refer to religious dogmas per se but to the practical side of religion, that is, magic. Obeah and wanga are occult methods used by Afro-Caribbean spiritual specialists and this is what would have been important to the author of the Book of the Law. After all, the infamous Chapter Three makes it clear that all previous religions are “black.”
However, as we have seen, the consensus of opinion seems to be that both obeah and wanga are “black arts” themselves. That is, they are concerned with what Kabbalists would consider the darker, or nightside, aspect of the Tree of Life and may be associated with the qlippoth: the shattered shards of creation that are tantamount to demons. And the connective tissue to all of this is the focus of both Grant and Bertiaux on the sexual aspect of these dark mysteries. This is an obvious direction for occultists who represent the most transgressive of their breed, for the “white” magician is usually thought of as being—if not celibate, then—more chaste than the average person, devoting his or her time and energy to good works, speaking with angels, and yearning for union with the divine: leading a life that would be considered conventionally moral and blameless. There is no mixing of the sexes in this type of occultism, or if there is it is within the religiously sanctioned confines of matrimony.
One only has to remember that the congregations in synagogues and mosques are separated by gender; that even Vedic practice in India keeps the sexes apart as much as possible. Christianity can be seen as an exception to this rule, and it is worthwhile to remember that the earliest Christian rituals known to the outside world took the form of the agape, or love-feast. These gender-mixed congregations would meet in secret (often in catacombs or cemeteries) due to their persecution by the state and by other religious authorities. Thus, Christianity could be considered the Satanism of its day.
When the genders are brought together in magical rituals, there is always the possibility that a sexual current will run through the group particularly in the heightened (almost romantic) atmosphere of a ceremony that is conducted secretly, in candle-light, with billowing clouds of perfumes and incenses, specially-designed robes in appropriate colors and materials, and so forth. One form of transgression—occult ritual—implies every other form, including the sexual; in addition, the appropriation of spiritual power away or apart from normative, socially-sanctioned priesthoods can be intoxicating.
In the rites of Haitian Vodun, the above conditions are exceeded through the use of a battery of drums and at times other musical instruments. In these rituals the focus is on the human body as the “horse” to be ridden by the gods in a form of divine possession. At such times, the individual person is no longer “present” as an ego or superego in his or her own physical form but has been momentarily dislodged by one of the lwa. The possessed person's body undergoes a subtle—or sometimes not so subtle—transformation as the personality of Erzulie (the goddess of love and passion) or perhaps of Baron Samedi de la Cimitiere (the god who controls access to the Underworld) or any of the many other gods who take over and cause the possessed person to walk and act in accordance with the characteristics of the particular lwa.
Oddly, these things are not discussed in the Voudon Gnostic Workbook of Michael Bertiaux. While it does treat of the many varieties of Haitian lwa it does not focus on the rites most commonly associated with Haitian Vodun, such as the rituals that take place in the peristyle and hounfort. Instead, Bertiaux treats the Haitian material the way that Crowley treats the Egyptian: as data to be incorporated into rituals and spiritual methodologies more familiar to Western European occult practice. In the case of Bertiaux and his Gnostic Vodun, it is a syncretism of a syncretism.
From a post-modernist perspective, of course, this is hideous: an outrage against the original material, an exploitation of an indigenous culture's spirituality. But that is true of all magic. Magic is, by its very nature, a method and not a faith or a dogma. Its practices transcend the cultural because they are concerned with altered states of consciousness and not with adherence to a particular Law or Tradition. This is how it was possible for Jewish mystics such as Shabbtai Z'vi or a Jakob Frank to “convert” to Islam and Christianity, respectively, and still maintain their following and their reputation as advanced adepts. This is how it was possible for an Aleister Crowley to incorporate yoga and quasi-Tantric practices into his Thelema even though he was an Englishman who had received the Book of the Law in Cairo replete with Egyptian gods doing all the talking. In this context, the creative approach to spirituality of a Michael Bertiaux is entirely consistent. There is virtually no form of occultism in the western world that does not incorporate elements of “other” religions and “other” occult practices. The very liminality of occultism implies that “otherness” will be a constant, determining factor in its construction.
While Bertiaux includes material from diverse sources to amplify his version of “voodoo,” he is not alone in examining this Afro-Caribbean system through the lens of other cultures and religions. While a purist may insist on a strict “African” interpretation of Vodun—denying any syncretism involving other religions (such as Roman Catholicism) or other mystical or magical systems—twentieth-century Haitian writers on the subject frequently invoke Greek, Egyptian and even Jewish terms and concepts as a means of expanding upon the rituals and the legends that inform it. This approach is condemned by post-modern anthropologists and academics as inherently colonialist and racist: the projection of white, western insecurities about race, sexuality, and religion onto a captive, “savage” population. The fact that some native Haitian authors on the subject contribute to this approach does not make the controversy any clearer.
An early author who is sometimes cited in the literature is Arthur C. Holly. Writing in French under the pseudonym Her-Ra-Ma-El, his books are a melange of Biblical references, Christian concepts, Afro-centrism, and a minimum of actual information on Vodun. His Les daïmons du culte voudo112 is the most-referenced, but usually derisively. However, in a line often quoted, he does insist on a connection between Haitian Vodun and ancient Egyptian and Assyrian religion:
C'est en vain que les procédés hypocrites ou violents ont été mis en oeuvre pour envelopper des ténèbres les phases brillants de l'évolution mentale du Nègre. Il est hors de conteste que l'antique civilisation Ethiopio-égypto-assyrienne doit être inscrite à son compte.113
(“It is in vain that hypocritical or violent processes have been used to shroud in darkness the brilliance of the mental evolution of the Negro. It is beyond doubt that the ancient Ethiopian-Egyptian-Assyrian civilizaton must be credited to his account.”)
and
Il nous parait indiscutable que la tradition Voudo descend en ligne directe: du sacerdoce et des rites usités dans les temples d'Ethiopie et d'Egypte.114
(“It seems to us undeniable that the Voudo tradition descends in direct line from the priesthood and the rites used in the temples of Ethiopia and Egypt.”)
