Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law.
This is a question that I have asked myself a few times over the years, and which I think is probably pertinent given my involvement with mystical and magical systems in general. It is not easy to answer definitively, so I will try to clarify it as much as I can.
Firstly, definitions are important. If a person asks me, yes or no, whether I believe in God, then to avoid complications I would probably reply, yes. However, this needs some qualification. What does 'God' mean, and what do I mean by believe. God to me is not some beard in the sky, a sort of discorporate father figure that I can ask favours of and beg forgiveness of sins. If praying worked, the world would be a very different place, so we can be quite certain that God doesn't answer prayers, at least in the sense that is commonly understood and taught in Sunday school. No. To me, God is the ground of being, the fundamental suchness of the universe, the basic energy of life itself. Liber legis calls it Hadit, and this describes it pretty well, but essentially God is unknowable. God is the silence between notes, the space between words, the eternal and imminent moment between one breath and the next. God doesn't answer prayers because God is prayer, and the person praying. Gods answer to prayers is in the prayer itself.
But a separate being that makes for holiness? I see no reason to even consider that possibility. The God of the ancient Hebrews, Yahweh, I regard as a form of local deity, elevated to master of the universe status by his worshippers, but essentially a Semitic tribal totem no different from Baal, Astaroth, or any of the other dozens of tribal totems running around the middle-east at that time and mentioned in the Old Testament as rival deities.
So, why even call it God? Cultural conditioning I suppose. In the right company using that designation is natural enough and people understand what is meant. But there is room for confusion, and of course those who reject the term might not like it, but that's not my problem. Besides, in the introductory lection we are advised about this in no uncertain terms, so it should, we would hope, be second nature to an initiate:
"Should therefore the candidate hear the name of any God, let him not rashly assume that it refers to any known God, save only the God known to himself. Or should the ritual speak in terms (however vague) which seem to imply Egyptian, Taoist, Buddhist, Indian, Persian, Greek, Judaic, Christian, or Moslem philosophy, let him reflect that this is a defect of language; the literary limitation and not the spiritual prejudice of the man P."
As for gods, demons, spirits, angels and the rest. I have had my fair share of dealings with gods over the years, but it was always with constructs of the mind, overlays onto reality, images deliberately given to forces, real or imaginary, but with no sense of a separate identity. The same goes for demons, angels and spirits to varying degrees. So no, I don't believe that they have any objective reality. They are however useful ways of interfacing with reality at different levels. For example my work with Liber Astarte was with the goddess Persephone. This was a rather interesting time in which I was able to see things from the perspective of cyclic birth and death, using the early agricultural symbolism and highlighting mans reliance as a species on the annual rhythms of the world, and the sense that we come out of the world, not into it. I have also had experiences that I might describe as demonic, soul sucking things that can attach themselves to a person in the lower astral. Whether these are just negative thought forms, symptoms of a diseased mind, or literal astral scavengers and bottom feeders. They frequently took on the form of walking corpses, thin, hungry things, or occasionally black angry things, aggressive and threatening, thereby matching traditional descriptions of such things.
The last time I saw one of these was on the night I arrived at my regiment when I was serving in the army. Nobody had told them I was coming, so I arrived at the guard room and was redirected to the barracks where I was given a place to sleep in a spare room. I deployed my roll mat and sleeping bag on the floor and that night settled in to sleep. In the early hours of the morning I awoke to see a black silhouette in the doorway in a threatening posture. It practically buzzed with aggression and I knew it to be non-human right away. I had to meet the regimental sergeant major in the morning and was annoyed at being awoken, I sat up and said, "F off, I'm trying to sleep", and promptly lay back down. I've not seen anything of the sort since.
What was this? I have no idea. However I've not seen much since that time, nothing uninvited in any case. I have had shells of dead things hanging around, more so when I was in my teens and early twenties, when I was living a lot more fast and loose and really not taking care of myself. More recently, a friend who died about 6 years ago used to visit from time to time, a silent presence in the corner of my mental vision, occasionally coming into my dreams. Oddly he became more and more inhuman as time went by, and more like a hungry thing and less like the friend I knew, until I took him to a nearby temple, he's not been around since. In any case, that was not my friend, just a thought form gradually falling apart over time. While I treated it as if it were a spirit, or a husk of the person I knew, I have no real reason to suppose it was anything other than my memory of my friend, a way of coming to terms with his death, but I will never know for certain.
As for the Angel, and angels in general? That's a subject in itself, which I think I have already covered. I will say that early in my A.'.A.'. career he took the form of a Sumerian God, sometimes the peacock angel of the Yezidi, and an ancient Hebrew spirit of the wilderness, but as I went on these names and forms were gradually cast aside, images of images, not things to be attached to, but useful at certain points in my training. At this moment, I would say that the 'Angel', is another stand in term, much like God, for that about which nothing can be said. These previous images can be called angels in the technical sense, i.e. messengers, ways of making the connection. But the connection made, they are no longer necessary and so I rarely employ them. I will go so far as to say that I was instructed by the Angel itself not to rely on these images and forms.
So in the final analysis, I suppose I an a positive agnostic in the matter of belief. I have no idea if any of these things are real, and reason says there is little to suggest that they are anything other than projections of the mind. Yet somehow treating them as if they are objectively what they present themselves to be seems to work. Or, as I think it was Robert Anton Wilson who responded, when asked if he thought these things were real: They're real enough.
Love is the law, love under will.
No comments:
Post a Comment