Nagas

That is not dead which can eternal lie, And with strange

aeons even death may die.

- Abdul Alhazred, Necronomicon

(from H. P. Lovecraft, The Call of Cthulhu, 1926)

THE RETURN OF THE WISE ONES

The Law of Thelema is a religion of uncertain extent, numbering perhaps as many as a quarter of a million adherents worldwide, with a strong intellectual presence on the Internet. It is an independent religion in its own right, with its own unique tradition, canon, beliefs, and practices.

Aleister Crowley (1875-1947) contributed greatly to the magical revival,as it has been called, during the first half of the 20th Century. His written works have had a profound effect on the practice of Magick. In addition, Satanism, as currently practiced by the Church of Satan and similar groups, have relied heavily on a sensationalistic interpretation of his writings. There are even marks of his influence in the writings of Gerald Gardner, the individual most responsible for the recreation of Wicca circa 1950. It seems likely that Crowley was commissioned by Gardner to write at least part of the Wiccan Book of Shadows, regarded as the Bible of modern Wicca.

Unfortunately, many conservative Christian authors have associated Crowley's beliefs and practices with Mediaeval Satanism. The latter was a form of Satan worship that did not exist in reality. It was invented by the Christian church in order to provide the theological and legal justification for the Witch burnings of Western Europe. As a result of this association, most of the writings by Fundamentalist and other Evangelical Christians about the Law of Thelema and Crowley are hopelessly inaccurate, and may be safely ignored.

Thelema is a development of:

the Judaeo-Christian apocalyptic writings, especially the Revelation of John in the New Testament.

the Enochian angelic utterances recorded by Edward Kelly and John Dee (the famous Elizabethan humanist scientist), and preserved for posterity by Meric Casaubon in his True and Faithful Relation of What Passed for Many Years Between Dr. John Dee and Some Spirits (1659),

mediaeval and Renaissance Cabala, hermetism, and magic, and

the modern magickal revival, beginning in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, associated with such names as Eliphas Levi, William Butler Yeats (considered by many scholars to be the greatest poet of the twentieth century), and Samuel Liddell "Macgregor" Mathers (co-founder and last Chief of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn).

Like Madame Helena Petrovna Blavatsky, founder of Theosophy, by which he was strongly influenced, Crowley forged a bridge between the Western mystical and magickal traditions and Oriental spirituality, especially Buddhism and sex magick, which was just beginning to be known and understood in the West. Crowley's spiritual philosophy also bears many points of similarity to complex or analytical psychology, developed later by Dr. Carl Gustav Jung.

Thelema is a religious philosophy based upon the individual Will. In fact the word Thelema is Greek for Will. The foundation of Thelema is "The Book of the Law, a cipher document dictated to Aleister Crowley by a "praeterhuman intelligence." Which is called in the Book, The Minister of Hoor Paar Kraat. Crowley later came to identify this being with the Ancient God of Sumer, Shaitan.

Only son and heir of a wealthy brewing family, Crowley's father, a retired engineer and evangelist of stern fundamentalist persuasion, died when Crowley was only 12, leaving him in the sole care of a neurotic mother and her immediate family, by all accounts a bunch of mean-minded religious bigots and fanatics. His father's death seems to have been a turning point in Crowley's life, prior to which he seems to have been a dedicated if immature believer in the literal truth of the Bible, which he admitted even in adult life underlies all his thinking. During this formative period the child was hardly allowed to read anything else! Crowley was also a weak and sickly child, which condition was exacerbated by the numerous punishments and privations inflicted by the severe Plymouth Brethren private schools to which he was sent. The imminence of puberty seems to have awakened a spark of rebelliousness, however, and throughout his adolescence Crowley turned increasingly against the religion of his ancestors. He developed a keen interest in the ways of the world, especially mountain climbing, sex, and fine literature (especially the poets Swinburne and Shelley). He became increasingly independent. By sheer dint of willpower Crowley overcame his physical weakness and became one of the most adventurous (some would say reckless) mountaineers of his generation, and a personal friend and fellow climber of world class mountaineer Oscar Eckenstein, with whom he set numerous world's records.

Crowley's intellectual brilliance was early apparent. Crowley even claimed to remember the circumstances of his infant baptism! Late in adolescence Crowley took up the game of chess, in which he rapidly excelled, earning his chess "half blue" at university. In 1895 he went up to Cambridge to study the liberal arts, with the intention of becoming a professional diplomat or a chess master. Crowley studied with feverish intensity, following a largely self-directed programme in which he made a point of reading every reference to any other author or work in every book which he read. He read voraciously, especially literature and poetry, post-Cartesian philosophy, the sciences, and occultism, sleeping very little and studying much of the night, spending his summer vacations climbing in the Alps. As the heir of a small fortune Crowley was free to do as he liked, and he did so with characteristic ferocity.

The year 1898 was a second turning point in Crowley's career. In this year he left Cambridge University without taking a degree, having resolved to become a professional poet; he published his first book of poetry, now a collector's item, entitled Aceldama: A Place to Bury Strangers In: A Philosophical Poem, by "a gentleman of the University of Cambridge"; and he was initiated in the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, certainly the most important and influential occult order of recent times. In the course of the next seven years Crowley published at his own expense more than two dozen collections of poetry and verse dramas, quickly acquiring a reputation as an important minor poet and fine publisher of the period, attracting the attention of no less a critic than G. K. Chesterton. During 1905 to 1907, Crowley self-published his Collected Works in three small-print volumes. Crowley became well-known in famous literary circles of the day, and was a personal friend of the sculptor Auguste Rodin, S. L. M. Mathers, and Allan Bennett (the Buddhist monk and Golden Dawn occultist who led the first Buddhist mission to the West), amongst others. Crowley's poetry is extremely lucid, fluent in many different forms, lyrical, controversial, and intellectually and morally challenging. In his poetry the lyricist and the didactician struggle for supremacy. The central themes of Crowley's early poetry are the metaphysical problem of the relationship between the Infinite and the finite, the ethical problem posed by the insatiable nature of human craving, the desire for liberty, and the biological nature of life, and the religious problem of how to resolve these dilemmas within the context of post-Cartesian rationalism, scientism, materialism, Darwinism, skepticism, and the implicit nihilism of the modern world. Not a set of themes calculated to please the bourgeois, several of Crowley's works were condemned as obscene, though they would hardly receive a second glance today. They were destroyed by Her Majesty's Customs, and are consequently very rare. Also rare is his third book of poetry (which is not included in his Collected Works), entitled White Stains

The third and most important turning point in Crowley's career came in 1904, in the same year in which he published S. L. M. Mathers' translation of the Goetia of Solomon the King, with an introductory essay by Crowley himself entitled "The Initiated Interpretation of Ceremonial Magic," in which he developed a theory of magic as a system for awakening unconscious psychic potentials. By this time Crowley had completely mastered the occult system of the Golden Dawn under the personal tutelage of Bennett and Mathers, the Order's two most advanced practical occultists. He excelled at skrying and traveling in the spirit vision and in evocation. He had achieved considerable success in Raja Yoga, achieving the lesser trance state known as dhyana. He had moved far beyond the "satanism" of his immaturity, through the esoteric Christianity of the Celtic Church, and had even rejected Golden Dawn magic as a tangential distraction from the main purpose of his life: the completion of the "great work" of uniting the personal consciousness with the divine. Crowley was entering his mature religious phase; he had embraced a rationalized interpretation of the Theravada Buddhism of his mentor, Allan Bennett, coloured by Hinduism and a profound comparative understanding born in a deep study of Professor Max Muller's Sacred Books of the East Series and the works of Sigmund Freud.

Crowley had married the beauty and socialite Rose Edith Kelly, daughter of the painter Gerald Kelly, the previous August. Still very rich indeed, the Crowleys embarked upon a world tour, returning to Crowley's Boleskine estate at Loch Ness, Scotland via Cairo, Egypt in March, 1904. On their visit to Cairo the previous autumn Crowley and Rose had spent the night in the King's Chamber of the Great Pyramid, where Crowley had showed Rose the Astral Light, a subtle bluish illumination which was bright enough to enable Crowley to read the ritual without the use of a candle. This time, Crowley, who had done no other Magick for several years, resolved on a whim to show Rose the sylphs, the elemental creatures of the air, and began the evocation with the Preliminary Invocation of the Goetia, Crowley's favourite. Suddenly and quite unexpectedly Rose became spontaneously entranced, repeating over and over again, "They're waiting for you. All Osiris. It's all about the Child." Rose insisted that Crowley perform a magickal ceremony before an open window in their Cairo flat without any of the traditional preparations. His second attempt, conducted towards midnight on the day of the spring equinox, revealed that the "childe" was Horus, the divine offspring of the Egyptian gods Isis and Osiris. According to Crowley he was told (through Rose's clairvoyance?) that he, Crowley, was to forge a new link with the Secret Chiefs of the Order of the Golden Dawn, as Chief of the Order, which office Mathers had forfeited. He was to inaugurate a new historical epoch for mankind, the Aeon of Horus, based on the "magickal formula" of the Crowned and Conquering Childe, which was to supplant the previous formula of the Dying God for the next two thousand years. Shortly afterwards, to prove the validity of her clairvoyance, Crowley conducted Rose to the Boulak Museum, where neither one had ever been. She took him straight to an exhibit of the funereal stele of Ankh-af-na-khonsu, an obscure XXVIth dynasty Theban priest; Crowley stated that she recognized the image of Ra-Hoor-Khuit (Horus) from such a distance that Crowley himself could not make it out! When Crowley looked at the exhibit, he was shocked. It bore the exhibit number 666, the very number with which Crowley had, since the age of 12, identified himself personally, as the number of the Great Beast of the Revelation of John, the Antichrist himself! This coincidence or synchronicity enormously impressed Crowley, and caused him to obey his wife implicitly when she instructed him to enter the "temple" (the living room of their flat) at 12 noon on April 8, 9, and 10, 1904, and write down what he heard, apparently without any preparations of any sort.

When Crowley entered the temple at the appointed time, he claims that he physically heard a voice coming from behind his left shoulder, as well as experienced a vivid subconscious impression of a regal presence of Persian or Assyrian countenance. The voice was devoid of any accent. For one hour it dictated; then it stopped. The voice returned at noon on April 9 and 10, thus dictating the three chapters and sixty-five pages of what came to be known as the Book of the Law, the gospel of the New Aeon of Horus. It seems likely that Crowley's perception of time was altered during this experience, i.e., that he himself experienced an altered state of consciousness (ASC), since Crowley experienced the dictation as normal speaking speed, but in fact from the time involved and the length of the manuscript it can be deduced that the voice spoke at about one-quarter the normal rate

Following the dictation of the Book of the Law, the Crowleys returned to Boleskine near Loch Ness. Crowley admits that he disliked the Book intensely, and wanted to get rid of it, sticking the manuscript in an attic. However, he did obey the injunction of the Book to make and burn a special incense, composed of several rare oils mixed with blood. The Book promised: "This hath also another use; let it be laid before me, and kept thick with perfumes of your orison: it shall become full of beetles as it were and creeping things sacred unto me." Shortly afterwards Crowley's estate was plagued by an infestation of unusual insects, similar in appearance to the Egyptian scarab beetle with a single protruding eye at the end of a long stalk, which the experts in London to whom Crowley says he sent a specimen were unable to identify. For five years Crowley ignored the Book of the Law, but the accidental discovery and rereading in 1909 of the book in his attic at Boleskine resulted in a conversion experience in which he accepted the Book and his role as described therein. This resulted in the writing of Aha! From that moment forward the Book of the Law became the foundation of his whole work, on which he based his spiritual and writing career for the next thirty-eight years of his life.

The Book of the Law was the first of thirteen holy books, which Crowley wrote in a state of high trance. He also authored several "holy notes" and two borderline texts, The Vision and the Voice and The Paris Working, to which Crowley assigned a mixed status. However, Crowley never claimed that he was not the author of the later holy books, which were written shortly after he "crossed the Abyss," i.e., annihilated the ego and attained the grade of Master of the Temple in the system of the Order of the Golden Dawn, which Crowley renamed the Argentium Astrum or Silver Star. The longest of these are the Book of the Free or the Blue Stone (Liber Liberi vel Lapidis Lazuli), describing his attainment of the grade of Master of the Temple, and the Book of the Heart Girt with a Serpent (Liber Cordis Cincti Serpente), describing his attainment of the Knowledge and Conversation of Aiwass, his "Holy Guardian Angel." Both books were written in rapid succession in 1907, and are masterpieces of mystical utterance, unsurpassed anywhere in the literature of comparative spirituality. These books constitute the critical canon of Thelema, and are considered by true Thelemites to be beyond rational criticism. All of Crowley's writings are considered to be authoritative to some degree, based on a system of classification which Crowley himself assigned to most of his works. Though Crowley wrote an extensive commentary on Liber Cordis Cincti Serpente, it is the Book of the Law which has been most extensively commented upon, largely by Crowley himself. Thelemites believe that the Book of the Law contains a system of vital precepts for the New Aeon, including an adumbration of a new political and spiritual vision of man and society which is destined to supersede all historical religions and societies. However, in 1925 Crowley dictated the last holy book, the Comment, in which the study and discussion of the Book of the Law is forbidden, upon pain of anathema. According to the Comment, "All questions of the Law are to be decided only by appeal to my writings, each for himself." The Comment was written at a time when Crowley's small community of Thelemites was being divided by differing interpretations of the meaning and purport of the Book of the Law. The majority of Thelemites follow Crowley's lead in interpreting the Comment to mean that no Thelemite may dictate to another how he or she chooses to interpret the Book of the Law, and that all interpretations are equally valid, but only for the person originating the interpretation. This has led to an anarchy of conflicting interpretations, and an extreme subjectivism in which the prohibition on studying the Book has been completely ignored. On the other hand, it is difficult to understand how Thelema is to be articulated, or why the Book was written at all, if the prohibition on studying the manifesto and foundation document of the New Aeon is taken literally. This has led to the view, articulated most thoroughly by Kenneth Grant, that the Book of the Law is written in a kind of code (sandhyabhasa), and that only the surface or literal meaning is forbidden. This would explain some very difficult and perplexing passages in the Book of the Law which are otherwise very difficult to explain or justify, as well as many obscure and clearly symbolic passages and several explicit references to a "hidden meaning." Thus Thelemites have become divided since Crowley's death into an exoteric school, to which the majority adhere, of which the most public exponent is the so-called "Caliphate" sect of the Ordo Templi Orientis (O.T.O.), and a minority esoteric school associated with the name of Kenneth Grant, who also claims the headship of the O.T.O. Both schools may be traced back to Thelemites who knew and worked with Crowley prior to his death, but neither one received a definitive charter from the Chief, despite claims to the contrary. The only one who did, Karl Germer, died in 1962 without appointing a successor. There is also an anarcho-fascist school the adherents of which reject all forms of association and are quite antisocial and even violent in orientation. Although Crowley sought during his life to address the "elect," since his death many borderline and pathological personalities, of whom Crowley himself would definitely not have approved, have brought disgrace and disrepute to his name and the philosophy which he was instrumental in articulating. An increasing number of Thelemites are becoming disenchanted with these alternatives, but no clear "fourth school" has as yet emerged. The only writer of any real interest to have emerged out of the Thelemic community since Crowley's death is Kenneth Grant, now in his 70s, who is however widely criticized for his extremely personal, eclectic, and some would say bizarre interpretations.

