SILVERSTAR1-PG0

So Below, As Above: The Serpent & The Star
by Qadathion

I.
    In 1904, there were ripples in the waters of the collective subconscious.

    Most people didn't recognize this. Dazzled by the wonders and promise of the modern era, they were oblivious to such a subtle shift. The 1904 World's Fair in Saint Louis featured a "Palace of Electricity" as well as a "Palace of Varied Industries". These weren't mere exhibitions, they were Palaces, and temples to materialism. The gods honored there? Technology, Capitalism and Industry. On the other hand, this was also the year that the first theatrical production of Peter Pan was performed, L. Frank Baum's novel The Land of Oz was published, and mythologist Joseph Campbell was born.

       Lurking just below the surface of awareness was the long-denied Goddess, the wise and ageless Serpent. She had been banished and burned, hidden and imprisoned for too long.   Her return was much needed to counterbalance the developing psychosis of the modern age.

    Artists, musicians and magicians always are the first to sense these shifts in the cultural and personal paradigm. In the magical arena, two men expressed it in very different ways (or, more aptly, from different directions): Austin Osman Spare and Aleister Crowley.

    During that year Spare, a London lad of 17, penned most of the drawings that would be published under the title EARTH: INFERNO.   On the Contents page is a drawing titled "EARTH": a naked woman is depicted lying on the apex of an arch, her face averted, holding in her hand a clump of her own hair. The journey up to the summit has clearly been arduous. Beneath the arch, writhing representations of humanity make frustrated efforts to couple, or they wander about alone, aimlessly. Below the drawing are these words:

    "The desertion of the Universal Woman, lying barren on the Parapet of the Subconsciousness in humanity; And humanity sinking into the pit of conventionality. Hail! The convention of the age is nearing its limit. And with it a resurrection of the Primitive Woman."

    With this potent combination of image and word, Spare expressed a key to birthing the New Age: the reclamation of that which had been lost in the soul and psyche of humanity. He didn't see that as a revival of literal goddess worship. He championed no particular goddess. To him this resurrection meant the cultivation of the oracular, visionary and creative abilities latent in the psyche, that which had been cast aside and suppressed in the Age of "Enlightenment". That is why she is described as "barren" -- it was necessary for her to re-establish her relationship with mankind and Earth for her to become fruitful again.

    Thousands of miles away, in Cairo, another Englishman, Aleister Crowley, was also responding to an ancient call but recording it with the written word only. On April 8, 1904, Crowley heard the words of Nuit, the ancient Egyptian Goddess of Heaven -- an Universal Woman if there ever was one! Unlike Spare's, this message of a New Way On for humanity came from above: Infinite Space, and was a beckoning of mankind to its future and its destiny.

    Nuit describes Herself in The Book of the Law (Liber AL) as the starry expanse bending down to touch the earth: infinity touching the temporal:
    "She bends in ecstasy to kiss, the secret ardours of Hadit..."
    "So she answered him, bending down... her lovely hands upon the black earth, & her lithe body arched for love, and her soft feet not hurting the little flowers..."
    "This shall regenerate the world, the little world my sister, my heart & my tongue, unto whom I send this kiss."

    Egypt was not the only mideastern culture with a Goddess of Heaven: in others she was known as Inanna, Ishtar, Ashtart, Asherah, Aphrodite Ourania, and by many other names. The words of Nuit in AL could have come from any one of these, and Nuit's description of the sexual nature of Her worship is identical with the rites of Ishtar, Aphrodite and the others. But, given that Crowley's revelation came in Cairo, it is fitting that the voice is that of an Egyptian goddess.

    Spare's revelation came from down below: the stratum just beneath consciousness. He felt the Goddess of the Underworld re-arising, like Persephone at springtime. For Crowley, steeped in Biblical lore as he was, it came as a shower of fire from the heavens, and was placed in a religious context. For Spare, it came as a reclaiming of a lost and hidden heritage from underground: the secrets of the Witches, and the way of the shaman-sorceror. Crowley experienced it as a descent of the Light from above, which too is a reclamation -- of that which had been lost in The Fall from mankind's original divinity. Crowley and Spare had never met in 1904, so they could not have been comparing notes. The resurrection of the Goddess was revealed to each, independently.

