HELIOPOLITAN COSMOLOGY FOR THELEMITES

By Shade Oroboros 817


    “Nuit! Hadit! Ra-Hoor-Khuit! The Sun, Strength & Sight, Light;
these are for the servants of the Star & the Snake.”     
  (AL, II, 21)

"Egypt was the Mother of Magicians", said Clement of Alexandria, and few would disagree. All of the nations who came into contact with Egyptian culture had high opinions of their esoteric expertise, from the Mediterranean and Middle Eastern world and on to Africa and India. From the great revival of magick sparked by the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn and the Ordo Templi Orientis to the latest Mummy movies, the enchantments of Egypt have been a formative paradigm for the modern mystery tradition. The deepest roots of western magick (and even of parts of eastern tantra) lie in Egypt, whose remarkable civilization was among the most stable and influential in the ancient world. As the oldest known creators of a written language their priesthood integrated magick, medicine, art, religion, science, architecture, music and astronomy in ways our own culture has yet to accomplish. The gods of the two united kingdoms of Upper and Lower Egypt, who often appear at least partially in animal shapes, seem like atavistic and transitional forms between tribal animism and a psychologically potent and spiritually complex cosmology which still calls to magicians up to the present day. Nor can it be considered insignificant that Liber AL vel Legis: The Book of the Law and Liber Pennae Praenumbra: The Book of the Preshadowing of the Feather, the twin revelations of the Double Current, were both received in an Egyptian terminology. Practitioners of our mysterious arts could do far worse than to immerse themselves in the mythology of this era, for the god-forms are still potent and their symbolic systems still valid. The primal land of Khem stood between the underworld of the dead and the overworld of the gods, quartered by the east/west journey of the Sun and the south/north flow of the Nile River, whose annual flooding or Inundation sustained all life.
    The complex interlocking pantheons of the various cults differ in details but share an essential sense that the Creator God/Goddess manifests itself under countless names and forms, as a series of emanations or principles called ‘Neters’. Evolved from the most primitive totemic gods into ever-increasing levels of sophistication, their many aspects offer access to all people according to their desires and levels of understanding, as if many channels run to and fro from the same vast ocean of cosmic energy.  A similar principle may appear throughout Hinduism and also in the now-popular Hebrew qabala, which sees the divine as a series of radiating and mutating forms appropriate to various levels of the universe and the human condition, the None becoming the One becoming the Many. We might recall that the early Judaic tribes spent quite some time in Egypt, and that their journey from paganism to monotheism was a rather rocky road.
    These deities of Egypt grow out of a landscape in precarious balance between the fertile Black Land on the banks of the Nile and the ever-encroaching Red Land of the desert. Born from the earliest tribal and local deities, they often preserve their animal or animal-headed forms. As they evolve through history they become more complex: similar gods combine, sometimes based on their forms as cow or hawk, serpent or vulture; sometimes due to similar aspects, attributes and functions; sometimes imposed by political forces or foreign conquests. Local icons become national gods, new names absorb and supersede the old in a series of divine forces manifesting through the natural world. Emerging from the primordial void at the beginning of time, these ‘Neters’ or cosmic principles form a shifting kaleidoscope of images, which express the various forms that the divine may assume.
    Much of Egyptian religion was originally solar, manifesting through the supreme creator and Sun-god Amon-Ra and his representative the hawk-headed deity Horus, whose human avatar was the ruling king or Pharaoh. Darker principles might include mysterious Set the deity of storms and chaotic powers, his brother Osiris the god of kingship and harvest, or jackal-headed Anubis the guide of dead souls. The Goddess also wore countless related masks, as Nuit the Night Sky or Isis the Mother of Magick, as Sekhmet the fierce lioness-headed protector, Hathor the patron of music and lovemaking who is also the bride of Horus, or the principle of harmony and balance Maat. Tahuti or Thoth, the ibis-headed scribe, healer, and creator of writing, is also the originator of all magick and later became the patron of alchemy and the Tarot. All of these gods reappear in the modern revelations of the Double Current. 

“A feast for Tahuti and the child of the Prophet - secret, O Prophet!”  (AL, II, 39)

Paganism is far healthier than monotheism because it has so many models and methods for consciousness (Joseph Campbell’s Masks of God), offering to all patron deities that speak to their individuality. To make a personal path of magick is to follow one's instinctive inclinations to True Will, finding new meaning in ancient symbols, which have power because they are still alive. I am always reading mythology because I find key details, eternal archetypes, and new aspects fascinating; and of course Egyptian ritual texts make great examples of style for modern invocations.  


