Basic Elements of Hermekate: Part Three
Hermekate, Songs, and the Abyss
For newer readers, the ideas discussed in this post depend heavily on what I wrote in the post Song of Hermekate, so anyone unfamiliar with that piece of writing should read that first before moving forward with reading this post.
However, in summary, I proposed a new form of expressing the Initiatory state that has traditionally been associated with the Grade of Magus, one that dispenses with the necessity of consolidating and codifying one’s Initiatory perspective by declaring one’s “law,” or “uttering the Word.” I claimed that the grade need not be rooted firmly to the principle of Logos anymore, and that with the advent of modern communications technology, it’s possible for the principles that have historically emerged through the work of individual Magi to instead emerge in a more collective form.
I shared the words that eventually went into the Song of Hermekate post with a group I was a member of at the time, and a few people said that it resonated with them. However, ever since I did so, I’ve second-guessed the entire concept and examined it critically—was it truly a valid idea? Did I share it in haste? Had I made a complete fool of myself in doing so? In the next section, I’ll explore some of the doubts and “cautionary skepticism” I’ve grappled with since first sharing the concept.
Second Thoughts
The first major point of doubt that I contended with was the claim that the paradigm of the Song transcends Logos itself.
Is such a thing even possible?
Is that even how Logos works?
Was I being completely ridiculous?
One of the reasons for this was the plain and simple fact that music theory is a thing; aside from the simple act of playing a musical instrument, it’s one of the things a person learns if they take classes. When I was a young boy first taking piano lessons, one of the first things my teacher went into was how to read sheet music. What this means is that while music may not be expressed in words, it could be written down: Musical notation is still a language of sorts, it’s just one that is very different from a language based on words. In this sense, music is still very Logoic.
All of that aside, even if a person never learns musical theory, or how to read sheet music, or how to transcribe their songs using it, music still isn’t necessarily neatly separated from Logos: The Pythagorean musical scale is very inherently mathematical. I may not care one lick about music theory, but if I play a well-tuned piano or guitar, the songs I produce still rely on that underlying mathematical precision. This means that whether the musician cares at all about it or not, Logos is still present. And that’s just one example; there are certainly musical scales other than the Pythagorean one, scales stemming from other cultures, based on an entirely different aesthetic sense; but still, there’s a mathematical structure to be found beneath it all—it’s just a different one.
So maybe the whole idea was just completely untenable.
Ultimately, I decided, it depends on how you look at it. In one sense, nothing that exists in the physical world is completely inseparable from the principle of Logos. We live in a world with physical laws, in finite bodies, and all of this follows certain rules. At the most abstract level we can mentally conceive of, there is still mathematics to contend with, and virtually all physical phenomena can be understood and expressed that way. Astrophysicists deal with concepts that are far beyond the ken of most people, almost unimaginable and incomprehensible in reasonable linguistic terms, to the extent that they have to come up with thought experiments and metaphors to convey their ideas to laypeople, but they will maintain that these are mere pale reflections of the actual, pure ideas they are dealing with: And advanced mathematics remain the key to seeing these things with the same eyes that they do.
There is no escaping Logos in this world.
However, the “escape” from this “Logoic trap” (wow, we’re actually sounding pretty goddamn “Gnostic” now) was in the original post, when I brought attention to the concept of acting from the heart. In Egyptian spirituality (to name just one example), the heart is the seat of the soul: It is the heart and not the brain that is truly in charge of us, and the heart is the gateway to the transcendent realm.
A musician playing a musical instrument improvisationally and from the heart may be expressing themselves through a Logoic structure, but that’s incidental to where I was placing my focus and emphasis in the concept of the Song: They are playing with feeling.
In the original post, I contrasted the “Logoic” principle with the “Sonic” principle, which was the best I was able to do given my understanding at the time. However, since writing that post, I’ve done more investigation. What is the “opposite” of Logos?
Eros.
And when I realized that, I laughed because it gave a whole new level of insight into my occasional use of the mask and pen name of Gogo Bordello. See? It was like my soul knew better the entire time, even though my mental and rational understanding of things had not yet assimilated the concept of Eros as it relates to Logos…which, really, just sort of proved my point in a way.
It is Eros which can transcend Logos.