    It was a two-pronged attack. The Goddess both arose and descended, meeting in the middle: Earth. She had not yet arrived, but had announced Her intention to return.

II.
    On August 24, 2008, I experienced a psychic event during which I felt and saw this touching of the Universal and Primitive Woman archetypes. From an e-mail I wrote that day:
    "I was taking a break from writing and walked across the room. I was transfixed for a moment on the pattern of light from my window glowing on the wooden floor in front of a three-legged brass plant stand upon which rests a pewter plate. I felt both deja-vu, as if I had seen this very same thing before, and Be-Here-Now, as if this was a perfect moment, never to be repeated.
    "I felt the need to stretch, and reached my arms towards the ceiling, palms horizontal to the ceiling.
    "I flashed on, and felt, and saw, a vast goddess figure above me, her palms meeting my palms. And below me, felt another vast goddess figure, her palms touching the soles of my feet.
    "No big energy flash or anything, just a sense of completeness, and the initiation of a "circuit"."

    This psychic event occurred while I was engaged in an e-mail exchange with an Initiated Priestess living in Europe. It was she who introduced me to the fact that, in ancient Greek religion, there were two complementary cults at work: the Ouranian gods of Olympus high in the heavens, and that of the older Chthonic deities of earth, survivors of the pre-Hellenic culture. The Olympian gods were those of public religion at that time, bright beings ruling Greek society from the celestial realm. Quite proper. The magic of the chthonic deities had been formed in agricultural society, when earth and water goddesses held sway, and were associated with fertility and Mystery. The Ouranian and Chthonic cults managed to thrive side-by-side until the "northern invaders", as they are known, encroached on the goddess-enraptured cultures of the middle East and imposed a patriarchal monotheism throughout those lands. The modern magical revival can be seen as an attempt to heal the deep wound the northern invaders inflicted.

    As above, so below. Some diagrams of the Tree of Life show the Serpent of Wisdom weaving through the Paths from Malkuth to Kether (from everyday consciousness to divine consciousness) intertwined with a downward Flaming Sword flashing through the Sephiroth from the sacred to the mundane. Spare's Primitive Woman rising can be seen as the Serpent, weaving its way along the Paths to return to the Source, and Crowley's Star Goddess bending as the Flaming Sword, flashing down from Heaven to Earth.

    As within, so without. Spare wrote "To reach up to the ceiling of Heaven -- look within". From the perspective of the conscious mind, both inner space and outer space seem infinitely deep and pregnant with meaning. If there is a difference, it is that outer space can be measured, but the depths of inner space are immeasuable.

III.
    As Kenneth Grant noted in The Magical Revival, Spare attributed the source of inspiration for his magical methods to a "Delphic Oracle" or Pythoness, who spoke through him during bouts of automatic writing. In other words, Spare did not employ a medium to channel the prophetic voice from beyond and act as a mere scribe and interrogator; he went into trance himself and he was both medium and scribe. Spare, always the individualist, realized that if a magician had the capacity of communing with the spirit world AND had enough self-control to draw or write the ensuing message, a second party could be dispensed with.

    Crowley, in most cases, acted in the role of scribe and employed a magical partner as his medium when communing with praeter-human intelligences, but there are notable exceptions. Crowley himself acted as seer and medium during the lion's share of The Vision and the Voice, with Victor Neuburg transcribing Crowley's voice and visions. In The Paris Working, again working with Neuburg, the men exchanged roles throughout the working. The medium for the Ab-ul-Diz Working was Mary Desti, and for the Amalantrah Working, Roddie Minor. There are many examples of Leah Hirsig fulfilling the role of medium. It seems that a job qualification for being one of Crowley's "Scarlet Women" was the ability to serve as a Pythoness.

