Post by wren on Nov 9, 2006 11:47:05 GMT -5
Sorcery and witchcraft are the degenerate offspring of occult
traditions coeval with those described in the second chapter. The
popular conception of witchcraft, shaped by the anti-Christian
manifestations that occurred in the Middle Ages is so distorted and so inadequate that to try and interpret the symbols of its mysteries, perverted and debased as they are, without reference to the vastly ancient systems from which they derive is like mistaking the tip of an iceberg for its total mass.
It has been suggested by some authorities that the original witches sprang from a race of Mongol origin of which the Lapps are the sole surviving remnants. This may or may not be so, but these 'mongols' were not human. They were degenerate survivals of a pre-human phase of our planet's history
generally- though mistakenly- classified as Atlantean. The characteristic that distinguished them from the others of their kind was the ability to project consciousness into animal forms, and the power they possessed of reifying thought-forms. The bestiaries of all the races of the earth are littered with
the results of their sorceries.
They were non-human entities; that is to say they pre-dated the human life- wave on this planet, and their powers- which would today appear unearthly- derived from extra-spatial dimensions. They impregnated the aura of the earth with the magical seed from which the human foetus was ultimately generated.
Arthur Machen was, perhaps, near the truth of the matter when he suggested that the fairies and little people of folklore were decorous devices concealing processes of non-human sorcery repellent to mankind.(1)
(1) See The White People, The Shining Pyramid, and other stories. This theme is a frequent one with Machen. The hideous atavisms described by Lovecraft in many of his tales evoke even more potently the atmosphere of cosmic horror and 'evil' peculiar to the influx of extra-terrestrial powers.
Machen, Blackwood, Crowley, Lovecraft, Fortune, and others, frequently used as a theme for their writings the influx of extra-terrestrial powers which have been moulding the history of our planet since time began; that is, since time began for us, for we are only too prone to suppose that we were here first and that we alone are here now, whereas the most ancient occult
traditions affirm that we were neither the first nor are we the only ones to people the earth; the Great Old Ones and the Elder Gods find echoes in the myths and legends of all peoples.
Austin Spare claimed to have had direct experience of the existence of extra- terrestrial intelligences, and Crowley- as his autobiography makes abundantly clear- devoted a lifetime to proving that extra-terrestrial and superhuman consciousness can and does exist independently of the human organism.(2)
(2) See The Confessions, Moonchild, Magick Without Tears, and other works by Crowley.
As explained in Images and Oracles of Austin Osman Spare,(3) Spare was initiated into the vital current of ancient and creative sorcery by an aged woman named Paterson, who claimed decent form a line of Salem witches. The formation of Spare's Cult of the Zos and the Kia(4) owes much to his contact with Witch Paterson who provides the model for many of his 'sabbatic' drawings and paintings. Much of the occult lore that she transmitted to him suffuses two of his books- The Book of Pleasure and the Focus of Life.(5) In the last years of his life he embodied further esoteric researches in a grimoire(6) which he had intended publishing as a sequel to his two other books. Although death prevented its publication, the manuscript survives, and the substance of
the grimoire forms the basis of this chapter.
(3) Frederick Muller, 1975.
(4) 'The body considered as a whole I call Zos' (The Book of Pleasure, p.45).
The Kia is the 'Atmospheric I'. The 'I' and the 'Eye', being interchangeable,
the entire range of 'eye' symbolism- to which repeated reference has been
made- is here applicable.
(5) First published in 1913 and 1921 respectively. There has been a recent
republication of The Book of Pleasure, with an introduction by Kenneth Grant.
(Montreal, 1975).
(6) This was to have been divided into two parts: The Book of the Living Word
of Zos and The Zoetic Grimoire of Zos; in the present chapter it is referred
to simply as the grimoire.
Spare concentrated the theme of his doctrine in the following Affirmation Creed of Zos vel Thanatos.
I believe in the flesh 'as now' and forever . . . for I am the Light, the Truth, the Law, the Way, and none shall come unto anything except through his flesh. Did I not show you the eclectic path between ecstasies; that precarious funambulatory way . . . .
