Found this out in the electronic ether a while back, thought I'd share...
Qabalahs of Silence
Romulus
November 1996
There are only two things that pique my interest now as we confront the flushing of civilization into the commode of the 21st Century. One consists of the possibilities for political and social revolution through M/magic(k). The other is the development of the ordinary mind without its having to resort to blundering hypnosis, thanatosis, unpredictable psychedelics or overworked rituals. I see the illumination and expansion of ordinary consciousness as the key that will finally implement thaumaturgical mutations into the everyday routines of the consensual reality. If the disease of our time is materialism and technology, then its cure cannot be a flood of homeopathies, but nothing less than the spiritus magi itself.
Unfortunately, by ordinary consciousness I do not mean the ordinary consciousness of commonplace minds. Only the special are of value. Moreover, the special do not necessarily trumpet their arrival. Those who have truly studied the Qabalah - not merely to impress others with their knowledge of the qabalistic vocabulary, but in order to understand what the "Received Doctrine" actually is and what it is intended to do - such people are not only rare but they tend to avoid revealing what they know and they find it difficult to translate their insights into ordinary language. How much more mute and intimate must the qabalahs of solipsistic, schizoid enterprise remain? Those who avoid telling fortunes with the sacred Atus of the Book of Thoth, but who would rather pursue its hidden revelations, such adepts use divination for its proper ends, which do not entail broadcasting. When numerology enters its more arcane precincts, it can no longer be bandied about amateurishly in terms of "this person is a six" or "seven is a lucky number". As for those who seriously pursue the Hermetic arts, they seldom proselytize by way of what they are doing nor indeed are they able to do so- they have learned, as alchemists of old have always known, that it is possible to talk to the uninitiated (and to one another) only in riddles. Yogis, Chaos-Magicians, the practitioners of Voudon and all the other misfits of contemporary, not yet completely disneyfied America, necessarily exist in an underground, immune to vulgar curiosity. Of the four elements of M/magic(k) it is Tacere, "to keep silent" that is the least respected, the least developed and the least understood. Yet without it, the other three elements are divested of their power.
It is easy to be caught up in exercises of the Will, in heady and courageous feats of Daring, in the intoxication of radiant, ever-expanding Knowledge. Omnipotence, Immortality and Omniscience - the divine attributes - have an irresistible pull, so that one easily sweeps everything else aside. But ignore the exigencies of Silence to your peril! To broadcast knowledge too freely is to build a palace out of sand on a foundation trampled by the multitudes. The first thing the soul encounters as it enters the Underground is the river of Lethe, whose waters of forgetfulness erase all past life from memory. In the passage of Astarte into the hall of the dead, she is obliged to shed all of her garments and jewels until she stands naked before the tribunal. When Sisyphus attempts to appropriate immortality for himself, the Gods grant his wish, as they always do with hubristic mortals, but they deprive him of all knowledge and experience of it save the endless mechanism itself - without content. The cycle of reincarnation is incorporated into the great meaningless stone that he is obliged to roll endlessly uphill again and again. The Hebrews in their caution, did not utter the sacred name of their God aloud, knowing that to do so would expose him to the vitiation of heathens and enemies. Similarly, what did the powerful nether-gods, the ancient ones of Lovecraft say? Their answer invariably is. . . Nothing. Silence is also the issue in the battle between Isis and Ra. As you know, Isis needs Ra's secret name in order to complete her repertory of magical powers. She obtains this hidden name by trickery, resulting in the immediate loss of his kingship of the Gods and she is clever enough not to seek her ruin by prattling this all-powerful technikrym to ordinary mortals.
We can already observe the catastrophe of the so-called Information Highway. Information is not knowledge. Knowledge is not wisdom. Yet technology has stolen wisdom from the greatest of thinkers and the most esoteric of libraries only to sift and winnow it until it has been reduced not just to the lesser levels of knowledge and information, but to meaningless bits of data to be offered to the public like gristle to dogs. We can observe the corruption of ancient wisdom in the world of popular M/magic(k) today, when the most miserable of souls can lay out the Tarot or recite the sacred mantras of India as the crowd applauds. Rank pretenders now imagine themselves capable of imitating the great Ape of Thoth himself, but they succeed only in imitating his qliphotic archetype, Baratchial , dropping their juggling spheres and stumbling, drooling and lumbering over the ground. The secret itself, of course, is not in the possession of these fools nor will it ever be, but everything that surrounds the secret has been ripped off leaving but trash behind, so that the jewel is not only buried and impossible to locate, but even the light it sheds has been swallowed up by the black-hole of ignorance.
The Silence of which we speak is not just the keeping of a secret, it is the great Void itself. It is the foundation of the corridors of the remote Abraxas, whose awakening cock-crow can never be heard by mortal ears. What then is the word of this deaf-world? It is uttered backwards, so that it remains eternally unsaid. The light that it sheds falls back within itself, to be captured by its envenomed shadow and released only by ultra-dimensional excretion. The heavy, pre-auric metals must be transmuted in a sealed alembic by the heat of the primordial yods of pre-emergent fire. In this ultimate implosion, the formula for transmuting the world and the universe itself falls into the endless Abyss. The magus who would pursue this dark matter, the end-product of light, must likewise follow it into the Abyss. The cries of the vultures, perched atop the pylons of the gate into the Other World, as they pronounce the secret name of Ra, can be heard only by the unwaxed ears of the Vulture-Mother, Mut, herself. All others hear but the soul-wrenching screeches of madness that send them spinning into endless oblivion.
[ 04-03-2002: Message edited by: modthree ] |