        The Egyptian Pantheon

    “I am the Hawk-Headed Lord of Silence & of Strength; my nemyss shrouds the night-blue sky.
Hail! ye twin warriors about the pillars of the world! for your time is nigh at hand.
I am the Lord of the Double Wand of Power; the wand of the Force of Coph Nia - but my left hand is empty, for I have crushed an Universe; & nought remains.”        (AL, III, 70-72)

In ancient Egyptian terms creation emerges from the limitless chaotic primal ocean called Nu or the Nun; our world exists as a bubble in the waters of space, the Sun and stars revolve above and below us. The parallel Greek notion is the titan/god Oceanus, whose waters are the origin of all earthly rivers and seas, as the Nun is the ultimate source of the Nile. The eight elder gods (to coin a phrase) before the beginning of things are called the Ogdoad, depicted in four male & female pairs; the males are usually shown with the heads of frogs (amphibians) and the female with serpent heads. They are:
     Nun & Naunet, the 'primordial waters' or 'abyss', which may be the earliest prototype of the Goddess. With the beginning of Time the Nun becomes Nut, the Night-Sky goddess, whose hieroglyphic sign is a water-jar (see Aquarius). She is later the thelemic Nuit or Nuith, jeweled with stars, clearly related to Egypt's gynanderous genetrix Neith. Consider also the Babylonian Tiamat, for Egypt’s evolution cannot be regarded separately from all the other middle-eastern traditions.
Kek & Keket or Kauket (sometimes as Gereh & Gerehet) are 'darkness'.
Heh & Hehet. 'infinity', may represent the stirring of the first currents in the Nun.
Amun & Amunet, the 'hidden ones', are deities of the invisible power or breath of life. In a later period Amoun or Amon-Ra becomes the ultimate and formless Creator and official supreme god of the Two Kingdoms, and his consort is seen as the Hand with whom he stimulates himself to ejaculate the universe; like the Eye of Ra, the Hand of Amun is deified as a goddess often associated with Hathor. In the later lists Amun & Amunet are thus replaced with Nia & Niat, deities of the 'void'. Some lists also include Tenemet, 'Chaos'. In Egypt the world order is 'maat', and chaos or disorder is 'isfet'.
Egypt's eternal Neters are a metaphor for the Void (Nun or Nuit) becoming All (Amon-Ra or Hadit) becoming Many (the fabled company of heaven, all the individual beings of life). The first image may be a bird of fire emerging from an egg, or a child being born from a lotus blossom. Later on the Supreme God becomes identified with many forms seen as Creators: the intellectual artisan god Ptah (with his companions Heka the personification of Magick, Sia the power of Thought, and Hu the creative Word), the phallic ram-headed god Khnum who forms humankind on a potter’s wheel, Tahuti or Thoth who creates by the power of the Word, and most importantly the supreme Sun-god Ra (sometimes Re) who is also Amon the Invisible God, the hiding of Hadit, or Atum the Complete One, or Kheph-Ra the Transforming or Self-creating or Becoming One. Creation by self-pleasuring has a long mythic history as well: in Greek myth Hermes is said to have taught masturbation to Pan, and this most primordial High God of Egypt created the world itself with a primal act of self-love:

"I copulated with my fist, my heart came to me into my hand, the semen fell into my mouth. I sent forth issue as Shu, I poured my self out as Tefnut; from one God I was three Gods..."        - Papyrus of Nes-Min

"Yes    I     it was me
grabbed my cock     drained seedwater
through my fist back into me    I wrapped myself around cock
joined in fucking my shadow     fanning me under his cloud
I rained seedwater    spewing it like barley from the earth
into my mouth     my own.
I sprouted windman Shu,     I dropped raingirl Tefnut."    
- Pyramid Texts

From this originating single divine form of self-awareness emerge the first generation of the gods known as the Ennead: from Amon-Ra are born first Shu and Tefnut, then Geb and Nut, then Osiris and Isis, Set and Nephthys, and finally Horus.
Shu and Tefnut are the original duality of separation into two sexes, and thus create the entire cosmos. Shu personifies air and light, Tefnut moisture; they are often portrayed as the twin lions who guard the Two Horizons, or as a male and female with lion heads. Both may wear the ostrich plume or feather-symbol of Maat as a crown. Tefnut thus generates all the myriad of other goddesses, including the Eye of Ra who is also the wrathful lioness Sekhmet or the cobra goddess Wadjet, and as the first-born daughter of Ra she is identical with Maat, the principle of the world’s order, balance and truth. I quote:

“Maat: Personification of balance, especially cosmic, but also moral and physical. She appears simultaneously with Hathor at the moment the demiurge becomes conscious of his desire to exist, a realization triggered by Hathor. In modern terms, we could say that the universe created in this way is the operating system run by the central processing unit, and that Maat is the software permitting it to be guided. A heavy responsibility! But the goddess is armed; the sarcophagus texts (Middle Kingdom) already incorporate her with the formidable Tefnut. She may also be the Uraeus in all her aggressiveness against the uncreated forces. Gods as well as men have need of this balance and are nourished by it. So the offering of Maat by the pharaoh makes that the culminating point of the divine office. These qualities make her the guardian of justice, of human and divine laws, the observation of which over the course of a lifetime will allow the candidate for eternal life to be judged as “righteous of voice,” during the psychostasia. Maat can be depicted as an ostrich feather or as a woman wearing such a feather on her head, which is also the hieroglyph of her name. Maat was worshipped in all the sanctuaries of Egypt and was depicted on royal and noble tombs, and even upon the tombs of private citizens, but as she was the omnipresent cosmic flow, she had no temple of her own.”    
- Sacred Sexuality in Ancient Egypt,  Ruth Schumann Antelme