Holly called himself a “Haitian esotericist”115 and this is borne out by his lengthy and sometimes incomprehensible study of Vodun through the lens of a kind of Kabbalah in which each letter of the Latin alphabet possesses mystical meanings, so that an analysis of any word (including the names of Vodun lwa) can yield a warehouse full of secondary and tertiary meanings. His emphasis is on this system rather than on Vodun itself, rendering his book of interest only to those studying early twentieth-century Haitian Francophone occult philosophy.
Indeed, Holly references all the usual suspects: Court de Gébelin, Fabre d'Olivet, Eduard Schuré, and Eliphas Levi (the Abbé Louis Constant) are all cited in this work, placing it firmly in the lineage of French esotericism, Theosophy, Freemasonry, and magic. This is especially the case with Levi, of whom Crowley believed himself to be the reincarnation. Except, in Holly's view, Africa and Vodun were the source for all European esotericism, including Freemasonry:
Sur ce point je n'ai personnellement aucun doute. Car DAm-Bha-Lah, la Mère Divine, la Négresse universelle, le COEUR QUI VIVIFIE l'humanité, est seule capable de réaliser la parfaite solidarité, basée sur l'Amour, entre Noirs et Jaunes. Cela, parce que Dame, la Grande Négresse du Ciel, est la Patronne des uns; Lah, le Grand-Petit Mulâtre du Ciel, le Dieu panthéistique des autres. Donc la Nation haïtienne se tournera—pour l'adoration dans le plus pur sentiment de fraternité—vers le Soleil Levant et son Fils Lumineux—c'est-à-dire, en termes maçonniques, vers le GRAND-ORIENT personnifié par la Reine du Midi et son fils Chiram. En effet, le Salut de la Patrie dépend plutôt de la Franc-maçonnerie que l'Eglise. Et le Voudo, c'est la Mère de la Franc-maçonnerie comme on vient de le l'entrevoir dans les pages précédentes.116
(On this point I personally have no doubt. For Dam-Bha-Lah, the Divine Mother, the Universal Negress, HEART THAT QUICKENS humanity, is the only one able to achieve perfect solidarity, based on Love, between the Black and Yellow [races]. This is because Dame, Great Negress of Heaven, is the Patroness of each; Lah, the Grand Little Mulatto of Heaven, is the pantheistic God of the others. So the Haitian Nation will turn—or worship in the purest sense of brotherhood—towards the Rising Sun and his Son of Light—that is to say, in Masonic terms, towards the GRAND ORIENT personified by the Queen of the South and her son Hiram. Indeed, the Health of the Country depends rather on Freemasonry than the Church. And Voudo is the Mother of Freemasonry as we have just had a glimpse in the preceding pages.)
Here Holly shows us that he has an esoteric interpretation of the names of the gods of Vodun, dividing Dambhala into separate syllables, each of which has its own meaning and relevance. This is something that Grant himself does, to similar effect, as in the following word analysis from his Ninth Arch, the last in the Typhonian Trilogies series:
Frater Achad interpreted the thirteen-lettered word MANIFESTATION as concentrating the magical formula of the Aeon of Maat whose ’lesser cycle’ was to manifest through her daughter, Mâ. This is correct so far as it goes, but there is more to it. The daughter typifies the Pythoness of Maat as the unawakened (i.e. virgin) priestess in her magnetic and oracular sleep. The essential formula may be schematized thus:
Mâ = entranced medium, ’lesser cycle’ (of the sixteen kalas)
ni = Amen, the Hidden God—the Sun behind the sun (Set-Isis/Sothis).
festat = Cairo, the locus of the Double Current: Aiwass/Nu-Isis
ion = Aeon; the ’Greater Cycle' wherein the seventeenth kala is secreted (i.e., the ultimate and Secret-ion).117
We will note that in both cases there are references to the Sun, and the Pythoness of Maat may have something in common with Holly's Dambhala. While Dambhala normally is considered to be a male deity, his symbol is also the snake. In Holly's paragraph above-cited, however, Dambhala is female since Holly focuses on the first syllable of the word, Dam, and sees in it a reference to the French word for woman, Dame. So Dambhala becomes, for him, the Divine Mother and Universal Negress, as well as the fons et origo of Freemasonry.
While Holly is perhaps an unusual and suspect source for information on Vodun, we have a more professional expert in Milo Rigaud. Rigaud—born Emile Rigaud—wrote a number of books on Vodun, heavily illustrated with photographs of ceremonies and diagrams of the vévés: the arcane symbols that attract the lwa to the rituals. While his books are comprehensive treatments of his subject, he also falls victim to the type of grand theories that obsessed Holly. He links the practice of Vodun to Egypt and to Solomon's Temple, among other places, and he quotes Holly approvingly in this instance, implying that he agrees with the Egyptian-Ethiopian-Assyrian roots of Vodun and their contribution to western, European esotericism and Freemasonry.118
Both Holly and Rigaud are Haitian authors, men who knew their country and its religious culture as well as anyone, but who wrote about it from a Francophone point of view. Creole is the language of the people in Haiti, and French is the language of the government and the intellectual elite. An educated Haitian, interested in religion and spirituality, first would seek for information in French which inevitably would lead to the fields of Martinism, Freemasonry, the various Gnostic churches, and authors like Eliphas Levi and Papus (Dr. Encausse) and many others, all of whom did, indeed, exert an influence over European and American occultism both through their books and through the organizations and secret societies they joined or founded. Holly and Rigaud would have found in these sources confirmation of what they already believed to be true: that their religious culture was part of a continuum of spiritual experience that began in Africa—everywhere in Africa, including Egypt, the Sudan, and Ethiopia—and thus had tendrils extending as far as the salons of Paris and the secret societies of London, Germany, and elsewhere on the continent.
