Dearest friends, beautiful and happy people,
Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law.
I have received from a reader — visibly a Martinist and a “spiritualist” Freemason — a rather long list of questions concerning (I quote) “the place of the god Pan in the Thelemic pantheon.” I suppose he is unaware that I am a student of the late Leptopœcile Sophiæ, whom people of his obedience — and now, like all the judges of France — consider and portray as the traitor to be hated above all others, the exact equivalent of the old evil wizard whom Ariana Grande hurls into a lava crater at the end of the “Break Free” video.
Well, there is no such thing as an illegitimate question… But where to begin?
Well then! At the beginning:
As you know, we do not celebrate a “New Year” on January 1st (since the Thelemic year begins on March 20th), but we dedicate this day to celebrating the great Pan — mischievous, lascivious, unpredictable Arcadian protector of shepherds, of the unheimliche, and of sensual pleasure — whom the Ecclesia Gnostica Catholica has made not only a saint, but an italicized saint (a major one).
This is of very good omen, even in the dreadful context of a post-New Year’s Eve hangover. The great Pan represents the Divine Itself manifesting in Incarnation. He is the One made manifest: the All (Πάν/Pan) that objectifies divine Unicity — which, being eternally unknowable, ineffable, inconceivable, incomprehensible, etc. — equates, in our human consciousness, to Zero, the symbol of our august Queen Nuit, the blessed Infinite, that is to say Nothingness, as it is written: “let it be ever thus; that men speak not of Thee as One but as None” (AL I:27). Thus the supreme spiritual realization (attainment) is called the “Night of Pan.”
Technically, Magick teaches that when Divine Energy manifests in a person on the spiritual plane, it produces Hirat (the “sacred Terror”); when it manifests on the psycho-affective plane, it produces laughter; and when it manifests on the physical plane, it produces the sexual impulse. This is why the great Pan is he who triggers panic fear — he whose appearance makes the inhabitants of Olympus laugh — and he whose rut is perpetual: “the lust of the goat is the bounty of God,” as it is said (Saint William Blake, Proverbs of Hell).
Under the reign of Tiberius (i.e., at the opening of the Christian parenthesis), an Egyptian pilot sailing off Paxos heard, as everyone knows, a mysterious voice ordering him to announce “the death of the Great Pan.” This was because the entire Christian project was to deny divine Immanence, to separate the High from the Low, and to evacuate God into the heavens.
In 1904 e.v. (i.e., at the closing of the Christian parenthesis), the poet — that is, the prophet — Jacques d’Adelswärd-Fersen landed in Sicily, at the foot of the Villa Tiberius, and, seized by trance while contemplating the Beauty of the place, cried out: “Not only is the great Pan not dead, but I now know that he will never die!”
I. Born Naked, Died Faun (Panic At The Disco)
Of course, the idea of designating an amoral and libidinous molester of nymphs as the patron saint of supreme spiritual attainment may seem vaguely embarrassing in this full post-#MeToo era…
And yet! Thelemites recoil before nothing, and this is indeed the case. We generally justify it scripturally as follows:
It is written:
“Behold! the Abyss of the Great Deep. Therein is a mighty dolphin, lashing his sides with the force of the waves. There is also an harper of gold, playing infinite tunes.Then the dolphin delighted therein, and put off his body, and became a bird. The harper also laid aside his harp, and played infinite tunes upon the Pan-pipe. Then the bird desired exceedingly this bliss, and laying down its wings became a faun of the forest. The harper also laid down his Pan-pipe, and with the human voice sang his infinite tunes. Then the faun was enraptured, and followed far; at last the harper was silent, and the faun became Pan in the midst of the primal forest of Eternity.” — Liber Cordis Cincti Serpente, 2:37-43.
Now, the dolphin that becomes a bird that becomes a faun that becomes Pan, being an initiatic sequence, designates by obvious analogy different categories of individuals and the different levels of consciousness of each of these individuals.
II. I Am Every God
The dolphin that frequents the abyssal depths is the profane personality — corresponding to the “Ye” which, in the Holy Books, 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, 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.
The bird designates the consecrated personality — Frater So-and-So — corresponding to the “You” which, in the Holy Books, 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).
The faun is the true being of the individual, the one the Ancient Egyptians called “the Defunct” — corresponding to the “Thou” which, in the Holy Books, designates “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” (Leptopœcile Sophiæ).
The great Pan, finally, is the divine ipseity of the individual, corresponding, in the Holy Books, to the “We” by which the gods speak of themselves — since Pan was thus named in homage to the totality of the gods.
III. Deep in the Primal Forest
Note that this nomenclature corresponds, on the hermeneutic plane, to the four levels of exegesis:
The dolphin studies from the abyssal depths: this is Pshat, the literal sense of the text, which deals only with the sensible world.
The bird studies “from on high”: this is Remez, the figurative, allusive, or symbolic sense.
The faun studies from the forest, the domain of the mighty god Therion, “he for whom the trees bloom and the flowers are moved,” the king of faerie, master of the winding paths in the deep woods: this is Dirash, the sense revealed by exegesis.
The great Pan studies from “the midst of the primal forest of Eternity”: this is Sod, the magical, mystical, or secret sense — at once the heart (midst) and the root (primal) of the Arcane (Eternity) that the Holy Text conceals (forest).
IV. Queen Nuit Stole Everything (Including My Virginity)
Moreover, the word “Eternity” has a gematria of 298, which in Hebrew is the numerical value of BRALHIN, the state of Son of the Gods, and an elaboration of 19 (2+9+8), that is to say the Will common to Eve (ChVH = 19) and to Job (AIVB = 19): to recover the Lost Paradise.
It is the nostalgia for the Garden of Eden that is the distant flute sound which awakens our irrepressible desire for the violent penetration of the seductive mysteries and the intimacy of our Queen.
Hence the Tragic (literally, “Song of the Goat”) of our existences, which invariably takes the form of the Devastation of Happiness.
When the Old Serpent of the City of Edfu, Hadit our Master, who is the Exorcist par excellence (AL II:7), makes all the Treasures, Palaces, and Wonders that His Spells had procured for us disappear in the blink of an eye, it is at the express request of our august Queen Nuit: the Goddess steals from us everything that steals us from Her.
There you have it, my Martinist friend — I have treated the matter well above your level, but it was to humiliate you :) — I quite enjoy humiliating the pretentious ignoramuses who fancy themselves “esotericists” :) It is because I have absolutely no respect for non-Thelemites and, as soon as they speak of spirituality, I always feel like asking them: “What business is it of yours?!”
Warm kisses from the Bahamas.
Love is the law, love under will.
— ☉︎ in 13° ♉︎ : ☽︎ in 13° ♐︎ : ☽︎ : Ⅴⅹⅰⅰ.
𓄿𓎛𓂧 𓇋𓈖𓏌
