The Oz Mix

Robert Anton Wilson, The Rosy Cross and The Night of Pan

2026-10-15T17:00:08.335-07:00

I'm just standing in a doorway

I'm just trying to make some sense

– "Waiting On A Friend," The Rolling Stones

So also is the end of the book, and the Lord Adonai is about it on all sides like a Thunderbolt,and a Pylon, and a Snake and a Phallus, and in the midst thereof He is like the Woman that jetteth out the milk of the stars from her paps; yea, the milk of the stars from her paps.

– The Book of the Heart Girt with the Serpent, Aleister Crowley

Not terribly long ago Gregory Arnott reminded me of an adage Robert Anton Wilson wrote in "The "Wilderness Diaries of Sigismundo Celine" found in Nature's God: "You are precisely as big as what you love and precisely as small as what annoys you." The big part of this equation recalls the function of the Rosy Cross operation mentioned in the previous Night of Pan post.

It's worth revisiting the opening of Wilson's Schrödinger's Cat trilogy to investigate the matter further. As mentioned previously, it opens with a quote on the title page attributed to Jesus from the apocryphal Gospel of St. Thomas:

Not until the male become female and the female becomes male shall ye enter the Kingdom of Heaven.

This reversal corresponds to the number 69. Above this quote is the title of the first book of the trilogy:

The Universe Next Door

69 holds a great deal of significance in other ways. See chapter 69 in The Book of Lies for more on that.

Adding the initials (known as Notarikon) of The Universe Next Door gives 69. But "Door" also indicates the path of daleth, the path the connects the two highest forms of the male and female principals on the Tree of Life: Chokmah and Binah. This path corresponds with Venus, the goddess of LOVE.

Taking "Door" out of the Notarikon addition gives 65 which represents the Holy Guardian Angel. We find it described in chapter 65 from The Book of Lies is called "Sic Transeat ––" In the commentary Crowley writes: The chapter title means, 'So may he pass away', the blank obviously referring to NEMO. Nemo translates as "no-man". Sic Transeat also = 69.

Chapter 65 mentions the "moon-pool of silver" which Crowley says is the Path of Gimel, leading from Tiphareth to Kether. In the commentary to the The Book of the Heart Girt with the Serpent Crowley writes that the Path of gimel is the position of the Holy Guardian Angel. The first book of Schrödinger's Cat qabalistically shows a cross with The Unverse Next = gimel; Door = daleth. It looks like this:

This suggests the Rosy Cross. The rose part of this equation comes from a correspondence with Tiphareth located at the base of this cross in the diagram. Though the trilogy starts with a quote from Jesus and the title of the first book qabalistically represents a cruciform cross, I feel confident it has nothing to do with conventional Christianity. That may be a misdirection.

The first section is titled "Don't Look Back." All the sections have titles, but being unnumbered, I don't think of them as chapters. The first sentence reads: "The majority of Terrans were six-legged." The phrase "six-legged" appears three times on the first page. Qabalistically, this immediately suggests Tiphareth-6, but looking at the whole phrase we get 6 + l (lamed = 30) = 36 which, of course, is 6 squared (6 x 6). The notarikon of "Don't Look Back" also = 36. The number 36 shows up four times on the first page; 4 x 36 = 144 = 12 squared. 12 is the key number for the path of beth which goes between Kether and Binah and corresponds to The Magus tarot card. We can look at 144 as practicing Magick.

This may seem fanciful to those who don't know Wilson or wish to deny his Cabala. The book Maybe Magick, scheduled for release at the end of this month (October, 2026) has a couple of articles (at least) that illustrate the complexity of his Cabalistic reckoning. Another example can be found in the introduction I wrote for Lion of Light.

Relative to the Rosy Cross practice, we connect the four 36s with Chapter 36, "The Star Sapphire" from The Book of Lies. The Star Sapphire describes a ritual that seems one iteration of the Rosy Cross. Indeed, the first instruction reads: Let the Adept be armed with his Magick Rood [and provided with his Mystic Rose].

A rood is an old English word that refers to a crucifix. The ritual begins by suggesting the Rosy Cross.

It's not my intention to provide instructions for performing the Star Sapphire ritual, but rather to illustrate its connection with the Rosy Cross and the Night of Pan. The best help for this ritual that I know of is found in The Magick of Aleister Crowley by Lon Milo Duquette. This book seems indispensable for anyone practically working with Thelemic rituals.

The second instruction asks the practitioner to give either the L.V.X. signs, or if they're ready, the N.O.X. signs. The latter indicates the Night of Pan.

The next four instructions concern drawing hexagrams in the four quarters and appear related to the YHVH formula as given in The Book of Thoth. Each of those instructions ends with ARARITA which is an acronym of the sentence: "One is His Beginning; one is His Individuality; His Permutation One."

Following the hexagrams we : Let him return to the Centre, and so to the Centre of All [making the ROSY CROSS as he may know how] saying ARARITA, ARARITA, ARARITA

Studying and practicing the rest of the Star Sapphire can provide more insight into the Rosy Cross; it describes shows one way of doing it. As mentioned in the last post, it can be practiced ex tempore, anytime, anywhere. I suspect that one reason it's numbered 36 is because it = 6 x 6. Bruce Springsteen may have been alluding to this practice when he sang: two hearts are better than one, two hearts can get the job done. It requires a partner, but the partner doesn't need to be physically present, or even be consciously aware of the working. The Night of Pan part – the feminine approach to phallic generation – comes in with how one works the Rosy Cross. Learning to master this balance seems a great, but difficult art.

I digress for a moment to address a misconception. The word phallus seems widely considered a synonym for the penis. It comes from the Greek word phallos which "referred to the image of an erect penis or a carving symbolizing generative power" not the organ itself. (emphasis added). The phallus, as this image, applies to both male and female. You can be a female or become-woman (as Deleuze puts it) and have tremendous phallic power – essentially, the creative force in nature. In Logic of Sense Gilles Deleuze makes the same point, but in the context of an infant maturing – growing its body.

It is this zone which must bind all the other partial zones, thanks to the phallus. And the phallus, in this respect, does not play the role of an organ, but rather that of a particular image projected, in the case of the little girl as well as the little boy, onto this privileged (genital)zone. By genital he means not only the reproductive organs, but also in terms of genesis, causing things to grow and come into being.

Back to the Cat: "Don't Look Back" makes great advice for the Thelemic crisis known as Crossing the Abyss; Wilson will symbolically allude to this crisis elsewhere in SC.

The character's name Epicene Wildeblood suggests the function of the Rosy Cross. Epicene means having characteristics of both male and female genders. Blood symbolizes life force, a product of the Rosy Cross. The Gematria of blood = 44. Crowley calls this a special number of Horus (Book of Lies, chapter 44). Epicene begins as a gay male in the novel then gets gender reassignment to become a woman and changes her name to Mary Margaret Wildeblood.

* * * * * *

Behold! I am a butterfly at the Source of Creation; let me die before the hour, falling dead into Thine infinite stream! – The Book of the Heart Girt with the Serpent, Aleister Crowley

Another facet of the Rosy Cross multiplicity gets shown through the number 68 often qabalistically expressed with the SC letter combination. Schrödingers Cat Part One opens with a quote from a Christopher Smart poem. Christopher ties into the cross image and to the Jesus quote. Wilson has "caste system" in the second sentence which could seem a solution to the other major problems listed in that sentence like war.

I've barely scratched the surface regarding the wealth of Hermetic material in Schrödinger's Cat. I look forward to the reading group about this Manual of Shamanism looking to commence in the not too distant future over at Rawillumination.com.

Crowley, Joyce, Lewis Carroll and the Night of Pan

2026-07-19T10:32:20.067-07:00

"... each of these words can act as a switch, and we can move from one to another by means of many passages; hence the idea of a book which does not simply narrate one story, but a whole ocean of stories."

– Michel Butor, Introduction aux fragments de "Finnegans Wake."

The mathematical logic, puns, nonsense, word and sound play of Lewis Carroll has profoundly inspired the Hermetic arts. Reading an annotated version of the Alice stories provides much insight into the construction of James Joyce's masterpiece, Finnegans Wake. Many of Carroll's characters populate Joyce's Book of the Night. Humpty Dumpty, master of language, gets referenced on both the first and last page of the Wake. Anna Livia Plurabelle, Joyce's feminine archetype, has the same initials as Alice Pleasance Liddell, the Alice of Alice's Adventure's in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass. Carroll would take Alice and her sisters rowing on a section of the Thames known locally around Oxford as the River Isis and tell them stories he made up off the top of his head. On one significant occasion Alice urged the professor to write the story down, and the rest is Herstory. Both Alice tales and FW get framed as dreams.

Aleister Crowley put Wonderland, Through the Looking Glass, and The Hunting of the Snark by Carroll on the A∴ A∴ reading list with a note beside each one: "Valuable to those who understand the Qabalah." He also titled a chapter in The Book of Lies after a couple of words from the nonsense poem "Jabberwocky" which appears in the first chapter of Through the Looking Glass. In Masks of the Illuminati by Robert Anton Wilson, the protagonist, Sir John Babcock receives the Complete Works of Lewis Carroll from his magick teacher with the explanation: "'Here,' he said gravely, 'is the condensed essence of Holy Cabala.'"

John Tenniel, The White Rabbit in the Queen's Court

Gilles Deleuze based his best (and most difficult) book of philosophy, The Logic of Sense primarily on a combination of Lewis Carroll's writings and the ancient Greek Stoics. Episodes from the Alice stories combine with lesser known Carroll writings, but he really champions Carroll's last major work, Sylvie and Bruno, calling it a masterpiece. Anyone reasonably familiar with esoteric literature will have heard the anecdote about the Zen monk who had a dream about being a butterfly, but when he awoke he didn't know if he was a monk dreaming of being a butterfly, or if he really was a butterfly now dreaming of being a monk. That duality defines the premise of Sylvie and Bruno: which is the dream and which is the waking reality? The reader must pay careful attention to which is which as the narrative frequently and seamlessly switches back and forth between the two realities, one seeming more dream-like than the other. Later, the two different worlds appear to comprise one of everyday, normal (as normal as can be in a Carroll story) reality and the world of fairies and magick. RAW shows his familiarity with Sylvie and Bruno by quoting from the infamous Gardner's song that runs throughout the story in the same Masks sequence.

Some time ago E.J. Gold recommended I reread Lewis Carroll every 5 years. Recently, he suggested that Wonderland may have similarities to bardo spaces. This appears borne out in Carroll's Preface to Sylvie and Bruno when he shifts gears to begin a discourse on death and the possibility of it occurring at any moment:

"Let me pause for a moment to say that I believe this thought, of the possibility of death – if calmly realised and steadily faced – would be one of the best possible tests as to our going to any scene of amusement being right or wrong. If the thought of sudden death acquires, for you, a special horror when imagined as happening in a theatre, then be very sure the theatre is harmful for you, however harmless it may be for others; and that you are incurring a deadly peril in going. Be sure the safest rule is that we shall not dare to live in any scene in which we dare not die.

But once we realise what the true object is in life – that it is not pleasure, not knowledge, not even fame itself, 'that last infirmity of noble minds' – but that it is the development of character, the rising to a higher, nobler, or purer standard, the building-up of the perfect (Wo)Man – and then, so long as we feel that this is going on, and will (we trust) go on for evermore, death has for us no terror; it is not a shadow but a light; not an end, but a beginning!"

Like Wilson, Crowley and implied by Joyce*, Carroll clearly advocates for personal, voluntary evolution (i.e. building character).

*For one example: "... and during mighty odd years this man of hod, cement and edifices in Toper's Thorp piled buildung supra buildung pon the banks for the livers by the Soangso." (FW, p. 4 emphasis added.) Experienced Wake readers will recognize the protagonist's initials, HCE, hence the personal nature; "buildung" suggests alchemy; also "bildung" = German for "education"; "supra" = Latin for "above" or "beyond."

The idea of some form of personal consciousness surviving the death of the physical body illustrates a theme both for the Thelemic philosophy of Aleister Crowley and for Finnegans Wake. A Book of the Dead intends to provides instructions along with a methodology for conquering death. Both the Wake and Magick appear heavily reliant on the Egyptian Book of the Dead (and they aren't the only ones; see The Western Lands by William Burroughs or listen to the musical translation on the album Seven Souls by Bill Laswell's Material.) John Bishop writes about the bardo Wake connection in a chapter in Joyce's Book of the Dark: "Joyce actively sought to have somebody write an essay exploring the Wake's affinities with this text" (the Egyptian Book of the Dead).

Going down the rabbit hole a little further with this, Crowley puts the practitioner's consciousness into the bardo by having them identify with Ankh-af-na-khonsu, a deceased Egyptian priest circa 700 B.C. A crucial message in the Egyptian Book of the Dead instructs the departing soul to unite themself with Osiris. Qabalistically, Osiris lives in Tiphareth. Crowley instructs his beginning students to direct all their magical efforts to realizing the Knowledge and Conversation of the Holy Guardian Angel, an operation which begins in Tiphareth.

I have been working with this kind of material for years via Crowley, Joyce and E.J. Gold's American Book of the Dead, a translation of the Tibetan Book of the Dead that John Lilly asked him to do in the early 1970s to help people who journeyed too far out on psychedelics. At that point, their ego and personality seems dead for all intents and purposes. Their consciousness directly confronts the bardo and they need help.

A premise I heard Gold give about 30 years ago, more recently repeated by Alan Chapman, holds that we live in the bardo now; that we have it backwards: what we call life actually appears more like death whereas when the body and ego die, true life begins if we have sufficient character developed (presence and attention) to tolerate it. I know this sounds implausible, maybe so. Unorthodox Sufis metaphorically put it in terms of sleep and waking. The ordinary life of identifying our "self" with a particular ego and personality along with the human conditioning and behavior we've been socially and culturally programed with, our so-called reality tunnels, represents immersion in sleep. Waking up from that sleep involves temporarily getting outside the limitations of our favorite reality tunnel. Put in the context of Tim Leary's neurological model: when one or more of the terrestrial circuits dominates and we identify completely with that territory, it seems safe to say that sleep rules.

Like any model or metaphor, the boundaries appear fuzzy. We can view the extremes of total vertical sleep and a complete waking state as two polarities on a spectrum. Sometimes we seem more awake, more present, less in our heads than at other times. I like to look at the eight circuits as if they comprise faders on a small mixing board. Usually, the first four faders have some position on the board, with faders five to eight very low or off. When getting into a gentle waking state through meditation or yoga, etc., faders two and four, the ego and personality will tend to go down or get completely turned off in the mix. Fader one, the bio-survival circuit will necessarily have to hold some position. The autonomic nervous system aspect of that fader will always run until biological death.

Another premise, along with experiencing the bardo all the time, holds that we wake up several times a day. Usually the habits of sleep appear so entrenched that unfortunately these brief moments of higher consciousness slide right by unnoticed. The ideas of self-observation and self-remembering given in Gurdjieff's Fourth Way school intends to make one more aware of these glimpses of the waking state.

Confronting death won't appeal to most people. We can content ourselves simply with the task of building character and ignore death. Trying to understand a difficult book like Finnegans Wake builds character. Engaging with the maze encountered in books of this nature develops a skill set that helps with navigating the maze of life. Lewis Carroll appears to advocate for love as a character builder. Being an Anglican Deacon, he was religious. He wanted to design a Children's Bible containing "carefully selected passages, suitable for a child's reading, and pictures. One principle of selection which I would adopt, would be that Religion should be put before a child as a revelation of love – no need to pain and puzzle the young mind with the history of crime and punishment."

Reading Sylvie and Bruno builds character. Speaking of Life in the "Crossing the Line" chapter:

"'And the secret of enjoying it,' he continued, resuming his cheerful tone,

is intensity!'

'But not in the modern aesthetic sense, I presume? Like the young lady in

Punch, who begins a conversation with "Are you intense?'

By no means! replied the Earl. What I mean is intensity of thought – a

concentrated attention. We lose half the pleasure we might have in Life by not

really attending.

The last chapter from the second book, Sylvie and Bruno Concluded, is titled "Life Out Of Death." It ends with Carroll's version of love is the law.

* * * * * *

Aleister Crowley and James Joyce both promoted Female intelligence as a way to raise consciousness in general. They seem to have taken their cue from Francois Rabelais. I wrote about this a few years ago. The question as to whether Joyce knew Crowley and included him in Finnegans Wake inspired a couple of other previous essays, one here and another there. Recently, my friend Bob Campbell shared another section from the Wake that could support, as he put it, "the emerging bridge between Crowley and Joyce." The full section runs from p. 167.18 - 168.14. This occurs toward the end of Chapter 6, the chapter that takes the form of a quiz. The section under consideration occurs as the conclusion of the eleventh answer (it has twelve questions in all) and, of course, eleven gives the number of magick or energy tending to change.

Coincidences and synchronicities haunt the serious researcher of the Wake. Bob speaks of "the emerging bridge;" the first question of this "nightly quisquiquock" asks "What secondtonone myther rector and maximost bridges-maker was the first to rise taller through his beanstale . . ." (emphasis added; FW p.126).

Going over over the most salient points: Bob starts with: "The trigger here is 'Mister Abby,' since potentially Joyce has already combined Crowley and Rabelais, as Oz pointed out, back on page 105, 'From Abbeygate to Crowalley.'"

"No! From Topsman to your Tarpeia! This thing, Mister Abby is nefand . . ."

The section begins with death. "Topsman" is older English slang for a Hangman. Tarpeia comes from Roman mythology, more specifically the historians Livey and Plutarch. She served as a vestal virgin (priestess) who betrayed Rome by letting their enemies, the Sabines, into the city. The Sabines were pissed at the Romans for abducting their woman. Tarpeia brokered a deal for her betrayal, but was herself tricked. After letting the enemy in, they crushed her to death.

Bob writes: "Nefand is an obsolete adjective meaning unspeakable, unmentionable, or morally abhorrent. Works for the wickedest man in the world, no?"

"Mister Abby" possibly exemplifies Joyce's blending of male and female energies given that Abby usually indicates a women's name. Another way to see it: tempering male energy with a feminine influence. Of course, looking at the mythic history "Topsman to your Tarpeia" suggests male energy crushing feminine influence. Using a Hermetic lens gives a different story: Topsman = Hangman = The Hanged Man (tarot) = male energy reversed. The Hanged Man corresponds with mem (Hebrew) = the element Water (a feminine element). Joyce writes "your Tarpeia" suggesting not the mythological character, but rather Mister Abby's (Crowley's?) Tarpeia who opens the doors to rescue the women.

Crowley started appearing all over the tabloids in the early 1920s after Raoul Loveday died while staying at the Abbey of Thelema in Sicily. Those tabloids made it to Paris and Joyce read newspapers. The tabloids put Crowley in a very negative light hence "This thing, Mister Abby, is nefand."

The thundering legion has stormed Olymp that it end. Twelve tabular times till now have I edicted it. Merus Genius to Careous Caseous! Moriture, te salutat! My phemous themis race is run, so let Demoncracy take the highmost!

Around 1923 Crowley wrote a short glowing review of Joyce calling him a genius. New Pearsons magazine, edited by Frank Harris, published it. Harris was a mutual friend of both Crowley and Joyce. Apparently some of his theories about Shakespeare made their way into Ulysses. Joyce paid attention to reviews. New Pearson's, an American magazine, could be found in Paris. If Joyce didn't see the article directly it seems that Harris would have brought his attention to it. Crowley spent a fair amount of time in Paris in the 1920s especially after getting kicked out of Italy. He socialized in bohemian and artistic circles. Joyce lived in Paris during that time and also socialized. It seems possible their paths may have crossed though no evidence for this, apart from the circumstance of proximity, has turned up.

As mentioned, Crowley called Joyce a genius. In the passage we see: "Merus Genius to Careous Caseous!" Translated from Latin it means roughly: "pure genius to decaying cheese." Breaking down "Merus" gives Mer + us. La mer = French for the sea. The ocean or sea is a feminine symbol. Caseous appears throughout this chapter and appears as a play on Caesar. Joyce profoundly influenced Thomas Pynchon. Pynchon connects Crowley with cheese in his most recent novel Shadow Ticket which you can read about here.

Moriture, te salutat = Latin for "He who is about to die salutes you." Historically it represents a phrase Roman gladiators shouted out to the Emperor before commencing their fight to death. Esoterically, it indicates the metaphorical death a male undergoes to get into the inner chamber vis-á-vis The Hanged Man.

"... so let Demoncracy take the highmost!" For most of human civilization in the West the common person was told that the only way to reach their God or Gods was through an intermediary, usually from the priestly caste. Crowley helped to democratize spiritual attainment. "Every man and every woman is a star." The Holy Guardian Angel registers as a daemon in the ancient Greek, Socratic sense.

My unchanging Word is sacred. -> "Change not as much as the style of a letter." – from Bob; the second half comes from The Book of the Law I:54

The word is my Wife, to exponse and expound, to vend and to
velnerate, and may the curlews crown our nuptias! Till Breath
us depart! Wamen. Beware would you change with my years. Be
as young as your grandmother! – the valorization of women. Curlews are birds symbolically connected with the new moon due to the shape of their beak.

The entire second half of this section reads:

Adversus hostem semper sac! Latin for "Always be brave against the enemy!" Detractors of either Crowley and/or Joyce?

She that will not feel my ful-
moon let her peel to thee as the hoyden and the impudent! That
mon that hoth no moses in his sole (not bound by traditional Judaism?) nor is not awed by conquists of word's law, who never with humself was fed and leaves
his soil to lave his head, (lave = Latin for "wash") when his hope's in his highlows from
whisking his woe, if he came to my preach, a proud pursebroken (both JJ and AC struggled financially)
ranger, when the heavens were welling the spite of their spout,
to beg for a bite in our bark Noisdanger, would meself and Mac
Jeffet, four-in-hand, foot him out? — ay! — were he my own
breastbrother, (In this chapter the questions are asked by Shem and answered by Shaun who are brothers; however, "breastbrother" appears close to "beastbrother;" obviously, AC = beast. It also seems another feminization of the male since breast usually suggests the female anatomy as in The Book of the Breast by RAW.)

my doubled withd love and my singlebiassed hate, – the first part rewards contemplation of it; singlebiassed hate might mean hate for seeing something from only one point of view or perspective.

were we bread by the same fire and signed with the same salt, (both bread and salt have the same Hebrew letters that add to 78 by Gematria; worth looking up in Sepher Sephiroth; or my Pynchon review linked to above.)

had we tapped from the same master and robbed the same till, ( I suspect this refers to Rabelais; see link above)
were we tucked in the one bed and bit by the one flea, homo-
gallant and hemycapnoise, bum and dingo, jack by churl, though
it broke my heart to pray it, still I'd fear I'd hate to say!

That concludes the answer to the eleventh question. The brief twelfth question and answer ends chapter 6.

12. Sacer esto? (Latin for "Be sacred?")

Answer: Semus sumus!

Bob concludes his contribution with:

"Also, at the end "Semus sumus!" - we are the same, or, we are Shem!

Both have penned attempts at new holy books. The Book of the Law and Finnegans Wake. Maybe!"

There's possibly more Crowley/Hermetic related material in this section. There's a play on salt and saltpeter – "soldpewter" and "forceglass" all strongly suggest Alchemy; pewter is a very strong alloy; glass symbolizes crystallization from volatility to something solid. One may also find more similarity with Chapter 1 of The Book of the Law.

As you will see, the parallels in the maps and models that Crowley and Joyce stake out makes it seem like they're exploring the same, vast unknown territory (the bardo or the subconscious mind?) from different, but overlapping approaches. Each one helps to understand the other.

* * * * * *

Another area Joyce and Crowley have in common – the Night of Pan. It seems Crowley made up this term/magical formula. I first saw it in The Book of Lies (1913); that's where it may have first seen the light of day. I've never heard Joyce use that phrase, nor seen a reference to it in FW yet, but the Wake seems undeniably a Night of Pan – a night with everything in it. This Night reminds me of the Bardo or Crossing the Abyss, but it also represents the feminization, or female application, of male energy as Crowley makes clear in Chapter 29, "The Southern Cross" in the BoL. In this book, Laylah serves as Crowley's Scarlet Woman/Babalon/ female archetype and he notes that "Laylah is the Arabic for 'Night'." Also, Nuit is the French word for night.

I know of at least two instances where Robert Anton Wilson directly compares The Book of Lies with Finnegans Wake. The first occurred in the Crowley 101 online course and appears in my Foreword to Lion of Light. The second comes from a radio interview, a transcription of which will appear in a new excellent RAW book coming out relatively soon called Maybe Magick. In that book Wilson is asked something like which Crowley book influenced him the most and it seems a toss up between The Book of the Law and The Book of Lies though he does indicate a preference and says why he likes each one.

Most, if not all, of The Book of Lies seemingly concerns the Night of Pan in one way or another. The first line in Chapter 1 "The Sabbath of the Goat" reads:

"O! the heart of N.O.X, the Night of Pan."

Crowley gives the formula of N.O.X. in chapter 1 and its commentary.

N. = Death by its tarot attribution.

O. = the Phallus, the redeemer, by its tarot attribution The Devil, the strongest male energy in the deck.

X. = the Cross; it relates to Pan by the 4 cardinal points of the cross extending infinitely.

The N. and O. look identical to Crowley's ON formula which has been explained ad infinitum by Jerry Cornelius and others. But real briefly:

O = Aiyn, the path that connects Hod with Tiphareth on The Tree of Life. Considered masculine, it compares to Yang from the Chinese system.

N = Nun, the path that connects Netzach with Tiphareth. Considered feminine, it compares to Yin from the Chinese system.

X = the Cross, or more completely the Rosy Cross = Tiphareth

In N.O.X. the N and O reverses ON which corresponds with the reversal of male and female energies.

Schrödinger's Cat by Robert Anton Wilson, one of his more profound occult transmissions, begins with a quote acknowledging the importance of this reversal:

"Not until the male becomes female and the female becomes male shall ye enter the Kingdom of Heaven."

– Jesus, in The Gospel of Thomas

In the N.O.X. formula, the feminine N signals the Death (or reversal) of ordinary yang energy, (O) i.e. unbalanced male energy; the kind of toxic masculinity that recently ended the political campaigns of Graham Plattner and Eric Swalwell in the U.S.A. But it's not always sexual; it appears the same dominant force that starts wars and drops bombs on people, places and things. These give extreme examples. Every heterosexual male has to deal with this kind of male energy.

The N.O.X. formula doesn't simply represent an intellectual model. It describes a function; something you do – a kind of work. This work also = the work of the Rosy Cross. It requires a male aspect and a female aspect. Although most literally done as a sexual working with two individuals, one adopting an active function, the other passive, it can be done anywhere, anytime by an active individual lifting up a passive individual astrally.

The O. part of the formula, the phallus, remains male, but takes on a feminized approach through the death of unconstrained male sexuality. The N. and O. combine then go on the cross, i.e. X. E.J. Gold calls this the "Man on the Cross." In Freudian terms, the Rose symbolizes the female with the Cross symbolizing the phallic male. Reversed in the N.O.X. formula, the phallic male = the Rose. A phallic generation and radiation of energy, also called L.V.X. or blood. The female now represents the Cross – all manifested Creation.

I can only scratch the surface here, but Crowley also combines the male and female in BoL chapter 77 where he merges his Scarlet Woman, Laylah with a He-Goat. Goat may freak out orthodox Christians as it suggests the Devil, and Crowley does play with this. It helps to know and apply Qabalah, some programs die hard. Goat = 83 = "love in its highest form." Crowley also identified with the androgynous goat-headed figure of Baphomet which figures into all of this. I'll leave this thread open to explore. BoL chapter 33 is titled Baphomet.

Feminizing the phallus – dying to or reversing standard male energy (as in The Hanged Man) seems extremely difficult for the average heterosexual male. The Book of the Law III:22 mentions "Ordeal x" which may reference this difficulty (shout-out to L.V.X. 15 for bringing my attention to it). Dressing in drag frequently occurred in traditional shamanism to help the male shaman adopt a feminine posture. Bisexual or gay men appear to naturally have an easier time becoming-woman (as Gilles Deleuze puts it). Some cultural examples may help. Mick Jagger has often been cited as energetically expressing androgyny. "Sympathy for the Devil" seems a very Crowley-type song if you catch the reversals. Groucho Marx, whom I don't believe had a bisexual history, nicely exemplifies a feminized phallic energy in many of his films. The comedian/actor Eddie Izzard appears another great example particularly in his comedy special, Dressed to Kill.

The N.O.X. formula and the material in the BoL appear very relevant to the crisis known as Crossing the Abyss. I won't go too far into that here. The initiate going through this is instructed to (metaphorically) put every drop of their blood into the cup of Babalon. This seems another way of expressing the death of base male energy. Going on the Cross, the Man on the Cross, as given by N.O.X. provides a pun for Crossing the Abyss. That's usually thought of as occurring only one major time climbing up the Tree of Life, but I suspect it happens frequently in smaller ways. Also, it seems to me that physical death marks a crossing of some kind of abyss by the individual consciousness, maybe.

My current favorite example of a phallic femininity is Queen's lead vocalist Freddie Mercury. An excellent performance illustrating this comes from their 1986 Live at Wembley concert available on disc or on You Tube, one of Queen's last shows before Freddie got too sick to perform. Another stellar performance by Queen occurred at their much shorter Live Aid set also viewable on You Tube. Their piece, "Bohemian Rhapsody," a Mercury composition, is the best song I've heard about Crossing the Abyss. But you have to hear the studio version to catch that as they would drop the introduction – "Is this the real life, or is this just fantasy" – for the live shows. One also has to be able to hear the pun in "nothing really matters."

Another semiotic for the N.O.X./Rosy Cross function: the SC = 68 combination. 6 = Tiphareth; 8 = Mercury = communication; communicate beauty. One verse in The Book of the Law instructs the reader to come up with new symbols. In Magick in Theory and Practice Crowley explains his rationale for having the English F correspond with the Hebrew Vau whereas traditionally it corresponds with Pe. Traditionally a hard sounding C corresponds with Kaph = 20 while a soft C corresponds with Cheth = 8. I suggest that the C in the SC combo corresponds with Cheth whether hard or soft. If one pays attention, one can find this semiotic throughout Wilson's fiction and in much of Thomas Pynchon's work, particularly in Gravity's Rainbow. 68 appears on the first page of Illuminatus! One can find it in some of James Joyce's books and it briefly appears in Deleuze's The Logic of Sense. Though it dates back to Rabelais, Crowley found the sense of it in The Paris Working, one of his most important operations. It shows up a few times in The Book of the Law as for example I:6: "Be thou Hadit, my secret centre, my heart & my tongue!"

The BoL doesn't make an exception. Chapter 1 has the line: "Cast the Seed into the Field of Night." The caps appear in the original; F+N = Nuit. This looks commensurate with giving every drop of blood into the cup of Babalon. Chapter 29 "The Southern Cross" and its commentary holds importance to this discussion as mentioned above. We find both the SC and the cross. It can also be seen as an instruction for going on the cross astrally, or in one's imagination. The fact that it's southern indicates to imagine the cross behind you. The active initiate, working to become a rose, visualizes a specific woman they know and love to go on the cross. Much easier said than done. The commentary says: "Chapter 29 continues Chapter 28" so that also helps provide the picture. Coincidentally, I lived in a hotel called The Southern Cross for about three weeks when working in Sydney, Australia on two different occasions.

"Here's another clue for you all, the Walrus was Paul" as John Lennon sings in Glass Onion. Another clue for going On the Cross (pun intended with on): N.O.X. = 210. RAW explains this number somewhere; the Rose and the Cross become one then, when perfectly balanced, cancel each other out to become none. Related to this, BoL Chapter 57, "The Duck-Billed Platypus" looks at the Rosy Cross.

* * * * * *

I don't have a lot of examples of a feminine phallus from Finnegans Wake and don't have much time to look as I want this up in time for Maybe Day 2026, but here's one that also recalls Crowley:

"I am told by our interpreter, Hanner Esellus, that there are fully six hundred and six ragwords in your malherbal Magis lande-guage in which wald wand rimes alpman . . ." – FW, p. 478

Alpman indicates the female phallus as Alp gives the initials of Anna Livia Plurabelle. Hanner Esellus has the initials of the male pronoun with the female name Ann inside Hanner; "which wald wand" shows the initials 666. The rest I'll leave up to the interested reader who loves to decipher things. Looking up 606 proves interesting.

Regarding N.O.X. or the Man on the Cross: And let every crisscouple be so crosscomplimentary, little eggons, youlk and meelk, in a farbiger pancosmos. – FW p. 613.

Killing, controlling, or reversing brutal male sexual expression is not new. In the Bible, Isaiah 66:24 reads: "And they shall go forth, and look upon the carcasses of the men that have transgressed against me: for their worm shall not die, neither shall their fire be quenched; and they shall be an abhorring unto all flesh" (emphasis added).

Nuit speaking in the Book of the Law: "But to love me is better than all things: if under the night stars in the desert thou presently burnest mine incense before me, invoking me with a pure heart, and the Serpent flame therein, thou shalt come a little to lie in my bosom. For one kiss wilt thou then be willing to give all; but whoso gives one particle of dust shall lose all in that hour." – I:61

In the Bible dust symbolizes flesh, the physical body.

This theme repeats itself from Hadit's point of view in the second chapter: "I am uplifted in thine heart; and the kisses of the stars rain hard upon thy body.

Thou art exhaust in the voluptuous fullness of the inspiration; the expiration is sweeter than death, more rapid and laughterful than a caress of Hell's own worm." II:62 & 63

Lewis Carroll gives his version with a poem in the first chapter of Through the Looking Glass:

Jabberwocky

'Twas brillig, and the slithy toves

Did gyre and gimble in the wabe:

All mimsy were the borogroves,

And the mome raths outgrabe

"Beware the Jabberwock, my son!

The jaws that bite, the claws that catch!

Beware the Jubjub bird, and shun

The frumious Bandersnatch!"

He took his vorpal sword in hand:

Long time the manxome foe he sought

So rested he by the Tumtum tree,

And stood awhile in thought.

And, as in uffish thought he stood,

The Jabberwock, with eyes of flame,

Came whiffling through the tulgey wood,

And burbled as it came!

One, two! One, two! And through and through

The vorpal blade went snicker-snack

He left it dead, and with its head

He went galumphing back.

"And has thou slain the Jabberwock?

Come to my arms, my beamish boy!

O frabjous day! Callooh! Callay!"

He chortled in his joy.

'Twas brillig, and the slithy toves

Did gyre and gimble in the wabe:

All mimsy were the borogroves,

And the mome raths outgrabe

Regarding the line: "Long time the manxome foe he sought" Martin Gardner notes in The Annotated Alice that "Manx was the Celtic name for the Isle of Man." In another note, he mentions "a striking similarity between (original illustrator John) Tenniel's Jabberwock and the dragon being slain by Saint George in a painting by Paolo Uecello, in London's National Gallery."

Jabberwock by John Tenniel

Crowley appropriates two of the nonsense words, Mome Raths for the title of Chapter 48 in The Book of Lies. Humpty Dumpty interprets mome as being short for "from home" and rath as "a sort of green pig (Through the Looking Glass, Chapter 6). Pig adds to 93; green corresponds with Daleth = door = Venus = love. Daleth represents the path that connects Binah (archetypal mom) with Chokmah (archetypal dad) on the Tree of Life. In Crowley's note for the chapter, he interprets them differently: mome = young girl;

rathe = early. Chapter 48 opens with:

The early bird catches the worm; and the twelve-year-old prostitute attracts the ambassador.

Neglect not the dawn-meditation!

Dragons are sometimes known as worms; we see two instances above of worm symbolizing base male energy. The second half of the first line gives a look at the disgusting side with the pedophile ambassador when the worm isn't caught.

This huge subject doesn't really end, but I'll wrap things up with a quote from Finnegans Wake which will make everything perfectly clear:

"Sole shadow shows. Tis jest jibberweek's joke. It must have stole. O,

keve silence, both! Putshameyu! I have heard her voice some-

where else's before me in these ears still that now are for mine.

Let op. Slew musies. Thunner in the eire.

You were dreamend, dear." – FW, p. 565

The Occult Timothy Leary

2026-06-18T12:44:54.207-07:00

The Occult Timothy Leary by Joseph L. Flatley makes a significant contribution to the secondary literature around the illustrious life and times of the always controversial Dr. Timothy Leary. In the popular mind Leary often gets remembered as an evangelist for drug experimentation and one of the prime instigators of the 1960s counterculture. Like one of his colorful predecessors, Aleister Crowley, much of his profound philosophical research and exploration gets hidden beneath the notoriety and controversy surrounding the man. Flatley intends to alter that perception by focusing on the Hermetic side of Leary culminating in a unique presentation of the eight-circuit neurological model of consciousness as reflected in the subtitle: The Tarot, Magical States, and Post-Terrestrial Evolution. He instantly won me over with a quote from Finnegans Wake before the proceedings began.

The book has two distinct sections. Part 1 provides a biography of Leary's life in approximately one hundred pages. Flatley does an excellent job sketching out all the salient points of his "Many Lives" with a particular emphasis on anything occult. A reader unfamiliar with the good Doctor or only aware of his popular image will find enough information for a balanced portrait of the man. At the other end of the spectrum, readers like myself who have read everything by and about Leary they could find will discover new interesting facts and anecdotes. As a fan of Leary, I found this compelling reading. I couldn't put the book down except when I got into the shower. Flatley shows meticulous research turning up brilliant gems of stories.

The primary occult connection explored in the first half of the book concerns Aleister Crowley whom Leary called himself the reincarnation of. People who take that to literally mean the transmigration of Crowley's soul into the body of baby Leary find that beyond baffling given that Timothy came into the world (1920) many years before Crowley enjoyed his Greater Feast (1947). What Leary means by reincarnation is told in the book. A You Tube video can be found where Leary states that "I'm carrying on much of the work he (Crowley) started." We also discover that Crowley wasn't the only famous magician Leary claimed to reincarnate.

I only know of two events that directly ties Leary to Crowley; Flatley examines both of them. The first concerns a synchronicity wherein Tim and his friend Brian Barritt had a powerful psychedelic episode they later found out occurred in the same spot where Crowley and his chela Victor Neuberg scryed the Enochian aethyrs in the desert near Bou Saada, Algeria. This Enochian working was documented in The Vision and the Voice. The book uses Barritt's partner Liz Elliot's account to tell the story. Elliot embellishes the event by claiming that Crowley and Neuberg "took their mescaline" when no evidence exists for that claim. Crowley certainly used peyote, known as anhalonium lewinii at the time, to access the visionary space, but evidently, judging by his diaries, not for those Enochian workings. His diaries go into great detail about how he gained access to those spaces. They appear to have been realized strictly through ceremonial magick and a specific mantra practice; no psychoactive substances. Mescaline was first synthesized from peyote in 1919; this magick occurred in 1909. This doesn't make the synchronicity any less amazing.