It's the perceived racist attitude towards Vodun that irritates anthropologists, however. They will insist that Vodun is a religion, and while they do not deny the magical aspects of the religion they will condemn any attempt to see in Vodun anything smacking of the titillating or suggestive. The approach of Bertiaux is attacked by experts who claim that he represents a colonialist and racist stereotyping of Vodun of the type we find in Lovecraft, for instance. By associating Vodun with sexual rituals and contact with supra-mundane entities—what many average observers would call “black magic” in a purely pejorative way (and perhaps as a thinly-veiled racist allusion)—Bertiaux is seen to be contributing to the Hollywood concept of Vodun as “voodoo” with all the weird rites and licentiousness that the term suggests.
There are problems with this analysis, however. It has become fashionable to assert that any interest in indigenous religions by white observers, be they academics and scholars or journalists and authors of popular books on the subject, is suspect. Edward Said implied as much in his ground-breaking book, Orientalism,119 when he castigated western, European attempts at describing Asia as rooted in colonialist and racist attitudes towards Asians, attitudes that were composed of equal parts of fear, disgust and desire. While Said's thesis has been criticized recently,120 it is still a difficult hurdle for non-indigenous observers to overcome for it is assumed that they are, ipso facto, tainted by the same vulnerabilities. This is even more pronounced among those who go overboard in attacking other non-indigenous observers whom they believe to be inappropriately reverent when it comes to religions like Vodun, for they can be accused of manifesting “white guilt” or some similar desire to be absolved of their race's historical crimes against non-white populations. It is truly a no-win situation, but usually is apparent in academic circles where the near-impossibility of staying above the fray is pronounced. Among occultists there are no such anxieties. In the quest for greater and greater occult power all avenues are fair game, and since occultism can be viewed (by some) as largely psychological and emotional, the racial and sexual stereotypes of any “cult” can be mined for their connections to deeper psychological complexes in the operator.
Yet there is another problem for the mainstream apologists for Vodun, and that is that there are secret societies in Haiti that are responsible for some of the bad press that “voodoo” gets, and which gave us the infamous “zombie powder” among other things. These societies specialize in those elements of Vodun that could be considered magic as differentiated from religion. Wade Davis has written two books121 on the subject of these societies which were the basis of his ethnobiological fieldwork in Haiti during which time he was actually initiated into one of these groups. The vigorous attempts by some anthropologists to downplay the more sinister aspects of the Haitian religious experience fall apart in the face of this type of scholarship. Of course, a case could be made that the Haitian secret societies—such as Bizango, Zobop, the Secte Rouge, etc.—bear as much relationship to traditional Vodun as the Church of Satan does to the Roman Catholic Church ... but Davis demonstrates that there exists a much closer bond between the secret societies and normative Vodun than one would suppose, and that these secret societies perform much the same function as the “Illuminati” or “Freemasons” are alleged to do in European countries: they are the real “masters” of the country, operating behind the scenes and meting out punishment where necessary to maintain order in the Haitian communities.122
Therefore, for our purposes we can acknowledge that what anthropologists call “Vodoun” or “Vodun,” etc. represents an assembly of various African religions under one convenient (albeit misleading) umbrella and that as a religion it deserves the same respect as any other; but we must also acknowledge that such things as curses, blood sacrifice, and even zombification also exist as part of the Haitian religious/occult experience just as antinomian secret societies and “satanic” occult groups exist within the normative white European Christian or Jewish religious experience. And it is within the context of the Haitian secret societies, such as the Bizango, that we find the greatest correlation with the ideas discussed by Bertiaux and Grant.
The element of Bertiaux's unique cosmology that interests Grant is the idea that there are points chauds or “hot points” (or “power points”) in the universe that act as portals into other realms of experience, as “gates” to the “underworld.” The adepts who are capable of entering these points at will are sometimes referred to as voltigeurs (or “leapers”) in the Bertiaux vernacular. These power points are located on the human body as well as at specific areas of the earth and in the cosmos, in perfect microcosm/macrocosm symmetry. It follows that if these points can be located simultaneously in the body as well as in the heavens (for instance) then physical manipulation or stimulation of those points is equivalent to opening the celestial gates, and a Tantric-type process can be pursued that uses the body and its hidden resources as a vehicle for celestial (and infernal) exploration. An essential characteristic of Tantra is the understanding that psycho-biological processes take place which alter consciousness. In rare instances, these processes may take place accidentally—through some form of physical or emotional trauma—but more often they are the result of careful practice and deliberate application of occult methods such as yoga, meditation, pranayama, and other means of interfering with the normal functions of the human body. If the body is a laboratory and a temple combined, then changing any of the body's processes such as control of breathing, of heartbeat, contorting the limbs into uncomfortable positions for long periods of time, or even taking drugs that alter either the physical or the mental activities of the operator will produce a variety of results that are outside the normal range of human experience.
The occultist uses the tools that are available to seek control over the body's autonomic nervous system—the system that regulates such things as breathing, heart rate, peristalsis, etc.—as well as control over the mind's “autonomic” functions, processes that can be located in what the Freudians call the unconscious mind. This is all quite different from the way of the mystic in prayer who wants to unite with the divine through piety and good works. It is a mechanistic approach to consciousness and divinity that horrifies churchmen and the pious, offending them as much as do frank discussions of sexuality. The pious speak of love and marriage; sex is either not mentioned or is couched in euphemism. The magician speaks of everything in terms of the use to be made of it, its pragmatic application to the desired goal.