The Book of Law presents a mystical metaphysics which seeks to reconcile pluralism, dualism, monism, and mystical nihilism in a single all-embracing cosmic conception. This conception is presented in terms of an elaborate symbology which encodes a profound philosophical system. Thus, the universe of phenomena is regarded as the product of the coitus of Nuit, the goddess of Infinite Space, and Hadit, her lord and consort, in which Nuit stands for the continuous and Hadit the discontinuous aspects of Creation. This dualistic conception masks a deeper monism, since Nuit and Hadit are one, and an ultimate nihilism, since all emerged out of Nuit, the Absolute Void of Not or Nothingness. This Nothingness is not, however, a merely static conception of simple emptiness. It is the dynamic foundation of the phenomenal world, which inevitably seeks to produce this plurality as a necessary function of its essential being, which transcends rational articulation but which may be intuitively appreciated by analogy with the parturitive bliss of maternity. Hence the ultimate divine principle is described in feminine rather than masculine terms. Strictly speaking, she represents an androgynous femininity, since she includes Hadit, the masculine principle, within herself. Nuit herself is dual, containing within herself an implicit nothingness which is completely reserved ("pale" and "veiled"), and an explicit parturitive nothingness which delights in the sheer multiplicity of her fecundity ("purple" and "voluptuous"). This plurality emerges out of the interaction of the continuous with the discontinuous, Nuit and Hadit. Its ultimate level is the Khabs ("light"), intuitively represented by the Star Sponge Vision so-called. In this vision, which Crowley experienced and built up over many years, the phenomenal universe is represented as an infinity of "stars," discrete atomic point-events identical with the ubiquitous principle of differentiation represented by Hadit. All are joined by infinite numbers of rays, each of which is also a "star," all discrete, yet completely filling the intervening space (i.e., continuous). This is "reality." What is experienced as "reality" by the embodied individual is a selection of the totality of possible point-events limited by the sensory range of the particular complex of "stars" which the individual has succeeded in incorporating into his conscious point of view, the materiality of which is an illusion of that same sensory complex and its need to preserve its vital integrity in a world whose basic nature is conflict, predation, and survival. Thus, the Book of the Law conceives of each conscious individual as a perfectly simple, and therefore indestructible, point of view in an infinity of possibilities all striving to return to their source and origin in Nothingness by gradually extending themselves over time to build up into their conscious sensorium an ever increasingly complex system of point-events, until they incorporate into themselves the totality of all that is, i.e., infinity. By definition, this evolutionary process must take infinite time. In addition, there is an hierarchy or "chain or being" in which an indefinite number of points of view have achieved all possible levels of conscious evolution, ranging from the totally ignorant yet divine simplicity of the perfectly unique monad to the ultimate divine consciousness of the universe itself, each centred in its own unique universality. There are, therefore, prehominids who subsist on the threshold of human incarnation, post-hominids who constitute evolved souls going over into a higher form of discarnate (from our point of view) existence, as well as an hierarchy of evolutionary states defining the range of human incarnation itself. These range from the bestial, somatic pashus to the psychic, pneumatic "kingly men." The purpose of human life, therefore, is conscious evolution from a lower to a higher state, from unconsciousness to superconsciousness, from animal existence to divine existence, from the real to the Ideal. Since the fundamental nature of the original Nothingness is parturitive, this process is eternal and never-ending.

Thelemites believe that in the New Aeon of Horus, the Crowned and Conquering Childe, human consciousness is destined to make a major evolutionary leap comparable to that which resulted in the transition from Neanderthal to Cro-Magnon man, resulting in the creation of a new biological subspecies, the so-called "kingly man." This transformation, known as the Next Step, will result in the universal acquisition of the state of cosmic consciousness or universal illumination, technically equivalent to the advent of the "Age of Aquarius." However, it will take several centuries at least to reach this state, before the kingdom of Ra-Hoor-Khuit can be properly established. This transitional epoch, which began in 1904, will be characterized by unprecedented suffering and violence.

The Book of the Law and the other Holy Books of Thelema represent the true gnosis, purged of the perverting doctrines of the Christians. Aleister Crowley, the prophet himself, represents the herald of the coming race of post-humanity. In addition to its metaphysics and spiritual advice the Book of the Law presents a practical political and ethical system of uncompromising purity and integrity. In particular, the new ethics completely overturns the traditional obsession with self-abnegation, world renunciation, pity, compassion, and altruism. It is this pseudo-spirituality which has led mankind to its present impasse, by fostering the self-division that is resulting in the "return of the repressed" and which is the root of all insanity, by inculcating a hatred of life which is destroying the planet, and by preserving and protecting the weak and the unfit, resulting in biological decadence, deterioration, and the curse of totalitarian collectivism, both communist and (even more insidious because unperceived) mass-market-driven urban industrialist capitalism. Against these perversions Thelema utters one Word, which, being interpreted, is "Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law." That is, by establishing a new society in accordance with the law of life itself mankind shall at last achieve collective self-realization, life affirmation, and perfect freedom and vitality. By creating a society in which only the divine can live, men shall become divine or die.

Thelema is necessarily anti-democratic. Democracy presents an absurd and impossible ideal, since the "general will" is unconscious. Therefore the degeneration of democracy itself is inevitable. In accordance with its essential insistence on the sovereignty of the individual, the Law of Thelema is necessarily committed to absolute autocracy. However, the autocrat himself must be wholly identified with the True Will of the whole of the society. That is, he must have achieved the perfect annihilation of the ego. Thus, the autocrat must be a spiritual king, the chief of the Great White Brotherhood himself, his "court" those who have similarly "crossed the Abyss." Moreover, this will be a constitutional autocracy, in which the equal sovereignty of all, guaranteed by open international borders, will be protected by an order of military renunciates second only to the Great White Brotherhood (followed by an aristocracy of wealth). In an autocracy without borders the autarch would have little opportunity to abuse his power, since the population could leave at any time. Thus, Thelemites do not accept the popular prejudice that democracy is the only political system that is compatible with freedom. Indeed, in its inherent tendency to devolve into conformity, mediocrity, and collectivism, Thelemites regard populist mass-market democracy as ultimately subversive of every form of liberty except that "liberty" which it chooses to tolerate for its own ends, which is to say, no liberty at all.

After founding his own occult order, the Fraternity of the Silver Star, in 1907, on the basis of the Cairo Working, and its biannual periodical publication, The Equinox, in 1909, Crowley began to digest the spiritual wisdom of mankind into a coherent practical system based on the Cabalistic Tree of Life. Crowley's intuition that underlying the enormous variety and diversity of human historical religiosity lies a universal, common spiritual inheritance has been largely confirmed by the psychological researches into the "archetypes of the collective unconscious" of the followers of the Zurich School of C. G. Jung, and contemporary ethnological researches into shamanic spirituality. Terence McKenna has argued convincingly that the original spiritual intuition and indeed the primary impetus for the first awakening and development of human consciousness resulted from the accidental ingestion of the psychoactive principle of psilocybin mushrooms, DMT, by our prehominid ancestors. The crux of McKenna's argument is the coincidence that DMT is also manufactured endogenously in the human brain, and is found in many different varieties of vegetable life. Subsequently, prehistoric shamans developed a complete technology of psychospiritual transformation to effect the same result as DMT without the use of any drug, of which eleven essential consciousness altering techniques have been identified: Concentration, Entrainment, Hypostimulation, Empowerment, Ordeals, Imagination, Purification, Breath Work, Posture, Reversal, and Indoctrination. All spiritual practices, wheresoever and whensoever situate, regardless of culture, symbology, or dogmatic orientation, resolve into a combination or permutation, of greater or lesser complexity, of some or all of these essential techniques. All these techniques have one thing in common: they all induce a transformation of the human psyche, which Jesus called metanoia, "new mind." It is analogous to the NDE ("near-death experience"), in which the psyche undergoes a radical disassociation from so-called consensual reality and perceives a new order of reality, which has been called "imaginal reality" (mundus imaginalis), which has its own autonomous teleology and which is even capable of "relativizing" consensual reality in certain circumstances. Crowley undertook to develop his own system of "scientific illuminism" based on his practical researches into comparative mysticism, the result of years of world travel, documented in the twenty-six official publications of the A...A... in Class D, and elsewhere in his extensive discursive writings. These publications document a system of mental self-development which includes invocation, self-control, regular ritual empowerment practices, "sex magick", devotional worship, four hours of daily meditation, breath control, guided visualizations, the manipulation of concrete symbols, concentration, and other practices designed to develop the True or Magickal Will and disorient and disorganize the egoic attachment to consensual reality. A more extensive list identifies 156 discrete practices referred to or discussed by Crowley. Since Crowley regarded each aspirant as an absolute individual, with his own unique path to self-realization, he refused to set out a universally applicable regimen of practice. Aspirants were required to select the practices that appealed to them personally and document and report their progress to their Superior, only on the basis of which advice for further practice was provided. Dogmatic or ideological considerations did not enter, though aspirants were required to memorize the Thelemic Holy Books and pass intellectual examinations in various courses of study. Nonetheless, a basic underlying pattern of practice does emerge from Crowley's writings which is more or less enjoined upon all aspirants, including:

the daily performance of a ritual of "invoking" or sanctification immediately upon awakening in the morning,

the adoration of the Sun at sunrise, noon, sunset, and midnight, followed by one hour of meditation,

the repetition of a formula recalling the central imperative of one's life, viz., the Great Work, before eating,

avoiding mass media,

the regular use of the Thelemic greetings,

the daily imbibition of an Eucharist at sunset,

the daily performance of a ritual of personal empowerment,

the study and memorization of the Holy Books of Thelema,

the practice of self-control and obedience,

simplicity of life,

the daily adoration of the Moon and one's Star,

the performance of a ritual of "banishing" or purification immediately before retiring for the night,

sleeping in a consecrated circle,

devotion to the Goddess as one falls asleep,

the performance of rituals and the celebration of feasts at significant periods of the year,

the regular practice of magick.

It is my intention to show how The Satanic Age and The New Aeon are two ways of describing the same. It is noteworthy, though, that different traditions have their own definition on when The Satanic Age/The New Aeon actually began. Therefore I will briefly outline the main claims of the beginning of The Satanic Age/The New Aeon in the following.

Some say that The Satanic Age started in the Renaissance with the rise of modern science and humanistic ideas, the revival of the ideals and virtues of Ancient Greece and Rome, the blossoming of the Arts as well as Occultism and the ancient mysteries.

The postponement of Judgement Day and the fact that the Christian Church had evolved into a political and economical force (contrary to the original intent of Christendom!) and the succeeding split up of the church into Protestantism and Catholicism (not to mention all the lesser variations) combined with the above listed all added to a weakening of the Church's appeal and power.

This farewell to the Medieval Times' way of thought and perception (or one might say rise of The Satanic Age) was to continue up through the centuries culminating with Darwin's theory of evolution,Nietzche's proclamation:"God is dead!" and the birth of modern physics (e.g. the theory of relativity and the quantum theory) and modern philosophy, the former acknowledging what Tani Janitsang in various articles has elaborated on as being The Dark Force in Nature; the hidden variable in the equation of the grand mystery of the world; the Ain Soph of the Kabbalah or: Satan.

Thelemites on the other hand although acknowledging Mankind's achievements - insist, that a New Aeon started in 1904 with the proclamation of The Law of Thelema through Liber AL vel Legis (The Book of The Law), that according to Thelemic tradition (and A. Crowley) was communicated to Aleister Crowley by an entity named Aiwass in Cairo in 1904.

Do what Thou Wilt Shall be the whole of the Law,Love is the Law, Love under Will and Every Man and Woman Is a Star & were the main credos ofThelema and rituals based on the Golden Dawn and O.T.O. were adapted to The Law of Thelema and The New Aeon.

Finally Modern Satanists claim that The Satanic Age started in 1966 when Anton Szandor LaVey founded The Church of Satan focusing on Mans carnal nature combined with rituals deriving from various occult sources (e.g. Aleister Crowley). Their argument for The Satanic Age is based on the evolution mentioned above.

One could rightfully hold all three opinions as being true considering the fact that a paradigm (Aeon) shift does not happen "overnight". It is a long process with the old paradigm (Aeon) slowly dying, ending up in an interregnum of scepticism, disillusion, decadence and decay - thus paving the way for the one to succeed.

The Christian Age didn't just start with the birth - or death - of Christ, it had a long period of preparation prior to its spreading all over the European nations of that time (the decay of all the ancient cultures and their religious foundation).

Whereas Rome was christened fairly early (approximately 350 e.v.) the Scandinavian countries were not christened until almost 700 years later (In addition to this it is interesting to note that in most rural districts of Europe pagan traditions persisted - despite the christening - and in fact they have - to a certain degree - survived all the way up to our times.).

However there seems to be no doubt that we do indeed live in a Satanic Age (or New Aeon), a turning point for mankind, finally free of the chains of religious imprisonment and submission, on the verge of discovering the potential of each individual: Every Man And Woman Is A Star - the deification, if you will, of Man.

Below I have attempted to outline the main characteristics of the three Aeons according to Thelemic tradition (there is no strict division between the three aeons, each sort of flows into the succeeding one):

The Aeon of Isis (The Pagan Age)

Maternal

Pantheism/Animism/Polytheism.

Nature/Culture

This Aeon is characterized by the spirit/soul being strongly attached to the tribe or clan that each individual belongs to. No such thing as a personal soul exists.

The spirit/soul is at terms with nature, it is involved in an interaction with matter; this being the only logical state of things in terms of keeping the wheel of life in motion.

An acceptance of the existence of other gods/forces than ones own.

A circular perception of life.

Individuality is of no interest - on a philosophical level - in societies of this Aeon.

The Aeon of Osiris (The Christian Age)

Paternal

Polytheism/Monotheism

Culture

The Aeon of Osiris is characterized by the idea of a personal soul and also the concept of conflict between spirit and matter.

Escatology is introduced and each individual has to strive for salvation of his/her soul by avoiding actions binding spirit to matter.

A chauvinistic attitude towards the gods/forces of others is introduced.

A linear perception of life.

Individuality in bondage, submission by means of fear.

The Aeon of Horus (The Satanic Age)

The Conquering Child

Every man and woman is a star.

Culture/Nature

The Aeon of Horus is characterized by the idea of Man as a potential god.

The idea of individuality persists.

The idea of a personal soul is viewed in a much broader definition of the concept personality (more comparable to that of the Aeon of Isis) including the spirits interaction with matter as the definition of life (the wheel of life in motion).

Freedom in use of models applicable to world explanation.

Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law.

Love under will.