But you had no courage, were tired, and feared. THEN AWAKE! De-hypnotize yourselves from the poor reality you be-live and be-lie. For the great Noon-tide is here, the great bell has struck . . . Let others await involuntary immolation, the forced redemption so certain for many apostates to Life. Now, in this day, I ask you to search your memories, for great unities are near. The Inceptor of all memory is your Soul. Life is desire, Death is reformation
. . . I am the resurrection . . . I, who transcend ecstasy by ecstasy, meditating Need Not Be in Self-love . . .
This creed, informed by the dynamism of Spare's will and his great ability as an artist, created a Cult on the astral plane that attracted to itself all the elements naturally orientated to it. He referred to it as Zos Kia Cultus, and its votaries claimed affinity on the following terms:
Our Sacred Book : The Book of Pleasure.
Our Path : The eclectic path between ecstasies; the precarious funambulatory way.
Our Deity : The All-Prevailing Woman.
('And I strayed with her, into the path direct'.)
Our Creed : The Living Flesh. (Zos):
('Again I say : This is your great moment of
reality- the living flesh').
Our Sacrament : The Sacred Inbetweenness Concepts.
Our Word : Does Not Matter-Need Not Be.
Our Eternal Abode : The mystic state of Neither-Neither.
The Atomospheric 'I'. (Kia).
Our Law : To Trespass all Laws.
The Zos and the Kia are represented by the Hand and the Eye, the instruments of sentiency and vision. They form the foundation of the New Sexuality, which Spare evolved by combining them to form a magical art- the art of visualizing
sensation, of 'becoming one with all sensation', and of transcending the dual polarities of existence by the annihilation of separate identity through the mechanics of the Death Posture.(7) Long ago, a Persian poet described in a few words the object of Spare's New Sexuality.
The kingdom of I and We forsake, and your home in annihilation make.
(7) Vide infra.
The New Sexuality, in the sense that Spare conceived it, is the sexuality not of positive dualities but of the Great Void, the Negative, the Ain: The Eye of Infinite Potential. The New Sexuality is, simply, the manifestation of non-
manifestation, or of Universe 'B', as Bertiaux would have it, which is equivalent to Spare's Neither-Neither concept. Universe 'B' represents the absolute difference of that world of 'all otherness' to anything pertaining to the known world, or Universe 'A'. Its gateway is Daath, sentinelled by the Demon Choronzon. Spare describes this concept as 'the gateway of all inbetweenness'. In terms of Voodoo, this idea is implicit in the Petro rites with their emphasis upon the spaces between the cardinal points of the
compass: the off-beat rhythms of the drums that summon the loa from beyond the Veil and formulate the laws of their manifestation.(8) Spare's system of sorcery, as expressed in Zos Kia Cultus, continues in a straight line not only the Petro tradition of Voodoo, but also the Vama Marg of Tantra, with its eight directions of space typified by the Yantra of the Black Goddess, Kali: the Cross of the Four Quarters plus the inbetweenness concepts that together compose the eightfold Cross, the eight-petalled Lotus, a synthetic symbol of the Goddess of the Seven Stars plus her son, Set or Sirius.(9)
(8) See previous chapter.
(9) The significance of the number eight as the height, or ultimate One, is explained in Aleister Crowley & the Hidden God.
The mechanics of the New Sexuality are based upon the dynamics of the Death Posture, a formula evolved by Spare for the purpose of reifying the negative potential in terms of positive power. In ancient Egypt the mummy was the type of this formula, and the simulation by the Adept of the state of death(10)- in
Tantric practice- involves also the total stilling of the psychosomatic
functions. The formula has been used by Adepts not necessarily working with specifically tantric or magical formulae, notably by the celebrated Advaitin Rishi, Bhagavan Shri Ramana Maharshi of Tiruvannamalai,(11) who attained Supreme Enlightenment by simulating the process of death; and also by the Bengal Vaishnavite, Thakur Haranath, who was taken for dead and actually prepard for burial after a 'death trance' which lasted several hours and from which he emerged with a totally new consciousness that transformed even his bodily constitution and appearance.(12) It is possible that Shri Meher Baba, of Poona, during the period of amnesia that afflicted him in early life, also
experienced a form of death from which he emerged with power to enlighten others and to lead a large movement in his name.
