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From: "John B. Fleming"Subject: HERALD-TEPAPHONE Date: Sun, 24 Nov 1996 15:40:59 -0500 (EST) A Quarterly Publication of IAO Camp, Ordo Templi Orientis Vernal Equinox, 1995 e.v. Volume One, Number One _________________________________________________________________ _Do what thou wilt shall be the Whole of the Law._ _________________________________________________________________ IAO Camp, Ordo Templi Orientis P.O. Box 5793 Bloomington, Indiana 47407 Personnel: The Non-existent Brother R. B., Camp Master Soror Shekinah, Minister of Protocol The Non-existent Sister R. H., Treasurer Frater In Profunda, Minister of Popular Enlightenment and Propaganda Frater W. B., Minister of Magical Formulae Outside Contributors: Frater Melekh ha-Zahab A. Quiller III Adam Weishaupt _________________________________________________________________ The _Herald-Tepaphone_ is the quarterly newsletter of IAO Camp, a duly chartered body of Ordo Templi Orientis. The _HT_ is published on the Equinoxes and Solstices. Subscriptions are $5.00 per issue or $16.00 for one year (4 issues), make checks or money orders payable to _Bowyer_. Membership in IAO Camp and/or O.T.O. is not required to subscribe or to submit material. Text submissions may be sent on paper or on 3.5 in. disk for WordPerfect or Microsoft Word (preferably on Macintosh), illustrations had better be on paper at present. All copyrights reside with the individual authors. The opinions expressed herein are the sole responsibility of the individual authors and do not necessarily reflect those of IAO Camp, the Ordo Templi Orientis, or of anyone else. _________________________________________________________________ In this issue... * From the Propaganda Ministry * King is Dead! * Notes on the History of Liber 365 or; The Bornless Ritual * Combining Orgone Accumulators and Ritual Magick: A Preliminary Report * Mysterium Coniunctionis: Ritual of the 0=2 Formula * Top Ten Rejected Newsletter Titles * Javacrucian Communique * Typhonian Tomes: Being a Guide to the Works of Kenneth Grant * Fax God * Reviews + Wicca: The Ancient Way, Janus-Mithras, Nuit-Hilaria, and Mer-Amun + Have You Been Cursed?, Keith Morgan + Cults That Kill: Probing the Underworld of Occult Crime, Larry Kahaner + High Magic's Aid, Scire (Gerald Gardner) + The Stone and the Elixir, Pensatia (Helen Merrick Bond) + Heeling Your Inner Dog: A Self-Whelp Book, Nicole Gregory and Judith Stone * IAO Camp Calendar of Events _________________________________________________________________ From the Propaganda Ministry Hello and welcome to the first issue of the _Herald-Tepaphone_, the newsletter that brings a whole new meaning to the term _deadline_. We will be coming to you four times a year with news, articles, rituals, rants, reviews, and anything else our jaded and depraved minds can think of. This newsletter is, like it says up there under the title, primarily the vehicle of IAO Camp, however anyone interested is more than welcome to subscribe and/or submit material for publication (in fact, at least one such person has already done so). You do not have to be a member of the Camp, or even of O.T.O., to join in, so please feel free. For our first issue we have an interesting mix of practical and scholarly items to tempt your mental palate. Future issues will feature articles on classical Jewish Qabalah, Finnish Magick, Traditionalist philosophy, more studies of Liber 365, more reviews of Kenneth Grant books, etc., k.t.l., et al, ad nauseam... So climb on board and prepare to enjoy the ride. _________________________________________________________________ King is Dead! We have just received word that Francis Xavier (In-1903-Crowley Received-the-Book-of the-Law) King shuffled off this mortal coil in London last November. While there will doubtless always be superficial writers on occult history who subtly patronize and disparage their subjects while exemplifying sloppy scholarship and somehow become regarded as authorities in the process, at least now we have one less to deal with. If the Gods are kind, this may actually leave room for someone who really does know and respect the subject to get published. _________________________________________________________________ Notes on the History of Liber 365 or; The Bornless Ritual by the Non-existent Brother R. B. A well-known authority on modern ceremonial Magick recently made the astonishing claim that the _Preliminary Invocation_ which appears in the 1904 Crowley-Mathers edition of the _Goetia_ is based on the Golden Dawn paper _Bornless Ritual for the Invocation of the Higher Genius._ This is wildly inaccurate, since the _Bornless Ritual_ published in _The Golden Dawn_ is not only not a G.