SLSL "TSR" Pasiphae, continued

[pynchonoid]

<http://www.hermetic.com/osiris/legendofpasiphae.htm>

Aleister Crowley and the Legend of Pasiphae
By Frater Osiris 2001
In his commentary on The Hierophant in The Book of
Thoth, Crowley states:


“There is a distinctly sadistic aspect to this card;
not unnaturally, since it derives from the Legend of
Pasiphae, the prototype of all the legends of
Bull-Gods. These persist in such religions as
Shaivism, and (after multiple degradations) in
Christianity itself.”1

As per his usual style, Crowley mentions nothing more
on this subject, leaving the investigation of this
almost casual remark to the curious reader. So what is
the significance of the Legend of Pasiphae, and what
is its relevance to the Hierophant and the New Aeon?
The answer lies scattered among Crowley’s writings;
but first let us recount the Legend of Pasiphae
itself. 

The Legend is set in ancient Crete, where Poseidon
sends King Minos a beautiful white bull up from the
sea to offer as a sacrifice to the god. King Minos is
so struck with the beauty of this bull that he keeps
it, sacrificing one of his own herd in its place. His
actions anger and offend Poseidon, who punishes Minos
by causing his wife Pasiphae to fall madly in love
with the white bull. With the help of Daedalus, who
constructs for her a wooden cow covered with real
hide, she copulates with the bull and conceives the
monstrous Minotaur. 

There is little mention of Pasiphae in Crowley’s
works, but what commentary and analysis we can find is
very enlightening. In The Paris Working, Crowley
establishes the general concept behind the Legend as
he interprets it:


“This is the great idea of magicians in all times:--

To obtain a Messiah by some adaptation of the sexual
process. 

In Assyria they tried incest; also in Egypt; the
Egyptians tried brothers and sisters, the Assyrians
mothers and sons. Phoenicians tried fathers and
daughters; Greeks and Syrians mostly bestiality. This
idea came from India. The Jews sought to do this by
invocation methods. The Mohammedans tried
homosexuality; mediaeval philosophers tried to produce
homunculi by making chemical experiments with semen.

But the root idea is that any form of procreation
other than normal is likely to produce results of a
magical character.

Either the father of the child should be a symbol of
the sun, or the mother a symbol of the moon.”2



Crowley goes on to link this concept with the Legend
of Pasiphae:



“SPRING CEREMONIES IN CRETE

There was a labyrinth there; they had the worship of
Apis from Egypt.

There was a sacred bull in this labyrinth, quite
white. At the spring festival they sacrificed twelve
virgins to him.

‘Here the brutish act appeared: Pasiphae 

being covered by the bull in the cow’s place’ 

Aeneid VI

They wanted to get a Minotaur, an incarnation of the
sun, a Messiah. They said they had one, but they
hadn’t.”3



Here the Legend of Pasiphae is given by Crowley as a
historical example of “procreation other than normal.”
There is reference to the sacred white bull, as well
as the Apis bull that was worshipped in Egypt, another
“legend of the Bull gods.” The virginity of twelve
women was sacrificed each Spring in hope that one
would bear a Minotaur, an offspring of “magical
character.”

The idea that “either the father of the child should
be a symbol of the sun, or the mother a symbol of the
moon” is also supported by the Legend of Pasiphae. The
Minotaur’s actual Greek name was Asterius, meaning “of
the Sun,” and Pasiphae, “she who shines for all,” was
originally a Cretan Moon goddess.4 The virgins are
twelve in number to represent the twelve signs of the
zodiac through which the Sun travels on his yearly
journey, suggested here as starting in the spring with
Taurus.

This symbolism of the Legend of Pasiphae is also found
in the Hierophant trump. The Hierophant is Osiris, or,
taken in context with the bull that supports him,
Serapis. The bull is focused on the loins of the
Woman, who is Isis, holding the lunar crescent that
identifies her with the Moon. It is this relationship
between the bull and the Woman that constitutes the
“distinctly sadistic aspect to this card.”

The Legend of Pasiphae is also interpreted at the
beginning of the 16th Aethyr of The Vision and the
Voice, where we begin to understand its relevance:



“There are faint and flickering images in a misty
landscape, all very transient. But the general
impression is of a moonrise at midnight, and a crowned
virgin riding upon a bull.

And they come up into the surface of the stone. And
she is singing a chant of praise: Glory unto him that
hath taken upon himself the image of toil. For by his
labour is my labour accomplished. For I, being a
woman, lust ever to mate myself with some beast. And
this is the salvation of the world, that always I am
deceived by some god, and that my child is the
guardian of the labyrinth that hath two-and-seventy
paths.”5

[...] 


“The central mystery in that past Aeon was that of
Incarnation; all the legends of god-men were founded
upon some symbolic story of that kind. The essential
of all such stories was to deny human fatherhood to
the hero or god-man. In most cases, the father is
stated to be a god in some animal form, the animal
being chosen in accordance with the qualities that the
authors of the cult wished to see reproduced in the
child.

“Thus, Romulus and Remus were twins begotten upon a
virgin by the god Mars, and they were suckled by a
wolf. On this the whole magical formula of the city
Rome was founded.

“Reference has already been made in this essay to the
legends of Hermes and Dionysus.

“The father of Gautama Buddha was said to be an
elephant with six tusks, appearing to his mother in a
dream.

“There is also the legend of the Holy Ghost in the
form of a dove, impregnating the Virgin Mary. There is
here a reference to the dove of Noah’s Ark, bringing
glad tidings of the salvation of the world from the
waters. (The dwellers in the Ark are the foetus, the
waters the amniotic fluid.)

“Similar fables are to be found in every religion of
the Aeon of Osiris: it is the typical formula of the
Dying God.

[...]



-Doug


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<http://www.pynchonoid.blogspot.com/>

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