The most obvious parallel between Crowley and Leary concerns their use of psychedelics to expand consciousness. There's no evidence Leary experimented with any Thelemic practices like the rituals of the pentagram and hexagram unlike his partner in crime Robert Anton Wilson, a prominent secondary character in TOTL. The stories with Wilson provide an added bonus to the book. It seems Leary went through a Crowley phase mainly after his escape from prison through to his recapture in Afghanistan and subsequent reimprisonment.

The second half of the book looks at the eight circuit neurological model of consciousness Leary formulated through the lens of the Tarot. This comes from The Game of Life by Leary with contributions by Robert Anton Wilson originally published by Peace Press in 1979 with a second edition coming out in 1993 by New Falcon. Flatley describes the structure of this model with each circuit having three stages for a total of 24 stages and how Leary assigned the 22 trumps of the Major Arcana to each of the stages while coining two additional Tarot trumps for stages 22 and 24. He begins by giving a brief history of the Tarot before examining each stage through its associated Tarot card and the astrological sign associated with it. For instance, stage 1, bio-survival receptivity is looked at through the lens of the first trump, The Fool and the Zodiac sign Pisces. It should be noted that the correspondences from the Zodiac appear to be entirely Leary's creation and have no relation to the Thoth Tarot or the Tarot of the Golden Dawn. The Zodiac only has 12 signs so only 12 Tarot trumps correspond with the Zodiac in the conventional system. Leary doubles up the Zodiac signs to match his formulation of 24 stages. Pisces corresponds with stage 1 while Pisces 2 corresponds with stage 13 in the model. The logic of this does make sense as we shall see shortly.

Each stage in TOTL begins with Leary's illustration of the Tarot card as it appears in The Game of Life with a slight modification from Flatley. For instance THE FOOL looks like:

This appears exactly the same in The Occult Timothy Leary except the top left and bottom right corner Ace of Diamonds signifiers have been replaced by the number 1 to indicate stage 1. This follows for each of the stages with the stage number replacing the playing card signifier Leary has. The Game of Life uses the Ace to 9 of Diamonds then the Jack, Queen and King of Diamonds to represent the 12 stages of the first four circuits which he called terrestrial. The post-terrestrial stages(13 - 24) uses the same playing card numbering but switches to the suit of hearts.

One thing I didn't know until reading this new book is that Leary's tarot correspondences originally appeared in his unpublished book The Periodic Table of Energy the substance of which became The Game of Life. This may or may not account for the slight and largely insignificant discrepancy in the Death card. Flatley maintains that Leary changed the name of the card to DEATH HORSE. In the second edition of The Game of Life this card goes by THE SKELETON HORSE in one place then DEATH-REBIRTH on the following page.

Leary applied the conventional order of the tarot for each successive stage with the exception of switching THE EMPRESS and HIGH PRIESTESS cards for stages 3 and 4.

Flatley does a superb job laying out the connection between the neurological stages and the Tarot trumps. It makes for a nice concise introduction to Leary's model with each section giving Keywords, Traditional meanings (Leary's card interpretations appear decidedly untraditional) and my favorite – Questions to consider in a reading. The latter provokes self examination. For instance, in stage 15 the question gets asked, "Are you finding a balance between indulgence and moderation in your sensory experiences?"

The final chapter consists of how to use Timothy's tarot for divination. Flatley shows his rigorous research by discovering a tarot reading by Leary found amongst his personal papers housed at the New York Public Library. This building can be seen in the opening shot of Ghostbusters, an extremely esoteric film in its own right, but I digress. What I find very interesting is that Flatley dug up the method Leary devised for a Tarot spread directly related to the neuro-circuits. Like a Robert Anton Wilson book or article on the circuits, The Occult Timothy Leary both provides the information and suggests ways to use it for personal evolution; magick in theory and practice.

Leary's tarot only uses the Major Arcana, the 22 trumps and the two additional cards he made up. Flatley references Robert Anton Wilson to bring in the Minor Arcana, the pip cards and the court cards in the four suits of Wands, Cups, Swords and Pentacles (or Coins). Each suit corresponds to one of the four elements: Wands = fire, Cups = water, Swords = air, Pentacles = earth. Wilson (incorrectly, in my view) attributes each of the suits to one of the four terrestrial circuits appearing in Prometheus Rising (Hilaritas, p. 118) like this:

Y fire wands CIRCUIT IV

H water cups CIRCUIT II

V air swords CIRCUIT III

H earth pentacles CIRCUIT I

The letters in the left column, YHVH, represent the four-fold name of God: Yod He Vau He. The attributions look correct EXCEPT for the circuits. Note the out of sequence circuit numbering in the far right column going IV, II, III, I. In my view, circuits I and IV make better sense when switched to make the attributions look like this:

Y fire wands CIRCUIT I

H water cups CIRCUIT II

V air swords CIRCUIT III

H earth pentacles CIRCUIT IV

This has the first circuit corresponding with fire while the fourth circuit corresponds with earth. Circuit IV, the Socio-Sexual, makes a composite of circuits I - III just as earth forms a composite of the three pure elements of fire, water and air.

Interestingly, right below these attributions Wilson provides Carl Jung's attributions from Psychology and Alchemy (PR p. 117) which RAW correctly assigns to the circuits with the first circuit corresponding to fire as it should, in my view.

Note that with the switch the circuits now appear in the same order that they get turned on in the body. In the Game of Life Dr. Tim also correlates the Wands/Fire suit with circuit I. This doesn't mean I'm right and Flatley/Wilson are wrong. As Crowley puts it in The Book of Thoth:

"It seems hardly possible to define these terms in such a way as to make their meaning clear to the student. SHe must discover for hirself by constant practice what they mean to hir. It does not even follow that SHe will arrive at the same ideas. This will not mean that one mind is right and the other wrong, because each one of us has hir own universe all to hirself, and it is not the same as anyone else's universe." (Quotation modified to reflect Leary's use of generalized personal pronouns.)

* * * * * *

The occult emphasis in the book appears squarely on connections between Leary and Crowley as made crystal clear by the cover illustration showing the good Doctor posing like a famous Aleister Crowley photo in the posture of the Hierophant (see above). However, I would argue that G.I. Gurdjieff had an equal if not stronger influence on Leary's thinking. In his dedication for Info–Psychology (Falcon, 1987) Leary places Gurdjieff at the top. It reads in full:

"This book celebrates all

Evolutionary Agents

And Cyber–punks

On this Planet and Elsewhere

Especially

Georges I. Gurdjieff

who made us laugh

Aleister Crowley

who did the English translation

To Israel Regardie

who kept the Falcon flying high

To Thomas Pynchon

who gave the American version

To William Gibson

first of our species to circumnavigate

the Info-World

In his novels NEUROMANCER, COUNT ZERO,

BURNING CHROME, MONA LISA OVERDRIVE

Gibson has outlined the Cyber-Info

Society of the near future"

TOTL begins chapter 1 with a story Tim told in his autobiography, Flashbacks (J.P. Tarcher, 1983) about his grandfather telling him at a young age to "Never do anything like anyone else, boy." This is a slightly different iteration of a well-known story Gurdjieff tells near the beginning of Beelzebub's Tales to His Grandson. In Gurdjieff's earlier version his grandmother lies on her death bed:

"'Eldest of my grandsons! Listen and always remember my strict injunction to you: In life never do as others do'

Having said this, she gazed at the bridge of my nose and, evidently noticing my perplexity and my obscure understanding of what she had said, added somewhat angrily and imperiously:

"Either do nothing – just go to school – or do something nobody else does.'"

She dies immediately after giving Gurdjieff this advice. It seems likely that both stories were fabricated, but they make an important point. I find it funny and a little paradoxical for Leary to tell the same story about being different though arguably he does make it different by changing the source to his grandfather. I believe Leary repeats Gurdjieff's story as a way of aligning himself to the same esoteric lineage. I last saw Leary speak at a club in New York called the Wetlands toward the end of 1990. He introduced his assistant as Gurdjieff's grandson.

I'm very grateful Flatley includes this anecdote: "'He (Leary) told me that the circuits were derived from Gurdjieff,' Rushkoff says." I have always believed that to be true, but would be hard pressed to find a citation for that knowledge. Fortunately I don't have to now. Familiarity with Gurdjieff's Fourth Way system provides a valuable background to understanding Leary's model of the brain circuits. Two primary principles Gurdjieff espoused are the Law of Octaves and the Law of Threes. These are most easily researched in In Search of the Miraculous by P.D. Ouspensky. The Law of Octaves derives from the discovery by Pythagoras of the diatonic musical scale in which the eighth note, called the octave, is exactly twice the frequency of the first note when ascending. Scale comes from the Latin scala which means ladder. The Law of Threes states that all manifested phenomena comprises three forces which he designated as active/affirming, passive/denying, and neutralizing/reconciling. This law resonates with various archetypes and principles related to 3 as for example the Christian trinity, the supernal Sephiroth in Kabbalah and even Ohm's law in electricity which states that V = IR; voltage V (reconciling) = current I (active) multiplied by resistance R (denying). Flatley compares the 3 stages for each circuit with the Trimurti group of Gods in Hinduism – Brahma the creator, Shiva, the destroyer and Vishnu, the preserver. Following Leary, he also connects them to the three aspects of neural synapses – the microscopic junctions where neurons communicate with each other (TOTL p. 115).

Leary's 8 circuits do not rigorously follow the musical aspects of the Law of Octaves, but the 3 stages in each circuit closely resemble the Law of Threes. Gurdjieff often described ordinary humans as 3 brained beings. Understanding the nature of each of these brains (also called centrums) can go a long way toward understanding the neurological model based upon them. The first one is the moving or instinctive centrum which handles all the physical functions of the body. I think of it as the physical brain. This corresponds with Leary's circuit 1 the Biosurvival. The second one is the emotional centrum or the Emotional-Territorial of circuit 2. The third brain is the intellectual centrum or the Semantic circuit as TOTL has it.

It seems a basic initial stepping stone, especially in the area of self-observation, to comprehend the first three circuits as the physical, emotional and intellectual aspects of the nervous system. Gurdjieff didn't clearly formulate a fourth brain but he does have a higher emotional centrum (circuit 6) and a higher intellectual or mental centrum (circuit 7). In CT1 RAW fills in the missing Gurdjieffian centrums as False Personality = circuit 4; the magnetic Centrum = circuit 5; and The Essence as circuit 8. Both Leary and Wilson changed the names of the higher circuits as their research and speculation evolved. Flatley uses Leary's original names as they appeared in Exo-Psychology and this is how they appeared in CT1. The original terminology makes the most sense to me so I agree with Flatley on that point. In the Game of Life, Leary changed the name of circuit 6 from the Neuro-electric to the Neurophysical. (For reasons unknown to me, the inconsistent use of the hyphen reflects both Leary and Wilson's nomenclature.) By the time of Info-Psychology [A Revision of Exo-Psychology] Leary has circuit 6 as "A Neurogenetic ontology" and circuit 7 as "A Neurogenetic teleology." Two pages later he refers to C6 as a Cyberelectronic phase and C7 as a Cybergenetic phase which reflects the original terminology. In Prometheus Rising Wilson calls C6 the Neurogenetic Circuit and C7 the Metaprogramming Circuit. By the time of Quantum Psychology, first published seven years later, RAW no longer calls them "circuits" changing them to "systems." C6 is now the Metaprogramming System with C7 named the Morphogenetic System. I find these differences in nomenclature helpful, not contradictory. They all serve to further the instruction inscribed upon the entrance to the Temple of Apollo (the Sun god) at Delphi: Know Thyself.

Comparing the Gurdjieffian centrums with Leary's circuits as presented by Flatley, we'll see a clear correspondence between the terrestrial and post-terrestrial circuits.

Leary Gurdjieff

Terrestrial

Circuit 1 Biosurvival Moving

Circuit 2 Emotional-Territorial Emotional

Circuit 3 Semantic Intellectual

Circuit 4 Socio-Sexual Personality

Post-Terrestrial

Circuit 5 Neurosomatic Magnetic Center

Circuit 6 Neuroelectric Higher Emotional

Circuit 7 Neurogenetic Higher Intellectual

Circuit 8 Neuroatomic The Essence

The most obvious ones are C2 Emotional with C6 Higher Emotional and C3 Intellectual with C7 Higher Intellectual. It appears C2 and 6 represent different modalities of the same system; likewise C3 and 7.

C1 concerns the functioning of the body and takes imprints soon after birth. C5 activation turns on the body's senses. The correspondence between C1 and 5 appears more obvious with Leary (soma means body). C4 and C8 don't show a clear correspondence, but I speculate they may show a similarity with C4 giving a composite of C 1-3; perhaps C8 represents a composite of the post-terrestrial circuits, though maybe not.

C1 represents the body. Trying practices that turns on the body like yoga or martial arts activates C5.

C2 suggests the heart. Opening the heart chakra gets you to C6.

C3 connects with the mind. Learning to control thoughts (very difficult) and focus the mind gives an approach to C7 ... maybe. I say maybe because I've personally not experienced this circuit. I have experienced some of the psionic attributes grouped within the C6 territory by extensively working to reach the Knowledge and Conversation of the Holy Guardian an operation that begins in Tiphareth, i.e. the heart.

* * * * * *

Flatley gives an account of the conditions following Tim's terminal prostrate cancer diagnosis leading up to his death. He leaves out a couple of points, one of which looks very occult. Leary's good friend John Lilly asked Glenn and Lee Perry, owners of the Samadhi Tank Co. to set up a floatation tank for him in his house to help with the transition. They went down to L.A. and set it up and in the process gave him a copy of The American Book of the Dead by E.J. Gold. Leary had written of rituals found inside it in an article years earlier called "Commonsense Alternatives to Involuntary Death" later included in the book Chaos and Cyberculture. Lee Perry related to me that after giving the book to Tim he started playing word games with the text on the back cover.

Leary originally planned to have his head removed after death and cryogenically frozen then changed his mind, as related in TOTL. However, in a film made by Paul Davids, Timothy Leary's Dead, about his final year leading up to and including his death, we see his head being severed for preservation. It can be viewed for free on Tubi. The final shot in the film before the credits roll shows a close-up of his severed head. This turns out to be a theatrical stunt, but looks very realistic. I thought this absolutely brilliant because of its qabalistic implications illustrating another close affinity with Crowley. The Hebrew letter Resh translates to English as Head and corresponds with The Sun tarot card. The Sun corresponds with Tiphareth. Crowley once stated (in The Confessions of Aleister Crowley) that his primary goal in life involved turning people on to the Knowledge and Conversation of the Holy Guardian Angel, an operation beginning in Tiphareth. This appears synonymous with the discovery of one's True Will, i.e. one's life purpose; the answer to the question, why are you here?" Timothy Leary symbolically carried on Crowley's work until the very end. TOTL relates the last word Leary spoke which happens to serve as a keyword for Tiphareth.

* * * * * *

I only have one major criticism. Leary's three stages for each circuit describes the functions of reception, integration and transmission. For instance, stage 13, the first post-terrestrial stage, indicates the receptive function of the Neurosomatic circuit, stage 14 gives the integration aspect of that circuit with stage 15 communicating from that circuit. Flatley writes, "When considering the tarot, it's probably more helpful and less abstract to think of the three functions of each circuit as feeling-thinking-action (or sensation-mentation-creation)." I completely disagree with this; for me it adds confusion being that they each have a circuit of their own, C2, C3 and C1. But lest we forget, these are merely maps and models so if it works for you to access that territory, it works; it doesn't matter what I think.

I also found a couple of small issues with the copy editing. The timeline gets confusing when the book appears to say the Beatles broke up in 1965 (p. 38). They actually dissolved in 1970. I didn't understand how the timeline jumps from 1965 to 1970 then back to 1966 until I realized the likelihood a mistake occurred. Page 190 under C7 calls stage 1 thinking when it should be feeling according to Flatley's designation. I saw 3 or four typos, but so what? Except for the timeline thing these errors don't interfere with comprehending the material.

All in all, I thoroughly enjoyed the book and commend the author, a true Evolutionary Agent, for all the hard work and time he devoted to help bring the work of Timothy Leary to a wider and perhaps younger audience. As R.U. Sirius states in the Foreword, "In The Occult Timothy Leary, Joseph L. Flatley gives you the big picture. And what a picture it is!"

Pynchon's Shadow Ticket from a Deleuzean Perspective

2026-04-05T17:29:00.000-07:00

The contents of Thomas Pynchon's novels can easily be termed a multiplicity. "A multiplicity is defined not by its elements, nor by a center of unification or comprehension. It is defined by the number of dimensions it has" - A Thousand Plateaus by Deleuze & Guattari, p. 249. The dimensions in Shadow Ticket include: the rise of Fascism and Nazism in America, the Chicago Mafia, music, the paranormal, general history, a transatlantic ocean voyage, a train ride across the midwest and east USA, labor unrest, detective adventures, a submarine adventure, international spying, humor, vampires, a golem, bowling, motorcycle gangs, early flying machines, etc, etc, etc.

"Since its variations and dimensions are immanent to it, it amounts to the same thing to say that each multiplicity is already composed of heterogeneous terms in symbiosis, and that a multiplicity is continually transforming itself into a string of other multiplicities, according to its thresholds and doors" - ibid, p. 249 (italics in original). In this case, the thresholds and doors may consist of active readers who see and possibly explore the connections into his other books or the connections to music, films or technology, etc.

The central protagonist in Shadow Ticket, Hicks McTaggart, may have received his surname, in part, from the early 20th Century metaphysician and philosopher J.M.E. McTaggart. McTaggart, an enthusiastic interpreter of Hegel is largely known these days for his self-explanatory essay "The Unreality of Time." James Williams, known as an excellent explainer of Gilles Deleuze, argues that the latter used McTaggart, among other things, as foil to come up with his own theories of Time in Difference and Repetition. Hegel serves as another foil and contrast for Deleuze's philosophy so Williams' argument appears plausible. He makes his case in the presentation "Deleuze's Answer to McTaggart: Series and Disjunctive Syntheses." Williams also points to similarities between the two philosophers. Unfortunately, the audio sounds pretty terrible so I recommend watching with closed captions for those interested.

As stated previously, reversal appears a motif in Shadow Ticket (ST = 69; see the gunplay reversal technique in chapter 6, etc). I suggest that Hicks McTaggart in various ways reverses the characteristics of J.M.E. McTaggart. For example, the latter McTaggart worked as an academic at Trinity College, Cambridge, England while the former McTaggart works on the street as a P.I. Interestingly, given that Hicks is a fictional character, he seems more human, down to earth and relatable than the analytical J.M.E. Finally, as we shall see, Hicks McTaggart acts more in accordance with Deleuze's theories while J.M.E. seems more opposed to them.

Pynchon name-checks Deleuze and Guattari in Vineland, a novel with evident connections to Shadow Ticket as has been previously shown. Looking at TP's oeuvre through the Deleuzean lens has precedent though not to any great extent. Stefan Mattessich took a crack at it with Lines of Flight - Discursive Time and Countercultural Desire in the Work of Thomas Pynchon (Duke University Press 2002) which I have mixed feelings about. It often reads as difficult as the most recondite of either Deleuze or Pynchon. Not all of us are scholars. Coming out when it did, Mattessich only reaches Mason & Dixon with his Deleuzean analysis. I will attempt to avoid too much jargon for the Deleuzean newbie.

Hicks McTaggart works at the Unamalgamated Ops detective agency. To amalgamate means to form into "one organization or structure," basically to form a unity of some kind. To operate unamalgamated means the opposite of that. This recalls Deleuze and Guattari's (D&G) concept of the Rhizome where they contrast a set unified structure which they call "arborescent" using the model of a tree with roots, with something like grass which grows like a rhizome. Most of the botanical type of rhizomes that the model is based on grow underground via horizontal stems as opposed to vertically planting roots. This makes their network mobile as opposed to sedentary trees whose horizontal growth and mobility is limited to how far they cast their seeds. Rhizomatic proliferation appears nonlinear, non hierarchical, decentralized and chaotic, not subordinate to an organizing principle or amalgamation into a particular form or structure. Any point in a rhizome can connect with any other point. Thus a rhizome effects a multiplicity of different aspects as opposed to the single entity of an arborescent model.

D&G's rhizome model appears as the introduction to A Thousand Plateaus (ATP), the second volume of their Capitalism and Schizophrenia series. They both introduce the concept along with the book as a rhizome. Being rhizomatic literature (the chapter and book), thus a multiplicity, it looks at writing from that model therefore providing some insight into the often convoluted and digressive style of Mr. P. D&G conceive a book as a literary machine with a productive function. "We will never ask what a book means as signified or signifier; we will not look for anything to understand in it" . . . "Writing has nothing to do with signifying. It has to do with surveying, mapping, even realms that are yet to come" (ATP, p. 4 - 5). Of course the central activity in Mason & Dixon concerns surveying and mapping. I postulate that the realms yet to come concern untapped abilities in the largely occult aspects of the human brain and nervous system. This territory or territories shows up in TP's novels as the paranormal or (so-called) supernatural.

The contrast between arborescent and rhizome doesn't present a strict dichotomy in D&G's schema. An arborescent structure can have rhizomatic offshoots; rhizomatic networks can settle in to a unified organization. As they put it: "There exist root or tree structures in rhizomes; conversely, a tree branch or root division may begin to burgeon into a rhizome. The coordinates are determined not by theoretical analyses implying universals but by a pragmatics composing aggregates of intensities. A new rhizome may form in the heart of a tree, the hollow of a root, the crook of a branch" (ATP, p. 15).

The arborescent plot of Shadow Ticket concerns detective Hicks McTaggart's assignment to locate and bring back home the cheez heiress Daphne Airmont. The novel has any number of rhizomatic digressions having little to do with the plot except tangentially. An obvious one being the subplot of Stuffy Keegan and the adventures of the mysterious submarine that courses throughout the book. Another recurring branch concerns the subject of apport and asport – objects mysteriously disappearing out of thin air (asport) or appearing out of thin air (apport) which we first hear about in chapter 5. Rhizomes produce multiplicities; multiplicities of all kinds abound in Pynchon. D&G will say that a rhizome is "defined solely by a circulation of states." We see a circulation of ever changing states in all of Pynchon's novels.

* * * * * *

"The first theoretical element of importance is the fact that the war machine has many varied meanings, and this is precisely because the war machine has an extremely variable relation to war itself. The war machine is not uniformly defined, and comprises something other than increasing quantities of force."

– ATP, p. 422

Deleuze and Guattari initially conceptualize the war machine as that which resists the State either individually or collectively. The war machine manifests and proliferates outside and against the State. This pole of the war machine doesn't have violent war as its primary objective. It's only when the State appropriates the war machine turning it into a military institution and an army that we see war as we commonly know it. D&G call this total war.

Related concepts include nomadology, and the difference between smooth and striated space. Nomads are in constant flux and movement; they are fluid having no fixed address. Historically, Eskimos, Mongols, and Bedouins lived nomadically moving as their environment changed. Touring musicians live as nomads. D&G expand the definition to include figurative as well as literal nomads. Anyone flexible in their thinking, so-called "free-thinkers" not rigidly bound to dogmas, ideologies and belief systems operate as nomads. Deleuze himself famously disliked traveling living most of his adult life in the same area of Paris yet nomadically travelled far in his thinking, intellectual expression and his own philosophy characterized by coming up with different nomenclature for looking at similar ideas in a different way. For example, smooth space describes a body without organs, aka the plane of consistency, aka the intense egg, etc. Nomads oppose fixed identity.

Striated space includes any space (mentally or physically) with a grid over it. For instance, roadways, traffic lights and street signs striate a space indicating where and when one can or cannot go. Oceans, deserts or steppes mark a smooth space. Any kind of meditation can mentally induce one into a smooth space. Smooth spaces typically go in between striated spaces. "But more generally, we have seen that the war machine was the invention of the nomad, because it is in its essence the constitutive element of smooth space . . ." (ATP p.417).

Back in the day, the protests against the Vietnam War functioned as a war machine. Hippies lived nomadically sometimes entering a smooth space via psychedelics and other consciousness raising technologies. Now we have the No Kings protest movement as a war machine against the State. Individually, anyone fighting against their complacency or working to break out of fixed, limiting beliefs constructs a kind of internal war machine for doing so. The Gurdjieffians describe a "war against sleep" as a fight against automatic, mechanical behavior. The Book of the Law provides instructions for the construction of a war machine at the beginning of its 3rd chapter.

The war machine has a presence throughout Vineland with its opposition to State Fascism and its war against drugs best exemplified by the macho Brock Vond and his cohorts. The war machine appears far more subtle and occult in Shadow Ticket.

"It would seem that the war machine is projected into an abstract knowledge formally different from the one that doubles the State apparatus." – ATP, p. 362. I've outlined some of the coded "abstract knowledge" that can go towards resisting fascism in the first post of this series. TP alludes to this kind of abstract knowledge in the opening Bela Lugosi quote: "Supernatural perhaps. Baloney . . . perhaps not." We're talking about knowledge that leads one to Initiation which from one viewpoint means becoming more yourself; connecting with your real purpose in life or at least a path toward discovering what that might be. Resisting the fascism of someone telling you how to live or what you should be doing.

Much of the "supernatural" knowledge presents itself allegorically, metaphorically or in code. Some of it may be possible to individuals motivated toward sensitizing their nervous systems to receiving energy normally filtered out. The various instances of telepathy throughout Shadow Ticket give an example of that. The novel may hint at how to develop more extraordinary abilities, but it doesn't directly provide techniques. It does paint scenarios illustrating such abilities recalling an old occult formula: first it exists in IMAGINATION then in WILL then in REALITY. Hicks's initials form a cypher that = WILL.

Some of this abstract knowledge seems impossible to put into practice, or if possible, a long way off for the average person. The ability to asport or apport objects that Thessalie tells Hicks about in chapter 5 comes quite easily to some of the characters later on. Maybe this is baloney, maybe it's in the future? Thessalie also introduces Hicks to the science of psychometry in the same chapter. This art can be attempted by anyone. Meditate on an object and try to receive impressions from it. Not every object will be what they call a reading object, i.e. give off impressions. Trying this at a museum that displays antiquities may help. These are just some examples. There seems a great deal of nomadic abstract knowledge in Shadow Ticket, much of it coded. Digging it out requires paying close attention.

How to receive useful abstract knowledge gets shown in chapter 15 when Hicks gets his fortune from penny scales that seems to be trying to tell him something important. "By now Hicks is used to this sort of thing, a network of penny scales all over town plus Chicago that can recognize him personally even blocks away. Must be done with radio waves somehow." In this case the information is trying to save his life. This provides an illustration of one way the Knowledge and Conversation of the Holy Guardian Angel communicates. Some organization (a State of some kind) appears to be trying to kill him. Whatever intelligence coming through the penny scale seems to be trying to save his life. Eventually Hicks listens and dodges a bullet.

Most of the main characters appear to live a largely nomadic existence. Hicks seems to get involuntarily thrown further into one after getting drugged in Harlem and waking up on an ocean liner bound for Europe. He spends the rest of the novel in various places in eastern Europe finding residence nowhere; always on the move nomadically. Daphne Airmont runs away with a clarinet player on tour before ditching him. Some of the action takes place on the Trans-Trianon 2000 motorcycle tour which encompasses a 2000 km circuit.

"The nomad has a territory; he follows customary paths; he goes from one point to another; . . . A path is always between two points, but the in-between has taken on all the consistency and enjoys both an autonomy and a direction of its own. The life of the nomad is the intermezzo. Even the elements of his dwelling are conceived in terms of the trajectory that is forever mobilizing them" - ibid, p. 380 (emphasis added).

Generally speaking, an intermezzo consists of an interlude between two substantial aspects like a brief musical passage between two larger movements. In this context I would say the intermezzo of the nomad goes in between two fixed identities. Hicks starts out as a gumshoe in Milwaukee. He ends up in Hungary with a new girlfriend and considers leaving the detective business to get into espionage or something else. The intermezzo also recalls the Bardo, the between lives state, a space which exists between the death of one identity and the birth of another. Death and the Bardo have a significant presence throughout Shadow Ticket.

D&G talk about two poles of the war machine. One pole shows State sponsored war; what's going on in Iran and the Middle East as I write this. The other pole consists of what Pynchon writes of as a subtext in Shadow Ticket and his other novels: "it is when the war machine, with infinitely lower "quantities," has as its object not war but the drawing of a creative line of flight, the composition of a smooth space and of the movement of people in that space." . . . "War machines take shape against the apparatuses that appropriate the machine and make war their affair and their object: they bring connections to bear against the great conjunction of the apparatuses of capture or domination."

Shadow Ticket Part II

2026-02-28T12:23:00.000-08:00

" . . . some rare authors, such as Dante and Chaucer, share Virgil's comprehensive vision and arrive at the richest idea of the development of the labyrinth by blending labyrinthine fact and fiction, structure and story, objective pattern and subjective fact."

– The Idea of the Labyrinth, by Penelope Reed Doob

Illustration of the mythical labyrinth in Crete

Thomas Pynchon's works form a maze or labyrinth for the reader to solve, some more labyrinthine than others; not a new idea in his secondary literature. David Seed wrote The Fictional Labyrinths of Thomas Pynchon (1988) that apparently explores the subject (I haven't read it). Others have made the same comparison of his writings to a labyrinth. Gravity's Rainbow seems inordinately puzzling just trying understand what goes on in the various scenes. Writers that have strongly influenced TP wrote labyrinthine classics: Joyce, Burroughs, Borges, Wilson, for instance. Nietzsche wrote about the inner life and deep self as a labyrinth with its various complex layers and depths to be explored. The prototype for the labyrinth model comes from the Greek myth of Theseus and the minotaur. The solution in this myth lies in following Ariadne's thread through it. Some interpretations of Nietzsche suggest that his concept, "will to power" can serve as thread through the maze of life. This doesn't mean a will to have power over anything else other than yourself; it means the will to do, to act rather than react; closely related, perhaps synonymous with Big Al's "do what thou wilt."

Shadow Ticket has many puzzling, maze-like aspects, but also a clear thread in Hicks McTaggert whose initials in Gematria = 54 = Thelema = Will. Attempting to thread the labyrinth of this text reflexively puts the interested reader in a proactive position of having to fully engage with solving the puzzle.

Every detective story seems like a puzzle to solve. The last post suggests that the reader play the part of a detective, with the assignment or ticket being the Shadow. When Hicks is given his ticket to locate Daphne Airmont his boss asks him "what's this expression on your face?" and he answers "Close attention, I think" (p. 4); perhaps a clue to pay close attention to the information given. The idea this book may be coded gets alluded to with a twist on a real historical character, Gleb Bokii portrayed here as Stalin's "chief cryptology genius" (p. 167). The real Gleb Bokii (1879 - 1937) was a Soviet revolutionary and a paranormal investigator.

The subject of Death recurs in Shadow Ticket. Investigating the shadow appears synonymous with attempting to solve the maze of the underworld. "An underworld where the dead live in shadow was common to beliefs in the ancient Near East" (Wikipedia). The most well known example from the Bible appears in the 4th line of Psalm 23: "Yea though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil, for thou art with me; thy rod and thy staff they comfort me." Pynchon's twist on this comes with the character of Daphne Airmont, the cheez princess. Daphne = 145 = "The Staff of GOD." The simplest way to describe the plot of Shadow Ticket: rescue the princess. The rod and staff suggests the phallic magick wand = WILL. Blending a phallic image with a principle female character appears suggestive of a solution to the unbalanced male energy spoken of earlier.

The Divine Comedy by Dante provides a foundational pillar in the canon of Western and Near Eastern literature. It poetically describes a journey through death and the underworld. The influence of this opus on modern and postmodern writers has been profound. You'll find it in James Joyce (Finnegans Wake), Ezra Pound (The Cantos), Robert Anton Wilson (Illuminatus! and others), Malcolm Lowery (Under the Volcano) to name a few.

Shadow Ticket shows some parallels with The Divine Comedy. In the final chapter Hicks realizes he's not going back to Milwaukee, his girlfriend has married a gangster, Don Peppino Infernacci. This suggests Inferno, the first book of The Divine Comedy. Hicks laments that he doesn't know the language here, but then "Terike zooms in," a new romantic interest, offering to teach him starting with the Hungarian word for tomato, paradicsom, recalling the third book of The Divine Comedy, Paradisio, with Terike playing the role of Beatrice, Dante's former love and guide there. Analysis of "tomato" supports that: to + ma + to; ma = the Mother archetype; the first "to" could mean he's going to her as Dante did with Beatrice; the second "to" = 79 = "Conjunction, meeting, union" Dante's Paradisio culminates with the union of the human will with Divine will; one interpretation of Crowley's "Do what thou wilt."

Shadow Ticket begins with imagery reminiscent of a contemporary Inferno. A loud explosion occurs on page 1. Flashing back to Hicks's time as a strikebreaker we find him regularly getting into violent skirmishes; in one instance he almost kills someone. We first hear about Don Peppino Infernacci described as "a lord of the underworld." The transition from Inferno to Purgatorio occurs gradually in Shadow Ticket as it also does in The Divine Comedy. I would place the beginning of it when Hicks leaves April at Union Station in Chicago to take the train to New York.

Purgatorio "Canto XII" has the lines:

"How different were these entryways from those

of Hell! For here it is with song one enters;

down there, it is with savage lamentations."

On the train to New York, a porter, McKinley Gibbs, brings a stack of records for sale and a Victrola. Gibbs gives Hicks a disc without a label which turns out to have April singing. He heard April singing it live before but never on a record. Hicks listens to it a few times then falls asleep. The lyrics are in the book (p. 124 - 125). When he wakes up, he looks for the porter, but no one has ever heard of him. He seems to have been a phantom. I suggest that this song marks his entry into the Purgatory section which goes for most of the rest of the novel. In the first Canto of Purgatorio Dante conceives of it as a journey to freedom and liberty which I see as a subtext of Shadow Ticket. Another interpretation of this territory holds it to be partially an allegory for the training of the will in this life.

Shades is the term Dante calls the souls of the deceased. He also frequently refers to them as ombra, Italian for shadow. We see a reference to a dead Italian on the first page of Shadow Ticket. Chapter 2 has "IMOPIO job, no question." IMOPIO stands for "Infernal Machine Of Presumed Italian Origin."

Hicks gets confronted with death in his previous job as a strikebreaker when he gets so mad at someone that he reaches for the weapon in his pocket to throttle the guy and finds it inexplicably gone. He realizes he would have killed him had not some supernatural agency temporarily removed the weapon. This event profoundly changes his life leading him to change course and get a job as a detective. The shock of being confronted with death by nearly killing someone proves transformational.

Last post I brought up the Death tarot card in chapter 13 when Bruno thinks about it. The implication is that he's knocking off rivals in the cheez industry. Two chapters later, 15, starts with Hicks having a sense that he's targeted. This is the Christmas Day chapter where he gets a deadly gift. On the Stupendica ocean liner in chapter 20 it seems Hicks gets killed, but he doesn't, a trick on the reader. Later, when the action shifts to Hungary we see a short bit about "Death's penis" an image that ties in with the aggressively male energy brought up last post with Fascism. There seems nothing more fascist than killing someone solely because the murderer has aggressive dick energy. Down the line, in Vladboy (fascist) territory in Hungary we see a sign on a club that translates to Wall of Death.

Stuffy Keegan is the fellow whose truck got bombed at the top of the story. It seems he escaped the blast, but it's left ambiguous. "Maybe I'm a ghost now and I'm haunting you" (p. 57). He ends up going aboard an old WWI submarine that seems equally mysterious. The sub appears able to travel across parallel worlds at the end of the story. That sub is known as U-13. As mentioned earlier, 13 is the key number for Nun (Hebrew) and all its correspondences which include the Death card. U-13 = you dead.

Nun means "fish." In Kabbalah, nun/fish symbolizes "heir to the throne" among other things. In medieval texts a final nun (last letter) was used as an abbreviation for "son of." The final phrase of the first paragraph in the book reads" "where it seldom gets more serious than somebody stole somebody's fish." Looking at it through the Kabbalah lens it becomes ". . . somebody stole somebody's heir." This encapsulates the plot though Pynchon has reversed the gender and made her an heiress. Vineland begins with Zoyd Wheeler, the son of Skeet Wheeler, having to reverse his gender by dressing in drag in order to collect his benefits.

* * * * * *

To be in the world but not of it describes a Sufi maxim that appears to apply to a subtextual directive proscribing a way of action in Shadow Ticket. I hazard to say that the hermetic/mystical coding found herein does not intend to teach a path toward personal enlightenment, but rather to a way of service intended to make the world a better place. In Qabalistic terms, in this instance we don't climb the Tree of Life to ascend to the lofty immaterial realm of Kether and hang out there, but rather to learn a transformational function that brings the life force and vitality of Kether down to the material world of Malkuth. We aren't "another one of those metaphysical detectives, out looking for Revelation" as Lew Basnight puts it in chapter 6.

Two names in the story serve to illustrate this perspective. I'll discuss Bruno's formerly right hand man and fixer, Ace Lomax first. Ace naturally suggests the Aces in the tarot especially since we find tarot encounters in the book. Lomax = Low (Malkuth) + maximum. Lon Milo Duquette's Understanding Aleister Crowley's Thoth Tarot provides an excellent description of the aces. Crowley says the aces aren't the four elements themselves, but rather the seeds of the elements comparing that to Kether and its relationship to the manifestation of the rest of the Tree. Duquette writes that all the lesser arcana (Court and small cards) of the Tarot live inside each of the aces's respective suit. He connects the seed quality of aces with subatomic particles that "aren't matter at all, but can only be described as nonmaterial 'tendencies'" (UACTT, p, 163). I hope you enjoy the qabalistic pun with Malkuth-10.

Crowley writes that the aces form a link between the Princesses and the small cards. The Princesses correspond with Earth. Bruno Airmont attempts to rehire Ace Lomax at the end of the novel offering him a top position in his enterprise. He also teases him with the prospect of becoming romantically involved with his daughter, Daphne, the cheez princess. Lomax turns him down. He gets many other job offers the last one being to escort Jews to safety from the fascists. Ace expresses guilt over antisemitic actions he's taken previously; this new job reverses that giving him a chance to expiate his past. This connects with the territory of Purgatory and the theme of Liberty for the Jews he rescues. Ace Lomax's initials = AL as in Big AL or Liber Al.

The second name illustrating the idea of vitalizing the material world: Bela Lugosi.

Lugosi can break down to: low (Malkuth) + go + see. Bela Lugosi was Hungarian. Much of the second part of the book occurs in Hungary. In old Hungarian Bela = heart or insides. Bela Lugosi = heart low go see.

The nature of producing this elan vital (Bergson) or what Gilles Deleuze calls "sense" can be found in the Crowley material herein. Previously we saw Bruno pass on the inner secrets of the International Cheese Syndicate (= 78 = the Tarot = to initiate = Ra Hoor Khuit, etc. etc. see Sepher Sephiroth). Like elan vital we find that cheese is alive: "'Cheese, oh to be sure, cheese is alive. Self aware, actually, maybe not exactly the way we are, but still more than some clever simulation. We're at a pivot point here in the history of food science, a strange new form of life that was deliberately invented like Dr. Frankenstein or something –'" (ST p.83)

Note the "c + s" combination which relates both to elan vital and food science. The story of Frankenstein can represent an alchemical allegory for self-actualization in the higher dimensions. Another contemporary iteration of that allegory comes in the form of Bob Dylan's "My Own Version of You" from Rough and Rowdy Ways:

"I'll take a Scarface Pacino and a Godfather Brando

Mix it up in a tank and get a robot commando

If I do it up right and put the head on straight

I'll be saved by the creature I create."