Next to be born are Geb and Nut, Earth and Heaven, who embrace so lustily and tightly together that Shu must forcibly separate them so that the world may exist. They give birth in turn to the generation of Osiris and Isis, Set and Nephthys, and ultimately Horus. The best-known story in Egyptian myth is the murder of Osiris by Set, his mourning by the Two Ladies Isis and Nephthys, and the avenging of his death by Horus. Osiris then becomes king in the Duat, the land of the dead, while Horus rules the living. The orbit of the Sun is seen as the cyclic voyage of the boat of the gods, where Ra-Hoor is enthroned in the day and Osiris his alter ego in the night journey. Osiris as a living embodiment of the grain harvest (rather than in his sacrificed phase as the god of the dead) may be almost green enough to be seen as Pan, who is also associated with the phallic god Min, but the Greeks recognized him as Hades/Dionysos, who are secretly one. Set is seen as the dark Opposer, a chaotic storm-god very similar to the many forms of Baal in other middle-eastern cultures, and while extremely and actively phallic he is also said to be sterile; Nephthys his sister-wife thus gives birth to the jackal or dog-headed god of death Anubis through adultery with their brother Osiris. But Set is also an essential power, a mighty warrior who stands in the prow of the barque of Ra and battles the threatening Chaos-serpent Apophis every night. Despite his contending with his nephew or brother Horus over the throne of Egypt, they are reconciled by the ibis-headed lord of wisdom, the original scribe of the gods Thoth. Horus and Set are the gods of the Upper and Lower Kingdoms, the Two Lands of Egypt, and so are often shown as paired in sacred art.
I also see the paired goddesses Isis as the revealed world of the living and Nephthys as the protector of souls in the invisible world of the dead; she is an image of the void or Body of Nuit in a sense. The souls of the dead are often seen as stars in the stellar body of Nut, and Nephthys is the Mistress of that House. Isis is the Great Mother and Queen of Magick whose sovereignty is associated with the Throne, and in later times she took over many of the names and aspects of the older supreme goddess Hathor or Sekhmet. There are many other forms of the Goddess as well, shifting aspects which interplay and merge at times.
Most important to us is one of the oldest known gods of humankind: Horus, the celestial falcon whose eyes are the moon and sun. His name may mean the High or Distant One. He has countless local forms and aspects and is sometimes divided into two incarnations, Horus the Elder born of Geb and Nut and clearly identified with the Sun-god Ra, and Horus the Younger born of Isis and Osiris and associated with several other child-gods (the lunar deity Khonsu, the lotus-born Nefertum, or Ihy the musician, son of Hathor); many divine triads consisted of a father, mother and child, idealized images of the family. I will discuss him further below, for clearly I can only scratch the surface of this rich mythology here. I plan another article on the complexities of Set and Horus in the near future.
While one must beware of combining systems, this Ennead does fit rather well in order on the qabalistic Tree of Life:
Kether: Amon-Ra, androgynous creator.
Chokmah: Shu, air and light, male principle.
Binah: Tefnut, waters of space, female principle.
Chesed: Geb, phallic earth god, solidification.
Geburah: Nut, represented by a 5-pointed star, as Neith a gynander and warrior goddess often associated with the greek Athena.
Tiphareth: Osiris, dying and reborn in the harvest.
Netzach: Isis, great goddess of love and sorcery.
Hod: Set, god of chaos, abrupt change and storms.
Yesod: Nephthys, mistress of the otherworld of the dead.
Malkuth: Horus, ruler and divine manifestation of the world.
Add as Daath the goddess of Truth and Balance Maat, the matrix and harmony of the Tao or Whole.


    The Double Current

“But your holy place shall be untouched throughout the centuries: though with fire and sword it be burnt down & shattered, yet an invisible house there standeth, and shall stand until the fall of the Great Equinox; when Hrumachis shall arise and the double-wanded one assume my throne and place. Another prophet shall arise, and bring fresh fever from the skies; another woman shall awake the lust & worship of the Snake; another soul of God and beast shall mingle in the globed priest; another sacrifice shall stain the tomb; another king shall reign; and blessing no longer be poured To the Hawk-headed mystical Lord!
The half of the word of Heru-ra-ha, called Hoor-pa-kraat and Ra-Hoor-Khut.”        (AL, III, 34-35)