`.D.`. paper, but is in fact based on the _Preliminary Invocation_, not vice versa. The _Bornless Ritual_ in _The Golden Dawn_ is one of Regardie's _purely personal productions_ and was composed sometime in the latter 1930s. I thought it might be of benefit to the well-known authority mentioned above, and to less renowned scholars in this field, to write up some of my notes on the history of this important ritual. Please bear in mind that these are only notes, part of an ongoing study of the subject, and certainly not my final judgments. The story of our ritual begins sometime around the fourth century of the Vulgar Era, when a Hellenized Egyptian writes it down as part of a _cookbook_ of magical incantations, all of them well-seasoned with barbarous names. In fact, several of the barbarous names employed in our ritual appear in the other incantations. The ritual, in its original form, is an exorcism. This cookbook -- or at least part of it -- ends up in the British Museum and is now known as _Papyrus Londonensis 46_: this is the primary source from which the modern versions of this ceremony are ultimately descended. The story continues with Charles Wycliffe Goodwin's _Fragment of a Graeco-Egyptian Work upon Magic_, which appears in the _Publications of the Cambridge Antiquarian Society_, no 2, in 1852. Goodwin provides a transcription of the Greek text of P. Lond. 46, with a facing-page translation and notes: this secondary source, rather than the manuscript itself, is the basis for the modern redactions of the ritual. In 1899 E. A. W. Budge, the G.`.D.`.'s favorite Egyptologist, publishes his _Egyptian Magic_. Included in this book (a tertiary source, for those who are keeping score) is the opening passage of our ritual, quoted from Goodwin's translation. Some G.`.D.`. initiate -- I presume Mathers himself, though as yet I have no proof of this -- reads Budge's book and is sufficiently impressed by the opening passage to look up the complete text in Goodwin's book: from the text in Goodwin he creates the redaction with which we are primarily concerned, the _Preliminary Invocation of the Goetia_. The earliest references (which I have found so far) to this ritual in its modern form are connected with Crowley's performance of it in the King's Chamber of the Great Pyramid, November 22, 1903. On this occasion he is obliged to read the text, which suggests he is not very familiar with the ritual at this date. Fuller's account of the event refers to the ceremony as _the ritual of the Bornless One_, but Crowley himself nearly always speaks of it as the _Preliminary Invocation of the Goetia_, suggesting that he has always considered the two as linked (and thus further suggesting that he received them together from Mathers?). In 1904, Crowley publishes _Goetia_, including as Preliminary Invocation our ritual, as redacted from Goodwin's text: this is, then, a tertiary source. The great difficulty with this edition is that the Preliminary Invocation is set in Caxton Blackletter, described justly by our well-known authority as _perhaps the most illegible typeface ever devised_; it is very difficult to read, and many letters look just like other letters except under careful scrutiny. The letter _x_, for example, is only distict from the letter _r_ by a tiny flourish at the bottom of the letter, so that if you don't know the intricacies of the typeface, the word _Abrasax_ looks like _Abrasar_. In 1916, the American pirate publisher L. W. DeLaurence produces his unauthorized edition of the _Goetia_. This is merely a reprint of the 1904 edition, with some deletions and a number of errors: i.e., it is a quaternary source. This edition sets the Preliminary Invocation in an easy-to-read typeface, but the typesetter is, unfortunately, not initiated into the mysteries of Caxton Blackletter: where the word _Abrasax_ appears in the 1904 edition, it appears in the 1916 edition as _Abrasar_. There are several other errors, all apparently due to the illegibility of the type in the 1904 edition. In 1921, Crowley writes his personal redaction of the Preliminary Invocation, which he titles _Liber Samekh_. Crowley's version is based on the 1904 _Goetia_, with a few changes which seem to be intentional. This is another quaternary source, and it is published in 1929/1930 as Appendix IV of _Magick in Theory and Practice_. Next, in 1932, Regardie publishes a version of the Preliminary Invocation titling it the _Bornless Invocation_ -- in his book _The Tree of Life_. His redaction is obviously based on the corrupt text of the 1916 _Goetia_, but it also includes a note that seems to echo Crowley's notes to _Samekh_. It is, therefore, a