Bruno Airmont, the Al Capone of Cheez, passes on his esoteric secrets to his daughter Daphne in chapter 37. Another allusion to passing on Big Al's (Aleister Crowley) material comes from Skeet Wheeler. Skeet, who wishes to become an apprentice detective idolizes Al Capone. He carries a photo of him in his wallet with the inscription. "To my old goombah Skeet, who taught me everything I know, regards and tanti auguri (happy birthday in Italian), always, Al" (p. 7). Another reversal here with the teacher (Big Al) learning everything from the apprentice (Skeet). The book ends with a letter to Hicks telling him he's moving to California simply signed "Skeet," the last word in the book.

Skeet = 99 = "The pangs of childbirth" (as in happy birthday);

"The Vault of Heaven; an inner chamber; wedlock; nupital."

We may assume that Skeet gets married to his new girl Zin as it seems their child is Zoyd Wheeler from Vineland - also connecting with childbirth.

Also 99 = "Clay of Death, Infernal Abode of Geburah;

Cognition, knowledge"

Skeet's name qabalistically connects with both Inferno and Paradisio.

Daphne's name also connects with Paradisio. In Greek mythology Daphne was pursued aggressively by Apollo. She prayed for help to her father, the river god Peneus who transformed her into a laurel tree to escape his erotic advances. Apollo designated the laurel his sacred tree. This myth is referred to twice in Paradisio Canto I. Daphne has since come to represent victory, honor, achievement and immortality. Victors were crowned with a laurel wreath in the ancient Olympics; see also poet laureate.

* * * * * *

The clearest influence of James Joyce that I see comes from the circular nature of subjects at the end of the book matching those at the top. The book starts and ends with mention of the railroad which gets associated with trouble at the top; happiness and the promise of new life at the end. A phrase on page 2: "happiness twins are back on the train again" suggests the happy couple, Skeet and Zin about to board the train at the very end. The explosion on page 1 gets referenced on the last page.

Something else at both the end and beginning of the novel is the word "breeze" – "breeze machine" at the end, "comes breezing up here to Milwaukee" in the first paragraph. Both are slang for traveling in these contexts. Breeze or a variation thereof easily appears one of the most frequently used verbs in the book coming with inordinate frequency. I don't know the significance of this, if any. It does remind me of his alternate spelling for cheese - cheez, which also sees frequent use.

A cryptographer looking for patterns would notice that "breeze" and "cheez" have the letter sequence "eez" in common; eez = 17 = The Star (tarot). Perhaps this quote from Purgatorio Canto XVII appears mere coincidence:

"So said my guide; and toward a stairway, he

and I together turned; and just as soon

as I was at the first step, I sensed something

much like the motion of a wing, and wind

that beat against my face, and words 'Beati

pacifica, those free of evil anger!'

Above us now the final rays before

the fall of night were raised to such a height

that we could see the stars on every side."

This quote shows Dante feeling a breeze possibly from a bird or Angel just before the shadow of the Earth brings night with the stars becoming visible. Beati pacifica refers to the a Bible phrase" "Blessed are the peacemakers." Duquette writes: "Traditionally the Star is the card of hope – the promise of things unseen" (UACTT p. 145).

Purgatorio Canto XXVIII connects breeze with hope:

"A gentle breeze, which did not seem to vary

within itself, was striking at my brow

but with no greater force than a kind wind's,

a wind that made the trembling boughs – they all

bent eagerly – incline in the direction

of morning shadows from the holy mountain;

but they were not deflected with such force

as to disturb the little birds upon

the branches in the practice of their arts;

for to the leaves, with song, birds welcomed those

first hours of the morning joyously,

and leaves supplied the burden to their rhymes –"

A gentle breeze, "which did not seem to vary within itself" suggests Will. Birds practicing their arts suggests Magick. It also recalls the Sufi classic, The Conference of the Birds. Joyce used "leaves" as a pun to symbolize death (as in leaves the body) in Finnegans Wake.

This breeze comes near the beginning of the Canto (line 7), a canto that marks an inflection point as Dante nears the end of his journey through Purgatorio and prepares to transition into Paradisio. This canto introduces the poet to the Garden Eden aka the Earthly Paradise.

I don't know if TP intended this association with the multiplicity of "breeze," but it does appear to fit with the project of attempting to make our world a little less inferno-like and more of a paradise. Or perhaps to focus and tune our perceptions in that direction. The postulate of Shadow Ticket as a magick grimoire, an agent of change, would have the Invocation go beyond the author's conscious intentions. In other words, this reading appears valid whether Pynchon meant it or not.

The next installment includes a Deleuzean perspective of Shadow Ticket. Stay tuned for Part III.

Magic Realism in Pynchon's Shadow Ticket

2026-01-25T21:56:00.000-08:00

"On the one hand, one would be a fool to think that reading a book about magical initiation is sufficient to constitute initiation. On the other hand, there are books where the text itself is the secret ... Texts can wind their import down twisted paths of verbal subterfuge such that to experience the course of their proceedings and the intensity and inner resonances of their content is to be brought to an experience on one's own terrain of what the author would lead one on to. " - Charles Stein, The Occult Harry Smith.

"Yet conscience must find ways to go on operating inside history." - Shadow Ticket, p. 279

This post will inevitably contain spoilers.

Common knowledge in the Pynchon universe holds that his historical novels include some subtext on the present time. Shadow Ticket is set mostly in 1932 when Fascism appeared in the ascendent around the world including the United States. Fascism plays a dominating role in the novel both in the macro geopolitical aspect and with the individual experiences and encounters by the characters. The story's timeline finishes around Christmas 1932. Hitler was appointed Chancellor of Germany in January, 1933. The Hitler movement in the U. S. first comes into the picture at the start of chapter 4. Hitler gets blended with Charlie Chaplin's humorous caricature of him from The Dictator followed by a serious portrayal that seems accurate until he's described as someone who "says whatever comes into his head." The real Hitler did not have that trait, he never went off script in his meticulously crafted speeches. This kind of verbal diarrhea clearly fits a contemporary American politician. I see at least one other parallel to the same politician with an episode that flashes back on Bruno Airmont's sexual attraction to his then teenage daughter Daphne.

Magic realism appears self defining – elements of magic blending in with so-called "reality." Shadow Ticket constantly walks a fine line between the paranormal, events difficult to explain by the rules of known physics, and the "real." Pynchon articulates this fine line in the opening quote before the title page that's attributed to Bela Lugosi from The Black Cat (1934). "Supernatural, perhaps. Baloney . . . perhaps not." I recently saw this film and recommend it for getting into the mood of the book. The film is set in Hungary where a fair amount of Shadow Ticket takes place in the second half. Lugosi's character's name is Vitus Werdegast thus aligning to Pynchon's great propensity for using the letter V; done here with high frequency. Werdegast is a German name; the W has a V sound. I expand the sense of magic with a Hermetic definition: causing Change to occur in conformity with Will.

Shadow Ticket (ST) starts out as a detective story then slowly morphs into something closer to espionage and spycraft. The protagonist, Hicks McTaggert, works for the Unamalgamated Ops detective agency. He gets the assignment to locate and bring back Daphne Airmont, the heiress to a cheese conglomerate owned by her father, Bruno, who has apparent ties to organized crime. He's known as the Al Capone of Cheez (as it's frequently spelled). Assignments from the agency are known as tickets. When asked to go on other assignments by different people he invariable defers by saying Unamalgamated would have to open a ticket on that. Shadow Ticket can thus be seen as the reader's assignment to act as a detective in a particular way. In post modern offerings the idea of suggesting the reader put in the effort to decipher the literature like a detective turns up in novels by Robert Anton Wilson and Vladimir Nabokov with a reference to the archetypal detective Sherlock Holmes. Shadow Ticket gives the nod to Holmes on page 8 in the words of the young Skeet Wheeler who aspires to be a detective.

So let's begin to unlock this occult transmission. I have previously outlined some of the elements and sources Pynchon's uses in his lexicon of symbolism and allusions in the recent Vineland reading group held over at rawillumination.net. Themes and characters from Pynchon's novels connect and bleed into each other, perhaps none more so than Shadow Ticket. The two most obvious, blatantly obvious examples in this novel being Vineland (Vin) and Against the Day (AtD). I also see less obvious allusions to Gravity's Rainbow and Mason & Dixon. It turns out the aforementioned Skeet Wheeler appears the father of Zoyd Wheeler from Vineland. Looking for something else in a Reddit group I came across this from user sylvester_stencil:

"He is 100% Zoyd's father. At the end of the novel Skeet tells Hicks he's moving to California with a girl he's fallen for named Zin. Skeet's real name is Floyd. Zin + Floyd = Zoyd."

Skeet, appears an adolescent somewhere in his mid to late teens, I believe, so the timeline matches up. ST ends with the young Wheeler writing a letter to Hicks. Skeet is the last word in the novel. Zoyd Wheeler enters in the second phrase of Vin. Like DL Chastain in Vin, Hicks goes through some Oriental training that changes his mindset. ST mentions the word "prairie" in its usual sense maybe four times; the first time it's directly connected with "winter surf" (opposite of Vin's summer surf) and a booming foghorn. Fog appears a number of times in both novels. Fog seems a kind of shadow. Horn = the Hierophant who communicates the secrets so a booming foghorn indicates a strong communication from the Temple which I consider Vineland to be.

The theme of freedom v fascism occurs in both books though the balance appears reversed; more explicit freedom in Vin; far more fascism in ST, very little, if any explicit freedom though we'll see an allusion to a path toward life, love liberty and light.

Lew Basnight works as a detective in both ST and AtD. The ocean liner Stupendica also shows up in both novels. A main theme, resistance to the invocation, evident in the title Against the Day, finds ample expression in ST beginning with the first sentence: "When trouble comes to town, it usually takes the North Shore Line." AtD has some strong parallels with the spiritual crisis known as Crossing the Abyss. Represented on the Tree of Life, it doesn't seem too far out to describe this crossing as a north shore line since it can traverse from Tiphareth to the Supernal Triad.

Speaking of Qabalah, like many of his novels Pynchon gives some obvious correspondences as if to say look in that direction. ST = 69 which often indicates a reversal of some kind. Both the freedom v fascism theme and the Skeet/Zoyd connection fits this. The obvious example comes in chapter 6 when Basnight shows Hicks a gunhand maneuver that involves handing over your gun to your adversary butt first then: ". . . you can spin the sucker around and shoot whoever's trying to take it away from you." Chapter 6 might be the shortest in the book and consists mostly of this trick though we do find another reversal. Basnight tells Hicks: "Just so long as you ain't another one of those metaphysical detectives out looking for Revelation." In AtD Lew Basnight operates as a psychical detective. Of course, any reader trying to figure out this or any other multilevel, multifaceted piece of literature works as a metaphysical detective if only because I consider language itself as metaphysical. I suspect most people do not because language appears so ingrained as a representation of physical reality. The notion of language as metaphysical gets greatly elaborated in Gilles Deleuze's Logic of Sense – where I started looking at language in this way. However, the point of the hermetic, esoteric data given in this book appears decidedly NOT to be personal enlightenment or revelation, but that my occur as a side effect. Lew qualifies it when he poo poos working as a metaphysical detective.

Another blatant correspondence occurs in chapter 13 which has a lot of back story on Bruno Airmont and his Cheese empire. In an interesting encounter a drunk or stoned Bruno, introduces himself as the Al Capone of Cheez to the real Al Capone. I won't spoil the rest of the joke. Al Capone is the first human in the novel, introduced as "Big Al" in the second sentence. Here, TP calls him "Big Fella." Both monikers were really nicknames for Capone. "Big" seems a significant indicator of esoteric functioning elaborated upon not too far ahead. Al calls Bruno a card. Bruno on his road of excess with a likely psychoactive drink thinks of the card numbered XIII, the Death card in the Tarot. That tells us that the chapter number, 13 in this case, may hold some Qabalah. I would argue that the page number can too. The theme of Death plays throughout most if not all of TP's ouevre. I'll get to more references later. One interpretation of the title Shadow Ticket: a detective assignment to piece together an experiential model of Death given that shadow connects with the Bardo. This connection gets made explicit at the bottom of page 60. The connection with the bardo, shadow and fog has precedence in Dante's Inferno Canto XXXI.

* * * * * *

In the early 90's after questioning Robert Anton Wilson he suggested I go to E. J. Gold's School, "but get out before it's too late." At a dinner with Bill Laswell in NY Peter Lamborn Wilson told me he thought Gold was the only one giving genuine Sufi instruction; he put down both Idries Shah and Gurdjieff for putting too much of their own thing into Sufi teachings which I disagreed with. Thomas Pynchon worked with Gold some time in the late 60's or early 70's in LA. Unfortunately, I don't know any details. But it really stands out to me in his work, especially Shadow Ticket. I suggest that a strong connection and transmission from an inner School can be seen here. I would argue TP's entire body of work constitutes an inner mystery school in itself if seen, decoded, assimilated and acted upon.

I suspect Pynchon refers to Gold here: "Kelly flips one switch and it's all lit up like Dearborn and Randolph. More dazzling as the night advances" p. 113. This is an intersection in downtown in Chicago. Randolph suggests Randolph St. Cosmo, the leader of the Chums of Chance from Against the Day a character obviously based on Gold. He manages to repeat this intersection at the top of chapter 25 referring to its quality of brightness at night while comparing it to an intersection in Budapest.

More importantly, Pynchon alludes, multiple times, to one of Gold's foundational disciplines known as the Popcorn Exercise. It's the initial exercise from his book Practical Work On Self. The kernel of corn to be popped becomes a metaphor for activating the emotional centrum; turning on and opening up the heart chakra. It's an operation in Tiphareth-6, thus showing a parallel to Crowley's Knowledge and Conversation of the Holy Guardian Angel. This initially occurs in ST when Hicks takes his girlfriend April to see the film Dracula starring Bela Lugosi on Valentine's Day in Chicago. By the time the film finishes "she'd eaten six cubic feet of popcorn." A cube has 6 sides; the two 6s side suggests 6 x 6 = 36 – coming up later. Seventeen pages ahead we see the phrase "popcorn by the bucketful." By Notarikon (adding the initials of a sentence or phrase), p + b + t + b = 93. Then, on page 93, "sack of movie popcorn." The Notarikon appears relevant there as well, but I'm not going that deep into it. 93 represents the Thelemic current because 93 corresponds to both Love and Will. In chapter 28 after the story has shifted to Eastern Europe, Bruno and Daphne go see a film and have a brief discussion about the way they serve popcorn there that easily applies to the metaphor of Gold's exercise: "... through a mouthful of giant exploded kernels fiery with erös paprika ..."

Hicks has a hatmaker named Vito Cubanelli. Vito = vital; Cube = 6; hat+maker, hat = Kether thus maker of Kether through the vital cube; pretty strong clue there. There's mention made of "mercury fumes." Mercury corresponds with Hod-8. Thus we see Tiphareth-6 along with Hod-8 giving us the magic number 68 of which I've talked so much about previously. 68 seems most usually represented with the SC letter combination; we see that combo here in the hatmaker bit. Elsewhere, we find another connection with Vineland where Prairie makes her special "Spinach Casserole." Page 28 has Hick's uncle making a "Surprise Casserole."

On the way to Dracula Hicks recalls the infamous St. Valentine's Day Massacre that happened 4 years before in Chicago in which 7 mobsters were brutally murdered by another gang. It's also mentioned one time before that alluding to the idea of strong resistance to the invocation of opening the heart. A historical character, Max Valentiner, comes into the picture in chapter 37 in relation to the backstory of the skipper of the freelance liberty submarine (resonant with Illuminatus!) that runs throughout the plot. Max Valentiner's name suggests maximum heart but something corrupted him as he torpedoed a boat full of civilians in WWI – another example showing resistance to the day. Valentiner is also mentioned in Against the Day. Yet another image of trying to block Tiphareth occurs with the attempted murder of Hicks on Christmas Day.

* * * * * * *

Pynchon not only illustrates the rise of Fascism in this era, both political and personal, he suggests an underlying energetic cause for it, i.e. unbalanced and out of control male or yang energy. This theme carries over from Vineland. One moment of brilliance in Paul Thomas Anderson's One Battle After Another, loosely based on Vineland, blatantly connects this raw, male, destructive energy with the Brock Vond-like character the first time we see him. ST begins to emphasize the letter O in the paragraph before the section break on page 2 that bring's up Otto's Oasis and Oriental Drugs. Page 6 has the head of the detective agency, Boynt Crosstown giving the "O-O" to Skeet. That comes up again a little later. O-O stands for observation operation though we're not told that in the book. The letter O corresponds to The Devil in the Tarot, a symbol, in a less favorable aspect, for unbalanced male energy. Later, we hear about the real historical fact that immigrants were given a welcoming gift of Jell-O when being processed through Ellis Island. Pynchon adds something about a Jell-O mold in the shape of the Statue of Liberty and Hicks wonders where you would start eating it, the head? Head corresponds to the Sun therefore also with Tiphareth so eating the head of the symbol of immigration suggests eating the heart of immigrants which seems precisely aligned with the brutal mass deportation of immigrants currently going on.

The problem of Fascism is given, but we also find solutions for dealing with it on a personal level. How to cope when the world goes to Hell. Humor provides a solution. Like any TP book, ST has an abundance of jokes, some quite obvious, others very subtle. Charlie Chaplin gets mentioned the two times Hitler makes an appearance. W.C. Fields comes through a phone line in a non-sequitur on page 128. We find at least a couple of sly references to the Marx Brothers and the old vaudeville comedy team of Gallagher and Shean is mentioned. Al Shean was the uncle of the Marx Brothers and an early mentor and supporter. Music appears as another way to live through times of Fascism. We find an abundance of musical references and a few songs in the novel. The jazz band with Daphne's boyfriend lands in the camp of the fascist group known as the Vladboys and survive by playing music and entertaining them. The publishers even went so far as to release a playlist for ST – thank-you Bobby Campbell for that.

An initiated hermetic solution reveals itself in the central character's name,

Hicks McTaggart. H + M + T =54

54 = Thelema (Book of Lies ch. 54) = Will and love under Will.

Looking at his last name: Mc + Tag + g + art.

Mc = master of ceremonies; also = 48 = work hard (ch. 48 Book of Lies).

tag = to tag someone with a responsibility or get tagged with a responsibility. The example given in ST occurs when Hicks inadvertently gives Daphne a lift on his boat helping her escape from a psychiatric hospital. He delivers her to some Objibwe Native Americans. Daphne feels that Hicks saved her and mentions the Objibwe belief that if you interfere with someone's life you'll be responsible for them forever. Hicks has been tagged with saving the cheez princesses life when he's later given the ticket to find her and bring her home.

g = gimel = the path that runs across the abyss from Tiphareth to Kether; corresponds to the High Priestess (tarot). There's a joke made by Daphne to Hicks about "Abyssinia."

art = art in the normal sense of the word. Many artists feel tagged with the responsibility to create things. Playing music, painting, writing etc., doing anything creative as a way of coping and counteracting fascism.

art also = 210, a very significant number for mystical work. The two becomes one then the opposite polarities cancel to become nothing. We find this in Latin at the climax of the Star Sapphire ritual (Book of Lies ch. 36): "OMNIA IN DUOS: DUO IN UNUM: UNUS IN NIHIL.

Another Thelemic word or formula relating to art = 210 is ABRAHADABRA said to be the key to the new Aeon; it also represents the "Great Work completed. Abrahadabra has 11 letters. That number holds much significance in this School since 11 = Magick - energy tending to change. Also from The Book of the Law: "My number is 11, as all their numbers who are of us" (I:60), spoken by Nuit, who represents the goddess archetype. The first phrase of chapter 11 in ST: "On days of low winter light . . ." = 210 affirming the connection between art = 210 and 11 and Abrahadadbra = the key to the new Aeon. In this cosmology the new Aeon is ruled by Horus, a god of war. Like the two in one idea, Horus has two aspects, Ra Hoor Kuit (male; energy projected out) and Hoor Pa Kraat (female; silence). Integrating the two provides balance and prepares for the next aeon that of Maat (female; Justice and hopefully peace).

The influence of Herman Melville on Pynchon has been established elsewhere. McTaggart sounds close to Claggart a character from Billy Budd, Sailor a novella by Melville. Billy Budd, the character, appears a model of the Rosicrucian ideal. In fact, the novella was found on Melville's desk after he died along with some poem fragments one of which was "The New Rosicrucians." Billy Budd was hired on as a foretopman on the ship the H.M.S. Indomitable where some of his fellow crew members called him Baby Budd because of his youth. Billy (William) Budd reversed = bud Will, a concept Crowley elaborated as part of the Initiate's development. John Claggart was the master of arms, i.e. chief law enforcement on the Indomitable. He falsely accused Billy Budd of fomenting mutiny; metaphorically illustrating resistance to the invocation or initiation. When confronted by this accusation in front of the Captain, Billy made the mistake of punching Claggart. The blow killed him leaving the Captain no choice but to have him executed. In that case, the resistance worked to stop the invocation as it does in many instances.

* * * * * *

A main theme of ST can be summed up as Pass It On. Skeet Wheeler, the kid who enters near the beginning and closes the story wants to be Hicks's apprentice. Lew Basnight mentors Hicks. Page 26 has a paragraph about musicians that ends with a hopeful kid waiting in back of the veteran musicians for his turn in the spotlight. In chapter 10 at the Nazi bowling alley, Hicks runs into Ooly Shaufel, a guard there. Ooly was Hicks's mentor when they both were strikebreakers. Page 69 has an exchange where Hicks asks his Uncle Lefty if what he's saying has anything to do with Al Capone, called the "Big Guy" here. Lefty replies, "I hear things. Sometimes I pass it on, sometimes I don't." This foreshadows the ending where Bruno wishes to pass on the secrets of the International Cheese Syndicate to Daphne; we're getting to that. Passing it on definitely seems like something an elderly author who has a great deal of arcane and esoteric information would hope to do.

* * * * * *

In 2007 E.J. Gold asked me to make a copy of a cd featuring old recordings of Aleister Crowley's voice. He told me not label it with Crowleys name, but rather use the name "Big Al" so it wouldn't be obvious who it featured. Then he gave me an enigmatic look. At the time, this seemed ridiculous, to me. Upon first reading Shadow Ticket I was stunned to see "Big Al" in the second sentence and immediately remembered the "Big Al" cd. I thought Gold could have remote viewed across time and that Pynchon connected Big Al with Crowley. Apart from using Capone's initials, AC once, I saw nothing to support this supposition until nearly the end of the book in chapter 37 when Bruno Airmont, the Al Capone of Cheez, wishes to pass on his fortune and other things to his daughter and heir Daphne Airmont. Daphne says she doesn't want his money but he says he wants to pass on everything he knows about the International Cheese Syndicate which he abbreviates InChSyn. I + Ch + S = 78 which corresponds to many things in the Sepher Sephiroth including: the Tarot; the Angel of Ra Hoor Khuit; and "to initiate." 78 is prefigured much earlier in the book on page 26 with the name checking of "Count" Basie. Pynchon puts those quotation marks around Count like usually never done except when referring to his full name, William James "Count" Basie. When a Qabalah teacher emphasizes the word "count" it can mean to add up and pay attention to Gematria ahead. Adding "Basie" gives us 78. Basie suggests base.

I postulate that Thelema provides a solution to Fascism with its projection of love under will facilitated by an activated emotional centrum and connected to 210 and Abrahadabra. Whether one goes all mystical or not Thelema on its most basic level appears a philosophy and practice that advocates personal liberty.

InChSyn suggests inches and syn an allusion to the male problem. It can also be seen as IC (I see) Syndicate (sin + dick + ate = eating up the problem). And I + CS. CS indicates an active function connected to 210 and Abrahadabra. Practicing this function expands one's more subtle morphology, one's being, as it were. So the idea of calling Crowley Big Al has some veracity. Capone is called Large Alphonse on p. 93.

It also occurred to me that Big Al could refer to Liber Al vel Legis, The Book of the Law. Chapter 3 starts with: "Abrahadabra; the reward of Ra Hoor Khut" (3:1). The short sequence with Hicks and his new girlfriend Terike near the end reminds me of verse I:62: "I am uplifted in they heart and the kisses of the stars rain hard upon the body." I was also reminded of the Abbey of Thelema with a couple of references to Palermo near the beginning, the name of the closest city to the Abbey in Sicily located in the village of Cefalu. In chapter 38 following the reveal in 37, a character named Chazz gets recruited into an "anti-Fascist guerilla force" in Sicily. Thelema could also be called an anti-Fascist force.

Back in chapter 37 (37 = Jechidah, the highest unity of the soul) Bruno Airmont (Bruno suggests Giordano Bruno, a spiritual predecessor of Aleister Crowley) tells Daphne that he has enough dirt on InChSyn "to send the whole business up in one giant fondoozical cataclysm."

fondoozical = fondo (found) + oz + ic (I see) + al (Crowley or Liber Al vel Legis).

oz likely refers to Liber Oz, a one page document aka the "Declaration of the Rights of Man" or as Robert Anton Wilson and I put it, the Rights of WoMan, after Leary. In Britain's darkest hour during WWII when it looked like the Nazis might take the island Crowley wrote Liber Oz and sent it to every dignitary he had an address for as a magical gesture against Facism. Coincidentally, 10 days after he sent them out the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor bringing the U.S. into the war eventually turning the tide. Shea and Wilson put Liber Oz in Illuminatus!

To be continued . . .

The Book of the Law Chapter 3 Fighting Cancer

2026-01-05T19:18:00.000-08:00

It seems advantageous to keep one's mood and spirits up as one navigates through cancer treatment. This can often prove difficult depending on how much pain and discomfort the body experiences; harder too when it drags on for months or years. Everyone finds their own tools and methods to handle the possible depression, anxiety, downerness, fear and pain. I have found Aleister Crowley's The Book of the Law (Liber Al) an excellent, non-chemical way to alleviate and banish debilitating thoughts and emotions. I will read a chapter a day for 3 days and have been doing this every week or two. If diagnosed as terminal (I'm not) or thought I may die in the near future (I don't) then I would be reading these chapters much more frequently. I suspect Liber Al shows, or can metaprogram one for life outside the body.

Chapter 3 in particular seems tailor made for anyone fighting something internal like cancer, an addiction or simple animal inertia. The second verse gives a problem then provides a solution. "There is division hither homeward;" made me think of cancer's rapidly dividing cells. The other division homeward comes between the cancer that wants to take over until death and the healthy cells that wish to remain growing and living.

The verses that follow immediately seems obvious for this model and should need no explanation. It goes on more or less in this vein (with exceptions) until verse 39 when the narrative switches direction.

Cosmic Scholar: The Life and Times of Harry Smith

2025-12-27T16:10:00.000-08:00

This excellent biography by John Szwed, published in 2023, documents the life of one of the XXth Century's most interesting, intelligent and unique eccentrics. Harry Smith (1923 - 1991) defies easy description. He's been called a polymath for his expert comprehension, experimentation and innovation into a plethora of both arcane and popular arts and sciences. The book's byline reads: "The Filmmaker, Folklorist and Mystic who transformed American Art." From the dust jacket description:

"He was an anthropologist, a filmmaker, a painter, a folkorist, a mystic, and a walking encyclopedia. He taught Patti Smith and Robert Mapplethorpe about the occult, swapped drugs with Timothy Leary, had a front row seat to a young Thelonius Monk, lived with (and tortured) Allen Ginsberg, was admired by Susan Sontag, and was one of the first artists funded by the Guggenheim Foundation."

My interest in him, in part, stems from the fact that he was an early recording engineer who kept it up, on and off, for his whole life. Smith grew up in the Pacific Northwest and developed a strong interest in Native American culture early on. At age 15 after discovering the writings of Franz Boas (1858 - 1942), the German-American pioneer of American anthropology, Smith began treks up and down the coast with portable recording equipment documenting indigenous tribal rituals through audio recordings, photography, water-color paintings, drawings and attempts to craft his own system of dance notation.

Szwed writes that Smith pursued this activity for 8 years. "Harry's seriousness, persistence and, humility gained him the respect of tribal leaders, who allowed him to use technology they might otherwise have had good reason to fear to document their songs, narratives, customs, language and games." He brought a disc-cutting machine to capture higher quality audio than the wire recorders which at that time comprised the standard. This fascinating period of Smith's life and career gets covered brilliantly in the book with much background and and intellectual context.

* * * * * *

"I'm glad to say that my dreams came true. I saw America changed through music."

– Harry Smith

Throughout his life Smith collected a wide variety of cultural artifacts including Seminole textiles, paper airplanes, Russian Easter Eggs, string figures like the Cat's Cradle, pop-up books, Tarot cards, etc., etc. some of these finding their way into museums like the Smithsonian. Szwed recounts how he got into string figures after reading a book by Kathleen Haddon, String Games for Beginners that demonstrated how to form a loop of string into various geometric shapes. He found out that these figures could be found everywhere on the planet and it became a lifelong area of research beginning with the Native American peoples he visited. He was interested in patterns that travelled across cultural boundaries. I suspect the influence of Franz Boas's aim to find out what it meant to be human.

Smith's collection of rare 78 recordings, beginning around 1940, eventually turned into the Anthology of American Folk Music. This had a profound influence on a wide range of musical artists including: Dylan, The Grateful Dead, Pete Seeger, Led Zeppelin, Springsteen, Sonic Youth, Elvis Costello, Beck, Wilco, Joan Baez, Taj Mahal, The Byrds, Canned Heat, Gordon Lightfoot, Harry Nilsson, Kris Kristofferson, Gillian Welch, Nick Cave, and Tom Waits to name a few. These recordings span from 1927 - 1932. Acquiring them became much more earnest in the early 1940's when the US government began melting them down to recycle their materials for the war effort.

In an essay by Luis Kemnitzer included in the Anthology's 1997 reissue he writes:

"In 1946 when I was shipping out of Seattle, Harry Smith was a legend among record collectors and jazz and country music enthusiasts that I met. People had been introduced to Lummi Midwinter Dances, which they called Spirit Dances, by Harry Smith. He had introduced blues record collectors to Jimmie Rodgers."

Moses Asche of Folkways Recordings commissioned Smith to assemble his favorite songs into a set that became the Anthology which included Harry's extensive anthropological descriptions and annotations. It was initially released in 1952, but took some years to catch on.

* * * * * *

Harry Smith first met the influential counter-cultural poet Ed Sanders in 1962 at a bar on Avenue A and 12th Street. Szwed writes: "He (Smith) was clutching a first edition of Aleister Crowley's Book of Lies and was declaring it a work of genius." A year or so later Sanders formed the Fugs with Tuli Kupferberg because they thought they could come up with better lyrics than the early Beatles songs which were becoming popular in underground (and not so underground) circles. Harry convinced Moe Asch to finance their first record and served as the Producer for it. Harry also came up with their name, the Fugs.

One of my favorite stories in the book concerns the attempt, lead by the Yippies, to exorcise or levitate the Pentagon in 1967. I had always considered this pure absurdist humor, but we find out that Ed Sanders, given the task of organizing it, relied on Harry to structure the ritual. He served as their magickal consultant providing them with some basic principles to go by. I would have loved to hear more about Smith's Thelemic connections. He was friends with Bill Breeze, the current Outer Head of the O.T.O. and James Wasserman who worked as Weiser and later became well known for his book designs of Thelemic related titles among other things. Harry illustrated the paperback edition of The Holy Books of Thelema. Breeze made him a Bishop in the Ecclesia Gnostic Catholica, the religious branch of the O.T.O.

Illustration by Harry Smith

* * * * * *

I feel a kindred spirit with Harry Smith through his interest in recording natural environmental sounds. The first time I did so happened at age 20 in the top floor of a hotel in Banff, Alberta when touring with a bar band called Relay. My friend, the lighting director Bob Gregory, had a reel to reel tape recorder. For a couple of days early in the morning I placed a pair of microphones outside the window of the penthouse suite where the band stayed and recorded the Dawn unfolding over Banff Avenue for about an hour each time. About 11 years later E. J. Gold made a comment to me that Bardo spaces could be navigated by sound. That set me on a path of recording ambient sounds in a variety of locations: sacred spaces, streets, museums, etc. I used a D.A.T. recorder and a Sony stereo condenser microphone to capture the sounds. Traveling and working throughout the planet with Bill Laswell in the late 80s and 1990s provided a wide variety of interesting locations. My first ambient recording of this nature occurred at the Basilica du Sacre Couer in Paris. Other recordings came from street sounds and temples in India (I recorded an elephant along with their sacred cows for the classical Indian violinist El Shankar), West Africa, the Australian Outback, Cairo and the King's Chamber in the Great Pyramid, the temple wall in Jerusalem, Rio de Janerio, Morocco, China, Mongolia, Tashkent, Samarkand, New York and Paris subways among others. I've also recorded interesting sounds found in my own backyard in Northern California. Les Claypool incorporated some of these on the Primus album Antipop. Tom Waits spoke highly of a sample reel of these recordings I made for him when auditioning for the job of his recording and mix engineer. In 2004, with Bill Laswell's help, I released a compilation of these called All Around the World on the Belgian label, Sub Rosa.

Cosmic Scholar recalls one phase of Smith's ambient recordings after moving to Boulder, Colorado in 1988 to stay and lecture at Naropa University, the school Tibetan Buddhist master Chögyam Trungpa founded over a decade earlier. Allen Ginsberg had arranged Harry's residence there.

"Within a few weeks of his arrival, he had recorded hundreds of hours of ambient sounds, 'pointing to the correlation between auto horns and birdcalls, and the intercommunication between machines and the animate world.' he could record the sounds of Boulder with a mic out the window, including crickets, cicadas, and squirrels at different times of the day. He told Beth Borrus, his assistant for his summer lectures, that he was looking for patterns: 'It was a long time before I realized that the squirrels were carrying on intelligent communication between each other, which reached a peak in the day when they were able to stop the birds from singing when the sun came up, which is why I was recording the thing anyhow. They evidently had some prior agreement, the Dawn Chorale.'" - Cosmic Scholar, p. 333.

A few years ago I was working in Portland at Flora Recording a studio owned and operated by the prolific Producer and Engineer Tucker Martine. Tucker and I have some tangential history together: I had worked alongside his brother Layng at Laswell's studio in Brooklyn and we both had received some form of mentorship from genius Engineer Jason Corsaro. Tucker told me a story that while taking a musique concrete course at Naropa he worked at a coffee place in Boulder, a spot Harry Smith frequented. His boss advised him to strike up a conversation with Smith. He took the advice and had several conversations with Harry. I feel something subtle and intangible may have been passed on to Tucker with those interactions. He also got into making ambient field recordings and has released a couple of albums one of being Broken Hearted Dragonflies (Insect Electronica from Southeast Asia).

* * * * * *

Szwed also documents the crazy, chaotic, contradictory, indigent side of Smith's life. He has several anecdotes and stories along those lines. Smith never met a drug he didn't like and had a long and extensive history of alcohol abuse. He never had anything resembling a conventional means of income mostly living off of the sometimes strained generosity of others. When he sometimes received large or moderate sums of money to finance the art projects, he would often spend it recklessly. Paying his hotel bills or rent was never a priority. Somehow he always found money to constantly acquire books and drugs.

John Szwed questions his ability to write a good biography on such an elusive subject as Harry. He more than rises to the occasion with this definitive work. It's a fascinating read. I've left out whole areas of Smith's activities, most notably his filmmaking projects. It's a book that inspires creativity through Harry Smith's example. I give it 5 stars and highly recommend it.

The Scarlet Letter and Thelema

2025-05-17T14:38:00.000-07:00

The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne appears an example of enlightened writing. Its vivid descriptions, powerful observations and attention to detail come from an illumined consciousness. It's been said that turned on mystics have a kind of beatific vision as if an interior light brightens everything they see. This describes the sense I get from much of Hawthorne's writing in this novel, even the darker, more tragic scenes. I get a similar sense reading Marcel Proust, William Blake or Arthur Rimbaud. This illumination seems transmittable to some degree. When I read writing of this quality, Tolkien is another example, it changes how I see the world. It wakes me up a little bit to the beauty all around. I contend that reading thought provoking enlightened literature is a path to higher consciousness, as valid and potentially effective as any other.

The Scarlet Letter and the scarlet letter – the book itself and the subject of the book have multiple levels with multiple meanings. On its surface, the novel appears a puritanical, Christian morality tale. The protagonist, Hester Prynne, has committed adultery and must pay the penalty of wearing a scarlet letter A on her chest for the rest of her life. Hawthorne writes like a trickster playing with the reader's perceptions, imagination and assumptions. Most people assume the A stands for adultery, but that's never explicitly stated in the book. This "A" comes to signify much, much more. It reverses itself as a symbol of punishment by transforming into an initiating symbol of strength and true will for Hester.

Hawthorne writes like an Adept with the first mention of the scarlet letter. The story has a long prelude called "The Custom-House" formulated as a memoir of when Hawthorne temporarily abandoned writing to make money and support his family as a customs inspector, something he did for 3 years. Like a true maker of illusions, he inserts the scarlet letter into what otherwise seems a truthful account making it appear that the subsequent story exists as genuine historical lore. He's also upfront and clear about its Hermetic nature and mystical depth. Upon first encountering the dusty letter A in the Custom-House some 200 years after the events told occurred, he calls the historical circumstances around it to be a riddle with little hope of solving. Then he writes:

"My eyes fastened themselves upon the old scarlet letter, and would not be turned aside. Certainly, there was some deep meaning in it, most worthy of interpretation, and which, as it were, streamed forth from the mystic symbol, subtly communicating itself to my sensibilities, but evading the analysis of my mind."

Again, this statement refers to the book as a whole and to the specific artifact that is the subject of the tale. He's speaking of art of psychometry – the psychic reading of impressions from artifacts – why I called him an Adept. Psychometry is allegedly how Gurdjieff received his ancient knowledge: traveling around Central Asia, North Africa and the Middle East reading artifacts. These artifacts included ancient dances. Hawthorne also hints at the method of how he obtained this psychic reception: focused and fixated attention on the letter – his eyes "would not be turned aside."

We see more Hermetic references and coding in The Scarlet Letter. The formidable antagonist, Roger Chillingworth, Hester Prynne's much older husband, was a scholar in Europe who became a doctor; he has his own devious agenda. He's described as an alchemist for the way he concocts his herbal healing potions and at one point is compared to Paracelsus.

Cabala is introduced when Hester has an occasion to visit the Governor's mansion. The interior "had indeed a very cheery aspect; the walls being overspread with a kind of stucco, in which fragments of broken glass were plentifully intermixed; so that when the sunshine fell aslant-wise over the front of the edifice, it glittered and sparkled as if diamonds had been flung against it by the double handful. The brilliancy might have befitted Aladdin's palace, rather than the mansion of a grave old Puritan ruler. It was further decorated with strange and seemingly cabalistic figures and diagrams, suitable to the quaint taste of the age ..."