As pointed out prior, one may argue when the Satanic Age or The New Aeon began, however I am sure most people will agree that we do live in a Satanic Age or New Aeon. One needs only to look at the number of Satanists openly claiming their beliefs and the, although reluctant, acceptance by society of these people claiming their civil rights to religious freedom and thus to be Satanists. If Christendom were still a strong and powerful religion it would be perilous to openly declare oneself a Satanist - hell, one could be burned at the stake on the grounds of mere suspicion.

Another proof of the Satanic Age/New Aeon is the general search for spiritual betterment outside a Christian context, the opportunity for attainment of knowledge even among the common people and the general focus on the individual in these modern times, the emancipation of women in the Western world (now finally sought combined with an acceptance of the fundamental differences between the sexes), the liberated view upon sex and sexual activities and the fact that for a long, long time not even Christians have been able to live their lives according to the Bible (Thou Shalt not Kill, Thou Shalt not Covet Thy Neighbours Wife, Thou Shalt Love Thy Neighbour as Thou Loveth Thyself etc.). Of course, the fact that we live in complex social structures does speak for the need of rules or laws of a behaviour regulating character. The big argument in this case would then be: to what extent do we wish society to put restraints on our options of action? Thelema and Satanism in general both have similar answers to that question: Do what Thou Wilt. Indulge. Know Thy Self. Be True to Thy Self.

I now intend to show what Satanism and Thelema have in common, in fact why they are indeed so closely connected, why The Satanic Age and The New Aeon are two ways of describing the same:

Satanism is a religion wanting the world, wanting life. It is spirit in matter, not the separation of the two. It is a love affair with the world, with the one(s) you love. There is no good or evil, only various situations where certain things or actions are more useful than others.

It is acceptance of the sum of ones qualities (the self) not a struggle against these.

It is the application of techniques whereby one may communicate and make use of the transcendent psycho dynamics, which some call demons, spirits or entities, for the benefit of oneself and the loved ones. This, of course, implies the realization that reality is subjective, not objective although the prevailing consensus leads one to think so (among modern physicists the prevailing consensus is based on the subjective reality).

It is also the realization of ones transcendental fate - represented by the genius or daimon of the individual (the transcendental aspect of the individual - one is tempted to say the personal god of the individual). This hopefully clarifies why Satanism is a religion based on individuality.

To sum it up one could say that Satanism is the deification of Man, finally freed of his chains and - being both Man and God - if not their superior - at least the Gods' equal.

The New Aeon is a concept of Thelema - a new religion founded by Aleister Crowley - which is characterized by the statements "Do What Thou Wilt Shall Be the Whole of the Law," "Love is the Law, Love under Will" and "Every Man and Woman is a Star" as put forth in Liber AL vel Legis or The Book of The Law written by Aleister Crowley and supposedly dictated to him by an entity named Aiwas (Crowley's genius - or Holy Guardian Angel as he himself put it), later to be identified with Shaitan.

According to Thelema The New Aeon is that period of time (viewed in a large time scale) where Man finally rids himself of the chains of religion and realizes his full potential as the Gods' equal. In order to achieve this one needs to undertake an occult initiation, culminating in the attainment of the knowledge and communication of his genius/daimon. Thus achieved there is no law but to live according to ones transcendental fate (as communicated by the daimon/genius), that is: "ones love affair with the world"(=love is the law) is determined by ones fate (=will). Do What Thou Wilt; ergo you have to live your fate.

The individual now stands with his feet below the hells and his head above the heavens, having transcended both he is now deified and truly a Star.

Every Man and Woman Is a Star is a very important statement as it tells us how to apply The Law of Thelema in practice: Firstly every man and woman is a universe in him- or herself, definitely a more positive view on Mankind than that of the Christians - thus placing mankind in the centre of the universe again. This furthermore signals that different laws apply for different people according to their fate (defined as Will). It is the ultimate statement of individuality, yet at the same time signals that the individual is a(n) (important) part of a larger structure as well as the stars being part of the universe, one missing it would be meaningless to speak of the universe as being the same. One may also find herein a clear hint to reality being subjective, an emanation of spirit from Ain Soph (The Dark Force) into matter, manifestation through active experience, a continuous creation process with the initiate as the active creator (demiurge).

As one can see there are more similarities than differences when comparing The Satanic Age and The New Aeon. The only differences are the various Egyptian god names used in Thelema and the Christian residue in some of the Thelemic writings.

Where Thelema seems to be very inspired by the Egyptian pantheon, Satanism in general tends more to the usage of various Hebrew and Babylonian names of gods/demons for ritual purposes. Although these differences may strike some as being in conflict one has to remember that it is not our names for the phenomena but the phenomena themselves that are interesting. Furthermore the many significant similarities in world views, ethics and main objectives are far more interesting than whether a psycho dynamic force (with the same qualities) is called one or the other. I mean, if, in some remote country, the word for the male sexual organ is "machgut" and we call it a penis (when keeping a civil tone), it is still used for the same things.

As for the Christian residue one has to keep in mind that Thelema was conceived of in a period of time where Christendom was still prevailing throughout the Western world, whereas Satanism in general has had time working for its cause (accepting that Satanism was not defined as a tradition until this century) and thus has been able to avoid such things as religious "leftovers".

To sum up the case I think that it is only fair to state that The Satanic Age or The New Aeon are two ways of describing the same phenomenon, and furthermore that Satanism and Thelema are more alike that different from one another on the basis of the account - although by no means exhausting - given in this essay.

In Crowley's interpretation of the formula of IAO he says of "Satan":

(This) "Devil" is called Satan or Shaitan, and regarded with horror by people who are ignorant of his formula, and, imagining themselves to be evil, accuse Nature herself of their own phantasmal crime. Satan is Saturn, Set, Abrasax, Adad, Adonis, Attis, Adam, Adonai, etc. The most serious charge against him is that he is the Sun in the South. The Ancient Initiates, dwelling as they did in lands whose blood was the water of the Nile or the Euphrates, connected the South with life-withering heat, and cursed that quarter where the solar darts were deadliest. Even in the legend of Hiram, it is at high noon that he is stricken down and slain. Capricornus is moreover the sign which the sun enterers when he reaches his extreme Southern declination at the Winter Solstice, the season of the death of vegetation, for the folk of the Northern hemisphere. This gave them a second cause for cursing the south. A third; the tyranny of hot, dry, poisonous winds; the menace of deserts or oceans dreadful because mysterious and impassable; these also were connected in their minds with the South. But to us, aware of astronomical facts, this antagonism to the South is a silly superstition which the accidents of their local conditions suggested to our animistic ancestors. We see no enmity between Right and Left, Up and Down, and similar pairs of opposites. These antitheses are real only as a statement of relation; they are the conventions of an arbitrary device for representing our ideas in a pluralistic symbolism based on duality. "Good" must be defined in terms of human ideals and instincts. "East" has no meaning except with reference to the earth's internal affairs; as an absolute direction in space it changes a degree every four minutes. "Up" is the same for no two men, unless one chance to be in the line joining the other with the centre of the earth. "Hard" is the private opinion of our muscles. "True" is an utterly unintelligible epithet which has proved refractory to the analysis of our ablest philosophers.

We have therefore no scruple in restoring the "devil-worship" of such ideas as those which the laws of sound, and the phenomena of speech and hearing, compel us to connect with the group of "Gods" whose names are based upon Set, or D, vocalized by the free breath A. For these Names imply the qualities of courage, frankness, energy, pride, power and triumph; they are the words which express the creative and paternal will.

Thus "the Devil" is Capricornus, the Goat who leaps upon the loftiest mountains, the Godhead which, if it become manifest in man, makes him Aegipan, the All.

He is the Open Eye of the exalted Sun, before whom all shadows flee away: also that Secret Eye which makes an image of its God, the Light, and gives it power to utter oracles, enlightening the mind.

Thus, he is Man made God, exalted, eager; he has come consciously to his full stature, and so is ready to set out on his journey to redeem the world. But he may not appear in this true form; the Vision of Pan would "drive men mad with fear". He must conceal Himself in his original guise.

In Magick Crowley speaks of the relation between Satan and Aiwass.

The Devil" is, historically, the God of any people that one personally dislikes. This has led to so much confusion of thought that THE BEAST has preferred to let names stand as they are, and to proclaim simply that AIWAZ --- the solar-phallic-hermetic "Lucifer" is His own Holy Guardian Angel, and "The Devil" SATAN or HADIT of our particular unit of the Starry Universe. This serpent, SATAN, is not the enemy of Man, but He who made Gods of our race, knowing Good and Evil; He bade "Know Thyself!" and taught Initiation. He is "the Devil" of the Book of Thoth, and His emblem is BAPHOMET, the Androgyne who is the hieroglyph of arcane perfection. The number of His Atu is XV, which is Yod He, the Monogram of the Eternal, the Father one with the Mother, the Virgin Seed one with all-containing Space. He is therefore Life, and Love. But moreover his letter is Ayin, the Eye; he is Light, and his Zodiacal image is Capricornus, that leaping goat whose attribute is Liberty. (Note that the "Jehovah" of the Hebrews is etymologically connected with these. The classical example of such antinomy, one which has led to such disastrous misunderstandings, is that between NU and HAD, North and South, Jesus and John. The subject is too abstruse and complicated to be discussed in detail here.

The word, LAShTAL includes all this.

"LA" --- Naught.

"AL" --- Two.

"L" is "Justice", the Kteis fulfilled by the Phallus, "Naught and Two" because the plus and the minus have united in "love under will."

"A" is "the Fool", Naught in Thought (Parzival), Word (Harpocrates), and Action (Bacchus). He is the boundless air, the wandering Ghost, but with "possibilities". He is the Naught that the Two have made by "love under will".

"LA" thus represents the Ecstasy of Nuit and Hadit conjoined, lost in love, and making themselves Naught thereby. Their child is begotten and conceived, but is in the phase of Naught also, as yet. "LA" is thus the Universe in that phase, with its potentialities of manifestation.

"AL" on the contarary, though it is essentially identical with "LA", shows the Fool manifested through the Equilibrium of Contraries. The weight is still nothing, but it is expressed as if it were two equal weights in opposite scales. The indicator still points to zero.

"ShT" is equally 31 with "LA" and "AL", but it expresses the secret nature which operates the Magick or the transmutations.

"ShT" is the formula of this particular aeon; another aeon might have another way of saying 31.

"Sh" is Fire as T is Force; conjoined they express Ra-Hoor-Khuit.

"The Angel" represents the Stele 666, showing the Gods of the Aeon, while "Strength" is a picture of Babalon and The Beast, the earthly emissaries of those Gods.

"ShT" is the dynamic equivalent of "LA" and "AL". "Sh" shows the Word of the Law, being triple, as 93 is thrice 31. "T" shows the formula of Magick declared in that Word; the Lion, the Serpent, the Sun, Courage and Sexual Love are all indicated by the card.

In "LA" note that Saturn or Satan is exalted in the House of Venus or Astarte, and it is an airy sign. Thus "L" is Father-Mother, Two and Naught, and the Spirit (Holy Ghost) of their Love is also Naught. Love is AHBH, 13, which is AChD, Unity, I, Aleph, who is The Fool who is Naught, but none the less an Individual One, who (as such) is not another, yet unconscious of himself until his Oneness expresses itself as a duality.

Any impression or idea is unknowable in itself. It can mean nothing until brought into relation with other things. The first step is to distinguish one thought from another; this is the condition of recognizing it. To define it, we must perceive its orientation to all our other ideas. The extent of our knowledge of any one thing varies therefore with the number of ideas with which we can compare it. Every new fact not only adds itself to our universe, but increases the value of what we already possess.

In "AL" this "The" or "God" arranges for "Contenance to behold contenance", by establishing itself as an equilibrium, "A" the One-Naught conceived as "L" the Two-Naught. This "L" is the Son-Daughter Horus-Harpocrates just as the other "L" was the Father-Mother Set-Isis. Here then is Tetragrammaton once more, but expressed in identical equations in which every term is perfect in itself as a mode of Naught.

"ShT" supplies the last element; making the Word of either five or six letters, according as we regard "ShT" as one letter or two. Thus the Word affirms the Great Work accomplished: 5 Degree = 6Square.

"ShT", is moreover a necessary resolution of the apparent opposition of "LA" and "AL"; for one could hardly pass to the other without the catalytic action of a third identical expression whose function should be to transmute them. Such a term must be in itself a mode of Naught, and its nature cannot encroach on the perfections of Not-Being, "LA" or of Being, "AL". It must be purely Nothing-Matter, so as to create a Matter-in-Motion which is a function of "Something".

Thus "ShT" is Motion in its double phase, an inertia composed of two opposite currents, and each current is also thus polarized. "Sh" is Heaven and Earth, "T" Male and Female; "ShT" is Spirit and Matter; one is the word of Liberty and Love flashing its Light to restore Life to Earth; the other is the act by which Life claims that Love is Light and Liberty. And these are Two-in-One, the divine letter of Silence-in-Speech whose symbol is the Sun in the arms of the Moon.

But "Sh" and "T" are alike formulae of force in action as opposed to entities; they are not states of existence, but modes of motion. They are verbs, not nouns.

"Sh" is the Holy Spirit as a "tongue of fire" manifest in triplicity, and is the child of Set-Isis as their Logos or Word uttered by their "Angel". The card is XX, and 20 is the value of Yod (the Angel or Herald) expressed in full as IVD. "Sh" is the Spiritual congress of Heaven and Earth.

But "T" is the Holy Spirit in action as a "roaring lion" or as the "old Serpent" instead of as an "Angel of Light". The twins of Set-Isis, harlot and beast, are busy with that sodomitic and incestuous lust which is the traditional formula for producing demi-gods, as in the cases of Mary and the Dove; Leda and the Swan, etc. The card is XI, the number of Magick AVD: Aleph the Fool impregnating the woman according to the word of Yod, the Angel of the Lord! His sister has seduced her brother Beast, shaming the Sun with her sin; she has mastered the Lion and enchanted the Serpent. Nature is outraged by Magick; man is bestialized and woman defiled. The conjunction produces a monster; it affirms regression of types. Instead of a man-God conceived of the Spirit of God by a virgin in innocence, we are asked to adore the bastard of a whore and a brute, begotten in shamefullest sin and born in most blasphemous bliss.

This is in fact the formula of our Magick; we insist that all acts must be equal; that existence asserts the right to exist; that unless evil is a mere term expressing some relation of haphazard hostility between forces equally self-justified, the universe is as inexplicable and impossible as uncompensated action: that the orgies of Bacchus and Pan are no less sacremental than the Masses of Jesus; that the scars of syphilis are sacred and worthy of honour as such.

It should be unnecessary to insist that the above ideas apply only to the Absolute. Toothache is still painful, and deceit degrading, to a man, relatively to his situation in the world of illusion; he does his Will by avoiding them. But the existence of "Evil" is fatal to philosophy so long as it is supposed to be independent of conditions; and to accustom the mind "to make no difference" between any two ideas as such is to emancipate it from the thralldom of terror.

We affirm on our altars our faith in ourselves and our wills, our love of all aspects of the Absolute All.

And we make the Spirit Shin combine with the Flesh Teth into a single letter, whose value is 31 even as those of "LA" the Naught, and "AL" the All, to complete their Not-Being and Being with its Becoming, to mediate between identical extremes as their mean --- the secret that sunders and seals them.

