The Sixth Element

Some silly "magical correspondences" for the non-element of void, copied from some pencil notes on a scrap of paper that was about to be thrown away.

Sense: No attribution possible.
Point of Pentagram: Centre.

(the invoking pentagram of Void thus cannot be traced but must be visualised as a fully-formed pentagram collapsing into the centre as it were a singularity; the banishing form reverses this)

Letter of the Name: The Silence after the Name has been uttered.

Tarot suit: No attribution possible.
Tarot court card: No attribution possible.
Symbol: O (that is, an empty circle)
Platonic solid: Teapot.

(A computer graphics in-joke; the teapot is only functional by virtue of the empty space inside)

Time: Timelessness
Season: Outside the circles of Time
Quarter: Centre
Jungian function: none -- ?? 'no-mind' / trance
Finger: the spaces in between
Deities: Tiamat, Leviathan, Yog-Sothoth

Been waiting for long?

Quack quack . . . quack quack

An officer in the engineer corps of the British colonial military, while surveying one of the more remote corners of India, has a unit under his command nearly wiped out by the solar-phallic fiery flying tree serpents which he had previously regarded as a wild native superstition. While recovering from the trauma he discovers the writings of an English doctor who helped treat people bitten by the same creatures when a clutch of them came ashore in the Liverpool docks in a shipment of kumquats. The serpents entwine in his fevered imagination and transform into splitting and diverging streams descending from the dimmest mists of prehistory to the end of the nineteenth century. The General rallies his remaining forces for a desperate counter-attack in which the creatures are all killed; their skins stitched together into a seven-foot long scroll on which a chart of the serpentine rivers is scribed for posterity, with an accompanying booklet written in ink alchemically compounded from the serpents' venom mixed with the ashes of incinerated wooden penises found in Irish round towers, setting out in as plain language as the mores of the time permit -- which is to say, not plain at all -- the nature of the chains of belief that bind us all, and attempting to trace the course and descent of the underground stream of forbidden worships, unholy rites and nameless cults from its earliest origins to the present day.

Meddling with the Goetia (1)

Being something of a sucker for vaguely occult Goth tat (though not enough for the more extravagent entries in the Alchemy Gothic catalogue), I recently acquired from a local vendor of such products, something represented by the manufactor as "The Seal of Furfur":

and associated, according to the blurb on the shop's display, with "power and knowledge."

Now the name Furfur appears in a 17th-century English work on magic (deriving from multiple sources of the previous century or earlier) known as the Goetia, where we learn:

The Thirty-fourth Spirit is Furfur. He is a Great and Mighty Earl, appearing in the Form of an Hart with a Fiery Tail. He never speaketh the truth unless he be compelled, or brought up within a triangle Δ. Being therein, he will take upon himself the Form of an Angel. Being bidden, he speaketh with a hoarse voice. Also he will wittingly urge Love between Man and Woman. He can raise Lightnings and Thunders, Blasts and Great Tempestuous Storms. And he giveth True Answers both of Things Secret and Divine, if commanded. He ruleth over 26 Legions of Spirits.

A website selling this tat assures us that each item in the range "is supplied with a colour leaflet giving full details of it's [sic] origins, benefits and qualities together with a simple ceremony to enable it's wearer to consecrate and empower their piece." Evidently the one that should have been with mine got lost somewhere along the line. Anyway, the Goetia gives the seal of Furfur as:

Whereas the "seal" I bought, once out of its little black bag, looked rather more like:

(see also this photo on another seller's website). Not much similarity, is there? This design in fact appears to be the seal of Astaroth, of whom the Goetia informs us:

The Twenty-ninth Spirit is Astaroth. He is a Mighty, Strong Duke, and appeareth in the form of an hurtful Angel riding on an Infernal Beast like a Dragon, and carrying in his right hand a Viper. Thou must in no wise let him approach too near unto thee, lest he do thee damage by his Noisome Breath. Wherefore the Magician must hold the Magical Ring near his face, and that will defend him. He giveth true answers of things Past, Present, and to Come, and can discover all Secrets. He will declare wittingly how the Spirits fell, if desired, and the reason of his own fall. He can make men wonderfully knowing in all Liberal Sciences.

So, was someone working for the manufacturers of this object unable to read--since in the Mathers-Crowley Goetia, which is the source for the versions of the seals with circular borders, the name is written around each--or was there some other motive for the substitution?

