The Wordless Aeon
Updates, High Weirdness, and the Importance of Sobriety in Magickal Initiation
Back on June 1st, in my post Pride and the Left Hand Path, I said I might write a post about habitual substance abuse and how it relates to the LHP around my one-year sober anniversary. In a somewhat roundabout way, this is that post.
Yep, as of June 20th, I rang in the North Solstice by celebrating my one-year sobriety date, which landed on that same day. Believe it or not, while the North Solstice also carries a great deal of symbolic meaning to someone who walks the Left Hand Path (because it was the date in 1975 when Michael Aquino performed the North Solstice working that resulted in The Book of Coming Forth By Night), I didn’t intentionally make that my sobriety date. I quit drinking on June 14th last year, just ahead of my move from Chicago to the Houston area with Veronica; the day after we moved into our new home, while getting some of V’s stuff from a family member’s home, we realized she had hung onto the leftovers from a cannabis vape I’d bought on a trip to Seattle a few months prior. I wasn’t about to throw that away, so I went ahead and indulged one last time, using it up. That was June 20th, 2023.
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You’d think that would be reason to celebrate…and on the day-of, it was. I was pretty happy, pretty proud of myself, because I hadn’t achieved a year of continuous sobriety for about 25 years. However, my celebration was short-lived. In the immediate afterglow, I hit a slump.
At first, I thought it was because of the close proximity, this year, of the North Solstice with the Strawberry Moon/Rose Moon, which came with some baggage. This year’s solstice was pretty interesting and considered significant among occultists, witches, and other lovers of woo. For one, it was the earliest North Solstice in over 200 years. Secondly, it coincided so closely with the Full Moon this year that for all intents and magic(k)al purposes, they were as good as simultaneous. Third, the Rose Moon is significant in that it is always the lowest Full Moon in the northern sky on any given year, but since this one fell so near the solstice itself, it was also the lowest one in many years—meaning it was much bigger in the sky. I saw it on my walk home from the mailbox that night, and momentarily mistook its glow for that of the setting sun even though it was on the wrong side of the sky. So, all told, it was a very magic(k)ally potent time.
Anyway, why would this be such a downer?
Well, one reason is that the Rose Moon will always stand out in my memory because of what took place on the night of the Rose Moon eclipse of 2020. I cover this in-depth in the post The Weighing of the Heart, but to summarize: V and I ended up deciding to trip on mushrooms that night, and I had a mind-blowing (literally) ego-death experience built around the mythological motif of the Ceremony of the Weighing of the Heart from The Egyptian Book of the Dead, then an experience of being operated on and psychically “upgraded” by Anubis. Then I went on an inspired two-hour rant covering ideas that I realized were related to my Word of Hermekate. Before that point, I had been struggling to extract meaning from the word “Hermekate,” which first echoed spontaneously in my mind in 2015, and wasn’t sure it was what I thought it was: A genuine Aeonic Word.
After that point, I was sure it was one and that this meant I had a great deal of work cut out for me. Like, a lot of work. I mean years and years of work. I had a very clear idea of the scope of what I would need to do for the Word to succeed, but no idea where to even begin…and that’s in large part because I wasn’t formally trained to a point at which my competence and knowledge in esoterica were equal to the task. I knew it. So, after one half-assed session of attempting to write my ideas down and create some kind of starting point, I hit the bottle and drank to blackout, which led to some weird paranormal shenanigans which are covered in The Weighing of the Heart.
The fact that blackout drinking was also a regular occurrence around that time was another reason I was daunted by the task. Obviously. Also, the fact that all of this was evidently catalyzed by a psychedelic trip poses additional problems. From the perspective of Western occultism, it’s essentially a major disqualifying factor because it came through a “drug” instead of through protracted esoteric practice (though to be clear, I was also no stranger to disciplined magic(k)al work—I once shared my daily magic(k)al routine circa 2012 with a ToS Adept, and they said it sounded too rigorous); and as someone highly conditioned by that worldview, I share the sense (despite myself) that this carries shame with it. I get how the way this all happened makes it seem like I’m really suggesting, “You can just trip really hard and become a Magus.” I’m not suggesting that and it’s way more complicated than that, but I get it.
On the other hand, as was raised by the account itself: Is that a matter of cultural chauvinism? There are many spiritual traditions throughout the world that involve use of entheogens. The Western mindset considers those traditions “primitive” and “inferior;” is that true? How arrogant do we want to be about it here in the Western world now that we’re doing feverish research into psychedelics and training therapists to use psilocybin to treat cases of major depression and trauma that our “advanced” Western psychiatry has failed to remedy? That is an example of one of the types of questions raised by my Word and its relationship with power dynamics.
