Fifth Grade Book Report

The Word of "Hermekate" and The Grade of Magus

It’s high time to break some new ground here at Dark Twins. Although it’s no longer the earliest post in my listings, since I ended up importing the content from a separate blog, the first post I wrote here was Flying Blind, originally drafted almost a year ago on February 4th, 2023; since then, it’s all been “me, me me!” and sometimes I feel self-conscious about that (heh). Yeah, there’s been some good content and commentary here and there about more impersonal matters related to esoterica, but I’ve been very self-involved. In a way, that should come as no surprise, since I made the claim in that original post that “I’m here to become an Ipsissimus, and do what an Ipsissimus does. To what end, it is not yet time to reveal here.” The word “Ipsissimus” is drawn from the Latin root “Ipse,” meaning “himself.” As will be made a bit more clear by the end of this post, such obsessive self-reflection is, in fact, an essential and unavoidable part of the path that leads to becoming an Ipsissumus, although I do feel that I overdid it here. That part of the path simply tends to be done more privately than I’ve done it here, and there was a purposeful, illustrative reason that I did it so openly.

Nonetheless, I’m glad to be veering into less personally-involved content in which I spend more energy examining general esoteric lore, modern occulture, and the meaning of my Word of Hermekate. To that end, the first matter I’d like to address as the focus of this post is The Grade of Magus. And just to be a tad obnoxious about it, I am going to begin by, yes, going back to take a quick peek at my life path and how it fits in with these objectives. Please bear with me. Before I get into it, I’ll at least offer a good explanation as to why I’m doing it: It’s to establish a clearer sense of the obstacles I have faced along the way, because one of the hopeful outcomes of the work will be to pave a way so that other people who come after me don’t have to face them.

A Herculean Task

At this point, I am pretty sure my small circle of readers looks like a Venn diagram where the two overlapping circles are:

1. People who have an interest in and familiarity with modern Western occultism drawn from the work of Aleister Crowley, and

2. People who know me personally and actually are interested in getting to know more of the wierd stuff I’ve been through.

Aleister Crowley was…controversial. These days, a word more likely to be used by his detractors is the more pointed descriptor of “problematic,” and a great many occultists in this burgeoning WitchTok era would just as soon cancel the guy entirely and focus on other things. Those who do pay attention to his work fall, again, into two main camps:

1. Genuine fans, or at least Thelemites, who may or may not recognize his more problematic aspects, but either way, have decided they more or less feel called to follow the path he created.

2. Those who understand that even if we don’t necessarily like him as a person, he managed to become so influential that most of the people who ignore him still probably owe their whole magic(k)al practice to the fact that he lived and did all that he did.

Of course, even if you acknowledge point two above, that still doesn’t mean you have to dignify him by paying any attention to what he wrote. There are all sorts of magic(k)al paths today that happily ignore him entirely, and there’s nothing wrong with that at all. Believe me, I completely understand the impulse to do so.

However, when I was much younger and beginning to make sense of why I was “destined” to be taught magic(k) at such a young age, I had “spirit guides” (whom I address most thoroughly in the post When They Talk Back) who insisted repeatedly that the reason I’m alive is to do work that closely parallels, and even furthers, the work that he did. It soon became clear that trying to avoid that path and do anything different was going to be a non-starter. This begins to sound quite a lot like shamanry; traditionally, when a shaman resists their spiritual calling, they begin to suffer “shaman sickness,” and great misfortune soon befalls them. However, since I am an American of European descent and shamanism is not part of the culture I was raised in, it’s generally been very hard for me to find my way by adhering to any path that might be recognized or described by that particular name, because such cultures are often closed. When a white person becomes deeply and authentically involved in a specific indigenous shamanistic culture, it’s generally because an actual shaman from that culture has recognized that the spirits with whom the culture works are in agreement that it is part of that person’s calling.

And to be clear, I have been told by such a person that, according to their culture and based on the divination she performed with rice, yes: I am meant to become a shaman.

So yes, some white people are born for this kind of work, and yes, some of them do become what we more traditionally recognize as a “shaman.” However, in modern Western culture, the closest thing we have to a “shamanistic” system is the Initiatory system that Aleister Crowley is famous for revolutionizing in his own particular way; and my own spirits, with whom I converesed as a teenager, very emphatically pointed to that system as part of my work. So I had no choice but to eventually come to an understanding of the work of not only Aleister Crowley, but also his successors, some of whom (such as Anton LaVey) were also very “problematic.” As we will see, that is all part and parcel of being a Magus.

For those interested, I wrote an essay for school about shamanism that goes a long way toward getting to the root of what this phenomenon is in a cross-cultural way, and I published it here at Dark Twins: Shamanism in Modern-Day Nepal. It was an A paper in my World Religions class at North Park University.

From an academic standpoint, you can’t really just say, “A Magus is a Western shaman;” in that context, you’re comparing apples and oranges, and it’s important to be clear and distinct, to respect the taxonomic protocols and such. But from the “inside” perspective as an actual practitioner, and especially from the spiritual (or “noetic”) perspective, you may be more open to seeing the similarities than the differences and to concede, “Yeah, the comparison essentially holds up.”

