the x-files

It is said that during the final bits of the Elysian mysteries certain words were said and a basket was shown to the participants, and that made them realise the Mystery of Elysius.

Some say, that the 3rd degree of Masonry used to be enough to propel people into the beginnings of enlightenment. If we believe the research of Bishop Hoeller, the Valentinians used the sacraments as initiations.

There seems to be a lot of things that in times passed meant a lot to people, that were words containing the deepest mysteries. Texts kept away from the profane, because they contained the secrets to ___insert something__ itself!

Most of these things are limited to time. I doubt that it would be useful for anyone to undergo the Elysian mysteries today because we are not in the same mental space. Eating meat fish drinking wine and having sex is also not a massive taboo for most of us and is not going to cause any shocks to the system. Being shown a gurus rose-smelling piss might be a life altering event for a lifelong groupie, but the western reporter is probably just going to think that it is gross.

The question whether there are traditions that still have secrets and whether or not there are papers that are not published is actually not relevant.

Of course there are papers that exist that haven't made their way into the internet.

Are the papers worth anything? NO. Not out of context. That is the whole point. Can you give me the texts for all the rites in the Swedish rite of freemasonry started by Duke Carl in March 1735? No, I doubt you can. Would it make any difference if some random got hold of them?

Nope.

A guy actually emailed me and said "If you have these ancient secret papers, why don't you share them or shut up about them?"

Thats kind of missing the point.

Allow me to demonstrate. Instead of sharing the papers I will play a game.

Let's play the game of "Giving the game away" and see how without the oral traditions, the correct context and being a part of a living tradition the following statements are meaningless, yet are still considered the highest secrets in some regards:

-The Tomb is empty

-Christ is slain Christ is Risen Christ will come again

-Osiris is a black God

-There is no part of me that is not of the Gods

-The dove confirms you are ready

-I am Truth!

-Chew and Swallow

-The god you worship is actually the Devil!

-Iao is short for Ialdabaoth

-There was a fifth nail for Jesus, but a Gypsy stole it.

-Only Loco gives the Asson

The thing is, the papers that haven't been released and are not findable are not what is going to solve an age old mystery. This is not an intellectual academic pursuit of putting a puzzle together. Having "Horus is the mystery" whispered into your ear, or being taken to a church at midnight to have your hair cut and wrist slit into a cup only makes sense, is only revelatory if you have been schooled in the right context.

The western mystery traditions have never, EVER, been about working out something intellectually as they relate to something so specific.

Putting corpse bits into a pot doesn't make you a Tata and until you get circumcised and accepted by a jewish rabbi as his student of Qabalah you are not -really- a kabbalist.

Did you know it is nigh impossible to create a 5 pointed star using a par of compasses and a straightedge unless you know exactly what you are doing? (hint, the wikipedia way is not the way) I will look up the reference when I have time

And if there are schools with mysteries? Mate, if Palo and Santeria has survived after being created in Cuba based on African religious practices, what makes you think there isn't a living tradition of other things?

Maybe some of these things rely on more then paperwork. Maybe the reason you cannot call yourself a Houngan just because you read some books on voudu and worship the Lwa isn't just some odd Exoteric rule, maybe there is a point to it. Maybe some of the grimoires are actually just bullshit made up of people who wanted a fast buck and maybe the corpus hermeticum is as esoteric as the bible, without certain specific empowerments or just a way of working that is meant to be un-locatable no matter how much one searches. the secret words are not qabalistic ennummerations, they are the colour codes of my little ponies.

Certain things will never make it to the public domain, and the moment they do they cannot be used for their intended purpose again.

This is the origin of the Old Alchemists saying:

"It is when we talk the most plainly nobody understands and when we talk in riddles that the people hang on our words".

I would want nothing more for there to be an essay or a book or ANYTHING I could just give out and know that if you just follow that instruction you will get to the end of what the traditions hint at. But it doesn't work like that. Because the moment that would happen the way to Gold would immediately transform into the way of Silver.

living proof: The Book of the Law. From one point of view every word in it is True. But Are you enlightened ujst because you read it? Really? (please please dont say yes, its a trap)

If you answered "No" why do you think that is?

Sometimes you need to be touched on the head by someone or be taken to a specific location or have become a vegan ascetic before being forced to eat a corpse of your own gender you have to copulate with whilst your mentor says chew and swallow...

Ce la vie, eh?

Knowledge

There are 3 sorts of people out there.