It declares that all somethings are equally shadows of Nothing, and justifies Nothing in its futile folly of pretending that something is stable, by making us aware of a method of Magick through the practice of which we may partake in the pleasure of the process.

The Magician should devise for himself a definite technique for destroying "evil". The essence of such a practice will consist in training the mind and the body to confront things which cause fear, pain, disgust,

The People of England have made two revolutions to free themselves from Popish fraud and tyranny. They are at their tricks again; and if we have to make a Third Revolution, let us destroy the germ itself!

Shame and the like. He must learn to endure them, then to become indifferent to them, then to analyse them until they give pleasure and instruction, and finally to appreciate them for their own sake, as aspects of Truth. When this has been done, he should abandon them if they are really harmful in relation to health or comfort. Also, our selection of "evils" is limited to those that cannot damage us irreparably. E.g., one ought to practise smellying assafoetida until one likes it; but not arsine or hydrocyanic acid. Again, one might have a liaison with an ugly old woman until one beheld and loved the star which she is; it would be too dangerous to overcome the distaste for dishonesty by forcing oneself to pick pockets. Acts which are essentially dishonourable must not be done; they should be justified only by calm contemplation of their correctness in abstract cases.

Love is a virtue; it grows stronger and purer and less selfish by applying it to what it loathes; but theft is a vice involving the slave-idea that one's neighbour is superior to oneself. It is admirable only for its power to develop certain moral and mental qualities in primitive types, to prevent the atrophy of such faculties as our own vigilance, and for the interest which it adds to the "tragedy, Man."

Crime, folly, sickness and all such phenomena must be contemplated with complete freedom from fear, aversion, or shame. Otherwise we shall fail to see accurately, and interpret intelligently; in which case we shall be unable to outwit and outfight them. Anatomists and physiologists, grappling in the dark with death, have won hygiene, surgery, prophylaxis and the rest for mankind. Anthropologists, archaeologists, physicists and other men of science, risking thumbscrew, stake, infamy and ostracism, have torn the spider-snare of superstition to shreds and broken in pieces the monstrous idol of Morality, the murderous Moloch which has made mankind its meat throughout history. Each fragment of that coprolite is manifest as an image of some brute lust, some torpid dullness, some ignorant instinct, or some furtive fear shapen in his own savage mind.

Man is indeed not wholly freed, even now. He is still trampled under the hoofs of the stampeding mules that nightmare bore to his wild ass, his creative forces that he had not mastered, the sterile ghosts that he called gods. Their mystery cows men still; they fear, they flinch, they dare not face the phantoms. Still, too, the fallen fetich seems awful; it is frightful to them that there is no longer an idol to adore with anthems, and to appease with the flesh of their firstborn. Each scrambles in the bloody mire of the floor to snatch some scrap for a relic, that he may bow down to it and serve it.

So, even to-day, a mass of maggots swarm heaving over the carrion earth, a brotherhood bound by blind greed for rottenness. Science still hesitates to raze the temple of Rimmon, though every year finds more of her sons impatient of Naaman's prudence. The Privy Council of the Kingdom of Mansoul sits in permanent secret session; it dares not declare what must follow its deed in shattering the monarch morality into scraps of crumbling conglomerate of climatic, tribal, and personal prejudices, corrupted yet more by the action of crafty ambition, insane impulse, ignorant arrogance, superstitious hysteria, fear fashioning falsehoods on the stone that it sets on the grave of Truth whom it has murdered and buried in the black earth Oblivion. Moral philosophy, psychology, sociology, anthropology, mental pathology, physiology, and many another of the children of wisdom, of whom she is justified, well know that the laws of Ethics are a chaos of confused conventions, based at best on customs convenient in certain conditions, more often on the craft or caprice of the biggest, the most savage, heartless, cunning and blood-thirsty brutes of the pack, to secure their power or pander to their pleasure in cruelty. There is no principle, even a false one, to give coherence to the clamour of ethical propositions. Yet the very men that have smashed Moloch, and strewn the earth with shapeless rubble, grow pale when they so much as whisper among themselves, "While Moloch ruled all men were bound by the one law, and by the oracles of them that, knowing the fraud, feared not, but were his priests and wardens of his mystery. What now? How can any of us, though wise and strong as never was known, prevail on men to act in concert, now that each prays to his own chip of God, and yet knows every other chip to be a worthless ort, dream-dust, ape-dung, tradition-bone, or --- what not else?"

So science begins to see that the Initiates were maybe not merely silly and selfish in making their rule of silence, and in protecting philosophy from the profane. Yet still she hopes that the mischief may not prove mortal, and begs that things may go on much as usual until that secret session decide on some plan of action.

It has always been fatal when somebody finds out too much too suddenly. If John Huss had cackled more like a hen, he might have survived Michaelmas, and been esteemed for his eggs. The last fifty years have laid the axe of analysis to the root of every axiom; they are triflers who content themselves with lopping the blossoming twigs of our beliefs, or the boughs of our intellectual instruments. We can no longer assert any single proposition, unless we guard ourselves by enumerating countless conditions which must be assumed.

This digression has outstayed its welcome; it was only invited by Wisdom that it might warn Rashness of the dangers that encompass even Sincerity, Energy and Intelligence when they happen not to contribute to Fitness-in-their-environment.

The Magician must be wary in his use of his powers; he must make every act not only accord with his Will, but with the proprieties of his position at the time. It might be my will to reach the foot of a cliff; but the easiest way --- also the speediest, most direct, least obstructed, the way of minimum effort --- would be simply to jump. I should have destroyed my will in the act of fulfilling it, or what I mistook for it; for the true will has no goal; its nature being to Go. Similarly a parabola is bound by one law which fixes its relations with two straight lines at every point; yet it has no end short of infinity, and it continually changes its direction. The initiate who is aware Who he is can always check his conduct by reference to the determinants of his curve, and calculate his past, his future, his bearings and his proper course at any assigned moment; he can even comprehend himself as a simple idea. He may attain to measure fellow-parabolas, ellipses that cross his path, hyperbolas that span all space with their twin wings. Perhaps he may come at long last, leaping beyond the limits of his own law, to conceive that sublimely stupendous outrage to Reason, the Cone! Utterly inscrutable to him, he is yet well aware that he exists in the nature thereof, that he is necessary thereto, that he is ordered thereby, and that therefrom he is sprung, from the loins of so fearful a Father! His own infinity becomes zero in relation to that of the least fragment of the solid. He hardly exists at all. Trillions multiplied by trillions of trillions of such as he could not cross the frontier even of breadth, the idea which he came to guess at only because he felt himself bound by some mysterious power. Yet breadth is equally a nothing in the presence of the Cone. His first conception must evidently be a frantic spasm, formless, insane, not to be classed as articulate thought. Yet, if he develops the faculties of his mind, the more he knows of it the more he sees that its nature is identical with his own whenever comparison is possible.

The True Will is thus both determined by its equations, and free because those equations are simply its own name, spelt out fully. His sense of being under bondage comes from his inability to read it; his sense that evil exists to thwart him arises when he begins to learn to read, reads wrong, and is obstinate that his error is an improvement.

We know one thing only. Absolute existence, absolute motion, absolute direction, absolute simultaneity, absolute truth, all such ideas; they have not, and never can have, any real meaning. If a man in delirium tremens fell into the Hudson River, he might remember the proverb and clutch at an imaginary straw. Words such as "truth" are like that straw. Confusion of thought is concealed, and its impotence denied, by the invention. This paragraph opened with, "We know"; yet, questioned, "we" make haste to deny the possibility of possessing, or even of defining, knowledge. What could be more certain to a parabola-philolsopher than that he could be approached in two ways, and two only? It would be indeed little less than the whole body of his knowledge, implied in the theory of his definition of himself, and confirmed by every single experience. He could receive impressions only by meeting A, or being caught up by B. Yet he would be wrong in an infinite number of ways. There are therefore Aleph-Zero possibilities that at any moment a man may find himself totally transformed. And it may be that our present dazzled bewilderment is due to our recognition of the existence of a new dimension of thought, which seems so "inscrutably infinite" and "absurd" and "immoral", etc. --- because we have not studied it long enough to appreciate that its laws are identical with our own, though extended to new conceptions. The discovery of radioactivity created a momentary chaos in chemistry and physics; but it soon led to a fuller interpretation of the old ideas. It dispersed many difficulties, harmonized many discords, and --- yea, more! It shewed the substance of the Universe as a simplicity of Light and Life, possessed of limitless liberty to enjoy Love by combining its units in various manners to compose atoms, themselves capable of deeper self-realization through fresh complexities and organizations, each with its own peculiar powers and pleasures, each pursuing its path through the world where all things are possible. It revealed the omnipresence of Hadit identical with Himself, yet fulfilling Himself by dividing his interplay with Nuit into episodes, each form of his energy isolated with each aspect of Her receptivity, delight developing delight continuous from complex to complex. It was the voice of Nature awakening at the dawn of the Aeon, as Aiwaz uttered the Word of the Law of Thelema.

So also shall he who invoketh often behold the Formless Fire, with trembling and bewilderment; but if he prolong his meditation, he shall resolve it into coherent and intelligible symbols, and he shall hear the articulate utterance of that Fire, interpret the thunder thereof as a still small voice in his heart. And the Fire shall reveal to his eyes his own image in its own true glory; and it shall speak in his ears the Mystery that is his own right Name.

This then is the virtue of the Magick of The Beast 666, and the canon of its proper usage: to destroy the tendency to discriminate between any two things in theory, and in practice to pierce the veils of every sanctuary, pressing forward to embrace every image; for there is none that is not very Isis. The Inmost is one with the Inmost; yet the form of the One is not the form of the other; intimacy exacts fitness. He therefore who liveth by air, let him not be bold to breathe water. But mastery cometh by measure: to him who with labour, courage, and caution giveth his life to understand all that doth encompass him, and to prevail against it, shall be increase. "The word of Sin is Restriction"; seek therefore Righteousness, enquiring into Iniquity, and fortify thyself to overcome it.

Satanism is a religion based upon the earthly needs of the individual. It realizes mans need to express himself in the form of religion. It therefore makes existence itself that very religion. The practitioner of Satanick Magick understands that without earthly power he is at a serious disadvantage. It is the here and now that concerns him. He is upon this earth ,and upon this earth, he must live.

Very few scholars will argue that Satan is the "Lord of the earth". It is he that holds material wealth in his hands. The Christian is swayed from material and earthly goods by their God for this very reason. For, a taste of success would deter them from the bond of slavery that is characteristic of the Christian Gnosis.

Satanism doesn't necessarily view Satan in the same way as modern Christian teachings portray Him. The Satanick magickian's thought pattern is based upon scientific data. He views biblical myth as a picturesque teaching system and not as concrete history. For him Satan is Lucifer or Lux-ifer. His name means Light Bearer or Bringer of Light. This taken in context with the idea of Satan as the Lord of the Earth, we then see him as a magickal archetype of the Sun. The Sun is our light bearer and bringer of light. It is the engine of our very existence. Every life form on the earth requires the Sun as its main source of life. Therefore as upon the earth ,we deify the Sun as Satan ,the Bright Spiritual Sun. It must be said that this is not entirely in agreement with the system of Satanism that has been dispensed by Dr Anton Szandor LaVey. It is the result when LaVeyan Magic is integrated with the doctrines and teachings of another pioneer occultist, Aleister Crowley. As this will deal primarily with practical Satanick Magick, the influence of Dr LaVey will play the prominent part. The works of Mr. Crowley are highly recommended reading for anyone who is serious about occult study. Many Satanists will disagree with this however, the authors firmly believe in the validity of the Aeon of Horus and the New dispensation administered by the Book of the Law. We are not LaVeyites, nor Crowleyites. Nor are we orthodox Satanists but Thelemites who have found great value in the practical system of magic set forth by Dr LaVey.

The creative platform upon which this system of magick is based lies in that we have taken a force that is harmonious with the intention of earthly magic and applied it in a manner in which it becomes a powerful symbol of the true God of Man, The Great Central Sun.

When performing satanick magick you are establishing your own godhead by the identity of yourself with the central source of power. You invoke the energy that we call Lord of the Earth, therefore becoming that energy and in the name of that force manifesting the will from the elemental powers that you have raised.

In this we will be examining the magical system of modern day Satanism of Dr LaVey in the light of the New Aeon Gnosis. It is a complete system of magic based upon personal experience and work of a legitimate Black Magickal Order. It is hoped that the reader will explore this system with an open mind. This is especially so if he happen to be an orthodox LaVeyan Satanist. It is firmly believed that by the integration of traditional magickal techniques and modern satanic thought, a very powerful system of infernal magick is created. With this in mind the student should find no difficulty in building a powerful and successful system for himself. The choice is yours and the door has now been opened wider than ever. This book will allow you entrance into that door to power.

It must be said however that even though this magical system has been well researched and a great deal of practical experience has been invested in its composition, there still lies certain dangers. Not those that one would naturally expect but dangers of the mind and more, the ego. Remember the law of the Satanist, "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you". Power is no excuse for ignorance. So, now; all those who have read the above, it is time to part ways with the unenlightened. If you feel the overwhelming need to live within the structured walls of a group, then go. For true power comes only to one who can be individualized amongst the many zombies. One who can stand tall alone. For the Call is real one, `the Call of Cthulu!

``Nor is it to be thought ... that man is either the oldest or the last of earth's masters, or than the common bulk of life and substance walks alone. The Old Ones were, the Old Ones are, and the Old Ones shall be. Not in the spaces we know, but between them, they walk serene and primal, undimensioned and to us unseen. Yog-Sothoth knows the gate. Yog-Sothoth is the gate. Yog-Sothoth is the key and guardian of the gate. Past, present, future, all are one in Yog-Sothoth. He knows where the Old Ones broke through of old, and when they shall break through again...'' H.P. Lovecraft, The Dunwich Horror (as from the `Necronomicon') The century in which we live has witnessed the dawning of a New Aeon; or rather, the return of energies and entities, across vast gulfs of time and space, from primal eras which antedate by millenia the appearance of humankind upon the Earth. In his pivotal Mythos tale, The Call of Cthulhu, Lovecraft has adumbrated the first portents of this return, the outer edges of whose pericosis with our own continuum is detected by the incredibly subtle and sensitive `antennae' of poets, writers and artists - more especially those already aligned to the concept of `outsideness' through their own explorations of alien, exotic, bizarre and outre subject matter. And indeed, it is through the work of such artists in actuality that the first hints and descriptions of these forces and entities find expression. This `new Aeon' is currently known under a variety of names by differing cults: the astrological `Age of Aquarius'; the Thelemic `Aeon of Horus', inaugurated by the avatar Aiwaz, in 1904 e.v.; Frater Achad's `Aeon of Maat', the Era of Truth and Justice; and so on. To that particular body of magicians, artists, writers, and other visionaries of the Cthulhu Mythos which constitutes Aeon of Cthulhu Rising, with reference to the prophetic fictional work of H.P. Lovecraft, as outlined above. As his description of the initial wave of Aeonic energy (which has such drastic effect on the dreams of `sensitive' individuals around the world) coincides with the rising of the island of R'lyeh on 28 February 1925 e.v., those of the understanding know the Aeon of Cthulhu Rising numerates this event as Year One, A.C.