In 1904 Aleister Crowley received the transmission commonly known as Liber AL vel Legis: The Book of the Law, which became the basis of his life’s work. It declared a New Aeon ruled by the god Horus, and revealed a neo-pagan and quantum cosmology centered within the Self, wherein each individual (the point-of-view, Hadit) was uniquely present as a Star in the living body of time-space (the universal Goddess, Nuit); their interplay gave birth to the child-god Horus (or Ra-Hoor-Khuit), exemplar and ruling archetype of the New Aeon of human history. From this vision he developed an elaborate and extensive system of Magick drawn from a fusion of the western qabalistic tradition as carried on by the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn which had trained him, later combined with explorations of eastern mysteries such as Taoism, Tantrism, and Sufism. This body of work is known variously as Thelema (Greek for Will) or the 93 Current, and perhaps is best expressed in such maxims as “The Method of Science, The Goal of Religion” and by his key-words “Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law”, "Every man and every woman is a star", and "Love is the law, love under will". His openly avowed purpose was the liberation of humanity by the revelation of each person’s own unique spiritual path, expressed as their True Will or the Word of their Holy Guardian Angel. Since his passing in 1947 many groups have sought to carry on his work, some of them more orthodox (assuming we can actually speak of any remote possibility of a Thelemic orthodoxy!) than others. In many ways Thelema has become the dominant paradigm of modern ceremonial magick, as the earlier Golden Dawn structure was considerably more long-winded and cumbersome, and while there were many pagan influences they also remained deeply mired in the Judeo-Christian worldview. Part of the appeal of Crowley's revelation lies in the fact that it is indeed a living Neo-Pagan mythos, and like the Heathen and Wiccan revivals of the last few decades has shown remarkable vitality.
    Crowley’s work was built upon by his magical son Charles Stansfeld Jones, also known as Frater Achad, who in 1948 received a vision of the next Aeon as ruled by the goddess Maat. His vision has been confirmed by the vital workings of Soror Nema, whose system began with her 1974 visionary reception of Liber Pennae Praenumbra.  The Double Current of Horus & Maat (as the Twinned Son & Daughter) forms a dual energy of great vitality, which may relate in some senses to both the light and dark sides of the Tree of Life. It is also reminiscent of the dual waves of the symbol of Aquarius, which is the astrological ruler of this age, or of the solar/lunar serpents intertwined upon the hermetic caduceus. In a sense, the energy of Horus is advancing the past toward the future while the energy of Maat is being projected backwards from the future to the past, meeting in the Eternal Now. Maat is largely Yin, Horus is very Yang, but everything contains its own opposite. Beyond the limits of male and female are the androgyne and gynander, the hermaphrodite, the Hidden God, the Two-in-One. When Crowley’s 93 Current (whose magical word is ABRAHADABRA and whose solar warrior-god is the falcon-headed Horus) combines in synergy with the 696 Current of the fair goddess of Truth and cosmic balance Maat (whose mantra is IPSOS, meaning "by that same mouth") magical development and ongoing synchronicity appear to accelerate. The concept of Maat as the daughter of the supreme sun-god Ra was central to the religion of ancient Egypt, and her Balance of Truth is a lesson which we would all do well to learn today; it relates strongly to the concerns of the ecological or Green movement. At the end of all Egyptian temple rituals the priest would elevate a small statue of Maat, requesting that justice and order be established in the four quarters of the world. I’ve been having a few other thoughts of late, including that if Maat is Order then Horus is Chaos, and that she is the ultraviolet and he the infrared end of the spectrum.
    Crowley’s revelation proposes a view of the cosmos focused entirely upon the Self, acknowledging that our only certainty lies in direct experience. The new model of consciousness proposed in The Book of the Law may be summarized in the astrological sign of the Sun, a circle with a point at the center. This magical circle represents the universe around us as the Great Goddess in Her dual nature of All (Isis or Hathor) and Naught (as Nuit or Nephthys). In Her we may find manifested both Everything and Nothing, Being and Void, Day and Night. Again, the central point is called Hadit or Set, the divine spark of primordial Chaos and consciousness at our core, the Invisible God in whom the individual soul and the cosmic Self or Atman are united and seen as identical. This symbol as a whole signifies the hawk-headed god-form of Ra or Horus, who is both the Supreme Deity and the Solar Child of Egyptian myth. This unique transition from perceiving God as either a deified Father or Mother to truly accepting ourselves as the Holy Child incarnate makes a leap beyond previous notions of divinity as something distant and external to an understanding of all existence as the passionate play of spirit and matter for the sheer delight of being. It rejects the usual sad monotheist delusion of the universe as given over entirely to struggle and sorrow, seeing these as mere side effects of physicality. It exalts Joy as the essential principle of existence, chaos and revolution as keys to human evolution, life and death as two sides of the same coin.

“The Aeon is a Child at Play.”    
           - Heracleitus, circa 500 BCE


Crowleyan Cosmology

“Above, the gemmed azure is
The naked splendour of Nuit;
She bends in ecstasy to kiss
The secret ardours of Hadit.
The winged globe, the starry blue
Are mine, O Ankh-af-na-Khonsu!”    - Liber AL, I, 14