(10) i.e. the assumption of the 'god-form' of death.
(11) See Arthur Osborne: Ramana Maharshi and the Path of Self Knowledge,
London, 1954.
(12) See Shri Haranath: His Play and Precepts, Bombay, 1954.
The theory of the Death Posture, first described in The Book of Pleasure, was developed independently of the experiences of the above mentioned Masters about whom nothing was published in any European language at that time.(13)
(13) i.e. 1913.
The Rosicrucian mystique of the pastos containing the corpse of Christian Rosencreutz- dramatized by MacGregor Mathers in the 5¡=6ú Ceremony of the Golden Dawn- resumes the mystery of this essentially Egyptian formula of the mummified Osiris. Spare was acquainted with this version of the Mystery. He became a member of Crowley's A.^.A.^., for a brief period, in 1910, and the
Golden Dawn rituals- published shortly afterwards in The Equinox(14)- may have been available to him.
(14) The 5¡=6ú Ritual was published in Volume I, No.3. in 1910.
The concepts of death and sexuality are inextricably connected. Saturn, death, and Venus, life, are twin aspects of the Goddess. That they are, in a mystical sense, one idea is evidenced by the nature of the sexual act. The dynamic activity connected with the drive to know, to penetrate, to illumine, culminates in a stillness, a silence, a cessation of all effort which itself dissolves in the tranquillity of total negation. The identity of these concepts is explicit in the ancient Chinese equation 0=2, where naught
symbolizes the negative, unmanifest potential of creation, and the two the two polaritites involved in its realization. The Goddess represents the negative phase: the atmospheric 'I' symbolized by that all-seeing Eye with all its ayin symbolism;(15) and the twins- Set-Horus- represent the phase of 2, or duality.
The lightning-swift alternations of these terminals, active-passive, are positive emanations of the Void, i.e. the manifestation of the Unmanifest, and the Hand is the symbol of this creative, power-manifesting duality.(16)
(15) See Chapter I.
(16) By qabalah, Hand=Yod=10; Eye=Ayin=70. The total, 80=Pe (Mouth), the Goddess, Uterus, or Utterer of the Word.
The supreme symbol of Zos Kia Cultus therefore resumes that of the Scarlet Woman, and is reminiscent of Crowley's Cult of Love under Will. The Scarlet Woman embodies the Fire Snake, control of which causes 'change to occur in conformity with will'.(17) The energized enthusiasm of the Will is the key to Crowley's Cult, and it is analogous to the technique of magically induced
obsession which Spare uses to reify the 'inherent dream'.(18)
(17) Crowley's definition of magick. See Magick, p.131.
(18) i.e. the True Will.
One of the foremost magicians of our time- Salvador Dali- developed a system
of magical reification at about the same time that Crowley and Spare were
elaborating their doctrines. Dali's system of 'paranoiac-critical activity'
evokes echoes of resurgent atavisms that are reflected into the concrete world
of images by a process of obsession similar to that induced by the Death
Posture.
Dali's birth in 1904- the year in which Crowley received The Book of the Law-
makes him, literally, a child of the New Aeon; one of the first! His creative
genius adumbrates at every stage of its flight the flowering of the essential
germ that has made him a living embodiment of New Aeon consciousness, and of
the 'Kingly Man' described in AL.
Dali's objects are reflected in the fluid and ever-shifting luminosity of the
Astral Light. They resolve themselves and melt continually into the 'next
step',(19) the next phase of consciousness expanding into the further image of
Becoming.
(19) Crowley defined the Great Work in terms of the 'Next Step', implying that
the Great Work is not a remote and mysterious thing, unattainable by humans,
but the realization of the 'here and now', and attention to immediate reality.
Both Spare and Crowley castigated the prevaricators who, scared of the idea of
work, look to the 'future life' and the unattainable, instead of seizing
reality and living NOW. 'O Babblers, Prattlers, Loquacious Ones, . . . learn
first what is work! and the Great Work is not so far beyond' (The Book of
Lies, Chapter 52).