However, before the complete influx of these elder forces into our present space-time continuum can be facillated, the secret and primal gateways must be located, and opened, to allow access from `outside the circles of time.' This gateway has been glyphed by Lovecraft as one of the Great Old Ones themselves - ``the noxious Yog-Sothoth who froths as primal slime in nuclear chaos beyond the nethermost outpost of space and time.'' As Guardian of the Gate, he is synonymous with Choronzon. The ``nethermost outpost'', itself an opening or window to the dimensionality of the Great Old Ones (Universe B), is the star Sothis, or Sirius. In turn, the gateway of the New Aeonic forces (Yog_Sothoth) is identified with the `non-Sephiroth', Daath, on the qabalistic Tree of Life. As Kenneth Grant explains: ``It is now possible to see the continous flow and evolution of Aeons occuring simultaenously and passing over into the world of anti-matter. The Yog (or Yug .. an aeon or age ..) of Sothoth is the counterpoint - as the Aeon of Set-Thoth, or Daath - of its Twin, the Yug-Hoor, or Aeon of Horus. Yog-Sothoth is the Gate through the aeons to the Star- Source beyond Yuggoth, the Yug or Aeon of Goth.''

The knowledge and formula by which this gateway can be reopened can therefore be only apprehended through the negative vortex of Daath. In the case of Lovecraft himself, who in waking life vehemently denied the verdical nature of the material with which he was dealing, the process of appropriation was almost completely subconscious, occuring through the medium of dream-experiences. As would be expected, the visitation of such unhuman and ultracosmic revelations took the form of the most hideous nightmares. By the same token, those initiates of the Aeon of Cthulhu are working towards the Opening of the Gate of Yog-Sothoth must be prepared to undertake this most dangerous descent into the Abyss of Daath (the so-called `false knowledge') in order to activate these formulae effectively. This process involves the projection of a part of themselves into those spaces `between', to which Lovecraft makes repeated reference, and which constitute the existentiality of the Old Ones themselves. Is is here that this `false knowlege' (glyphed as Lovecraft as the grimoire, Necronomicon) can be found and retrieved, brought back through the vortex of Daath, and finally given actual, concrete manifestation in the Outer.

In The Magician, his training and his work, Butler writes that:

"A clear idea of the nature of the magical Egregore, or group form, should be built up in the mind in order that the aspirant may understand what part he plays in the whole complex scheme, and thereby may know how closely he is guided and aided in his chosen work."

[The mysterious head idol reportedly possessed by the Knights Templar, called the Baphomet, may have been intended as a representation of an egregor. RNS]

The word also appeared in The Magical Philosophy,

"That deep level of racial and archetypal egregores...is termed the Collective Unconscious..."

The word appears thrice more in the discussion on the ensuing page, However, we are introduced to a new term: "Watcher".

"...the Watcher ... at the Threshold ... is not ... a valid archetypal egregore "

The word also appeared in the French introductory booklet of AMORC, Maitrise de la Vie:

" ... l'Egregore manifeste par la Roise-Croix constitue un idee-force ... Il est un champ d'energie cosmique ... "

By Eliphas Levi, The Great Secret, "The Magnetism of Evil" has a multitudinous array of egregors (spelt without an "e"):

Levi refers to the powers of nature and the cosmos as egregors. "These colossal forces have sometimes taken a shape and have appeared in the guise of giants: these are the egregors of the Book of Enoch."

Levi later claims, discussing the planets; "...governed by those genii which were termed the celestial watchers, or egregors, by the ancients."

Further on in his article he relates the egregor to the Kabbalistic Adam Kadmon ("that collective giant"), to the "Anakim in the Bible," and generally speaking to natural powers operating the world and to their analogies as they have been expressed in myths in various cultures. When he has done that, he says:

"This is why we reject the mythology of the egregors finally and absolutely."

The manuscript of this work had been finished in 1868 and was first printed in 1897. Levi, who had been trained as a Roman Catholic Priest, died in 1875. The founders of the Golden Dawn were acquainted with his writings. Levi himself was conversant with Rosicrucian ideas.

The word egregor at the Intermediate Greek - English Lexicon, founded upon the seventh edition of Liddell and Scott's Greek-English Lexicon, with reference to egeiro = to be awake, to watch.

As I turned to egeiro (Root EGER) (transliterating into English):

(1) to awaken, to wake up, to rouse.

(2) to rouse, to stir up (example: stir up the fight)

(3) to raise from the dead (N.T.)

(4) to raise or to erect (example: a building)

(1) to keep watch or vigil (Il)

(2) to be awake (Hom.)

(3) to rouse or stir oneself, be excited by passion (Hes., Thuc.)

Clearly this word had many interpretations. Obviously it was connected to watching and wakefulness. It was obvious that at least some of the references I quoted above knew of its meaning as well as its source.

A Concordance to the Septuagint, -"egregoros".

The Concordance brings two citations of the word egregoros, together with the Hebrew equivalent = (Hebrew letters, "ayin", "yod", "reish"). The word in Hebrew is pronounced IR or ER.

(1) Lamentations, 4:14: "They wandered blind through the streets, polluted with blood, so that none could touch their garments."

The Septuagint translated "blind" into 'watchers"; instead of the Septuagint translators read .

Lamentations 4:14, according to the Septuagint, should be read thus:

"Watchers moved through the streets, polluted with blood, so that none could touch their garments."

The word is spelt "ayin", "vav", "reish". The difference between the letters "yod" and "vav" is a tiny half a millimeter length of stroke. There could have been a scribal error somewhere, especially as the word IR or ER had become rather extinct as a terminology, probably from the third century C.E..

(The Vulgate translated "blind" = "caeci" . Daniel 4:10 is translated in the Vulgate as "vigil").

The second reference from the Septuagint is from Daniel, 4:10, 20,

Daniel 4:10,: "...and behold, a watcher and a holy one came down from heaven."

According to the Septuagint there are two Greek versions to this sentence: Codex A (Sinaiticus) writes egregoros but Theodosion writes "eir".

According to Andre Lacocque, Le Livre de Daniel, commentaire de l'ancien Testament, there are two versions, one "paraphrastique" (paraphrasing ) and the other "suit de pres le texte" (follows the text). The book of Daniel is the only biblical one where the Greek of the Septuagint is replaced by that of Theodosion, who adhered to the Hebrew and Aramaic text...

It is clear that Theodosion considered "eir" a special concept or terminology and decided not to translate it into an ordinary Greek adjective. He probably thought it would lose its significance in such a translation.

Now that we know that a Watcher is an egregor, and that an egregor is an "eir", which in Hebrew would be ("ayin", "yod", "reish") we turn to the Hebrew and English Lexicon of the Old Testament, with an appendix containing the biblical Aramaic, based on the Lexicon of Wm. Gesenius,

Here we come to the end of our search. According to Gesenius:

(he writes ir, not er) = "n. m. waking, or wakeful one, i.e. angel."

The root of the word is Syrian, in Hebrew it would be "er", plural form "irin" (Daniel, 4:10, etc.).

Gesenius then continues: "c.f. Charles - Enoch..."

Thus, the mystery is solved. An egregor is an angel, sometimes called watcher; in Hebrew the word is ir, and the concept appears in The Book of Enoch, edited by Charles (that would be 1 Enoch).

- also means city. (In modern Hebrew, ir - city; arim - cities).

We have now made a full circle with circumstantial evidence, leading us to wonder whether a group of people, in the second half of the nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth century, a group that was somehow connected to the Rosicrucian mysteries, was also dealing with Enochian secrets. It is obvious that they knew of the Book of Enoch, the manuscript of which had been brought to Europe in the 18th century; they had classical education and could read Greek. Still, the secret (whatever it was) must have been a very well-kept one, for the only ones referring to Enoch are Eliphas Levi, prior to the foundation of The Golden Dawn, and the writers quoted above - after the demise of The Golden Dawn. Of the Golden Dawn itself we know they reorganized the system called Enochian magic, based on the activities of Dr. John Dee (1527 - 1608). Dee referred to his system as "angelic". It was the G. D. members who named it Enochian. Of John Dee it has been claimed that he was the "founder of the Rosicrucian Order, the protestant response to the Jesuits" ...

An additional question left unanswered is whether Dr. Dee was aware of the word egregor in the sense of a watcher/angel from the Book of Enoch. Generally speaking, the word "governor" in Dee's context is translated into Hebrew as "Sar" (the letter "shin" vowelled as "sin" and the letter "reish"), when it is retranslated it would be "arch" like "archangels (Greek "archon" also translated as 'Prince'). This type of angel, the archangel, appears in the Book of Enoch, and the "Sarim" in there are called "Irim" as well.

What is even more amazing is that the Dead Sea Scrolls refer to "towers" protected by angels. During a discussion of angelic names, M. J. Davidson, in his Angels at Qumran, explains that "The group of four archangels, Michael, Sariel, Raphael and Gabriel are called by Syncellus (1.En.9.1) 'megoloi archanggeloi'. (Syncellus in his time distinguished between 'mere' archangels and 'Mega' Archangels). The same list occurs in 1QM9.14-16, where the shields of the towers are to be inscribed with these four names."

Davidson explains that in the Qumran Community, the war between The Sons of Light (the Qumranites) and The Sons of Darkness (all outside the sect) ... "is to be conducted with acute awareness of the place of the angelic world in it.... 1QM 9.10-16 provides details on battle formations which involve four 'towers' ('Migdalot') which are apparently units of soldiers with specifically long spears and shields.... On each of their shields is written the name of one of the four archangels."

An additional puzzle concerning Dr. Dee and modern occult milieu, the former being the elusive Liber Loagaeth, otherwise known as Liber Mysteriorum Sextus et Sanctus, dictated to Kelly and Dee by the angels and the latter Lovecraft's Necronomicon - "The Call of Cthulhu". Both texts deal with the Old Ones and both are reminiscent of the myth of the Fallen Angels. Lovecraft claimed to have based his Necronomicon on a Manuscript of the Liber Loagaeth but later he retracted his claim. This is in conformity with my assumption that the topic of egregors was "top secret" among operating magicians at the beginning of this century.. Somehow the mysterious Liber Loagaeth manuscript disappeared (how did it come into Lovecraft's possession ?) while Lovecraft denied ever having come into contact with it.

However, according to information on The Necronomicon, Liber Logaeth was not dictated to Kelly. The Latin text came to Dr. Dee's possession while he was at the court of Emperor Rudoph II, in Prague.

-The"the fabulous city of Irem"-

"Irem is very important in Arab magick. 'Irem Zhat al Imad' (Irem of the Pillars) ...was probably built by the Jinn under the direction of Shaddad, Lord of the tribe of Ad. The tribe of Ad, according to legend, was a race roughly equivalent to the Hebrew 'Nephilim'....In Arab legend Irem is located in the Rub al Khali...- 'the empty Quarter' [which] ...refers to the VOID and is the same as AIN in the Kabbalistic traditions....Modern archaeologists have identified ruins at Shisha, Oman, as those of Irem, better known as the lost city of Ubar."

The name Irem is too close to comfort to the name IRIM (egregors) or ARIM (cities) in Hebrew (it can also be 'spelt' Erim - awake - in the plural form), especially as the Liber Logaeth deals with fallen angels.

"Imad" is "Amood" (Hebrew), a pillar. It comes from the Hebrew verb AMD - 'to stand' - .

"Jinn" in Arabic is "devil", an oriental kind of devil as in "Aladdin and the Lamp".

("Majnun" in Arabic means "crazy" (bedeviled ?). )

"Ad" means 'eternity' or 'forever' in Hebrew ( )

Thus, Irim, the city of the Nephilim is again linked with the Book of Enoch, since the Nephilim, according to that Book, were the sons of the Irim (the egregors).

It is also linked with Sitchin's theory of the aliens who built ziggurats ("Zhat" ?) as landing sites. If I wished to speculate, I could rephrase and say that according to Arab Legend, the city of the ever-wakeful ones, had tall landing and taking off sites (pillars, ziggurats), which were built by an immortal tribe.

Moreover, the name Cthulhu, could refer to the Hebrew root = KTL ("kof", "tet", "lamed") which means to 'kill', in battle and, or, other such unsavory circumstances. Thus, Cthulhu would be the name of a mighty and lethal (KaTLani) warrior.

It must be pointed out, however, that the Liber Logaeth abounds with many other strange names. I would like to suggest, therefore, four possibilities:

(1) The similarity of the names Irem and Cthulhu to Hebrew is accidental;

(2) Dr. Dee received those names by channeling and scrying from incorporeal entities;

(3) An excerpt or a manuscript of The Book of Enoch was available to Dr. Dee; (4) An excerpt or a manuscript of what later came to be known as Liber Logaeth was available to Dr. Dee.

Since I prefer the third possibility, which again connects me to the Book of Enoch, I ask myself again whether Dr. Dee had some kind of version, or excerpt of Enoch in his extensive library.

`Was there an excerpt of The Book of Enoch in Dee's period ?

"The Book of Enoch is among the important Jewish apocalyptic books of the Second Temple. It was considered part of the scriptures among the Christians until the third century C.E. and Enoch is mentioned in the New Testament (Jude, 14) as a prophet: Later it became apocryphal and as the years went by it was lost. It was preserved only in the Ethiopic Church."

According to Michael A. Knibb, The Ethiopic Book of Enoch, "Regrettably we have no information concerning the circumstances in which Enoch was translated from Aramaic into Greek nor of the presumed date of translation ... fourth to sixth centuries ..."

According to Matthew Black, The Book of Enoch - or 1 Enoch, "...no one seems to doubt that it was a Greek vorlage which the Ethiopic translated, with or without the help of a copy of the Semitic (in my view Hebrew) original."

According to J. T. Milik, The Book of Enoch, Aramaic Fragments of Qumran Cave 4, "The altogether incontestable terminus ante quem falls in the year 164 BC, the date of the composition of the Book of Dreams which is closely dependent on the Book of Watchers."

Prior to the modern research of the Book of Enoch, hardly nothing was known about it, while "the short Greek excerpts in Syncellus, covering 6.1-10, 14; 15.8 - 16.1, provided the only source of information we had".

Georgius Syncellus wrote, at the beginning of the 9th century (808-810) a chronography of the earth, from the first day of creation to the year 284 C.E. Syncellus used The Book of Enoch as part of his sources, though, according to Milik, not directly: "It will be remembered, however, that he [Syncellus] was acquainted with the Enochic writings only through the works of the Alexandrian historians Pandorus and Annianus (around C. E. 400)."

Fortunately for us, Syncellus' sources were based on the "Book of Giants". As a result, the Greek excerpts that survived supplement the Ethiopic text.

The Chronography of Syncellus was translated into Latin already at the beginning of the 9th century, together with the Chronographies of the Confessor (752-818) and others by Anastasius, surnamed Bibliothecarius, who, after having been cardinal and anti-pope and thrice excommunicated, became papal librarian under Hadrian II and John VIII. His literary energy was great, especially in translation from the Greek.