quinary source based on two quaternary sources, and it includes a few new errors of its own. Finally we come to the redaction of the ritual which our well-known authority supposes to be the original. Sometime in the late 1930's, while an Adeptus Minor of the Stella Matutina, Regardie writes a ritual for spiritual development which he calls _Bornless Ritual for the Invocation of the Higher Genius_, based on his own 1932 _Bornless Invocation_. This new version corrects most of the errors unique to the 1932 version, but retains two of them, which makes this a senary source; i.e., it is a text (1941) based on a text (1932) based on a text (1916) based on a text (1904) based on a text (1852) based on the original manuscript (4th century, more or less). Regardie includes this ritual in his 1937 - 40 _Golden Dawn_, as an example of how G.`.D.`. technique can be adapted to a variety of purposes. The attentive reader will already have noticed that I avoid the common name for this ceremony, _the Bornless Ritual_. The reason is that the only one of these many versions which is actually called _Bornless Ritual_ is Regardie's personal adaptation (1937), which is considerably more elaborate than the _Preliminary Invocation_ on which it is based. In other words, _Bornless Ritual_ should not be used as a generic term for all versions of this ceremony, because it is properly applied to only one version (which is, moreover, the least typical of all the modern versions). A more acceptable -- if less common -- name is _Liber 365_, the official classification of the _Preliminary Invocation of the Goetia_. These are, let me repeat, only rough notes. Further details, possible criticisms and my responses, evidence which might contradict my assumption that Mathers created our modern redaction of the ritual, comparisons of the various versions from 1852 - 1937, and comparisons of Goodwin's text with more recent scholarship, are all appropriate subjects for future articles. _________________________________________________________________ Combining Orgone Accumulators and Ritual Magick: A Preliminary Report by Fr. In Profunda III` I have recently embarked on what promises to be a rather interesting series of Workings that combine traditional ceremonial technique with modern _techno-Magick_. My partner in thaumaturgy is the local Discordian mage, Tom Madai (or, to give his full title, His High Irreverence Pope John-Paul-George-and-Ringo XXIII). Tom's system involves direct manipulation of abstract energies in a manner not unlike Reiki, with a good dose of quantum theory thrown in. In the course of his research he recently built an orgone accumulator and the two of us are now using it in tandem with more-or-less traditional ceremonial Magick. For those readers not familiar with the subject, _orgone_ is a term coined by the late psychologist Wilhelm Reich to describe what others call _life-force_, _prana_, _psychic energy_, etc. The orgone accumulator, one of many gadgets he designed to use this energy, is simply a box with nested layers of organic and inorganic material that automatically _accumulates_ and stores this energy. Tom's accumulator is a simple two layer affair of wood and sheet metal about 2.5 feet square and 1 foot high. Before we began our joint project Tom had already satisfied himself that his machine worked as advertised, and that orgone is the same energy used in Magick. His next idea was to use it in ritual, which is where I came in. Our first experiment took place in my living room. The device began to do its thing as soon as we set it up, generating a field about five feet across as verified by Tom's clairvoyance and my dowsing. This field expanded quickly to fill the whole room even before a formal Circle was cast. My Star Ruby solidified and intensified the field dramatically. Among other things, the accumulator was used to charge what was supposed to be a regular four-hour candle; when lit it lasted at least six hours (unfortunately, I fell asleep before it burnt out, so the exact figure eludes me). The burn-out was complete with, however, a good deal of melt-off. I deliberately refrained from taking down the Circle after the Working in order to study its evolution over time after the accumulator was removed. Within a few days my dowsing disclosed that not only was the Circle still there, but that it had assumed a complex vortex structure with concentric rings. This is similar to what some dowsers find in megalithic stone circles such as Stonehenge and Rollright in Britain. This did not especially surprise me as I am aware that many ancient earthworks have a structure not unlike an orgone accumulator, in this case using layers of turf or peat and clay