Hawthorne employs the technique of presenting an image ripe for cabalistic interpretation – sunshine on broken glass sparkling like diamonds – then explicitly refers to Cabala as if providing a hint for how one can look at the prior image.

The comparison between the pagan Aladdin's palace and the Puritan mansion I find interesting. Setting his story in mid 17th Century Puritan Boston, Hawthorne frequently appears critical of dogmatic Puritan values and their lifestyle though not entirely of the Christian milieu. Many commentators connect Hester with the story of Esther, the Persian Queen in the Old Testament who courageously saved the Jews in her country. If you google, "What does the story of Esther teach us," the AI buddy will provide a number of answers that easily apply to The Scarlet Letter.

The book ends with the line engraved upon the one tombstone that serves for the graves of both Hester and her one time lover, Arthur Dimmesdale: "ON A FIELD, SABLE, THE LETTER A, GULES." This looks coded, but once again Hawthorne provides the key that it uses heraldic nomenclature. Heraldry is a system of communicating symbols, signs and colors to provide identification usually as a familial Coat of Arms. Field indicates the background; sable means black; gules means red. On a black background the scarlet letter A.

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And now a word from our sponsor, Earth Coincidence Control Office.

After writing the above paragraph I took a break. Looking at You Tube, I saw Lon Milo Duquette's daily video in my recommended list. Today's offering, just posted, covered the subject "Aleister Crowley and Baseball." It starts with Lon holding up an old California Angels baseball cap with a large scarlet letter A close to the camera so that it fills the frame.

The scarlet letter representing an Angel does find a parallel in the novel with Hester's young daughter Pearl. Describing the way Hester dressed her in a crimson velvet tunic "embroidered with fantasies and flourishes of gold thread" for the visit to the cabalistic governor's mansion. "So much strength of coloring ... was admirably adapted to Pearl's beauty, and made her the very brightest little jet of flame that ever danced upon the earth." ... "It was the scarlet letter in another form, the scarlet letter endowed with life!"

Nathaniel Hawthorne was profoundly influenced by the late 16th Century epic poem The Fairie Queen by Edmund Spenser, a recognized classic of Hermetic literature. So much so, that he named his daughter Una after one of the main characters. A primary aim of modern Hermeticism is the valorization and promotion of Female Intelligence. This appears evident in contemporary writers of the esoteric persuasion such as James Joyce, Aleister Crowley, Robert Anton Wilson, Timothy Leary, Thomas Pynchon and Gilles Deleuze to name a few. It began as far back as the 15th Century with Francois Rabelais' classic Gargantua and Pantagruel.

In The Fairie Queene Una plays the love interest and guide to the Redcrosse Knight on his journey. Her story becomes an apt allegory of female wisdom and higher intelligence. She compares favorably with Babalon in the Thelemic cosmology. Spenser's poem has several strong female characters, notably different from the literature of that era, maybe from much literature of any era. The Scarlet Letter's strongest and most intelligent characters are two woman, Hester and her daughter Pearl. Pearl's name also has Biblical allusions referring to the pearl of great price (Matthew 13:45-46). Hawthorne calls her an "elf-child" though says the Puritans think she might be a "demon offspring." She ends up becoming "the richest heiress of her day, in the New World." She was a new born baby at the beginning of the book reaching the age of 7 when the tale ends. The final chapter writes of what happened to her afterwards. In real life, Una Hawthorne was 6 at the time it was written thus likely providing an inspiration and model for Pearl.

Another mask or guise of the scarlet letter is being a Bardo Guide, a guide in and around death. Hester took on the task of visiting and providing human contact with sick people in times of pestilence. "There glimmered the embroidered letter, with comfort in its unearthly ray. Elsewhere the token of sin, it was the taper of the sick-chamber. It had even thrown its gleam, in the sufferer's hard extremity, across the verge of time. It had shown him where to set his foot, while the light of earth was fast becoming dim, and ere the light of futurity could reach him" (emphasis added).

There are more scenes touching upon death and describing a liminal, bardo-like space. Significantly, Hawthorne wrote The Scarlet Letter in a 6 month burst of inspiration following the death of his mother. Thus, he was most probably in an altered state of mind some, if not all, the time he wrote the book. I infer this based on my own experience of feeling like I was on a mild psychedelic for about 3 months following the death of my father.

Synchronicity strikes again. Within two minutes of writing the last sentence I received an email from a woman who knew my mother well and had just discovered the Memorial I wrote for her in 2020 following her passing.

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The Scarlet Letter tells a tragic love story, but there appear instances where it sublimates into divine love, what the ancient Greeks called Agape. This describes the love or vitality that lights up and provides vivifying life force to Creation. May the force be with you. In this, and in other ways, it aligns with the doctrine of Thelema which advocates a philosophy of love: "Love is the law, love under will." Thelema also advises being true to your genuine nature – as opposed to what societal and other conventions tell us how to be – with the injunction: "Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law." We find this great lesson expressed in the "Conclusion" chapter: "Among many morals which press upon us from the poor minister's miserable experience, we put only this into a sentence: – Be true! Be true! Be true! Show freely to the world, if not your worst, yet some trait whereby the worst may be inferred." The minister's experience felt constantly miserable precisely because he lived a lie to himself and to the world. He had a habit of putting his hand over his heart as if in pain.

An example of Agape, providing life force to creation, gets suggested in the memoir prelude, "The Custom-House" where Hawthorne discusses the nature of romance writing. It begins in a bardo state (bardo = the realm of the in-between): "Thus, therefore, the floor of our familiar room has become a neutral territory, somewhere between the real world and fairy-land, where the Actual and the Imaginary may meet, and each imbue itself with the nature of the other. Ghosts might enter here, without affrighting us.

. . . The somewhat dim coal-fire has an essential influence in producing the effect which I would describe. It throws its unobtrusive tinge throughout the room, with a faint ruddiness upon the walls and ceiling, and a reflected gleam from the polish of the furniture. This warmer light mingles itself with the cold spirituality of the moonbeams, and communicates, as it were, a heart and sensibilities of human tenderness to the forms which fancy summons up."

Aleister Crowley believed Rabelais forecast the new Aeon when writing of the Abbey of Thélème in Gargantua and Pantagruel. I consider The Scarlet Letter another precursor to the new Aeon envisioned by Crowley. We find a literal prophecy in its penultimate page:

"She assured them too of her firm belief, that, at some brighter period, when the world should have grown ripe for it, in Heaven's own time, a new truth would be revealed, in order to establish a surer ground of mutual happiness." Hester thought she might be this prophetess, but decided that wasn't possible due to her circumstances. "The angel and apostle of the coming revelation must be a woman, indeed, but lofty, pure, and beautiful; and wise, moreover, not through dusky grief, but through the ethereal medium of joy: and showing how sacred love should make us happy, by the truest test of a life successful to such and end!"

This "ethereal medium of joy" finds multiple expressions in The Book of the Law, the received text that inaugurated the new Aeon according to Crowley. The ninth verse of the second chapter easily applies to the life Hester Prynne:

"9. Remember all ye that existence is pure joy; that all the sorrows are but as shadows; they pass & are done; but there is that which remains."

There seems ample room for extensive Qabalistic interpretation in The Scarlet Letter, but I'll spare the reader my full exegesis except to drop a few crumbs pointing to further research. The scarlet letter A connects, of course, with Aleph and all its correspondences – The Fool in the Tarot. Aleph (ALP) appears a prominent recurring image in Finnegans Wake as Anna Livia Plurabelle, another resonance with female Intelligence.

A also corresponds with an upright pentagram, a five pointed star because of its shape. We find something very close to this kind of scarlet letter in the Book of the Law I:60:

"My number is 11, as all their numbers who are of us. The Five Pointed Star, with a Circle in the Middle, & the Circle is Red."

Crowley's comment on this verse: "The Circle in the Pentagram? See Liber NV."

Liber NV is numbered 11. It begins:

"000 This is the Book of the Cult of the Infinite Without

00 The aspirant is Hadit. Nuit is the infinite expansion of the Rose; (remember this rose). Hadit the infinite contraction of the Rood.

1. Worship, i.e identify thyself with the Khabs, the secret Light within the Heart.

11 is the number of Magick or energy tending to change. The Scarlet Letter proceeds through a process of transformation. The first chapter, "The Prison-Door" begins with a sad, very strong male image in front of a prison door. The novel ends with a woman apostle and angel in the ethereal medium of joy saying how sacred love should make us happy. Very basically, the book starts sad and ends happy. Here's the first sentence:

"A throng of bearded men, in sad-colored garments, and gray steeple-crowned hats, intermixed with woman, some wearing hoods, and others bareheaded, was assembled in front of a wooden edifice, the door of which was heavily timbered with oak, and studded with iron spikes."

Yet even in this harsh locale magical aid is offered in the form of a wild rose-bush at the threshold of the prison door "covered, in this month of June, with its delicate gems, which might be imagined to offer their fragrance and fragile beauty to the prisoner as he went in, and to the condemned criminal as he went forth to his doom, in token that the deep heart of Nature could pity and be kind to him."

Rose, June, beauty and deep heart of Nature all correspond with Tiphareth, the central sphere on the Tree of Life that also corresponds with the heart chakra. Hawthorne breaks the fourth wall at the end of this short chapter by plucking one of the rose-bush's flowers and offering it to the reader. "It may serve, let us hope, to symbolize some sweet moral blossom, that may be found along the track, or relieve the darkening close of a tale of human frailty and sorrow." After giving a rose to the reader, he blatantly tells us it's a symbol. In the United States, and many other parts of the world, it sure feels like we're living in the "darkening close of a tale of human frailty and sorrow." Hawthorne gives us a huge clue on how to relieve and get through it.

Much could be made of both Hester Prynne and Pearl's initials connecting with the Hebrew letter Peh, a correspondence with The Tower in the Tarot aka The House of God. Also, the scarlet letter A seen as a pentagram and worn on the chest gives an obvious image of the instruction to protect the heart.

Moby Dick and Finnegans Wake

2024-12-19T19:03:00.000-08:00

Herman Melville

James Joyce

Two classics of literature separated in time by nearly 90 years. Very different in their style of writing, yet similar in size, and in the full on aim of attempting to consider everything imaginable in life and in death. Both works come chock full of philosophy, metaphysics, alchemy, magic, and bardo information but differ drastically in presentation. The narrative seems clear and evident in Moby Dick, we always know where we are in the story. It's just the opposite, extremely opaque, in Finnegans Wake. The new reader often has no idea what's going on in terms of any storyline and is advised to consult a reader's guide such as the excellent one by Tindall or Campbell & Robinson's Skeleton Key. The surface plot of Finnegans Wake seems either inconsequential or non existent. It all takes place over one night with the protagonists asleep until the end. Moby Dick's plot is more substantial, but you could probably cut out two thirds of it or more and not affect the basic elements of the story.

These two magnum opuses offer masterpieces of metaphor over multiple levels of sense. W.H. Auden called Moby Dick an 'elaborate synecdoche' in which whale fishing becomes an image of all our lives, teeming with parable and multiple symbolic correspondences. The same description could easily apply to Finnegans Wake sans the whale fishing. A snapshot of the microcosm - the local environment, representing the macrocosm – all and everything, seems the ultimate synecdoche. One example of this in Finnegans Wake: the initials HCE, that of the main protagonist Humphrey Chimpden Earwicker, also stand for "Here Comes Everybody."

Melville writes of uniting the microcosm with the macrocosm at the end of chapter 70, "The Sphynx:"

"O Nature and O soul of man! how far beyond all utterance are your linked analogies! not the smallest atom stirs or lives in matter, but has its cunning duplicate in mind." In this chapter, they behead a Sperm Whale and "in the midst of so intense a calm, it seemed the Sphynx's in the desert." Captain Ahab proceeds to address the dismembered head as if its spirit lived on and could communicate what it has seen in its travels. This seems on par with a magician grilling a non-human entity that's been invoked:

"speak, mighty head, and tell us the secret thing that is in there. Of all divers, thou has dived the deepest. That head upon which the upper sun now gleams, has moved among this world's foundations. Where unrecorded names and navies rust, and untold hopes and anchors rot, where in her murderous hold, this frigate earth is ballasted with bones of millions of the drowned; there, in that awful water-land, there was thy most familiar home."

This quote alludes to the land of the dead at the end; that subject is another point in common between MD and FW as we shall see. Death runs throughout Moby Dick. The first words in the book come from a person who is dead. Chapter 49, "The Hyena," laughs at death. The cycle of death and rebirth/renewal appears throughout Finnegans Wake. Obviously, the title itself immediately suggests Finnegan's death. The reader confronts death on the front cover.

The use of Cabala provides another commonality between Joyce and Melville. Cabala appears evident in the above quote. The Hebrew letter Resh means "head" and corresponds with The Sun in the Tarot. Melville demonstrates this correspondence with the phrase: "That head upon which the upper sun now gleams."

No direct evidence exists that Joyce read Moby Dick except, possibly, for the apparent appearance of it in the Wake. The occurs in FW page 13 in the penultimate paragraph. Before we examine that, let's look at what immediate precedes the great white whale's entrance. Top of page 13:

"So. This Is Dyoublong?

Hush! Caution! Echoland!"

Dyoublong alludes both to Dublin and to the phrase "do you belong?"

The second line suggests the Bardo of HCE, with the suggestion reinforced in the subsequent paragraph which has multiple references to death. For instance:

"gravemure" = grave + mure (wall). This gets reinforced a couple sentences later with: "Hear? By the mausolum wall." Then: "With a grand funferall" (funeral, combined with the suggestion of laughing at death). In this paragraph we find multiple references to music and listening or hearing, and a couple to magic. The Tibetan Book of the Dead, aka the Bardo Thodol, translates as the power of liberation by sound. At the end of the paragraph for example: "They will be tuggling foriver. They will be lichening for allof. They will be pretumbling forover. The harpsdischord shall be theirs for ollaves."

"They" and "theirs" in the last four sentences could easily refer to disembodied souls traveling in the land of the dead; "foriver" alludes to both "forever" and "for river." The river, in Finnegans Wake represents the flowing of LIFE. Next sentence: "lichening" = listening; "for allof" – all of time or all of life? Then "pretumbling forover" seems a unique way to represent the Bardo, the territory a soul enters after life ("forover") and before rebirth ("pretumbling"). The last sentence: "harpsdischord" – many events feel discordant in the Bardo, but some things feel harmonious like a harpsichord might sound; "ollaves" reflects "allof" again, but also suggests "all loves" (all our dearly departed) by switching the "o" with the "a"; "ollaves" also reminds me of those small balls of fruit that go in martinis though I honestly don't know what that has to do with anything.

The paragraph just examined also contains another reference to Dublin, "Dbln." Dublin plays prominently into the Bardo or subconscious mind of both HCE and Joyce. Believe it or not, all this appears relevant to Moby Dick.

In the essay "Moby Dick's Hyphen" by David Collard, which appears in his book, Multiple Joyce, he writes that what Melville does for whales and the whaling industry, i.e. going into it at considerable length and detail, Joyce does for Dublin in Ulysses. If you're thinking of picking up a copy of Multiple Joyce to read how Moby Dick may have influenced him, don't. I just communicated everything he has to say on the subject. It's not a bad essay on Moby Dick, yet with little connection to Joyce. If you, like me, wondered why the original title of Moby-Dick has a hyphen in it that never appears in the text, there's nothing mysterious about it. According to Collard, a typesetter inadvertently put a hyphen in the title and it stayed, basically a typo. The rest of Multiple Joyce looks good, but I haven't read enough to recommend it.

Skipping the next paragraph in FW p. 13 after the one just analyzed brings us closer to our whale friend:

"So, how idlers' wind turning pages on pages, as innocens with anaclete play popeye antipop, the leaves of the living in the boke of the deeds, annals of themselves timing the cycles of events grand and national, bring fassilwise to pass how."

The first phrase: how idlers' wind turning pages on pages could suggest reading a book. I know Joyce scholars give a different interpretation of "idlers'" so this may seem purely coincidental, but in Moby Dick chapter 102, "A Bower in the Ardacides" Melville calls the skeleton of a dead Sperm Whale washed up on the beach "a gigantic idler!" The next sentence has: "the mighty idler seemed the cunning weaver." Weaver is used metaphorically – when you read the whole passage it appears akin to the Sufi metaphor of weaving together the fabric of existence.

"the leaves of the living in the boke of the deeds" = the leaves of the living in the book of the dead. Joyce uses "leaves" multiple times in FW as a pun for leaving the body – told to me by Robert Anton Wilson in his Tales of the Tribe class.

In the same chapter, slightly before Melville calls the whale skeleton a gigantic idler, he writes: "Through the lacings of the leaves, the great sun seemed a flying shuttle weaving the unwearied verdure." The weaving metaphor plays throughout this section. "Leaves", as a metaphor for the soul leaving the body, right beside "the great sun" recalls the Egyptian Book of the Dead where the primary goal of the soul is to unite with Osiris after bodily death. Osiris qabalistically corresponds with the sun.

In his mid 19th Century ornate language Melville sums up this section with: "Life folded Death; Death trellised Life; the grim god wived with youthful Life, and begat him curly-headed glories."

Books of the dead deliver instructions and navigational tips for passing through the Bardo hopefully liberating the soul or programming a favorable rebirth (curly-headed glories). This information appears practically useful whether going through a physical, biological death or a psychological one with a temporary death of the ego. Both Finnegans Wake and Moby Dick qualify as books of the dead.

"bring fassilwise to pass how." I don't have a good read on this line and would only be speculating. In an earlier missive on FW, I postulated that the question "how?" appears central to the opus.

At last we get to our whale:

1132 A.D. Men like to ants or emmets wondern upon a groot hwide Whallfisk which lay in a Runnel. Blubby wares upat Ublanium.

1132 A.D. looks like a date, but seems more cabalistic, to me.

11 = magic, or energy tending to change; 11 also = a circularity of form or motion. Joyce had a strong interest in cycles of time. Finnegans Wake has a circular form.

32 = the ten Sephiroth (spheres) on the Tree of Life + the twenty-two paths that run between them. The Tree of Life provides the form for the filing cabinet of correspondences. Qabala can be considered one kind of coding or mapping of consciousness. It also maps the Bardo. These particular correspondences appeared in Sepher Sephiroth first published in 1909 by Aleister Crowley and derived from the work of MacGregor Mathers and Allan Bennett of the Golden Dawn. Joyce knew people from those circles such as William Butler Yeats and others. It seems probable those correspondences were known to him.

A.D. = after death therefore indicating the Bardo.

"groot hwide Whallfisk" sounds like great white whale-fish. "groot" = Danish and Dutch for "big;" "hwide" = Danish for "white;" "Whalfisch" = German for whale; "fisk" = Danish for fish. Melville mostly (incorrectly) considers whales to be fish in Moby Dick. The exception being when he considers how they have to breath air in chapter 85, "The Fountain."

Joyce's word for whale, "Whallfisk" contains both "all" and "whall" (sounds like "wall") – connecting with the multiple mentions of "wall" and "all" earlier on this page. Two earlier instances of "wall" occur beside images of death – by the grave and by the mausoleum. The Hebrew letter "nun" translates as "fish" in English and corresponds with the Tarot card Death. Whallfisk shows another wall beside death with the fish correspondence. Could this wall indicate the separation or boundary between life and death?

Men would look like ants when doing their business with a great white whale; "emmets" appears an archaic British word for ants. Extensive whale hunting would seem archaic even in Joyce's time; "wondern" sounds like wandering, but also "wonder" = a cabalistic pun for "all" when considering the mystical tautology, "all is one," (found at the very end of Led Zeppelin's Stairway to Heaven, and elsewhere); "wondern" = wonder + n; nun = n = Death; ergo wondern cabalistically puts "all" besides "death." When you die, either biologically or egotistically, mystics say you have an opportunity to connect with "all."

"Blubby wares" = the oil obtained from whale blubber used as fuel in lamps at one time.

"upat" = "up at," but also translates as "four" in the Cebuano language, a language spoken in the Phillipines near where a lot of the action in Moby Dick takes place. Of course, for Joyce and his unbridled use of homonyms, four = for. Joyce uses the word "for" multiple times on this page (see above). Joyce starts the paragraph on p. 13 that I didn't examine: "Four things therefore..." as kind of a humorous pun on "four" with "therefore."

"Ublanium" appears close to an archaic name for Dublin (Eblana) and also sounds like Dublin.

Blubby wares upat Ublanium translates as"Whale oil for Dublin." Perhaps Joyce alludes to the archaic name for Dublin because of the archaic nature of this illumination. Whale oil stopped being used to light up lamps somewhere around 1860.

"Blubby wares" could easily indicate a shorthand term for Moby Dick (full original title Moby-Dick or, The Whale) as Melville provides encyclopedic information (wares) on just about every aspect of whales one can think of. Since Joyce identifies so strongly with Dublin, could blubby wares for Dublin, or blubby wares up at Dublin be a sly acknowledgement by Joyce of the influence of Moby Dick?

It's true that these passages analyzed don't provide an explicit connection to Melville or Moby Dick, but it comes pretty close with "great white whale," Moby Dick indisputably being the most famous one in literature. Let's call this circumstantial evidence.

More circumstantial evidence: Moby Dick begins by looking at the etymology of "whale." The first quote comes from Richard Hakluyt (Melville incorrectly spells it Hackluyt) and refers to a "whale-fish," very close to Joyce's "Whallfisk." Hakluyt goes on to stress the importance of "the letter H, "which almost alone maketh up the signification of the word..." Joyce's word for white, "hwide" begins with h.

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This seems the extent of Moby Dick appearing in Finnegans Wake if indeed it does at all. There are a couple of other parallels, but they don't seem convincing to me as anything more than coincidence. The closest comes on FW page 210 with: ". . . a reiz every morning for Standfast Dick" followed a couple of lines later by"two appletweed stools for Eva Mobbely." Someone else might have more luck connecting this, or anything else in this section to Moby Dick, I don't buy it, or maybe I don't see it. FW p. 492 has the name, Afamado Hairductor Achmed Borumborad whose initials make AHAB, and does show Arabic overtones, but the rest of the section appears to connect with One Thousand and One Nights more commonly known as Arabian Nights. It seems to have nothing to do with Captain Ahab.

Some general parallels between the two novels:

both appear very influenced by The Bible and by the works of Shakespeare.

the writing in both novels sounds musical, at times; moreso with Joyce. Both books incorporate songs; I only recall one in Moby Dick in chapter 9, "The Sermon," but the "Extracts" section at the beginning quotes from songs.

Joyce got known for putting lists and catalogs in. Melville has a little of that as does Rabelais who influenced them both. Melville quotes Rabelais in the opening section and directly mentions him later in the text.

Moby Dick originally was published in England as The Whale before assuming its final title, Moby-Dick or, The Whale. Wake and Whale sound alike and rhyme at the beginning. In the latter, taking out the "h" and replacing "l" with "k" turns Whale into Wake. The word Joyce uses for whale, "Whallfisk" removes the "h" in fish and replaces it with a "k." Would Joyce make such a subtle nod to Melville, by switching two letters? In my opinion, absolutely yes.

Water runs in the background (often the foreground), throughout both novels. Finnegans Wake famously starts with riverrun, sometimes called the "river of life." Most of the action in Moby Dick occurs in the ocean. It starts in the rain with Ishmael deciding to go to sea. The second paragraph begins a lyrical ode to water continuing for a few pages before landing on the same metaphor Joyce uses: "But that same image, we ourselves see in all rivers and oceans. It is the image of the ungraspable phantom of life; and this is the key to it all." Joyce ends FW with "The keys to. Given!" before returning to the river that started it all.

Oz Fritz

December 19, 2024

Nevada City, California

The Red Tear by David Pellicciaro

2024-08-10T17:49:00.000-07:00

This is the best video I've seen in a long time. The trippy visuals guarantee that you can watch it multiple times and see something new and different each time. The music presents a deep dive into the symbiotic relationship, the connections and reconnections through the blood that flows between mother and child beginning in the the womb. A spiritual voyage of discovery through a dreamscape bardo sequence leading to a return to the source.

David Pellicciaro landed the vision, wrote and arranged the music and performed it with a little help from his friends: Dale Fanning - drums, Wally Ingram - percussion, Scott Padden - bass, Scott Law - guitars, Beverly Modell - backing vocals, David Pellicciaro – piano, keys, sound design, vocal. Recorded by Dave at Lucky Devil Sound and by Danielle Goldsmith at Tiny Telephone, both in Oakland. Mixed and mastered by Yours Truly at High Velocity, Nevada City, CA. The video was directed and edited by Dylan Cortez-Modell based on Dave's concept.

William Blake would have enjoyed seeing his influence here. Timothy Leary may have reckoned it as a total immersion into the genetic code, a tour through the futique circuits of DNA. Enjoy!

The 23 Enigma & The Western Lands by William S. Burroughs

2024-07-15T21:58:00.000-07:00

This is the third article in a series on contemporary and ancient Books of the Dead. The first piece is here and the second one is there.

spiriti questi? personae?

tangibility by no means atasal

but the crystal can be weighed in the hand

formal and passing within the sphere: Thetis,

Maya, Ἀφροδίτη,

- Ezra Pound, Canto LXXVI

Note: "atasal" = union with God; from Avicenna.

Thetis = mother of Achilles who made him immortal, except for his heel, by dipping him in the River Styx, the river that runs through the Underworld.

Maya, also spelled Maia = the daughter of Atlas and mother of Hermes via a liaison with Zeus. The Greek word = Aphrodite, the goddess of love

The 23 Enigma – encountering a network of synchronicities and coincidences related to the number 23 – seems quite familiar to many readers of Robert Anton Wilson. He laid out his experience with this phenomenon in Cosmic Trigger – the Final Secret of the Illuminati. Multiple listings to Twenty-three appear in the Index beginning with William Burroughs telling him about it and recurring frequently until nearly the end of the book. The importance of this engima to Wilson's Hermetic development cannot be overstated. He compared it to the flash of insight Dr. James Watson received walking down a spiral staircase leading him to consider DNA as spiral-shaped, an intuitive hunch that led to cracking the DNA code. This opened up the world of Science and applied Technology to all kinds of new beneficial healing advances for humanity. "23 was my spiral staircase, my intuitive signal." ( CT I p. 46, Hilaritas). The 23 Enigma served as an entry point for Wilson to crack, actually more like construct, the code of numerology and correspondence found in the science of Cabala. I contend that this also brought beneficial healing advances for some parts of humanity through his writing and teaching.

Wilson presented the 23 Enigma so well that it entered the underground cultural lexicon. Some examples of this off the top of my head include an excellent, but short-lived (1987-1988) science fiction TV show called Max Headroom. The main character works as an investigative reporter for Network 23. Around the same time, a great film packed with esoteric information, Who Framed Roger Rabbit, came out. It opens with a Warner Bros. style cartoon, Somethin's Cookin'. In it, Roger gets tasked with babysitting Baby Herman after Mother says she's off to the beauty parlor. The baby innocently gets into all kinds of dangerous situations that Roger frantically tries to protect him from resulting in various daredevil slapstick antics. A refrigerator falls on Roger's head at the end of it, but he blows his part by seeing tweety birds instead of stars and gets fired. He pleads with the director, "please drop the refrigerator on my head again," the director replies, "we've dropped the refrigerator on your head 23 times already!" When you see this, especially after viewing it more than once and knowing the context of the rest of the film, it feels more like a deliberate inclusion rather than a random coincidence

In 2007 this enigma entered the mainstream with the film The Number 23 starring Jim Carrey – I have not seen this. The description of it says the protagonist finds an obscure book about 23 that leads to a descent into darkness. As recently as a few weeks ago on the TV show Last Week Tonight with John Oliver, Oliver played a clip of a jury foreperson reading the guilty verdict on 34 charges brought against a political candidate. To great comedic effect, Oliver showed each charge of guilty being read one by one in sequence only stopping at the 23rd.

According to Wilson odd coincidences and synchronicities tend to multiply as one gets more involved with the occult. I can verify this through my experience and would add that not only do synchronicities increase upon the spiritual path they can also help to guide. I've heard reports from several people that coincidences involving 23 become spookily more frequent after reading Wilson on the enigma. Part of the reason may certainly be attributed to selective attention. We see more 23s because we're looking for them or we gain increased maze brightness to that number simply from having read about the enigma; they jump out to us because we've tuned in to the phenomena. Anyone working along the lines of Scientific Illuminism is encouraged to be skeptical of assigning significance whenever seeing a 23. Yet, there seem occurrences of 23 (or any number important to us) not so easily explained.

Anyone who has come across and assimilated some kind of self-observation practice, whether from the disciplines of Buddhism, Yoga, Gurdjieffian 4th Way practices or something else can gradually become cognizant of the source of their attention. Meaning that a process of discernment can get applied to numerological encounters – did I make it up or is there some sort of occult communication going on? Perhaps a communication from one of the higher brain circuits? For the most part, these higher circuits seem occult (hidden) to our ordinary awareness. Can the more unknown parts of our DNA and nervous system arrange for synchronicities to communicate to our consciousness via unknown forces and interactions that can be modeled in quantum physics? What is the difference or relationship between a turned on C6 (using Leary's model) and the Knowledge and Conversation of the Holy Guardian Angel (using the Thelemic model)? As RAW said, and I concur, 23 can act as an intuitive signal. A signal for an educational process that starts to alchemically construct and turn on C6 – it seems never ending, yet always growing in beauty like a well tended garden full of joy to produce, and in a vegetable garden if I may extend the metaphor, tasty and joyful to eat the produce.

The discernment process reflexively exercises Intuition. Numerological consideration can be a workout for Intuition. Intuition does get stronger when exercised. Numerology can also be complete self-delusion without a healthy sense of skepticism. Intuition enters the picture when attempting to discern whether you're deluding yourself or if something real is going on.

* * * * * *

PROOF OF CONCEPT (maybe)

Regarding encountering synchronicities in this line of work, the day after I wrote the last few paragraphs a post came up in my Facebook feed from Dan Clore asking about: Musicians of interest to sombunall RAW fans?" I opened up the comments and one of the first ones I saw from Robert Rabinowitz included a quote from Cosmic Trigger about the 23 Enigma. The quote includes Wilson saying: "This, of course, illustrates Jano Watts' concept "The Net" – the lines of coincidence-synchronicity that connect everything-with everything. It is also an analogy with what phsyicists call QUIP – the Quantum Inseparability Principle" Rabinowitz goes on to write that he composed a classical sounding piece of music called QuIP. He plays the flute,with Jai Jeffryes on piano. You can hear the live performance of it here. Right below was a comment from Jessebob Baughman who gave a shout out to this blog and to my discography that I greatly appreciated.

* * * * * *

One of my favorite anecdotes concerns someone who posted a skeptical diatribe on Twitter about the 23 Enigma then went out to eat and was directed to table 23. It both blew and changed his mind. I've often been asked, what does it mean to encounter weird 23 synchronicities? So I've developed a take on it: 23 signals you're in the Bardo now. Let's look at how I got there:

By Gematria 23 = Parted, removed, separated. This easily suggests death - physically when parted, removed and separated from the body, and psychologically when parted, removed and separated from ego and personality.

23 = Joy

23 = A thread. Maintain the thread of consciousness while traversing the labyrinth of the Bardo appears a prime instruction in Tibetan Buddhism.

23 = Life

23 corresponds with death, the Bardo and Life and, for added measure, Joy. It recalls the line: "This is the creation of the world, that the pain of division is as nothing and the joy of dissolution all." (Liber Legis I:30)

In the "List of Primes" from 777, Aleister Crowley's Qabalistic dictionary,

23 = The glyph of life – nascent life

This nascent life could easily symbolize newborn life in the higher domains of consciousness.

Key 23 in 777's "Table of Correspondences" represents the Hebrew letter Mem, the element Water, and The Hanged Man in the Tarot. In The Game of Life, Leary connects Mem and The Hanged Man (and thus 23) with Caste 13, the first stage of what he calls "Post-Terrestrial Evolution" which include Circuits 5 - 8 in his model.

This Tarot card is an unmistakeable, dramatic signal from DNA that your nervous system contains post-terrestrial circuits which free the body from the gravitational and terrestrial limits of the womb planet. The Birth of the Self. The Self! The Self! - Leary, The Game of Life.

Hexagram 23 in the I Ching = Po/Splitting Apart. This splitting apart can suggest entering the Bardo when the spirit leaves the body or entering a psychological Bardo, even a Chapel Perilous when the higher, post-terrestrial consciousness breaks free from identification with terrestrial consciousness. Sufis call that "waking up."

The six lines of an I Ching hexagram carry a meaning when the line indicates that it changes. The first four changing lines in Hexagram 23 sound rather dire and appear to refer to complete identification with Circuits 1 - 4, what Sufis call "sleep." The fifth changing line could refer to the post-terrestrial side:

A shoal of fishes

Favor comes through the court ladies

Everything acts to further

A "shoal of fishes" could serve as a metaphor for the alignment of our wishes, aims and desires to formulate a Will to wake up. In Thelema, Nuit and Babalon are two of the court ladies. In the opening quote, Ezra Pound utilizes Greek mythology to present the court ladies Thetis, Maya and Aphrodite.

The top changing line in Hexagram 23 means:

There is a large fruit still uneaten.

The superior man receives a carriage.

The house of the inferior man is split apart.

A carriage = a vehicle which could be a kind of "body" for navigating the territory of the post-terrestrial circuits. "Man", of course, represents the ancient generic term Leary rebranded as "WoMan."

And finally . . . in Crowley 101, the online course Robert Anton Wilson gave under the auspices of The Maybe Logic Academy in 2005, we studied Chapter 23 from The Book of Lies. In that chapter, Crowley takes off on the then contemporary expression, "23 Skidoo" which means "get out!" He proceeds to express the word OUT as a Magick formula with sophisticated Qabalah, but more simply I think he also literally means "Get out" judging from the repetition of it five times. Get out of your comfort zone, get out (at least temporarily) of your habitual belief systems, the ordinary way of seeing things. Get out of your sleep. Get out of your enlightenment. It reminds me of entering the Bardo because whatever you get out of seems like a small death. It also recalls the Burroughs/ Gysin formula, "Here to Go" and Crowley's fifth power of the Sphinx, "to go."

* * * * * *

A large number, but not all of 23 synchronicities appear connected to either death or birth. In Cosmic Trigger, Wilson tells the story of William Burroughs introducing him to the 23 Enigma. According to Burroughs, it first came to his attention when an acquaintance by the name of Captain Clark mentioned that he'd been operating a ferry from Tangier, Morocco to Spain for 23 years without an accident. Later that very same day the ferry sunk killing everyone on board including Clark. Burroughs apparently turned on the radio that night and heard of an Eastern Airlines, Flight 23 plane crash also piloted by a Captain Clark. The flight was going from New York to Miami. It doesn't say if anyone died so I searched online for a record of it and couldn't find anything that matched those details. There was a mysterious plane crash of a United Airlines flight 23 in 1933 near Chicago killing everyone onboard that was later suspected to have been caused by a bomb and thus the first instance of terrorism of that kind. Although it was flight 23, it was not Eastern Airlines, wasn't going to Miami and the pilot wasn't Captain Clark. There was a crash near San Francisco in 1964 of a plane flown by a Captain Clark that killed 44 people. Clark had been shot by another passenger. Right time and the same Capitain's name, but it was Pacific Air Lines flight 773 – nothing to do with 23 or Eastern Airlines. Who knows what Burroughs heard on the radio that night, if he misheard it or if the newscaster supplied misinformation. Whatever happened, it caused Burroughs, and later Wilson to begin notating odd occurrences of 23. It's interesting to me that garbled communication brought recognition to the 23 Enigma. What agency was at work to bring this about? It's almost as bizarre, though not as far-reaching, as Albert Hoffman "accidentally" discovering the consciousness altering properties of LSD, another well-known, albeit much stronger Bardo enabler.

Wilson writes of taking a skeptical friend to see the film Charly about a mentally challenged character transformed into a genius by neuro-surgery in Operating Room 23 – a dramatic metaphorical death and rebirth. He lists a number of gangster deaths connected with 23. For instance, "Mad Dog" Coll shot on 23rd street at age 23. There's the story of Laura Huxley attempting to communicate with her husband Aldous after his death. A psychic told her Aldous wanted to communicate "classic evidence of survival" after death. The disembodied Aldous allegedly directed her to read line 23 on a particular page in a particular book on modern writers. The line praised Aldous Huxley "in this admirable communication." What strikes me as odd is how anyone living, even Aldous Huxley before he passed, would know exactly where the book was (fifth book on a certain self'), exactly which page and which line to read. Then, of course, we have the famous incident on July 23rd, 1973 when RAW received his first communication on the importance of Sirius following a prolonged excursion into the Bardo the night before courtesy of Crowley's Holy Guardian Angel ritual, John Lilly's Beliefs Unlimited and sex Magick.

In Cosmic Trigger RAW considers that the 23s might result from selective perception yet identifies this selective perception as the metaprogrammer, one of the higher neurological circuits. In other words, my words, the metaprogrammer selects perceptions to guide the mundane awareness to the expanded awareness of the post-terrestrial territory. Working with Aleister Crowley's terminology, as RAW did at the time, one could say the Holy Guardian Angel selects perceptions for the Initiate to enable its Knowledge and Conversation to function as a Guide. He writes that most of his communication from the HGA came from synchronicities.

Related to selective perception, RAW incorporates 23s into the Discordian Law of Fives "which holds that all incidents and events are directly connected to the number five, or to some multiple of five, or to some number related to five in one way or another, given enough ingenuity on the part of the interpreter" (CT I p. 57). His reasoning holds that 23 can break down as 2 + 3 = 5 so whenever you see a 5 or a multiple of 5 you're also implicitly getting a 23. Of course, by the same logic, 5s and their multiples also implicitly contain the numbers 14, 32, and 41. Ingenuity seems the key word for interpreting the Law of Fives. It means "the ability to solve difficult problems in original, clever and inventive ways." It also seems related to "genius" and, for me, connects with a work by Plutarch, De genio Socratis. It refers to the daimon of Socrates, which, according to Plutarch, means that Socrates has a guardian spirit who leads him in the best way. This also perfectly describes the Guide aspect of the Holy Guardian Angel. Paradoxically, the Law of Fives can come across as a rationalization for making shit up to see whatever it is you want to see, or conversely, intuitively connect with the HGA to receive guidance. Crowley connects 5 with The Hierophant from the Tarot, the one who communicates the secrets of the temple. Incidentally, RAW writes that he put all the research and data he found concerning 23s in Illuminatus!

As I see it, strange sightings of 23s can serve as a reminder of being in the Bardo, the space of in betweenness, in between waking sleep and enlightened awareness. Coincidences can serve as a reminder to make the attempt to wake up. Waking up can seem as simple as being fully present in the moment, disengaged from daydreams and mental chatter. According to the Sufis, we naturally wake up several times a day. These instances are called "moments of freedom", but we usually don't recognize them due to the momentum of the sleeping state carrying over through them. They involuntarily slip by. It's not always necessary to take a psychedelic, perform prolonged rituals or meditations, fast, do yoga or otherwise engage in esoteric practices to enter the Bardo, though these don't hurt and can help if done with discipline. You don't have to physically or mentally contort yourself, find a guru or join a cult to construct a path toward higher consciousness.