Now, not that sex has no place in my work—it’s definitely shown up, heh—but the obstruction in my understanding had a lot to do with the fact that while we most often think of the principle of Eros as being inherently sexual, that’s really only one level of its expression. The word “eros” (ἔρως) comes from the verb “éramai” (ἔραμαι) and “erãsthai” (ἐρᾶσθαι), ‘to desire, love.” Looking at things this way put another idea I had once expressed into perspective, relating to the theme of “turning things around” that has cropped up in many places in my work. It’s an idea I once played with in a Facebook post and, like the concept of the Song, later doubted (and so I deleted the post, feeling foolish about it):
While the formula of the Word of Thelema is “Love is the Law, Love under Will,” the formula of the Word of Hermekate might be, “Will is the Law, Will under Love.”
The flowering of this understanding put some of my previous magic(k)al work into perspective, but that may be a matter for another post.
My other major doubt regarding the concept of the Song stemmed from a recognition that my own understanding of the system of Initiatory grades might be incorrect or incomplete.
One of the main inspirations for my idea of “collective Words,” or “Songs,” came from the extremely high levels of synchronicity that I had been experiencing. Quite often, whether others were aware of it or not, it seemed that myself and other people in my sphere of awareness were “on the same wavelength,” which in turn suggested to me that we might all be attuned to something far beyond ourselves, something inherently transpersonal, and expressing that principle through our thoughts, words, and deeds—whether we realized it or not. I explore this phenomenon and give examples of it in great detail in the post Song of Twilight.
Quite a while after formulating and sharing the concept of the Song, I realized that I might be getting ahead of myself; in one sense, the concept would only be valid on the assumption that the other parties in question were actually aware of what they were doing, and as I came to learn, quite often, the people I had my eye on were not intentionally participating in the same “Song” I perceived: Some of them didn’t even know who I was, and their actions happened to align with my own by “happenstance.”
At the time I came up with the concept of the Song, I was still somewhat unconscious of how closely my experiences were aligning with the Theater of the Word as described by Don Webb in Overthrowing the Old Gods: Aleister Crowley and the Book of the Law. Instead, I was thinking of them more along the lines of Chapel Perilous.
Once my understanding grew to accommodate the wider perspective and the relationship between those two ideas, I started to wonder if perhaps my concept of the Song was really just a matter of me misinterpreting phenomena related to the upper grades? Was I misattributing the synchronicity I was witnessing to a concept that ultimately held no validity?
Was I mistaking the proverbial “forest” for the “trees?”
Maps vs. Territories
However, as I reviewed my understanding of Initiatory grades as taught by various schools, I came to realize that while I could potentially be making the mistattribution described above in the particular cases I was watching unfold before me, it still didn’t necessarily invalidate the concept of the Song entirely. In other words, just because the people I was watching weren’t necessarily participating consciously in these phenomena didn’t mean it wasn’t possible for them to be doing so in theory. This would just mean that I might not have been seeing a “Song” in action—yet.
Upon reviewing Initiatory grades —especially the way they were mapped onto the Qabalistic Tree of Life in the Golden Dawn and even the A.:.A.:.—I realized once more, just as in the case of the section above, that even if I wasn’t expressing all of this with complete conscious understanding at the time, the concepts were still essentially valid and still held up. I expressed much of this in Week 10 of Inner Tarot Revolution, where my Shadow card was The Priestess, and I concluded that in terms of the Qabalistic Tree of Life, it could be said that Songs emanate from the territory of the “Supernal Triad,” beyond Da’ath; and when you look at how the Initiatory grades were mapped onto the Tree in the Golden Dawn and the A.:.A.:., all of this does essentially line up:
From one point of view, there is no difference between a “Chapel Perilous” experience and a “Theater of the Word” experience: They are both, essentially, describing the same phenomenon.
From another point of view, the two are differentiated by the understanding brought to bear on the experience by the person going through it.
“Chapel Perilous” experiences are becoming more and more common these days; people are going through it almost spontaneously, without having done any intentional or explicit esoteric work beforehand. As the Wikipedia article I linked to above states:
"Chapel perilous" is also a term referring to a psychological state in which an individual is uncertain whether some course of events was affected by a supernatural force, or was a product of their own imagination.
This pertains most to the people who have been undergoing the experience lately outside of explicit esoteric work: Such people are often “victims” of the experience, and find themselves absolutely bewildered by it.
