Dear friends, beautiful and happy people,
Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law.
Soror Astarte just read my Twelfth Night Hermeneutic and thinks I am “brilliant.”
No, Cara Soror. Giordano Bruno is brilliant. I have merely spent half a century eating like an ogre, drinking like a Templar, smoking like a chimney, playing like a diplomat, fornicating like a satyr and snorting Peruvian coke on strippers’ boobs.
Besides, like Ankh-af-na-khonsu, the priest of the princes (blessing & worship to him), when he was admitted into the presence of our august Queen, the great goddess Nuit (AL I, 26), I immediately ask: Who am I?
What then is this “Me,” dear Sister, that keeps returning in a loop, in an incantatory refrain, in the mysterious formulas and magical allegories recorded in our Holy Books?
A few years ago, at an ultra-decadent cocktail party given by my friend X. to celebrate the sale of a batch of fake Van Goghs to some oil-rich bougnoule, I was approached by a very beautiful Sciences Po graduate — the extreme Kundera-fan type — dressed in a severe white Chanel suit, who questioned me about my writing work.
I declared to her: “I am the enfant terrible of a couple of cursed lovers, officially divorced with much noise and fury, but constantly burning with desire for each other: Thelema and Judaism.”
She replied that she found it “cute” and immediately invited me to an orgy on Avenue du Maréchal-Maunoury.
Those were the good times.
But after all — the enfant terrible of Thelema and Judaism: that is to say, of Babylon and Jerusalem, i.e., of Babalon and Sion (ציון), which are one and the same:
Babalon = B(2) + A(1) + B(2) + A(1) + L(30) + O(70) + N(50) = 156 = Tz(90) + I(10) + U(6) + N(50) = Tziun ציון, Sion
A furious, passionate embrace, therefore, of Magick and Halakha — I am the child that Xerxes and Queen Esther conceived right after the events reported in the Megillah.
For yes: Thelema is the crown of the Æon of Horus, just as Buddhism was the crown of the Æon of Osiris, and Judaism that of the Æon of Isis.
According to Cathy, my official shrink, these are the three fundamental complexes: Icarus, Oedipus, and Hamlet.
Buddhism, which hates the demiurge-father who turns the wheel of Karma and wants to reintegrate the happy matricial nothingness of Nirvana, suffers from an Oedipus complex.
Judaism, which considers Mother Nature intrinsically evil and wants to “repair” her — that is, to destroy her — in the name of an invisible father, suffers from a Hamlet complex.
Thelema, which disregards the paternal warning and, proclaiming “Do what thou wilt,” joyfully launches itself toward ever more Light, suffers from an Icarus complex.
In fact, I listen neither to Daedalus nor to Cathy: < Me doth the Woman of the Mysteries instruct in vain > (Liber Cordis 3, 58) — and I ask once again: who is < Me >?
Me = M(40) + E(5) = 45 = אדם, Adam, that is to say, Man.
Now, what is man that Thou art mindful of him? (Psalms 8:5)
According to the Book of the Law, there are five categories of men:
The Hermit (the exceptional being, the unique model, the off-scale case — my fellow, my brother — paradoxically so, in that we belong to the unclassifiable).
The Lover (he who, in every circumstance, behaves like a country squire on a fox hunt, or like a young man of excellent family at a 16th-arrondissement ball — the one who dines like a gourmet, dresses like a dandy, and plays with life and money with a casualness that makes the Trogs burn with envious hatred — the cheerful jet-setter who deflowers débutantes and penetrates VIP enclosures, and who has perfectly assimilated the fundamental Shumulism: life is a party and parties do not last).
The man of Earth (the spiritual gentleman farmer: a noble soul, but still held back by crude material considerations).
The Heathen [plouc, redneck, bumpkin, etc., generally translated as Troglodyte, abbreviated as Trog] (the average taxpayer, Mr. Everybody, the honest but mediocre saver, whose religion is, depending on the case, one of the crapulous creeds (AL III, 50-54), or football, politics, a singer, etc.).
The Outcast [unfit, wretched and/or weak] (the unwelcome, the incapable — whether he lives in the slums [wretched] or in his mother’s basement [weak]: he turns up equally as a provincial magistrate, a civil party in the trial of Sir Shumule, or a pathetic little throat-cutter without stature at Moulins-Yzeure Prison — the constant being the unquenchable hatred he feels toward “the one who goes his way with a light heart”).
This is the capital point: a Hermit may pass himself off as an Outcast (Liber Tau teaches us that the Magister Templi is the Fool of the Tarot), but not the reverse, as it is written: < it may be that yonder beggar is a King. A King may choose his garment as he will : there is no certain test : but a beggar cannot hide his poverty > (AL II, 58).
Perpetually assailed, as his function requires, by < danger & trouble > (AL III, 11), the prince-priest may have an access of melancholy, as it is written: < I will hide thee in a mask of sorrow : they that see thee shall fear thou art fallen : but I lift thee up > (AL II, 53) — this has no consequence; but nothing and no one will ever make Emmanuel Macron a credible head of state: < There is none that shall be cast down or lifted up : all is ever as it was > (AL II, 58).
Just as only royal souls — Hermit, Lover, and man of Earth — are capable of accepting the Law of Thelema, so too the first direct Commandment of the Book (AL I, 6) sums up, in the person of the prince-priest, the three modes of service to Ra-Hoor-Khuit: warrior, lord, and Thebes — i.e., direct Action, Promulgation by example, and the Ascesis of the Magician who, in the twilight of his Temple, casts his power of enchantment onto the scales of the cosmic balance.
Above all, above all, above all, whether one is still <gross>, already < fine >, or belongs to the < lofty chosen ones > (AL I, 50), in all cases and at every level: < let not one know well the other ! > (AL I, 50)
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 19° ♈︎ : ☽︎ in 7° ♑︎ : ☿︎ : Ⅴⅹⅰⅰ.
𓄿𓎛𓂧 𓇋𓈖𓏌