Traveling through the Bardo, attempting to metaprogram new realities, expanded perceptions, new ways of thinking and doing is not a picnic or a walk in the park despite Illuminatus! literally starting with a walk in New York's Central Park. The Bardo can be terrifying with shocking ambushes, intense radiations, piercing sounds among other gnarly sensations. Chapel Perilous, the Dark Night of the Soul, the ordeal of Crossing the Abyss all occur in this territory. Hence the usefulness of a guide whether it be one's daimon, Holy Guardian Angel or a Book of the Dead of one kind or another – the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams appears one fun and light-hearted example.

Nowadays, we have Films of the Dead. Three of those that immediately come to mind include The Seventh Seal by Ingmar Bergman, Beeteljuice by Tim Burton, and All That Jazz by Bob Fosse. Note that Beeteljuice borrows part of the classic "It's showtime, folks" line from All That Jazz. This three minute and thirty-three second clip gives a taste of the Bardo . . . where all your dreams and nightmares can come true.

The 23 Enigma offers more than a symbol as a bardo indicator. Not every coincidence appears meaningful. 23 can serve as an identifier in a code. Toward the end of chapter 23 in Thomas Pynchon's last novel, Bleeding Edge, there appears what I suspect is an allusion to Robert Anton Wilson's inveterate agnosticism and principle of Maybe Logic interspersed with a few 93s (Thelema adds to 93 making it aka the 93 Current). The CS glyph that I've mentioned once or twice ("slowly cooking", "soon compelling", "cozy schmozy", etc.) runs throughout chapter 23. Pynchon is an acknowledged and brilliant Qabalist. More on the Qabalah in Bleeding Edge here.

Another instance of 23 as a code identifier appears in Neuromancer by William Gibson. Chapter 23 in that iconic novel opens with: "Molly fished the key out on its loop of nylon." Recall that RAW considered 23 a key number; "out" recalls the "get out" formula from The Book of Lies chapter 23; "fish" indicates the Hebrew letter Nun which corresponds with the Tarot trump Death. Thus, 23 (the Bardo) = a key for Death; "nylon" adds to 210 an important Qabalistic number RAW explicates somewhere in the Historical Illuminatus trilogy, if memory serves: two becomes unified as one then becomes none – a progression that appears a form of death and rebirth. A loop in music describes a passage, usually a drum or percussion phrase, that repeats over and over until stopped. A "loop of nylon" thus symbolizes the repetitive, mystical practice of 210. Entrance into a Bardo space appears obvious in that chapter to those who recognize it. It concludes with a death and rebirth. I wrote more on the 23 Enigma and death in Neuromancer, parallels with Leary's S.M.I.²L.E. formula, and its influence on Pynchon's Bleeding Edge in a post here.

* * * * * *

"ANCIENT EGYPTIAN PAPYRUS DEMONSTRATES

THAT LIFE AFTER DEATH IS WITHIN THE REACH OF EVERYMAN . . .

However, soon the Papyrus starts unrolling very precise instructions

for reaching the Land of the Dead. . .

Just as the Old World mariners suddenly glimpsed a round Earth to be circumnavigated and mapped, so awakened pilgrims catch hungry flashes of vast areas beyond Death to be created and discovered and charted, open to anybody ready to take a step into the unknown, a step as drastic and irretrievable as the transition from water to land. That step is from word into silence. From Time into Space.

The Pilgrimage to the Western Lands has started, the voyage through the Land of the Dead. Waves of exhilaration sweep the planet. There is hope and purpose in these faces, and total alertness, for this is the most dangerous of all roads, for every pilgrim must meet and overcome his own death."

– William S. Burroughs, The Western Lands, p. 115

"The Magical Universe, MU, is a universe of many gods, often in conflict. So the paradox of an all-powerful, all-knowing God who permits suffering, evil, and death, does not arise.

"What happened, Osiris? We got a famine here."

"Well, you can't win 'em all. Hustling myself."

"Can't you give us immortality?"

"I can get you an extension, maybe. Take you as far as the Duad. You'll have to make it from there on your own. Most of them don't. Figure about one in a million. And, biologically speaking, that's very good odds." – ibid., 113

Bill Laswell and I both agree that The Western Lands is one of William Burroughs' best works. On one level it's a brilliant, direct and highly informative Book of the Dead. My first encounter came from helping record Burroughs reading from it for the Material album Seven Souls. (constructed and produced by Laswell). Apart from Burroughs and Laswell, this manifestation of Material also includes Rammellzee, Foday Musa Suso, Faheim Dandan, Nicky Skopelitis, Simon Shaheen, L. Shankar, Jeff Bova, Sly Dunbar and Aiyb Dieng. In the title track, Burroughs outlines the fate of the different souls in the afterlife, according to Egyptian mythology.

Material Seven Souls

The Western Lands is a collage-like collection of episodes ranging from fictional and science fictional vignettes to auto-biographical moments, dream fragments, old-cut-up experiments, references to his friends, other books and writers, occult experiments, black magic and more. It includes some of his favorite subjects like giant, killer centipedes taking over remote outposts of civilization and the adventures and modus operandi of the Persian mystic leader Hassan i Sabbah; the latter being another Burroughs influence on Robert Anton Wilson who put Sabbah in Illuminatus!.

The connecting theme running throughout is confronting and conquering death. Unlike Bob Wilson, Burroughs doesn't place any stock in prolonging the life expectancy of the physical body ("it's full of holes, it's full of holes"). Rather, he seems to take the approach of training ourselves to become familiar with the Bardo and the ordeals found there; learning how to tolerate and deal with that territory through gradual exposure. The afterlife technology he presents, though largely Egyptian, can come from anywhere.

"The Hindus teach that the Heaven World is more dangerous for the soul than the Hell World, since it is more deceptive and conduces to the fatal error of overconfidence and assumption of immunity. Like a fighter the soul must be constantly in training lest it grow soft on an ephemeral throne." ibid, p. 137

Much of the bardo training value in The Western Lands doesn't come from any advice or data presented. It comes from the bardo scenes, the moods and feelings of that space evoked by Burroughs' visceral descriptions. He frequently gives a taste of this territory gently letting the reader metaphorically dip their toes into the strange, disorientating, sometimes terrifying Land of the Dead. A couple of brief examples:

"The cave system penetrates the mainland for miles. No one knows how far back the tunnels go. Some narrow into dead ends, others open into huge caverns with underground rivers and lakes. There is a deadly stasis of impregnable grandeur, forming a dense medium, difficult to breathe. One suffocates in fairy lands forlorn, magic casements, ruined palaces." ibid, p. 189

"He sees canals and paths and bridges, a network to the sky with an intricate series of locks and sluices, gardens and houseboats pulled by large turtles with eyes for ropes in their shells. The turtles have webbed feet and move with surprising speed and power, pulling barges of produce and passengers.

In the distance he can see a vast lake in milky light. There is no sun or satellite visible. It must be reflected light that gives such a soft, even distribution. Occasionally he meets people on the path. He can feel their bodies as a precise displacement." ibid. p. 244

The poignancy, profundity, and genuinely masterful quality of the writing comes from Burroughs directly confronting his own death in these pages. The Western Lands begins and ends with a semi-autobiographical character, "the old writer." This character had published a novel once that made quite a stir but was never able to finish another one. Now he was humming the refrain to "Dead Man Blues" by Jelly Roll Morton. On page 3 he gives the writer a name: "So William Seward Hall sets out to write his way out of death."

Not only his own death. His dear friend and closest collaborator, the painter Brion Gysin, died the year before this was published. Gysin, the formulator of a consciousness altering device and doorway into the Bardo called the Dreammachine, was the one who introduced him to the cut-up technique. Gysin does get mentioned by name a few times. As does another friend/collaborator and ex-lover, Ian Sommerville who had an untimely death at the age of 36 in a car accident on Burroughs' birthday in 1976. Sommerville was an electronics technician who also collaborated with Gysin to create the Dreammachine in 1961. The year before, Sommerville found a way to program a random sequence generator that Gysin applied to his cut-up technique. Years later, Robert Anton Wilson tried similar experiments with computer software programmed to create random cut-ups that found their way into his book on synchronicity, Coincidance.

On p. 236 WSB writes a Bardo hotel episode: Le Grand Hôtel des Morts where he glimpses Sommerville several times on an escalator or in the corridors or waiting rooms and references his fatal car accident. He asks the front desk girl if Ian Somerville is there. He is and comes out. They "exchange a few dead sentences. It doesn't matter who says what." He then asks if Brion is there, but he isn't.

The strongest reference to Gysin's death occurs in the last episode in the book where the "old writer . . . had reached the end of words, the end of what could be done with words. And then . . ." A distant memory of the British in Gibraltar evokes a bardo scene that ends with a metaphor for clinging to a dying life. The book ends with:

"In Tangier the Parade Bar is closed. Shadows are falling upon the Mountain.

'Hurry up, please. It's time.'"

The Parade Bar was a restaurant in Tangier that Brion Gysin bought, set -up and operated primarily for the purpose of having a regular venue where the Moroccan music he loved could be performed live. These were the Master Musicians of Jajouka from a small village a couple of hours away. The "Mountain" seems a reference to Hassan i Sabbah aka, the Old Man of the Mountain. Burroughs mythologizes Sabbah as the one who breaks the monopoly energy vampires have on the gates to Immortality. The last line is what you hear in British pubs announcing the last call for alcohol before closing for the night. T.S. Eliot used the same line in The Wasteland. It's not clear to me if Burroughs intended to reference The Wasteland, but it would be appropriate if so as that poem appears another excursion into the Bardo. A recurring theme in both this book and Burroughs' philosophy is the breaking out of TIME and expanding into SPACE. I don't know if these were officially his last words: when he had his fatal heart attack and was being taken out of his house on a stretcher he said to his companion, "back in no time."

The Western Lands portrays the Bardo of William S. Burroughs, the documentation of the unraveling of his subconscious mind and making it conscious. The deaths of both his parents turns up in an episode on p. 42. The presence of his son, Bill Burroughs Jr. who tragically died young after a difficult life is there too.

* * * * * *

In chapter 4, Kim Carsons, a Western (as in the old west in the U.S. circa late 19th Century/ early 20th Century) character from WSB's previous novel, The Place of Dead Roads – the second novel in a trilogy that concludes with this novel – is given the assignment to find the Western Lands and find out how the Western Lands are created; he wants to find their blueprints. The Western Lands is what the ancient Egyptians equated with Immortality. Burroughs wants to know why the Egyptians needed to preserve the physical body after death with mummification. He considers it a mistake. Carsons is based on the English writer Denton Welch, but also stands in as another alter ego for WSB. The author frequently breaks the so-called fourth wall with direct references to his writing process. In this case, Kim receives a summons from the District Supervisor to get his assignment, but he wants to know why he isn't the District Supervisor since he wrote him. A snippet of the writer's philosophy on writing follows.

Via a fragment of an ancient Mayan codex, Kim's assignment surrealistically morphs into a search for monster centipedes and the Centipede God. The chapter mixes genuine research and data on centipedes embellished greatly by the author's vivid imagination (we hope it's an embellishment!). Carson journeys into the wilds of the South American island of Esmeraldas in search of the centipede cult. The Guide gets introduced as the one taking the expedition down a river into the jungle though Kim has left the narrative and it's now Neferti leading the voyage.

"The Guide consults his map, which opens like an accordian. The map is brightly colored, depicting unusual beings. Some of them are growing upside down into the ground, shoots sprouting from their legs."

At first only referring to him as The Guide, we soon find out the guide's name is Wilson. This could allude to either Robert Anton and/or Peter Lamborn Wilson. I suspect both – they're both quite obviously very experienced Bardo Guides. The latter gets thanked in the acknowledgements section at the beginning for providing research on Hassan i Sabbah.

* * * * * *

Burroughs affirms synchronicity pretty early on (p. 30) calling it a pregnant concept that replaces the "monumental fraud of cause and effect."

Proof of Concept (maybe)

When Burroughs came to Platinum Island to record excerpts from The Western Lands, I knew very little about him and didn't know what to expect. I bought several of his books beforehand to read up on him, but thanks to a busy studio schedule only had time to read one of them, Junky. It was the first book he wrote and doesn't represent his genius.. I did know of his pioneering literary cut-up techniques and had recently read Robert Anton Wilson's new book, Coincidance, which also contained cut-up experiments generated from computer software. I brought my copy in to show Burroughs after we finished recording. He seemed very interested when leafing through the book so I told him he could keep it. This delighted him immensely. After he and his editor James Grauerholz left the studio they went upstairs to visit his friend the famous grafitti artist Keith Haring whose painting studio was a couple of floors above our recording studio. About 6 or so months later a new Burroughs release called Interzone, comprising Naked Lunch outtakes was accidentally delivered to our studio. It was addressed to Haring. Unfortunately (or not, you never know), Keith had confronted and succumbed to his own death from AIDS in the intervening period. I was there when our studio manager received the mail. "You're into Burroughs, aren't you?" He said to me, "here you have this book, Keith Haring won't be needing it." I'd given a book by Robert Anton Wilson to WSB and somehow, through fate, magic or random chance, a book from him was gifted to me.

That one day meeting and recording William Burroughs is one of the highlights of my career as a sound engineer and one of the highlights of my life. Before he arrived, I half expected a somewhat washed-up character from the 60's. When he left, I felt like I'd met one of the most wise individuals I would ever meet and still feel that's true to this day. I wrote up and posted the experience on this blog slightly more than 14 years ago. The follow-up post is here.

I'll leave you with more bardo words of advice from WSB and music from Bill Laswell's Material. This one comes from the album Hallucination Engine.

Words of Advice for Young People – Material featuring William Burroughs.

Joyce, RAW, Crowley and the Book of the Dead

2024-05-27T13:40:00.000-07:00

"Finnegans Wake is similar in structure to the song "Finnegans Wake" and to the four Gospels and to the Egyptian myth of Osiris and to the Book of the Dead and the Tibetan Book of the Dead and 1700 other things at least." – Robert Anton Wilson, Interview on Finnegans Wake and Joseph Campbell, 1988.

Joyce also regarded himself as an alchemist taking all the gross matter of the world and turning it into sublime eternal art. He also compares his work to what the priest does in the Mass only Joyce felt that he was doing it for real and the priests were faking it which is to turn the mortal into the immortal.

– Robert Anton Wilson, ibid.

My style is heavily influenced by Joyce. Everything I do has a Joycean element in it.

– RAW, ibid.

Reality Is What You Can Get Away With (RIWYCGAW), a film treatment by Robert Anton Wilson, begins with the death of all life on earth via a seemingly relentless montage of atomic explosions – you are dead along with everything else.

The reader-viewer gets thrown immediately into the Bardo. The story begins in the Land of the Dead which turns out to be a dream (or is it?) and recurs until Ignatz (our protagonist witnessing all this) can't tell if it's real or a dream. A TV turns itself on (a definite bardo indicator) with more atomic blasts then the title "Death of Earth." This soon morphs into "Death Of Ego."

Right off the bat this gives us the two primary reasons to learn about the Bardo: 1. Real, physical death and 2. Psychological death when your entire primate identity: ego, personality, intellect, gets blown to smithereens one way or another, and there you are, once again for the first time ever, in the bardo.

Back in the film treatment, the "Announcer" who hipped us to "Death Of Ego" has a photo of a Playboy Bunny behind him. The next time we see him or her, a page later in the book, the photo has changed to the iconic one from 1968 showing the imminent execution of a Vietnamese prisoner on the streets of Saigon. Suddenly, death has gone from the death of all humanity to the death of an individual; from the impersonal to the personal or from the macro to the micro.

The Announcer proceeds to deliver the first direct bardo instruction:

"The process of rebirth can be painful and confusing. Many of the dead do not know they are dead. They think they are just wandering from room to room looking for their car keys – or watching a Cisco Kid movie about urine smugglers. Some even think they are watching educational TV." The opposite page shows Ignatz and his wife Betty Boop watching TV in a scene that appears to be from the 1950s or early '60s. They seem completely oblivious to the dead guy (Frankenstein's Monster) sitting beside them.

Being dead and not knowing your dead seems equivalent to being in the bardo and not knowing you're in the bardo, an obvious interpretation of the photo with Igntaz, Betty and the Monster (a dead guy brought back to life) (RIWYCGAW, p. 21). The last sentence in the quote: "Some even think they are watching educational TV, seems like it could directly hit home with a viewer watching this in a film – "are they talking about me, at this moment?" Might I be in the bardo and not know it? Wilson brilliantly provokes the reader-viewer to such a consideration.

Since we heard it straight from the horse's mouth that everything RAW does has a Joycean element, I'll offer the following connection. The heroic Cisco Kid character originally derives from an O. Henry story, "The Caballero's Way", published in a collection called The Heart of the West (1907). Wilson was certainly well read enough that this reference could be intentional. The weighing of the heart is one of the most well known scenes from the Egyptian Book of the Dead. The candidate's heart was placed on the scale to be weighed against the feather of truth placed on the other side of the scale. If the heart proved lighter than the feather then the candidate was allowed to continue on their journey to the land of immortality, known in some instances, as the Western Lands.

Smuggling urine forecasts a joke Wilson introduces later, but looking at a possible Joyce influence here: urine = you're in = you're in the bardo now. The Cisco Kid, via RAW's imaginative movie for dead people, smuggles in (gets it past the conscious censors) the notion that you're in the bardo now.

Incredulity trigger warning for the forthcoming anecdote that relates to the experience of being dead and not knowing it. A shaman I once worked with whom I found credible, told me that after the collapse of the World Trade Center towers on 9/11/2001, he felt a calling to travel there in his body of light to tell the the spirits of the recently deceased what had happened. He claimed that they didn't know they were dead. They had no idea of what happened. He was providing a public service by telling them.

An obvious Joycean-style connection at the beginning of RIWYCGAW occurs with the riffing on "Death Of Ego . . . Death Of Earth", which to an experienced Joycean detective and a Cabalist gives the initials DOE. Wilson cuts to an animation of a small deer dancing then has Ignatz say "A female deer . . . a doe . . ." (the two ellipsis – the three dots – are in the original). If we pursue this pun for further connections, like we might for something in Finnegans Wake, we find an allusion to the common mnemonic for remembering the notes of a diatonic musical scale: do, re, mi, fa so, la, ti, do. It became well known in the musical, The Sound of Music with a song that begins:

"do a deer, a female deer,

re a drop of golden sun . . ."

G. I. Gurdjieff, another Wilson influence, has his Law of Octaves which represents each step in any process with the notes of the diatonic scale. To sound a do (long "o"), in his lingo, means to begin something or to begin a process. RAW sounds a doe with Death of Earth . . . Death Of Ego at the start of RIWYCGAW. Re, a drop of golden sun connects with the Egyptian influence. Re is a common alternate spelling for Ra the sun god. The first step or instruction indicated in many of the spells from the Book of the Dead calls for the soul of the deceased to unite themself with Osiris. Osiris abides in the cabalistic sphere of Tiphareth, the solar territory on the Tree of Life.

Reminders that Reality Is What You Can Get Away With portrays a Bardo trip occur throughout the film treatment. Another one occurs on p. 48 - 50 with the Schrödinger's Cat paradox from quantum physics that concludes with the cat being both dead and alive until someone opens the box to take a measurement. Lest we dismiss this as simply a theoretical exercise from physics, we hear Orson Welles addressing Edward G. Robinson's objection that it's impossible for a cat to be both alive and dead at the same time. "Welles (witty twinkle) Erwin Schrödinger proved it. He's got a Nobel prize in physics. He also proves you're dead and alive at the same time." The Schrodinger's Cat paradox recurs throughout the film.

The concept of a favorable rebirth plays out on p. 28 - 29 starting with a study showing the benefit of an enriched environment upon the cognitive skills of rats. Our beloved Announcer returns on the following page with a death/rebirth procedure that could be likened to the methods of Zen koans or Finnegans Wake to name two.

"Announcer: If enough Alien Signals are thrown into the brain – enough Chaos and Confusion – the third neurological bardo prepares for rebirth on a higher level of networking. A new ego you might say."

The paradoxical bardo cat comes back on p. 158 in the context of a different Orson Welles film leading to a riff on reimprinting (rebirth) against a soundtrack of Beethoven's "Ode to Joy." "If you want to change all your imprints at once, sign up now to join the first Space Colony and enter a totally new reality-tunnel." As Beethoven's Ninth Symphony begins rising to its peak, the following visual in the film suggests a glorious rebirth in higher dimensions.

On p. 160 Betty Boop begins discussing the symbolism behind the Sacred Chao. She addresses the reader-viewer a couple of times as; "O nobly born," the same terminology used to address the Voyager who has left their body in the Tibetan Book of the Dead.

Weirdly enough, a few days ago, I received an invitation to join a Betty Boop Facebook group from a complete stranger. The extent of my exposure to the wiles of Ms Boop prior to reading RIWYCGAW comes from multiple viewings of the highly recommended bardoesque film, Who Framed Roger Rabbit.

For me, just the title Reality Is What You Can Get Away With suggests the bardo. How long can you hang out in the bardo? How much presence can you bring there? How well are you able to use your attention to choose a favorable rebirth? What can you get away with in the Bardo?

* * * * * *

Contemporary so-called Books of the Dead differ from their traditional counterparts with a less direct, more allegorical or metaphorical presentation. For instance, they don't have "Book of the Dead" in their title. No one might know that James Joyce intended Finnegans Wake as a Book of the Dead (on one level) but for the fact that he requested his friend, Frank Budgen, write an article explicitly saying so. Sometimes an afterlife adventure can be deduced from the title – a wake indicates a reception, often a party of sorts following a funeral. Wilson's play, Wilhelm Reich in Hell seems obvious from the title. Another contemporary Book of the Dead, The Western Lands by William S. Burroughs makes it clear with its dust jacket of stylized ancient Egyptian illustrations and hieroglyphics that he intends to signify the Western Lands of Egyptian mythology.

Traditional Books of the Dead seem meant to provide direct assistance to the voyager after biological death, but also appear quite effective for aiding someone going through the death of ego for one reason or another. Many untrained voyagers in the mid 1960s to mid 70s found themselves flung willy nilly into scary bardo spaces after taking a strong psychedelic dosage. John Lilly asked his friend E.J. Gold to make a modern translation of the Tibetan Book of the Dead specifically to help people having difficulties with an overwhelming psychotropic drug experience. This resulted in the American Book of the Dead, an instruction manual equally effective for both ego and physical death. Early in his consciousness-altering research Timothy Leary recognized the value of the Tibetan Book of the Dead for mapping out psychedelic spaces as made evident in the book he wrote with Richard Alpert and Ralph Metzner, The Psychedelic Experience – A Manual Based on the Tibetan Book of the Dead (1964). John Lennon quotes directly from this book in his song Tomorrow Never Knows: "Turn off your mind, relax and float downstream, it is not dying, it is not dying . . ."

Modern literary Books of the Dead like Finnegans Wake and RIWYCGAW seem geared to ego death, aka raising consciousness. This means they are relevant to us right where we sit now in our current life even if we don't expect to die for years, decades, or millenia (if they figure out how to extend biological life). They provide bardo training both directly and indirectly. The latter through creating the feel or mood of the apres-vie by simulating bardo spaces through dream sequences (Finnegans Wake has its own dream language), surrealistic effects like suddenly shifting environments (sudden transitions), non-sequitur events, drug episodes, etc.; anything that disorients the habitual perception of how we make sense of reality. RAW, at times, employed the cut-up technique popularized by William Burroughs to come up with bardo sequences.

Publicly, RAW appeared more interested in what occurs after the death of the ego than in surviving the demise of his biological form. He seemed more invested in scientific advances to provide biological life extension than what might happen in the afterlife sans corps. His focus writing about bardo exploration concerned itself with mapping out and establishing a domain in territories of higher consciousness while learning how to function and even work there. In other words, bardo awareness and personal functionality after ego death rather than the individual's journey after physical death. Of course, the former also prepares you for the latter.

* * * * * *

Always assume you're in the bardo whether it seems like it or not. This axiom seems akin to advice from the Gurdjieff and Castenada schools to maintain the awareness that one could die at any moment. Castenada's Don Juan said that death is always behind you just over your left shoulder. If you turn around fast enough, you can see it.

All this talk of staying aware of death can sound morbid until you realize that it's really about waking up to life. Anyone who has had a near death experience or even an encounter where the real possibility of imminent death stared you in the face can testify that you become incredibly alive and fully present when you think you're about to die. Bardo training is as much about life, maybe moreso that it is about death. Life outside the well worn grooves of a mechanical existence programmed by primate social and cultural imperatives. Navigating through life in the extraterrestrial brain circuits also seems like running through a maze or labyrinth.

E.J. Gold is an acknowledged researcher and expert in Bardo training. He's the author of multiple books, videos, plays and computer video games on the subject. His most straightforward book on the Unknown realms shamans and other intrepid adventurers explore is Life in the Labyrinth, not death in the labyrinth. With enough experience, one come to the realization that death as an absolute finality does not exist; death becomes an indicator of profound change that always brings about a rebirth or resurrection of some kind, a becoming. RAW writes about the realization of his own immortality in Cosmic Trigger I.

Always assume you're in the bardo. Why? Most of the time it feels like I'm going about my business doing the things of ordinary life. Most of the time I feel identified with my ego. There seem to be gradations of ego death. You can temporarily blow out your self identity for several hours with a psychedelic. If strong enough, you no longer assume you're in the bardo, you have the undeniable perception of being there. More gentle ego deaths result from any kind of meditation or magick ritual. It can happen when listening closely to or when playing music. We find even subtler deaths than those.

Always assume you're in the bardo seems the opposite of what we normally assume, that we are this static, unified persona that has predictable reactions to any given situation. A little self observation reveals the static ego to be a fiction, a construct in our mind that's constantly reinforced by others who have the same assumption. If we pay attention to our inner states and outer behavior it will become noticed that we subtly change identities and manifest ourselves differently as the environment changes. We're different with our parents than when hanging out with our buddies; different when in a church or temple (even if we're not religious) than in a bar or nightclub, etc.

* * * * * *

The bardo is the territory where magick takes place. It's the space where reprogramming or metaprogramming can occur; also known as the choice-point space. Die to our old self, choose a preferred rebirth. For example, suppose I want to eat healthier food. Formulate a ritual where the "self" that loves junk food undergoes a metaphorical death. Introduce a set of instructions encouraging the bardo voyager to take rebirth as a "self" that eats healthier. Repeat as necessary – a complete transformation of one's eating habits seems highly unlikely after one experiment, yet there will usually be incremental progress . . . and the progress accrues. I estimate that it took a good ten years, maybe more, to morph from someone who ate mostly fast food to someone who rarely eats junk food. One of the keys to reprogramming involves forsaking moral self-judgement. I'm not a "better" person because I no longer consume Big Macs, I just feel better. Conversely, I'm not prone to emotionally beating myself up for ingesting empty calories. I enjoy it at the time.

Wilson devised a reprogramming formula; it's found in Cosmic Trigger I (p. 120 Hilaritas edition):

"B_n = B_o + P_n + MS

where B_n is new behavior, B_o is old behavior, P_n is a deliberate new program for self-change and MS is a metaprogramming substance such as LSD." He showed his formula to the good Dr. Leary who commented that B could be switched out for C (Consciousness) or I (Intelligence).

The "new program" and "metaprogramming substance" parts of the formula takes place in the Bardo, in the transition between the old and new behavior. Of course, psychedelic substances are not absolutely required. Crowley gives a drug free death/rebirth exercise in section "AAA" of "Liber HHH" found in Appendix VII of Magick Book 4 Liber ABA (p. 589 1st Edition).

Cosmic Trigger I returns to the "pattern of death-rebirth" saying that it still appears symbolically in the Roman Catholic Mass and in the Masonic "raising" ceremony. He continues: "the candidate is often brought to a state of terror similar to the emergency condition of the nervous system in near-death crises. What occurs then, and is experienced as rebirth, is a quantum jump in neurological awareness. In Leary's terminology, new circuits are formed and imprinted."

Everything seems connected in the bardo. John Lennon expressed it perfectly in I Am The Walrus: "I am he as you are he as you are me and we are all together." RAW identifies it as the non-local circuit in Finnegans Wake.

* * * * * *

The great advantage of encountering the Bardo gently through literature, film, music, theater, or any artistic medium is that you can take it at your own pace or choose to not take it at all. Timothy Leary famously said that reading Ulysses and Finnegans Wake served as preparation for psychedelic spaces. Bardo preparation or training for fully entering it later.

An allusion to both rebirth and to death appears on the first page of Finnegans Wake. The reference of the rainbow ("regginbrow") can be interpreted as God's covenant for Life, as a promise of rebirth on a macrocosmic scale following the death of all animals outside of Noah's Ark after the Great Flood (except for ducks and fish, according to Eddie Izzard).

Eddie Izzard – Ducks & the Flood

Immediately after this sign of hope and rebirth, this covenant for Life, is when we plunge into the Bardo with: "The fall", followed by the hundred letter thunder word. The sound of thunder signals the entrance to the underworld. Thunder is a not uncommon sound in the bardo. When you hear thunder, especially if close by, it can key in a bardo space which means it can wake you up a little. I was once doing sound design, adding sound effects behind spoken word readings from the American Book of the Dead. I was laying in the sound of thunder. E.J. Gold heard what I was doing, came into the studio and said there's lots of thunder in the Bardo.

The next sentence following the thunder word describes the death of Tim Finnegan whose wake gives the book its title.

"The great fall of the offwall entailed at such short notice the pftjschute of Finnegan, erse solid man, that the humptyhillhead of humself prumptly sends an unquiring one well to the west in quest of his tumptytumtoes: . . ."

In a 19th Century Irish-American ballad, also called Finnegans Wake, Tim Finnegan, all liquored up, falls off a a ladder and apparently dies. At his wake, the corpse get splashed with whiskey which revives him – an early allusion to the death and resurrection theme that runs throughout the book. It also refers to Finn McCool, the legendary Irish giant said to lie in trance beneath the Dublin landscape. McCool was beheaded in one version of the legend. Perhaps this helps explain why his head sends someone to the west looking for his toes.

I've not seen an adequate explanation of "pftjschute." It reminds me of a sound a cartoon character might make upon suddenly disappearing and thus appears an appropriate sound for death. Dissecting this word, we see that "chute" in its standard definition of "a sloping channel or slide for conveying something to a lower level" sounds like going into the Bardo or the Land of the Dead. Chute is also the French word for fall; "pftjs" adds to 165. In Sepher Sephiroth, the dictionary of Gematria originally published in 1912 by Aleister Crowley with contributions from Allan Bennett and MacGregor Mathers, 165 = "To make them know;" also "NEMO." Nemo represents a high grade in the Thelemic hierarchy, the Master of the Temple. It means "no man" and connects with death.

It's explained in the "Cry of the "13th Aethyr" from The Vision and the Voice by Crowley, Victor Neuburg, and Mary Desti: "And he saith: No man beheld the face of my Father. Therefore he that hath beheld it is called NEMO. And know thou that every man that is called NEMO hath a garden that he tendeth. And every garden that is and flourisheth hath been prepared from the desert by NEMO, watered from the waters that were called death. We have an allusion to a garden with Eve and Adam in the first sentence of the Wake.

In the commentary to Chapter 65 "Sic Transeat —" from Crowley's The Book of Lies, :

"The chapter title means, 'So may he pass away', the blank obviously referring to NEMO.

I have no idea if Joyce knew the gematria meaning of 165 and intentionally placed it with the otherwise incomprehensible "pftjs ..." or if it's just one of those synchronicities that he loved. It certainly fits.

"Erse", the name of a language, is a synonym for Gaelic. It may also pun with "else;" as in "the pftjschute (no man) of Finnegan – else (otherwise a) solid man. Finnegan then gets conflated with Humpty Dumpty, the living giant egg and master of language in Lewis Carroll's Wonderland tales who had a great fall "offwall". Humpty suggests the alchemical egg where transmutation occurs (see Paracelsus or Carl Jung).

Then we get to the (possibly) Egyptian part: "sends an unquiring one well to the west in quest of his tumptytumtoes: . . ."; "unquiring" breaks down as the prefix "un" = not and "quiring": a quire is the area in a church or cathedral set aside for the clergy and choir; this suggests a "not Christian" one; "well to the west" recalls the Western Lands, the land of immortality. The journey through the bardo to immortality; "tumptytumtoes" has the Egyptian god of the setting sun, Tum, in the middle of it. The adoration of Tum occurs at dusk in the Thelemic "Liber Resh" ritual. Tum is a derivation of Atum. In very early Egyptian pre-history, Atum was the chief god, the primordial living being who created the cosmos as personified by other gods.

Tum as the sun god at dusk fits in well with a book beginning to dive into the night. Atum as a creator sun god whose toes are creations of a material world (Malkuth on the Tree of Life) also seems appropriate for the emerging "chaosmos" (chaos + cosmos) of Finnegans Wake.

* * * * * *

Bardo episodes appear in all of RAW's fiction in various forms: dreams, drug experiences, magick, meditation visions, etc. The very first sentence of The Historical Illuminatus Chronicles Volume I says it all: Sigismundo Celine was lost in a dark forest with a Red Indian, seeking the supreme wakan. (The Earth Will Shake p. 3 Hilaritas edition). Sigismundo is having a dream or reverie in church on Easter Sunday.

Right off the top, we find parallels with Dante's The Divine Comedy which begins on Good Friday with Dante lost in a dark forest. I have written extensively on the S + C letter semiotic (Sigismundo Celine), most recently toward the end in the first post of this series, Folds and Overlaps Between Aleister Crowley and Finnegans Wake. Before that, in my post on Rabelais. "Red Indian" also appears a deliberate use of initials with R + I = 210, a significant qabalistic calculation for multiple reasons.

Wakan is a Native American term that translates roughly as Great Spirit or life force. Considering a Joycean influence, wakan sounds similar to waking. "Waking up" is a Sufi expression of enlightenment borrowed and used extensively in Gurdjieff's 4th Way movement and other contemporary spiritual guides. In the 4th stanza of The Divine Comedy, Dante describes himself as "so full of sleep just at that point where I abandoned the true path." (Knopf, 1995 translated by Allen Mandelbaum). Death soon becomes direct and explicit in the story with Sigismundo witnessing the murder of his Uncle in the church by 4 assassins.

Illuminatus! (co-written with Robert Shea) also begins in the Bardo and quite clearly connects with the start of The Historical Illuminatus – "The earth quakes . . ." being the most obvious sign,

The Bardo, magickal, non-local circuit aspect of RAW's fiction comprises just one level or layer of complex, multi-leveled presentations. They're also simply great adventure and detective romances. His most direct and sustained journey through the Bardo occurs in his two film treatments, Reality Is What You Can Get Away With and The Walls Came Tumbling Down (the latter links to a post on its bardoesque aspects) and to his play Wilhelm Reich In Hell which will be discussed in the future.

Stay tuned for a discussion on the 23 enigma, the Bardo, and a Book of the Dead by William S. Burroughs.

Joyce, Crowley, and The Book of the Dead.

2024-05-13T13:45:00.000-07:00

"Of the sleep of Ulro! and of the passage through

Eternal Death! and of the awaking to Eternal Life

This theme calls me in sleep night after night & ev'ry morn

Awakes me at sun-rise, then I see the Saviour over me

Spreading his beams of love, & dictating the words of this mild song.

Awake! awake O sleeper of the land of shadows, wake! expand!

I am in you and you in me, mutual in love divine: . . ."

- Opening lines to Jerusalem by William Blake

"William Blake's Jerusalem should be added to the list of major sources for James Joyce's Finnegans Wake" – Karl Kiralis

In the previous episode, I postulated that Joyce used Finnegans Wake to show HOW to construct something. It began with the premise that Howth Castle and Environs (HCE) signified an alchemical pun. That something = the construction of stable and permanent structures of higher consciousness; higher bodies in a largely unknown new territory. Put another way: awakening and accessing, at will, higher brain circuits. Why would anyone even bother? Of what use is it to explore and map out unknown territory? Why would Joyce encode instructions for a metaphysical construction in his monumental undertaking to explore the Night?

In Plato's dialogue, Phaedo, an account occurring on Socrates' last day alive, Socrates says that "true philosophers ... are always occupied in the practice of dying." In The Consciousness of Joyce, Richard Ellman notes that Joyce possessed a copy of Phaedo. The practice of death concerns the separation and release of the soul from the body. According to Socrates, true philosophers are "ever seeking to release the soul," it is their "especial study." Therefore philosophers are "ever studying to live as nearly as they can in a state of death."

Let's update the terminology with Timothy Leary's 8 Circuit model of consciousness: the four lower "terrestrial" circuits represent the "body" and the four higher "extraterrestrial" circuits represent the "soul." The practice of dying, or as Sufis put it, dying before you die, consists of temporarily moving (separating) one's primary attention and awareness from the terrestrial circuits to the extraterrestrial circuits, from the body to the soul. We'll call the source of awareness and attention concerned with the physical body, emotions and intellect of the terrestrial circuits, the ego or personality. The terrestrial circuits and their operation are also known as the human biological machine since they function largely mechanically. The source of attention still remaining after the ego temporarily disappears, i.e. the "soul," we'll call the "voyager" as the environment (territory) it passes through constantly changes and shifts as if on a journey or voyage.

In this reading, Howth Castle = how to construct a stable structure; Environs designates the territory of the higher dimensions – the territory of death from the point of view of the ego; commodius vicus of recirculation might indicate the practice of philosophy as Socrates saw it, the constant practice of dying.

The construction of a stable, crystalized body of consciousness able to hang out in the higher dimensions not only serves to enable the practice of dying, (separating the soul from the body) it also desires to survive the death of the biological form, the physical body. The territory and environs of the higher brain circuits appears largely, if not completely, unknown to the ego and personality that directs the activities and functioning of the body. If one doesn't practice death before dying, by raising consciousness, this territory can come as an overwhelming, even terrifying shock to the voyager when the ego disappears at discorporation. It's my premise here that Joyce incorporates within the Wake various strategies for surviving Death.

Many Joycean scholars and enthusiasts see Finnegans Wake as a journey through the Night. This book speaks a specialized and very complex dream language causing some to interpret the whole thing as the dream of Humphrey Chimpden Earwicker, the central character. Mythologically, it can also represent the dream of Finn MacCool, the legendary Irish hero whose giant form rests across the landscape of Ireland lying in a perpetual trance (bardo) in lieu of death.

Finnegans Wake and the territory of Death share a labyrinthine quality in common; a maze-like complexity often baffling and disorientating. It's easy to get lost in either. Multiple cultures have devised various strategies, spells, disciplines, codes and instructions for navigating the Land of the Dead. The two most well known examples being the Bardo Thodol, more commonly known as the Tibetan Book of the Dead, and the collection of spells entombed with the deceased in ancient Egypt called the Papyrus of Ani, aka The Egyptian Book of the Dead. The latter appears explicitly multiple times in the Wake.