    Stepping beyond traditional magico-mythological models of cosmology to that of the New Aeon, we now find in Thelema a space-age pantheon based upon the interaction of the individual observer with the play of the cosmos. These gods are also depicted upon the ancient Egyptian artifact now known as the Stele of Revealing, a relic now kept in the Cairo Museum, which triggered Crowley’s reception of Liber AL. The first chapter of this Book contains the words of the Star Goddess Nuit, She whose double aspect simultaneously contains both all the changing manifestations of matter and also the diamond emptiness of the void. She is the universe or the multiverse, and upon the Stele she appears as a beautiful naked woman arched like the sky above all. The second chapter is the cosmic revelation of Hadit, the divine stellar seed of awareness and motion at the central core of every being, which is each individual yet omnipresent point-of-view. He is depicted on the Stele as a winged solar disk with serpents, and is often seen as secretly identical with the chaotic Egyptian storm-god Set. This motif of a winged disk representing the Sun appears in many civilizations throughout the ancient Middle East.
In the third and final chapter arrives the message of the Child, Horus ever reborn, a force to end all restriction, the primal vibration of ecstasy reverberating in-between these twin extremes of the infinity within and that without; it declares a new age of freedom, force and fire. Horus is shown as a hawk-headed god seated upon a throne, worshipped by the priest Ankh-af-na-Khonsu for whom the Stele was made. It is this third chapter that probably gives people the most trouble, as the rhetoric is quite nietzschian and iconoclastic, not to mention gory and apocalyptic. I suppose that in part this might reflect Crowley's early traumas with a rabidly fundamentalist upbringing, but in a wider sense the birth of any new aeon always implies the destruction of a decaying and corrupted old aeon. In the reading of visionary texts it is always wise to recall that subtle and elusive distinction between consensus reality and symbolic metaphor.
    Horus is in part an avenging and martial force, but at the same time is a symbol of royal justice and the healing or integration of the soul; he is strongly linked to the Sun God Ra. In Egyptian thought each ruling pharaoh was the living incarnation of Horus, while all the earlier deceased pharaohs became one with his father Osiris, the ancestral deity of life beyond death. His many aspects in ancient times are reflected in twin forms in Liber AL as both the silent child called Hoor-par-kraat or Heru-par-kraath (Horus the Younger, child of Isis, in Greek called Harpocrates) and as the active or elder aspect of Ra-Hoor-Khuit, the warrior-god Horus. They are combined in the balanced solar manifestation of Heru-Ra-Ha or Hrumachis, the Lord of the Two Horizons. These twins represent the paths or processes of turning inwards by mysticism and outward by magick.
In a similar sense the dual goals of becoming Hadit and Nuit united (Spare’s Zos and Kia) are of the central Eye of God that opens to perceive the manifestation of All Otherness as a boundless cosmic Void of Stars filled with continuous love-play. In terms of quantum physics Hadit is Energy as a Particle, Nuit as a Wave. Their essential identity is expressed in the key or formula discovered by Frater Achad: the double word AL (‘God’ or ‘All’, better known as the ancient Babylonian and Hebrew divine name EL which appears at the ends of most angel’s names) is reversed as LA (‘Not’, ‘Night’, or ‘Naught’). Everything that is, is not; and everything that is not, is. Apparently an appreciation of paradox is necessary to life itself. This is expressed in Crowley’s power-word LASHTAL, with the ShT referring to the god Set. I would now like to explore the Egyptian roots and aspects of these New Gods in greater detail.

“Now, therefore, I am known to ye by my name Nuit, and to him by a secret name which I will give him when at last he knoweth me. Since I am Infinite Space, and the Infinite Stars thereof, do ye also thus. Bind nothing! Let there be no difference made among you between any one thing & any other thing; for thereby there cometh hurt.”    (AL, I, 22)

    The First Chapter contains the words of the Goddess described as Nuit, the Queen of Heaven, the arching body of space and time, the universe herself. She herein defines herself as ‘Infinite Space, and the Infinite Stars thereof’; this qabalistic notariqon clearly identifies her as ISIS the Great Mother of ancient Egypt, and shows her double nature as both the diamond void of empty space as well as the physical form of the galaxy and all within it. Indeed, in ancient Egypt the great goddess Isis is often portrayed as paired with her twin sister Nephthys as the Two Ladies: 

"... they understand the horizontal circle, which divides the invisible part of the world, which they call Nephthys, from the visible, to which they give the name Isis; and as this circle equally touches upon the confines of both light and darkness, it may be looked upon as common to them both ..."    
- Robert Temple, The Sirius Mystery   