The immediate source of the error at least is identifiable. In the printed edition of the Goetia as issued by Aleister Crowley on his Society for the Propagation of Religion Truth imprint in 1904, and reprinted as facsimile by Equinox Books and First Impressions in more recent years, the illustrations are grouped on three plates, some way separated from the text referring to them. The figures are numbered sequentially 1-184 (though those from 176 on in fact belonged to the Theurgia-Goetia, the second book of the 17th-century compilation known as the Lemegeton, whose text was not published by Crowley), beginning with the seals of the Spirits., the seal of the first Spirit, Bael as fig 1, that of the second Spirit, Agares as fig. 2, and so on. So, the seal of the thirty-fourth spirit would be fig. 34, right?

Wrong. Mathers was working from multiple MSS., which had suffered divergence from repeated copying; in eight cases the seals of the spirits differed sufficiently in his examplars that two forms are given (#26, Bune, has two significantly different seals in some exant MSS., one apparently being a radically simplifed form of the other). Result: figure 34 is the seal of Astaroth, and this outfit's QC is so bad they didn't bother checking. Similarly, FB2 in their line is called "Cross of Zagan," its supposed power being "transformation," since

The Sixty-first Spirit is Zagan. He is a Great King and President, appearing at first in the Form of a Bull with Gryphon’s Wings; but after a while he putteth on Human Shape. He maketh Men Witty. He can turn Wine into Water, and Blood into Wine. He can turn all Metals into Coin of the Domninion that Metal is of. He can even make Fools Wise.

but seeing as fig. 61 is actually the seal of Murmur, of whom we are told:

He is a Great Duke, and an Earl; and appeareth in the Form of a Warrior riding upon a Gryphon, with a Ducal Crown upon his Head. There do go before him his Ministers with great Trumpets sounding. His Office is to teach Philosophy perfectly, and to constrain Souls of the Deceased to come before the Exorcist to answer those questions which he may wish to put to them, if desired. He was partly of the Order of Thrones, and partly of that of Angels. He now ruleth 30 Legions of Spirits.

that was the seal that got etched on said cross (clearly visible in this photo on the website of Kyro UK). The seal of Murmer also once turned up on an Alchemy Gothic pendant (not in their current range).

In other words, the most credible explanation would indeed appear to be sheer incompetence; there seems to be no obvious benefit to marketing the seal of Astaroth as that of Furfur, since the former name in any case is far better known. Possibly indeed, the loss of elementary critical faculties and observation skills is just one of various effects of meddling with the Goetia.

. . . and a greater feast for death.

[This came out of a drunken conversation with a bunch of Thelemites many years ago, and was previously published in Because, the journal of one of the Yorkshire OTO groups. To be sung to the tune of "Bela Lugosi's Dead," of course.]

Gold on white
silk hooded black robes
back on the rack
Aleister Crowley's dead
The goat's come out of hiding
the demons all have fled
the off white stains
have dried up
Aleister Crowley's dead
he's dead he's dead he's dead
the virginal whores
re-veil the tomb
the rose and cross have wilted
never to rebloom
gone back to that old Black Room
the Beast . . .

[much repetition omitted]

lege iudica atque ride

The Blasphemous Tome of Forbidden Elder Lore of the Month Club (1)

[This series will present material originally written in connection with a background (contemporary) for the Call of Cthulhu role-playing game; since I never actually got round to running that background or even actually writing any scenarios, this material is being made available for any other GMs who want to use it.]

The Epistle of Simon the Magician.

. . . But before I set out how I came to possess this gnôsis, I must counter the noxious lies about me spread by one Loukas, who in his Praxeis makes me out to be the lowest of men, a common sorcerer [γοες] who fooled the people by simple tricks and sought to obtain the favour of the Gods with base coin . . .

The Epistle of Simon the Magician (henceforth EpSM) is a quasi-Gnostic text, purported to be a letter from the "Simon Magus" of early Christian legend to a school or group of disciples (the work has no title in MS., but opens "Simon of Samaria, called the Magician, writing to those seeking to be made perfect").