The journey the soul embarks upon following the dissolution of the physical body is said to be fraught with great peril and danger; with overwhelming lights, sounds, sensations and radiations. It could be compared with a robust psychedelic trip encountering intensely strange and disorientating territory following the temporary death of the ego. The instructions, spells and advice found in Books of the Dead intends to help guide the voyager through the daunting labyrinth between death and rebirth. In its role as a Book of the Dead, Finnegans Wake guides the reader through this unnerving landscape. One way it does this is by presenting a very difficult, but solvable maze to unravel. Learning to solve one maze – to become maze bright – strengthens skills for solving other mazes like that of the afterlife.

All the mythologies concerned with the technology of Death include rebirth or resurrection. The instructions found in such Books are also meant to help the voyager select a either a favorable rebirth or transcend to a level beyond the human cycle of death and rebirth. We don't have a word in the English language to signify the territory between death and rebirth so we'll appropriate the Tibetan word for it, the Bardo.

Every night when we go to sleep our waking consciousness experiences a little death then gets reborn in the morning to a new day. The world of dreams appears conterminous with the Bardo; the unraveling of the conscious mind is common to both situations. Joyce's Book of the Night therefore becomes a Book of the Dead. "James Joyce once suggested to his friend Frank Budgen that he should compose an article on Finnegans Wake and title it James Joyce's Book of the Dead." *

*quoted from Joseph Campbell, Mythic Worlds, Modern Words. His source is an article by Frank Budgen, "Joyce's Chapters of Going Forth by Day," in Horizon, 1941

On Wake pages 30 and 31 Joyce writes of the genesis of his protagonist's name, Humphrey Chimpden Earwicker. In Mythic Worlds, Modern Words, Campbell interprets this passage as deriving Earwicker from "earwig ("ear-beetle"). He continues: "This 'dangerous' insect is Joyce's Irish counterpart and parody of the scarabareus (the Mediterranean 'dung beetle') which in Egyptian iconography represents Kephra, the sun-god, and is a primary symbol of resurrection and immortality. . . . Earwicker ('Awaker'): he is the earwig in the sleeper's (i.e. reader's) ear. And Finnegans Wake itself is the accompanying papyrus, The Book of the Dead." (Mythic Worlds footnote p. 299).

Campbell made this point earlier in his book:

"Humphrey Chimpden Earwicker: An earwig is a bug that gets in your ear and keeps buzzing. This can be compared to the Egyptian scarab, which is put on the heart of a person being buried in a sarcophagus and represents the reawakened. 'Earwicker' can be read as the awaker and the word Buddah means 'the one who is awake.'" (p. 242)

Waking up in the Buddhist, Hindu, or Sufi sense - waking up from the world illusion or the life dream – seems exactly what happens to the voyager when the body dies. Learning how to "wake up" appears another practice of dying before you die.

In Joyce's Book of the Dark, John Bishop writes:

"There are several good reasons for approaching Finnegans Wake, and it's treatment of the wake, through a reading of the Book of the Dead. Joyce actively sought to have someone write an essay exploring the Wake's affinities with this text; as he explained in a letter to Harriet Shaw Weaver, one of the '4 long essays ' in his testamentary collection which he planned to have follow "Our Exagmination" was to examine specifically the Wake's reconstruction of the night in reference to the Book of the Dead."

Joseph Campbell sees Khephra as one identity of Humphrey Chimpden Earwicker (HCE). Khephra is a big deal in the Thelemic pantheon. He is the ancient Egyptian God associated with the scarab who represents the Sun at midnight. Kephera carries the Sun through night to its rebirth in the morning just as HCE carries the reader of Finnegans Wake through the Night to rebirth in a new day. Another name for the Egyptian Book of the Dead is the Book of Coming Forth by Day. The name Khephra means to "come into being" or "becoming."

In the Thelemic rituals of "The Mass of the Phoenix" (Chapter 44 in the Book of Lies) and "The Great Invocation" (Magick Book 4 p. 672 Weiser, 1994 first edition) Khephra is identified as an aspect of Horus, the crowned and conquering child who presides over the new Aeon; it's implied in the former and explicit in the latter. Both those rituals serve to invoke Horus, meaning that the practitioner completely identifies themself with the god for the duration of the ritual. For example we have from the latter:

Hail, O An-Kert (goddess of fertility), who hidest thy companion in the womb!

Hail, Khephra, self-created!

Grant that the dead man Ankh-f-n-khonsu may come forth with victory to behold the Disk, and that he may journey forth to see the Great and Inscrutable God, who dwelleth in the Infinite. . . .

Yet my form is the form of Khephra: my locks flow down as the locks of the earth before Tum, the locks of earth before Tum! (Magick, p. 674 - 675)

Tum represents the Sun at dusk making this Khephra entering into the Night.

Both Crowley and Joyce draw heavily and directly from the Egyptian Book of the Dead and both found at least some of this Egyptian inspiration from the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn. However, Finnegans Wake functions as a Book of the Dead far beyond its specific allusions to the Papyrus of Ani; in the Wake's dream language, the Papyrus of Anna – Anna Livia Plurabelle.

Scene of the weighing of the heart from the Egyptian Book of the Dead

* * * * * *

The touchstone tale for descent and journey through the Underworld is Dante's The Divine Comedy consisting of three books: Inferno, Purgatorio, and Paradiso. In Mythic Worlds, Modern Words Joseph Campbell presents the theory that Joyce modeled his oeuvre, beginning with The Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, after the literary works of Dante Alighieri. Portrait, he says, parallels Dante's first work, a collection of poems and commentary dedicated to his muse, Beatrice Portinari. Campbell explains that Ulysses corresponds with Inferno and Finnegans Wake with Purgatorio – Purgatory. Paradiso was to be Joyce's next book. He didn't have the opportunity to write it before exiting his mortal coil. Joe doesn't fully explain the Purgatorio – Wake correspondence, but we find evidence for it beginning with18 references in Finnegans Wake to a small cave called St. Patrick's Purgatory on an Irish island where legend has it that St. Patrick found the entrance to Purgatory. These begin on page 80: "her filthdump near Serpentine in Phoenix Park (at her time called Finewell's Keepsacre but later tautaubapptossed Pat's Purge)" . . .

The word Purgatory means "cleansing" – purging; "her filthdump." These references recur until nearly the end of the book: "Reparatrices for a good allround sympowdhericks purge, full view . . . " (p. 618).

Purgatory describes a Bardo space as it's in between Hell and Heaven just as the Bardo lies in between Death and Rebirth. One definition of the Bardo: any space that's in between or in transition. Campbell says that Joyce makes an analogy between purgatory and reincarnation. "What is being reincarnated is not only the individual, but also the universe." (MWMW p. 20).

Purgatory may have its genesis in Egyptian mythology. In The Gods of the Egyptians (Vol. I p. 171), E.A. Wallis Budge surmises that Purgatory has its roots in their notion of the Tuat, a valley which separated this world from heaven. Like the purgatory of Finnegans Wake, a river runs through the Tuat said to be a counterpart of the earthly and the celestial Nile. Cleansing appears a big part of what occurs in the Bardo with the voyager confronting all their subconscious "monsters and demons" (impurities and regrets) in order to recognize them as aspects of their own consciousness and let them go; purge them.

* * * * * *

Let's examine a paragraph from p. 593 that has multiple sources with Bardo imagery: an Egyptian Book of Coming Forth by Day influence, a Biblical reference, an alchemical allusion, and a cabalistic communication. It's the 4th paragraph in the fourth and final section. In this part of our beloved story, night has ended and a new day is dawning by calling Array! Surrection! – a ray of sunlight coming through and a resurrection. A half page later:

The eversower seeds of light to the cowld owld sowls that are in the domnatory of Defmut after the night of the carrying of the word of Nuahs and the night of making Mehs to cuddle up in a coddlepot, Pu Nuseht, lord of risings in the yonderworld of Ntamplin, toph triumphant, speakth.

Much to unravel here. Buckle up your seat belts, folks! Nuahs and Mehs are Shaun and Shem reversed, these are the names of the twin sons of HCE. Shaun is a postman, carrying the word – communicating. Shem is a penman, a writer who creates with words. Coddlepot suggests a cobblepot, a hastily assembled pot, container, or vessel. To "cuddle up in a cobblepot" could indicate embracing "up" (up = higher consciousness) through cobbling up a vessel – a higher body of consciousness.

Joyce reverses names to multiply linguistic sense. For instance, Nuahs appears a conflation of the Egyptian goddess Nu and Noah of Biblical fame. Carrying the word of Nuahs = the mission of Noah's Ark. The "cowld owld sowls" (cold old souls) represent the animals a cow, owl and sow. The "domnatory of Defmut" reminds me of purgatory if you take it as damnatory of silence; Defmut = deaf mute = silence. These souls/animals are in the domnatory, the ark, with the night symbolizing the Great Flood. The story of Noah's Ark is another tale of traveling through death (of all life on Earth except for those in the Ark) to the resurrection of a new beginning.

It's been established by multiple scholars that James Joyce was a master of Cabala. The aspect of Cabala called Notarikon considers the significance of the initials of words. The letter N, as in Nuahs, corresponds with the card of Death in the Tarot. Thus, "the night of the carrying of the word of Nuahs" cabalisticly gives us "carrying the word of Death," i.e. a Book of the Dead.

The M of Mehs corresponds with the Hanged Man card. Consulting the description of it in Crowley's The Book of Thoth shows its relevance to themes here. I advise reading the whole description but here are some relevant quotes: "This card, attributed to the letter Mem, represents the element of Water. It would perhaps be better to say that it represents the spiritual function of water in the economy of initiation; it is a baptism which is also a death." A serpent appears around the left foot of the Hanged Man. "In this inferior darkness of death, the serpent of new life begins to stir. " If we interpret "domnatory" as a portmanteau of dominant and territory then "domnatory of Defmut" becomes the dominant territory of silence. Returning to The Book of Thoth: "and the sound M (is) the return to Eternal Silence, as in the word AUM. . . . Through his Work a Child is begotten, ("cuddle up in a coddlepot" displays child-like language) as shown by the Serpent stirring in the Darkness of the Abyss below him. . . . Moreover, Water is peculiarly the Mother Letter . . . in Nature, Homo Sapiens is a marine mammal, and our intra-uterine existence is passed in the Amniotic Fluid. The legend of Noah, the Ark and the Flood, is no more than a hieratic presentation of the facts of life,"

The Wake quote from p. 593 certainly has an Egyptian Book of the Dead feel to it. Some say that Defmut alludes to the Egyptian goddess Tefnut which fits the Noah's Ark narrative as she is the goddess of rain. Defmut could also allude to Duatmutef, one of the sons of Horus who also corresponds to Mem (Water; Hanged Man) in a table found in Magick, p. 540.

"Pu Nuseht" though it sounds Egyptian, seems nothing more than "The sun up" reversed. However, the reversed "up,"a separate word here, could serve to qualify and link to the "up" of "cuddle up", i.e. cuddle up to the sun. I learned from Peter Quadrino's excellent blog, Finnegans, Wake! that "Ntamplin" is a quasi Greek way of spelling Dublin (he explicates the whole passage in greater detail here.) Since the Bardo, in one sense, seems an unraveling of the subconscious mind, Dublin undeniably factors into the Bardo ("the yonderworld" – underworld) of James Joyce; "toph (top) triumphant" connects with the direction of "up". Quadrino and others point out that "toph" gets close to an anagram for "photo " the Greek word for light, but it's also close to an anagram for Ptah, an older solar god from Memphis, Egypt who is considered the personification of the rising sun – fitting in with the new day theme here.

The "eversower seeds of light" (the Sun?) speaks. An excellent analysis of what it says is given in the Finnegans, Wake! blog here. For our purposes, I'll note the sentence: "Verb umprincipiant through the trancitive spaces." Transit is another term for being in the Bardo (transitioning); trancitive spaces suggests bardo spaces. Being in a trance describes another kind of bardo space. Principiant comes from the Latin principiare - to begin. The "Um" is a mostly obsolete prefix for "about" therefore umprincipiant could mean "about to begin. "Verb" = voyager cf. Buckminster Fuller's famous quote, "I seem to be a verb" which he also used as a title for a book. We end up with the Voyager going through bardo spaces awaiting rebirth or resurrection – about to begin.

Before we move on, it should be noted that the Noah's Ark reference appears more than simply another resurrection story. The notion of an Ark, a fortified vessel carrying pressure cargo through the "dark and stormy night" or whatever metaphor you choose for difficult times, appears an important, recurring theme in the Wake as a Book of the Dead. In this dream language,, a homonym for Ark, "arc", as in a shaft of life arcing through the darkness, communicates the same theme of carrying light through the night; this also describes Kephra's (HCE) function.

The last sentence of the second paragraph in the Wake (p. 3) connects with the quote we've been looking at from p. 593:

"Rot a peck of pa's malt had Jhem or Shen brewed by arclight and rory end to the regginbrow ringsome on the aquaface."

HCE's sons, Shem (Jhem) and Shaun (Shen) appear in both quotes, their names spelled forward here. We find an explicit allusion to the arc (arclight) – Ark homonyms. Then, "regginbrow ringsome on the aquaface" obviously refers to the rainbow, God's promise to Noah, that appeared after the rains had subsided and the world was covered in water ("aquaface").

* * * * * *

I am more interested in parallels between the material presented in Finnegans Wake with the philosophy of Thelema than to any mention or allusion to the human being Aleister Crowley. The "eversower seeds of light" phrase from p. 593, though metaphorically consonant with the rising of the sun, suggests some kind of personification of the sun. We find such a personification in the form of the Egyptian god Khem.

"Khem (is) an ithyphallic deity . . . generally represented as standing upright, with his arm extended in the act of scattering seed. . . Khem represented the idea of divinity in its double character of father and son. As father he was called the husband of his mother, while as a son he was assimilated to the god Horus. He symbolized generative power surviving death." (Rawlinson, History of Ancient Egypt)

The central altar piece in Thelema is known as The Stele of Revealing. It was the funerary stele (tablet) of the priest Ankh af na Khonsu who lived circa 6th Century B.C. Khonsu was a priest of Menthu, a local Sun-god, in Thebes. Crowley considers Menthu an iteration of Horus for having the head of a hawk. In the Thelemic cosmogony, Horus represents the deity reigning over the new Aeon which began in 1904 with the reception of The Book of the Law. In at least three important Thelemic rituals, "The Mass of the Phoenix", "The Great Invocation" and "Liber Samekh", the aspirant identifies themself with the dead man Ankh af na Khonsu traveling through the underworld to get reborn as Horus. "The Great Invocation", in particular, borrows heavily from the Egyptian Book of the Dead. This is where Khem, the "eversower seeds of light" comes in.

In Section Aa of "Liber Samekh", a ritual for invoking the Holy Guardian Angel – in one sense, a person's deepest and most true Self, the True Will – we see:

I am ANKH-F-N-KHONSU Thy prophet, unto whom Thou didst commit Thy Mysteries, the Ceremonies of KHEM . . .

Hear Thou Me, for I am the Angel of PTAH-APOPHRASZ-RA: this is Thy True Name, handed down to the Prophets of KHEM.

Crowley identified himself with Ankh-af-na-khonsu. He wrote the so-called short "Comment" to The Book of the Law using that identity. In the original ritual that Crowley turned in to "Liber Samekh", the first quoted line read: "I am Moses Thy Prophet, unto whom Thou didst commit Thy Mysteries, the Ceremonies of Israel." The ritual instructions say to substitute Moses with the aspirant's own magical motto and Israel for their own Magical Race. Earlier in the ritual, Apophrasz was described as "the Truth in Motion" i.e. the Voyager.

The Great Invocation" has:

"By the mysterious spell of the dead Lord of Khem: by its miracle revelation unto the Beast, The Prophet of the Sun."

The parallels with the Wake passage from p. 593 appear undeniable though I stop short of asserting Joyce knew Thelema that well to make the parallels intentional. Joyce does have a Prophet of the Sun speak and he does describe this Prophet as an "eversower seeds of light" which alludes to Khem. Aleister Crowley, in his altruistic activities, also perfectly fits the description of an "eversower seeds of light."

Stay tuned for the next episode which will go into some of the Bardo/Book of the Dead influences found in the work of Robert Anton Wilson who was deeply influenced by both Joyce and Crowley.

Finn MacCool, the giant sleeping in the Irish landscape

The Golden Thread

2024-02-12T19:20:00.000-08:00

A Mystical Puppet Rock Opera

Dalrymple and the Wild Daimons

Dalrymple MacAlpin

Rotes Erdherz Kupferkatze enters the darkened stage from the back wearing a deerstalker hat, the kind made famous by Sherlock Holmes, and strikes a few notes on the vibraphone to start the show and begin the Invocation. Yes indeed, the game is afoot – the game being magic, or if you like, magick. The first visible non-human character, Rumpelstilzchen, enters the back of the theater introducing himself and setting the stage for the night's adventure. In the darkness behind the puppet, lit only with a flashlight by an apprentice light technician, Dalrymple pulls the puppet's strings and channels his voice as they walk through the aisle directly in front of where I'm sitting; I can feel the timelessness of Rumpel's character; he's been at this a long time: weaving golden threads which he says are stories.

The immediacy of the opera coming to to life in the middle of the audience recalls for me a performance of Back to Methuselah by the Living Theater in New York led by Julian Beck and Judith Molina where imp-like performers ran through the audience chanting: "in the future, all is poetry." It also recalled the way Tom Waits began his Mule Variations tour, coming through the back of the theater in Oakland giving a carny-style rap while walking through the theater to the stage. Rumpel is clearly in good company with dramatic stage entrances. It seems kind of a genius way to start a show because it captures the audiences attention immediately and lets them know they are part of the adventure and invocation. The fourth wall, the division between performers and attendees, is broken before it was even built. An intimate rapport with the audience gets established from the get go.

The humans in the Wild Daimons are: Chuckling Crow playing bass, upright and electric, and the occasional conga; Ouroborous playing all things drum and percussion-like; and Rotes Erdherz Kupferkatze on tenor sax, vibraphone and theremin. Dalrymple MacAlpin's instruments include guitar, piano, synthesizer, gut-stringed medieval harp and counter-tenor vocals. The Wild Daimons also consists of four marionette puppets: Rumpelstilzchen, Dortchen Wild, DJ Tele-Grimm-Gram and Ceridwen. The puppets are one form of the non-human life this production calls forth – each of them manifest and project themselves as a distinct entity, a non-homo sapien life-form able to cross over into the human dimension. The musicians play textural sound effects creating an evocative soundscape for the narration then transform into a band playing full on rock songs with lyrics advancing the story as operas do. Opera comes from the Latin and means work.

Live video projections bring an electronic kind of non-human life through a screen hanging above the center of the stage, a square-shaped box angled to resemble a diamond. The first band song is "Three Sisters and Their Thread" and we see their visages on the screen spinning and weaving the threads of Fate and Destiny. They are the three fates from Greek Mythology: Clotho spins the thread of human fate, Lachesis dispenses it and Atropos cuts the thread determining the moment of death. In the lyrics they tell the assembled: "we expect you to remember for what it is you yearn."

This gives the first explicit reference of a central theme here: waking up and remembering the divinity within, the empowered soul. Synchronistically as I write this, the song Power of Soul by Jimi Hendrix is playing on the radio:

"With the power of soul anything is possible,

with the power of you, anything that you wanna do."

The program guide given to the audience on the way into the theater helps explain. Multiple descriptions of the Wild Daimons appear in their Mission Statement, one of them being: "Alter-ego comic book superheroes waging war against the soulless eradication of personal godhood."

It also informs us that "daimon" comes from the Greek word meaning provider of destiny. No less than Carl Jung attests that: "There was a daimon in me and in the end its presence proved decisive." Later in the show, we hear that the Golden Thread is to help make contact with your daimon. "Tune in to the Golden Thread." In the Author's Statement, Dalrymple expresses the wish for the receivers of this gnosis "[t]o transform your reality by remembering your destiny." Appropriately enough, the song after the three Fates is: "We Are Gods."

I can strongly relate as this all seems cognate with my personal religion, Thelema and Magick, which instructs the student to aspire to the Knowledge and Conversation of the Holy Guardian Angel also known as the individual's True Will. The qabalistic Tree of Life provides the structure for Magick to hang its hat on. The journey to the daimon there, the HGA, begins in the central sphere on the Tree corresponding with the color gold – a golden thread leads you there. Perhaps the connecting link is Irish poet William Butler Yeats who is cited as an inspiration. Yeats was a prominent member of the late 19th Century occult society, The Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn which formed the foundation of Magick.

Daimons and entities coming through puppets aren't the only kinds of praeter-human Intelligences encountered on this journey. Extraterrestrial aliens break through in one song along with appropriate imagery lighting up the screen. One image reminded me of a classic moment in the film ET by Steven Spielberg where the finger of the friendly ET touches and electrifies the finger of the little boy.

This image itself seems to have been inspired by Michelangelo's famous painting that adorns the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel called The Creation of Adam.

The music informs us that these alien intelligences appear interdimensionally rather than from other planets or star systems in our Universe. This aligns with my understanding of those that have registered on my radar, but who can really tell for sure?

Not all of the nonorganic Intelligences come from the serious, occult, mystical, supernatural, or UFO side of things. We also get a healthy dose of whimsy through children's make-believe. Does anyone still remember being a child and seeing things outside the ordinary before the grown-ups told us it wasn't real? The children in the audience may have had some of the deepest experiences of the night being so closely in touch with their imagination.

The dream realm gets paid a visit in the piece "A Re-occurring Childhood Dream." Another song concerns the spelling controversy surrounding the Berenstein Bears children's books that some think is correctly spelled Berenstain. By an extraordinary bit of luck and good fortune the Berenstein Bears themselves are reached and asked their opinion on the matter. Mama Bear says it's always been Berenstein and doesn't know what all the fuss is about. The song presenting this matter has the title Ambiguity and uncertainty even surrounds beloved children's literature. Some imaginative types hold that both spellings are correct in different universes, parallel universes that have somehow become known to each other. This phenomena even has a name - the Mandela effect named after Nelson Mandela whom some have sworn died in prison, contrary to the alternate view that he was released from prison and lead the reform in South Africa. Parallel universes is given serious consideration by some theoretical physicists, but it's not known whether they've looked into the Berenstain/Berenstein brouhaha.

Act One concludes with a guided meditation lead by Dortchen Wild, a distinguished crone whom Rumpel calls his meditation teacher. Once again, the whole audience is invited to participate in "The Golden Thread Meditation Class" which begins with Dortchen instructing the class to "shake it out" – shake the body out to wake up and release any tension from sitting through the first act. Production assistants armed with straw baskets containing strands of gold fabric roam through the public giving each member their own physical golden thread. Another sign of magic at play.

This trailer gives a little taste of The Golden Thread:

In Act Two we collectively cross over into the Land of the Dead. It's the spirit of DJ Tele-Grimm-Gram coming across the video screen who serves as our guide to the Afterlife through his Dead-Time radio program. In an earlier iteration of The Golden Thread I attended a few months back, Tele-Grimm-Gram enthused wildly about the artistic collaboration between Mr. Rodgers (yes, that Mr. Rodgers) and James Brown which resulted in the soon-to-be hit song, "It's a Beautiful Day in This Funky Neighborhood," a funky uptempo jam sure to get any skeleton swaying to the beat and rattling their bones. They played it again for this evening's performance.

In his former incarnation, Mr. Rodgers posed as the innocuous host of a children's TV program, but in reality served as the vessel for his own angelic Daimon. His raison d'être (Fred Rodgers spoke fluent French) appears closely aligned with The Golden Thread's central theme: "The world needs a sense of worth, and it will achieve it only by its people feeling worthwhile. Anyone who does anything to help a child is a hero to me. It's our job to encourage each other to discover that uniqueness and to provide ways of developing its expression."

Some of his other life lessons include:

Embrace your inner child
Don't talk down to children
Don't be afraid to feel things
To love is a choice, a process, and a struggle
Be a good neighbor
Look for the helpers
Accept and love everyone, no matter their differences

The Wild Daimons' self-description as comic book superheroes finds literal expression in a comic book created and written by Dalrymple with help from: Grey Cat (illustrations), Annie Kendall (coloring and lettering), P.M. Hodges (layout and editing) and Daniel Agulilar (cover colorist). The first issue, Issue O called Children of the Void, released last November was available at their merch table. Its style resembles the graphic novels of Grant Morrison (The Invisibles) or Alan Moore (Watchmen). My companion picked one up and discovered this first edition signed and numbered (she got #74 out of 500) and came with a fully charged Key to the universe (a real physical key, small but potent) designed "[t]o aid in the process of making things happen." My friend Paula put the key on her meditation altar.

It reminded me of the Greenwich Village folk singer Melanie who had a hit song called Brand New Key. Melanie enjoyed her Greater Feast, leaving her biological form and crossing over to the Other Side about ten days before this performance. She could still have been in her 49 day bardo cycle before taking rebirth or moving on. The comic book story continues the theme of communication from the Land of the Dead. The first page following the opening quotes welcomes the reader to DEAD Time and instructs us to "have a pleasant death." It maintains a strong bardoesque mood and presence throughout with both evocative illustrations and the aprés vie storyline.

The theme of moving through the bardos, aka voyaging in the macrodimensions of the Labyrinth, has a Golden Thread connection to the well-known Tibetan Buddhist exhortation to "maintain the thread of consciousness" as one goes through sudden disorientating reality shifts and experiences intense sensations, lights, sounds, and radiations while getting instantly stripped of all ego and personality and having your mind taken apart; try not to blackout and lose the thread of consciousness.

"It's a Beautiful Day In This Funky Neighborhood" seems a slightly coded metaphor for the Egyptian Book of the Dead aka the Book of Going Forth by Day. The territory of the bardo could certainly appear a funky neighborhood. The main instruction in said book tells the departing soul to unite with Osiris; that's the prime aim. Osiris is one of the death and resurrection gods that corresponds with Tiphareth on the Tree of Life making him consonant or interchangeable with Christ, Buddha or Krishna, etc. The English word for Tiphareth is Beauty. If you regard "this funky neighborhood" as the afterlife, then declaring it "a beautiful day" suggests the contact or union of the soul with Tiphareth.

One way to prepare for death is to attempt this contact with Tiphareth before you die and make it a habit. It seems cognate with contacting your daimon or establishing the knowledge and conversation of the Holy Guardian Angel. Discovering your truest self and aligning to it has the bonus effect of preparing for biological death. Paradoxically, the practice and aim of being ready for death, however far in the future that may be, has the effect of making Life come alive. Getting ready for death as a daily meditation practice affirms Life.

The rock opera changes gears out of the bardo and enters into more science fiction types of alternate realities with "Kozmar's Portal Transformation" and "Projection Outer Space Transender." It concludes with Rumpel bestowing various blessings upon the audience in his inimitable poetic style in "Initiation of the Spirit." This title sums it up perfectly for me as the night's performance did feel like an interactive initiatory journey. I saw my friend Camen Hodges, a professional in the film industry, memorializing the production on videotape so one can only hope a recording of it will be available in the not too distant future for those unable to be there in person. A full length album with much of the music is scheduled to go into production this Spring.

Along with Camen, The Golden Thread had a dedicated team helping it come to life that included: Angela Holm, Rowan Holm, Benjamin Milner, Pamela Hodges, Mistress Nimble Thimble, Michael West, Casey Burke and Stephanie Moellman. Special thanks is also due to Paul Emery who promoted the event. More information on Dalrymple and the Wild Daimons can be found on their website.

Every page of your story reflects the potential inner light of transcendence. The Golden Thread connects us to the world of the unconscious where shines the source of this light, i.e. the daimons.

- Dalrymple MacAlpin

Folds and Overlaps between Aleister Crowley and Finnegans Wake

2023-12-16T21:17:00.000-08:00

“Smiting his breast, he reproached his heart with word.

Endure, heart, endure you have endured worse before.”

- Odyssey, XX, 17 -18 by Homer as quoted in Allan Bloom’s translation of The Republic, p. 68.

It’s interesting to see how different books in a writer’s oeuvre connect together. Each episode in Ulysses, except for the first three, corresponds with an organ in the human body. For instance, the 6th episode, Hades, connects with the heart. This scene in the book takes place at Paddy Dignam’s funeral in a graveyard causing Bloom, by association, to reflect upon his dead son Rudy as well as his late father. Reaching the end of the book, these organs collectively and metaphorically construct a transcendental, new “man,” actually a WoMan. This new WoMan, Eve and Adam, continues her riverun in the first sentence of Finnegans Wake signified by the initials HCE found in Howth Castle and Environs.

“riverun, past Eve and Adam’s, from swerve of shore to bend of bay, brings us by a commodious vicus of recirculation back to Howth Castle and Environs.”

This describes a real place in space/time. The river, the Anna Liffey, flows through Dublin, Ireland past the Church of the Immaculate Conception aka Adam and Eve’s and out into the ocean overlooked by Howth Castle. We’ll call this real place, a Microcosm. Joyce likes to use puns to suggest or convey multiple meanings. I postulate that Joyce intends to communicate HOW to construct an edifice, a castle, in the Higher Dimensions, or, if you will, the higher, “extraterrestrial” brain circuits as given in Timothy Leary’s 8 Circuits of Consciousness model. This edifice, if successful, will connect with everything. We call that the Macrocosm. Uniting the Microcosm with the Macrocosm describes a basic goal of Magick.

Constructing such a structure, or a “higher body” if you will, seems a different kind of immaculate conception. It’s signified by the initials HCE (Howth Castle and Environs) which appears frequently throughout the book in many guises. These are the initials of the primary protagonist, Humphrey Chimpden Earwicker but they also stand for Here Comes Everybody; these two significations allude to uniting the Microcosm with the Macrocosm. This theme gets suggested again at the beginning of the 4th section: “Array! Surrection! Eireweeker to the wohld bludyn world” (p. 593). I read this as: A resurrection! Earwicker to the whole bloody world. The “how” part gets suggested later on the same page: A hand from the cloud emerges, holding a chart expanded. Joyce gives us a map; HCE shows up twice in that sentence. An allusion to “how” turns up in the last complete sentence in the book and the sentence preceding: “The keys to. Given!” The trope, “keys” turns up elsewhere in Finnegans Wake including a few pages before the end. The same trope turns up in Ulysses.

Incidentally, Joyce used Cabala, a fundamental technology for the construction of higher bodies or brains. By Gematria, the Cabalistic transposition of letters into numbers, HCE adds to 18; Ulysses has 18 episodes.

Aleister Crowley also endeavored to provide everyone with such edifice building keys through Magick and his system or quasi-religion called Thelema. This essay intends to point out some of the parallels between Finnegans Wake, Magick and Thelema alongside references to Mr. Crowley, himself. Due to time constraints and the vastness of the subject, this piece merely provides an outline for a more detailed expanded account in the future. You could call this a work in progress, if you will.

Thelema and Finnegans Wake appear completely isomorphic and resonant with each other right from the get go. Thelema means Will in ancient Greek and adds to 93 by Greek Cabala. Agape, spiritual Love – the highest kind, also adds to 93 indicating a connection and strong resonance between Love and Will. It’s called love under will because on the surface Thelema directly means Will and under that, qabalistically, it also means Love. Love under will also indicates intentional or directed love.

Speaking of the Greeks, the word “swerve” from “swerve of shore” in the first sentence dates back to Epicurus when he used it to describe the unpredictable and indeterminate swerve atoms take which he attributes to the creation of life and order out of chaos. This swerving (of shore) “provides the free will which all living things throughout the world have.” Gilles Deleuze calls it the production of sense. Swerve = Will.

The next sentence, physically under the first one as you look at the page, has:

“Sir Tristram, violer-d’amores, fr’over the short sea, had passencore rearrived from North Amorica on this side the scraggy isthmus of Europe Minor to wielderfight his penisolate war.”

“Violer” could mean violater; it also suggests what Joyce had in his first draft, “viola-d’amore,” a six or seven stringed musical instrument with an equal number of sympathetic strings below the played ones to create additional harmonics. It’s similar to a regular viola; played in the baroque period. Stringed instruments at that time often had intricately carved heads at the top of the neck. Most common on a viola d’amore was a carved head of Cupid blindfolded to show the blindness of love. As a bonus, the “d” before “amore” qabalistically connects with Venus, the Goddess of Love. The first two sentences in Finnegans Wake clearly show “love under will – Thelema.”

Still on page 1, Joyce not only indicates great potentialities he also confronts those possibilities with obstacles and challenges anyone attempting to realize those potentials might face such as “wielderfight the penisolate war”, “the great fall” and the fragility and volatility of the metaphysical surface (higher brain circuits) represented by Humpty Dumpty, the giant, sentient egg.

The appearance of Sir Tristram alludes to the story of Tristram and Iseult, a frequently recurring theme in the Wake, where Tristram is a knight escorting the Irish princess Iseult back to Ireland to marry King Marc. They fall in love along the way. Joyce has him coming back from North Armorica, Armorica being an ancient name for Brittany. It also suggests North America, where Joyce is about to go in this same second sentence.

Sound plays a huge role and provides an entrance to Joyce’s language and meanings. Armorica sounds like amour – love; it also has the word “armor,” the American spelling for armour. The message: protect your love. Very soon we see the fragility of this construction of higher consciousness. The image of the Thoth Tarot card The Chariot illustrates this story – escorting and protecting the Grail.

Iseult connects with all the Goddess archetypes in the Wake and with Babalon in the Thelemic cosmology. In the Hebrew tradition both of these, Babalon and Iseult is called the Shekinah.

* * * * * *

Nothing mentioned thus far connects directly with the man Crowley. We first find this link on page 105, the only time in the book he’s mentioned this clearly and unambiguously. Joyce connects him with Rabelais, a major influence on both Crowley and Joyce, by alluding to the Abbey of Thélème:

From Abbeygate to Crowalley

Through a Lift in the Lude, Smocks for Their Graces and

Me Aunt for them Clodshopper, How to Pull a Good Horuscoup

even when Oldsire is Dead to the World, ...

"Abbeygate" seems a clear reference to Rabelais connecting with Gargantua chapter 52, "The Inscription set above the main Gate of Thélème." The first line obviously alludes to the trajectory of the Abbey of Thelema; the word "all" appears in the Crowley allusion consonant with the theme of Pan. "Lude" suggests the lewd humor Rabelais was known for, it also translates as 'play" from Latin; this one word indicates playful lewdness or lewd playfulness. "Lift in the Lude" implies wisdom in the folly; "Smocks for Their Graces" = mocking their Graces - satirizing Papal and Church establishment authority. "Horuscoup" brings us back to Crowley who was an expert astrologer (horoscope - he was the ghostwriter for popular American astrologer Evangeline Adams). More pertinent is the inclusion of the Egyptian god Horus in the portmanteau word. Crowley defined his mission as announcing and helping make manifest the new aeon of Horus, a central tenet of Thelema.

Both Joyce and Crowley drew upon Nietzsche. “ … even when Oldsire is Dead to the World” suggests the famous “God is dead” pronouncement which, according to Deleuze, has at least 12 different interpretations. Horuscoup also = a coup by Horus as in a coup d’etat; a take-over from the old, authoritarian rendition of God to one that affirms life and the joy within it. Affirmation of life was also championed by Nietzsche. The first page of the Wake ends: “where oranges have been laid to rest upon the green since devlinfirst loved livvy.” Joyce announces an affirmation of life here: “livvy” = the river Liffy = Anna Livia Plurabelle = LIFE.

Anna Livia Plurabelle is the main female protagonist, wife of Humphrey Chimpden Earwicker and mother to their children. Her initials, ALP appear the second most frequently found in phrases throughout the book. She represents the Goddess archetype and, in this sense, is the first character in the Wake entering with the 3rd word “Eve.” Just as Crowley or Aiwass begins The Book of the Law with Nuit, Joyce begins Finnegans Wake with Eve.

Attentive readers will notice that nearly everything – themes, people, places, etc. - repeats or recurs in the Wake albeit a little differently each time. This seems along the lines of Nietzsche’s concept of Eternal Recurrence as well as Vico’s cyclic theory of History. The first sentence illustrates this structural aspect with the phrase: “commodious vicus of recirculation.” Pattern recognition seems a crucial key for unlocking the secrets and keys herein. Thus we can expect a return to Crowley by name even if obscurely.

The first mention of Crowley, quoted above, comes on the second page of the first Anna Livia Plurabelle chapter as part of a list of names of [h]er untitled mamafesta memorializing the Mosthighest. The second time, more of an obscure allusion, comes on the second page of the second Anna Livia Plurabelle chapter, p. 197, with the name “Garda Growley.” It’s preceded by a description that bears some resemblance to Uncle Al as portrayed in the tabloid press in the early to mid 1920s: “And the cut of him! And the strut of him! How he used to hold his head as high as a howeth, the famous eld duke alien, with a hump of grandeur on him like a walking weasel rat. And his derry’s own drawl and his corksown blather and his doubling stutter and his gullaway swank.” The last sentence references various Irish locales. Crowley is an Irish name though Aleister was an Englishman, alien to Ireland. “Garda Growley” suggests the nursery rhyme: “Mary, Mary quite contrary how does your garden grow? With silverbells and cockle shells and pretty maids all in a row.” Crowley’s lifestyle certainly seemed contrary to convention. The feminization of the male principle appears an important concept in both the Wake and Thelema and connects with the concept “becoming-woman” as presented by Deleuze and Guatarri in A Thousand Plateaus. More on that later.

The next possible mention occurs on page 229:

“Go in for scribenery with the satiety of arthurs in S.P.Q.R. ish and inform to the old sniggering publicking press and its nation of sheepcopers about the whole plighty troth between them, malady of milady made melodi of malodi, she, the lalage of lyon-esses, and him, her knave arrant. To Wildrose La Gilligan from Croppy Crowhore. For all within crystal range.

Crowhore could be a portmanteau allusion to Crowley and Horus. Joyce plays around a lot with the name Horus elsewhere in the Wake. Horus, of chorus, represents the reigning deity of the new aeon in Thelema. Wildrose La Gilligan might represent Rose Crowley, AC’s first wife who was quite wild. Their marrriage lead to the reception of The Book of the Law. There was a “plighty troth between them” – they got married to rescue Rose from a planned marriage to someone else whom she didn’t love – her malady? Gilligan comes from an Irish name meaning lad or boy. La adds to 31 = Not or Nothing and corresponds with Nuit. Wildrose not a boy? La also = the feminine form of “the” in French; “the” is the last word in Finnegans Wake and etymologically means God. Croppy was a name for Irish rebels in the late 19th Century. Crowley, along with Nietzsche and Joyce strongly rebelled against the Roman Catholic Church. S.P.Q.R. stands for the “Senate and the People of Rome.” Crowhore could also indicate Crowley plus whore. Wildrose is described as the lalage of lyon-esses. Lalage was an old common name for courtesans = high class prostitutes. It’s also the name of the genus of triller birds – song birds, thus a connection with “milady made melodi.” And with enough imagination one can suggest the reception of The Book of the Law. Making a melody out of a malady connects with the alchemical transformation of gold out of lead or out of shit. Lyon-esses recalls the French city Lyon, also female lions. Lion has great symbolic importance in Thelema, it corresponds with Tiphareth. Crowley has been called a lion of light. The beginning of the quote could again refer to the yellow journalism that befell the Beast. La = 31 also = “How?” according to the Sepher Sephiroth.