Others approach it more consciously, and in traditional A.:.A.:. terms, the experience is most closely related to the grade of Magister Templi, in which the aspirant applies The Oath of the Abyss taken in an earlier grade:
I. I, O.M., etc., a member of the Body of God, hereby bind myself on behalf of the Whole Universe, even as we are now physically bound unto the cross of suffering:
II. that I will lead a pure life, as a devoted servant of the Order:
III. that I will understand all things:
IV. that I will love all things:
V. that I will perform all things and endure all things:
VI. that I will continue in the Knowledge and Conversation of my Holy Guardian Angel:
VII. that I will work without attachment:
VIII. that I will work in truth:
IX. that I will rely only upon myself:
X. that I will interpret every phenomenon as a particular dealing of God with my Soul.
And if I fail herein, may my pyramid be profaned, and the Eye closed to me.Liber DCLXVI
One may do all of the work associated with the system of grades as prescribed by the A.:.A.:. in a purely rote fashion and then, at this Initiatory precipice, take The Oath of the Abyss mechanically, all without actually having the experience. In fact, that may even be what most often takes place: An Initiate in such a position, then, is basically using the Oath of the Abyss as a framework for “jump-starting” the actual Initiatory experience, by intensely focusing their Will on beginning to perceive the underlying patterns in all phenomena they behold.
Many occultists, quite full of themselves, assert that this is, in fact, the only “valid” way to Cross the Abyss: On purpose, in an explicitly intended fashion. Again, they are following the formula of “Love under Will.”
That’s fine, and it lends them an air of authority.
But pragmatically, I would assert that it doesn’t matter how you do it. If you accidentally stumble into the Abyss, what matters most at that point is what you manage to make of it. If you make it across, no matter how the fuck you got there, I say you’re a champion.
That’s “Will under Love.”
At any rate, having the experience is one thing, but yes: Making something of it is another thing entirely. It’s possible to flounder in the Abyss indefinitely, never really heading in any definite direction thereafter. My opinion is that the point at which a “Chapel Perilous” experience begins to give way into a “Theater of the Word” experience is once the person having the experience begins to discern, amid the frenzy of uncanny coincidences and strange phenomena, some sort of organizing principle that actually begins to move in some definite direction. For me, what this meant was paying close attention to the phenomena occurring in my life and beginning to “teach myself its language.”
When I saw synchronicities involving, say, maritime themes, ships at sea, boats and piracy: What were the common threads tying them together? What was I being shown? What was being communicated to me? When I saw synchronistic themes involving certain symbols—say, roses, or serpents, or birds—what did those mean? More than that: Which meanings and patterns were personal—that is, derived from my own memories and interactions with those symbols—and which were more archetypal or transpersonal? I found that these phenomena expressed themselves in both layers, and learning to discern the two (or to interpret them on both levels simultaneously, but still separately) was crucial.
Either way, I was beginning to learn the “language” of the Abyss, and in so doing, to learn how to live in constant dialogue with the universe in both personal and transpersonal aspects. And soon, I started to realize that the universe was saying very specific things deeply connected with my life path.
The principle of the Song basically holds that at this point, the aspirant has the option of going in one of two ways:
Opt to “declare one’s law” or “Utter one’s Word,” or essentially, to work hard to explicitly formulate their experiences in words for the sake of others; to sharpen one’s ideas into a consolidated “package” that could be conveyed to others.
Opt to “wing it,” and simply “follow the music” from that day forward, playing “metaphysical jazz” with the people and things around oneself.
Of course, the two aren’t necessarily exclusive, either: A person who opts for pathway 1 can also walk pathway 2 while they are at it.
Aleister Crowley made his own distinction of a two-forked road centering around the Abyss, saying that one had the choice of either becoming a “Babe of the Abyss” and completing union with their “Holy Guardian Angel,” or renouncing the angel and becoming a “brother of the left hand path.”
Is this “forked road” analogous to the choice between choosing to complete the utterance of one’s Word vs. simply “rockin’ on” in the music of the Abyss? At this point in time, I’m not entirely sure. This contrasting of “Words” with “Songs” may simply be a different way of characterizing the same decisive point on one’s path, or this may be a level of “choice” that pertains to a stage that only applies after a person has already chosen to become a Babe of the Abyss. I did state in Week 10 of Inner Tarot Revolution that this is, indeed, the case.