    Serving as an oracle is not the sole province of woman, even though more women than men seem to have a natural capacity for it. There is a neuro-biological reason for this. The right hemisphere of the brain, the lobe that was dominant in the early stages of human evolution, is the first to develop in the fetus and is the seat of intuitive and holistic perception. The left side of the brain, on the other hand, deals with linear, concrete, sequential thinking. Image recognition and music appreciation take place in the right lobe, while the left lobe is predominant in logic, organization and analysis. The functions of the right brain are those associated in our culture with "feminine thinking", with the appreciation of aesthetics and meaning, while "thinking like a man" means the left lobe functions are being used, and black/white, right/wrong, dualistic distinctions hold sway.

    The battle between matrifocal polytheistic religions and the paternalistic monotheism of the northern invaders can be seen in neurological terms as a "war between the lobes". The suppression of goddess worship also meant suppression of right-brain qualities, as the left-brain one-way-thinkers denied the ancient ways and proceeded to expand civilization, with the alphabet as its sword: the Word is Law. What seemed to infuriate the patriarchal monotheists above all else was the IMAGE of the goddess -- her many idols, figurines and pillars. They say "a picture is worth a thousand words", and that is true. The written scriptures and prophecies of the patriarchs were no match for the voluptuous images of the goddess that were created from the stuff of earth itself: clay, wood and stone. Much of the Pentateuch details the destruction of the popular religion of the Hebrews (the exaltation of Asherah, a descendant of Ishtar), and the establishment of the cold and rigid Mosaic code in its place.

    Leonard Shlain, in The Alphabet versus the Goddess, makes a convincing case that it was the development of the alphabet and literacy that sounded the death-knell of the Goddess and feminine spirituality. For almost 400 pages he chronicles how alphabetic cultures around the world have served to undermine and suppress the role of women in society, and to institutionalize the left-brain values of patriarchal "male superiority". But the last 40 pages are devoted to evidence that this long-overwhelming tide began to turn, starting in 1900, with the publication of Sigmund Freud's The Interpretation of Dreams. In it Freud introduced the concept of the unconscious, that unsettling part of the mind that is censored during waking consciousness. Freud recognized that the unconscious mind is where the problems encountered in waking life seek resolution, through the medium of the often bizarre and disturbing symbols in dreams. The unconscious is the oracle we consult every night during sleep, to interpret the conflicts of waking life via mythic symbols.

    Freud's new way of looking at the mind, emphasizing the importance of the irrational, mysterious part that is so much larger than the censored and focused conscious mind, was really an invitation to the ancient goddess to return from her slumber beneath the surface. The relevance of the intuitive, psychic and prophetic aspects of the mind began to gain acceptance. Reason and logic were not the only games in town.

    Spare and Crowley, in the realms of art and magic, were more like technicians than theoriticians. The offered tools and methods for working with the unconscious while conscious. It is interesting to look at Spare's Alphabet of Desire in terms of what Shlain says about the alphabet being used as a weapon against the intuitive goddess. Spare devised a way around this limitation of the accepted alphabet by creating a personal one based on the deepest impulses of his subconscious. As Steffi Grant describes it in her introduction to Zos Speaks, Spare's Alphabet transforms words into glyphs that bypass the censor of the rational mind. Spare's method was to create a glyph of a desire (a sigil) and then forget about it, figuratively burying it in the soil of his subconscious. That is where the magic was worked, in a way the conscious mind is incapable of achieving.

    This bypassing of the conscious censor can also be seen in much of Spare's writing. Steffi quotes Spare as saying "I now find pleasure in destroying words..." He did this by reducing an idea to its simplest form, a condensation of a thought to its essential, "pre-manifest" impulse. It has been suggested that Spare may have been dyslexic, but this actually might have been an advantage for him, an aid to seeing beyond the surface. I think we can see a similar process at work decades later in the work of Brion Gysin's and William S. Burroughs' experiments with the cut-up method of literary creation.