Anyway. Back in the day, when my spirit guides told me that was the work I was here to do, I just about shit my pants, and the seeds of self-doubt that eventually developed into the same weeds I contend with to this day were planted; in fact, that hints at some of the meaning behind the pen name I have since adopted, “Dan de Lyons,” because the dandelion—typically regarded as a weed—can also be considered a beautiful flower symbolizing hope (as a harbinger of Spring), as well as a symbol of resilience (they will thrive in fucking concrete if they have to). Lastly, they propagate prolifically, their seeds taking flight on the winds and spreading far and wide.

Why so much doubt and stress? Because, just look at who I was suddenly comparing myself to! The man was world famous! He singlehandedly redefined magic(k) as the world at large knew it! He wrote and wrote and wrote, and his work was really complex. And I had to “further” that? Did I have to become as famous as him? Did I have to master all that dense knowledge, and then top it? Fuuuuuuuuuuuck that. Not me, man; I couldn’t even pass Algebra or stay off the psych ward at the time. My guides tried to get me to ease up, telling me it wasn’t quite like all that, but they also couldn’t just spell my path out clearly for me and tell me what, specifically, I did have to do. I had to find my own way; and given the state of occulture at the time, that was difficult to do.

Of course, little did I know, even as all of this was happening to me (in the late ‘90s and early ‘00s), there were those who already had made advances in the kind of Initiatory work Crowley was best known for, and more than that, had taken significant steps in rendering it much more accessible and down-to-earth than it was in the state of affairs Crowley had left behind; namely, Temple of Set and its members. However, at the time, my only connection to occulture was Internet chat rooms, and the only people doing that kind of work in those chat rooms were either adherents of the traditional Golden Dawn system, or Thelemites; and they were typically the exception. Most of the denizens of those rooms were actually chaos magicians, who really didn’t give a fuck about such structured aims. Temple of Set was nowhere near as well-known in those days as it is now, largely because its members had not busied themselves as much with publishing lots of books as people stemming from other currents did at the time. Unlike Crowley and LaVey, they were not seekers of public notoriety. They just wanted to do the work; and in my eyes, this is one of the most respectable things about ToS.

The closest I came was to encounter the work of Anton LaVey, whose Church of Satan did essentially base its system of grades on that of Crowley’s A.:.A.:.; however, I tried reading The Satanic Bible and it didn’t really resonate with me because LaVey’s philosophy was largely rationalistic and materialistic, and I was sitting in my room talking to invisible dragons. As such, I was unable at the time to appreciate the contributions he did make to the overall understanding of Initiation; as it turns out, they were much more important than my teenage self realized, and I had dismissed that work in error.

At any rate, aside from any such notion that I would actually have to become as prestigious a figure as Aleister Crowley (which turned out to be sorely mistaken), there were other hurdles to overcome that made my task feel “too big,” and though they were modified as my understanding developed over time, even today there are similar problems of prestige with accomplishing what I have set out to accomplish.

Basically, as I did take occasional stabs at understanding systems such as Thelema and The Golden Dawn, and based on further discussions with Ilyas and Rose, it became apparent that doing the work I was meant to do would involve encountering the territory of the upper grades in such systems, and one major problem with that was this: According to the most prevalent understanding of such things, that was a task so lofty that even a person fully immersed in an actual school or order engaging in Initiatory work was very unlikely to make it that far. Even in my younger years, I had begun to understand some of the overlap between the esoteric Initiatory work of magic(k)al systems and the more abstract idea of psychological Individuation as espoused by Carl Jung, but even Jung said that this work was for the few.

In fact, no matter what the context, the general consensus was that it was doubtful any living person could actually accomplish it. One of the major problems with Crowley’s school of thought was that, based on The Golden Dawn’s model of esoteric Initiation, any grade from “Magister Templi” and beyond was so advanced that no living, embodied human could do it; to get that far, you had to reach the absolute summit of possible Initiation in your incarnate life, and then keep going in the astral realm after your physical death; so when Crowley started proposing that he had attained Magister Templi and even Magus, then Ipsissimus (a claim which he never really tried to justify by way of explanation), most people familiar with Western esotericism simply scoffed and waved him off entirely. If you were to take Crowley at his word, he had done what no one else had done and it was, in fact, possible…but even he qualified this by making the claim that he was so special that he was virtually the only one alive who could achieve it. For those less familiar with the spiritual territory we’re discussing here, the only other living people who had become so spiritually “evolved” were men (notice the gender bias) like Jesus, or to a lesser extent of renown, Enoch or Elijah, who were similarly world famous for literally ascending into heaven. When Crowley claimed to reach the same heights, he also essentially said no one else would likely do it again for hundreds or even thousands of years; he left behind a system for people to follow in his footsteps, but also said that reaching his level wasn’t even really the point.

And according to Ilyas (whose name, though I didn’t know this at the time, is actually a different version of the name “Elijah”), that’s the territory I had to reach.

The kind of person attracted to Thelema was the kind of person with a spirit so intrepid (or simply narcissistic) that they seriously pondered daring to strive for what was widely regarded as impossible.

In a word: Pioneers.