This is what one finds in Bertiaux as well as in Grant. It should be noted that Grant's information concerning Vodun is purely of the Bertiaux variety. There is no attempt to offer an academic presentation of the material, no citations of scholarly works on Afro-Caribbean religion juxtaposed with citations from the Voudon Gnostic Workbook just as there are no discussions of Roman Catholic doctrines or excerpts from the Lutheran prayer book. There is no devotional literature in magic. The interest of Bertiaux, Grant and Crowley is on spiritual techniques and esoteric technology. The cultural contexts of Vodun, Egyptian religion, to a lesser extent the Tantras, and even the Yezidis are ignored or at least unacknowledged in favor of the deconstruction of their respective technologies—the way a gear-head takes apart an automobile engine to see how it is put together. These techniques give rise—mostly through ritual—to otherworldly experiences that they then attempt to describe and analyze for a wider audience, with wildly uneven results. Grant's presentation of the already complicated and sometimes hyperbolic Bertiaux material verges on the incomprehensible, and I contend that it is not meant to be read as linear prose but as a kind of free-association: language reduced (or elevated) to mantra and chant.
Bertiaux, like Grant, is obsessed with the dark side of esotericism. Traditional Kabbalah, alchemy, Freemasonry, Rosicrucianism are all ignored in favor of the more sinister aspects of the spiritual experience, and ways are sought to contact entities that are believed to exist in other dimensions, entities that are nevertheless understood to be capable of interacting with our own. These are alien beings in every sense of the term: they are not beautiful in any conventional sense: no angels with harps, no long-bearded prophets. These are the monstrous shapes imagined by Lovecraft and other horror writers of his generation; except that for Bertiaux and Grant they are not figments of imagination and thus “not real,” but have an independent existence of their own. In the Bertiaux and Grant cosmology, Lovecraft did not invent these creatures: he saw them in his dreams, which are a time-honored method of communicating with the unconscious mind (in a modern sense) or with the spirit world (in a more ancient context). The gods of Vodun may have begun the same way as Great Cthulhu and Nyarlathotep; and the methods of contacting the one may be used to contact the other, and with similar—even measureable—results. What began in a dream may be contacted in a dream, or at least in a trance. The altered states so representative of spirit possession in Haiti—and recognized as such by Lovecraft in “The Call of Cthulhu”—are a way of re-dreaming the original dream, of going “back to Guinee”: to an African homeland that exists nowhere on earth, yet everywhere on earth. The points chauds are elements of an occult Matrix, places where one strand of the spider's web crosses another. Taken together, they form a membrane over the cranium of the magical operator like the touch screen on a computer monitor. It is where Bertiaux's “voodoo” meets Grant's Tantra that the intellectual and conceptual explosion takes place that leads the Typhonian Order into the realm of the Dark Lord.
In Pursuit of Gold
It was most likely observing the meetings of David Curwen and Aleister Crowley that provided Kenneth Grant with the impetus he needed to realize that Indian Tantra held the key to the mysteries of the OTO as well as to all of western occultism itself. While Grant usually quotes discredited texts on the Yezidis and on Vodun, in the realm of Indian religion and magic he is on somewhat surer ground even as he makes at times reckless use of the texts. For many western occultists, drawn to magic through the works of Crowley or of the other magicians who came out of the Golden Dawn environment, Grant's books were the first that introduced them to Tantra and to the potentiality of this rather messy yet strikingly powerful tradition: “messy” in the sense that no one can agree on what Tantra is; powerful because it deals with magical processes in remarkably clear language.
Of all the unspeakable cults in Grant's repetoire, Tantra is where his erudition (although subject to serious criticism by actual Tantrikas) and his grasp of the terminology shines through. Grant is a knowledgeable non-initiate when it comes to Tantra, but it must be said that he makes mistakes in nomenclature, definitions, etc. which may be due more to the lack of access to published materials (and his own lack of initiation into a Tantric circle) than to any desire to confuse or bloviate. The value in Grant's description of Tantric rites and concepts lies in the fact that it is the first time for many western occultists that they have been exposed to this material and serves as an inducement to conduct their own, independent research. Further, while Tantrikas may object to Grant's cavalier use of Tantric terms and concepts to further his own investigations of the Dark Lord, it is entirely consistent with Bertiaux's approach to Vodun and Crowley's approach to Egyptology and Yezidism. That is not to absolve these magicians from a responsibility to be accurate insofar as possible, but it does demonstrate the essential bricolage tendency of western occultists who strive to reach beyond a Judeao-Christian framework and into other, foreign realms. This is the lure of Babalon, of course: the ultimate “foreigner” and seducer of spiritual aspirants since time immemorial.
David Curwen (1893-1984) was an intimate of Aleister Crowley in the period 1944-1947, until the latter's death in December of that year, and they maintained a deep correspondence on magic, alchemy and especially Tantra. Curwen recently (2006) was “outed” as the author of the very influential alchemical work In Pursuit of Gold (1976) written under the pseudonym Lapidus (Latin for “Stone”). In Pursuit of Gold was subtitled “Alchemy Today in Theory and Practice” which seems to echo Crowley's own Magick in Theory and Practice and to a certain extent these two volumes complement each other as modern takes on these ancient arts.
The relationship between Curwen and Crowley was not always fraternal. Crowley soon began to realize that Curwen—who had studied Tantra in India—was more knowledgeable than he when it came to Indian forms of occultism and, of course, in particular Tantra. Crowley's exposure to Tantra was limited to a few English translations of a handful of Tantric texts, whereas Curwen's experience was much deeper and more profound. When both Curwen and Crowley began to realize Crowley's limitation in that regard, the friendship suffered a little. Crowley had to be the smartest man in the room, at least where occultism was concerned, and Curwen was living proof that there were other mysteries, other revelations to which Crowley had had no previous access.
At the same time, a friendship developed between Kenneth Grant and David Curwen, to the extent that Curwen encouraged Grant to explore Tantra more deeply. This would set Grant on the path for which he would become most famous: the exploration of Thelema and the core secret of the OTO as delineated in the texts and practices of the Tantric adepts of India.
