Dear friends, beautiful and happy people,
Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law.
It’s official! Frater Y. is popping the question this weekend in Sèvres, over the Sunday roast, and he’s absolutely terrified!
(I’d be scared too, mind you, if I had to spend a Sunday in Sèvres…)
I keep repeating to him the fundamental Shumulism: The crucial moments of existence are like pitbulls — they can sense fear — But he won’t listen.
Y. accuses me of “talking from a position of ease” (since, as everyone knows, my wife Chloé is so cool and badass that SHE was the one who, at the age of eighteen, very solemnly and gravely asked my parents for my hand in marriage).
He probably doesn’t know that I myself, many years ago, had to perform a similar manoeuvre to the one awaiting him this Sunday — and in my case, I must admit, it ended in complete fiasco…
One August evening in the South of France, after seventy-two hours of particularly heated orgies without sleep, my friend Fix and I were cooling off, slumped on a bench.
From there we had a view into a garden where a charming family was just starting dinner: a very patriarchal patriarch, two young girls dressed in Cyrillus, a mother straight out of Little House on the Prairie, all of them eating melon with port.
The scene moved us deeply.
The kindly simplicity of their ways, the peace, the quiet happiness of these people — all of it awakened violent nostalgia in the hearts of us inveterate party animals.
I remember feeling something like a tear trembling at the corner of my beautiful eyelashes.
Fix was in the same state.
“Listen,” I said to him, “we’re idiots to be lamenting like this. All we have to do is ask for the two girls’ hands in marriage, and that’s it…”
No sooner said than done.
We took a while to find the gate, and even longer to find the doorbell.
The father eventually came to open the door.
I introduced myself and declared that I had the honour of asking, for myself and my friend François-Xavier, the hand of each of his daughters.
The worthy man must have misunderstood our intentions, because he answered us with a flood of invectives in which the words “drunks,” “hooligans,” and “wankers” came up with painful frequency.
“Your refusal, sir, would lose nothing by being expressed in less vulgar terms,” I articulated as best I could while we withdrew.
Ah, those were the days :)
Frater Y., for his part, reminded me earlier that the akashic reminiscences of the Prophet recorded in Liber Cordis Cincti Serpente include the moment when, newly married and on his way to the wedding night, he found the demon Choronzon waiting for him on the threshold of the nuptial suite…
Do you remember the verse?
On the threshold stood the fulminant figure of Evil, the Horror of emptiness, with his ghastly eyes like poisonous wells. He stood, and the chamber was corrupt; the air stank. He was an old and gnarled fish more hideous than the shells of Abaddon. — Liber Cordis, 4:34.
I. Snow Leopard in the Seabed
Obviously, coming face to face with Cthulhu as a prelude to the wedding night is a bit of a boner-killer, and most people see this episode as an ultra-stressful horror-movie scene or a convoluted bad trip.
Not me: I chant this Holy Verse every time a guard appears at the door of my cell, or when I catch sight, through the window, of a particularly ugly inmate (I know this one guy who, when he smiles, matches the description in the verse perfectly. Just add a baseball cap and it’s spot on! Incredible…).
After which I recite “We have nothing with the outcast and the unfit: let them die in their misery” (AL II, 21) as an Exorcism — given that the “prison population” is almost exclusively made up of outcasts (the inmates) and of unfit people (the prison staff) — which gives a Thelemite in captivity the constant sensation of being a snow leopard who has wandered into a marine documentary. It’s very exotic.
II. Me And Choronzon Blues
Speaking of exorcisms, inmates and prison guards — that is to say, of demonology — what am I saying? Of goetia!… What exactly is the demon Choronzon who tried to ruin the wedding night of a guilgul of the priest of the princes Ankh-af-na-khonsu (blessing & worship to him)?
During the blessed hours of our dear Abbey of Thelema (August 2019 – April 2022), one morning I received the following unexpected question:
“From GH the Zenist to Sir Shumule the Thelemite, greetings!
Happiness and gallant success!
I cannot manage, Master, to understand exactly what the demon CHORONZON — described by John Dee and Sir Edward Kelly, who has become the ‘devil’ in Thelemic philosophy — actually represents.
May I solicit your High Lights on this point?
Nine prostrations.”
I had replied:
My dear Zen friend,
Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law.