Spare had already succeeded in isolating and concentrating desire in a symbol
which became sentient and therefore potentially creative through the
lightnings of the magnetized will. Dali, it seems, has taken the process a
step further. His formula of 'paranoiac-critical activity' is a development of
the primal (African) concept of the fetish, and it is instructive to compare
Spare's theory of 'visualized sensation' with Dali's definition of painting as
'hand don colour photography of concret irrationality'. Sensation is
essentially irrational, and its delineation in graphic form ('hand done colour
photography') is identical with Spare's method of 'visualized sensation'.
These magicians utilized human embodiments of power (shakti) which appeared-
usually- in feminine form. Each book that Crowley produced had its
corresponding shakti. The Rites of Eleusis (1910) were powered, largely, by
Leila Waddell. Book Four, Parts I & II (1913) came through Soror Virakam (Mary
d'Este). Liber Aleph- The Book of Wisdom or Folly (1918)- was inspired by
Soror Hilarion (Jane Foster). His great work, Magick in Theory and Practice,
was written mainly in 1920 in Cefalu, where Alostrael (Leah Hirsig) supplied
the magical impetus; and so on, up to the New Aeon interpretation of the Tarot
(The Book of Thoth), which he produced in collaboration with Frieda Harris in
1944. Dali's shakti- Gala- was the channel through which the inspiring
creative current was fixed or visualized in some of the greatest paintings the
world has seen. And in the case of Austin Osman Spare, the Fire Snake assumed
the form of Mrs. Paterson, a self-confessed witch who embodied the sorceries
of a cult so ancient that it was old in Egypt's infancy.
Spare's grimoire is a concentration of the entire body of his work. It
comprises, in a sense, everthing of magical or creative value that he ever
thought or imagined. Thus, if you posses a picture by Zos, and that picture
contains some of his sigillized spells, you possess the whole grimoire, and
you stand a great chance of being swept up and attuned to the vibrations of
Zos Kia Cultus.
A little known aspect of Spare, an aspect that links up with his friendship
with Thomas Burke,(20) reveals the fact that a curious Chinese occult society-
known as the Cult of the Ku- flourished in London in the nineteen-twenties.
Its headquarters may have been in Peking, Spare did not say, perhaps he did
not know; but its London offshoot was not in Limehouse as one might have
expected, but in Stockwell, not far from a studio-flat that Spare shared with
a friend. A secret session of the cult of the Ku was witnessed by Spare, who
seems to have been the only European ever to have gained admittance. He does,
in fact, seem to have been the only European apart from Burke who had so much
as heard of the Cult. Spare's experience is of exceptional interest by reason
of its close approximation to a form of dream-control into which he was
initiated many years earlier by Witch Paterson.
(20) 1886-1945.
The word Ku has several meanings in Chinese, but in this particular case it
denotes a peculiar form of sorcery involving elements which Spare had already
incorporated in his conception of the New Sexuality. The Adepts of Ku
worshipped a serpent goddess in the form of a woman dedicated to the Cult.
During an elaborate ritual she would become possessed, with the result that
she threw off, or emanated, multiple forms of the goddess as sentient shadows
endowed with all the charms possessed by her human representative. These
shadow-women, impelled by some subtle law of attraction, gravitated to one or
other of the devotees who sat in a drowsy condition around the entranced
priestess. Sexual congress with these shadows then occurred and it was the
beginning of a sinister form of dream-conrtol involving journeys and
encounters in infernal regions.
The Ku would seem to be a form of the Fire Snake exteriorized astrally as a
shadow-woman or succubus, congress with which enabled the devotee to reify his
'inherent dream'. She was known as the 'whore of hell' and her function was
analogous to that of the Scarlet Woman of Crowley's Cult, the Suvasini of the Tantric Kaula Circle, and the Fiendess of the Cult of the Black Snake. The Chinese Ku, or harlot of hell, is a shadowy embodiment of subconscious desires(21) concentrated in the alluringly sensuous form of the Serpent of Shadow Goddess.