    The usage of the Egyptian pantheon runs throughout Liber AL, and we may therefore identify her with the whole range of goddesses, for the many deities of the Two Lands or Double Kingdom of ancient Khem constantly transform in the subtle interplay of their aspects and attributes. Prominent among those who may be most clearly linked to Nuit (variously spelled as Nu, Nuit, and Nuith in Liber AL) are the following:
    First is the Nun, the vast chaotic ocean of the primal waters of space that predates the creation of the universe, who is more of a cosmic principle than a personified being.
    Second and most clearly is Nut, the sky goddess represented as a beautiful woman, jeweled with stars, arched over the world. At times Nut is also depicted as the divine Cow, an animal form also taken by both Isis and Hathor, whose four hooves rest upon the four quarters of the earth and whose belly is speckled with stars. Nut’s symbol is a water-jar and she may have been identical with the Milky Way.
    Third, there is also an early royal goddess named Neith, who might well recall the spelling of Nuith. A dual-sexed gynander who is seen as the virgin mother of the Sun, she also rules both warfare and skillful crafts, and also became (like Isis) one of the great universal forms of the Goddess. In Greek terms She is often associated with Athena, and the celestial queen Hera (like Hathor, a cow-goddess) would be cognate to Nuit as a personification of the sky. The symbol of Neith is two crossed arrows.
    Fourth, there is the above-mentioned Nephthys, sister of Isis, wife of Set, and mother of jackal-headed Anubis; she is a rather shadowy figure without a well-defined cult, but apparently ruled the realm of death, while Isis controlled the fields of life.
    Fifth, Isis herself is among the best-known deities of Egypt, a Great Mother (of the god Horus), a Queen of Magick, a universal goddess who later absorbed the symbolism of many others in the pantheon, and whose worship was widespread throughout much of the Mediterranean world and was among early christianity’s greatest competitors. Her symbol is the throne, and she was linked to the sacred kingship. Her iconography (a queen seated on a throne, nursing the child Horus) was later appropriated by the Virgin Mary as Mother of God.
    The Second Chapter expresses the god Had, Hadit, or Hadith, the very center of consciousness, the seed of the true self, the individual point of view where every man or woman is seen as a star in the body of Nuit. This is depicted as a winged solar orb, a symbol also popular in Babylon:

"An ancient conception of heaven held that it was the wings of a falcon stretched out over the world. A drawing on a First Dynasty tomb shows the solar bark, together with a Horus falcon, on a pair of wings thus symbolizing heaven. From the Fifth Dynasty onwards a sun disc was placed between the pair of wings, hence the image of heaven became a solar symbol. Originally the winged disc belonged to the god Behdet whose epithet was 'he with colored plumage' and who had already merged with Horus at an early date. With that, Behdeti began to assume the role of Horus who was identified with the king. The two uraei which surrounded the solar disc towards the end of the Old Kingdom were a part of royal symbolism; there are New Kingdom representations in which the snake's heads wear the Upper and Lower Egyptians crowns respectively. After the New Kingdom the winged disc appeared as a symbol of protection above temple doors and at the top of stelae."
       - Manfred Lurker, The Gods and Symbols of Ancient Egypt

    In terms of Liber AL (and its visual template, the ‘Stele of Revealing‘) this deity is thus identified with the Horus of solar heat who is portrayed as the winged globe, Heru-Behutet, or perhaps Behedti might be the actual transliteration closest to Hadit. However, Hadit is also often said to be one with Set, the dark god of chaos and magick, who is in some senses the twin (or uncle, in other versions) of Horus; they battle and are then fully reconciled in a cosmic drama of sacred kingship. Set is the rebel, the outsider, the desert god of strangers and foreigners: perhaps a suitable symbol for the zeitgeist of our era.
    As the essential duality, Nu and Had may be seen as any of the pairs of gods in Egyptian (or other) mythology: as the dark waters of the Nun and the lotus-born sun-god Atum-Ra who rises from them; as the primal formative dyads of Tefnut and Shu, or Nut and Geb who are heaven and earth; as Isis and Osiris, or Nephthys and Set; as Sekhmet and Ptah, or Mut and Amoun. The pantheons of Egypt are primal and sophisticated, elegant and evocative, and reward deep study and devotion with insight and magical power. The pagan gods are often very complex personalities, like other living beings, and in exploring the energies and symbols of these archetypes one achieves new heights and depths of meaning. The often-quoted aphorism of modern hermetics states that “All gods are one god, all goddesses are one goddess, and there is one initiator”.
The Third Chapter more fully expresses Horus as the Lord of the New Aeon; as in ancient Egypt, he appears under many names and forms. Many of the major pantheons of Khem (and there were a number of local cosmologies) were ruled by father/mother/son triads: Osiris, Isis, Horus are the best known, but Amoun, Mut, Khonsu, or Ptah, Sekhmet, Nefertum, or Ra, Hathor, Ihy, and others were also prominent. Horus is the Holy Child, the ever-becoming one, and the defining god of the sacred kingship: every deceased pharaoh became one with his father, Osiris; and every son and heir was crowned as the living and incarnate Horus. In later times all were seen as resurrected by or joining with the group-soul of Osiris as the god of the dead in the afterlife; and perhaps today we may all consider ourselves as the embodied forms of Horus, the Crowned and Conquering Child of AL; each a star in the body of Nuit, which is again one of the earlier traditional models of the perfected soul or ‘akh’ in the Egyptian afterlife.
    Horus is seen as having a double aspect: Horus the Elder, the solar lord of kingship and battle, the incarnation of the supreme sun-god Ra; and Horus the Younger, son of Isis, the holy child, eternally reborn Babe in the Lotus (which is a symbol of unfolding life). In Liber AL they are named as Ra-hoor-khuit and Hoor-par-kraat and other variations; they represent the processes of turning outwards and inwards, of union with the external Nuit by expansion and the internal Hadit by contraction, of the paths of active magick and passive mysticism or yoga, of speech and of silence, of the light and the darkness.