    Crowley, being a master of the English language, was not so bold, original or revolutionary as Spare in his work with words. Yet Crowley understood the need to bypass the conscious censor in order to let the magic work in the shadow realm. He knew the value of using the "barbarous names of evocation" in magical workings, like those long strings of almost unpronounceable words in Graeco-Egyptian magic, words of an unknown and ancient language so garbled that the rational meaning is lost, even if the original concept remains. Crowley's work with the Enochian language was surely effective, the result being the profound book The Vision and the Voice, which was to prove the basis of so much of his magickal system. Reasonable or not, when these barbarous words are used in ritual, they work. Things happen.

IV.
    Spare viewed Woman as "all otherness", and so did not restrict himself to the love or worship of one woman (although he was married once). His experience of the female has been described as "atmospheric" -- She was everywhere, and the Primitive Woman manifested in many forms. To Spare, individual women were "refracted fragments" of Woman, and at the core represented Desire, the motivating factor of the Self. A key to understanding his perspective can be found in Dante's Purgatorio, where in a dream the author encounters a particularly unattractive crone, but by dint of his gaze, she is transformed into a desirable woman. Spare's vision was very much below the surface, touching the essence of what a person is, as opposed to the image they present to the world.

    Crowley's vision was different but in some ways complementary. He was even more promiscuous than Spare, and the women he was involved with came in all shapes and sizes, but he tended to put the women he was currently involved with on a pedestal, dubbing them with the honorary "Scarlet Woman". I say pedestal, but at the same time Crowley felt the inner need to have her in the gutter at the same time. AC suffered from the Madonna/Whore complex, the pathological need to both exalt and defile the feminine. That was both a result of his upbringing in a fundamentalist Christian household, and the fact that he never really "got" women, or his own feminine nature. Despite claiming the highest levels of spiritual attainment, he failed in his own inner alchemy. The Gnostic Mass is without doubt a beautiful ceremony in which the Sacred Feminine is empowered and honored, but really it comes down to the Priest, and what the Priestess can do for him. The Priestess, at the end of the Mass, is left squatting on a pedestal, while the Priest turns his back and returns from whence he came.

    Despite the personal failings of both men, they were at least trying to reconnect with the true empowering source of Magic, which is, was and always will be Woman, and to offer tools for others to achieve the same. From a modern neurological perspective, they were both attempting to redress the imbalance between the left and right brains which had become so ingrained over the last 3000 years. Spare with his cultus of Zos and Kia, the Hand and the Eye. Crowley with his cult of Hadit and Nuit. In both cases, the dynamic interplay between that which observes and shapes, and that which moves and creates. Shiva and Shakti all over again.

V.
    One interpretation of each man's respective contribution is to view Spare as working with the Lunar current and Crowley with the Venusian wave.

    Spare's first teacher in occult matters, his mentor, was a card-reading fortune teller named Mrs. Paterson, an "old crone" said to have descended from a line of Salem witches. His recurring theme of feminine forms both aged and nubile, set against darkness, with serpents and crescent moons as sub-themes, are certainly evocative of the Dark Feminine -- Hekate and Lilith. The Witches Sabbath is something he understood, and from which he drew inspiration. Perhaps his most condensed illustration of the Delphic Oracle who spoke through him is in the work "The New Eden", which serves as the frontispiece for Images and Oracles of Austin Osman Spare: a naked woman gazes with fascination at a coiled serpent, a crescent moon to the right of her. Above this, a Hecate-like mask whose hair balloons out into a batwing shape above her head.

    The juxtaposition of these two forms of the feminine in Spare's art -- the fertile maiden and the barren crone -- can be seen as the contrasting faces that the Moon shows to Earth: the Full Moon and the Black/Dark Moon. Full Moon nights are known for their effect on human behavior, and it seems that this is when the "feminine" aspects of the psyche are strongest. Romantic love blooms under the full moon, as does jealousy, lust and wild abandon, and psychic vision is at its peak. Black Moon nights are in one sense the nadir of the Lunar cycle, but not in the Lunar influence on the psyche and psychic abilities. This is the point when the Moon is not directly reflecting the illuminating light of the Sun, and so in a sense that is when we see the depth of feminine energy: not reflective, but resurgent. The dark moon is an in-between time, a time when ancient and outside things can come through, and is the point in the cycle when subtle change can occur, changes in perception and direction during the next cycle.