The subject of Tantra is vast, and I have introduced the subject elsewhere,123 but for the purposes of this investigation we will focus on the type of Tantric groups that are of interest to Grant, the “unspeakable cults” of India.
The first such group is the Sri Vidya sect.
r
Vidy
(“Holy Knowledge”) can actually be broken down into four separate, but linked, manifestations. Basically, it is form of Goddess worship that has as its goal advaita, or non-duality. Therefore it is a Shakta tradition (as differentiated from a Shaivite tradition) in which the source of power, of shakti, is imagined in the Goddess. The particular goddess in the case of Sri Vidya is known as Lalit Tripurasundar. Tripura Sundari means “Beautiful Goddess of the Three Cities,” the three cities in this case referring to three different aspects of the goddess as physical, subtle, and supreme. She is usually depicted as a sixteen-year-old girl, and for that reason is sometimes called 
o
a
or “Sixteen” and Lalitã or “she who plays.” It should be noted that the number sixteen figures prominently in Grant's number system as the designation for the sixteenth kala, the ultimate of the kalas or secretions of the priestess. Her mantra also contains sixteen letters.
The foremost symbol of the Sri Vidya sect is the Sri Meru Cakra, which is a three-dimensional version of the Sri Yantra, usually made of special metals in a sacred alloy that allows the blessings of the Goddess to flow more powerfully. The Sri Yantra is a two-dimensional magical drawing of nine interlocking triangles that represents the unity of male and female—Shiva and Shakti—forces and could thus be seen as a depiction of the essential philosophy of both Tantra and Thelema.
The form of worship known as Samayachara takes place in the mind, as even the rituals—puja—themselves can be performed mentally if the appropriate ritual objects are not to hand. In this case the Goddess is visualized and the entire ritual is much more personal and interiorized.
In increasing complexity, we then arrive at the form of Sri Vidya known as Dakshinachara in which an external form of the Goddess is required: either an idol or the Sri Meru Cakra ... or even a female devotee. It should be noted that in this practice there is no intimate contact between the worshipper and the woman—the suvasini—who represents the Goddess although she is a focus for the ritual.
The Kaulachara is the one that gets most of the attention, for the external object of devotion is a living woman or a man, or a male and female couple. The famous ritual of the “Five M's”—the panchamakara—is part of the Kaulachara repetoire, although not practiced as often or as widely as believed. Since the goal of Sri Vidya is essentially advaita and the negation of all duality, the rituals themselves emphasize that there is no difference between the worshipper and the worshipped: that, in effect, everyone and everything is the Goddess. Eventually all sense of self—self as a separate entity, apart from the rest of the cosmos—disappears. The use of nudity and sexuality in these rituals, which can be as physical or as virtual as the leader determines, is designed to remove all sense of “otherness” by conquering shame, fear, and carnal desire.
The final, and most controversial, form of Sri Vidya is the Vamachara practice. The devotees of Vamachara are the groups that meet in cemeteries and crematory grounds, and which see the Goddess in her terrible and frightening aspect. The idea is to transcend even the grossest, most loathesome aspects of creation, of humanity, of reality. To see the Goddess in the corpses of the cremation ground, to smell Her perfume in the stench of burning flesh, and to hear Her voice in the hideous sounds of an Indian cemetery in the night is the height of spiritual piety. And when the Vamachara circle goes to the extent—as some of them do—to perform panchatattva or panchamakara (the ritual of the Five M's that includes maithuna or sexual contact) in the intimate, overwhelming presence of corpses is to conquer death and to bring all of creation back to a single point: death and the act of conception taking place in the same location, decay and desire obliterating the boundary between this world and the next.
It is no wonder then that Grant would have been fascinated by these practices. He would have seen—as glimpsed through a scrim, at an angle, in shadow—the secrets of the Gnostic Mass and the Star Sapphire ritual exposed and expanded through the intense ceremonies of the Kaulachara and Vamachara sects. The Tantric texts and rituals would have revealed to Grant the secrets behind the secrets. Shiva and Shakti on thrones in the center of the Kaula circle are analogues of Chaos and Babalon, of what Jung perhaps would call the Shadow and the Anima, and the consumption of the fluids in the Gnostic Mass and the Star Sapphire rituals are perfectly comprehensible within the context of the Sri Vidya tradition. In fact, the reasons behind the secrets of the OTO's VIIIth and IXth degrees would be explained and amplified through consulting the Tantric texts, not only of the Sri Vidya sect but also of a number of other groups from the Kashmiri Shaivites to the Nath Siddhis and, of course, of the Tibetan Tantric tradition with its famous Kalachakra Tantra and the associated scheme of initiations.
Grant would focus on two aspects of the Tantras that he felt were crucial to an understanding of Thelema. The first was the idea of non-duality and the destruction of the ego. This also concerned Crowley, of course, as we have mentioned above, in his pursuit of samdhi or the state of actually experiencing non-duality through the identification of subject with object during meditation. Crowley, who was familiar with the Yoga Sutras of Patanjali (an English translation of which had appeared in 1914), knew that samadhi was the highest possible state of consciousness that could be achieved while still alive, the only possible higher state being that of the mahasamdhi or “great samadhi” that occurs at the time of death.
The second was the concept of the kla.
The best blood is of the moon, monthly ... (AL III:24)
Grant would have been the first western occultist to write openly about this subject, at least the first to enjoy a wide audience among those interested in ceremonial magic and the western occult tradition. The kalas are explained as vaginal secretions, not limited to menstrual blood, which occur during the entire menstrual cycle and which have different occult properties depending on the day they occur. These are not to be understood as the grosser physical form of mucoid secretions or blood, but as their subtler counterparts imbued with qualities that are analogous to the alchemical elements that are involved in the process of spiritual transformation.