or stone rather than wood and metal. These earthworks also seem to accumulate energy, possibly for weather-control, which was another of Reich's projects. Tom and I plan to continue our collaboration. Future projects include charging talismans and, eventually, the evocation of Deities to sensible manifestation. stay tuned. _________________________________________________________________ Mysterium Coniunctionis: Ritual of the 0=2 Formula by Fr. Melekh ha-Zahab _Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law._ This ritual is to be used whenever desired, in order to attune the Magician to the union of opposites in his or her nature. The Temple A large Circle is traced on the Temple floor, 13 feet in diameter. A white pillar is placed at the southern edge of the Circle, a black pillar at the northern edge. At the base of the white pillar, on its western side, is burning a single candle. At the base of the black pillar, on its western side, is a cup or basin of water. Incense of Abramelin, and none other, is burning outside the Circle. The Magician The Magician is attired in the robe of his degree, or otherwise in an unadorned black robe. The Ritual The Magician stands in the center of the Circle, facing East. Assuming the Sign of Mulier, he intones: _A ka dua Tuf ur biu Bi a'a chefu Dudu nur af an nuteru. _[He faces East to symbolize his aspiration to the Unity, in Nothingness, of Nuit.] He then performs the Lesser Banishing Pentagram Ritual of Earth, describing the Circle on the floor as he cicumambulates. He returns to the center of the Circle, facing East. He Says: _O Nuit, continuous one of Heaven, let it be ever thus; that men speak not of Thee as One but as None; and let them speak not of thee at all, since thou art continuous! None, breathed the light, faint & faery, of the stars, and two. For I am divided for love's sake, for the chance of union. This is the creation of the world, that the pain of division is as nothing, and the joy of dissolution all. _He then turns clockwise and advances in a straight line to the white pillar, taking up the candle, making the triangle of Fire before him with the candle while facing West and saying: _I consecrate with Fire._ He then turns clockwise and advances in a straight line to the black pillar, taking up the basin of water, making the triangle of Water before him (by sprinkling the water with thumb, index and medius) while facing West, and saying: _I purify by Water._ He moves back to the center of the Circle, facing West. He begins reciting a series of opposites, given below. For the first of each pair, he raises his left hand to the South while speaking the word. For the second of each pair, he raises his right hand to the North while speaking the word. Thus, after both opposites are recited, he is standing again in the Sign of Mulier. [He should, as completely as possible, identify himself with the words as he speaks them, as if he is creating magnetic poles to his left and right (the pillars), with the force of his identification.] Then, concentrating and sending forth the energy of the unification of these opposites, he gives the Sign of the Enterer while intoning sharply: _Achad!_ He visualizes the projection of the energy to the circumference of the Circle, where it begins to transform the Circle into a sphere of brilliant white light. He retires in the Sign of Silence, the right hand to the lips. The opposites are as follows: Fire -- Water Positive -- Negative Light -- Night Father -- Mother Force -- Form Therion -- Babalon Osiris -- Isis Ra-Hoor-Khuit -- Hoor-Paar-Kraat Concious -- Unconcious Sun -- Moon Red Lion -- White Eagle Cross -- Circle God -- Man With each pair, the intensity of the sphere's light has increased, corresponding with the Will of the Magician's divided self to unite, with Love, into a circle of Naught. [He is finally allowing the magnetized poles to slam together, having increased their attraction to each other, and the tension between these opposites, through the previous words.] He assumes the Sign of Mulier, this time facing West to symbolize his attainment of Union, as if identifying with Nuit. At the moment of climax, he slowly brings his arms down to cross his breast, right over left, forming the Sign of Osiris Risen, while he intones: _IAO._ The opposite energies are brought down with the arms, and are concentrated in the heart of the Magician, which is imagined to be the center of the sphere, where the arms are crossed. When this Union is fully experienced, the Magician says: _Love is the Law, love under will._ Then, turning clockwise to the East, again in the Sign of Mulier, he intones: _A ka dua Tuf ur biu Bi a'a chefu Dudu nur af an nuteru. _The