ATD: Masks & Symmetry (of injuries)

[Glenn Scheper]

quotes from: Magick in Theory and Practice by Aleister Crowley

It is much easier (for obvious reasons) to acquire the Magical Memory when one 
has been sworn for many lives to reincarnate immediately. The great obstacle is 
the phenomenon called Freudian forgetfulness; that is to say, that, though an 
unpleasant event may be recorded faithfully enough by the mechanism of the 
brain, we fail to recall it, or recall it wrong, because it is painful. "The 
Psychopathology of Everyday Life" analyses and illustrates this phenomenon in 
detail. Now, the King of Terrors being Death, it is hard indeed to look it in 
the face. Mankind has created a host of phantastic masks;
  -- http://www.leapinglaughter.org/archive/libri/L_004p3.txt
  Untitled

This equilibrium is affirmed by the magician in arranging the Temple. Nothing 
must be lop-sided. If you have anything in the North, you must put something 
equal and opposite to it in the South. The importance of this is so great, and 
the truth of it so obvious, that no one with the most mediocre capacity {60} for 
magick can tolerate any unbalanced object for a moment. His instinct instantly 
revolts.<<This is because the essence of his being a Magician is his intuitive 
apprehension of the fundamental principles of the Universe. His instinct is a 
subconscious assertion of the structural identity of the Macrocosm and the 
Microcosm. Equilibrium is the condition of manifested existence.>>.
  -- http://www.leapinglaughter.org/archive/libri/L_004p3.txt
  Untitled


Sleeping all day Sunday, I felt essentially dumb and numb; I surfed
The Yellow Book: Gnosis, the Divine Mother Kundalini and Jinn Science
and hit Crowley's book. Reading it, its introduction makes clear that
Crowley had a very early, perhaps virginal autofellatio experience,
and his use of many symbols in it is in perfect alignment with my own.
(But very many of his symbols spark absolutely no recognition in me.)

Before I touched my teens, I was already aware that I was THE BEAST whose number 
is 666. I did not understand in the least {XI} what that implied; it was a 
passionately ecstatic sense of identity.
In my third year at Cambridge, I devoted myself consciously to the Great Work, 
understanding thereby the Work of becoming a Spiritual Being, free from the 
constraints, accidents, and deceptions of material existence.
  -- http://www.leapinglaughter.org/archive/libri/L_004p3.txt
  Untitled

However, his disparaging of Apocalypse contrasts with my treasuring it.
There is something essentially "bad faith" or Satanic about his gnosis.
Perhaps it is absence of the second half, Love thy neighbor as thyself.

The G is a silent letter, as in our word Gnosis; and the sound GN is nasal, 
suggesting therefore the breath of life as opposed to that of speech. Impelled 
by these considerations, the Master Therion proposed to replace the M of AUM by 
a compound letter MGN, symbolizing thereby the subtle transformation of the 
apparent silence and death which terminates the manifested life of Vau by a 
continuous vibration of an impersonal energy of the nature of generation and 
knowledge, the Virgin Moon and the Serpent furthermore operating to include in 
the idea a commemoration of the legend so grossly deformed in the Hebrew legend 
of the Garden of Eden, and its even more malignantly debased falsification in 
that bitterly sectarian broadside, the Apocalypse.
  -- http://www.leapinglaughter.org/archive/libri/L_004p3.txt
  Untitled

Yours truly,
Glenn Scheper
http://home.earthlink.net/~glenn_scheper/
glenn_scheper + at + earthlink.net
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