"Anastasius was one of the few people in the west who knew Greek..."

However, the Latin version of Anastasius, which is called Historia Tripartita or Chronographia Tripartita and which was used in the West does not refer to the fallen angels, since Syncellus was used as a source only from Roman times.

Knibb claims that a Latin translation of the entire Book of Enoch may have existed at one time, and brings, as a reference, two examples, one of which from the 9th century:

"En.1.9, the passage quoted in Jude 14f., is quoted also by Ps. Cyprian and Ps. Vigilius. The latter seems to have taken the passages not from Jude, but from the Book of Enoch itself ..."

"... In 1893, M. R. James discovered a fragment of Enoch in Latin in a 9th century British Museum manuscript ..."

Between the 9th and 15th centuries, as far as I know, there is no evidence that the Book of Enoch was used, directly, or through quotations, not to mention the expression egregor in Greek or in Latin.

Milik writes that "The existence of a book of Enoch kept by the Abyssinian church among the sacred books of their bible had been known in Europe, in a vague way, since the end of the fifteenth century"

Pico Della Mirandola (end of 15th century) heard of Enoch: "It is probably of this type of work that Pico is thinking when he says that his practical cabala has nothing to do with the wicked magics going on under the names of Solomon, Moses, Enoch or Adam, by which demons were conjured by bad magicians ... from Pico's Apologia."

After the fall of Constantinople, (1453 C.E.) many texts of the Roman and Greek culture reached the West. On the other hand, the legend of the angelic uprising was known in the east of the Empire. A Bar Hebraeus (1226 - 1286) wrote an extensive chronography on the subject:

"...Therefore, according to what time hath brought, I, having entered the Library of the city of MARAGHAH of ADHORBIJAN, have loaded up this my little book with narratives ... from many volumes of the Syrians, Saracens (Arab), and Persians which are preserved here....

After Adam came Seth his son. In the time of Seth, when his sons remembered the blessed life (which they had led) in Paradise, they went up into the mountain of Hermon, and there they led a chaste and holy life, being remote from carnal intercourse; and for this reason they were called IRE , meaning watchers and sons of Alohim. ... After Seth came Anosh his son ... although he submitted to marriage, he was not neglectful in pleasing God, and he did so more than those who chose a life of virginity and who went up into the mountain of Hermon, but who did not abide in their covenant. ...

...And in the fortieth year of Yard [biblical Yared]... the Sons of God, about two hundred souls, came down from the mountain of Hermon, because they had lost all hope of a return to Paradise. And because they lusted for carnal intercourse with women, their brethren the sons of Seth and Anosh despised them, and regarded them as transgressors of the covenant, and they refused to give them their daughters. And because of this, they went to the children of Cain, and took wives, and begat mighty men of names ... notorious for murders and robberies. Moreover, they set up over them the first king, a man whose name was Samyazos.

...The ancient Greeks say that Enoch is Harmis [Hermes ] Trismaghistos ..."

(The Chronography of Bar Hebraeus (1226-1286), translated by E. W. Budge, 1932).

Thus, it is obvious that the legend of Enoch was assimilated in the Orient (and in the Slavonic world as well - there are Slavonic translations).

As far as the west is concerned, direct quotations from Syncellus could be found at the Chronography of all Times, the Thesaurus Temporum. This one was compiled and edited by Josephus Juste Scaliger (1540 - 1609). It is written in Greek, which I do not read. The book I saw was Reproductio phototypica editionis 1606 Thesaurus Temporum, Lugduni Batavorum, 1606.

Dr. Dee who knew Greek (he would write notes in Greek in his diary) died in 1608. However, his "angelic" activities took place in the last decade of the 16th century. Nevertheless, in the light of the proximity of dates, it cannot be ruled out that he had seen, read or owned a Chronography or a manuscript quoting the Greek Syncellus.

The Thesaurus Temporum was finally translated into Latin and published in 1652 ("Prodiit Parisiis a.1652, Typis Venetis revisum a.1729).

The Latin Chronology says:

"Canon Chronicus...ad Georgii Syncelli Chronologiam...

Anni a mundi conditu

1000 primus egregorum descensus

1058 egregororum ad filias hominum profectio secunda

1077 Egregogorum manifesta transgressio

1123 Enoch nascitur (Enoch annus 1)..

1420 Diluvium futurum Enocho revelatur (Enoch anni 298)

1487 Enoch transferatur in paradisum (Enoch anni 365)

1642 De Enoch anni non emplius loquitur Georgius.

Noe nascitur, 1643 Noe annus 1.

It is obvious from the above that even though the Chronography is very concise, the word egregor is rather extensively used in its context. The translator, Goar, did not change egregor into "vigil".(from Greek into Latin). He also claimed that he used for his translation Scaliger's compilation as well as a Codex Palatinus by Syncellus, #246 in the Vatican Library, "Romae, Anno 1637"

In conclusion I would venture to suggest that Dr. John Dee could have come into contact with a version of the Book of Enoch; a Slavonic version perhaps, or the Greek excerpts by Syncellus. It would also account for the great secrecy under which this term was both kept, and preserved. Although the Irim, the egregors, are angels on both sides of the camp - fallen angels as well as faithful ones .

"Mary" The horrible results of the expirements of one demented scientist named Jack on his girlfriend Mary. Mary now has the ability to assume forms at will but can only hold them for a short time before reverting to her natural form, a small gravity bound shoggoth.

Abdul AL Hazred Poet and mystic of Sanna in Yemen, best know for his Kitab Al-Azif or Necronomicon. He's said to have been a descendant of the mythical tribe of Ad, and is a legend in the Middle East. Alhazred is known for his many travels to forgotten and unholy places across the Middle East. The first of these led him to Egypt, where he studied under the wizard Yakthoob. After his master's death, he led the wizard's disciples to Memphis and then Irem, where many of them were destroyed in a freak accident. He spent some time at the Nameless City, then rejoined his followers in Alexandria. There, he failed to dispel the evil from the Black Mosque and was forced to leave the city. He returned to the Nameless City and from there went to the Valley of Tombs and the Black Mountain in Turkey before settling in Damascus. During a pilgrimage to Chorazin on the Sea of Galilee, Alhazred fell into a trance-like state. This lasted for eight years, and during this time he wrote the Necronomicon. He wrote about his dimensional travels in this book and probably worshiped both Cthulhu and Yog-Sothoth. Ibn Khallikan, his 12th-century biographer, tells of the mad poet being devoured in the marketplace of Damascus in broad daylight by an invisible monster. Others claim that his death was illusory and that he was borne off to the Nameless City to be tortured and killed.

Arkham A fictional town supposedly based upon the real-life city of Salem, Massachusetts.

Azathoth The blind idiot god, the monstrous nuclear chaos beyond angled space. Azathoth, although unintelligent, acts as the king of gods in the mythos, issueing chaos with his messenger, Nyarlathotep.

Black Goat of the Woods Alias of Shub Niggurath Also Black Goat of the Woods with a Thousand Young.

Byakhee A creature of some sort described by H. P. Lovecraft best in "The Festival." "There flapped rhythmically a horde of tame, trained, hybrid winged things....not altogether crows, nor moles, nor buzzards, nor ants, nor decomposed human beings...." -H.P. Lovecraft, The Festival Also, a widely used character generator supporting several languages for the Windows platform.

Chaugnar Faugn An elephant like god.

Cthulhu The high priest of the elder gods, he stayed on Earth after the stars changed, laying dead and dreaming in his city of R'lyeh.

Dagon Demi-God of the Deep Ones, often referred to as Father Dagon, basically is a VERY large, very old Deep One.

Deep Ones A race of fish/frog/human hybrids that live beneath the seas. These creatures can successfully breed with humans and do not die of natural causes.

Dunwich Small, almost deserted village in north central Massachusetts. The town was founded in 1692 by settlers who left Salem just before the witch trials started. For a while, the town prospered on a number of mills that sprang up, but after one of the founders suffered a nervous breakdown and killed several prominent townspeople, things started to go downhill, starting with most of the mills closing, another few headline-grabbing murders, various scandals, more economic disasters...soon enough, Dunwich had a reputation as a hopeless backwater hellhole, complete with people marrying close relations, weird religious looniness, and a general degeneracy of morals and genetics. One of the biggest things to ever happen in Dunwich were the strange disasters and murders that plagued the area in the late 1920s. It all started when a local named Wilbur Whately--whose scrambled DNA resulted in a boy in his early teens who was about eight feet tall, thoroughly goatish in appearance, and friggin' huge--was killed by dogs as he tried to break into the university library in a nearby town. Soon, the house that Whately lived in (both his parents were either dead or mysteriously missing) was destroyed in an explosion. Then cattle started disappearing. And then people. Some of them eventually turned up, but never in sufficient quantities to make a full person... At the time, all the Dunwichians (Dunwichites? Dunwichivillians?) assumed all these events were connected, and eventually, some university professors came to town and held an exorcism--either seriously believing that they were destroying evil or putting on a show to try to calm the growing panic. As it turns out, though there were no more disappearances, Dunwich didn't fare that well afterwards. Some residents were driven even crazier by all the hoopla, and state officials, spooked by the weird occurences, destroyed all the road signs leading to Dunwich, pushing the town further and further into obscurity and hopelessness. Nowadays, Dunwich is almost dead and almost forgotten.

Eater Eaters are horrid beings which are, fortunately, very rare. They are created by dark and terrible spells from the skinned corpse of a human being. The resulting creature is devoid of all memories, but can be trained by its creator. First mentioned in My Aunt's house by Michael C LaBossiere

Elder Things an ancient race, capable of taking the bodies of other things. Among other things, they were responsible for creating the shoggoths, who later rose up an destroyed the elder things. They are typically seen with the barrel shaped bodies of deep sea plants that they last controlled when they were destroyed. As this race where time travellers, it is perfectly possible to see one at any point in history or the future, millenia after thier extinction.

Ghouls The classic walking dead from ancient lore. They are a degenerate race that feeds off of the dead.

Grappler A strange subterranean entity composed entirely of writhing hands. It is carnivorous an can eat human flesh. The Grappler by Jack Reda

Hastur He Who is not to be Named. Hastur goes by a myriad of names, and is typicaly personafied by a column of fire.

Leng Leng is a city in the H.P. Lovecraft mythos, built by the Great Old Ones just east of Mountains of Madness in the Antarctic. Professor Dyer, from the Miskatonic University Expedition, found this city together with his colleague, a person named Dansforth, when they investigated the destruction of a subexpedition base came to the west of the mountains. They belived that this was the first city build by the Great Old Ones, and that is was build on the site where they, the Great Old Ones, first came to earth. The city is now in ruins, because of the ice fields and the unspoken horror from the Cold Wastes of Kadath. The inhabitants where forced to move to another subeterranean city, which was located miles below the plateau.

Mi-Go They are creatures from beyond the borders of our galaxy, they mined certain areas on earth for minerals which could not be found on their home planet. The location of three such mining colonies on earth are known; one in the Andes, the Appalachians, and the Himalayas. The Mi-Go are more vegetable than animal, they are somewhat fungoid. Because of this they can not be photographed by ordinary camera equipment. What can be learned from various descriptions which has been found the following conclutions can be drawn; they are pinkish in color, about five feet long, with a sort of convoluted ellipsoid where its head should be, covered with a multitute of very short antennae. What makes the Mi-Go truly unique is the ability to travle in heatless and airless space in is corporeal form, though some of its variants do need mechanical or curious surgical transportation to do so. The Vermont variety have organic wings which allow the free flight in space, allthough flying in our atmosphere is rather limited. They communicate primarly through telepathy, but with a few surgical modifications they can communicate with humans, allthough their accent is somewhat buzzy. They are very competent in matters such as surgery and can remove the brain of lesser species and storage them for transportation to other worlds through space. Contrary to what some people belive, the Mi-Go are physical beings and therefore killable.

Miskatonic University A university in Arkham, which is in New England somewhere, according the H P Lovecraft's geography. Their motto is, "A Small Sacrifice for Knowledge", and their mascot is the Fighting Cephalopods. Visit their website at www.miskatonic.net. Now&with online admissions!

Necronomicon The book of dead names. Bound in human flesh and written by Abdul Al Hazred, this book is either a super powerful grimoire of magical spells, or a who's who of the Mythos deities and sub-deities. One thing that should be remembered though, is that this book is NOT real, never was real, and was never written. There are several fraudulent copies floating around, most of which are recyclings of Sumerian/Babylonian mythologies.

PHPSlash A port of the popular Slashdot code to PHP.

R'lyeh R'lyeh. City of the Great Old Ones now lying under the Pacific Ocean. Castro, a member of the Cthulhu Cult captured in the swamps south of New Orleans on November 1, 1907, stated that the Great Old Ones slumber in their stone houses in the great city of R'lyeh, waiting for the time when the stars are right and the earth is ready for their return. He goes on to say that it is the spells of Great Cthulhu who preserve the Great Old Ones. For countless millennium R'lyeh sat abandoned and in deathless sleep, then a catastrophe struck and it sank beneath the waves. The uppermost pinnacles of the city and Great Cthulhu's tomb are located at S. Latitude 47° 9', W. Longitude 126° 43', though the full size and extent of the city is unknown. On February 28, 1925 (EST), R'lyeh raised from the depth of the Pacific Ocean floor. There is only one recorded physical encounter with the city of R'lyeh, written in English text by Gustaf Johansen prior to his strange and untimely death. It is thought that he wrote the encounter in English to protect his wife from inadvertently reading it rather than providing a more accurate description (Johansen was Norwegian). Johansen encountered R'lyeh on March 23, 1925. Initially, Johansen describes a coastline of mingled mud, ooze, and weedy Cyclopean masonry. At the pinnacle of the island stood a garganteous monolith that soared into the heavens. The monolith was surrounded by greenish stone blocks of unbelievable size. Though not describing any definite structure, Johansen describes broad impressions of vast angles and surfaces too great to belong to anything on this earth. This description collaborates with that of Henry Wilcox, who described the geometry of the place as wrong--abnormal, non-Euclidean, and loathsomely redolent of spheres and dimensions not of our own. Johansen describes the polarizing miasma of the place as mind affecting, creating illusions of insanity in conjunction with the crazily elusive angles of carved rock. He goes on to tell of climbing what he could only imagine to be a staircase made of titan oozing blocks which was meant for no mortal foot. Atop the monolith was an oddly angled door which he accidentally opened, releasing Great Cthulhu from his tomb. Johansen fled along with one other member of his crew, who later died. The island sunk again on April 2, 1925 and lies again as the tomb of the deathless Great Old Ones.

Richard Upton Pickman Richard Pickman is the leading character in H. P. Lovecraft's short story, Pickman's Model. He was a prolific painter who lived in Boston, Massachusetts in the 1920s. He was best known for his ability to fuse life and horror into the canvas, and his work caused much uproar in the local art world. Most of his critics wouldn't even look at his work because of its inherent morbidity.