ritual is ended. Notes * The Sign of Mulier can also be considered as a representation of Baphomet, as a symbol of the union of opposites. * The technique used in the litany of opposites is not unlike parts of _Liber Pyramidos_, where the Magician identifies, in rapid succession, with _opposite_ energies, or states of conciousness. Interestingly, this technique is sometimes used in hypnosis to deepen trance. It seems to work because the person in trance is shifted so quickly between one state and another that he or she _slingshots_ past them into a deeper state altogether. This is exactly the object of this ritual, so one can readily see that the key to its proper performance is the effectiveness of the Magician's indentification with the opposites recited. * Although pillars are used, they are not to be considered as strictly representative of the familiar Qabalistic/Masonic pillars. Some of the opposites recited fall readily into the Qabalistic attributions to the pillars. Others, such as God and Man, do not. The point to be made is simply that the pairs can be considered opposite for the purpose of the ritual. They may not be opposites along the same continuum, and they may not always be opposites! * While the concept of opposites is clearly expressed in the litany and by the presence of the pillars, the concept of Unity (as Ain) is addressed in other aspects of the ritual. The Circle/Sphere is the most prominent of these. The Circle is 13 feet in diameter, and since 13 is the number of AChaD (Unity), the circle is reaffirmed by the vibration of AChaD with each pair, and by the fact that there are 13 pairs. Multiplying 13 pairs by 2 words per pair (Unity through duality), we get 26. This connects the supreme goal of the ritual to the Formula of Tragrammaton [YHVH], although this ritual is more explicitly based on one interpretation of the IAO formula, where _I and O are the opposites which form the field for the operation of A_ (see _Magick in Theory and Practice_ under _The Formula of IAO_). Furthermore, by the end of the ritual the Magician has built the sphere and has identified a point at his heart as the sphere's center. This is one final affirmation of union through love under will, as it represents the union of the point and the circle, Hadit and Nuit. _Love is the Law. love under will._ _________________________________________________________________ Top Ten Rejected Newsletter Titles 10. The Aleister Crowley Fanclub Newsletter 9. Everything Worth Knowing 8. Old Farts in Turbans 7. Slobber 6. Blood of the Moon Monthly 5. Hoosier Thelemite Quarterly 4. Gack 3. We Don't Care how They do it in New York 2. Samekh Final 1. Brain-Rotting Bak-Bak _________________________________________________________________ Javacrucian Communique In the year 1592 of the Vulgar Era, His Holiness, Pope Clement VIII officially declared Coffee to be a Christian beverage. Originally introduced by Arab merchants, the Holy Bean had been regarded by many as the wine of infidels. _________________________________________________________________ Typhonian Tomes: Being a Guide to the Works of Kenneth Grant by Frater In Profunda III` Part Three: _Cults of the Shadow_ (Muller 1975, Weiser 1976, Skoob 1994) If this were a comedy segment on _The Late Show with David Letterman,_ Paul Shaffer would come up with some campy Vegas-esque theme-music for the occasion, something like this: _Oh, those Cults! Yeah, those crazy Cults, Those crazy, crazy, crazy Cults of the Shadow-w-w-w! _So if the Reader will supply the music we may proceed. With its predecessors, _The Magical Revival_ and _Aleister Crowley and the Hidden God_, _Cults of the Shadow_ forms Kenneth Grant's _Typhonian Trilogy_ dealing with various schools of sexual Magick. This time he presents his interpretation of several such "Cults" (Grant has a perverse affection for lurid terminology) and attempts to show them as parts of one primordial Current. Grant first discusses a number of West African/Voudon deities, linking them to appropriate Paths on the Tree of Life. This part is quite interesting and well done, but Grant spoils it by insisting that these are the prototypes of the Ancient Egyptian pantheon. There is just not enough resemblance; and if there were, would it not make more sense if the ancient Egyptian Gods were the ancestors of the modern African dieties? After all, just because Africans are supposedly _primitive_ does not mean their religions have remained unchanged for 6,000-plus years. Grant then gives a rather peculiar history of Egyptian religion (one can't help thinking it would have helped to consult even one book on Egyptology published since 1907), and moves on to Tantra. He maintains that