So this sober anniversary was bittersweet. I was glad I made it, as sobriety is and has been crucial in my journey to understand the Word of Hermekate…but on the other hand, there’s still a lot of shame attached to it, mainly because, out of a kind of desperation paired with the result of chemically lowered inhibitions, I started blogging about Hermekate again here at Dark Twins before I got sober. I sort of jumped the gun, here. As my longtime readers know, this whole scenario has resulted in more than one embarrassing/humbling moment when I had to face consequences of my substance abuse problem and clean up messes that would never have been aired so publicly if I hadn’t started writing before my Word was fully-developed. Little missteps and corrections here and there.
Then again, in the chicken-or-egg sense, if I hadn’t started writing so early in the process, I also wouldn’t have made several of the connections that I did, and as such, probably wouldn’t have developed the Word as well as I have. So it’s a wash.
Honestly, I have the tacit support of a handful of friends to thank. I’ve gotten much-needed nudges of encouragement along the way to keep going, and I’m thankful for those. I think one reason may be that there is value in documenting this process the way that I am. That methodology ends up influencing how everything unfolds, but it also gives a glimpse into things few people would otherwise get to see. If all goes well, this will all be good data that can be used by other practicing occultists as well as those who simply study the occult. When it comes to Aeonic Words, most people only ever get to taste the soup—my readers also get to watch it being cooked.
One reason this kind of data is valuable is because it helps to establish some things about the nature of Aeonic Words as a phenomenon, but the downside to this is, once more, hard for me to endure. Simply put, I’m not as well-trained as most occultists who utter Aeonic Words, and this results in a very bewildering experience given the sort of “liminal space” my work occupies. On the one hand, that relative lack of training makes the very claim itself rather dubious on an internet full of self-deluded (or flat-out lying) wizard dude-bros claiming, “Yeah man, I totally crossed the Abyss. No big deal, bro.” Second: Even if my experiences and writings prove convincing and some people see potential for actual validity of my Word, it would only be grudgingly accepted by some people because I didn’t exactly “go through the proper channels,” and that pisses people off for a wide range of reasons. Some might be jealous, especially if they themselves had knuckled under and worked really hard to jump through a bunch of hoops only for me to come along and prove that just maybe, they didn’t have to do that.
Of course, those people would be dumbasses, because I’ve been at this for almost 30 years, and it hasn’t been a fucking picnic. I didn’t jump through their hoops, but damned if I haven’t paid some serious dues. I don’t wanna hear it, frankly.
Those with more wisdom might be concerned for a different reason, and to illustrate it, I’ll quote Margaret Ingalls, AKA Nema Andahadna, from the chapter on Binah in her book Maat Magick: A Guide to Self-Initiation:
It’s no coincidence that a major Western religion abounds in images of sheep and children. Initiation is difficult, dangerous, and requires getting your hands dirty. You assume profound risks and responsibilities in pursuit of the unknown, with no one to blame but yourself if you fall.
Is it compassionate to open doors to initiation for the confused, the desperate, the ignorant, the comfortable? If you’re in Level 3, you know the answer.
p. 79
Yeah, I’ll tell ya…if you’re in “Level 3” (analogous to the grade of Magister Templi), then you’ve seen some shit. A perusal of my written accounts here at Dark Twins will also elicit an answer to the above question. When things go wrong, it can get messy. I count myself fortunate as one who barely made it. As my post The Temple of Madness: A Chapel Perilous Story illustrates, my journey literally sent me to the madhouse, to a state-run mental health facility called Madden (yes) Mental Health Center, which was little better than prison. This is not a game.
So, from the point of view described by Nema above, there’s a strong case to be made that doing things the way I have is not only reckless for the risks it has posed to me, but also in the sense that it might give people the wrong idea and encourage them to take the same risks I did. I admit it’s possible, but in light of this risk, I’ve refused to hold the gory details back. This way, at least people can clearly see what the dangers actually are, and hopefully that will suffice to warn away people who aren’t equipped to handle initiatory work. If not, I have only this to say:
Exploration has always been dangerous. Traveling the seas in a ship or longboat is dangerous; before the craft of shipbuilding and the art of sailing were well-established, anyone attempting such things would have been regarded as mad. You fuck up your navigation work and run out of food in the middle of the ocean, you’re done for. The same goes for astronauts. My father was well-studied in physics and chemistry, and he used to tell me when I was a boy that anyone who got on the Space Shuttle was nuts because they were sitting on a gigantic bomb.