You are a seductive mystery destined for a sublime fate who, like every one of us, has a dark side.
A part of your psyche growls, salivates and bares its teeth: it is unconscious — it is irrational — it feeds exclusively on ill will, perverse passions and instinctive fears.
It is the piece of the sickness-of-the-world that has landed on your plate.
Choronzon is the name we give to this mess of repressed desires, ego bruises, and silly self-delusions that you deliberately ignore because it is unflattering and differs, in painful proportions, from what you would like to believe you are.
Carl Gustav Jung calls it “the Shadow”; Christians call it the Evil One; Jews call it the Yetzer Hara; Hindus call it Apasmārapuruṣa; Buddhists call it Māra; the ancient Egyptians called it Seth — You can call it your evil twin, your Mephisto, your inner Cancer native.
Consequently, Choronzon is also what the Alchemists transform into gold: not something intrinsically “evil,” but a subordinate who — like all stalkers, all affection-starved bunny-boilers, and all dismissed lackeys — becomes hysterical through overcompensation because he is ignored.
Thus man compulsively turns caricaturally low-rent in order to stop suffering.
If you neglect to “stamp down the wretched & the weak” (AL II, 21), the wretched & the weak will bite you in the calf: they will systematically sabotage your efforts, unless you make the effort to aggressively identify them and alchemically transmute them: “Refuse none but thou shalt know & destroy the traitors” (AL III, 42) — Isn’t it well known that complaining about the shortcomings of others is to betray one’s own failings?
If you disinherit an aspect of your character, it will suddenly materialise at the edge of the wood, in more or less human form, when you least expect it…
Like the One Ring of Sauron, it wants to be found: hence the Freudian slips, the pseudo-accidents, the stupid inhibitions — the dangerously repressed libidinous kinks,
Me and Choronzon were walking side by side,
I’m gonna beat my woman until I get satisfied …
the “terrible adventures” of which Saint Friedrich Nietzsche, of blessed memory, tells us that they eventually make us suspect that the person to whom they happen is himself someone terrible.
See, dear Zen friend! The dwarf who refuses to admit he is a dwarf will be thrown (or rather launched, since he is a dwarf) onto a basketball court in front of millions of viewers: whoever denies what he doesn’t like in himself will have his nose rubbed in it.
So be an Alchemist rather than a mediocre hoarder! Visita Interiora Terrae Rectificando Invenies Occultum Lapidem: “Until you have made the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate,” Carl Jung also said — or, in my tireless formula: what you flee is your Salvation.
Love is the law, love under will.
— Sir Shumule
III. Joyful Noises Only (Exorcism by Voluptuousness)
Speaking of horror films, the only word whose capital letter seems incongruous in our verse is precisely “Horror,” whose gematria is 681, the same as that of TRVOH: “joyful noises,” “rallying cries,” “blaring music,” etc.
From which we deduce that anything carrying the idea of PARTY puts Choronzon to flight.
A Thelemic dwelling, being both a Palace and a Temple, must constantly resound with joyful sounds — and on all Three Planes, since 681 = 217 × 3 and 217 is the gematria of BIRH (“palace” or “temple”).
Therefore, recommendations to Frater Y. and to anyone about to found a home as he is:
. On the religious plane: rituals “performed with joy & beauty” (AL II, 21).
. On the social plane: party all day in the salons.
. On the physical plane: cries of voluptuousness constantly rising from the bedrooms.
Such is the triple antidote to Choronzon — therefore, very logically, the sine qua non condition of Happiness — and the Supreme Exorcism.
IV. The Way of the Beḥedit (Funk It and Throw a Party)
That is why the word “feast” is so recurrent — so mantrically recurrent — in the Discourse of the Old Serpent of the City of Edfu, Hadit our Master, who is the Exorcist par excellence (AL II, 7) and constantly enjoins us to feast — that is, to feast without cease.
The famous Bootsy Collins Theorem — “When the bailiff knocks on the door and you don’t have the money to pay, say ‘funk it’ and throw a party!” — is not a punchline, but an Arcane of Operative Magick.
Meditate upon this, dear friends, and go your gorgeous ways 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 27° ♈︎ : ☽︎ in 20° ♈︎ : ♃︎ : Ⅴⅹⅰⅰ.
𓄿𓎛𓂧 𓇋𓈖𓏌