Making The Grade

I myself was not as self-confident as the typical Thelemite, so I followed a different, less direct path; while I didn’t veer off-course entirely, I did lower my expectations somewhat by getting involved in Theosophy. The Theosophical Society also dealt with esoteric Initiation, but with a much less egocentric approach influenced heavily by (certain white people’s understanding of) Tibetan Buddhism. These folks were walking a path of Initiation, but one much less focused on making personal progress than the typical Western approach, to the extent that practicing any magic(k) at all was considered too “spicy” and impetuous. This path focused more on meditation and on serving others. It, too, firmly placed the upper reaches of its conception of Initiatic advancement in the spirit realm as opposed to the material human realm, and in fact went even farther in such an emphasis: Here, even the very lowest Initiates were already flirting with the boundaries between physical life and the spiritual world; in the esoteric teachings followed by Theosophists, by the time you were getting ready to shed your physical body and walk solely in the spirit realm, you were still a lowly “chela,” or disciple, and just beginning your serious work alongside one of the “Masters of the Wisdom.” You had just begun, young grasshopper.

“Humility” was the watch-word here.

And yet, not long after I started working and volunteering at The Theosophical Society, as a 25 year-old, the upper crust at the American Section of the T.S. was nosing me up to the front, asking me to give talks.

So maybe Ilyas and Rose were serious; and yes, when I eventually left The Theosophical Society, I took my Initiation into my own hands and started working Golden Dawn magic(k).

---

And now, it’s time to set my personal story aside and focus on The Grade of Magus, which is the Initiatic level at which Crowley focused his establishment of Thelema. Going forward, I will be zeroing in on ideas drawn from two works:

1. The Temple of Set Vol. I by Michael Aquino; most particularly, the chapter entitled “Initiation.” I highly recommend that anyone reading this post study that book and that chapter if they would like to fully understand some of the context for the rest of this post, because I will be skipping over a comprehensive discussion of the earlier degrees in order to focus on The Grade Of Magus. I’ll give an overview, but it will be very brief.

2. Overthrowing the Old Gods: Aleister Crowley and The Book of the Law by Don Webb; most particularly, the chapter entitled “The Grade of Magus.”

It will be impossible to discuss these concepts without also making some mention of Aeons, but I will be addressing the Aeons much more comprehensively and directly in the next installment of The Inner Tarot Revolution; I didn’t reveal the upcoming cards in Week 24’s post, but one of them is, in fact, The Aeon.

Just what is an “Initiatic Grade?” For that matter, what is “Initiation?” Isn’t it just some egotistical “circle jerk” for certain types of self-entitled white guys to make themselves feel important and special?

At their worst? Yes, pretty much. One of the biggest issues with Initiation is dealing with that all-too-human tendency. However, in better circumstances, that’s not really what it’s all about. Though Initiation has often been hidden behind systems with layer upon layer of obfuscation, secrecy, and symbol-laden grandiosity, in the simplest terms, Initiation is about personal growth and development, particularly along the lines of the evolution of consciousness. Most people take consciousness for granted, and without pausing to examine it at all, it’s very easy (and common) to assume that the way we experience the world is the way it has always been. However, it seems pretty clear upon reflection that there are differences between the quality of consciousness embodied in, say, a squirrel, and a typical human. Upon such reflection, we come to reckon with the fact that the state of human consciousness we hold today has evolved over time, and is in fact continuing to evolve even now. In the field of psychology, it’s recognized that as part of each person’s development after birth, we essentially spend our infancy and childhood going through our own specific “recapitulation” of humankind’s evolutionary development until we “catch up” with the modern state of mind. For those interested, Gary Lachman recently published a good article addressing some of the problems a person might quickly point out when first presented with such an idea: If Consciousness Is Evolving, Why Aren’t Things Getting Better?.

Initiatic Grades, then, are an attempt to name and classify separate stages in the evolution of an individual’s consciousness.

The very backbone of The Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn’s entire esoteric system was The Qabalistic Tree of Life, the well-known glyph of which is used to map out every element of the system, including its main branches of the tarot, astrology, and alchemy. As such, even its system of Initiatic grades is mapped out across the Tree; since there are 10 “spheres” or “Sephiroth” (singular: “Sephirah”) on the Tree, there were 11 grades (the first, “Neophyte,” or “(0)=[0],” was a “probationary” grade that determined whether or not a person could even hack the actual, main degrees, and was not mapped onto the Tree of Life).

For context, The grade of Magus was the 10th of the 11 grades in this system.

When Crowley came along and founded the A.:.A.:., he changed things up a little bit, but still basically followed the same system.

Occultist Anton LaVey was a very pragmatic person who was deeply skeptical and critical of anything that even remotely smacked of religion; he cared very little for the pomp and circumstance surrounding virtually all established spiritual systems and held the view that any time any person rooted their authority in the realm of spirit, they were either completely self-deluded, they were totally trying to swindle you, or some combination of the two. While I, as a spiritually-minded person, make some qualifications to this view and believe many spiritual people are sincere, I also recognize that LaVey’s attitude regarding such things has a very strong basis in truth. Sadly, he was probably more correct to err on the side of skepticism to the degree that he did. To him, it was “put up or shut up:” If you were going to claim any kind of authority, it had to be based on something tangible, substantial, and irrefutably demonstrable. However, he did still see the value in using a system of grades to classify states of consciousness, but he very adamantly dispensed with all hints of The Qabalah in his system and, having divorced the concept of grades entirely from the Tree of Life, streamlined things into a shorter list of grades totaling 5—and in this classification, Magus is the very top:

1. Satanist I°

2. Witch or Warlock II°

3. Priest or Priestess of Mendes III°

4. Magister IV°

5. Magus V°

Related to, but separate from these grades delineating states of consciousness is the concept of “Aeons,” which in one sense is a way of distinguishing the individual states of consciousness enumerated in the grade system from the collective and historical phases of the evolution of consciousness through which humanity has traveled in time. In the Golden Dawn system, these were recognized as the Aeons of Isis (The Mother Goddess) and Osiris (The Father God). According to the Golden Dawn system, humanity dwelled in the Aeon of Osiris.