The subject of kalas is a complex one, for the production of the kalas depends on the occult capability of the priestess as well as on their manipulation by the priest. There are astrological and astronomical considerations and ritual requirements to ensure the proper condensation of these essences at the right time so that they may be employed for magical ends.
Basically, the word kla indicates a unit of time, most specifically a lunar “digit” or day. Different authorities offer different definitions and identifications of this lunar day. In some cases, it refers to about one-day-and-a-half in solar days, or about 36 hours. In other cases, the authorities insist that each lunar day is equivalent in length to a solar day, only calculated from dusk to dusk rather than from dawn to dawn, etc. Those familiar with Vedic astrology are familiar with this term and with a related term tithi, which means the same thing but which is used more often in astrology than in the Tantras.
The important thing to remember here is that the lunar cycle is really the result of the interplay between the moon, the earth and the sun. If we consider the earth to be a vessel for the mingled essences of the sun and moon—a traditional Tantric concept—then the importance of the kala becomes apparent. On different days of the lunar cycle, as the moon gradually waxes from a New Moon to a Full Moon, and then begins to wane again, the quality of moonlight (it's brightness) changes from night to night. The Indian astrologers and Tantrikas imagine this to be the Sun giving the precious Soma to the Moon, drop by drop, until the Moon is full, at which point it begins returning the Soma to the Sun, also drop by drop, until it is depleted; and then the whole cycle begins again. Each lunar day has a specific quality associated with it, as well as a specific deity. It is this concept that is related to the Tantric idea of kalas that Grant writes about so frequently. Each lunar digit or kala has a different quality. When this quality is combined with the individual menstrual cycle of the priestess, then you have a different “tincture” or essence.
Central to Indian religion and especially to Tantra is the concept of amrita. Amrita is the combination of the male and female potencies that ensures immortality, and the power to cure illness. It is the source of western ideas about the elixir vitae and the Philosopher's Stone. It is the result of an internal process of meditation, yoga, and ritual but also involves alignment with the priest or priestess as well as with the lunar phases themselves. It is an interlocking of the microcosm with the macrocosm—the human body with the stars—in a way that transcends how this is understood by the newcomer to ceremonial magic and alchemy. The sensitivity of the female partner to her menstrual cycle and the corresponding sensitivity of the male partner to the female partner—coupled with: (1) the awareness of both to the external “cycle” of the sun and moon, and (2) the proper performance of rituals that are undertaken with a great deal of personal preparation (particularly in the psycho-biological processes which are subsumed under the control of the autonomic nervous system: in particular breathing, heart rate, etc.)—provides a vehicle for spiritual transformation that would be difficult to surpass. As one identifies oneself with the Goddess through the normal stages of the Sri Vidya puja, but with these other considerations honored, then the goal of advaita or non-duality is obtained through identification of the Goddess with the universe, the universe with the Goddess, and eventually identification of the Self with No-Self: the transcending of opposites and the attainment of samadhi.
In the earlier stages of the process—which can take many years to perfect—the amrita is cultivated, taking care that it does not become a poison instead of a medicine. The Tantras are full of instructions towards this end, although they may at times seem incomprehensible as they are written in the “twilight language” common to all the deeper forms of esotericism both in Asia and in the West. The amrita is the combined essences of the male and female practitioner, as has been described, with the caveat that it is not the grosser elements that are important, for they are only the vehicle for the subtle powers they represent. Only accomplished Tantrikas—or, in the Western context, magicians—are capable of generating these subtle essences. As can be seen, the Gnostic Mass would be capable of this function in only the most advanced case, as well as the Star Sapphire ritual which makes use of the same ideas. But is there really a connection between the Tantras that Grant praises so highly and Thelema? Aside from the obvious similarities, there is other evidence to show that there might be a stronger connection than previously understood.
As Tantric scholar David Gordon White describes in his The Alchemical Body: Siddha Traditions in Medieval India:
In the royal consumption origin myth ... the moon was revived and replenished in its bright fortnight through the offering of a soma sacrifice. Soma is the fluid essence of the moon, which, in the sacrificial context, must be bought. With what does King Moon buy back his vital fluids? With a red cow, whose name, rohin, is the same as that of the starry woman who was the original cause of his woes.124
This is a rich vein of symbolism that could be mined by any Kabbalist with great benefit. As scholar of Judaism Rafael Patai and Kabbalah scholar Moshe Idel have both indicated in their writings, Tantra may very well have been the unseen influence behind European and Middle Eastern forms of alchemy and Kabbalah. In this single myth, we have an indication that there was some cross-fertilization between Jewish mysticism and Tantric alchemy in startling ways.
As Jewish scholars know, a red cow (sometimes called a red heifer, a parah adumah 
in Hebrew) is required for the purification of anyone who came into contact with a corpse (Numbers, 19:2—19). The cow had to be unblemished, completely red, and had never been yoked or used to perform any work. It would be sacrificed and burned, its ashes placed in a ritual vessel that contains pure “living” water, i.e. from a spring as opposed to collected rain water. Along with the ashes of the red cow, cedar and hyssop are also burned along with the cow, as well as wool that has been dyed red. The resulting water is then sprinkled on a contaminated person using a branch of hyssop.
It is a requirement to have the ashes of a red cow available in the Temple, and for that reason the building of a Third Temple in Jerusalem could not take place until such a red cow had been found that would be a suitable candidate for this ritual requirement. There is no logical argument for this requirement, no reference to other sources that would provide a context for this rather bizarre ritual, and for that reason Talmudic scholars consider it to be a divine mandate. But the connection between a red cow, ritual purity, and living water seems to have a precedent in ancient India and the above citation offers a way towards understanding this rather arcane stipulation.