(21) Hell is the type of the concealed place symbolic of the subconsciousness;
the 'infernal' region.
traditions coeval with those described in the second chapter. The
popular conception of witchcraft, shaped by the anti-Christian
manifestations that occurred in the Middle Ages is so distorted and so inadequate that to try and interpret the symbols of its mysteries, perverted and debased as they are, without reference to the vastly ancient systems from which they derive is like mistaking the tip of an iceberg for its total mass.
It has been suggested by some authorities that the original witches sprang from a race of Mongol origin of which the Lapps are the sole surviving remnants. This may or may not be so, but these 'mongols' were not human. They were degenerate survivals of a pre-human phase of our planet's history
generally- though mistakenly- classified as Atlantean. The characteristic that distinguished them from the others of their kind was the ability to project consciousness into animal forms, and the power they possessed of reifying thought-forms. The bestiaries of all the races of the earth are littered with
the results of their sorceries.
They were non-human entities; that is to say they pre-dated the human life- wave on this planet, and their powers- which would today appear unearthly- derived from extra-spatial dimensions. They impregnated the aura of the earth with the magical seed from which the human foetus was ultimately generated.
Arthur Machen was, perhaps, near the truth of the matter when he suggested that the fairies and little people of folklore were decorous devices concealing processes of non-human sorcery repellent to mankind.(1)
(1) See The White People, The Shining Pyramid, and other stories. This theme is a frequent one with Machen. The hideous atavisms described by Lovecraft in many of his tales evoke even more potently the atmosphere of cosmic horror and 'evil' peculiar to the influx of extra-terrestrial powers.
Machen, Blackwood, Crowley, Lovecraft, Fortune, and others, frequently used as a theme for their writings the influx of extra-terrestrial powers which have been moulding the history of our planet since time began; that is, since time began for us, for we are only too prone to suppose that we were here first and that we alone are here now, whereas the most ancient occult
traditions affirm that we were neither the first nor are we the only ones to people the earth; the Great Old Ones and the Elder Gods find echoes in the myths and legends of all peoples.
Austin Spare claimed to have had direct experience of the existence of extra- terrestrial intelligences, and Crowley- as his autobiography makes abundantly clear- devoted a lifetime to proving that extra-terrestrial and superhuman consciousness can and does exist independently of the human organism.(2)
(2) See The Confessions, Moonchild, Magick Without Tears, and other works by Crowley.
As explained in Images and Oracles of Austin Osman Spare,(3) Spare was initiated into the vital current of ancient and creative sorcery by an aged woman named Paterson, who claimed decent form a line of Salem witches. The formation of Spare's Cult of the Zos and the Kia(4) owes much to his contact with Witch Paterson who provides the model for many of his 'sabbatic' drawings and paintings. Much of the occult lore that she transmitted to him suffuses two of his books- The Book of Pleasure and the Focus of Life.(5) In the last years of his life he embodied further esoteric researches in a grimoire(6) which he had intended publishing as a sequel to his two other books. Although death prevented its publication, the manuscript survives, and the substance of
the grimoire forms the basis of this chapter.
(3) Frederick Muller, 1975.
(4) 'The body considered as a whole I call Zos' (The Book of Pleasure, p.45).
The Kia is the 'Atmospheric I'. The 'I' and the 'Eye', being interchangeable,
the entire range of 'eye' symbolism- to which repeated reference has been
made- is here applicable.
(5) First published in 1913 and 1921 respectively. There has been a recent
republication of The Book of Pleasure, with an introduction by Kenneth Grant.
(Montreal, 1975).
(6) This was to have been divided into two parts: The Book of the Living Word
of Zos and The Zoetic Grimoire of Zos; in the present chapter it is referred
to simply as the grimoire.
Spare concentrated the theme of his doctrine in the following Affirmation Creed of Zos vel Thanatos.
I believe in the flesh 'as now' and forever . . . for I am the Light, the Truth, the Law, the Way, and none shall come unto anything except through his flesh. Did I not show you the eclectic path between ecstasies; that precarious funambulatory way . . . .