One of the hallmarks of Crowley’s system of Thelema was the declaration that humanity had moved from The Aeon of Osiris and into the Aeon of Horus (The Child God); as such, according to him, The Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn was now obsolete, its members dwelling in the past, and his Law of Thelema had supplanted it. This Law was also his Word, and according to him, The Law of Thelema was to rule over all humanity for the foreseeable future; Crowley was its Magus, and The Aeon of Horus would dominate all world history until another Magus came along to usher in The Aeon of Ma’at, but according to Crowley, it was going to be quite a while before that happened; he didn’t know exactly when, but it could potentially be thousands of years. That’s how unique and godlike Crowley considered himself to be. Later in life, he did make some room for there to possibly be a Magus other than him, but such a Magus would necessarily be of a slightly lesser and essentially subservient status to his own, and the Word of said Magus would necessarily have to fall in line with and ultimately uphold The Aeon of Horus.

Back to LaVey: Being such a pragmatist, in the same stroke as his “cancellation” of the Qabalah, he also essentially threw out the entire concept of Aeons altogether as just so much occultnik claptrap. Instead, he declared The Age of Satan, beginning in the year 1966, an age rooted not in the spiritual realm of ancient Egyptian Gods and Goddesses, but in the strict material soil of the real world; though he still used a mythological figure, i.e. Satan as the Age’s figurehead, this was held to be merely symbolic, with Satan chosen mainly in opposition to the dominant form of religiosity in the United States at the time, Christianity.

While he considered the spiritual foundation of everything he had dismissed to be far too pompous for his Age, he did still follow in Crowley’s footsteps by making himself its Magus; like Crowley, he considered himself to be such an exemplar of yet another world-spanning Age that he and only he was to be regarded as its “captain.” He did not acknowledge another Magus while he continued to draw breath. He was still “top dog.”

He did, however, acknowledge some others as holding the IV°, that of Magister, one of whom was Michael Aquino. Aquino was a very prominent member of The Church of Satan, regarded by many as essentially being LaVey’s “Left Hand Man.” His relationship with LaVey was complicated, because he clearly saw great value in The Church of Satan and its teachings, but ended up following a path that in some ways ran in complete contradiction to them. This is a whole, big, ball of wax that is beyond the scope of this already-lengthy post, but in short, Aquino grew disappointed in LaVey when, according to him, LaVey essentially began selling off positions in the Church’s upper grades, turning the entire enterprise into a personal money-making endeavor. Aquino also held the view that “Satan” was a real entity who actually existed.

In 1975, on the night of the North Solstice, Aquino performed a Working in which he made contact with said entity, whom he regarded as being best embodied in the form of the Egyptian God Set, and wrote The Book of Coming Forth By Night, which was essentially his answer to Crowley’s Liber AL vel Legis or The Book of the Law. From there, The Temple of Set was born, its initial membership consisting of defectors from The Church of Satan.

I’ll get into the nuance of this in greater detail when I cover The Aeons more directly in the next installment of Inner Tarot Revolution, but in short, what Aquino essentially did here was to forge a new Initiatory formula that synthesized elements of Thelema with the modifications LaVey brought to bear in The Church of Satan; he upheld the spiritual legitimacy of Thelema, acknowledging a genuine spiritual being (more accurately, a pair of beings) behind it, one of whom he also felt was behind The Church of Satan whether LaVey wanted to acknowledge it or not, and declared that the short-lived Aged of Satan was little more than a transitional phase between the Aeon of Horus and a new Aeon which he ushered in: The Aeon of Set.

One of the bases for the changes he made was a recognition that the entire paradigm of Aeons as Crowley apparently understood them was rooted in a specific understanding of Egyptian mythology that was known by Aquino to be inaccurate (or at least incomplete, outdated and superseded by new archaeological developments); further, it was also rooted in an understanding of what Aeons are that was also known by Aquino to be inaccurate.

While upholding more of the spiritual/religious idealism exemplified by Aleister Crowley, Aquino also held the work of the Temple of Set to a standard of harder pragmatism than Crowley had done with Thelema, and part of this meant better investigating and more precisely developing the understanding of Initiatic grades and what they really describe. To an extent that had not yet been achieved before, Aquino based the system of grades for Temple of Set much more on essence and the actual states of being they were meant to describe, and this is one of the things I appreciate most about his work.

Within the Temple, this understanding was developed and incubated; one of the consequences has been that the Temple has “Recognized” a number of people to The Grade of Magus, something made possible by the changes in context he introduced by establishing The Aeon of Set. Again, I will revisit this in greater detail when I write about Aeons, but for the purposes of this post, the most important thing is that The Temple of Set has since been at the forefront of development in the understanding of Initiation and what it really is by taking pioneering steps to examine and classify it objectively, and in so doing, has set a precedent stating that the upper degrees are more concrete and attainable than had been previously taught.