Those who don't care

Those who believe in something

Those who have Gnosis.

Now, someone asked me the following question:

"What is the difference between a Gnostic and a Christian, because it really seems that they both do the same thing, following myths and stuff".

Someone else asked me:

"What is the difference between a magician who claims to be enlightened who can work with spirits and do miracles and a magician who has actually found the stone of the wise, seeing as they both seem to do the same thing, you know, majicka."

I thought about charging sex, money and power for a made up answer, then I realised I'm not a douchebag and can do so for free with the real answer.

Gnosticism

It is all about the attitude. You see, all those holy texts out there, from the bible to the Bhagavad Gita to Liber Al were made up by someone who themselves may or may not have had gnosis. It might be they had gnosis, it might be they mistook a vision for a moment of gnosis or it might be they were complete and utter dicks and just wanted a way to control people.

The attitude needed is to choose to work with a religious myth. Not because you believe in it, not because you were raised in it, but because it happens to resonate with the cultural scheme in yourself and you can make the tools work.

Whilst you do this you are 99% the same as any Psychic, someone who truly believes. Thats the point. But when you start to have mystical experiences that show the bringing on of what in alchemy is often referred to as the albedo phase, you will not ground them in the tradition, running back to a textual or authoritative source, you will work to understand them based on your lived experience thusfar.

Then, when you are truly ready the grace can in some few cases bestow upon you gnosis (See the Life story of Boehme) or you may be lucky enough to be guided by someone else who has gnosis and they can impart this upon you. When this truly happens you will know it.

Because until a Gnostic has Gnosis s/he is merely a psychic who is intellectually drawn towards that which s/he perceives as gnosis, whereas a psychic doesn't even ask the questions intellectually and simply accepts.

But from the view of the one with Gnosis, they are both psychics because they both live either in the world they choose to believe in, or the world they have been made to believe in, not the world that is truly there.

Magic

The same rule applies to a magician as does a gnostic, here however, the mythologem that is referred to is called the Stone of the Wise, that is not a stone.

The books are made up in the same way as above, sometimes by people who know how to make others make use of existing symbolic systems to interface with the mind of the Godworld, some who have no ideas and just wanted to make a buck. Same goes for modern books on magick used for "enlightenment" versus magic made for practical results. Some are shit and others are really good. Compare with the old Alchemical texts where some actually could guide you to Gold others were outright dangerous and some were extremely good chemistry handbooks.

In the same way as it is impossible to get Gnosis by following concrete rules, it is not possible to attain unto the stone within the context of the lower work within magical traditions.

It certainly is possible to become a very effective magician, to have practical results, even to experience magically altered states of consciousness. But tell you what. You are not doing anything different then millions of people in oriental Asia are doing daily. The rituals, the conversation with spirits all that, they do from birth. The pujas, the offerings, the communing with spirits and their ancestors, casting powders on the people next door... this is being done by many more then you could count.

"There are more people practicing magick today then ever before". I'm truly sorry but that is utter bullshit in the context it was said. There are just as many people practicing magick today as there has always been, except in secularised countries like USA and Europe and heavily dogmatised religio-political places where even having a bad non-religious conformist thought will get your face melted with acid. And even so the enormous amount of people born in China and India and the region makes up for our slackness.

Aside from that? No, people still do magick. The same way as people in the desert do and did. The same way as egyptians woke up and fed their housegoods, as Romans bowed slightly before the fire in their house etc. My grandmother refuses to pour out hot water to this day as she doesn't want to hurt the housetomte. A lunar consciousness exists in many places as a matter of fact and has done so as attested by countless academically accepted historical sources such as papyri, lead-tablets and ethnologic research conducted the past 50 or so years attests to. Doing magic and having a living relationship with spirits and being good at magic is not something true and unique for a select few that we have managed to bring back from utter destruction.

It is not magic itself that will raise you to find the stone of the wise, it is a very specific application of mystical and magical techniques that might if you are lucky, bring about the change.

Argent's inane metaphor of the week:

Following recipes will make you a good cook, and if you have any talent whatsoever you may even learn to cook without a recipe. Thats good. Welcome to the club of being a magician. But until you can turn that fucking turnip into a carrot, you do not have the Stone of the Wise.

It is here that it is all brought together. For Gnosis is not non-dual awareness, it is not unio-mystica. the Stone of the Wise is not an initiation, or to wank around with God.