I found an aside with Gilligan that Joyce couldn’t possibly have known, a fun coincidence. Most readers will remember the TV sitcom, Gilligan’s Island. The very last episode was called "Gilligan, the Goddess." It concerns the Chief of a neighboring island in search of a “White Goddess.” The characters think that this might get them off the island but the three women bow out after finding out this Goddess is meant to be sacrificed to a volcano. So the men put on dresses and pretend to be this White Goddess recalling the “becoming-woman” concept mentioned earlier.

Moving on to page 234 we find another possible Crowley reference: he had his tristiest cabaleer on; and looked like bruddy Hal. Hal = Al? “bruddy” = either brother or bloody or both (blood brother) all of which could apply to A.C.. Cabaleer = someone who practices Cabala. Hal adds to 36 = 6 x 6. 36 also = “How?” A few lines down on the same page: “a haggiography in duotrigesumy, son soptimost of sire sixtusks.” A hagiography is the biography of a Saint. Crowley famously called his autobiography, The Confessions of Aleister Crowley a hagiography or the “hag” for short. Joyce could have seen that – the first volumes of the hag were published in the 1920s. Duotrigesumy breaks down as duo (2) + tri (3) + gesu (Italian for Jesus = key 6 Tiphareth ) + my (possessive pronoun). I could go on, and there’s more of a similar nature on the same page. I considered that this may be Joyce calling Crowley his brother, maybe?

Sixtusks could refer to 6 + the tusks of an elephant, a large beast. Page 234 also alludes to Buddha, another key 6 correspondence; there’s a well-known parable about Buddha calming an angry elephant with loving kindness. Tusks also sounds like a homonym for “tasks” as in 6 tasks; especially when we look ahead to p. 263 to find: “The tasks above are as the flasks below, saith the emerald canticle of Hermes [HCE] and all’s loth and pleasestir [ALP], we are told on excellent inkbottle authority, solarsystemised, seriol-cosmically, in a more and more almightily expanding universe under one, there is rhyme-less reason to believe, original sun.

Next on page 276: “But bless his cowly head and press his crankly hat, what a world’s woe is each’s other’s weariness waiting to beadroll his own proper mistakes, …” Head and hat qabalistically connect with Tiphareth and Kether respectively. The two adjectives in the first phrase are “cowly” and “crankly” and when you switch their first letters you get “crowly” and “cankly”; it seems the kind of wordplay Joyce employs.

This one on p. 328 – 329 seems less visible except for the obvious Thelemic symbols: “our fiery quean, upon the night of the things of the night of the making to stand up the double tet of the oversear of the sieze who cometh from the mighty deep and on the night of making Horuse to criumph over his enemy, be the help of me cope as to pluse the riches of the roed-shields, with Elizabeliza blessing the bedpain, at the willbedone of Yinko Jinko Randy, come Bastabasco and hippychip eggs, she will make a suomease pair and singlette…”

The first part of “Bastabasco” sounds close to “Beast.” Beast gets mentions elsewhere, but doesn’t seem to connect much with Crowley as far as I can tell – except for this one and the next one below with its proximity to Horus. Crowley + Horus becomes a recurring motif. It also has the Egyptian cat-headed goddess Bast who sometimes manifested as a black jaguar or a humanoid jaguar, a unique beast. Bast is a protector goddess and the daughter of Ra. She was sometimes called the Goddess of the Rising Sun. The second half, basco, suggests the fiery tobasco sauce used in some egg recipes. The “willbedone of Yinko Jinko and Randy” provides a qabalistic synch: Y+J+R = 220 = the number of verses in The Book of the Law.

The next beast linked to Crowley and Horus appears on page 347. We see “a white horsday” . . . “how the krow flees end in deed. . . “ (Crowley’s name Perdurabo means “I will endure until the end”.) and “when we sight the beasts.” All in the same sentence. This last mention from page 473 occurs at the end of the second chapter of Book 3 or chapter 14 overall. In the story it speaks of the ending of night and the coming of the morning: “Brave footsore Haun! Work your progress! Hold to! Now! Win out, ye divil ye! The silent cock shall crow at last. The west shall shake the east awake.” Haun refers to Shaun, one of the twin sons of HCE and ALP. The last line quoted here resonates with a line in The Book of the Law: “There cometh a rich man from the West who shall pour his gold upon thee” (III:31). “The silent cock shall crow at last” looks very straightforward on the surface, but also pregnant with Thelemic meaning. Silence seems a big deal in Magick. Horus represents a twin God with one aspect, Ra Hoor Khuit, very outgoing and connected with yang/male energy. The feminine aspect, Hoor Pa Kraat, is withdrawn and connected with silence. In the Star Ruby, the Thelemic version of the Lesser Banishing Ritual of the Pentagram, one assumes the classic posture of silence, forefinger to the lips, no less than four times in the short ritual. It occurs immediately after assuming the posture of sign of The Enterer aka the sign of Horus for the outgoing aspect. Cock being slang for penis, silent cock combines the female (silence) and male energies. Silent cock represents a feminization of male energies, a subject I haven’t been able to expand upon much with this short piece, but which recurs throughout the Wake. This feminization has absolutely nothing to do with either biological gender identities or emasculation. It represents the sublimation of sexual energies. Sexual energy = spiritual energy when sublimated. We find this “becoming-woman” trajectory in the name of the male protagonist, HCE. Both the letters H and E correspond with the Hebrew letter “Heh” which occurs twice in the four-fold name of God called Tetragrammaton: YHVH (Jehovah). These letters symbolize: Y = Father, King or Knight in the Tarot court cards depending on the deck; the first H = Mother or Queen; V = the Son/Prince; the final H = the Daughter/Princess (Thoth Tarot). The final two words of the sentence under discussion, “at last” have the initials a + l, which holds much significance Thelemically. The Book of the Law seems more commonly known by its Latin title: Liber AL vel Legis often abbreviated as Liber Al. This a +l letter combo occurs four times in the last sentence of Finnegans Wake: A way a lone a last a loved a long the

Joyce tips off the alert reader to look through the lens of Cabala in the third word of the Wake, “Eve”, which corresponds with the third sephira, Binah, key # 3. In Coincidance, Robert Anton Wilson writes of the Cabalistic significance of Anna Livia Plurabelle = ALP = 111. He also seems very aware of the SC code as I’ve commented upon numerous times often in discussion groups about one or another of his books. Joyce employs this code. Joyce scholars appear pretty hip to the cryptography and letter play of HCE and ALP. They may want to also turn their attention to SC. This code appears quite connected to Crowley’s system stemming from an often overlooked important text of his called The Paris Working which revealed the identification of Christ (Tiphareth – 6) with Mercury ( Hod – 8). SC adds to 68 when corresponding C with Cheth as non-traditional Qabalists often do. Tiphareth = the heart chakra; Hod = communication. Communicate the heart. The Book of the Law affirms this in the 6th verse of the first chapter: “Be thou Hadit, my secret center, my heart & my tongue!” “The silent cock shall crow at last.” shows two instances of S+C in this short sentence.

I traced this SC coding back to Rabelais in a section about Saint Chapelle found in the third book of Gargantua and Pantagruel in chapter 15 called “The Excuse of Panurge; and an exegesis of a monastical cabbala concerning salted beef.” It also connects with divine food – see Chapter 68 in The Book of Lies called “Manna.” On page 68 of Finnegans Wake in one sentence near the top we find: "sweet churchyard"; "soft coal"; "same hot coney" and "son of a Coole." The next sentence begins with a phrase carrying the initials HCE followed by one with ALP. On page 132 amidst much Cabalistic reference we find: “cabalstone”, “sleepy children”, “storen clothes”, “snake charmer”, “calm sagacity”, and “the clearness of his spotless honour.” This penultimate phrase on this page reads: “and as for the salmon he was coming up in him all life long.” From A Skeleton Key to Finnegans Wake by Campbell and Robinson: “The strong play on the salmon theme throughout Finnegans Wake corresponds to the importance of salmon in Irish myth and folklore. It was from the taste of the flesh of the great, wise, salmon that Finn MacCool, according to the ancient tale, acquired his ‘Tooth of Knowledge.’” There’s the food connection. Incidentally, the first word in Ulysses begins with S; the last word of the first sentence begins with C.

So many subjects, so little time. The Egyptian Book of the Dead gets lots of airplay in the Wake and serves as a major component in Golden Dawn magic, the basis of Crowley’s Magick. Phoenix Park in the Wake and the “Mass of the Phoenix” in Thelema illustrates another overlap between the two, both concerning the theme of resurrection. It was either Campbell, Robinson or Tindall who opined that resurrection serves as the main theme in Finnegans Wake. Resurrection follows death; in between is the territory known as the Bardo. This territory gets addressed by the Egyptian and other books of the dead. One of the two major ordeals in Thelema is known as “Crossing the Abyss” which appears a similar territory as the Bardo and relates with Chapel Perilous. Finnegans Wake can be looked at as how to successfully navigate the Bardo to realize a good resurrection, or how to cross the Abyss; how to get through the Night or Chapel Perilous. John Lilly called it meta-programming. All this and more lies ahead in the riverun.

TO BE CONTINUED

34th Series of Primary Order and Secondary Organization

2023-11-06T15:44:00.002-08:00

This series begins by looking at the development of the phantasm as a pendular motion swinging between the two extremes of the metaphysical surface and the partial objects and drives in the depths. The greatest danger is the collapse of the surface into the depths. The greatest potential lies in the constitution of a metaphysical surface of great range on which even the objects of the depths are projected.

Deleuze calls this pendular motion the forced movement of the phantasm; this forced movement increases its amplitude. The full amplitude brings about the metaphysical surface which he also calls Thanatos or the Death Instinct. Deleuze defines the Death Instinct differently than Freud – not as a wish for death but a wish to go beyond death. He envisions a struggle between Thanatos, or the metaphysical surface and the destructive drives of the depths. If the metaphysical surface wins out then an infinitive verb or an Eternal Truth gets inscribed on this surface. What Lewis Carroll calls "Impenetrability" and "Radiancy" gets actualized. Impenetrability comes from the 6th chapter in Through the Looking Glass, and is uttered by Humpty Dumpty. Examples of Radiancy can be found in Carroll's poems: Phantasmagoria

Dreamland

Beatrice In the infinitive verb inscribed upon the metaphysical surface, the secondary organization is brought about and from this organization, the entire ordering of language. This allows the event as that which can be expressed. The sexual organization is a prefiguration of the organization of language just as the physical surface was a preparation for the metaphysical surface. Perversion is an art of the surface as opposed to subversion as a technique of the depths. Most sexual crimes are subversion not perversion. The real problem of perversion (radical change) is shown correctly in the essential mechanism which corresponds to it, that of Verleugnung (denial). Verleugnung is not an hallucination, but rather an esoteric knowledge. Primary order goes from the beginning sounds and noises in the depths then to the voice on high followed by speech then language. Words are directly actions and passions of the body. They are demonic possession or divine privation. In relation to the voice, words can reach an excessive equivocation. (Perhaps the best example gets found in Joyce's Finnegans Wake.) An equivocation which ends equivocity and makes language ripe for something else. This something else is that which comes from the other, desexualized and metaphysical surface – the revelation of the univocal, the advent of Univocity – that is, the Event which communicates the univocity of being to language. Humor constructs all univocity. The dynamic genesis doesn't end. There is the problem of the work of art yet to come. A construction of Music für ein Haus.

See Karlheinz Stockhausen's 1968 group composition project: Music für ein Haus.

33rd Series of Alice's Adventures

2023-09-25T16:55:00.000-07:00

In this Series Deleuze plugs Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, and Through the Looking Glass into the three orientations of the dynamic genesis: the depths, the heights, and the surface. He mentions the circular mushroom that causes Alice to grow or to shrink depending upon which side she eats from. This circles the reader back to the very beginning of The Logic of Sense as that's how the book starts.

In a footnote, Deleuze mentions two poems by Carroll that illustrate the good voice on high. They are: The Two Brothers and The Three Voices He also mentions Sylvie and Bruno which he again calls a masterpiece as he did earlier in the book. It gives another example of the good voice on high withdrawn but also the two surfaces, the surface between bodies and ideas (ordinary reality in Sylvie and Bruno), and the metaphysical surface (the fairy/magic reality). The first book is here. Sylvie and Bruno Concluded is here. About two thirds of the way through this Series there's an inflexion point where Deleuze stops talking about Alice and Lewis Carroll and begins to look at great authors as Doctors or Diagnosticians of Civilization. He'll talk about this in relation to the pure event and the metaphysical surface. The Series ends with obscure quotes from another Lewis Carroll story: A Photographer's Day Out. I don't find it in print on the internet but here's a video of the story being read.

Let This Be Enough by Catherine Scholz

2023-09-12T17:20:00.002-07:00

There is no right way or wrong way to record music. Sometimes it's done very fast to capture spontaneity and freshness. Bob Dylan is known to prefer this method. Other times, it can be labored over longer. Both approaches went into the creation of the new single by Catherine Scholz. Much of the track - drums, percussion, rhythm guitar, violin and lead vocal was recorded in half a day at Ancient Wave in Nevada City. There was also some minimal drum editing. That's lightening speed for me when you consider that it usually takes a minimum of two hours to set up drums, mics and rout them into the desk.

We started with Catherine playing a rhythm track on one of the studios beautiful Martin acoustic guitars. She played to a click track, a metronome, to assure consistency with the timing. However, most serendipitously, she made a mistake in the form by including an extra verse section. Following Brian Eno's oblique strategy to "honor thy mistake as a hidden intention," we kept it for use as an instrumental section for solos. Then I had Catherine double her guitar part; she made the great suggestion to play it on a different acoustic guitar, her own. Next was her vocal. She did a warm up pass while I got her level. Then she did a take all the way through. By then, Mark McCartney had arrived to set up his drums. I expected to come back later to work on Catherine's lead vocal, but we never did. That first take was all that was needed.

We got the drums up and sounds on them lickety-split. Mark is a pro, and pretty instantly locked into the groove. It had already been decided in a pre-production meeting that he would play the drums with brushes. We did three drum takes. For the final one, Catherine requested more of what's known as a "stirring the soup" sound like you might hear in older jazz recordings where the brushes swirl around the surface of the snare drum and play accents on the 2 and 4 of the measure. In one of the initial passes, I liked the way Mark was keeping time with his hi hat on the "1 and" + "3 and" of the beat and asked for more of that. That third take was the one we went with. Mark came in for a playback, heard a few things slightly off which we fixed on the spot through editing. He heard a tambourine part, overdubbing it in one pass. Catherine had the thought for him to play some cymbal swells at transition areas, from the first verse into the chorus, from the chorus to the solo section, etc. I asked Mark if he had mallets for that, but he was way ahead of me and already had them out, ready to go.

Following the drums, we had just enough time to record some violin parts by the very talented Mei Lin Heirendt. Based on the lyrics, I asked her to consider a melancholy mood with a glimmer of hope in there as she played. We recorded a couple of passes all the way through with Mei Lin playing fills in response to Catherine's words along with a solo. After those two passes, we worked on just the solo and got a beautiful one. John Taber, a professional and extremely excellent photographer (among other things) got some great shots of this musical invocation. Hats off to my assistant, Jaya Betts, who made the seamless, technological flow possible.

Catherine Scholz

More of John Taber's shots can be seen in the Production Credits on Catherine's site.

The rest of the instruments were recorded remotely at the various musician's local studios. Catherine added some background vocals at her place. Bassist Jared May sent in his part from his home in L.A. Tommy Coster was enlisted to play piano. He graciously included some other ideas he had: a wurlitzer piano part and some ambient synthesizer swells for transitions. Pete Grant sent multiple takes of lap guitar, pedal steel guitar and dobro – all gorgeous fills, textures and solos. I had an embarrassment of riches to flesh out the arrangement.

Catherine's fiancé, John, had the suggestion to turn the song into a duet. We both thought it could significantly contribute to the song. She asked her friend, Francisco Aviles to contribute a verse and a chorus. Francisco sang the second verse modifying the lyrics slightly to suit his vocal delivery, then they both sang the last chorus. Francisco sent me one take which I plugged into mix and sent to Catherine. She asked if there were any alternate choices, so I had him send all his takes which included nine more. I spent a few hours listening and compiling the best parts. It was a good call; his earlier takes had a softer, more velvety quality that suited the song well. Catherine heard the new, composite take and requested one line be swapped back to the first take which worked very well.

For the solo, I originally went with Mei Lin's violin for the whole thing. John also had the idea to have the solo switch to the lap steel halfway through, then have the violin come back to join it at the end. It was another great idea as it musically anticipated a second voice, Francisco's, entering the song with both voices together on the last chorus.

Emotionally, as I interpret it, it seems to concern a reckoning of a relationship which both parties want to confront directly as per the lyrics that begin each verse: "Say it to my face ...". They both agree that their union will be enough to carry them through anything. I find it very moving.

A review at Melo Groove puts it more eloquently:

Celebrated singer-songwriter Catherine Scholz is set to make a profound impact on the hearts and minds of listeners with the release of her latest single, “Let This Be Enough.” This soul-stirring song transcends boundaries and speaks to the deeply human experiences of unrequited love, longing for reciprocation, and the struggle for self-acceptance.

The full review is here.

You can listen or download Let This Be Enough on any of these platforms.

Enjoy!

32nd Series on the Different Kinds of Series

2023-08-28T16:42:00.000-07:00

The 32nd Series returns to earlier concepts in The Logic of Sense but this time in the context of Freudian psychology and analysis. The serial form begins with the release of the sexual drives. It talks about three different kinds of series and the type of synthesis they provide; the connective, conjunctive and dynamic syntheses. It recapitulates the dynamic genesis of the developing child learning language starting from the chaotic noises in the depths, then hearing their parents use language (the voice on high) and finally beginning to use speech at the surface. This still isn't language until the Event or sense occurs.

Working from Psychanalyzer by Serge Leclaire, Deleuze connects the basic elements of language, phonemes, morphemes and semantemes, with the three sexual positions: erogenous zones (connective synthesis), the phallic coordination of the surface (conjunctive synthesis) and the Oedipal affairs or castration complex (disjunctive synthesis).

The paradoxical nature of the phallic image both coordinating the surface and contributing to the dissipation of the castration complex is compared to the paradoxical "Object = X" that circulates between the two series of the signifier and the signified. It is both an excess and a lack and is always in a state of disequilibration. Not said in the video: The disjunctive synthesis proves to be "the destination and truth of the others."

Picture Frame by Cassidy Joy

2023-08-15T19:36:00.001-07:00

A strong invocation brings its own resistance. I tell my clients that unusual obstacles or adversity in the recording process often indicate the music coming through carries a strong force. Giving birth in any realm presents its own challenges. This appears clearly evident with the capturing of Cassidy Joy's new single Picture Frame.

The first recording date was postponed due to a slight cold – nothing too uncommon there. On the morning of the new date, a power outage shut down all electricity to the studio. Our irresponsible provider, PG&E, said it would be back on by 11:30 am; no problem there, the session was scheduled for noon. Indeed, power was restored shortly after 11. Cassidy arrived and got settled. She did a little warm up run through of the song as I set my levels. We checked the tuning on her acoustic guitar – looking good, we were all set to go. At that exact moment, the power goes out again. Unbelievable! I got my emergency generator going and we finally began. This is less than ideal as my generator and all the other generators in the neighborhood increases the ambient noise hum in the space, but I thought I could deal with it. Halfway way into her performance the power came back on, but near the end of the song my audio software abruptly stopped. That had never happened before – likely due to the less than steady electricity provided by my generator. Cassidy felt good about the take, but I had to sheepishly tell her about the drop out and ask her to play it again.

We did another run through; it was a significantly stronger delivery, the best. The obstacles had pushed her to another level. It felt like the one. During the playback to confirm, we heard the yowling of a cat. Was it in the recording? Would this great performance be compromised? Fortunately not, the cat's contribution only occurred during playback not the recording itself. We added another rhythm guitar part, did some minor editing and had a track. After much more than usual resistance, a new piece of beauty had come down from wherever it comes from for all the world to hear. Perseverance paid off.

As I interpret the song, it tells a story of someone looking at a photo and reading the biography of what they see there:

Pretty lady in a picture frame

Silk white dress

Wreaths the baby's breath

Pretty mama of a high born name

Keeps a treasure chest

Never leaves a mess

There's a subtle sense of tragedy, a mood of melancholy in this song.

And if I didn't know better

I'd say you had it all together

And if I couldn't see through you

I'd almost swear that I knew you

From the face that you were wearing in a picture frame.

One belief in philosophy holds that the artistic expression of tragedy is just as necessary as comedy in the balanced development of society. Perhaps when feeling some pain in a work of art, it helps us deal with any pain we'll inevitably experience in life itself?

Pretty mama sitting all alone

Underneath the roses, hoping someone would notice

She built her castle from her father's stone

And though she'd never know it

Inside the tears are flowing.

It goes on to tell the tale of this woman's family and the hardness of their lives. These words don't and can't tell the complete story. You have to listen to the emotion of Cassidy's vocal delivery together with the key and chord changes in the song. My advice is to listen many times. I naturally do in the production of it. The repetition of the playback, always hearing something different each time, searching for the technical parameters that will give the best expression, made me feel like I was in a picture frame. Listening to it now without any technical considerations, makes me want to find a way to heal all the pain in the world. To quote John Lennon: "You may say that I'm a dreamer, but I'm not the only one." Perhaps if enough people hear Picture Frame enough times, the empathy in world will increase by one slight degree. Maybe that will help get us through the night?

Ain't love a funny thing?

You can download Picture Frame here. It will be available to listen on Spotify and Apple music soon.

31st Series of Thought

2023-07-24T16:11:00.004-07:00

This Series looks at the process of the phantasm engendering thought. A narcissistic wound or trace of castration causes desexualized/neutral energy to create a metaphysical/cerebral surface resulting in thought. This metaphysical surface of thought is invested by the sexual surface of the body (sublimation) and by the objects of the depths and the heights (symbolization).

Deleuze uses a metaphor of a romantic couple to conceptualize sexual sublimation. The phantasm's formula: from the sexual pair to thought via castration. It may prove useful to approach this Series like a Zen koan. The phantasm originates in the void. He last wrote about the void in the "19th Series of Humor" in connection with Zen. I suggest giving it a review (p. 137 in the 1990 edition; p. 141 in the Bloomsbury newer edition). There seems a great deal of movement, cycling back and forth and feedback loops implied as thought metamorphosizes and reinvests in itself through sublimations and symbolizations. The phantasm always goes back to an originary phantasm and carries it along to wherever it's going. It constantly changes. Due to all this looping, Deleuze says the phantasm is the site of the eternal return. The writing returns to earlier concepts like the void. Again, by connecting the trace of castration with the crack of thought from the "22nd Series: Porcelain and Volcano" mentioning the writers Lowry and Fitzgerald from that Series. He references the "21st Series of the Event" when talking about death toward the end. There is an inflexion point in this Series when Deleuze changes from talking about the little thoughts of the internal dialog to more creative, problem-solving thoughts. This point is where he mentions the "phantasm's path of glory." It does it with "the incorporeal splendor of the event as that entity which addresses itself to thought, and which alone may invest it – extra-Being." I.e. sense. Splendor, in the hermetic sense, can be researched in my blog: The Hermetic Transmission of Francois Rabelais.

30th Series of the Phantasm

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Deleuze first presents his interpretation of the concept of the phantasm and its relation to sense in this Series. He comes from a Freudian point of view saying that psychoanalysis is the science of the event. He goes into three characteristics of the phantasm in this series and continues the discussion of it in the next Series.

1. The phantasm is the resultant of an action (outer) and a passion (inner) and represents a pure event. 2. The relationship of the ego to the phantasm 3. The phantasm finds expression in the proposition. It inheres in the infinitive form of the verb. The Aion is the neutral infinitive for the pure event. Objects in the depths he calls simulacra; objects in the heights = idols; objects at the surface = images. Freud's book "Totem and Taboo" is the great theory of the event. You can read it here.

The Hermetic Transmission of Francois Rabelais

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Member of the NEW TRAJECTORIES WEBRING

Happiness is reached when a person is ready to be what (s)he is.

– Desiderius Erasmus

Rabelais, once more, laid down the philosophical principles

which determined the destiny of Shakespeare in literature

and Bacon in science.

– Aleister Crowley

All references are to the 2006 Penguin Classics edition of Gargantua and Pantagruel translated and annotated by M.A. Screech. This edition contains five books ordered chronologically by publication date. This makes the second book Gargantua; some editions place it first in the sequence given that it takes place before Pantagruel's birth. In modern parlance, Gargantua is a prequel. Since the 19th century, most scholars, including Screech, don't believe Rabelais personally wrote the fifth and final book. The anonymous writers writing under his name do a good job of imitating his style.

Gargantua and Pantagruel, by Francois Rabelais, distinguishes itself as the first mass-produced popular novels that combine literature with philosophy and mysticism in the hermetic fashion. The carrier wave for this transmission is humor in every form imaginable: satire, slapstick, scatalogical, salacious, sexual, irony, wordplay, nonsense, parody, dark, burlesque, ribald, bawdy, juvenile, farcical, facetious, surreal, etc. A massive dose of sugar that makes the medicine go down or be unnoticed. Rabelais was dubbed the Laughing Philosopher by Mary Patricia Willcock in her 1950 biography of him, a well-deserved epithet he shares with the ancient Greek writer Democritus. These novels should be in the Guinness Book of World Records for the most extensive, detailed, erudite, cultivated, fetid, malodorous, putrid, stinking and rank variety of fart jokes in the entire output of human literature. Rabelais celebrates both physics and metaphysics, but above all, JOY.

These five multileveled novels comprise, among other things, a survey and criticism of philosophical, religious and ethical knowledge from the West, ranging in time from Ancient Greece to the beginning of Renaissance Europe. It's presented as a pastiche of fable and folklore replete with proverbs, adages, sayings, quotations, etc. Sources drawn upon include Plato, Plutarch, Pliny, Aristotle, Aesop, Avicenna, Homer, Hesiod, Cicero, Seneca, Virgil, Ovid, the Bible, Erasmus, Cornelius Agrippa, and many others, some of them totally obscure to the modern reader.

Roots

Rabelais' funny bone taps into roots going back to the dawn of civilization. The oldest joke known to humankind is a Sumerian fart joke: They had a saying: Something that never happened since time immemorial; a young lady did not fart in her husband's lap.

His most prominent, guiding light, his mentor, was the humanist philosopher Desiderius Erasmus who died a few years after the initial publication of Pantagruel. Erasmus' best known book is In Praise of Folly, a satirical look at society, in particular The Church. Both Rabelais and Erasmus were inspired by the Greek satirist Lucian, in particular his short essay (or letter) To One Who Said to Him 'You Are a Prometheus in Words.' He wrote it in response to a critic who complained that he put "comic laughter in philosophic solemnity." Up until Lucian, it was unusual to combine Comedy with thoughtful Dialogue. As an example, Lucian points out how philosophy was ridiculed in Aristophanes' satire, Clouds, with Socrates reduced to calculating how far a flea can jump in one leap. Clouds symbolize philosophical hot air in that play.

Erasmus begins In Praise of Folly with a short poem, On the Argument and Design of the Following Oration which closes with:

"So here,

Though Folly speaker be, and argument,

Wit guides the tongue, wisdom's the lecture."

He starts the oration proper demonstrating, why humor? In a ridiculous costume and speaking as Folly:

"HOW slightly soever I am esteemed in the common vogue of the world, (for I well know how disingenuously Folly is decried in the world, even by those who are the greatest Fools) yet it is from my influence alone that the whole universe receives her mirth and jollity: of which this may be urged as a convincing argument, in that as soon as I appeared to speak before this numerous assembly all their countenances were gilded over with a lively sparkling pleasantness: you soon welcomed me with so encouraging a look, you spurred me on with so cheerful a hum, that truly in all appearance, you seem now flushed with a good dose of reviving nectar, when as just before you sate drowsy and melancholy, as if you lately come out of some hermit's cell."*

* This vivifying life-force, the reviving nectar, exemplifies what Gilles Deleuze refers to as humorous nonsense making a donation of sense in his magnum opus, The Logic of Sense.

Erasmus was a close friend of Sir Thomas More, known for his book Utopia, a term he coined. Both writers translated different works of Lucian into Latin. The Latin title of In Praise of Folly, Moraie Encomium puns off of his friend's name: it can be translated as In Praise of More. Moria, in Greek, translates to Folly. Puns run throughout In Praise of Folly. Like fart jokes, Gargantua and Pantagruel multiply puns wherever possible. A great thing about this edition is that M.A. Screech notes which puns in French don't come through in translation.

Erasmus loved and collected proverbs, over 4000 of them, which he also commented upon; some are still in current use like: "in the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king." He published them under the title Adagia - adages. One or another of these adages, sometimes several at a time, get referenced by Rabelais in nearly every chapter.

Both Rabelais and Erasmus were ordained as Catholic clergy and both eventually got excused from having to perform their priestly duties to pursue scholarly activities which in Rabelais' case also involved becoming a Doctor of Medicine. They were known as lay priests. Rabelais had also joined both the Benedictine and Franciscan monastic orders. Religious upheaval was in the forefront during their era. The Protestant Reformation began in 1517 c.e., less than twenty years before the first edition of Pantagruel. Both these scholars skewered the Papacy, monastic life and other aspects of The Church while avoiding taking sides in the religious schism of their times.

Contemporary Influence

The enduring effect of Rabelais on entertainment culture, even in small ways, goes largely unnoticed these days. How many fans who have seen Pink Floyd play live post-Animals album realize that the flying pig at their concerts appeared in the third book of Pantagruel? A satire on semiotics, two characters communicating nonverbally through ridiculous signs and gestures happens twice in the Pantagruelian adventures. A skit riffing off the same premise would turn up some 400 years later in an episode of Monty Python and the Flying Circus called Michael Ellis. This episode strongly influenced writer Robert Anton Wilson as I document here. Studies exist looking at the influence of Rabelais upon Monty Python. Someone writing as Dr. Karma calls Rabelais the father of modern sketch comedy in the piece The Quintessence of Rabelaisian Pythonesque.

The humor in G & P for the most part, appears very low-brow, often scatalogical. As a medical Doctor, Rabelais became fascinated and intrigued by every aspect of the body and all its working parts. In Rabelais and His World, Russian philosopher Mikhail Bakhtin formulates two interconnected concepts, literary modes he calls Carnival and the Grotesque Realism. The former has developed "an entire language of symbolic concretely sensuous forms" that challenge dominant cultural assumptions through humor and nonsense. He defines the latter as pulling down all that is noble and ideal to the material level. Pointing out, for instance, how Rabelais metaphorically employed various functions of human anatomy to illustrate political conflict. Bakhtin begins his study with a very interesting quote from Alexander Herzen: "It would be extremely interesting to write the history of laughter."

From his very first album, Freakout, musician and composer Frank Zappa showed a distinctly Rabelasian bent for combining bawdy, often sexually explicit, humor with social satire. This risque sensibility runs throughout Zappa's oeuvre. Some prime examples come to mind: "Dinah Moe Hum" and "Camarillo Brillo" from the Over-Nite Sensation album, the" Don't You Eat the Yellow Snow Suite" and "Cosmik Debris" from Apostrophe, the film 200 Motels, "Why Does It Hurt When I Pee", "Crew Slut" and "Catholic Girls" from Joe's Garage to name just a few.

In a 2008 thesis for her Master of Arts degree titled Frank Zappa and Mikhail Bakhtin: Rabelais's Carnival Made Contemporary, Sarah Hill Antinora calls "Joe's Garage: Acts I, II, and III, a carnivalesque attack on organized religion, the Church of Scientology, rock and roll's obsession with groupies, and, above all, censorship." Pulling an anecdote from an interview of Zappa by David Fricke in Rolling Stone magazine, Antinora demonstrates his musical comedy:

"Just as many of the carnivalesque writers did before him, Zappa often mocks with love. For example, he used to play Led Zeppelin's "Stairway to Heaven" note for note, until the guitar solo. His complete brass section performed the guitar solo instead."

Gail and Frank Zappa

Zappa employed Pauline Butcher as his platonic, live-in secretary for four years in the late '60s/early '70s. Along with his family, Zappa lived in a large log cabin in Laurel Canyon, LA, formerly owned by cowboy star Tom Mix. Seven other people lived there along with Frank's then family of four. It wasn't uncommon for rock star royalty to drop in and pay him a visit. Butcher recounts how Robert Plant gave his wife Gail a book by Aleister Crowley on "the otherness of life." The book made its way to Frank. "I think he was strongly influenced by Aleister Crowley. I think he got quite a few ideas from Aleister Crowley's book." (Quoted from a You Tube video in which Butcher was asked why Zappa didn't read newspapers or pay attention to the news.) Aleister Crowley has been more influenced by Rabelais than anyone else except, possibly, James Joyce. More on that ahead.

Hermeticism

Among the arts and sciences which it is affirmed Hermes revealed to mankind were medicine, chemistry, law, art, music, astrology, rhetoric, magic, philosophy, geography, mathematics (especially geometry), anatomy and oratory. Orpheus was similarly acclaimed by the Greeks.

– Manly P. Hall, The Secret Teachings of All Ages

Encounters with all these fields of learning occur in Gargantua & Pantagruel though often subject to the ridicule of parody or satire. Rabelais provides a broad reckoning of the knowledge of his time and didn't appear at all shy with giving an opinion except where it could get him in trouble. Contemporary authors that have attempted an encyclopedic scope of all known knowledge include James Joyce with Finnegans Wake and Ezra Pound's The Cantos. Robert Anton Wilson had ambitions to write his own epic exploration to be called Tale of the Tribe. In its five volumes, Gargantua & Pantagruel portrays a Renaissance tale of the tribe.

The strict definition of Hermetic thought adheres to those writings bearing the authorship Hermes Trismegistus. A much broader definition is adequately summed up in the full title to Hall's opus quoted above:

An Encyclopedic Outline of

Masonic, Hermetic, Qabbalistic, and Rosicrucian Symbolical Philosophy

Being an Interpretation of the

Secret Teachings concealed within the Rituals, Allegories

and Mysteries of All Ages

Hermetic also indicates a tightly sealed container, as in hermetically sealed. This metaphorically applies to Hermetic philosophy as many of the symbols or allegories don't easily give up their knowledge. The symbolism acts as a sealed container holding information or wisdom inaccessible to the profane. They need to be unlocked before their secrets get revealed in gnostic apprehension. Hence the term "occult," meaning hidden, gets accurately applied to Hermetic thought. Rather than anything macabre or scary, garish or ghoulish, occult simply means hidden.

Rabelais immediately lets us know he intends a Hermetic transmission. In the second paragraph from "The Prologue of the Author" to the first book, he implores the reader to drop all his daily tasks to learn his novel by heart, in case printing presses should fail so it can be passed on to their descendants as a "religious cabbala." Those two words don't appear in the first edition, circa 1531 but do turn up in the definitive edition of 1542 which include a number of revisions and variations he added, many of which were done to avoid the (sometimes fatal) wrath of the Authorities. It seems possible he added the "religious cabbala" description to clue people in to the esoteric side found therein. Cabbala would explain his odd and apparently deliberate use of long, strangely specific numbers. "The Prologue" starts by addressing "Knights most shining and chivalrous ..."

Pantagruel is a giant coming from a long line of giants. Tales of giants were popular then. His father is Gargantua, a name Rabelais picked up from an earlier folk tale by an anonymous author called the Great and Inestimable Chronicles of the Enormous Giant Gargantua. He tells us the meaning of Pantagruel – Pan in Greek means all; gruel means thirst, hence all thirst or always thirsty. It's suggested Rabelais named him that because he wrote it at the end of a four year drought in Europe. In the book, he writes that "his father imposed that name on him ... wishing to signify that at the hour of his nativity all the world was athirst, and foreseeing in a spirit of prophecy that he would one day be the Ruler of the Thirsty-ones." This is immediately followed by another sign: when his mother was giving birth, before he came out of the womb "there first sallied forth from her belly sixty-eight muleteers, each leading by the halter a mule laden with salt; after which there came nine dromedaries laden with smoked bacon and ox-tongues, seven camels with eels, and then five-and-twenty wagons with leeks, garlic, chibols and onions." All things that will drum up a great thirst.

We find Cabbala in the title of the first book:

PANTAGRUEL

The horrifying and dreadful

DEEDS AND PROWESSES

of the most famous

PANTAGRUEL

KING OF THE DIPSODES,

Son of the Giant Gargantua.

Newly composed by Maître Alcofribas Nasier

Dipsodes means thirsty. Maître translates as master. Alcofribas Nasier is an anagram of Francois Rabelais. The initials of the author's name as presented here spells MAN. This aligns with the Tale of the Tribe aspect of this work. Looking at the pseudoynm he chose: in the Bible, "Al" represents God. "Nasier" is close to the Arabic name Nasir which means friend or supporter.

Speaking on the issue of Rabelais' attitude toward free-will, translator M.A. Screech writes in his Introduction: In Pantagruel (following the Latin Vulgate) men must be 'God's helpers'. By the time of the Fourth Book, following the original Greek, men must be God's co-operators... The technical name for the doctrine of Rabelais is synergism ('working together').

Cabbalists have a penchant for all kinds of puns, wordplay and looking at things in reverse. Seen this way, Pantagruel means both always thirsty and a thirst for All. "Drink" becomes a watchword throughout the novels, as if a central sacrament; what they drink, what quenches their thirst is wine. However enthusiastic any of the characters become about the product of the vine, it never seems to get consumed in excess, we never find a celebration of inebriation or drunkenness. Wine, of course, symbolizes intoxication of the innermost, intoxication of spirit, as in the blood of Christ. In the Fourth Book, Rabelais uses the symbol of a winged Bacchus borrowed from the 2nd Century Description of Greece by Pausanius to represent spiritual intoxication. This sign caught on to become included in many Renaissance emblems.

Hermes Trismegistus

This legendary Egyptian figure, who most likely didn't literally exist as a single individual, gets directly mentioned by our author multiple times. But then again, it seems every ancient learned character imaginable gets name checked by Rabelais, whether in praise or criticism, to make most erudite his raunchy tale of the tribe.

A large part of the Third Book concerns Panurge trying to decide if he should get married or not. Getting cuckolded (cheated on) is his biggest fear. The character of Panurge serves as a foil to Pantagruel; it's his earthly, more human and base side. If you think of Pantagruel in the position of Thoth – the Egyptian God who brought writing and magic to humanity, cognate with Hermes, then Panurge would be the Ape of Thoth – the animal aspect.