To reach this point has depended on one thing: The audacity of standing up and saying that Crowley was wrong, and then doing the hard work of backing up that assertion with clear, reasoned support and, most importantly, establishing a better way of understanding these things.

Michael Aquino has since written and released The Temple of Set to the world, a gift of some of the Temple’s findings and inner lore to interested Initiates, and in it, he explains the actual phenomenon of the grade system in ways Crowley never did. This has been a valuable resource eagerly studied by many students of occultism who, like Aquino himself, saw that there was value in what Crowley professed, but also realized he was pretty full of himself and really loved to overcomplicate things. I say all of this because I have a great deal of respect for Aquino and what he accomplished; my own path depends entirely on it.

That being said, as we will see, it is part of the very essence of The Grade of Magus that any one person’s understanding of it is deeply influenced and colored by not only one’s personal perspective, but also, insofar as that perspective is inexorably linked to how a person had been taught about these things, to ideas and concepts linked to the degree only by tradition, which does serve to obscure a clear view of what’s really going on. In other words, the process of refining our understanding purely of the evolution of consciousness itself is still ongoing, and this means there is still work to be done to separate that from the accretions of tradition that have been built around it over time, and this in turn means that even Michael Aquino held certain views that had more to do with his idosyncratic reference points than with an objective understanding of what is happening in the mind of a Magus.

And in my opinion, while understanding all of this material is necessary for anyone interested in doing this work, there has been no better way of explaining The Grade of Magus yet than the one Don Webb shared with the world in Overthrowing the Old Gods, and his decision to write that book and make it publicly available was a great gift for reasons I will go on to elucidate and explore as Dark Twins unfolds.

Like many of Webb’s writings, Overthrowing the Old Gods began as teachings that he originally penned exclusively for Temple of Set members, these in particular being part of his work as High Priest. What this means is that as closely as he was able to cleave to examining these subjects objectively, even these writings hold biases specific to the view from within Temple of Set, which means anyone studying them who is not a member of the Temple of Set has a lot of careful examination, thinking, and additional study to do in order to clearly refine those ideas even further in a way that takes those biases into account.

I believe this was the best he could possibly do, for a few reasons, and I believe one of the reasons he released these writings publicly was because, given the nature of this territory, it’s actually impossible in a sense for someone to “see the forest for the trees,” to completely separate the Temple of Set’s specific contexts from the Initiatory “raw material.” I believe one reason this material was released was because there are things that a set of “fresh eyes” (such as mine) could do with it that no invested Temple member could because of the biases they will necessarily hold, based in large part on their personal allegiance to the Temple itself. I know this because even as someone who has never been a member, I have had to fight hard to overcome its biases and to challenge the thinking of its luminaries in a way that actually brings clarity and offers new insights, rather than simply being a bratty, rebellious “naysayer.”

And that’s a big part of the reason I have shared so many of the nitty-gritty details of my own personal path through this work; because they matter. To my knowledge, I am the first person stepping up to say, “I have a Word” without having been trained as a member of any of the actual Initiatory Schools involved…and that’s a tall order.

Let’s dig in.

The Five Steads of The Grade of Magus

The first key passage in the chapter toward understanding why I think it was written and what is to be achieved by publishing it is this:

There is little written on the grade of Magus, and we take Crowley as an authority. I would like to make some brief comments about the condition the Magus finds him or herself in.

p. 140

This establishes an important point that I think is very easy for most readers of a book like this to overlook: That The grade of Magus is a state of being. The vast majority of published material discussing matters like this is much more focused on what a Magus does than on what a Magus is, and phrasing things the way Webb did here is making a clear statement that there is a difference between those two things.

This is huge.

Why? Because, without first clearly establishing that distinction, there’s basically no way of examining the grade except from within the context of an esoteric school. Without that perspective, Crowley was a Magus because he rose in the ranks of The Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn and then stepped beyond it to declare his Law of Thelema. That’s all most people ever come to understand about him. Hardly anyone ever wants to discuss the man at all outside of that very particular set of achievements; and much the same is true for everyone else to hold the title ever since.

Anton LaVey probably came the closest as an outlier to the prevailing trend, because as far as I understand (and I may be wrong because I have not studied his biography extensively), he didn’t study in a school like the Golden Dawn, the O.T.O., or the A.:.A.:.; but he did start one, and so he did pretty much ape their way of doing things even as he modified it. Then he sold it to the public. Other than that, though, anyone else you can name by the specific title of “Magus” in this sense is inseparable from the schools that have made use of various versions of the Initiatic system of grades. In a way, it would actually be somewhat foolish to claim to hold said title without being formally connected to such a school, because the title itself is so deeply interwoven with the systems themselves.

What Don Webb is hinting at by the turn of phrase above is that it has been discovered and established that there’s an underlying reality to the grade that is not one and the same with the schools delineating it. Something similar was written by Michael Aquino in Temple of Set when he wrote, of the IV°, that it is a “thing in itself.”

Everything else Don Webb wrote in the chapter needs to be meticulously run through this same filter.