Gnosis and The Stone are the same thing and both can only be bestowed by divine Grace in very exceptional circumstances (Life of Boehme, St.Martin, Jung) but most often it is achieved by the littlest amount of helping push, the yeast given by someone who has some already. The light of the Gnosis within someone, a particle of the Stone.

Until that is in place the magician is a magician without Gnosis. Without the Stone of the Wise.

Is this a bad thing?

Nope. Everyone should do magick. Everyone should learn how to speak to spirits. Everyone should be a psychic and have some form of relationship with the divine.

But should we claim that what in alchemical terms is barely an albedo phase is the end-result?

No.

This tendency started with Crowley and the world around the WW1 when modernism shattered the Western world and brought about the end of the enlightenment era and plummeted us down into a meaningless pit.

We overcompensate. It is not enough to learn how to cook, we want to change parsnips into oranges. And we will use the cookbooks for this end for surely they will have the keys?

It is not enough we recover from the curse of modernism and seek to be in communion with the divine. No, we will use a portion of a religious system, say the bible, and seek complete enlightenment through that, ignoring that within that framework the only people who have all needed to reach the highest possible level whilst alive are really the bishops.

People want the fast way forward without knowing what it is. They don't want to serve the Lwa they want to become a houngan. It is not enough to learn self-defense and get in good shape, no you want to open your own dojo.

I am not saying that it should take 50 years to get Gnosis. I am saying that you can spend 50 years and never get it.

Alchemy has broken down the mystical-magical language to as pure a symbolic system as possible.

Doing religion and doing magick all fit into the earliest forms of having developed a lunar consciousness (think, a mirror) and working with the preparing for Nigredo.

Without having passed through Nigredo there will be no albedo, hence no citrinitas and thus no rubedo.

St. Mother Theresa was seeking for Albedo for over 30 years. Why? because she used the wrong tool for the wrong job.

If you want to be a good magician, if you want to have a relationship with the divine then do it. But don't enter into a process that you don't know how to get out of.

To have the Stone of the Wise or have Gnosis you need to pass into the alchemical Albedo phase and then transmute that into rubedo.

Do you have to be perfect to summon Raphael for a chat? Hell, no. Do you need to fast for 7 days just to jinx someone? Doubt it.

But if you have worked through your nigredo phase and the white-gray mass starts to brighten, then you will not be a bag. You will no longer be tied to outer forms. You will truly have been turned inside out and cleansed. Remember that bad thing you did? Gone.

Only then will you truly be able to say: I am utterly and perfectly happy with myself in every single way all the time. And you will also have performed the traveling into the deepest reaches of the world/beyond the astral/the subconscious (yourself) and there found the centre and that centerpiece will be you.

You will not care about things. You will not be angry or happy. You might experience these things but they will not move you from your center.

This is Albedo, this is where todays living orthodox saints, he none-phoney sadhus and Daoist masters reside in. and you know what? Just as there are little old women who can make a meal to beat any michelin star chef, can hex you to death with a glance no matter how much magick you have done, so there are people who have through very hard work gotten to this point.

If you truly can look into your own eyes in the mirror, away from your friends, away from the internet, away from even the eyes of god and say that this is the case, in everysingle moment, then you have achieved the albedo.

Not only will you have by necessity passed through the Dark Night of the Soul and met your guardian, but if you'd have done so, religion and magick, as performed by others will not be a part of you anymore. You will live and breathe divine contact as the RightHandMan of God, (written for westerners as I'm sure you get it by now).

it is here and only here that What is really meant by the Knowledge and conversation of the HGA can be achieved. That the work to create the alchemical body takes its start because it is the center-sun that is the prima-materia for this work. Not the lead you are now.

Then, and ONLY then can the Rubedo phase start and that work can utterly ruin everything and blemish the white with impurities forever. Any and all ideas you have about the Rubedo are false. Even the projections upon the albedo are as incorrect as a 7 year olds musings about old age are.

And just to pull my dick out: The blog exists partly to help define lines, not to offer theories, none of this is theory.

There, that should have answered the 24 emails I received asking questions.

It must be an angel

There is a fad among postmodern internet occult celebrities and their students to claim having achieved the knowledge and conversation of the Holy Guardian Angel.

This operation, which according to a published grimoire takes 6-18 months depending on the specific version of the published versions you read, they accomplish in much less time.

Of course they do. You see, Crowley himself said that the achievement of the HGA is the first step, then we are talking.