But you had no courage, were tired, and feared. THEN AWAKE! De-hypnotize yourselves from the poor reality you be-live and be-lie. For the great Noon-tide is here, the great bell has struck . . . Let others await involuntary immolation, the forced redemption so certain for many apostates to Life. Now, in this day, I ask you to search your memories, for great unities are near. The Inceptor of all memory is your Soul. Life is desire, Death is reformation
. . . I am the resurrection . . . I, who transcend ecstasy by ecstasy, meditating Need Not Be in Self-love . . .
This creed, informed by the dynamism of Spare's will and his great ability as an artist, created a Cult on the astral plane that attracted to itself all the elements naturally orientated to it. He referred to it as Zos Kia Cultus, and its votaries claimed affinity on the following terms:
Our Sacred Book : The Book of Pleasure.
Our Path : The eclectic path between ecstasies; the precarious funambulatory way.
Our Deity : The All-Prevailing Woman.
('And I strayed with her, into the path direct'.)
Our Creed : The Living Flesh. (Zos):
('Again I say : This is your great moment of
reality- the living flesh').
Our Sacrament : The Sacred Inbetweenness Concepts.
Our Word : Does Not Matter-Need Not Be.
Our Eternal Abode : The mystic state of Neither-Neither.
The Atomospheric 'I'. (Kia).
Our Law : To Trespass all Laws.
The Zos and the Kia are represented by the Hand and the Eye, the instruments of sentiency and vision. They form the foundation of the New Sexuality, which Spare evolved by combining them to form a magical art- the art of visualizing
sensation, of 'becoming one with all sensation', and of transcending the dual polarities of existence by the annihilation of separate identity through the mechanics of the Death Posture.(7) Long ago, a Persian poet described in a few words the object of Spare's New Sexuality.
The kingdom of I and We forsake, and your home in annihilation make.
(7) Vide infra.
The New Sexuality, in the sense that Spare conceived it, is the sexuality not of positive dualities but of the Great Void, the Negative, the Ain: The Eye of Infinite Potential. The New Sexuality is, simply, the manifestation of non-
manifestation, or of Universe 'B', as Bertiaux would have it, which is equivalent to Spare's Neither-Neither concept. Universe 'B' represents the absolute difference of that world of 'all otherness' to anything pertaining to the known world, or Universe 'A'. Its gateway is Daath, sentinelled by the Demon Choronzon. Spare describes this concept as 'the gateway of all inbetweenness'. In terms of Voodoo, this idea is implicit in the Petro rites with their emphasis upon the spaces between the cardinal points of the
compass: the off-beat rhythms of the drums that summon the loa from beyond the Veil and formulate the laws of their manifestation.(8) Spare's system of sorcery, as expressed in Zos Kia Cultus, continues in a straight line not only the Petro tradition of Voodoo, but also the Vama Marg of Tantra, with its eight directions of space typified by the Yantra of the Black Goddess, Kali: the Cross of the Four Quarters plus the inbetweenness concepts that together compose the eightfold Cross, the eight-petalled Lotus, a synthetic symbol of the Goddess of the Seven Stars plus her son, Set or Sirius.(9)
(8) See previous chapter.
(9) The significance of the number eight as the height, or ultimate One, is explained in Aleister Crowley & the Hidden God.
The mechanics of the New Sexuality are based upon the dynamics of the Death Posture, a formula evolved by Spare for the purpose of reifying the negative potential in terms of positive power. In ancient Egypt the mummy was the type of this formula, and the simulation by the Adept of the state of death(10)- in
Tantric practice- involves also the total stilling of the psychosomatic
functions. The formula has been used by Adepts not necessarily working with specifically tantric or magical formulae, notably by the celebrated Advaitin Rishi, Bhagavan Shri Ramana Maharshi of Tiruvannamalai,(11) who attained Supreme Enlightenment by simulating the process of death; and also by the Bengal Vaishnavite, Thakur Haranath, who was taken for dead and actually prepard for burial after a 'death trance' which lasted several hours and from which he emerged with a totally new consciousness that transformed even his bodily constitution and appearance.(12) It is possible that Shri Meher Baba, of Poona, during the period of amnesia that afflicted him in early life, also
experienced a form of death from which he emerged with power to enlighten others and to lead a large movement in his name.