The earliest known copy of this work appears in Greek, in a papyrus codex found in the Egyptian desert in 1998 c.e. EPsM occupies about three-quarters of the codex and is followed by a scribal note stating that it had been copied in Alexandria in the second year of the reign of the Emperor Julian, from an "ancient copy" found in the Temple of Serapis, "for the benefit of those seeking perfection in the true Gnôsis." This date at least is believed credible based on paleography and the condition of the codex. The remaining leaves are filled with what appear to excerpts from Hermetic texts, also in Greek. The date of composition of EpSM, based on an analysis of the Greek style and usage, is tentatively placed in the latter half of the third century c.e., and certainly no earlier than 200 c.e.; some of the language employed, indeed, appears to reflect the technical terminology of Neoplatonic Theurgy, which would suggest a date somewhat nearer to the claimed time of the known copy. The author attribution (even assuming Simon of Samaria to have been an historical figure in the first place) is thus, as with most works of this class, spurious and the work is an example of pseudoepigraphy.

Contents: As Bentley Layton (see the "genre analysis" of the Nag Hammadi texts &c. in Gnostic Scriptures) might have put it, EpSM has a complex mixture of genres in which various traditional materials are subordinated to others:

I. Epistle from a teacher to a school of disciples.
. . . A. Autobiography
. . . . . . 1. Visionary revelation
. . . . . . . . . a. Theogony
. . . . . . . . . b. Cosmogony and uranography
. . . . . . . . . c. Treatise on the nature and origin of souls.
. . . . . . 2. Mystical "ascent."
. . . . . . . . . a. Description of successive stages of gnosis.
. . . B. Exhortations.

Besides forming a frame for a lengthy revelation-discourse, the autobiography contains an audi alteram partem account of Simon the Magician's set-to with Simon the Rock (the explicit reference to the Praxeis or "Acts of the Apostles" is another pointer to dating EpSM). "Simon" states that he had been initiated into "The Mysteries" (he does not state which of the various Mystery Cults around at the time) prior to his encounter with the new sect and specifically states he was attracted to them by the reputation of their leaders for thaumaturgical powers—a reputation which he claims he later found out was 'worked up by the reports of fools and liars, or won by the use of tricks which I had long ago abandoned'—but after taking their first "initiation" he discovered that (a) the initiation and attached teaching did nothing to increase his knowledge or power, (b) it was considered by the cult to be little more than a preliminary purification, (c) the cult had a second initiation, which he refers to as "transmission of the pneuma," (d) it was this second initiation which was associated with thaumaturgic powers, (e) any progress in the cult, and certainly being accepted for the second initiation, required an exclusive devotion to "this new God of the Hebrews called Jesus" and would thus mean burning his boats so "those gods on whom I once had called would no more hear my voice." Aware also that it was not uncommon among teachers of the Mysteries to require fees, sometimes quite substantial, for their greater initiations, he approached the leader of the cult (he refers to him as "the leader of this sect, a Jew named Simon whom his followers call 'the rock' (ο πετρος)," sarcastically adding that this sounded like the epithet of a gladiator) at the first opportunity and as he puts it, politely enquired what this fee was, whereupon he was told to get lost.

After this rejection he travelled some more, and, growing somewhat weary of the life of a wandering thaumaturgist, took up with another (unnamed) teacher, from whom he learnt to "turn his attention to the Divine Mind." On so doing (the description of the process is obscurely phrased but seems to imply some kind of ritual invocation; certain phrases used in the Greek suggest the technical terminology of Neoplatonic Theurgy) and received from "Mind" a lengthy revelation. This revelation is written in (somewhat defective) Greek hexameter verse, probably out of convention rather than because "Simon" had any particular liking or affinity for the form. The revelation opens with a cosmogonic myth, here loosely paraphrased in English:

IN THE BEGINNING there was nothing save the great First Thought;
First Thought, who from self contemplation did become insane.
As to how long this madness lasted, it may not be said;
This happens in Eternity, for Time as yet was not.
An æon or an instant passed, First Thought came to itself,
By casting forth its madness as the first separate being.
This first separate being had no mind, but awesome pow’r
And blind insatiable will to create and to destroy.
Nor did this being have as yet a name, and even though,
In latter ages, certain names have been bestowed on it,
These names it were not well to speak nor even yet to write.
Thus there became First Madness. And thus First Thought knew fear.
Then with its primal unity now shattered past repair,
The First Thought did again create, six more separate beings;
These were Space/Time, and Life, and Wisdom; Mind, and then two more,
But these last two, their names and pow’rs, are yet unknown to me.
And thus became the Ogdoad, the primal Elder Gods.
And then did Mind reflect upon this Primal company;
And thought: Though we have all this pow’r, to what end shall it serve?
Then, prompted by dim memories of something yet to come,
Mind thought to make a Universe of matter and of form.
The raw power of First Madness in the matrix of Space/Time
Would shape the raw materials which Life could animate;
The three remaining Primals, Mind thought, would not serve this cause,
Not representing anything this kind of world should need.