    “The Perfect and the Perfect are one Perfect and not two;
nay, are none!”    (AL, I, 45)

    These constant themes of duality, twins, doubles, reflections, and polarity are both typical of Egyptian thought and also at the core of a system whose poles are best expressed in the mathematical formula of 0 = 2. In Thelemic terms, the Void (Tao, the Way) manifests itself as pairs of opposites (the Yin and the Yang). Our creation oscillates between cosmos and chaos, all and naught, Had and Nu. The One, which so obsesses most religious philosophies, is an ever-shifting chimera that exists only as a paradox of unity or inbetweeness, a 'hieros gamos' or sacred marriage of the two extremes. The Book of the Law can be read on many levels and in many ways; everyone must find their own true method of interpreting the formulas presented. Ultimately the path shown is that of all magick: of ‘Solve et Coagula’, or analysis and synthesis. Experience must be divided into duality, reunited, and ultimately cancelled out in a burst of energy which transforms the individual; for in the words of ancient alchemy often quoted by the gnostic scholar and psychologist Carl Jung:

“A Circle whose Center is Everywhere, and that has Nowhere a Circumference.”
- Hermetic aphorism from The Book of the 24 Philosophers

    Perhaps the most essential element of the vision of Liber AL is the unity of love and will, Nuit and Hadit, perception and action. Many becomes two, two one, one naught.


        Practical Aeonics, & IHVH Revisited

“Abrogate are all rituals, all ordeals, all words and signs. Ra-Hoor-Khuit hath taken his seat in the East at the Equinox of the Gods; and let Asar be with Isa, who also are one. But they are not of me. Let Asar be the adorant, Isa the sufferer; Hoor in his secret name and splendour is the Lord initiating.”        (AL, I, 49)

    The magickal worldview tends to take a somewhat mythic view of history, dividing it into vast aeons of time. Many ancient chronologies are arranged into the Golden Age of the Gods, the Silver Age of Heroes, and the Iron Age of Men; thus in Hindu terms we are in the Kali-Yuga or Iron Age. The Mayans and Aztecs have other formulas, as do the Jewish and Christian biblically based calendars, or those of Asia. Many of these are simply convenient attempts to systematize a view of evolutionary history as a linear scheme of time running from creation to destruction, and which may then proceed again to further cycles in turn. Historical accuracy aside, these are useful paradigms expressing magical formulas and mythological world-views.
    In prehistoric times we find the Nameless Aeon before recorded culture, as the human evolved from the beast into a world of small tribes and paleolithic proto-shamanism, through the birth pangs of language and magick and art; this is usually ascribed to the strange Babylonian and Egyptian dwarf-god Bes or Bez, a protector who was very active in the popular magick of the common people. He is also very similar to Pan in some ways. The Crowleyan-based schema mentioned above concerns itself primarily with three approximately two-thousand-year aeons, and his various heirs have worked out the next one in advance:
    The Aeon of Isis the Mother: polytheistic, matriarchal, agricultural, physical, shamanic. An era of tribalism and migration, hunting and herding, ruled by Aries. The woman was the image of the life-force, and her vital ability to give birth was an enormous mystery before the genetic contribution of the male was understood; like the Mother Earth, Grandmother Ocean and Great-Grandmother Space, she gave life to all in a peaceful time of paganism (according to some).
    The Aeon of Osiris the Father: monotheistic, patriarchal, urban, spiritual, hierarchical. This was an era of city-states and invasions, writing and technology, ruled by Pisces. The role of the father came to dominate, linked to the sacrificial cultus of the dying and reborn god, the eternally rising and falling sun and its representative image the phallus. The era of endless warfare sparked by bronze-age invaders and later Judeo-Christian-Islamic obsessions.
    The Aeon of Horus the Son: pantheistic, androgynous, and multi-cultural. Now beginning an era of chaos and freedom, science and sexuality, ruled by Aquarius. Notions of death and rebirth are replaced by the reincarnational knowledge of the eternal and ecstatic continuity of consciousness. This is closely linked to or twinned with:
    The Aeon of Maat the Daughter: humanistic, gynanderous, the world-mind. To be an era of holistics and transformation, of unity and mutation, ruled by Capricorn (the Goat, Pan?). Her formulae are as yet only partially revealed, and lead eventually to the returning silence of the unknown Wordless Aeon. All of these spans of time are words declared by the ibis-headed god Thoth, yet ultimately are wrapped and raptured about by Eternity.
    Examined in terms of the elemental qabalistic formula of IHVH, Osiris or Hadit would be I/Yod the Father, the formative seed of fire; Isis or Nuit is H/He the Mother, as water; V/Vau is air, Horus the Son; and H/He final is Maat, the Daughter, manifesting Earth and completing the circle. They are the King and Queen, Prince and Princess of the Tarot. These are the letters of the rather infamous Tetragrammaton, the Square Name of God or unpronounceable four-letter-word of the sacred qabala. Rearranging it in the chronological order of the Aeons results in the spelling of HIVE, reflecting the Maatian icon of the bee (the Hebrew letter 'He' can be transliterated as either H or E, here beginning and ending the sequence). It occurred to me that in the earlier ages of Isis you had polytheism and Osiris had monotheism, the Many and the One; then balancing in the future with Horus as the Many and Maat as One, the genders are reversed. Our god Horus had countless forms and aspects in ancient Egypt, and every Pharoah was his incarnation; so today as Kings we are also the avatars of the Eternal Child.    
“Who worshipped Heru-pa-kraath have worshipped me; ill, for I am the worshipper.”    (AL, II, 8)