Shoggoth The Shoggoths where created by the starheaded Old Ones a long time ago, they where the first organic creatures of earth. They where created as best of burden, to serve the Old Ones under the sea. The Shoggoths are protoplasmic creatures, able to change their "flesh" into any type of organs or forms by command of the Old Ones. After a time they devloped and manged to mimic the sounds and speak of their masters, and even began thinking for themselves. Their changed led to the War of Resubjugation, which occurred around one-hundred and fifty million years ago, when they rebbeled agaist their masters. How long this war lasted is unknown, but the Old Ones manged to regain control by the use of energy weapons. The first and only encounter between a Shoggoth and a human occurred under the lost city on the Plateau of Leng. They are desribed by Professor Dyer of the Miskatonic University Expedition (At the Mountains of Madness) as: "vaster than a subway train--a shapeless congeries of protoplasmic bubbles, faintly self-luminous and with myriads of temporary eyes forming and unforming as pustules of greenish light all over the tunnel-filling front...crying "Tekeli-li! Tekeli-li!" and at last we remembered that the demoniac Shoggoths--given life, thought, and plastic organ patterns by the Old Ones, and having no language save that which the dot groups expressed--had likewise no voice save the imitated accents of their bygone masters."

The Esoteric Order of Dagon An organization devoted to Dagon, Babylonian sea deity and one of the Great Old Ones in H.P. Lovecraft's pantheon. It was founded by Captain Obed Marsh. Before the fall of Innsmouth, this cult had basically consumed the entire town, completely replacing the freemasons and taking over its hall, along with several churches. Almost the entire non-cult population of the town was eventually driven out or sacrificed. Father Dagon was worshipped, along with Mother Hydra, by the Deep Ones, an amphibious race of ageless fish-people who had a colony near Devil's Reef just offshore of Innsmouth, and who had taken great steps towards subverting its population, to the extent of interbreeding with many of its remaining citizens. The Deep Ones were probably responsible for the resurgence of fishing in the town observed after the rise of The Esoteric Order of Dagon. The head of the Esoteric Order wears "a kind of tall tiara," which holds special significance to the Deep Ones, as do the dates of April 30th and October 31st. Lovecraft does not describe the vestments used by the Order's priests, except to say that they were "peculiar" and wore "queer robes." Many members of the Order have the Innsmouth Look, which indicates Deep One ancestry.

The Great Old Ones Strange beings from a long-forgotten age, they were worshippers of the Outer Gods. Those who remain in our world feature prominently in the stories of H. P. Lovecraft. One must be careful not to confuse the Great Old Ones (Cthulhu and co.) with the Outer Gods (Azathoth et al.), the Deep Ones (Children of Father Dagon), or the Crawling Chaos Nyarlathotep, the soul and messenge of the mad and insensate Outer Gods.

Time Gas A strange gas that can be minded from pockets in the earth that causes any who breathe it to regress back in time to a pre-human era. It was first mentioned in the story The Black Traveler by moderan

Yog-Sothoth Yog-Sothoth is one of the Outer Gods. Many would probably just classify Yog-Sothoth as a Great Old One, as Cthulhu, this would be a wrong asumption. If you have read the story; Dunwich Horror, Lovecraft quotes a passage from the Necronomicon: "Yog-Sothoth knows the gate. Yog-Sothoth is the gate. Yog-Sothoth is the key and the guardian to the gate. Past, present, and future are one in Yog-Sothoth." He is here described as a creature which knows of the Great Old ones; their ways, where they lived, and where they now slumber. Which means Yog-Sothoth is a different type of creature. A creature above the Great Old Ones. He is belived to be the one which spawned the Whateley twins, Wilbur and his brother. Wilburs brother was never named, because he didn't look much like a human at all, but more like his father. Which can be read in the flowing quote from the Dunwich Horror: "Bigger'n a barn...all made o' squirmin' ropes...hull thing sort o' shaped like a hen's egg bigger'n anything with dozens o' legs like hogsheads that haff shut up when they step...nothin' solid abaout it--all like jelly, an' made o' sep'rit wrigglin' ropes pushed clost together...great bulgin' eyes all over it...ten or twenty maouths or trunks a-stickin' aout all along the sides, big as stove-pipes, an' all a-tossin' an' shuttin'...all gray, with kinder blue or purple rings...Oh, oh, my Gawd, that haff face--that haff face on top of it...that face with the red eyes an' crinkly albino hair, an' no chin, like the Whateleys...It was a octopus, centipede, spider kind o' thing, but they was a haff-shaped man's face on top of it, an' it looked just like Wizard Whateley's, only it was yards an' yards acrost..."

Yuggoth Yuggoth is the name used by H.P. Lovecraft in his stories to refer to the planet Pluto. It is where the Mi-Go come from.

The Necronomicon tells of the Old Ones, who arrived on the primal

earth from "dark stars". When land appeared they swarmed from the

oceans to build cities at the poles and raise temples to Those

cursed by the Gods. Their ghoulish spawn ruled the earth until

the Elder Lords, appalled at their abominations, acted:

"...casting Them forth from the Earth to the Void beyond the

planes where chaos reigns and form abideth not. And the Elder

Lords set Their seal upon the Gateway and the power of the Old

Ones prevailest not against its might.

Loathsome Cthulhu rose then from the deeps and raged with

exceeding great fury against the Earth Guardians. And They

bound his venomous claws with potent spells and sealed him up

within the City of R'lyeh wherein beneath the waves he shall

sleep death's dream until the end of the Aeon."

- Liber Logaeth (translated by Dr. John Dee)

"In all probability Cthulhu is based on the Norwegian myth of the

Kraken, a legendary monster thought to live under the waves of

the northern seas."

-Philip A. Shreffer, The H.P. Lovecraft Companion

"Below the thunders of the upper deep;

Far, far beneath in the abysmal sea,

His ancient, dreamless, uninvaded sleep

The Kraken sleepeth; faintest sunlights fell

About his shadowy sides: above him swell

Huge sponges of millennial growth and height;

And far away into the sickly light,

From many a wondrous grot and secret cell

Unnumber'd and enormous polypi

Winnow with giant arms the slumbering green.

There hath he lain for ages and will lie

Battening upon huge seaworms in his sleep,

Until the latter fire shall heat the deep;

Then once by man and angels to be seen,

In roaring he shall rise and on the surface die."

In exile with their Master Azathoth, "Lord of All", in the

chaotic Void, the Old Ones bide the day until they return to rule

earth once again.

"Azathoth is the 'ultimate nuclear chaos', at 'the center of

infinity'. It is from the Throne of Azathoth that the aimless

waves, 'whose chance combining gives each frail cosmos its

eternal law', originate from."

"However, before the complete influx of these elder forces into

our present space-time continuum can be facillated, the secret

and primal gateways must be located, and opened, to allow access

from 'outside the circles of time'. This gateway has been glyphed

by Lovecraft as one of the Great Old Ones themselves - 'the

noxious Yog-Sothoth who froths as primal slime in nuclear chaos

beyond the nethermost outpost of space and time'.

Yog-Sothoth is coterminous with ALL time and space. In Through

the Gates of the Silver Key Lovecraft describes Yog-Sothoth

thus:'an All in One and One in All of limitless being and

self-the last, utter sweep which has no confines and which

outreaches fancy and mathematics alike. ' Past, present, future

all are one in Yog-Sothoth.

The acting principles of Yog-Sothoth and Azathoth

are 'infinite expansion and infinite contraction' respectively.

As Guardian of the Gate, Yog-Sothoth is synonymous with

Choronzon.

The 'nethermost outpost', itself an opening or window

to the dimensionality of the Great Old Ones.

Universe B...is the

star Sothis, or Sirius.

"It is now possible to see the continous flow and evolution of

Aeons occuring simultaneously and passing over into the world of

anti-matter. The Yog (or Yug .. an aeon or age ..) of Sothoth is

the counterpoint - as the Aeon of Set- Thoth, or DA'ATH - of its

Twin, the Yug-Hoor, or Aeon of Horus. Yog-Sothoth is the Gate

through the aeons to the Star-Source beyond Yuggoth, the Yug or

Aeon of Goth." Kenneth Grant

"The knowledge and formula by which this gateway can be reopened

can therefore be only apprehended through the negative vortex of

DA'ATH. In the case of Lovecraft himself, who in waking life

vehemently denied the veridical nature of the material with which

he was dealing, the process of appropriation was almost

completely subconscious, occuring through the medium of

dream-experiences. As would be expected, the visitation of such

unhuman and ultra-cosmic revelations took the form of the most

hideous nightmares."

"That cult would never die until the stars came right again,

and the secret priests would take Cthulhu from His tomb to

revive His subjects and resume His rule of earth. The time

would be easy to know, for then mankind would have become as

the Great Old Ones; free and wild, and beyond good and evil,

with laws and morals thrown aside and all men shouting and

killing and reveling in joy. Then the liberated Old Ones would

teach them new ways to shout and kill and revel and enjoy

themselves, and all earth would flame with a holocaust of

ecstasy and freedom."

- H. P. Lovecraft, "The Call of Cthulhu", (1926)

Necronomicon: "Original title Al Azif being the word used by

the Arabs to designate that nocturnal sound (made by insects)

supposed to be the howling of demons."

"Composed by Abdul Alhazred, a mad poet of Sanaa, in Yemen,

who is said to have flourished in the time of the Ommiade

Caliphs, circa A.D. 700."

- H. P. Lovecraft

According to Lovecraft's history, Abdul Alhazred "travelled

widely, from Alexandria to the Punjab, and was well read. He had

a flair for languages, and boasts on many occasions of his

ability to read and translate manuscripts which defied lesser

scholars. Just as Nostradamus used ritual magic to probe the

future, so Alhazred used similar techniques (and an incense

composed of olibanum, storax, dictamnus, opium and hashish) to

clarify the past, and it is this, combined with a lack of

references, which resulted in the Necronomicon being dismissed as

largely worthless by historians. Alhazred "is often referred to as 'the mad Arab', and while he

was certainly eccentric by modern standards, there is no evidence

to substantiate a claim of madness, other than a chronic

inability to sustain a train of thought for more than a few

paragraphs before leaping off at a tangent. HPL wrote that Alhazred's title was 'Mad Poet'. 'Mad' is usually

written majnun in Arabic. Majnun means 'mad' today. However, in

the eighth century (Alhazred's time) it meant 'Possessed by Jinn'

[the Old Ones]. Alhazred appears to have had access to many sources now lost,

and events which are only hinted at in the Book of Genesis or the

apocryphal Book of Enoch, or disguised as mythology in other

sources, are explored in great detail.

Alhazred may have used dubious magical techniques to clarify the

past, but he also shared with 5th. century B.C. Greek writers

such as Thucydides a critical mind and a willingness to explore

the meanings of mythological and sacred stories. His speculations

are remarkably modern, and this may account for his current

popularity: he believed that many species besides the human race

had inhabited the Earth, and that much knowledge was passed to

mankind in encounters with being from other 'spheres'. He shared

with some neo-platonists the belief that stars are like our sun,

and have their own unseen planets with their own lifeforms, but

elaborated this belief with a good deal of metaphysical

speculation in which these beings were part of a cosmic hierarchy

of spiritual evolution. He was also convinced that he had

contacted these 'Old Ones' using magical invocations, and warned

of terrible powers waiting to return to re-claim the Earth - he

interpretated this belief in the light of the Apocalypse of St.

John, but reversed the ending so that the Beast triumphs after a

great war in which the earth is laid waste. Alhazred visited the ruins of Babylon and the

subterranean secrets of Memphis and spent ten years alone in

the great southern desert of Arabia-the Roba el Khaliye or

'Empty Space' of the ancients and 'Dahna' or 'Crimson Desert'

of the modern Arabs, which is held to be inhabited by

protective evil spirits and monsters of death. Of this desert

many strange and unbelievable marvels are told by those who

pretend to have penetrated it. In his last years Alhazred

dwelt in Damascus, where the Necronomicon (Al Azif) was

written and of his final death or disappearance (738 A.D.)

many terrible and conflicting things are told. He is said by

Ebn Khallikan (12th century biographer) to have been seized by

an invisible monster in broad daylight and devoured horribly

before a large number of fright-frozen witnesses. Of his

madness many things are told. He claimed to have seen the

fabulous Irem or city of Pillars, and to have found beneath

the ruins of a certain nameless desert town the shocking

annals and secrets of a race older than mankind. He was only

an indifferent Moslem, worshipping unknown deities whom he

called Yog-Sothoth and Cthulhu. Alhazred is said (by HPL) to have journeyed to Egypt in search

of occult secrets. This is consistent with the time frame that it

was supposed to have ocured in. Between the fourth century and

the tenth century Near Eastern scholars interested in magickal

matters viewed Egypt as an invaluable source of information.

During this time many corrupt Egyptian words and phrases entered

magical writings. Gnostic, Coptic, and Greco-Egyptian word

formulas were incorporated in great number into existing Arab

magickal systems.....It has been suggested that some of the

Barbarous names used in Lovecraft's fiction might indeed be

corrupt Egyptian word formulas. Particularly Yog-Sothoth,

Azathoth, and Nyarlathotep are said to have an Egyptian origin.

(Note the obviously Egyptian endings 'hotep' and 'thoth'.)"

"Azathoth is said to be derived from Asa-thoth. The Rites of the

Gods states that Asa translates as 'source' from ancient Egyptian

and Thoth (Tehut) is of course the popular god name. Asa is an

alternate name of Thoth....(He is considered the "source" because

of his association with the beginning of time). Ausaa-Thoth or

Aasaa-Thoth is translated as the intelligence of Thoth.

"Mankind, Shaitan is Khadhulu."

-Quran 25:29

Cthulhu is very close to the Arabic word Khadhulu (also spelled

al qhadhulu). Khadhulu (al qhadhulu) is translated as 'Forsaker'

or 'Abandoner'. Many Sufis and Muqarribun writings make use of

this term (Abandoner). In Sufi and Muqarribun writings

'abandoner' refers to the power that fuels the practices of

Tajrid 'outward detachment' and Tafrid 'interior solitude'.

By the time Mohammad was writing Shaitan was being called 'the

Old Serpent (dragon)' and 'the Lord of the Abyss'. The Old

Serpent or Old Dragon is, according to experts such as E.A. Budge

and S.N. Kramer, Leviathan [Hebrew]. Leviathan is Lotan

[Canaanite]. Lotan traces to Tietan. Tietan, we are told by the

authorities on Near Easern mythology is a later form of Tiamat.

According to the experts the Dragon of the Abyss called Shaitan

is the same Dragon of the Agyss named Tiamat.

The dragon is an abandoner for he leaves all that is sacred.

The dragon goes here and there without pause.

-The Book of Annihilation (an Arabic text on magick)

One of the titles of the Dragon is Lord of the Abyss. The title

Lord of the Abyss translated into Sumerian is 'Kutulu'. Kutu

means 'Underworld' or 'Abyss' and Lu is Sumerian for 'Lord' or

'Person of importance'.... Indeed the ruler of the Abyss (kutu)

in Sumeria was the Old Dragon Mumu-Tiamat.