The universe thus created by these four Primal demiurgic powers proved unstable, and imploded messily. But

This fall, though cataclymsic was yet in no sense complete:
The rulers of this universe, the Kings of Ancient Time,
Lurked on within the ruins of the cosmos that collapsed.
For while these worlds be shattered, still their broken shells remain.

There then follows a rather confused account on the nature and origin of souls as manifested in humans and other sentient beings in the present creation, in the course of which the metre first becomes strained, then breaks down completely and is finally abandoned. The beings peopling the first universe did not have souls as such; some were essentially automata, others were animated by a greater or lesser 'spark' of the First Madness; and since this universe collapsed due to structural flaws rather than the First Madness deliberately withdrawing Its power, the most powerful of these inhabitants, the "Kings of Ancient Time" or "Great Ones of Old Time" survived, and lurk on in the broken spheres. In any case, the creation of souls is ascribed to Wisdom and the two unnamed Primals; their existence is initially almost as 'angels' in the realm of the Primals. After some indeterminate period has passed:

Once more did Mind reflect and think, What use to have a mind
If one may not learn from mistakes, and try the task again?
So yet once more the great First Madness did put forth its pow’r;
Within the matrix of Space/Time a Universe took shape.
Now Mind did look upon these works, and thought that they were good;
Or, if not good, they at the least were better than last time.
Then First Madness assumed a place within the great gulf fixed,
and Life surged forth to populate the countless worlds new-formed.
And once more did First Thought know fear.

And so First Thought took counsel with the three who yet were loyal,
And, fearing lest this Universe should founder like the last,
Established they the Ring Pass Not, and set their seal thereon,
Imprisoning the Primal pow’rs who had defied their will.

Along, however, with the four rebellious Primals and an unknown number of the Great Ones of Old Time, an astronomical number of largely blameless souls are entrapped within the universe.

[Desunt cetera.]

The papyrus codex containing EpSM was later stolen during a break-in at the museum where it was being studied.  Prior to this, a complete English translation had been prepared and submitted to various academic journals, but was universally rejected as "sloppy and uncritical"; several reviewers took exception to the translator's comparing the cosmogonic myth with teachings of modern occultist groups and legends contained in Theosophical literature.  The translation has had a limited circulation in MS. and TS., although the translator herself has disappeared (along with all extant photographic prints and negatives of the papyrus) after being sacked in a dispute over alleged plagiarism and fraudulent expenses claims.

For the translation: +4 Mythos, 1d3 / 1d6 SAN, spell multiplier x 2; spells include Contact Nyarlathotep, Create Skrying Window, Journey to the Other Side.

In Man we Trust (1)

(On reading Dr. Thomas Inman's Ancient Faiths Embodied in Ancient Names)

The Doctor has dissected the human body and found no soul therein. He has attended far too many difficult and messy births to do anything but shudder at gaudy images that portray the sacred mother and her child. Has seen too many cases of the clap picked up through ill-advised encounters in the rougher parts of town to entertain romantic fantasies about the joys of state-unsanctioned love.

To occupy his leisure hours and exercise his mind the Doctor sets himself the task of tracing out the origins of the various family and given names his fellow Britons bear. But the Doctor does not realise that a rose may grow from shit; it had never crossed his mind that the brightest and most fragrant blooms oft sprout on stems whose roots reach down to realms which a Victorian gentlemen would not wish to contemplate, still less mention in mixed company. Still, medical training does much to remove squeamishness, and however unpleasant he may find the vistas of reality which open up before him as his research proceeds, he will not flee the light into the safety of a new dark age, although the shocks of revelation piling one upon the other push him near the brink. In everything his time and land professes to hold most holy he finds the most intimate and indissoluble connexions with just those things his time and land would rather not discuss at all, still less hear spoken of in church.