Hindu Tantra was imported from Egypt, citing some implausable bits of etymology to prove it: Egyptian _Bast_ and _Sekhmet_ to Sanskrit _Pashu_ and _Shakti_ for example. While this may look good in print at first glance, Ancient Egyptian and Sanskrit are very different languages from very different families, and the actual pronunciation of Egyptian is far from certain anyway. So it will take more than a few lucky similarities to convince me. Grant still focuses on one Tantric Tradition to the exclusion of all others. He also performs some rather odd feats of logical gymnastics. He joins orthodox Tantrics in denouncing _Prayoga_, whereby intercourse is had with Succubi, yet he later advocates his personal method of _dream-control_ which involves exactly that! Finally he comes to more contemporary sects with two chapters on Crowley and Thelema (which he insists on calling _The Cult of the Beast._) Much of this is devoted to legitimising Grant's _Typhonian_ O.T.O. He denounces formal Initiations as _mere copies of masonic rituals having little magical value,_ eliminates Lodges in favour of _power-zones_ and generally scuttles all of Crowley's ideas for the reform of society. Grant states that the O.T.O. devotes itself to Kundalini Yoga and _establishing a gate in space through which the extraterrestrial or cosmic energies may enter in and manifest on earth._ Trans-Plutonic planets and the star Sirius figure largely in Grant's personal-mythology-presented-as-objective-fact. He then deals with the career of Charles Stansfield Jones, better known as Crowley's _Magical son_ Frater Achad, who had such a promising start -- he discovered the secret key to Liber AL -- and then went off the deep end. By 1926 Achad decided that Crowley was _unable_ to utter the Word for the aeon of Horus because, having identified himself with the Beast, he became _inarticulate._ So Achad came up with a Word of his own, which appearently didn't work because in 1948 he announced a whole new aeon, that of Maat or Ma-Ion! Achad is an excellent example of _ego-abcess_ and paranoid obsession, besides being the first Thelemic _heretic._ The major problem in this chapter is that Grant's commentary is so unclear it's hard to tell if he is simply reporting Achad's theories or actually supporting them. The book ends with a short piece on Austin Spare's Zos-Kia Cultus, but before that we get two chapters on something new: Michael Bertiaux's La Couleuvre Noire (the Black Snake Cult.) This is a (theoretically) Voudon-oriented group centred in Chicago. I say _theoretically_ because there is little recognisable Voudon in it - Bertiaux is incredibly eclectic and has a fetish for pseudo-technical jargon that must be seen to be believed. The curious reader may consult the _Voudon Gnostic Workbook_, a collection of Bertiaux's correspondence courses that is about the size of a large city's phonebook -- and has about the same literary and Magical value, if that. Grant quotes mostly Lovecraft-oriented material in this section. Grant's style remains consistent in terms of scholarship (damn little) and peculiar expressions (lots.) For those keeping score here are the new ones: _efflorescence_, _Uranography_, _co-types_, _infra-liminal vibration_, _audile_, _comports_, and the truly amazing _sexo-somniferous magnetization._ All I can say is that this book is better than Bob Larson's Guide to Cults, but I won't put it on any _recommended reading_ lists anytime soon. (The previous two installments of this series appeared in Volume IV of the _Midwest OTO Tribal Diary_, interested parties may write the _H-T_ for copies. The next installment will cover _Images and Oracles of Austin Osman Spare_.) _________________________________________________________________ Fax God It has long been a custom to tuck written prayers to God into the crevices of the Wailing Wall in Jerusalem. Now Bezeq Telecommunications Corporation in Israel has set up a special fax line for those who can't make the trip in person. The faxes come from all over the world and are taxen to the Wall by a special messenger once each day. So far, the longest fax ran to 40 pages. _________________________________________________________________ Reviews _Treat 'em rough._ Wicca: The Ancient Way by Janus-Mithras, Nuit-Hilaria, and Mer-Amun. Illuminet Press, 1994, (63 pp., $5.95). These folks represent the Isis-Urania Covens, a Canadian group of Egyptian Qabalistic Witches who tend the flame of Traditional Wicca. Their system, needless to say, is incalculably older than the innovations of Bro. Gardner, and of course is _the very old and unbroken traditional European lineage_, etc., etc., -- you've heard all this before. Their ancient Book of