Another very important clue to the nature of the grade of Magus V° (along with the VI°) is that Michael Aquino also wrote, in a letter to the Temple membership on June 10, 1982, that they are “freakish” or “accidental” occurrences (Temple of Set Vol. II, p. 348); in other words, it’s not the sort of accomplishment someone can just decide to chase, and actually get there just through working hard and applying themselves sufficiently to the task. It doesn’t work that way. If it happens for you, it happens for you; again (and very much in line with my comments above about shamans), it is not just a thing you do, it is a thing that you either are or are not.

And this, all by itself, is one of the biggest reasons I have labored so long under such tremendously heavy doubt for most of my life when I came to feel that it was my calling: Because I knew that it just doesn’t work that way. You don’t wake up one morning and say, “I think I want to be a Magus” and then make it happen; not unless it’s really meant to happen. And because of this, I would wager that for most people, they never realized they were Magi until someone or something indicated to them that they may just have arrived at that point.

This means that no matter what, right out the gate, the very fact that I would lay claim to the title at all is bound to be taken by most people who understand these things as the best possible indicator that I am most definitely not an actual Magus. And this means that I have known for my entire life that it’s not a sane or good idea to even speak of such a notion until either a) some school confers the grade upon me, or b) I accomplish something substantial enough to justify the claim on my own.

It has not been an easy ride, ladies and gentlemen.

As it turns out, that very state of affairs happens to be one of the major things my Word—Hermekate—means to change; and of course, that’s an even bigger can of worms to open up than claiming the Grade at all.

Again, since the best example of someone naming themselves a Magus outside of a traditional school is Anton LaVey, I’ve known that the first and most obvious challenge to the claim would be: “So, uh…if you’re a Magus…where’s your school?”

*sigh* I….yeah. I know.

Webb continues:

The Temple of Set holds that the Master of the Temple is isolated in his or her understanding of the universe. This isolation has come from experimentation in the objective universe, synthesized with subjective understanding of the self.

The Magus is changed by this isolated understanding in a manner different from the Master. The Magus’s understanding is in synch with divine will as mediated by the aeon. Or in simpler terms, three things align: the personal intent of the Magus to know his or her Self, the lack of certain ideas that are needed for the aeon to Xeper, and the Will of the Prince of Darkness.

pp. 140-141

These words, again, seem so deeply linked to specific contexts from within the Temple of Set that there is almost no point discussing the concept at all without referring to that context. To make a claim to the grade of Magus that relies at all on this commentary (at least as far as anyone currently regarded as an authority on such matters knows) means making a clear statement of connection to the Aeon of Set and a claim of connection with the Prince of Darkness. In Temple-specific terms, this means there is no point even considering it before you’ve reached the grade of Priest III°; and again, being a complete outsider to the Temple and making the claim would appear absolutely laughable at best.

And yet, Don Webb is sharing this information publicly.

He said it himself, though: First things first; if I want to say I am a Magus, first I have to establish a foundation for saying that I am “isolated in [my] understanding of the universe,” and that “[my] isolation has come from experimentation in the objective universe, synthesized with subjective understanding of the self.” Hence, the laborious and even nauseatingly tedious telling of my life story here at Dark Twins, in order to establish those facts.

He goes on to say something else that provides and important clue and spur (these words have been my only refuge in some times of very deep despair and demoralization):

The task of the Magus is to produce changes in the objective universe that reflect eternal values, and to do so requires that the Magus violate certain commonly held opinions and mores of the Temple of Set. The changes will radiate beyond the Temple into the greater human world, in both direct and “magickal” ways.

p. 141

So even for Temple of Set members, it is established unequivocally here that what a Magus is doing has implications that reach far outside the specific context of the school, and this is yet another big clue that such work is a thing that can happen outside of the school. It’s something Webb acknowledges elsewhere in this book when he states that the kind of thing a Magus does has been done in examples that had nothing to do with esoteric schools, naming such figures as Thomas Jefferson and Sigmund Freud: People whose work is so evolutionary that the person themself is basically fused with the work that they’ve done. In this case, however, the people did not use the explicit title of “Magus,” which still draws its legitimacy mainly from an esoteric school.

I think I will probably wait a while before I “poke the bear” of which “opinions and mores of the Temple of Set” the Magus must violate; I admit, I’ve been curious about it throughout the course of my work, and I have some ideas/opinions about it, but they’re somewhat beside the point by now.

For now, I’ll examine the “steads of the grade” in turn, so as to bring the focus back to the essential experience of the grade.

The Graal

Magi are in the presence of the graal, which is said to bring forth only their favorite food. Every magickal and spiritual experience is now cast in the form of their Word. Likewise this effects them very erratically. When they get a portion of their food, they have an output that makes any of their previous output seem like they were standing still. But deprive them of their food and they lapse into depression and physical sickness. One may compare the drive of the Magus to that of a quest for water in the desert.

p. 143

This passage is an example of what I described in Week 24 of Inner Tarot Revolution when I talked about statements from this chapter that were incomprehensible by me—until they weren’t. There were parts of it that I understood very well, as I already alluded to above in this post, because what Webb describes here is akin to the “shaman sickness” that I referenced above. That is something I have experienced for most of my life. It’s hard to understand what he means here by “food” unless you’ve personally had the experience and that is one of the main keys to this chapter that mean it will only be fully understood by the people for whom it was written. Dark Twins is a good example of what he meant when he discussed how a Magus with their food has such an output: Over the course of a few months, I managed to very quickly crank out 118 posts here. Then I stopped writing, and got severely depressed and tired.

