Liber 111 Aleph

Book: Liber 111 Aleph by Aleister Crowley

An extended and elaborate Commentary on "The Book of the Law", in the form of a letter from the Master Therion to the son of mankind. Contains some of the deepest secrets of Initiation, with a clear solution of many cosmic and ethical problems. This is Equinox III vi

Download Aleister Crowley's eBook: Liber 111 Aleph

Books in PDF format to read:

Aleister Crowley - Liber 451 Siloam
Frater Achad - Liber 31
Aleister Crowley - Liber 242 Aha
Aleister Crowley - Liber 011 Nu
Aleister Crowley - Liber 111 Aleph

A Revisionist Manifesto

Since last November my friend Frater Barrabbas has been following an ongoing debate in the Pagan community over how closely modern Paganism resembles its historical ancestors. In a more recent article he discusses his interpretation of the three philosophical perspectives that seem to be fueling the debate.

These three different philosophical perspectives are based on three different approaches to engaging with a tradition. I call these three perspectives "traditional lore, reconstructionist" and the middle ground of "objectified traditional lore," or "revisionism." If you ever wanted to be entertained, just get together three individuals who are die-hard adherents of these three different perspectives, introduce them to a strategic point of disagreement, and then let the fur fly.

According to Barrabbas' definitions, Traditionalists are defined as members of a particular initiatic system or lineage who adhere to to the teachings of that tradition regardless of outside evidence to the contrary. Reconstructivists seek to restore the practices of a particular group at a particular period in time according to academic writing and research about the tradition. Finally, Revisionists validate and augment their lore by researching academic and scientific information. Like this. By those definitions I'm clearly a Revisionist and proud of it. In fact, I have no idea why anyone would want to be a Traditionalist or Reconstructionist if they're at all interested in doing magick.

Purely Traditionalist systems suffer from the accumulation of dogma. Without any sort of peer review inaccurate information can wind up being disseminated. For example, the Golden Dawn origin story about Anna Sprengel and her body of European adepts made for a great plot element in my novel but most experts agree that it is probably not historically true. From the fragmentary technical documents that have been published on the Golden Dawn tradition sometime between Aleister Crowley's work with Macgregor Mathers ("Liber O vel Manus et Sagittae") and Israel Regardie's publication of the Stella Matutina documents ("The Golden Dawn") it looks like the Lesser Invoking Ritual of the Hexagram was replaced by the Lesser Banishing Ritual of the Hexagram, a change which is taught by most of the modern Golden Dawn orders but which according to my own empirical research on probability shifts massively weakens the system.

Reconstructionists sometimes make important new historical discoveries about their respective traditions that prove useful, but without revision any such system is always going to contain elements that were appropriate in a particular time and place but are no longer relevant to the modern world. For example, there a million books out there that purport to teach "Celtic" Paganism. Many experts believe that the discovery of bog men clearly demonstrates that the ancient Celts practiced human sacrifice. Should we? Obviously a modern person is going to respond in the negative to that one, but as soon as you start changing even extreme elements of the system to fit the modern world you effectively are a Revisionist anyway. I also think the idea that if a magical practice is old it automatically works well needs to be discarded once and for all. My electric refrigerator works a lot better than an icebox.

When Traditionalists and Reconstructions went to war over whether or not Ronald Hutton's ideas about the history of Neo-Paganism were correct my Revisionist response was pretty much a big yawn. Who cares? Seriously. Either the techniques work or they don't. Whether or not they're ancient or modern shouldn't make any difference, especially since the debate seemed to be between two sides that couldn't agree over what percentage of modern Pagan practices have ancient roots. The more important question is what percentage of modern Pagan techniques work and what percentage don't. If all the people kicking up a huge fuss about whether the correct percentage of ancient lore is 10% or 90% instead performed a series of experiments with various Pagan magical techniques and recorded their results something useful would be generated rather than an emotional but pointless debate.

Magick is a technology. That means if something works better it is better, plain and simple. Some of its effects can be subjective, but that only makes evaluation of those aspects difficult, not impossible. Psychologists research subjective mental phenomena all the time. And as far as practical techniques go, all you need to do is set up experiments to test the probability shifts those techniques produce. Ancient methods are still worth studying because the human mind has changed little over the last several millenia, but they should be researched, tested, and integrated into modern systems only if they are found to be effective. The "sifting" method that most proto-sciences use to accumulate knowledge can occasionally produce spectacular successes that the formal scientific method will miss, but at the same time it can produce some spectacular failures, superstitions that manage to live on as the tradition evolves despite their ineffectiveness.

What amazes me from following this whole debate is how ridiculous it is. If your spiritual system works for you and produces the results you want, why should you care if it's ancient or modern? If it doesn't work for you, why should you practice it? Thelema works for me and "The Book of the Law" was written in 1904. I've certainly never lost any sleep over its relatively recent origins. As a matter of fact, from the standpoint of study, being in possession of the original manuscript is quite useful, and if the book were thousands of years old it almost certainly would have been lost. Furthermore, Thelema's modern elements such as "the method of science, the aim of religion" are a big part of its appeal to me and had it originated even hundreds of years ago those elements would probably not be present.

UPDATE: The comment thread for this article has drifted over into discussing the issue of individuals in the Pagan community who do not practice magick but still want to be treated as authority figures. That conversation is continuing over at Rob's place.

Religion Belief Robert Kernodle Fluid Is God

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Hmmmm... I'm not a believer in ANY form of supreme being, but if I were, this might be the closest thing to how I would conceive of it. Or not.

Interesting art to go with his philosophical perspective. Sounds a little like panentheism to me.

FLUID IS GOD

By Robert Kernodle

The Supreme Being Is Like A Liquid.