The word rohin is the key. It does not mean “red cow” specifically but simply “the red one.” It is the name of a Goddess, the “starry woman” of the citation, and is assigned to one of the nakshatras—the rohini nakshatra—which is the star Aldebaran,125 found in the constellation Taurus, or the Bull. Rohini is the wife of Chandra, a lunar deity who is identified with Soma. The symbols for Rohini/Aldebaran are the Temple and the Chariot.
Thus we have a Red Goddess, a Red Cow, the waters of purification and Soma, and the Temple. The Moon must buy a red cow and offer it in exchange for Soma, which seems to be a myth cognate to the idea of a red cow being burned and its ashes used to create purifying water. Add to that the symbolic connection to Aldebaran and the Temple and you seem to have a perfect explanation for the Jewish requirement.
Further, the fact that the symbol of the Chariot is also included takes us into another, deeper realm entirely. The “descent to the Chariot” is a practice known in the Jewish mystical practice of the Merkavah 
(“chariot”) also known as Hekhalot 
(“palace”) mysticism. The aim of the practice is to ascend seven levels, or chariots, or palaces, to finally appear before the Throne of God. I have made the case elsewhere that this ancient mystical practice was the inspiration for the degree rituals of the Golden Dawn, which then became the basis for Aleister Crowley's A
A degree structure.126
There is more evidence that this may be correct. In that in various world mythologies Aldebaran is usually connected to the constellation of the Pleiades, the “Seven Sisters,” in the same way that the asterism of the Big Dipper consists of seven stars that are called “the Chariot” in Middle Eastern (and Chinese) cultures. They surround the Pole Star which forms the Throne of God in this system, because it is unmoving and eternal, the axis around which the world turns.
This entire complex of ideas is reprised in the Thelemic idea of the Scarlet Woman, Babalon, as the partner of Therion and whose relationship with the Beast provides the Soma, the life-giving elixir.
To continue the astronomical theme one step further, the brightest supernova explosion ever recorded in human history took place in the year 1006 CE. It occurred on April 30 of that year, which is—as the Necronomicon tells us—the “day the Great Bear hangs from its tail in the sky,” i.e., the day the Gate between this world and the next is opened. On the same day, the volcanic eruption of Mount Merapi on the Indonesian island of Java destroyed an entire civilization and buried the spectacular monument Borobudur. It lay under volcanic ash and vegetation for centuries before being rediscovered and eventually reconsecrated by the Dalai Lama—recognized as a temple of Vajrayana, i.e. Tantric, Buddhism.
The supernova occurred in a constellation known to the ancients as Therion. The Beast.
These ancient cults—of the Yezidi, of the Afro-Caribbean religions and their secret societies, and of the Tantrikas—are carriers of specific information that modern cultists find indispensable for an understanding of their own traditions, rites, and practices. But these practices are dangerous. They involve trafficking with the contents of the unconscious mind through manipulation of psycho-biological processes that are still little-understood and recognized even less. To writers like Grant and Lovecraft, they are analogous to trafficking with supramundane entities ... not “analogous” in the way the word is normally used, but perhaps better understood in the sense of “analogue” as opposed to “digital.” To Grant and Lovecraft, plumbing the depths of the unconscious mind is not metaphorically similar to plumbing the depths of deep space, they are different ways of expressing the same thing. The practices may be analogues of each other to the non-initiate, but they meet in the rituals and practices of the adept, of the initiate.
The most ancient mysteries were of a physical, not a metaphysical nature. There was an esoteric and an exoteric version of them, corresponding to the written and the oral Law of the Jews. But, contrary to what is usually supposed, the metaphysical was the exoteric version, not vice versa.... The secret, oral, or hidden wisdom embodied in the gloss [to the seventeenth chapter of the Egyptian Book of the Dead], refers to the physical origins of the abstract concepts which appear in the text; spiritual matters are experienced in terms of physical, more precisely of physiological, phenomena.127
89 Should probably read Unaussprechliche Kulte.
90 One of the earliest sources was the famous British archaeologist Austen Henry Layard in his Nineveh and Its Remains, London, John Murray, 1849. Articles on the Yezidi had appeared in French a few years earlier by M. Boré in his “De la vie religieuse chez les Chaldéens” in two parts, July and August 1843, in the Annales de Philosophie Chrétienne. Isya Joseph published some preliminary articles on the Yezidi in the American Journal of Semitic Languages and Literatures, in January and April, 1909 in a two-part series entitled “Yezidi Texts.” These would be followed by his book Devil Worship in 1919. Another book-length treatment of the subject was The Cult of the Peacock Angel by R.H.W. Empson, London, Witherby, 1928, appearing a year after Crowley associate William Seabrook's Adventures in Arabia: Among the Bedouins, Druses, Whirling Dervishes, and Yezidee Devil Worshippers, 1927; New York, Blue Ribbon, 1930. For a more recent and scholarly source, see John Guest, The Yezidis: A Study in Survival, London, Routledge, Kegan and Paul, 1987, and Giulia Sfameni Gasparro, “I Miti Cosmogonici Degli Yezidi” in Numen, Vol. XXI, Fasc. 3, pp. 197-227, and Vol. XXII, Fasc. 1, pp. 24-41, Leiden, Brill, 1974. It should be noted that Crowley's identification with Sumer predates the appearance of popular books on the subject by at least ten years.
91 See for instance J.F. Coakley, “Manuscripts for sale: Urmia. 1890-2” in Journal of Assyrian Academic Studies, Vol. 20, no.2, 2006 where the trade of one Jeremiah Shamir in Mosul was cited as a source for documents of dubious provenance. See the Encyclopedia Iranica, online edition, New York, 1996- entry, “Jelwa, Ketab Al-” for the reasons (mostly linguistic) behind this claim. Also see the above cited book by John Guest for more information on Shamir.