Prior to this were shamanic eras of gods in animal form, ruled by Taurus as reflected in sacred horned bull-gods; before that the Gemini age might well have included twin gods, but who knows? In a future age of Sagittarius, star flight and alien contact? Who knows? These most basic aeonic classifications are essentially symbolic gateways, and we have access to the forces and formulae of any of them at will. Rather than being limited to actual periods of time, they are levels of myth and magick, states of consciousness and initiation, and modes of ritual working.
    Pete Carroll in his Liber Null proposes a similar but somewhat different outline of the evolutionary procession of aeons: Shamanic, Pagan, Monotheist, Atheist, bringing us now to the technological edge of a fifth aeon which is still chaotic and undefined. Medieval Christianity, on the other hand, saw a sequence of the three Ages of the Father (grounded in authority and the Old Testament), the Son (of love and the New Testament), and in the immanent post-apocalyptic future that of the Holy Ghost or Paraclete (based on freedom). These represent the revelations of Moses, Jesus, and the mystic Joachim of Floris, whose visions inspired much of the later End Times Christianity. Hegelian-Marxist historical theory would see the process as thesis, antithesis, and synthesis.

"God is that, having the head of a hawk and a spiral force."    
- Oracles of Zoroaster


    Revising Liber Resh vel Helios

“The light is mine; its rays consume
       Me: I have made a secret door
    Into the House of Ra and Tum,
       Of Khephra and of Ahathoor.
    I am thy Theban, O Mentu,
       The prophet Ankh-af-na-khonsu!”    (AL, III, 38)

After many years of daily use of Crowley’s Liber Resh (a wonderful practice involving salutations to God as the Sun at dawn, noon, dusk, and midnight) I have slightly modified my personal version to include sacred animal forms and slightly less crackpot nomenclature.  I believe the original version came out of the translation of the names on the Stele of Revealing that Crowley used and incorporated into Liber AL, in a rather more primitive period of Egyptological research. I suspect that Ahathoor is Hathor, who is a solar goddess rather than a form of the Sun god, which always bothered me. The primordial Hathor is in a sense the consort of Horus, Hat-Hor, the House of Horus; she is the daylight sky while Nuit is the night.

‘Hail unto Thee who art Amon-Ra in Thy rising, even unto Thee who art Amon-Ra in Thy strength, who travellest over the Heavens in Thy bark as a Lion at the Uprising of the Sun. Tahuti standeth in His splendour at the prow, and Ra-Horakte abideth at the helm. Hail unto Thee from the Abodes of Night!’

‘Hail unto Thee who art Aton-Ra in Thy triumphing, even unto Thee who art Aton-Ra in Thy beauty, who travellest over the Heavens in Thy bark as a Hawk at the Midcourse of the Sun. Tahuti standeth in His splendour at the prow, and Heru-Ra-Ha abideth at the helm. Hail unto Thee from the Abodes of Morning!’

‘Hail unto Thee who art Atum-Ra in Thy setting, even unto Thee who art Atum-Ra in Thy joy, who travellest over the Heavens in Thy bark as a Ram at the Down-going of the Sun. Tahuti standeth in His splendour at the prow, and Heru-par-kraath abideth at the helm. Hail unto Thee from the Abodes of Day!’

‘Hail unto Thee who art Kheph-Ra in Thy hiding, even unto Thee who art Kheph-Ra in Thy silence, who travellest over the Heavens in Thy bark as a Scarab-Beetle at the Midnight Hour of the Sun. Tahuti standeth in His splendour at the prow, and Hrumachis abideth at the helm. Hail unto Thee from the Abodes of Evening!’

These new versions employ various names of the Sun-god: Amon the Hidden One at dawn; Aton the visible disk of the sun at noon (this is also the Aten worshipped by the heretic pharaoh Akhenaten in his unfortunate experiment in monotheism); Atum the phallic ram at sunset; and Khepra the scarab-beetle at midnight. His name means ‘becoming’, and is identical with the power-word XEPER employed by the contemporary Temple of Set. The other four names are aspects of Horus mentioned in Liber AL. I also have a fifth and central verse of my own heretical revisionism:

        ‘Hail unto Thee who art Sothis in Thy Shining, even unto Thee who art Hadit in Thy Self, who travellest amid the Heavens in Thy bark as a Child at the Center of the Star. Tahuti standeth in His splendour at the prow, and Abraxas abideth at the helm. Hail unto Thee from the Abodes of Eternity!’

By Bes-na-Maut my breast I beat;
       By wise Ta-Nech I weave my spell.
    Show thy star-splendour, O Nuit!
       Bid me within thine House to dwell,
    O winged snake of light, Hadit!
       Abide with me, Ra-Hoor-Khuit!”    (AL, III, 38)