ASPECT 396 - PhotoFluidism by Robert Kernodle

Beyond Religion

I do not claim to be a Christian. Neither do I claim to be a member of any other religion that treats the Supreme Being as an entity with human-like intelligence. I do not condemn anyone's religious beliefs, nor do I preach to people to believe as I believe. I write here to share a unique point of view on a very popular topic - God.

Supreme Being

I DO believe in a Supreme Being, but this being is a verb as much as a noun. In my way of thinking, the Supreme Being is not a conscious spirit, but simply the action of existence that all things share. Anything that exists is part of all being, and all being is the Supreme Being. The Supreme Being, thus, is the sum total of all that exits.

All that exists has the common connection of existing. All that exists has the common action of being. Being is the united action of all things. The Supreme Being is both matter and energy, both substance and its relationships, both stuff and its motions. Being cannot be without a substance, and substance cannot be without motions to relate it. The Supreme Being, thus, cannot be an entity without substance, because having no substance means having no being. Consequently, the Supreme Being is always someTHING in motion.

ASPECT 283 - PhotoFluidism by Robert Kernodle

Sublime Fluidity

What is reality? To what thing and to what motion can all things relate? I believe that all things relate to a fluid. All being is a fluid being, forever morphing and creating recurring self-similar forms. Human beings are results of this great fluid being that came before it.

Life, consciousness, intelligence, feeling, and the sensation of existing all arise from the supreme fluid being. This fluidity is the marvel of being - humans are part of it, we are it, we are a consequence of it. Human intelligence comes from the substance and motion of the Supreme Being, which does not think as humans think.

Proto-Intelligence

What we call "chaos", "chance" or "accident" is what exists prior to minds that can name it. We humans arise from this condition of matter and motion that we call "chaos". Life is truly amazing, because something that seems so opposite to it actually gives birth to it. The very nature of being is to create life like us.

The great fluid being of reality is capable of swirling humans into existence, because the way of fluid is to seek self-consciousness to reflect back on itself. Consciousness, therefore, is a reflection in the greatest of all liquid pools.

If someone wants to call this idea of Supreme Being "God", then I can agree to this label. This God, however, is not person-like, not father-like, and not king-like. This God is not power wielding. This God is simply what is.

God is like a stream that knows how to flow, because it flows along the only path it can - the path that enables it to flow. God is like water with infinite and eternal morphing ability, fitting what contains it without conforming permanently to any one container. God is like a bubble that forms in the only sequence of events that exists to accommodate it. God, thus, is beyond absolute containment by the human mind, because mind is finite, and God is infinite fluidity.

Humans can only feel God - we can never know God. The effort of trying to contain what is far beyond containing is how we feel God. God is the overwhelming sensation of trying to grasp something far greater and far more complex than consciousness can grasp.

God is like the huge scale of a fractal that dwarfs all of its budding beautiful designs on smaller scales. God has no mind, yet God is all minds. Human minds, in this way, are only very remotely similar to the fluid processes that created them. God cannot know each mind personally. Each mind is simply a fragment of God's whole existence in the unison of existence that God is.

Minds arise from something that precedes mindfulness. This something that precedes mindfulness is God. In this way, humans are perfected God. Sand is perfected God. Trees are perfected God. The ocean is perfected God. Any one thing that we can name is perfected God, just as everything named together is God being realized. ASPECT 602 - PhotoFluidism by Robert Kernodle

Human Responsibility

In my concept of God, humans must assume total responsibility for their existences. We cannot reason with all existence the way we reason among ourselves. We learn from our own existences and from our own thoughts, because these are processes of God, and this is how God moves through us. Each part of God manifests its own particular perfection or imperfection, so these things are in human hands to the degree that the greater flow allows it. Humans, thus, are in a sensitive position of being creators who must learn when they are able to shape specific forms and when they must participate with forms greater than they can control.

Humans rule God to some degree, as God rules humans. We are all in existence together, in unison, and in similar roles. God, in this sense, gave us a small dose of God-like power to control part of our being. Human being, after all, is a miniature of Supreme Being.

Tags: Religion, Philosophy, fluidity, Robert Kernodle, FLUID is God, reality, divinity, art, Supreme Being, God, PhotoFluidism, panentheism

Suggested ebooks:

Irv Slauson - The Religion Of Odin
Chantepie De La Saussaye - The Religion Of The Teutons

Keywords: john dee smith  aleister crowley writings  our guardian angels  astral travel blog  enochian magic dangers  john dee  thoth tarot deck  astral projection experience  mysteries of freemasonry  austin spare art  

Babylon And Ishtar

Perhaps the earliest origin is the ancient city of Babylon, a major metropolis in Mesopotamia (modern Al Hillah in Iraq). Babylon is the Greek variant of Akkadian Babilu (bab-ilu), meaning "Gateway of the god". It was the "holy city" of Babylonia from around 2300 BC, and the seat of the Neo-Babylonian empire from 612 BC.

One of the goddesses associated with Babylonia was Ishtar, the most popular female deity of the Assyro-Babylonian pantheon and patron of the famous Ishtar Gate. She is the Akkadian counterpart to the Sumerian Inanna and the cognate to the northwest Semitic goddess Astarte. The Greeks associated her with Aphrodite (Latin Venus), and sometimes Hera. Ishtar was worshipped as a Great Goddess of fertility and sexuality, but also of war and death, and the guardian of prostitutes. She was Also Called the Great Whore and sacred prostitution formed part of her cult or those of cognate goddesses. Many have associated Ishtar with the figure in the Book of Revelation of Babylon the Great, Mother of Harlots and Abominations.

Books in PDF format to read:

Arjun Vishad Yog - Bhagvad Gita
Anonymous - Odinism And Asatru
Rodolfo Amadeo Lanciani - Pagan And Christian Rome
Anonymous - Babylonian And Assyrian Literature