Thank you Aquila, and Cerastes & Silvaeon for following! This is quite interesting project for me as well, since I haven't read this book for some time, and consciously thought only those parts of it which form the basis for the more practical Demons' Cube text.
The following is once again written without reading it through afterwards, so proceed at your own risk. The second half of Chapter One:
Correspondences naturally extend to everything. While investigating them, the reader should always remember how the law of reflection reverses its influence and the the forces swapping their polarities periodically change to their opposites and back again: no tabulation is ever absolute nor applicable in all the situations, the for the cosmic pattern is multidimensional and can be approached from many different directions.(*9) Just layering facts and details upon each other leads to confusion, and this is one reason why pure intellectual investigation can never bring about very nutritious fruit.
Like the reader notices, the influence of the Moon does not belong to our tabulation at all, and no path belongs under it. This is because the Moon itself is just a force, without a dynamic essence of its own and acting as a mediator, and its correspondence is more like the matter and matrix, working of the paths than the means or inner being of Work. Moon is the ”pure maiden” of the myths and legends, which the neophyte wins for himself; it represents his own workable and opening potential personifcated, his bride and the perfected Grail – which is the archetypical, feminine chalice in its purest form, as the cup of eternal life and sacralisation.(*10)
Footnotes:
*9 For example, the order of the three paths given in The Book of Paths [1st edition] swaps the places of the first and the thirt path from the basic form herein presented. These changes occur because of temporal agents, which also must be taken into consideration when pondering on practical application in question.
*10 And accordingly, before this "purification of the Moon" and finding of its inner silver has been accomplised, Moon represents also all that deception and illusion that rises to oppose the aspirant as projection of his own subconscious mind. But all the distortion which gets reflected back to us from the Moon has its origin in ourselves, it has been made possible by our own wrong thinking. From this follows that in practice as well as in symbolism the Moon is covered by its difficult and dangerous aspect.
In the later years of brotherhood, the inner Moon have given birth to this higher octave of the hidden, fourth and double aspect of Chalice. It can be seen under the secret womb of the Moon in the "Peaks of Mountain Meru" transmutation of the Hieroglyphic Key in The Book of Paths and in Unseen Fire #1, page 83. I didn't remember this later work was already sketched in the Gospel of Saturn.
Father is cold reason; he holds the golden fetter of inevitability, with which human beings so eagerly engirdle themselves. He is cold, eternally cold in his majestic loneliness, eternal contemplation at the edge of time and space. He is merciless, he is dark, but not less reverable because of this nature of his. We human beings do not yet understand evil, nor vice; we refuse to perceive but the form, and thus become deceived. Evil purified is divine.(*11) What forms would be left to be afraid of in the perfect darkness, which the confused fantasy of human mind would left unanimated by its chaotic conjurings?
Saturn is the ultimate, deepest essence of Earth; the prince of the center's fire (its primordial creative fire) and ice (the ceasing of creation), for in their perfect absoluteness these two do meet. Elemental ice is Earth purified to its limits; it is crystallized life, the solidified form of water without a blemish. Saturn itself is the same Stone of which we have already spoken about. That Stone can be seen also in the legend about himself as Cronos: it is answer set forth by him.
Footnotes:
*11 What is "purified evil"? Acting aout destructive and nocturnal impulses in a way wherein no hurting or lovelessness is allowed. This is possible only for a very highly advanced entities. A high adept, who finally learns the nature of evil, gets to his hands a tremendous power, and is able to use it in a perfectly instructive way without adding in any way but in greatly lessening the distress of humankind and all the nature. In what way this happens must remain impossible to understand for men whose consciousness yet lives on the planes of form. It is enough to say that the form of such a magician, towering to the almost inconceivable heights, is similar to that of his master and teacher, Saturn: outwardly immobile, cold as stone, and inwardly filled with the highest kind of magical activity, which has the power to transmute the energies of being and extract from the gross shape its golden core.
In Fosforos I wrote about the Rock (Stone) which must be turned upside down to form that celestial foothold that is mentioned in the Sermon on the Mount. It is not only ethics, but the rockbed unto which the ethics are based: the irrational idealism in metaphysical trust to chosen ideals which are seen as actual spiritual constellations. The legend of Cronos is the following one:
Wikipedia wrote:"The period in which Cronus ruled was called the Golden Age, as the people of the time had no need for laws or rules; everyone did the right thing, and immorality was absent.
Cronus learned from Gaia and Uranus that he was destined to be overcome by his own sons, just as he had overthrown his father. As a result, although he sired the gods Demeter, Hestia, Hera, Hades and Poseidon by Rhea, he devoured them all as soon as they were born to prevent the prophecy. When the sixth child, Zeus, was born Rhea sought Gaia to devise a plan to save them and to eventually get retribution on Cronus for his acts against his father and children.
