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| Portrait of Sir Shumule aka David van Horn, by HIH Princess Clothilde-Naama |
To Karl Germer.
Dear friends, beautiful and happy people,
Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law.
About yesterday’s post, Soror K. wrote to me:
‘Vintage Shumule: equal parts Thelemic sermon, decadent gossip, and sly tarot exegesis delivered with the languid arrogance of a man who knows he will never have to queue at the post office… Frankly, so rosy it could double as a tourism brochure for the New Aeon.’
That said, she is genuinely wondering about the source of my “superhuman capacity for resilience,” which she rates as “at least equal to [my] Bachic resistance.”
Easy! Besides being a textbook case of Peter Pan syndrome, I am a servant of the god Heru-ra-ha, the Crowned & Conquering Child. And resilience is the specific superpower of childhood.
But it’s a good question: It is written < there be times of darkness, and this as a lamp therein > (Liber Magi, 6) — What is your own personal portable lamp? What happy memory contains, for you, enough light that, no matter the circumstances, the < darkness and terror > around you systematically turn into < light and joy > (Liber Tzaddi, 17)?
What is it that — like Saturnus, OHO Karl Johannes Germer, who silently recited the Holy Books of Thelema to himself “from first to last and from last to first” in order to “keep in shape” during his detention in the Nazi concentration camp at Esterwegen (where reading had been forbidden him) — what, I ask, allows you to remain connected to the gods in the midst of trial?
Most prisoners think of their mother. Why not? Mom was the archetype of the bossy MILF châtelaine, and on the Freudian level that’s comforting.
Personally, though, whenever I feel a touch of the blues I think with all my strength about my late mentor in Thelema (whom, by the way, I now refer to only by the “posthumous magical pseudonym that is an inside joke”: ‘Leptopoecile Sophiæ’ (LS). His real name was dragged through quite enough mud — during the investigation and the first-instance hearing of my trial before the tribunal de grande instance of Cusset — by what passes for the judiciary in France, who painted him as the exact equivalent of the evil old wizard whom Ariana Grande hurls into a lava crater at the end of the “Break Free” video).
I would never call him my “master,” because he constantly repeated: “AL II:65 makes it clear that the ancient serpent Hadit is our Master, our guru, our rebbe, our duca, segnore e maestro, to the exclusion of all others — each of us is a disciple whom Hadit has accepted, meaning each of us is Hadit’s Holy Chosen One.”
Just evoking LS’s physical appearance, the care he took with his grooming, the degree to which his every gesture carried that effortless nonchalance that the parvenu hates in the aristocrat so much he’ll burn down the Bastille over it — that alone is enough to put me overjoyed.
Frater N. (who was also his pupil) once invited me to reflect on the fact that while our late mentor remains, for us and a few others, an invigorating memory, the Aurum Solis and the Ordo Astrum Sophiae consider him the arch-traitor to be hated above all (because he cold-bloodedly ditched them the moment he became a Thelemite), and most “hermeticists” who have mentioned him in print (especially the Martinists and the butthurt clowns of AMORC) simply report that he was ultra-authoritarian and cruel in his teaching, that he physically mistreated and punished his students, humiliated them the moment they arrived, and was particularly merciless if he detected the slightest hint of defiance.
It is true that LS invariably suspected anyone who approached him in an initiatory context of suffering from morbid masochism… :)
Why am I telling you all this?
Because Soror Sinthea — whom I call Soror Sin just to annoy her — asked me earlier today what hermeneutic meaning should be given, respectively, to the different pronouns (ye, you, thou) by which the gods address humanity in The Book of the Law.
LS once entrusted me with this Key:
‘Ye’ designates the < company of heaven > (AL I:2), i.e. the totality of all incarnate gods who constitute humanity proper — whether they are consciously Thelemites or not — as opposed to “the people” (= them), who are troglodyte monkeys (who appeared on Earth “exactly like maggots in an apple,” cf. The Paris Working), worshippers of the Blind Creature of the Slime, and dedicated to turning this marvellous Garden of Delights that is the World into the Old Grey Land of Desolation for the benefit of that Creature.
(N.B.: In my opinion, no one has ever illustrated this essential Arcanum better than the group Telepopmusik in the music video for their track “Breathe.”)
The Ye — gods temporarily disguised as men and imprisoned in animal bodies — have the exactly opposite mission: to restore the Earthly Paradise, to destroy the Old Grey Land by promulgating (consciously or unconsciously) the Law of Thelema.
(Soror Jezebel has a brilliant formula for the concept of the “unconscious Thelemite”: “All Kim Kardashian lacks is renouncing the Armenian Apostolic Church to fulfil absolutely every condition of the ideal Scarlet Woman as described in Chapter III of Liber AL.”)
Come, O ye gods, and let us feast! — LLL 6:46
Ye are against the people, O my chosen! — AL II:34.
‘You’ designates conscious Thelemites (those who have accepted the Law, recognised Ra-Hoor-Khuit as Lord of the Æon, and hold that The Book of the Law is the letter of Truth).
But you who have defied the law; you who have conquered by subtlety or force; you will I take unto me, even I will take you unto me. — Tzaddi, 19.
I will give you a war-engine. — AL III:7.
‘Thou’ designates the true being of the individual, the one the Ancient Egyptians called “the Defunct” — “Thou,” LS said, “is very precisely the one who appears before the Scales of Maat for the Weighing of the Heart — when, on the threshold of his eternal destiny it is no longer possible for him to escape who he really is through lies, psychodramas, or fallacious reasoning.”
Therefore thou art wholly pure before Me. — Liber Cordis Cincti Serpente V:10.
thou hast no right but to do thy will. — AL I:42.
Meditating upon which, go forth, dear friends, under the protection of that spiritual sphere whose centre is everywhere and circumference nowhere, and which we call GOD.
Warm kisses from the Bahamas.
Love is the law, love under will.
— ☉︎ in 15° ♐︎ : ☽︎ in 16° ♋︎ : ♄︎ : Ⅴⅹⅰ.
— ☉︎ in 15° ♐︎ : ☽︎ in 16° ♋︎ : ♄︎ : Ⅴⅹⅰ.