And uncle Al is always right, isn't he? Except when he mixes up about 4-5 different concepts, refers to them as one thing and then, keeps changing his mind.

Crowley is, in his published writings unnable to distinguish between his understanding of the mystery of being, the revelation of his (lesser) solar mystery, the beginnings of his Citrinitas phase, his initial contacts with what is a Holy Guardian Angel and Solar consciousness.

This is why he has several completely different methods for attaining unto it (whatever it is at that point he is referring to with the same word :S)

Now, as we know after having read previous posts on this blog, there is more to the western tradition then the Netultists* think.

You see, I happen to have access to a few** manuscripts that are a few hundred years old belonging to various Traditions*** that aim to perform similar things.

It is not impossible to find one of the bastardised versions of the Arcana Arcanorum online. I leaked one myself about 6 years ago that I got from a friend, because the person I know who is one of the people in charge of the masonic currents that hold the keys to the A.A. and thus knows his thing claimed: that A.A. document is about as effective as mixing coke, cola nuts and fizzy water and calling it coca cola. I happen to agree, knowing what I know so I thought it wouldn't hurt.

Anyway, point being even with the bastardised version floating around online you will quickly realise that whoever was meant to receive that document probably worked through the system that it belongs to.

Now, last I checked the A.A. belongs to the Memphis Misraim Rite that only starts to hand out the real deal from the degrees above 50. (not counting some of the cool angelology in the lower scottish rite degrees). So, whoever is receiving the papers should by this point be a Master Mason, with other degrees, manifest those in real life and have quite a few years under his or her belt in the system, living with it day in and day out. THEN you undertake the operation underlined in the A.A. after receiving the initiations**** for it.

Aside from the fact that the books out there do not come with keys and are thus impossible to decypher, these things take time because the process takes time.

I can get you a contact with your angel in 3 hours. You can experience solar consciousness after 3 days of fasting or sleep-deprivation. Hell get some illegal substances and get it in a few minutes. You can experience non-dual awareness by accident. But these things are not the same thing as what happens when you have built yourself a vessel.

A bad example but one worth mentioning anyway is: That when Mathers and co shaped, modernised and innovated and made workable a lot of the raw data out there, because they had the keys to do so, they choose to place the Abramelin work in the 5=6 grade. Now, why would they do that?

It is remarkably easy to have a subpersona masquerade as an entity. To have a random being pretending to be your Holy Guardian Angel. To spend years and years devoting yourself to something you think will free you from the world or make you into something keeeewl.

Truth is, its not gonna work, its fake.

I don't doubt that cool effects come out of this, heck I don't doubt that some of the Netultist stuff has effect. But, it's not the same thing as what is really meant by achieving the Knowledge and conversation with your holy guardian angel.

To get back to the GD version, as that will be the one most people are actually familiar with. This is Crowley's lifetime version:

You spend X time going through from neophyte to juniorus adeptus minor. This would have taken, about 5-6 years, or so. Possibly 3-4 if you push it. So then you undergo certain operations in the Adeptus minor grades to work through certain things.

Then, you'd be ready to perform the Abramelin operation*****, which actually ONLY makes sense in the context of what you have undergone. Hmm. Odd.

* I am making up a new word. Netcultist. it stands for any wannabe magician who has learned their stuff online, from books online, from books only and is too busy reinventing the wheel.

This goes from people reading a few books on Hoodoo calling themselves conjurers, readers of grimoires who think they represent some long dead tradition that needs reviving as if it died, puffers who know about as much about alchemy as I know about airline traffic management followers of 'traditions' that are about 10 years old, any witches who think there has been a surviving cult of anything they have been initiated into (sami-shamans on my mothers side of the family are exceptions) but you know who you are and other wankers who are the magician equivalent of protestant christians but instead of fucking with the Bible are discarding minimum 3000 years of oral teachings and think they can do it better.

In short, New + net + occultists+ cultists

**when I say few, I mean many

***Those things with history that have survived because their bullshit works, not because its popular

**** Initiations are those cool things that actually work by making you a living link in a Tradition that is alive. They also prepare you in various ways and make it possible for you to do certain things that it would be completely impossible to do without the initiation. For the netultists out there, this is the traditional version of getting an internet subscription.

***** You didn't really think that The Abramelin Operation is written by Mr Worms who just accidentally published a holy ancient ritual for the fun of it? You DO know that the Abramelin operation is merely a look-alike-rip of some more secret papers out there?

Ooops. I did it again, didn't I?