Rhea secretly gave birth to Zeus in Crete, and handed Cronus a stone wrapped in swaddling clothes, also known as the Omphalos Stone, which he promptly swallowed, thinking that it was his son. Rhea kept Zeus hidden in a cave on Mount Ida, Crete. According to some versions of the story, he was then raised by a goat named Amalthea, while a company of Kouretes, armored male dancers, shouted and clapped their hands to make enough noise to mask the baby's cries from Cronus. Other versions of the myth have Zeus raised by the nymph Adamanthea, who hid Zeus by dangling him by a rope from a tree so that he was suspended between the earth, the sea, and the sky, all of which were ruled by his father, Cronus. Still other versions of the tale say that Zeus was raised by his grandmother, Gaia.
Once he had grown up, Zeus used an emetic given to him by Gaia to force Cronus to disgorge the contents of his stomach in reverse order: first the stone, which was set down at Pytho under the glens of Mount Parnassus to be a sign to mortal men, and then his two brothers and three sisters. In other versions of the tale, Metis gave Cronus an emetic to force him to disgorge the children. After freeing his siblings, Zeus released the Hecatoncheires, and the Cyclopes who forged for him his thunderbolts, Poseidon's trident and Hades' helmet of darkness. In a vast war called the Titanomachy, Zeus and his brothers and sisters, with the help of the Hecatonchires and Cyclopes, overthrew Cronus and the other Titans. Afterwards, many of the Titans were confined in Tartarus. However, Oceanus, Helios, Atlas, Prometheus, Epimetheus and Menoetius were not imprisoned following the Titanomachy. Gaia bore the monster Typhon to claim revenge for the imprisoned Titans."
It is interesting to see here the three different "paths" how the god-child could be nourished (Zeus is the over-god, the One God of the ancients, and this name is used by Platonists and other Greek initiates in the same meaning as esotericists use "God" when the fallacies of the church are not meant). Also one should note well the Omphalos stone, which is the polar stone, the omnipresent Center.)
By understanding this secret we will triump over the ”Malignant Father”.(*12) Absorbing and realization of a certain power, these are the prizes for true psychomachia or soul's struggle. For when we conquer the father within ourselves, we understand him outside of us, and vice versa. When we stop being in subordinate relation to one or other power – i.e. when we stop hoping and fearing – then the creative potential of the power in question surrenders to our use. This is a law of nature that applies in all levels. It is the secret reason to why the Oriental and Orientally inspired systems have so much stressed the need to attain psychological independence, like a state of certain kind of indifference, where everything flows as if by nature and effortlessly. For an Occidental character the journey to this point is usually more easily attained by active working rather than devotional surrendering.
Footnotes:
*12 Constrictedly or possessively realized aspects from the high archetypes rise against their opposites rather than being able to assimilate it to themselves. Thus the "evil father" is the matter-hating intellect, which emphasizes severity and cold discipline, where the "evil mother" is the darkness that absorbs others to itself, the suffocation of consciousness with astral experiences of form. In reality there is no such evil entity in the archetypal world; suffocating factors are born only from the deluded conceptions of the cognizer.
Needless to say, the Star of Azazel seeks to join these two hands. In the terminology of the principles, âtma-manas is the path of Work and âtma-buddhi the path of devotion. Without the âtma or telos aspect of will (striving, mental effort) either one would be left barren. When it is present, it unites the two like the upward point of a unilateral triange gives birth to the formal existence and ascending direction of the lower points right and left.
Saturn is the prince of time, and thus of timelessness; the power of eternal repetition, repercussion, retribution and of justice. He equalises everything. He is the reaper, Abaddon. The name of his planetary intelligence is Zazel, our Azazel in his latent, challenging form. The influences of the planets are the priests to the mysteries, they are presentators of the problems for the human beings, and the man who is able to solve the mysteries of the planets in his own life, by living the spirit of the law, goes through the narrow gate to Life.(*13) But that Life is something completely different than what usually is meant by this word in everyday language. We human beings, who have arranged our lives accoring to time and matter, have never relly seen Life, we know nothing of Life befoe the great journey of initiations has been undergone. Only the perfect perdition from all we have thought to be life will open the gate to the kingdom of Sat.(*14)
Father, the force behind the symbol of Saturn, is Satan, the keeper of keys; he who has the power to bind and release, as for the model for the Roman Catholic pope, who also holds the title of God's steward on earth. This matter-refracted reflection and his direct unconscious "avatâra" is that Peter, the threefold betrayer, the builder of the three churches;(*15) the one who was crucified upside down;(*16) who tempter of his master;(*17) he, who wanted to follow the ideal across the waters, but sank to the waves;(*18) he, who chose violence instead of turning the other cheek;(*19) this hot-tempered man, who rather saw the mote in his apostle brother's eye rather than the beam in his own – he truly represents the whole church of the score of centuries, and the Roman Catholic ecclesia especially, he, the denier of the creed of his master.(*20)
Footnotes:
*13 Matthew 7:14.