    In Crowley's Thelemicult, the Venusian aspect of the Sacred Feminine seems to be the focus -- the goddess of love and lust, embodied in Babalon. The sensual and sexual rites described by Nuit in AL as her modes of worship seem to be identical with those of the Babylonian goddess Ishtar. Ishtar was the Babylonian name for the planet Venus, and She was revered as the goddess of both Love and War.   In the Thelemic perspective, Babalon is not just a Holy Whore, she is also a Warrior -- the Scarlet Woman girt with a sword.

    It is fitting, then, that Venus, like the moon, has two aspects. That light in ancient skies was known as both the bright and morning star and the evening star, most visible just before sunrise and just after sunset. In this respect Venus, like the Moon, has a rising and a setting, and marks the passage of time. From our perspective, the planet Venus is never far away from the Sun, and that is because it is the second-closest planet to it. But to the Babylonians, this meant that Ishtar, as Morning Star, was leading her slain son/consort Tammuz (the Sun) back to Earth from the Underworld, and as Evening Star pursued him as he descended back into darkness. At dawn she emerged triumphant from her journey, leading the Sun back to his throne in the sky.

    No wonder that Crowley should find this way of looking at the feminine a bit more appealing than Spare's lunar ethos, AC being a spermo-gnostic. Venus sticks close to the Sun, and seems to exist only to serve and save him. Parallels can be drawn between this and the Gnostic Mass, in which the myths of Isis/Osiris or Ishtar/Tammuz is recreated. The Priest arises from the Tomb, and is reborn via the Priestess, but at the end of the ceremony returns to his Tomb. (I've always found this conclusion to the Mass a little puzzling: after being reborn and his power restored by the Priestess, the Priestess is again concealed and the Priest turns tail and retreats back into the Tomb from whence he came. Shouldn't they at least dance together or something before going their separate ways? The conclusion of the Mass hardly seems like a Hieros Gamos, it is more like an inequitable divorce, where the husband gets custody of the Children, and the wife is left alone in her apartment).

VI.
    I wouldn't say that 1904 marked the beginning of a New Age, but it was the year when two male magicians were compelled to express their inner realization that it was the return of the Sacred Feminine that was to lead the way in the transformation of human consciousness and begin to heal the patriarchal scar. That was a huge step in the 20th century magical revival. But such shifts in awareness take place over time and manifest at all levels -- psychological and spiritual first and then eventually cultural and political. The gradual shift away from patriarchal dominance began in the 1800s, but it took until well into the 1900s for there to be visible change in the cultural zeitgeist, with women's suffrage, a growing acceptance of holistic and natural medicine, the ecological movement and the "sexual revolution".

    Yet, the "war between the lobes" continues, and there is still formidable resistance to every attempt at integrating feminine values with the existing power structure. The battle rages on, but at least there are signs of hope. If any good is to come from the current economic crisis, it will be the exposure of the existing economic system as a house of cards that has collapsed under its own weight, and the realization that we need to recreate civilization from the bottom up. The same holds true for the patriarchal religions that still have a choke-hold on the planet. This "holy war" between Judeo-Christianity and Islam is becoming very tiresome, and hopefully soon the time will come when the majority will comprehend that the only solution is "none of the above", and return to a gentler and joyous way of looking at life.

    Many are looking toward the year 2012 as marking either the total destruction of the world as we know it or the transformation of the world into a better, saner place. I'm not about to put all of my eggs in that basket: previous prophecies of the date of Armageddon have been consistently disappointing. But perhaps it will mark one of those tipping-points when the spiral of human evolution begins a higher arc. We can only hope.