The insight that humans can develop abilities, visions and empathies going far beyond ordinary capacity lies at the heart of Hermetic thought. Among other things, a hermetic transmission intends to show through metaphor, allegory and directly, how to go about unlocking hidden potentials in the human biological machine. Gargantua and Pantagruel are giants and come from a long line of giants: allegorical for expanded human potential. Not only are they giants, they're shape-shifting giants, their size varies in different situations.

The adages, jokes, proverbs, puns, fables, allegories, etc. injected into the satire communicate a multi-level didactic course of learning in Pantagruel. As mentioned above, the nonsense makes a donation to the sense of the instruction. Aleister Crowley received this so well that he made salient parts of it a cornerstone of his School. There's an excellent section in Book 1 Ch. 8 where Gargantua writes a letter on how he wants his son to be educated. He is to develop his capabilities and knowledge to the max. He tells him to learn multiple languages, Greek, Latin, Hebrew, Chaldean. "I want you to learn all of the beautiful Civil Texts by heart and compare them to moral philosophy." ..."Then frequent the books of the ancient medical writers, Greek, Arabic and Latin, without despising the Talmudists or the Cabbalists; and by frequent dissections acquire a taste of that other world which is Man." Along with much more in the curriculum.

The Abbey of Thélème and Aleister Crowley

After a long, eventually victorious war that takes up much of Book Two, Gargantua rewards those who fought beside him with land and riches. That won't do for the heroic Frere Jean des Entommeures aka the Monk. Gargantua offers to make him Abbot of one or another or both of two distinguish Abbeys but the Monk turns him down and requests that he be allowed to establish his own abbey to his own devising, contrary to all others. The last six chapters of Gargantua concern the building of the Abbey of the Thélèmites and how it's to be run. It's Rabelais' ideal, utopian formulation of a Monastery.

The Cabbalistic numerology of its financing and construction appears obvious. Six and multiples of six play a prominent role. The building is to be hexagonal and its to be six stories high. Each angle has a solid round tower measuring sixty paces in diameter. The specificity of the financing suggests numerology. I'm amused that Rabelais includes how the budget is to be balanced. The initial outlay is: "twenty-seven hundred thousand, eight hundred and thirty-one Agnus-dei in ready coin" supplemented with sixteen hundred and sixty-nine thousand Sun-crowns and as many golden Pleiades raised from tolls on the river Dive" until its completed. A perpetual annual endowment for maintenance and upkeep comes to twenty-three hundred and sixty-nine thousand, five hundred and fourteen rose nobles derived from ground rent. Both men and women are equally welcome in this utopian religious order though they abide in separate living quarters. "In each of the ante-chambers stood a crystal looking-glass, framed in fine gold and surrounded by pearls; it was large enough to give a true reflection of the whole person."

The Abbey of Thélème

Perhaps the most controversial, misunderstood and enduring legacy is the one rule of the Abbey translated either as 'Do what thou wilt' or 'Do what you want' depending on which interpretation you read. Examined closely, these interpretations contradict each other. Aleister Crowley and M.A. Screech interpret it as Do what thou wilt. Many choose 'Do what you want' to excuse libertine debauchery. 'Do what thou wilt' appears much more aligned with Pantagruelian philosophy, as I read it. To start, Thélème, or Thelema as Crowley later spelled it, is a Greek word meaning Will therefore it seems the one rule would have more to do with Will than with Want. This chapter (55) begins: "Their whole life was ordered not by laws, rules and regulations but according to their volition and free-will." Rather than providing a license for immorality, Rabelais explains:

Do what thou wilt because people who are free, well-bred, well taught and conversant with honorable company have by nature an instinct – a goad – which always pricks them to virtuous acts and withdraws them from vice. The call it Honor. In a note, Screech points out that Rabelais' definition of honor matches that of a theological concept called synderesis - the guiding force of conscience. This force can be cultivated and strengthened. In the story, the freedom and liberty given by 'Do what thou wilt' results in the Thélèmites all trying to please each other.

Aleister Crowley felt that Rabelais forecast a new aeon of Life, Love, Liberty, Laughter and Light some 370 years ahead of time. Crowley endeavored to actualize what Rabelais had imagined. He set up his own Abbey of Thelema in Cefalu, Sicily to put his principles into practice. As he saw it, these principles came from outside ordinary humanity. The man Crowley did not write, but rather received the Law of Thelema; it was given to him for humankind by an outside source. As the story goes, a "praeter" (beyond) human Intelligence named Aiwass dictated the the Law of Thelema to him in what became known as The Book of the Law. Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law. In the 16th century, M.A.N. (Maitré Alcofrybas Nasier) had prophesied its own next step.

Aleister Crowley

Crowley analyzes and comments upon Rabelais' prophecy in the article, The Antecedents of Thelema reprinted in The Revival of Magick. It's remarkable that a force starting out virtually, as an idea in a piece of literature, becomes actualized into the world. Crowley found other prophetic synchronicities in Gargantua; he found his name and magickal motto there. The final chapter (56) is called "An enigma uncovered amongst the foundations of the Abbey of the Thélèmites." This enigma appears as a long, apocalyptic visionary poem by the Court poet Mellin de Saint-Gelais (a real person) Rabelais tacked in there supplemented with his own intro and outro. It concludes:

Then we shall all with certain knowledge see

The good and fruit brought forth from patience' tree:

To whom, before, most suffering did grieve

Shall be allotted most, shall most receive

Such was the promise. How must we revere

Him unto the End does persevere.

Crowley's first motto, his name, in the Golden Dawn, Perdurabo, means 'I will endure unto the end.'

Crowley received the Book of the Law ("shall most receive"). This looks like a prediction, to me.

The Monk, head of the Abbey of Thélème, asks Gargantua what he thinks this engimatic poem means and gets the answer: "divine Truth." The Monk disagrees, he sees it as a description of a tennis-match. "The end means that, after such travails, they go off for a meal! And be of good cheer!"

The Roman Catholic Church looms large in G & P. Both Rabelais and Crowley knew the Bible inside out and used quotations from it to suit their own purpose. Both also sharply criticized The Church and its bureaucracy though it held much more danger to do so for Rabelais therefore he appears more guarded; guarded, but far from silent in his criticism. As we shall see, Thelema wasn't the only thing Crowley inherited from Rabelais.

Another obvious connecting link between the two is humor, both writers were extremely funny. It's not always clear when they intend to be serious or when a serious point lurks behind a joke, or when it seems pure, nonsensical farce. Robert Anton Wilson calls Crowley the funniest mystic he knows.

The Final Oracle

"Do you have gullets so daubed, paved and enamelled

that you did not recognize the savor of the bouquet of this deifying liquor?"

As the story of Pantagruel and friends continues, it increasingly incorporates mythology into the hermetic signal. Most scholars agree that the posthumously published Fifth Book was by Rabelais in name only. It seems one or more Adepts saw the underlying hermeticism in the first four books and not only took up this line of thought, but brought it forward making it blatantly obvious. The writing has as much erudite reference and imitates the voice of Rabelais well, but perhaps with a little less subtle wit in the humor. However, the Alchemy, Magic and Cabbala loudly states right off the top "Here I Am!" in the Prologue to the Fifth Book ("I will wait upon the masons, boil up the pot for the masons and, since I cannot be their comrade, they will have me as a listener – I mean an indefatigable listener – to their most excellent writings.") proceeding to a slowly rising crescendo that climaxes with an archetypal journey down through the Underworld leading to an encounter with the final oracle, the oracle of the bottle.

Panurge's question of whether to marry or not eventually sends the gang to the oracle of La Bouteille on a distant island. Chapters 33 - 47 of Book 5 concerns their adventure when they get to that island. I consider this essential reading for students of Thelema; the chapters are short. We discover the bottle is "trismegistical." The High Priestess Bacbuc brings Panurge to the bottle telling him to listen to it for a word. She does a ritual to bring forth the Word. Panurge hears "a sound such as is made by bees when they are born from a young ox duly slaughtered ...

Whereupon was heard this Word: Trinck.

'Might of God!' exclaimed Panurge. She has split – to tell no lie, cracked! Thus in our lands speak crystal bottles when they burst by the fire.'" Trinck is a German command: "Drink!" The Word of the final oracle is Drink!, a main theme of Pantagruel (thirsty for All.) German is used for the onomatopoeic sound of a bottle cracking, and perhaps also for the cabbalistic significance of the letters.

As mentioned above, the great majority of chapters in Gargantua and Pantagruel refer to one or several adages by Erasmus whose first book, In Praise of Folly, he wrote to communicate Wisdom. Aleister Crowley composed a lengthy epistle to his magical son called Liber Aleph vel CXI, The Book of Wisdom or Folly. It comprises 208 short, adage-like chapters of a page, or often less. The last one is: On the Final Oracle. It concludes: "I cry aloud My Word, as it was given unto Man by thine Uncle Alcofribas Nasier, the Oracle of the Bottle of BACBUC, and this word is TRINC." Crowley then changes it to TRINU, saying that was the ancient spelling, to make it add up to 666. As he testified in Court: "'The Beast 666' only means 'sunlight'. You can call me 'Little Sunshine'." It's a solar number as 6 = Tiphareth. 6 x 6 = 36. Adding the numbers 1 - 36 = 666. This agrees with the Cabbala in the story where Trink is called "that Word of beauty." Liber Aleph enumerates as 111. 111 x 6 = 666.

Crowley also used TRINC as an adage for The Chariot tarot card in the 1925 publication, The Heart of the Master. He used this adage again in The Book of Thoth, one of the last books he wrote:

VII

The issue of the Vulture, Two-in-One, conveyed;

This is the Chariot of Power

TRINC: the last oracle.

It's outside the scope of this essay to unpack all the Qabalah here, it seems central to Thelemic magick. The chariot carries the Holy Grail. Suffice to comment briefly from The Book of Thoth: The Holy Grail in this card is described as: " . . . of pure amethyst, of the color of Jupiter, but its shape suggests the full moon and the Great Sea of Binah.

In the center is radiant blood; the spiritual life is inferred; light in the darkness."

The Chariot Thoth Tarot

The oracular bottle at the end of Gargantua and Pantagruel is the Holy Grail. As noted, it's trismegistical – thrice greatest – connecting it to Binah, the Great Mother archetype, through key number three.

James Joyce

French writer Valery Labaud called Joyce's novel Ulysses the vastest and most human work written in Europe since Rabelais. (Joyce, Selected Letters). Ulysses shocked and scandalized readers when it came out for its frank portrayal of human bodily functions. Both Joyce and Rabelais examine the human body, its parts and functions, sexual or otherwise in great detail sometimes going deep into its anatomy. Rabelais, after all, was a medical Doctor.

Mythology informed both their works against the ever present background of The Church. Though set in modern times, Joyce modeled Ulysses after The Odyssey, the ancient Greek epic poem by Homer. Similarly, Rabelais has his adventurers sail in unknown lands in the last two books encountering many different unusual, fantastic, inhabitants of strange islands.

The constant wordplay with the aim of packing as many different meanings as possible into any particular word or phrase runs through Gargantua and Pantagruel but is taken several levels beyond by Joyce, particularly in Finnegans Wake. Rabelais experiments with portmanteau words and punning homophones – words or phrases that sound the same but have different meanings: "'By Holy Goosequim!' exclaimed Pantagruel, 'since the last rains came you have developed into a great fill-up-it, Sir – I mean philosopher!'" Later on we have: "'We are lost, all of us. O that now, to kill him, there were here some valiant Perseus.'

'Pursue us: then pierced by me!' Pantagruel replied"

The sounds of the words must be heard to get the puns. Joyce does this so much in Finnegans Wake that it often reads like its own language. Sounding out the words seems the only way to extract some sense from it. This is a form of Cabbala. Cabbala means 'to receive'.

James Joyce

Joyce also inherited Rabelais' penchant for making lists and cataloging things. Both take it to absurdly humorous lengths at times. They both use satire and parody to challenge conventions; they both saw value in learning as many languages as possible. They were both experimental writers. Joyce famously tried different narrative techniques in Ulysses. Rabelais does the same but not to the same extent. Joyce had upwards of three hundred and fifty years more material at his disposal. He had Shakespeare, Jonathon Swift and Laurence Sterne to draw upon. All three show a marked influence by Francois Rabelais.

On the first page, Joyce alludes to the male protagonist of Finnegans Wake, Humphrey Chimpden Earwicker, as a sleeping giant in repose under the landscape of Ireland. The giant theme comes up again on page 6: "And the all gianed in with the shout-most shoviality. Agog and Magog and the round of them agrog." Remember, Joyce uses the sound of words to suggest puns. Therefore, "gianed" suggests gianted; all = Pan; "shoviality" suggests joviality; "shout-most shoviality" implying the physical, slapstick, sometimes cruel humor found in G & P. Agog and Magog connects with a legendary British giant, Gogmagogg, which later got corrupted into two giants, Gog and Magog; "agrog" can refer to an alcoholic beverage recalling the Pantagruelian enthusiasm (agog also = enthusiastic, or excited eagerness) for drinking wine.

Joyce claimed to have not read Rabelais, a little digging proves otherwise. The Joyce scholar John Kidd even tracked down Joyce's copy of Gargantua and Pantagruel which was in the original French. Polyglotism in Rabelais and Finnegans Wake by Jacob Korg is one of many papers looking at approaches and techniques Joyce likely picked up from Pantagruel.

The Nexus of Crowley and Joyce

Both writer/mages borrowed significantly from Rabelais, albeit in different ways. Crowley was very explicit about it, Joyce, more implicit. Did the two know each other's work? We have explicit evidence Crowley read Joyce, he published a review in a magazine calling him a genius. The whole, short review appears in the Nocturnal Revelries blog here. In an excellent biography of Crowley, Perdurabo, by Richard Kaczynski, the author states categorically that Joyce never read Crowley. He doesn't cite how he knows this; my guess is that he made an inference based on a published list of books in Joyce's library that contained nothing penned by Crowley. It sounds disingenuous to suggest that Joyce didn't know of Uncle Al and his philosophy. Both were well acquainted with W.B. Yeats, Crowley even knew Yeats' father. Yeats disapproved of Crowley, but admired Joyce and did what he could to help get him established in the literary world. Later, Yeats invited Joyce to join the Irish Academy. It seems Joyce and Yeats corresponded not infrequently over the years; perhaps the subject of Crowley never came up? Maybe so, but Joyce did read newspapers; Crowley appeared as a subject/target in multiple, salacious newspaper articles particularly in the early 1920s when the alleged scandals of his Abbey of Thelema got splashed all over the tabloids. Those articles included glosses of Thelemic ideology, though highly, unfavorably biased. Circumstantial evidence aside, we find a direct indication Joyce knew Crowley because he clearly invokes him in Finnegans Wake on page 105:

From Abbeygate to Crowalley

Through a Lift in the Lude, Smocks for Their Graces and

Me Aunt for them Clodshopper, How to Pull a Good Horuscoup

even when Oldsire is Dead to the World, ...

"Abbeygate" seems a clear reference to Rabelais connecting with Gargantua chapter 52, "The Inscription set above the main Gate of Thélème." More on that below. The first line obviously alludes to the trajectory of the Abbey of Thelema; the word "all" appears in the Crowley allusion consonant with the theme of Pan. "Lude" suggests the lewd humor Rabelais was known for, it also translates as 'play" from Latin; this one word indicates playful lewdness or lewd playfulness. "Lift in the Lude" implies wisdom in the folly; "Smocks for Their Graces" = mocking their Graces - satirizing Papal and Church establishment authority. "Horuscope" brings us back to Crowley who was an expert astrologer (horoscope - he was the ghostwriter for popular American astrologer Evangeline Adams). More pertinent is the inclusion of the Egyptian god Horus in the portmanteau word. Crowley defined his mission as announcing and helping make manifest the new aeon of Horus, a central tenet of Thelema.

A contemporary post-Rabelasian nexus point of James Joyce and Aleister Crowley is found in various books and talks by Robert Anton Wilson. RAW became deeply immersed in both their work and often compared the two, sometimes mashing them together as, for instance, in Masks of the Illuminati.

Robert Anton Wilson

Striking correlations between Rabelais and Robert Anton Wilson are easily noticed. Both endeavored to write a Tale of the Tribe. Both present a didactic, Hermetic transmission couched in humor, satire, parody, and playfulness. Wilson wrote that all his novels and some of his non-fiction books were composed in the Hermetic style; he put a great deal of stock in 'Do what thou wilt'. One clear point of reference in common: the ancient Greek mystic and philosopher, Pythagoras and his school. Pythagoras and different aspects of his system – numerology, geometry, even his dietary habits – turn up frequently in Gargantua and Pantagruel. Wilson outlines a general gloss of Pythagoras in Cosmic Trigger I that sounds very much like his own approach:

"... his work was the first attempt in history to unify science, mathematics, art and mysticism into one comprehensible system and as such is still influential. Leary, Crowley and Buckminster Fuller have all described themselves as modern Pythagoreans."

At one point Wilson became obsessed with Sirius, the Dog Star, going so far as to suspect he might be in telepathic contact with Higher Intelligence coming from there. Pantagruel was born when the Dog Star bays at the Sun – the dog days of July and early August. Like James Joyce and Aleister Crowley, both Rabelais and Wilson appeared to have prophesied future events in their writings.

Robert Anton Wilson

Another tangential connection with Rabelais comes with Wilson's character Frank Dashwood, the head of Orgasm Research in the Schrödinger's Cat trilogy. The character's name comes from the 18th century politician and rake, Sir Francis Dashwood, who is mistakenly said to have started one of the most notorious Hell-Fire clubs that came and went in England and Ireland during that era. The original Hell-Fire club was started a little before Dashwood's time possibly by Philip Wharton, the history is unclear. Members were alleged to be atheist blasphemers who mocked the Church by engaging in Satanic rituals and sexual debauchery; so the story goes, no one really knows exactly what went on. The press conflated Dashwood's equally anarchistic, libertine club, the Monks of Medmenham Abbey, aka the Order of the Friars of St. Francis of Wycombe, with the Hell-Fire Club.

Dashwood is said to have put the one rule of the Abbey of Thélème, 'Do what thou wilt' above the door to his Abbey. It had been a real medieval monastery at one time, founded in the 12th century. Dashwood had it fixed it up and formed a club for the elites of his day entertaining notables like Benjamin Franklin and many prominent British politicians. During the restoration of Medmenham, workers found an old Madonna statue. Dashwood had it spruced up and placed front and center in the courtyard. RAW calls Medmenham Abbey, the "Abbey of St. Francis" in his historical novel, The Widow's Son but notes that the press more accurately called it "the Hell Fire Club – a kind of society of freethinkers and atheists who took perverse pleasure in burlesquing the sacraments of Christianity." He then references a possibly apocryphal story concerning the Earl of Sandwich getting bitten by an orangutan during a Black Mass there. Skeptics suggest that it was really the local Anglican Bishop dressed up in an orangutan suit.

Last, but not least: Rabelais writes a long list of useless and preposterous activities of one outrageous character where it is said: "if he dreamt: it was of flying phalluses scrambling up walls." A flying phallus serves as a recurring motif in Schrödinger's Cat.

Introducing Ms. God – the Divine Feminine

More common ground (or sky) shared by James Joyce and Aleister Crowley involves placing the archetype of the Great Mother centerstage in their works. Joyce does so with the character Anna Livia Plurabelle in Finnegans Wake; before that, with a perspective from deep inside a woman's consciousness – Molly Bloom in Ulysses. After reading the latter, renowned psychoanalyst and hermetic philosopher Carl Jung quipped: "only the devil's grandmother knows so much about the real psychology of a woman. I didn't." Crowley's sacred text, The Book of the Law, begins with "[t]he manifestation of Nuit." Nuit originates from the ancient Egyptian sky goddess, Crowley promotes her to a star Goddess. She represents the Divine Feminine at its most expansive and all encompassing, among many other things. She invites humanity to join her:

Now, therefore, I am known to ye by my name Nuit . . . Since I am Infinite Space, and the Infinite Stars thereof, do ye also thus. - Al:I:22

Relief of Nuit from the Dendera Temple, Egypt

Crowley's gig centered upon announcing the aeon of Horus. He said the formula of this aeon is the tarot card, The Chariot. The charioteer is built into the chariot. "His only function is to bear the Holy Grail." The Holy Grail carries the pure essence of the Divine Feminine.

Joyce seems to have understood this about Crowley, while also pointing to another source for introducing the feminine into contemporary spirituality, Francois Rabelais. I infer this because the above quote from Finnegans Wake that alludes to both Rabelais and Crowley appears in the section that introduces Anna Livia Plurabelle. This glorious, Nuit-like introduction is worth quoting:

In the name of Annah the Allmaziful, the Everliving, the Bringer of Plurabilities, haloed be her eve, her singtime sung, her rill be run, unhemmed as it is uneven!

Her untitled mamafesta memorialising the Mosthighest has gone by many names at disjointed times.

The last line seems one of Joyce's paradoxes or jokes because although this mamafesta (manifesto/mama festival/mama feast) may be untitled, its many names (which aren't titles apparently) goes on for about three pages. One of those names is the above quote that starts: "From Abbeygate to Crowalley . . ."

I contend that Rabelais was an early disseminator for introducing the sacred feminine principle into Western thought. Let's begin in the middle of Gargantua and Pantagruel then make our way forward and backward to each end. We'll start with the Joyce reference – Abbeygate. It's been incorrectly stated that the words 'Do what thou wilt' were inscribed over the entrance gate to the Abbey of Thélème. 'Do what thou wilt' was the only rule of the Abbey. The inscription over the gate goes on for about three pages and describes the kind of people welcome to come inside and those who are not. Nothing is said about gender until the penultimate stanza:

Enter herein you dames of good descent,

Come with frank minds and with us find true joy:

Beauteous Flowers, with faces Heaven-bent,

Upright and pure, on Wisdom all intent;

In the notes preceding the second chapter of Book 1, "On the Nativity of the Most-Redoubtable Pantagruel," M. A. Screech informs us that along with the landscape of the Old Testament, the story is also set in a comic version of Thomas More's Utopia which had been out for less than twenty years at that point and only available to Latin readers. Pantagruel's mother, Badebec, was the daughter of the King of Amaurotes in Utopia. Unfortunately, Badebec dies giving birth to Pantagruel. Gargantua is torn between weeping for the loss of his wife or laughing for joy at the birth of his son. This dialectic between the highest and the lowest, or between comedy and tragedy informs the whole book.

I postulate that Pantagruel's mother dying upon childbirth provides a metaphor for the death of the role of Female intelligence in the birth of The Church. In the Fourth Book, Rabelais makes the Greek god Pan correspond with Christ; Pantagruel's birth thus alludes to the birth of Christ and the resulting establishment of the Church without the Mother. Gargantua's loss echoes the world's loss:

'Should I weep?' he asked. 'Yes, Why? Because my good wife is dead, who was the best this and the best that in all the world . . . Her loss to me is immeasurable. O God of mine! What have I done that you should punish me so? Why didn't you send death to me rather than her? To live without her is for me but to languish. . . Alas, my poor Pantagruel: you have lost a good mother, your gentle nurse, your most beloved lady! Ha, false Death, how malevolent, how cruel you are, to take from me her who, as of right, deserves immortality.' (emphasis added)

Rabelais certainly didn't appear to be a feminist, none of his principle characters are women. He also seems no misogynist.

Pantagruel takes Panurge to various oracles attempting to divine the answer to the latter's matrimonial question. Pantagruel explains how each oracle works. At the oracle of dream interpretation he says: the soul often foresees what is to come, and then goes on to explain. Quite out of the norm for his time, Rabelais represents the soul as female. In that era, following Plato, the soul was thought to be genderless. As the body sleeps, she – the Soul – is able to go back to her home in Heaven:

From there, she is granted the signal favor of participating in her primal and divine origin and of contemplating that infinite Sphere whose center is in every place in the universe and whose circumference nowhere: God, that is, by the teachings of Hermes Trismegistus in whom there is no becoming, no transience, no waning, all times being the present; there she discerns things not only past amongst the motions here below but also things to come; she bears them back to her body, and as she expounds them to her friends via her body's organs and senses she is termed prophetic . . .

Many years later, this found its way into Crowley's Book of the Law: "In the sphere I am everywhere the center, as she, the circumference, is nowhere found." - Al:2:3. Crowley conceives this sphere as the union of the archetypal male – Had, the center – with the archetypal female – Nuit, the circumference. Qabalists will note that this appears as the 3rd verse (key 3 = Binah – the Mother) in the 2nd chapter (key 2 = Chokmah the Father).

To reiterate, Cabbala runs throughout this epic adventure. Therefore, it corresponds quite nicely that Rabelais dedicated the Third Book to Marguerite, Queen of Navarre. He had to receive permission to do this, probably from her brother, Francois I King of France. Marguerite became Queen of Navarre through marriage. She had become a patron and protector of Rabelais. She also wrote books; Screech describes her as liberal, platonizing, defender of evangelicals – some frowned upon by her royal brother – and attracted to the mystical teachings of Hermes Trismegistus. Rabelais begins Book 3 with the short dedication:

FRANCOIS RABELAIS

to the Mind

of the

Queen of Navarre

Abstracted Mind, enraptured, true ecstatic,

Who Heaven dost frequent whence thou derivest

(Leaving behind thy host and place domestic,

Harmonious body, which in concord striveth

To heed thine edicts: stranger, it arriveth

Bereft of senses, calm in Apathy)

Deignest thou not to make a lively sortie

From thine abode divine, perpetual,

This Third Book here with thine own eyes to see

Of the joyful deeds of good Pantagruel?

A direct call to the Divine Feminine comes at the end of chapter 53 of the Fourth Book with a pun:

"Deacon!" said Homenaz "Deacon! Beacon! Shine light over here with double lanterns. And girls: bring in the fruit . . . O, good my God, whom I adore yet have never seen, open for us, by special grace – at least in the article of death – the most sacred treasure of Holy Church, our Mother, of which thou art the Protector, Guardian, Custodian, Administrator and Distributor . . ."

When Pantagruel and Panurge receive the advice to seek the oracle of La Dive Bouteille, the plot essentially becomes a quest for the Holy Grail with a variety of situations and adventures along the way, Once on the island, to get to the Holy Grail, they must make the archetypal journey through the Underworld. Their guide is the High Priestess Bacbuc. Note the similarity between her name and Pantagruel's mother, Badebec. William Tindall points out that James Joyce coins the word "baccbuccus" (Finnegans Wake, p. 116) which combines Bacbuc with Bacchus, the Roman god of wine and pleasure who also shows up toward the end of the Fifth Book. Baqbuq is the Hebrew word for flask.

Frank Zappa benefited greatly by by putting one iteration of the Holy Grail, a strong female presence, front and center in his music. One day in the early 80s, Moon Zappa wrote a playful note to her father suggesting they work together on a song so she could spend more time with him. Frank took her up on it and came up with "Valley Girl" featuring 14 year old Moon ad libbing different scenarios in "valley-speak" caricaturing the San Fernando Valley youth culture where she went to school. The song, continuing the long tradition of social satire dating back to Rabelais, took on a life of its own spawning a Valley Girl cottage industry successful to this day. It was also Frank Zappa's only successful commercial hit song and brought in much extra revenue that allowed him to pursue other artistic interests like his experimental orchestral music.

Pantagruelion

Pantagruelion is a plant spoken of with great enthusiasm. It has "so many virtues, so many powers, such perfection and so many wonderful effects." It's basically a cannabis plant so many people believe it concerns the joys of ingesting THC and getting high. However, on the surface at least, the reference is to hemp. Great detail goes into all the things that can be done with hemp which one commentator believes is a metaphor about industriousness in the world. Rabelais specifically says that the female plant, what provides strong THC, "serves no useful purpose." This may or may not be a dodge; I see no indication of a hidden agenda about getting high. He does go into the anti-inflammatory properties made possible by boiling the root and ingesting it, what we now know as CBD, which is derived from the male plant. The male plant only contains trace amounts of THC. The only clue he may be referring to pantagruelion as consciousness altering comes with the ambiguous statement: "By exploiting the virtues of this plant, Pantagruel has put new and painful thoughts into our minds, worse than those stirred by those giant Aloïde." Rabelais then speculates that perhaps the children of Pantagruel will discover another plant with similar powers which will allow humanity to visit the stars. It's easy to think of this plant as psychotropic.

Laughter is the Best Medicine

Rabelais, ever the Cabbalist and Medical Doctor, begins Book 3 with an address to his patron about why he wrote this book:

Most-illustrious Prince: you have already been duly informed how I have been daily solicited, begged and importuned by so many great personages for the sequel to my pantagruelic mythologies, of the grounds that many of the ailing, the sick, the weary or the afflicted have, when they were read to them, beguiled their benighted sufferings, passed their time merrily and found fresh joy and consolation. To whom I normally reply that, as I wrote them for fun, I sought neither glory nor praise of any kind: my concern and intention were simply to provide such little relief as I could to the absent sick-and-suffering as I willingly provide to those who are present with me, seeking help from Art and my care. Occasionally I explain to them at some length how Hippocrates (describing in several places especially in the Sixth Book of the Epidemics, the formation of his doctor-disciple). . .

He frames the whole purpose of his comedy writing in terms of the best way for a doctor to provide for a patient. To illustrate the multiple sides of his writing, he uses the parable of the Emperor's daughter Julia appearing in provocative dress before her displeasing father Octavian Augustus. The next day she's dressed chastely and her father says, that's more like it. She explains that today I dress for the eyes of my father, yesterday for the eyes of my husband. Rabelais compares his writing to a female voice dressing differently, wearing different masks for different occasions. He brings up the Sixth Book of the Epidemics by Hippocrates again for the belief mentioned therein that the doctor's demeanor or "vibe" determines the outcome of the patient's health to a significant degree. He raises the question of whether the patient's health improves or worsens by contemplating the happy or gloomy qualities of the doctor or whether it's due to "the pouring of the doctor's spirits, serene or gloomy, aerial or terrestrial, joyous or melancholic, from the doctor into the person of his patient (as in the opinion of Plato and Averroës) . . . "

It boils down to: everything must aim at one target and tend towards one end, namely to cheer him up without offence to God and never to depress him in any manner whatsoever.

The second option, 'the pouring of the doctor's spirits', sounds like what Sufis call the transfer of baraka. Remember, this metaphor of the doctor/patient relationship gives the rationale of why he wrote Pantagruel. Rabelais is the doctor, the patient is the world. On the following page, he finds a way to cite the Sixth Book of the Epidemics for a third time (666). Of course, the metaphor of literature as a doctor fits very nicely with Gilles Deleuze's notion that literature functions as a cultural diagnostic tool.

Dr. Francois Rabelais

Rabelais' philosophy came to be known as pantagruelism loosely defined by M.A. Screech as "a smiling, charitable and tolerant wisdom which accepts and surmounts misfortune." It has this in common with the Stoics. Pantagruelism might be thought of as a pragmatic approach to Stoic philosophy. Rabelais clarifies a bit more in Book 3:

"I will recognize in all of them a specific form and an individual property which our elders called pantagruelism, by means of which they will never take in bad part anything they know to flow from a good, frank and loyal heart. I have regularly seen them accept good-will as payment and, when attributable to weak resources, be satisfied with it."

Compare this with the metaphor above of a doctor pouring their spirits onto the patient.

Sainte Chapelle

I have commented frequently in the past on the cabbalistic SC letter combination found quite a bit in the literature of Robert Anton Wilson, Thomas Pynchon, Aleister Crowley with additional appearances in James Joyce and Gilles Deleuze. It seems to have something to do with food, particularly divine food known as manna. For example, by Gematria, S + C = 68 (Samekh + Cheth). Crowley's cabbalistically numbered Book of Lies chapter 68 has the title "Manna." Elaboration upon the basis of this motif can be found in Thelema, Deleuze and 68. Some examples appearing in Robert Anton Wilson's oeuvre can be seen in this post on Gematria. I have often wondered where this semiotic coding originated? Perhaps in The Third Book of Pantagruel:

"'I know what you mean!' Frère Jean replied. 'That metaphor has been served up from the cloister cooking-pot . . . For in my days, whenever the monastic fathers got up for their mattins (morning prayers), they, following a certain ancient practice – cabbalistic: not written but passed down from hand to hand – performed certain noteworthy preliminaries before going into church: they shat in their shitteries, pissed in their pisseries, spat in the spitteries, melodiously hacked in the hackeries and raved in the raveries, so as to bring nothing impure into divine service. Which done, they would devoutly proceed to the Saint Chapelle (for that was the name for the monastery's kitchen in their enigmatic jargon) and there devoutly urge that the beef for the breakfast of Our Lord's monastic brethren be put then and there on the fire.

Often they lit the fire under the pot themselves.

I repeat: "Often they lit the fire under the pot themselves."

The real Sainte Chapelle in Paris

Traveling through the Underworld on their way to the oracle of the bottle, the High Priestess Bacbuc takes our heroes to a Temple at the center of which is a most marvelous fountain. The waters of this fountain taste like whatever wine the drinkers choose. After quenching their thirst, Bacbuc asks them what they think. Unsatisfied with their answers, she determines that their palates need cleaning:

And so there were brought in lovely, fat, happy hams, lovely, fat, happy smoked ox-tongues, lovely tasty, salted meats . . . and other such chimney-sweepers of the gullet. At her command we ate until we had to admit that our stomachs had been well and truly scoured clean by a thirst which had quite dreadfully plagued us.

Bacbuc then improvises on the story of Moses providing manna from Heaven when the Israelites were wandering in the desert, as told in Exodus. Only this manna, as Bacbuc tells it, similar to the waters of the fountain, tastes like whatever food you want. She takes them back to the fountain: "Bring your mind to it and drink!"

The waters of the fountain seem to have a life-giving quality to them. The fountain's form, as described, seems prophetic of a life replicating molecule discovered in the 19th century and decoded by Science in the 20th century.

"The outflowing water gushed from that fountain through three pipes and channels made of fine pearls and sited at the apex of three equilateral angles at the tip of the fountain as described above. Those channels projected in the shape of a double helix."

The big discovery/decoding of the life transmitting DNA molecule is its double helix structure. This begat the new science of molecular biology. The monumental importance of this to human progress doesn't need to be said and is yet to be fully known; you could call it a giant discovery. I don't know if these Sherlock Homes-like, scientific sleuths, James Watson and Francis Crick, the double helix DNA model formulators, were pantagruelions, but they tapped into something.

Bacbuc, the High Priestess, explains how the double helix form affects the fountain's water:

" . . . it is entirely via the form of that twin spiral which you can see, together with that five-fold fleuron (flower shaped) which vibrates with each internal impulse – as in the case of the vena cava where it enters the right ventricle of the heart – that the waters of this holy fountain filter out, producing a harmony such that it rises to the surface of the sea in your world."

Conclusion

Writing at a time when expressing the wrong thing could easily get you killed or locked up, Rabelais managed to engage in a very broad range of social, political, and ecclesiastical satire and have his audience, including the Establishment, clamoring for more. He took his humor-laced criticism right to the edge and reeled it back. The edition I have shows the revisions he made from the first edition in 1532 to the second, definitive edition published in 1542. He expanded many of the passages, but also changed things, adding ambiguity, to avoid upsetting certain Authorities when the satire got a little too direct.

Rabelais always operates within the mystical dimension of Christianity. He brings in pagan and hermetic wisdom to expand the Judeo-Christian framework from within. For instance, calling KNOW THYSELF (caps in the book) the "Law of Moses" given to the Jews. The very next sentence explains that this law appeared on the temple of Apollo at Delphi. Rabelais seems receptive to the wisdom and understanding at the core of all doctrines. Like Crowley, he selectively quotes many passages from the Bible to support his points. Other times, he'll modify Biblical phrases in his narrative to suit his purposes. He identifies Pan with Christ.

His mentor, Erasmus, expressed this blending well:

Sacred scripture is of course the basic authority for everything; yet I sometimes run across ancient sayings or pagan writings – even the poets – so purely and reverently and admirably expressed that I can't help believing that the author's hearts were moved by some divine power. And perhaps the spirit of Christ is more widespread than we understand, and the company of the saints includes many not on our calendar.

Like many of the works it would later inspire, Gargantua and Pantagruel communicates on many levels simultaneously. It can be read for sheer fun and entertainment; a burlesque carnival approach to this adventure we call life. The fart jokes alone are worth the price of admission. It can be read as a compendium of folktales dispensing the common sense and morals of the day; or as scathing satire on established Institutions couched in humor. Monty Python and Frank Zappa are just two of the many artists who carried on that tradition. Many comedians as well: Lenny Bruce, George Carlin, Richard Pryor and Eddie Izzard to name just a few. Influenced by Thomas More's Utopia, Rabelais expresses a hopeful vision for humanity with an inherent hidden agenda that things can get better. Also hidden, how to go about putting this vision into action.

Receiving the full Hermetic transmission seems incumbent on getting initiated into its mysteries. It appears axiomatic in the Western occult tradition that the only real Initiation is self-Initiation. The transmission is hermetically sealed but it can be unlocked. It presents a challenge for the reader who is also interested in the Great Work of transformation.

I'll end with a quote that exemplifies the inclusion of Hermetic philosophy – the infamous "as above, so below; as below so above" relationship of the microcosm (the individual WoMan) with the macrocosm (Universe) – into Christian symbolism. It also illustrates what G. I. Gurdjieff called "the Law of Reciprocal Maintenance." Lastly, it says in different words Gilles Deluze's statement that sense must be produced.

"For Nature created Man but to lend and to borrow. The harmony of the heavens will not be grander than the harmony of his polity (community).

The intention of the Founder of this microcosm is to maintain therein its soul, whom he has placed within as its host, its life. Now life consists in blood. Blood is the seat of the soul. That is why one single task weighs down upon this microcosm: continually to forge blood. And in that forging all its members are in their proper roles, their hierarchy being such that each borrows from the other, each lends to the other. The material – the substance – proper to be transmuted into blood is supplied by Nature: bread and wine. Within these two are comprehended every kind of food . . ."

Or as The Beatles put it: I get by with a little help from my friends.

29th Series – Good Intentions Are Inevitably Punished

2023-05-27T15:55:00.000-07:00

The 29th Series continues looking at the process of the dynamic genesis. It continues directly from where the 28th Series leaves off speaking of Oedipus as the hero of the surface. The good intentions concerns Oedipus restoring the image of the mother from the depths and evoking the father image of the heights to produce the surface. The surface is where the development of the ego mostly occurs. These intentions inevitably go wrong due to the fragility of the surface. Deleuze references Freud's Beyond the Pleasure Principle chapter 4 for the development of the ego which he says is essential to the bio-psychic theory of surfaces. The whole book is here, scroll down for chapter 4.

There is a look at what is meant by the image of the phallus and castration. Deleuze looks at what is meant by intention which he says is the moral notion par excellence. He compares intention, willed action, with accomplished action. He also looks at what he means by Image which eventually designates action in general or the pure event. Another concept of Freud's, desexualization, is examined. Freud thought this desexualization nourished he death instinct and conditioned thought. Deleuze cites chapter 4 from The Ego and the Id by Freud. Again, the whole book is here, scroll down to chapter 4: Deleuze calls the two aspects of desexualization, sublimation and symbolization.