(10) i.e. the assumption of the 'god-form' of death.
(11) See Arthur Osborne: Ramana Maharshi and the Path of Self Knowledge,
London, 1954.
(12) See Shri Haranath: His Play and Precepts, Bombay, 1954.
The theory of the Death Posture, first described in The Book of Pleasure, was developed independently of the experiences of the above mentioned Masters about whom nothing was published in any European language at that time.(13)
(13) i.e. 1913.
The Rosicrucian mystique of the pastos containing the corpse of Christian Rosencreutz- dramatized by MacGregor Mathers in the 5¡=6ú Ceremony of the Golden Dawn- resumes the mystery of this essentially Egyptian formula of the mummified Osiris. Spare was acquainted with this version of the Mystery. He became a member of Crowley's A.^.A.^., for a brief period, in 1910, and the
Golden Dawn rituals- published shortly afterwards in The Equinox(14)- may have been available to him.
(14) The 5¡=6ú Ritual was published in Volume I, No.3. in 1910.
The concepts of death and sexuality are inextricably connected. Saturn, death, and Venus, life, are twin aspects of the Goddess. That they are, in a mystical sense, one idea is evidenced by the nature of the sexual act. The dynamic activity connected with the drive to know, to penetrate, to illumine, culminates in a stillness, a silence, a cessation of all effort which itself dissolves in the tranquillity of total negation. The identity of these concepts is explicit in the ancient Chinese equation 0=2, where naught
symbolizes the negative, unmanifest potential of creation, and the two the two polaritites involved in its realization. The Goddess represents the negative phase: the atmospheric 'I' symbolized by that all-seeing Eye with all its ayin symbolism;(15) and the twins- Set-Horus- represent the phase of 2, or duality.
The lightning-swift alternations of these terminals, active-passive, are positive emanations of the Void, i.e. the manifestation of the Unmanifest, and the Hand is the symbol of this creative, power-manifesting duality.(16)
(15) See Chapter I.
(16) By qabalah, Hand=Yod=10; Eye=Ayin=70. The total, 80=Pe (Mouth), the Goddess, Uterus, or Utterer of the Word.
The supreme symbol of Zos Kia Cultus therefore resumes that of the Scarlet Woman, and is reminiscent of Crowley's Cult of Love under Will. The Scarlet Woman embodies the Fire Snake, control of which causes 'change to occur in conformity with will'.(17) The energized enthusiasm of the Will is the key to Crowley's Cult, and it is analogous to the technique of magically induced
obsession which Spare uses to reify the 'inherent dream'.(18)
(17) Crowley's definition of magick. See Magick, p.131.
(18) i.e. the True Will.
One of the foremost magicians of our time- Salvador Dali- developed a system
of magical reification at about the same time that Crowley and Spare were
elaborating their doctrines. Dali's system of 'paranoiac-critical activity'
evokes echoes of resurgent atavisms that are reflected into the concrete world
of images by a process of obsession similar to that induced by the Death
Posture.
Dali's birth in 1904- the year in which Crowley received The Book of the Law-
makes him, literally, a child of the New Aeon; one of the first! His creative
genius adumbrates at every stage of its flight the flowering of the essential
germ that has made him a living embodiment of New Aeon consciousness, and of
the 'Kingly Man' described in AL.
Dali's objects are reflected in the fluid and ever-shifting luminosity of the
Astral Light. They resolve themselves and melt continually into the 'next
step',(19) the next phase of consciousness expanding into the further image of
Becoming.
(19) Crowley defined the Great Work in terms of the 'Next Step', implying that
the Great Work is not a remote and mysterious thing, unattainable by humans,
but the realization of the 'here and now', and attention to immediate reality.
Both Spare and Crowley castigated the prevaricators who, scared of the idea of
work, look to the 'future life' and the unattainable, instead of seizing
reality and living NOW. 'O Babblers, Prattlers, Loquacious Ones, . . . learn
first what is work! and the Great Work is not so far beyond' (The Book of
Lies, Chapter 52).
