An Essay in Thelemic Resilience
Dear friends, beautiful and happy people,
Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law.
I am often asked how I manage to remain so imperturbably radiant and prodigiously cheerful amid the splendours of Exile and Detention.
Some people, I am told, would have long since succumbed to spleen and discouragement. After all — 1,217 days pacing the corridors of this prison, and I still haven’t found the bar!
Not to mention that ALL my attempts to have crates of Dom Pérignon delivered and Panamanian escorts smuggled in have lamentably failed, and that the judges politely but sepulchrally refuse to allow me even the most rudimentary basic survival equipment in my cell (an indoor zen fountain, a bevelled mirror, an electromagnetic field detector to spot ghosts, etc.).
The truth is that I am a disciple of the Old Serpent, Hadit our Master, and the Beḥedite philosophy set forth in the Second Chapter of The Book of the Law absolutely forbids any access to the blues: “They shall rejoice, our chosen: who sorroweth is not of us,” as it is written (AL II, 19).
Never forget: “Oh rejoice! rejoice!” (LLL 7, 24) — that is the whole of Thelema; everything else is merely commentary. (We have recently expanded on this.)
Regarding Hadit, Frater Y asked me in a rather introspective letter (Frater Y is increasingly writing like Lord Byron on a morning of epic hangover and crushing homesickness) what we should conclude from the difference between the way the Old Serpent, our Master, describes His physical appearance in The Book of the Law (“Blue am I and gold in the light of my bride: but the red gleam is in my eyes; & my spangles are purple & green” — AL II, 50) and in Liber Cordis Cincti Serpente (“My head is jewelled with twelve stars; My body is white as milk of the stars; it is bright with the blue of the abyss of stars invisible” —Cordis I, 28).
It is an excellent question.
I. Only the Beautiful Deserve Our Love
By virtue of the Magical Theory of Signatures, the physical appearance of a being reveals absolutely everything about its inner formula and its function in the universe.
That is why the Lord of all the gods commands us to labour “for beauty’s sake and love’s” (AL III, 56).
By naming beauty before love, He clearly enjoins us to love only the Beautiful.
(Frater N once remarked of a “hideous old Heathen of the bunny-boiler type” that “the Prophet would probably have put her under his microscope as an interesting entomological case”, but that “Leptopoecile Sophiae [our common Thelemic mentor] would, upon seeing her, have immediately thrown her down a well.”)
Thelema is the cult of Beauty, since it is the cult of the goddess Nuit, and the goddess Nuit is first and foremost “the beauteous one,” as it is written (AL I, 26).
II. My Wife Looks Like the Vampire Chick from Fright Night II (And That’s Magick)
Beauty is Magick.
Someone once told me that a man’s wife always physically resembles the woman who first aroused his truly frenzied transports of love when he was an adolescent.
In fact, it is indisputable: my Beloved Spouse Chloé is indeed the perfect double of Julie Carmen as Régine Dandridge in Fright Night II — minus the yellow eyes and vampire teeth, of course. There is no absolute rule, except “Do what thou wilt” (AL III, 60).
Dear friends, I had the fulminating golden youth of the typical high-born libertine; I am now an old hermit imprisoned in the mists of the Grey Land of Desolation — and I know from experience that I would have avoided ABSOLUTELY ALL the Great Misses of my life, without exception, had I always followed the Precepts set down in The Book of the Law.
Everything is there.
III. The Cruel Tutelage of Hadit: Why Your Fuck-ups Are Secretly Lessons from the Old Serpent
But let us return to the verse:
“My head is jewelled with twelve stars; My body is white as milk of the stars; it is bright with the blue of the abyss of stars invisible.”
The joke is that in Hebrew, the words meaning “suffering” (AGM), “captivity” (GVLH), “blood” (DM), and “horror” (ChVL) — a rather good summary of the atmosphere at Moulins-Yzeure prison — all have a gematria value of 44, whose Mystical Value is 990.
Now, 990 is 330 (the gematria of “stars”) multiplied by 3, that is, by the number of times “stars” appears in our verse.
And 330, in Hebrew, is the gematria of “restriction” (MTzR), “hurricane” (SOR), and “error” (ShL).
Since our tripartite verse is logically a description of Hadit on the three planes (spiritual, philosophical, and physical), we deduce that our sufferings, caused by our errors, are in reality different parts of the Teaching that Hadit imparts to His chosen ones, to His “stars.”
In plain terms: our spiritual, relational, and practical faults are secretly orchestrated by the Old Serpent so that the terrible readjustments they trigger may form us.
Such is the Cruel Tutelage of Hadit.
IV. Love Nuit, Serve Ra-Hoor-Khuit, Talk Like a God
What does this “mystical” description of the Old Serpent in the verse reveal to us, and — since we are commanded to BE Hadit (AL I, 6) — what does it order us to do?
On the plane of Thought: “My head is jewelled with twelve stars” — to have nothing but Nuit in one’s mind. Majnun-level devotion to my Queen.
On the plane of Action: “My body is white as milk of the stars” — the body is exclusively a vehicle for transmitting the spiritual nourishment that proceeds from the gods — i.e., its sole purpose is to Promulgate the Law. Seven lives for Ra-Hoor-Khuit.
On the plane of Speech: “it is bright with the blue of the abyss of stars invisible” — the goal of every conversation is to bring the other person to do what they will. To speak only on the frequency that connects the “Ye,” that is, the Thelemites, temporarily incarnated in Old Grey Land, who are seeking to rediscover the Earthly Paradise there, their only true homeland, the “garden of immortal kisses” (Cordis IV, 9).
As for the divine “blue abyss,” drop everything and reread my Twelfth Night Hermeneutic.
No, seriously. Put down whatever you are doing and reread that indispensable text.
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 11° ♉︎ : ☽︎ in 7° ♏︎ : ♀︎ : Ⅴⅹⅰⅰ.
𓄿𓎛𓂧 𓇋𓈖𓏌