92 One author has suggested that the word Ta'us comes from Ta'uz, a form of the ancient Babylonian god Tammuz. Empson, op.cit., p. 184. If so, this would further bolster at least a Babylonian (if not Sumerian) connection to the Yezidis.
93 The theory that the ancient Sumerians might have come to Mesopotamia from India is one of the options being seriously considered by linguists and physical anthropologists. That they were non-Semitic seems to be generally accepted. That their origins are mysterious and shrouded in the eldritch tendrils of the mists of antiquity is also accepted. See for instance Arkadiusz Sohysiak, “Physical anthropology and the ’Sumerian problem,'” in Studies in Historical Anthropology, vol. 4:2004 [2006], pp 145-158 for an overview of the prevailing theories. At any rate, this new theory is consistent with what the Yezidi say about themselves. It is also implied in the Schlangekraft recension of the Necronomicon when it is attested that the symbol of the Sumerian “race” is the Ar with “Aryan” as cognate.
94 See, for instance, Empson, op. cit., p. 174-175.
95 Nineveh, discovered by the archaeologist Layard who also wrote of his meeting with the Yezidis, was an ancient city famously cursed by the Biblical prophet Nahum, who called it a “harlot that was beautiful and agreeable and that made use of witchcraft ...” (Nahum 3:4), as good a Biblical description of Crowley's Babalon as any. Nineveh was also the city where Jonah was sent to preach, and from where he subsequently fled to the sea, only to find himself swallowed by a whale. There is today a shrine to Jonah at Nineveh, believed to be his tomb.
96 Kenneth Grant, Outer Gateways, p. 92
97 Agharta is frequently confused with Shambhala. Shambhala is a well-known Tibetan Buddhist concept, which became the “Shangri-La” of Hollywood fame. The origin of the word Agharta and the mythology connected with it is ambiguous and possibly a fictional creation of European travelers and mystics. The Theosophists believe it is a kind of polar opposite to Shambhala and the domain of demonic forces.
98 As may be observed in the beliefs and practices of the Qumran sect that gave us the Dead Sea Scrolls. The Qumranites set themselves up as the true Jews in opposition to the Jerusalem Temple Jews.
99 Empson, op. cit., p. 183.
100 William B. Seabrook, Jungle Ways, London, George G. Harrap, 1931.
101 William B. Seabrook, Adventures in Arabia: Among the Bedouins, Druses, Whirling Dervishes, and Yezidee Devil Worshippers, 1927; New York, Blue Ribbon, 1930.
102 Kenneth Grant, Outer Gateways, p. 106.
103 This claim is made by Crowley in several places, as we have seen. In his Cephaloedium Working (1920), he is quite clear in the statement that lists his titles: “... whose Holy Angel his Guardian is Aiwaz 93, the God first dawning upon Man in the land of Sumer....”
104 Indeed, as one Yezidi leader said to a journalist at the time of the US-led invasion of Iraq in 2002, Melek Ta'us means “the ancient one.” (Patrick Graham, “Iraq's ’Devil Worshippers'” in the Canadian National Post, December 17, 2002.) This fits perfectly with the terminology used in the Necronomicon Gnosis.
105 A symbol that also appears in the Schlangekraft recension of the Necronomicon many times on the various seals of the planetary forces as well as prominently on the Crown of Anu (p. 112).
106 Grant, Outer Gateways, p. 103. Acording to Grant the word Yezid signifies one of the three persons in one “god” of the Yezidi, the other two being Melek Ta'us and Sheikh Adi, the latter of whom many scholars assume was the real creator of the Yezidi clan although this is still hotly contested. Grant's theology here is suspect.
107 Ibid., p. 104.
108 Aleister Crowley, Confessions, Chapter 61, p. 554.
109 R. v. Krafft-Ebing, Psychopathia Sexualis, New York, Rebman Co., n.d., p. 3.
110 See Ivor Morrish, Obeah, Christ, and Rastaman: Jamaica and its religion, Cambridge UK, James Clarke & Co., 1982, pp. 22-23. It is referred to as one of the “blacker arts.” (p. 40)
111 See A. Metraux, Voodoo in Haiti, New York, Schocken Books, 1972, p. 285 where the wanga is defined as “the magical weapon par excellence” which has “a property that is harmful to one or more people.”
112 Arthur C. Holly, Les daïmons du culte voudo, Port-au-Prince, Imp. Edm. Chenet, 1918. See also his Dra-Po: étude ésotérique de Égrégore africain, traditionel, social, et natural de Haiti, Port-au-Prince, Imp. Nemours Telhomme, 1928.
113 Holly (1918), p. iii.
114 Ibid., p. 506.
115 Ibid., p. xi.
116 Ibid., p. 514.
117 Kenneth Grant, The Ninth Arch, London, Starfire, 2002, p. xxv.
118 Milo Rigaud, Secrets of Voodoo, San Francisco, City Lights, 1969, 1985, pp. 10-11.
119 Edward Said, Orientalism, New York, Vintage, 1979.
120 Authors such as Robert Irwin and Bernard Lewis have attacked Said's work on methodological grounds as well as on charges of erroneous data and sweeping generalizations that include every Western scholar and reporter on Middle Eastern and Asian affairs and culture.
121 Wade Davis, The Serpent and the Rainbow, New York, Warner Books, 1985; Passage of Darkness: The Ethnobiology of the Haitian Zombie, Chapel Hill, University of North Carolina Press, 1988.
122 Davis (1988), p. 284.
123 Levenda, Tantric Temples: Eros and Magic in Java, Lake Worth: Ibis Press, 2011.
124 David Gordon White, The Alchemical Body: Siddha Traditions in Medieval India, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996, p. 36
125 In astronomical literature, Aldebaran is identified as the star alpha Taurus.
126 See the author's Stairway to Heaven for a more detailed defense of this theory.
127 Kenneth Grant, The Magical Revival, New York: Weiser, 1972. pp. 2—3.