Spare had already succeeded in isolating and concentrating desire in a symbol
which became sentient and therefore potentially creative through the
lightnings of the magnetized will. Dali, it seems, has taken the process a
step further. His formula of 'paranoiac-critical activity' is a development of
the primal (African) concept of the fetish, and it is instructive to compare
Spare's theory of 'visualized sensation' with Dali's definition of painting as
'hand don colour photography of concret irrationality'. Sensation is
essentially irrational, and its delineation in graphic form ('hand done colour
photography') is identical with Spare's method of 'visualized sensation'.
These magicians utilized human embodiments of power (shakti) which appeared-
usually- in feminine form. Each book that Crowley produced had its
corresponding shakti. The Rites of Eleusis (1910) were powered, largely, by
Leila Waddell. Book Four, Parts I & II (1913) came through Soror Virakam (Mary
d'Este). Liber Aleph- The Book of Wisdom or Folly (1918)- was inspired by
Soror Hilarion (Jane Foster). His great work, Magick in Theory and Practice,
was written mainly in 1920 in Cefalu, where Alostrael (Leah Hirsig) supplied
the magical impetus; and so on, up to the New Aeon interpretation of the Tarot
(The Book of Thoth), which he produced in collaboration with Frieda Harris in
1944. Dali's shakti- Gala- was the channel through which the inspiring
creative current was fixed or visualized in some of the greatest paintings the
world has seen. And in the case of Austin Osman Spare, the Fire Snake assumed
the form of Mrs. Paterson, a self-confessed witch who embodied the sorceries
of a cult so ancient that it was old in Egypt's infancy.
Spare's grimoire is a concentration of the entire body of his work. It
comprises, in a sense, everthing of magical or creative value that he ever
thought or imagined. Thus, if you posses a picture by Zos, and that picture
contains some of his sigillized spells, you possess the whole grimoire, and
you stand a great chance of being swept up and attuned to the vibrations of
Zos Kia Cultus.
A little known aspect of Spare, an aspect that links up with his friendship
with Thomas Burke,(20) reveals the fact that a curious Chinese occult society-
known as the Cult of the Ku- flourished in London in the nineteen-twenties.
Its headquarters may have been in Peking, Spare did not say, perhaps he did
not know; but its London offshoot was not in Limehouse as one might have
expected, but in Stockwell, not far from a studio-flat that Spare shared with
a friend. A secret session of the cult of the Ku was witnessed by Spare, who
seems to have been the only European ever to have gained admittance. He does,
in fact, seem to have been the only European apart from Burke who had so much
as heard of the Cult. Spare's experience is of exceptional interest by reason
of its close approximation to a form of dream-control into which he was
initiated many years earlier by Witch Paterson.
(20) 1886-1945.
The word Ku has several meanings in Chinese, but in this particular case it
denotes a peculiar form of sorcery involving elements which Spare had already
incorporated in his conception of the New Sexuality. The Adepts of Ku
worshipped a serpent goddess in the form of a woman dedicated to the Cult.
During an elaborate ritual she would become possessed, with the result that
she threw off, or emanated, multiple forms of the goddess as sentient shadows
endowed with all the charms possessed by her human representative. These
shadow-women, impelled by some subtle law of attraction, gravitated to one or
other of the devotees who sat in a drowsy condition around the entranced
priestess. Sexual congress with these shadows then occurred and it was the
beginning of a sinister form of dream-conrtol involving journeys and
encounters in infernal regions.
The Ku would seem to be a form of the Fire Snake exteriorized astrally as a
shadow-woman or succubus, congress with which enabled the devotee to reify his
'inherent dream'. She was known as the 'whore of hell' and her function was
analogous to that of the Scarlet Woman of Crowley's Cult, the Suvasini of the Tantric Kaula Circle, and the Fiendess of the Cult of the Black Snake. The Chinese Ku, or harlot of hell, is a shadowy embodiment of subconscious desires(21) concentrated in the alluringly sensuous form of the Serpent of Shadow Goddess.
(21) Hell is the type of the concealed place symbolic of the subconsciousness;
the 'infernal' region.