The part I couldn’t understand—until it happened to me—was where he said that “every magickal and spiritual experience is now cast in the form of their Word.” I thought I understood it vaguely when I first read it, but although I had heard my Word in 2016 when I first read this, I didn’t have an understanding of its meaning yet. Once that meaning came to a certain level of development, I came to experience this part of The Graal, and it was maddening. It’s very true, even to this day, and it’s one element of the seemingly incessant synchronicity I have belabored so much here: A lot of it will be easily brushed off by people who haven’t had this experience because it’s not truly remarkable synchronicity and is so tied to one’s subjective understanding of one’s Word. An example I can cite is how, a few months back, I was watching the Netflix series Bodies; the entire plotline seemed to me to be connected to Hermekate, and at one point while I as watching it, Veronica walked by the television and spun a little LEGO Christmas carousel sitting next to the TV, which also reflected my subjective inner thoughts regarding my Word; if I wanted to, I could waste an entire day writing a detailed exposition of why that was all so…and I have done similar things here at Dark Twins, all just to make that one point and establish a documented firsthand understanding of The Graal.

I’ll spare you.

The Theater of the Word

The ritual chamber and the laboratory of the Magus is the objective universe. This does not mean that the Magus suddenly finds life easy. Instead he or she finds life traditional; that is, he or she lives in a world where the symbolic act is real. Other humans become actors in a play to teach him or her, and they provide a place for the Magus to deliver great soliloquies.

p. 143

As I promised in Week 24 of Inner Tarot Revolution, this explains a lot regarding my writings here, and it covers the other half of the synchronistic phenomena that are not adequately explained by The Graal. It’s another perfect example of a part of the chapter I didn’t fully understand until I experienced it, and then even when I did begin to experience it, it took me a long time to trust that that was actually what was going on (as opposed to me simply undergoing a straight-up psychotic break).

For several years, I was under the impression that “the theater” described some kind of specific process or procedure within The Temple of Set that is part of their established protocol for evaluating the validity of a Word or the Recognition of a Magus (something that requires a unanimous vote from the entire Council of Nine); and, in fact, it’s still possible that that is, indeed, a part of the picture. Since I’m not a Temple of Set member, I can’t comment on that.

However, let’s put it this way: The above passage looks rather poetic, but it turns out to be completely literal in ways no one would believe without witnessing or experiencing it for themselves.

At some point, the objective and subjective universes synchronize so closely and intensely that it becomes almost impossible to separate them again; the Magus has an inner thought, and that thought very soon seems to be expressed by something that happens within the Magus’s field of perception. The incident I mentioned above with the LEGO carousel (notice how something like a rotating carousel can be thought of as resembling the form and type of motion implied by my VSigil, pictured below) is one example. The fact that I went for such a long time wondering if people like Father Nathan Monk were reading Dark Twins and sending me hints in their social media posts is another example. This becomes a constant part of the life experience of the Magus, but it is especially pronounced (so I think; I am still a bit unsure of the actual definition of the following terms, but have pieced it together from my experiences and the hints I have found scattered in the writings of Webb and Aquino) during the actual “Utterance” of a Magus’s Word. It still exists, but it gets toned down.

“Theater” is a great metaphor for this, especially given the sense of things when these synchronicities begin to hit; there’s a quote from William Shakespeare’s “As You Like It” that captures this well:

All the world’s a stage,
And all the men and women merely players;
They have their exits and their entrances;
And one man in his time plays many parts,
His acts being seven ages.

Things that people say and do really seem intended to send the Magus a message. Every word and gesture transpiring within their field of view is impregnated with meaning that, as in the stead of The Graal, also seems to reflect the Magus’ Word. It reaches a point that even begins to feel exaggerated, like in cartoons when someone is playing a trick on someone and gives a contrived, obvious wink to a third witness; likewise, a friend’s poignant turn of phrase stands out in just that way, so as to seem like they’re really dropping some hint for you, and yet when you ask them about it, they have no idea what you’re going on about. As this drama unfolds, it even begins to develop a recognizable “rhythm,” a “cadence,” such that the Magus can almost feel one of these kinds of statements approaching, and there is a delightful sense of satisfaction that absolutely tickles the brain as each one drops.

The purpose of this drama is for the Magus to further develop their understanding of their Word. As someone who has actually undergone Masonic Initiation ceremonies, I can say that my entire life felt as if it had been transformed into that same sort of dramatic play, to the extent that I think it’s possible or likely that such ceremonies were, in fact, modeled after mystical experiences such as The Theater of the Word; every scripted word and every ritual gesture in such ceremonies holds and communicates very specific meanings to the Initiate, and for the Magus, that becomes his or her entire life.