*14 Sat (Sanskrit) = reality, existence in the word's deep metaphysical meaning.
*15 Matthew 17:4. These three "tabernacles" are to do with the expressions of the lower triad. Their "builder" is the lower demiurge or kâma manas.
*16 Acts of Peter, 37.
*17 Matthew 16:23.
*18 Matthew 14:28-30.
*19 John 18:10.
*20 That rock of the Self or, we might say, inner objectivity, upon which the artesan must build, represents also the objectivity of matter when rightly realized. In the school of life many classes can be completed without connecting one's process to this center of matter's magical power, but the final most enduring phase will be accomplised only and solely with it; by taking conquered Saturn as part of the process. How many Christian esotericist has seriously pondered, why Jesus chose to give special position to this difficult a man? Precisely because he like all the high masters knew that reality is great Unity, and that Unity is applied to the living and fully potentialized development by creating a system that includes its own opponent. Judas is another application of the same profound truth in another situation. A master teacher is not blind to the so called evil, and the Nazarene adept was not a naive idealist: he realized very well what he was doing, and that in order to accomplish the long timespan's cataclysmic revolution in the world of spirit he had to take into himself and thus gradually alchemically change the opposing charge. For like the interpretation of the Christian mystic presents to us, crucifixion of Jesus did not end in his death two thousand years ago, but it is still going on. In the world of spirit – which in its own way is as exact as the physical world – the apostasy and lie of Peter (the Roman Catholic church) carries on to this day; and again and again he denies his master because of fear and lack of faith, like Judas again and again betrays him "for the greater glory of God". An occultist, who would like to understand the meaning of the difficult planets (Saturn and Mars) and thus attain their powers, is advised to ponder the actions of these characters of Christian mythology as well as their correspondences in world history and its anticipated future.
I refer to the fact how the Christianity has turned upside down Jesus' creed of love and honesty from the very beginning of Peter's first church. The name Peter, or Cephas, means Rock, and was given to him by Jesus for to be the foundation of his church.
"Not every one that saith unto me, Lord, Lord, shall enter into the kingdom of heaven; but he that doeth the will of my Father which is in heaven. Many will say to me in that day, Lord, Lord, have we not prophesied in thy name? and in thy name have cast out devils? and in thy name done many wonderful works? And then will I profess unto them, I never knew you: depart from me, ye that work iniquity." (Matthew 7:21-23)
As vessels of our Master(*21) the Christian churches have indeed sunk into the waves of the illusion of materiality again and again, and would they not in this work only unconsciously follow the inspiration of the two actually embracing systems of development, we could not help but to laugh that unbeliavable heresy, that the Churches throw onto face of their master daily and hourly.
We have mentioned this analogy before: the apparent part of the Catholic Church in our as well as their common working.
Footnotes:
*21 Satan, to be understood as the manifestation of God in the world – the fullness of spirit and matter which is magic. For an orthodox Christian the Holy Matter, Nature itself, is ”The Adversary”.
Here "our" means the Left Hand Path, and "their" the Right Hand Path, following two differing theological statements as well as fundamental ideas of practice. At the end of the chapter comes the part which a bit later formed the motto and the starting point for the both parts of Argarizim:
For precisely because of its “fall” – mirabile dictu! – the Roman Catholic Church has done the work assigned to it, full of meaning as is Judas' betrayal in the soteriological legend. For at the same time, it has both conserved the outer body of the teaching of the earlier age's redeemer as if embalmed, and on the other hand, made possible – no, necessary – the replacement of that outer body and the creation of a new revelation. The most marvelous mystery! Certainly we do not claim that it would have been carried out knowingly, but all the more surely under the straight inspiration of the archetypical powers. Christianity has accomplished its mission in bringing these two, the Sermon on the Mount and the myth of the Fall of Lucifer, to the threshold of the new age, misunderstanding both, reaching the perfection of neither. For here are the two paths, the Right Hand Path and the Left Hand Path, so clarified and perfected that they meet each other in that mercilessness which is a sign of the presence of the absolute justice in the long process of human development. Who truly comes to understand one of these most miraculous characters, Christ or Satan, will understand both; and in the path he has chosen he truly will ascend above the heights of the clouds (i.e., the subtle constructions of pure reason); and will be like the most High.(*22)
Footnotes:
*22 Cf. Isaiah 14:13.
Coming up next: A much more compact chapter of Saturn's Nemesis (?) relation to Sanat-Kumâra and Narada.