According to Lloyd Keane in his thesis entitled Magick, Liber Aba and Mysterium Coniunctionis: A Comparison of the Writings of Aleister Crowley and C.G. Jung:
The Abyss represents a barrier or "buffer" between rational and monophasic consciousness and a form of trans-rational, trans-personal consciousness which incorporates a polyphasic paradigm... Following the pattern of the World's descent myths the initiate must leave all preconceived and preconditioned notions of the subject-object dichotomy, of the tangibility of the external world, and the very existence of the initiate behind. Again, each initiate's experience would be different but the basic understanding is that "the Babe of the Abyss"...has undergone a complete shift in consciousness where all semblances of the "Pseudo-Self" have been discarded including the bond between the initiate and his or her Holy Guardian Angel.
In other words, by the time a person is genuinely experiencing the synchronistic phenomena referred to in this post, there’s no turning back; one would, indeed, already be a “Babe of the Abyss,” and such a person is already living their life with an altered (essentially, eliminated) sense of difference between subject/object. This is a paradoxical state of being that will forever defy the attempts of a person to fully describe it in words—that is, it is a state of mind “beyond Logos.”
Past this point, one can only do the best one can to even discuss the world as they perceive it, and this is one reason so much confusion continues to abide regarding these Initiatory states.
There is inherent paradox in all of this. For example, one of the very defining features of the Supernal Triad on the Tree of Life—of anything that dwells in the Abyss and beyond—is that all distinction is said to break down past that point (and my own personal experiences back this up); and yet, that realm is still broken down into three separate Sephiroth on the Tree of Life: Kether, Binah, and Chokmah.
How the fuck does that work?
Only a Babe of the Abyss truly knows.
Likewise, the true distinctions between any grade from the Abyss and beyond can be hard to understand: In the traditional grade systems delineated in the Golden Dawn and the A.:.A.:., the grades beyond the Abyss are those of Magister Templi, Magus, and Ipsissimus; in the truncated and simplified grade system employed in Temple of Set (as I understand it), the Crossing of the Abyss is effected prior to Magister Templi, in the grade of Priest/Priestess III°; in this example “Set” can be considered another way of describing and understanding the same thing Crowley called the Holy Guardian Angel, and the III° is the grade in which the aspirant has begun to merge therewith. Again, paradoxically: If the entity you are merging with is technically your own Higher Self, then in one sense, you were never truly “separate” from it, and the merger is a shift describing a change in how conscious and actively-effected this relationship is within the scope of one’s perceptions.
It’s a real trip, I can say that much, and all of this is reflected in my own experience of the grades: It was only in retrospect, once I had finally begun to understand my Word—in other words, once I had crossed into territory that I recognized as being related to the grade of Magus V°—that I ever dared to suspect I might hold a state of being that was even slightly comparable to that of Priest III°. At that point, everything was rather a blur and it was almost like I had basically “skipped” from what I might recognize as the III° to the V°.
This is when I truly understood what Michael Aquino meant when he said that the IV°, V°, and VI° were all basically different phases of expressing the essential degree of Priest/Priestess of Set III°. It was also then that I realized that, more than likely, the separations between those grades would probably only ever make sense to me if I were to join the Temple of Set and move through them formally.
They are all terms for describing phenomena (and noumena) that defy words themselves.
In our earthly understanding of things, dwelling in such states always involves linguistically and conceptually “chopping things up” that, in the truest sense, have no real distinction; so just as with the distinctions between the three Supernal Sephiroth, or between the upper Initiatory grades, there is likewise little distinction between the various paths on the Tree of Life that dwell beyond the Abyss.
Bridging Tiphareth, through Da’ath, and to the Sephirah of Kether, is the Path of Gimel, expressed by the tarot trump The Priestess. To this path, I assign my “mask” or “persona” of Gogo Bordello.
Bridging Binah and Kether is the Path of Beth, expressed by the tarot trump The Magus. To this path, I assign my “mask” or “persona” of Dan de Lyons.
“Babe of the Abyss” or “brother of the left hand path?”
“Song” or “Word?”
“Dan de Lyons” or “Gogo Bordello?”
What’s the difference?
I dunno. You had to be there.