Some...link Kingu (Qingu) with the Ancient Ones by assigning him

the status of general for the Ancient Ones in their war against

the Elder Gods (which this myth supposedly represents.) Though

these groups claim to be servants of the Elder gods, they worship

Tiamat as a benevolent creatrix, ignoring the fact that it was

Tiamat who appointed Kingu HER general in the Enuma Elis [the

Babylonian Epic of Creation], leading to the conclusion that

Tiamat was an Ancient One and therefore that this group

worshipped the Ancient Ones while claiming to serve the Elder

Gods.

Another race is the Deep Ones who are a type of amphibious

creature resembling a mixture of a fish, a frog and man. The Deep

Ones worship a god called Dagon. Dagon is a deity resembling a

giant Deep One. Dagon and the Deep Ones seem to be Allied in some

way with Cthulhu.

Arab myth mentions mysterious fish-men from the sea of Karkar.

These fish-men are probably derivative of the myths related to

the actual Near Eastern god Dagon. Dagon is a Philistine deity

that appears as a giant fish-man. Dagon is a later version of the

Babylonian Oannes.

Oannes was a repulsive amphibius being who came from space in an

egg shaped vehicle. The fragments of text that survive are a

Babylonian retelling of a much more ancient Sumerian tale. Six

thousand years ago or so, the Vela supernova was an awe inspiring

sight from the earth. It was then, according to legend, that

powerful beings or Watchers came from the sky, taught humans

the arts of civilization, then made them their slaves.

According to Robert Temple in his Sirius Mystery, astronomical

knowledge imparted by the Oannes is preserved by the tribal Dogon

people today.

In A.D. 950 the Azif, which had gained a considerable though

surreptitious circulation amongst the philosophers of the age,

was secretly translated into Greek by Theodorus Philetas of

Constantinople under the title Necronomicon.

This title [Necronomicon] is translated as 'the Book (or image)

of the Practices of the Dead'; Necro being Greek for 'Dead' and

Nomos meaning 'practices', 'customs' or 'rules' (as in astronomy).

For a century it impelled certain experimenters to terrible

attempts, when it was suppressed and burnt by the patriarch

Michael. After this it is only heard of furtively, but (1228)

Olaus Wormius made a Latin translation later in the Middle

Ages.

The work, both Latin and Greek, was banned by Pope Gregory IX

in 1232, shortly after its Latin translation, which called

attention to it.

A Latin translation was made in 1487 by a Dominican priest Olaus

Wormius. Wormius, a German by birth, was a secretary to the first

Grand Inquisitor of the Spanish Inquisition, Tomas de Torquemada,

and it is likely that the manuscript of the Necronomicon was

seized during the persecution of Moors ('Moriscos') who had been

converted to Catholism under duress; this group was deemed to be

unsufficiently pure in its beliefs. .

It was an act of sheer folly for Wormius to translate and print

the Necronomicon at that time and place. The book must have held

an obsessive fascination for the man, because he was finally

charged with heresy and burned after sending a copy of the book

to Johann Tritheim, Abbot of Spanheim (better known as

'Trithemius'); the accompanying letter contained a detailed and

blasphemous interpretation of certain passages in the Book of

Genesis. Virtually all the copies of Wormius's translation were

seized and burned with him, although there is the inevitable

suspicion that at least one copy must have found its way into the

Vatican Library.

...The Latin text was printed twice - once in the 15th

century in block letter (evidently in German) and once in the

17th (probably Spanish); both editions being without

identifying marks, and located as to time and place by

internal typographic evidence only.

It was written in seven volumes, and runs to over 900 pages in

the Latin edition.

Of the Latin texts now existing one (15th century) is known

to be in the British Museum under lock and key, which another

(17th century) is in the Bibliotheque Nationale at Paris. A

17th century edition is in the Widener Library at Harvard, and

in the Library of Miskatonic University at Arkham; also in the

library of the University of Buenos Aires.

Numerous other copies probably exist in secret, and a 15th

century one is persistently rumored to form part of the

collection of a celebrated American millionaire. A still

vaguer rumor credits the preservation of a 16th century Greek

text in the Salem family of Pickman; but if it was so

preserved, it vanished with the artist R. U. Pickman , who

disappeared early in 1926. The book is rigidly suppressed by

the authorities of most countries, and by all branches of

organized ecclesiasticism. Reading leads to terrible

consequences. It was from rumors of this book (of which

relatively few of the general public know) that R. W. Chambers

is said to have derived the idea of his early novelThe King in

Yellow.

They have walked amidst the stars and They have walked the

Earth. The City of Irem in the great desert has known Them;

Leng in the Cold Waste has seen Their passing, the timeless

citadel upon the cloud-veiled heights of unknown Kadath

beareth Their mark. Wantonly the Old Ones trod the ways of

darkness and Their blasphemies were great upon the Earth; all

creation bowed beneath Their might and knew Them for Their

wickedness.

-Liber Logaeth (translated by Dr. John Dee)

The Latin text came into the possession of Dr. John Dee in the

sixteenth century. Dr. Dee made the only English translation of

the Necronomicon known.

Dr. John Dee, the famous English magician, and his assistant

Edward Kelly were at the court of the Emperor Rudolph II to

discuss plans for making alchemical gold, and Kelly bought the

copy from the so-called 'Black Rabbi' and Kabbalist, Jacob

Eliezer, who had fled to Prague from Italy after accusations of

necromancy. At that time Prague had become a magnet for

magicians, alchemists and charletons of every kind under the

patronage of Rudolph, and it is hard to imagine a more likely

place in Europe for a copy to surface.

Dee and Kelly's Enochian system has many parallels with HPL.

Schueler asserts that the Enochian tradition proposes the

existence of a God or Force which is the manifestation of

Infinite Space similar to Crowley's Nuit and HPL's Yog-Sototh.

Schueler also contends that The Divine manifestation of the

nuclear point at the center of infinity (equivalent to Hadit or

Azathoth) is also important to Enochian magick. The Enochian Keys

state that the world is nearing an eon spanning Cycle in which

Ancient Gods will return to there throne and the world will be

forever changed. These keys also mention an imprisoned dragon

**Cthulhu**

The Necronomicon appears to have had a marked influence on

Kelly; the character of his scrying changed, and he produced an

extraordinary communication which struck horror into the Dee

household...Kelly left Dee shortly afterwards. Dee translated the

Necronomicon into English while warden of Christ's College,

Manchester...

An English translation made by Dr. Dee was never printed, and

exists only in fragments recovered from the original MS.

...The manuscript passed into the collection of the great

collector Elias Ashmole, and hence to the Bodleian Library in

Oxford.

Dee's cipher manuscript was called Liber Logaeth, and was

evidently a portion of a larger manuscript, the origin and

nature of which is not known. Due to its history and the

similarity in content to the Cthulhu Mythos, this document has

been presented...as being, at least a portion of, the document

which was the inspiration for HPL's Necronomicon.

The Old Ones were, the Old Ones are and the Old Ones shall be.

From the dark stars They came ere man was born, unseen and

loathsome They descended to primal earth. Nor is it to be thought

that man is either the oldest or the last of Earth's masters, or

that the common bulk of life and substance walks alone. The Old

Ones were, the Old Ones are, and the Old Ones shall be.

Beneath the oceans They brooded while ages past, till seas gave

up the land, whereupon They swarmed forth in Their multitudes and

darkness ruled the Earth. At the frozen Poles They raised mighty

cities, and upon high places the temples of Those whome nature

owns not and the Gods have cursed. The ice desert of the South

and the sunken isles of Ocean hold stones whereon Their seal is

engraven, but who hath seen the deep frozen city or the sealed

tower long garlanded with seaweed and barnacles?

Great Cthulhuis Their brother, the shaggoths Their slaves. The

Dholes do homage unto Them in the nighted vale of Pnoth and Gugs

sing Their praises beneath the peaks of ancient Throk. Great

Cthulhu is Their cousin, yet can he spy Them only dimly. l!

Shub-Niggurath!

Beyond the Gate dwell now the Old Ones; not in the spaces known

unto men but in the angles betwixt them. Outside Earth's plane

They linger and ever awaite the time of Their return; for the

Earth has known Them and shall know Them in time yet to come. Not

in the spaces we know, but between them. They walk serene and

primal, undimensioned and to us unseen.

And the Old Ones hold foul and formless Azathoth for Their Master

and Abide with Him in the black cavern at the centre of all

infinity, where he gnaws ravenously in ultimate chaos amid the

mad beating of hidden drums, the tuneless piping of hideous

flutes and the ceaseless bellowing of blind idiot gods that

shamble and gesture aimlessly for ever. They walk unseen and foul

in lonely places where the Words have been spoken and the Rites

howled through at their Seasons. The wind gibbers with Their

voices, and the earth mutters with Their consciousness. They bend

the forest and crush the city, yet may; not forest or city behold

the hand that smites.

The soul of Azathoth dwelleth in Yog-sothoth and He shall beckon

unto the Old Ones when the stars mark the time of Their coming;

for Yog-sothoth is the Gate through which Those of the Void will

re-enter. Yog-sothoth knowest the mazes of of time, for all time

is one unto Him. He knowest where the Old Ones came forth in time

along long past and where They shall come forth again when the

cycle returneth. Yog-Sothoth knows the gate. Yog-Sothoth is the

gate. Yog-Sothoth is the key and guardian of the gate. Past,

present, future, all are one in Yog-Sothoth. He knows where the

Old Ones broke through of old, and where They shall break through

again.

After day cometh night; man's day shall pass, and They shall rule

where They once ruled. As foulness you shall know them and Their

accursedness shall stain the Earth. Man rules now where They

ruled once; They shall soon rule where man rules now. After

summer is winter, and after winter summer. They wait patient and

potent, for here shall They reign again.

The quotes from Lovecraft were taken from his short story The

Dunwich Horror ( 1928). Lovecraft attributes the source of his

material to Olaus Wormius' Latin version of Abdul Alhazred's

Necronomicon, as printed in Spain in the 17th century. Note how

Dee's Liber Logaeth places the return of the Old Ones at some

indeterminate future while in Lovecraft's version, They are

coming soon (and in his stories have already arrived.)

No Arabic manuscript is known to exist; the author Idries Shah

carried out a search in the libraries of Deobund in India,

Al-Azhar in Egypt, and the Library of the Holy City of Mecca,

without success.

The Arabic original was lost as early as Wormius' time, as

indicated by his prefatory note (there is, however, a vague

account of a secret copy appearing in San Francisco during the

present century but later perishing by fire); and no sight of

the Greek copy - which was printed in Italy between 1500 and

1550 - has been reported since the burning of a certain Salem

man's library in 1692.

Nathan of Gaza precipitated one of the most profound events in

the history of Judaism. In 1665, while only 21 or 22 years old,

he proclaimed that Sabbatai Tzevi was the Messiah.

Nathan also wrote the Sepher ha-Sha'are ha-Daath, a commentary on

the Book of the Alhazred. Nathan's purpose appears to have been

to develop a methodology for a systematic exploration of the

realms of the Klippoth [husks or shells of materiality which

ensnare the spirit], as part of his mission to redeem the sparks

[concentrated shards of the original creation], using some of

Alhazred's techniques. It is an extraordinary development of

Alhazred's work, identifying the Klippoth with the primordial Old

Ones.

Nathan developed a huge following and for many years Judaism was

riven with charges of heresy. Many prominent Rabbis and community

leaders sided with Nathan, and it took most of a century for the

drama to unwind. Eventually the Sabbatean movement went

underground, and while it is a certainty that a copy of the

Sepher ha-Sha'are ha-Daath exists in a private library somewhere,

no one is admitting that they have it.

In the years from 1933-38 the few known copies of the

Necronomicon simply disappeared; someone in the German government

of Adolph Hitler took an interest in obscure occult literature

and began to obtain copies by fair means or foul. Dee's

translation disappeared from the Bodleian following a break-in in

the spring of 1934. The British Museum suffered several abortive

burglaries, and the Wormius edition was deleted from the

catalogue and removed to an underground repository in a converted

slate mine in Wales (where the Crown Jewels were stored during

the 1939-45 war). Other libraries lost their copies, and today

there is no library with a genuine catalogue entry for the

Necronomicon. The current whereabouts of copies of the

Necronomicon is unknown; there is a story of a large wartime

cache of occult and magical documents in the Osterhorn area near

Salzburg.

Since the publication in 1938 of H. P. Lovecraft's essay on the

Necronomicon, at least one more copy of this obviously rare book

has surfaced and is now in the collection of the [John Hay]

Library at Brown University, Providence, Rhode Island. Printed by

the Owl's Wick Press at Philadelphia in 1973, this modern edition

of the Necronomicon appears to be a facsimile of the original

Arabic text that Lovecraft presumed lost by the year A. D. 1050.

A problematical aspect of the Brown University copy, however, is

that the text, though appearing to the untrained eye to be in

Arabic, is actually in a language known to Semitic scholars as

Duraic.

The Great Beast Aleister Crowley interpreted the horrifying

communication by Kelly (under the influence of the Necronomicon

four centuries earlier) as the abortive first attempt of an

extra-human entity to communicate Thelemic Book of the Law.

There is no question that Crowley read Dee's translation of the

Necronomicon in the Ashmolean, probably while researching Dee's

papers; too many passages in Crowley's Book of the Law read like

a transcription of passages in that translation.

The Ancient Ones Satan; Teitan Tiamat

Azathoth Aiwass (?) Azag-thoth

The Dunwitch Horror Choronzon Pazuzu

Shub Niggurath Pan Shub Ishniggarab (?)

Out Of Space The Abyss Absu; Nar Mattaru

IA! IO! IAO! IA (Jah; Ea; Lord of Waters)

The Five-pointed star cavern The Pentagram The AR, or UB (Plough

Sign: the original gray pentagram and sign of the Aryan Race)

Vermis Mysteriis The Serpent Erim (the enemy; and the sea as

Chaos;

Gothic: Orim, or Worm Great

In Lovecraft's panthaeon, Nyarlathotep, Azathoth,

Shub-Niggurath, and so forth...represent chaos and

oblivion....Later on, when the war with the Elders vs. the Others

became apparent, Nodens, Bast, and the Elders became represented

as deities of order and structure.

It should also be pointed out that Zoroasterism, the religion of

the ancient Persians who conquered Babylon, does teach about a

cosmic struggle between the forces of Darkness and Light.

And I proceeded to where things were chaotic. And I saw there

something horrible: I saw neither a heaven above nor a firmly

founded earth, but a place chaotic and horrible. And there I

saw seven stars of the heaven bound together in it, like great

mountains and burning with fire. Then I said: 'For what sin

are they bound, and on what account have they been cast in

hither?' Then said Uriel, one of the holy angels, who was with

me, and was chief over them, and said: 'Enoch, why dost thou

ask, and why art thou eager for the truth? These are of the

number of the stars of heaven, which have transgressed the

commandment of the Lord, and are bound here till ten thousand

years, the time entailed by their sins, are consummated.

Book of Enoch 21:1-7a

ARE YOU READY TO

'CROSS-OVER'

...`NOW?

CLICK HERE

YOUR JOURNEY AWAITS!