The final straw descends when a ship ties up in port and from a crate of kumquats unattended on the quay a clutch of solar phallic fiery flying tree serpents emerge into the night. By the time the beasts have all been rounded up by council dogcatchers, some eight hundred and thirty one dockworkers, streetcleaners, sailors on shore leave and random people in pubs have been bitten, and the Royal Infirmary is quickly overwhelmed. The Doctor and his colleagues work their fingers to the bone, and thanks to their ministrations all bar two hundred and twenty-eight of the victims make a full recovery; but by the time he makes his way home in the hope of catching sleep, the venom has seeped through the Doctor’s skin and been carried to his brain. As in his fevered dreams the serpents twine around his spine in a phantasmical caduceus, the final barriers collapse and crores of phalloi shamelessly arise from names and symbols which even in the nineteenth century of the common error all England had thought fit to print in books for general circulation. The sacred tree of Nineveh becomes a giant vaginal slit, the hair about tied up in tufts while seven clitorises sprout fantastically from the top and winged genii and priests makes oblations of testicles and scrotal sacs—their own, or whose?

Eight hundred and sixty-four prostitutes, driven from the docks district by police and vigilante gangs, pitch their tents upon the Doctor’s lawn and by the light of moon and sun invite all passers by to enter the holy of holies. A humble tortoise pokes its head out from its shell and calls to mind an image that makes the Doctor blush. A chalice filled with water mixed with sacremental wine suggests to him a horror that he dare not set in print; he can but darkly hint that under this symbolic form the Roman church keeps up a rite once so violently denounced when carried out for real.

Yes, we made it all up . . .

Forthcoming from Celephaïs Press when it's actually been written.

Legend has it that a summary of the rites and traditions of Chaos Wicca was discovered in the form of a cipher manuscript, found stuffed inside a Bulwer-Lytton novel which had lain undisturbed for decades, miscatalogued in the English Literature stacks of Leeds University Library.

Another story has it that the rumoured Chaos Wicca Coven (motto: "Yes, we made it all up: that's the point"), supposed to have conducted strange rituals involving cheese and soft fruit in a Leeds 6 basement in the late 1970s, never really existed, and that the manuscript was in fact a prop for a live-action roleplaying game which had been mislaid by the GM while doing background research.

A talk on the subject of Chaos Wicca was promised to the Leeds University pagan society in 2002 or so but cancelled for reasons never adequately explained.

Be that as it may, the "tradition" (to use the term loosely) appears to have been created by the time-honoured practice of stealing fragments of doctrine and ritual from all over, nailing them together and roughly planing over the joints to make something that might pass as a coherent whole in very bad light to an observer whose perceptions were impaired by alcohol or heavy psychedelics, and then inventing a questionable origin story which would not stand up to twenty-three seconds of serious examination.

[More to follow if I can be bothered.]

The Chapter for making the Transformation into a Squibbon

Velle Omnia, Velleque Igitur Nihil

The trees of eternity shake, and stalk-eyed things with tentacles brachiate through the boughs. Ambulatory slime-moulds lurk in wait for flying fish. Giant pachyderms evolved from squid patrol the forest floor. The wheel turns, and wheels turn within wheels. The house has fallen and the Dragon sunk and many once rejoicing in the glory of the earth are dead, or so it seems; but he that is fallen may rise again, and fall and rise once more; for in this race pole position is an honour that passes round. Four long ducks quack quack insistently that the pole or palus is a simple phalik symbol, until invited to consider the symbolism of being slapped about the head hard with a large wet fish. At the distance of a century our own times might seem as strange.

Glory blazes, and collapses as a singularity . . .

“Even to the abyss, annihilation. An end to loneliness, as to all.”

. . . to will all, and therefore to will nought.

in templo stellarum ambulo sub umbra alarum noctis

Test, please disregard

HEKAS HEKAS ESTE BEBELOI 

EL + ELOHIM + ELOHE + ELOHIM SABAOTH + ELION + EHEIEH ASHER EHEIEH + ADONAI + YAH SHADDAI + TETRAGRAMMATON SHADDAI + AGIOS O THEOS + ICTURON + ATHANATOS + AGLA + AMEN Slain lamb, be a tower of strength against the demons Sacrificial lamb, give power against the powers of darkness Slain lamb, give us power to bind the rebellious demons Open your gates, ye princes, open the eternal gates And the King of Glory shall enter! The Eternal King, the King of Kings, The Lord Almighty is this King of Glory Glory be to the Father, to the Son and the Holy Ghost. 

ZAZAS ZAZAS NASTANADA ZAZAS