Shadows sounds strikingly similar to Doreen Valiente's versification of Bro. Gardner's work, and some of their traditional aphorisms could be mistaken for paraphrases of Dion Fortune. They study Qabalah because it's astonishingly similar to their own system, and sketch a hilarious picture of Medieval Witches and Qabalistic Jews fleeing persecution together and then casually comparing their secret doctrines while hiding out in the forest: _this was clearly the re-establishment of a long-forgotten alliance._ Yeah, right. -- A. Quiller III _________________________________________________________________ Have You Been Cursed? by Keith Morgan. Pentacle Press, 1994, (23 pp., $5.95). Trees died so that this could be printed. Let us mourn. -- A. Quiller III _________________________________________________________________ Cults That Kill: Probing the Underworld of Occult Crime by Larry Kahaner. Warner Books, 1988, (280 pp., $5.95 new). An especially dull and pointless collection of the same old rumours and innuendo. -- Adam Weishaupt _________________________________________________________________ High Magic's Aid by Scire (Gerald Gardner). Weiser, 1975, (352 pp., $3.95 new, but about $10 these days). This is a fun little story of sorcery in the Middle Ages. The fact that it often reads like advance-promo for Bro. Gardner's later books on Wicca merely adds to its charm and interest for the student of occultism. The plot involves a fairly unlikely alliance between a Pagan Witch and a Christian Mage (yeah, right again), and just maybe a few too many sneers at the Church (or maybe not), but it's still fun. Although it is. married throughout by, erros of punctuation and of orthografy; typical of Bro. Gardner. Or perhaps a pour jab ov edithing on teh pert of Samael Wiser. Then again, since we are dealing not with an ordinary novelist but with an Initiate, we must not rule out the possibility that these are _Qabalistic Mistakes_ which secretly point to mighty arcana. For example, on p. 268 a spirit is conjured _through HIM who half created all things_. The casual reader will giggle at the obvious misprint of _half_ for _hath_, but the Qabalist will ponder deeply: if HIM half-created all things, then who created the other half? Perhaps HER? The Torah tells us that ELOHIM is the author of Creation, so we can conclude that if HIM created half, ELO created the rest. This interpretation is supported by the Scripture, for we read that the Creation is two-fold -- _In the beginning ELOHIM created the Heavens and the Earth_. And ELOHIM perfectly expresses this two-in-one idea of Deity, as it consists of the feminine Eloah with the masculine plural ending -im. But I digress... -- A. Quiller III _________________________________________________________________ The Stone and the Elixir by Pensatia (Helen Merrick Bond). Euclid, 1970, (54 pp., $5 new). Self-flattering goo about self-transcendence. -- A. Quiller III _________________________________________________________________ Heeling Your Inner Dog: A Self-Whelp Book by Nicole Gregory and Judith Stone. Times Books, 1993, (99 pp., $12). Is God to live in a dog? Evidently. -- Adam Weishaupt _________________________________________________________________ IAO Camp Calendar of Events Spring, 1995 E.V. April Fri. 7: Camp business meeting, 8pm. Sat. 8: Day of Nuit. Gnostic Mass (open), 9pm. Sun. 9: Day of Hadit. Mon. 10: Day of Ra-Hoor-Khuit. Thr. 20: CUUPs Class on Tantra, 7pm, facilitated by Sister R. H. Thr. 27: CUUPs Class on the Magick of A. O. Spare, 7pm, facilitated by Fr. I. P. Fri. 28: _Book Four_ study group, 8pm. May Fri. 5: Camp business meeting, 8pm. Sat. 13: Gnostic Mass (open), 9pm. Thr. 18: CUUPs Class on Tantra, 7pm, facilitated by Sister R. H. Sat. 20: Open discussion - 'Being a Thelemite', 7pm. Sun. 21: Sister R. H.'s birthday. Thr. 25: _Book Four_ study group, 7pm. June Fri. 2: Camp business meeting, 8pm. Fri. 9: Gnostic Mass (open), 9pm. Thr. 15: CUUPs Class on Tantra, 7pm, facilitated by Sister R. H. Sat. 17: Open discussion - _Liber Reguli_ (pot-luck dinner afterwards), 7pm. Wed. 21: Summer Solstice. Thr. 22: _Book Four_ study group, 7pm. Covenant of Unitarian Universalist Pagans (CUUPs) Magick Classes meet at the U. U. Church on North Fee Lane. All other events, unless otherwise specified, meet at the IAO Camp temple. All times and events are subject to change, so please call ahead to confirm. _________________________________________________________________ _Love is the law, love under will._ EOF
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Southern
Spirits: 19th and 20th century accounts of hoodoo,
including slave narratives & interviews
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