As Webb continues:

…in other words the Magus doesn’t know how the play is going to end. This quality is essential; the ritual drama is the means whereby the Magus gains more being. If he or she knew the end of the play, there would be little learned from it. It is also often less than fun.

pp. 143-144

I described this in Week 24 of Inner Tarot Revolution, as well: In my case, “the end of the play” was when I met Father Nathan Monk and the “illusion of intention” collapsed all around me. At that moment, the uncanny sense of the “ritual drama” ceased immediately. Synchronicity and correspondence between my subjective and objective universes did not cease, but my captivation and mystification by it all came to an abrupt end.

The Workshop

The best form of passing the Word is by a living teacher teaching a living student. Then the students become teachers. This does not mean the Magus should not write, but that writing is a tool for the preservation of the Word in the world. The Magus is a creator and teaches other creators. The Magus is a preserver; by writing books, he or she makes sure that the Word can be continued after his or her life—until fresh fever comes again from the skies. The Magus is also the destroyer; he or she ends existing paradigms. Historically in the West, most Magi founded their own schools.

p. 145

Since I have not come up from within any established esoteric school, I have done the best I could here; I don’t have enough clout to have actual “students,” and so I had to create my own Workshop using the tools I had ready to hand. For me, Dark Twins is the Workshop, as have been previous blogs, such as 4 separate incarnations of Hermekate.

In these words are also the key to another pattern one will notice in my above synopsis of the evolution of Initiatory grades: The tendency for all these dudes to come along and decide to just toss aside the hard work of their forebears, even flippantly, as no longer being relevant. This is something that, I am sure, the establishment of the Initiatory environment of The Temple of Set has helped to temper by erecting certain boundaries around the grade and establishing the Aeon of Set to serve as a “buffer” that balances the need for evolution in thought with this tendency of Magi to shit all over the work of those who came before them.

Yes, it’s all part of the process; and while many babies have been thrown out with the proverbial bathwater, there is something about the tendency that is essential. It results in many errors, but is not itself a design flaw. The esoteric community is slowly learning how to account for and accommodate this tendency.

The Magnetization

The Magus’ coming into being has an effect on the human cosmos. It causes others to have an immanent experience of the Divine, based on their preexisting material. In other words just as the Magus’ experience has two parts—the long, hard path of their life where they bettered themselves via the principle and the moment of divine revelation—other humans who currently use the principle (even though they have not heard the Word) have the divine experience upon hearing the Word.

p. 145

I’m still developing my understanding of this stead, but it’s one of the more abstract and “magic(k)al” aspects of the grade. It addresses the hidden ways in which the Magus’ experience of the world has a direct magic(k)al impact upon it that is wholly independent of any explicit attempt on the part of the Magus to express or communicate their Word to anyone else. As one pointed example of this in my case, I know in my heart and in my bones that the episode of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds entitled “Subspace Rhapsody” is an effect of the Magnetization of my Word; whomever wrote that episode had not heard of Hermekate, but the plot of the episode reflects the principle of the Song that is established with my Word.

One of the other more important purposes of the Word of Hermekate is to serve in mitigating this effect in a world where an increasing number of Magi are able to come into being—but I will explain this in greater depth in a future post.

Other Words

The Magus is not alone in his or her utterance. First, the other Words that have helped him or her in the journey before are connected with the new Word. The interconnections that aided in his or her self-creation become a map for teaching the Word to Setians. This may begin with simple writing exercises like “Word X is like and unlike Xeper.” These connections can lead the Magus through the first part of his or her utterance, but the Magus needs to be weaned from these connections, so that the Word does not exist only in the jargon of the Temple.”

p. 146

This is a very interesting stead; at first glance, it appears to be the stead most firmly restricted to the specific context of Temple of Set as an Initiatory school; in order to make much sense of it, one needs to have an understanding of other Words that have come into being through the Temple, and for the most part, at the time this book was first published, the main way to gain that would have been to join the Temple of Set.

This is one of the reasons, as I step back and examine the overall body of Webb’s work, I suppose that one of his reasons for releasing material like this has been, in part, to test and even expand the limits of what a Magus can be and do, potentially from outside the Temple; to assist in this, he later released the books Energy Magick of the Vampyre and How To Become A Modern Magus: A Manual for Magicians of All Schools, which both contain chapters based on Words that were Uttered within Temple of Set. In order to gain a fuller understanding of this stead from outside the Temple, one must connect all of these dots.

It is part of my plan to write some posts in the future examining the Word of Hermekate in light of some of these other Words.

---

To close, I wanted to quip about the final line of the chapter, especially in regard to my work here at Dark Twins thus far:

The path to the state has been one of terrible sanity and sobriety that often looked like madness, ecstasy, or suffering to the onlookers in the theater.

p. 147

*sigh* I would probably understand this much better, and serve as a much better case study, if I had spent less time stumbling drunk while writing Dark Twins, but what’s done is done. In complete honesty, I do think my drinking has, in part, reflected the fears and doubts I have carried for so many years in connection with my Task; among other things, it has been a form of self-sabotage into which I have slipped in the wake of my imperfections and frequent bouts of indecision.

As I once expressed in correspondence related to my Temple of Set application:

”Imp of the perverse?”

The journey thus far, despite the waves of disappointment at certain outcomes, has been worth it. As I have alluded to here, I can now see more clearly than ever some of the ways in which my Word will achieve more for having come into being outside the Temple than it ever could have from within.

It will be of much wider use to the greater esoteric community this way.