Such risks are how progress is made.
One big step taken by my work—and my sharing of the same—is to help establish the legitimacy of various phenomena associated with these levels of initiation, and some of what I will be covering in the rest of this post will help to illustrate how and why that is, but in a nutshell:
The fact that I wasn’t so formally trained goes a long way toward separating my experiences from the influences of prevailing esoteric groups, which in large part helps to rule out things like mere social contagion as factors in said experiences. In other words, if a magician is training with a group of other magicians for the specific purpose of having certain initiatory experiences, then it’s hard to prove that they aren’t just working together to “manufacture” those experiences, or basically conditioning each other toward highly biased outcomes. In less polite terms, they could all be bullshitting each other and themselves to the point that everyone believes a bunch of utter garbage. Having these experiences independently and relatively unprepared helps to demonstrate that they aren’t merely socially-constructed realities, but instead are simply realities. The method isn’t ironclad from a scientific point of view, but nonetheless, this makes me something like the “control” in a scientific experiment. One of the keynotes of my journey has been that, more than once, I’ve perceived things or had experiences in my gnosis, then learned things that backed them up later through study.
This stuff generally doesn’t unfold that way when people are “doing it by the book” and training up for these experiences.
There’s one last important thing to note about my doing things this way:
I was told at a young age by my “spirit guides” that this was how it was going to happen. I was told by them that this is precisely why I was born. I’ll elaborate on this later.
First, I have some updates which are potential examples of the above type of evidence, but also potentially not; and if nothing else, my sharing them will help to furnish a good example of why it’s not great to mix initiatory work with a substance abuse problem.
I’ll mark this subject transition with a song I listened to often in the drunken, turbulent times that came in the wake of 2020’s Rose Moon eclipse. It was basically my theme song for a couple of years.
Abandon All Hope, Ye Who Enter Here
This morning, going through our refrigerator, I pulled out an unopened bag of iceberg lettuce that had clearly gone bad, and really didn’t want to just throw it away; it was organic matter and there seemed to be something perverse about keeping it encased in plastic and sending it to a landfill, where its molecules might never find their way anywhere else. So I went to the bedroom where Veronica lay after taking her shower and told her I was going to throw it away but I felt weird about it, and she said, “Why don’t you go toss it into the field out back for the birds and animals? And take those sweet potatoes, too.”
So I went back to the kitchen and took the sweet potatoes out of the refrigerator and put them on the counter next to the bag of lettuce, but before I left, I walked back into the bedroom, laughing a bit, to talk to V.
Those sweet potatoes had brought back memories.
I lay on the bed next to V and talked to her for a while about my ex-wife, “The Priestess.” She had been involved in Ifá, an African diaspora tradition of the Yoruba people from Nigeria. I had joined the same House as her in the Chicago area, and our Babalawo had seen fit to give me my Warriors—physical representations of the orishas Elegua/Eshu, Ogun, and Ochosi that I was to “feed” on a weekly basis. I related to Veronica how, every Monday night, I would sit down in The Priestess’s temple space, where we both kept our Warriors on the floor, and talk to the orishas as I “fed” them by rubbing red palm oil (a substitute for animal blood) all over the handmade clay head with cowrie shell eyes that represented Eshu, the miniature steel tools representing Ogun, and equally tiny metal bow and arrow that represented Ochosi. As I did this, I was to praise them and ask them for their help with anything and everything I could think of; the idea behind this practice was that I kept them fed, and they would “fight my battles for me.” This also involved an offering of foods that they liked, and because it was one of Eshu’s favorites, I almost always offered him sweet potatoes. I was supposed to cut them into 3 slices since that was his number.
Then at the end, I would stand up, fill my mouth with a swig of rum, and spit it all over the Warriors.
Ashe!
The reason I shared this story with Veronica was because she likes an extremely clean house, and leaving all this food laying around inside the house was something liable to attract pests, especially here in Texas (think German cockroaches). Usually, back in the day, the sweet potatoes were rotting or moldy by the time I scooped them up to discard them. I knew she’d get a kick out of it.
I generally regarded this practice as a chore. My feelings about it were ambivalent; there was a part of me that was genuinely interested in Ifá, but it was also a point of tension in my relationship with The Priestess because honestly, Ifá occasionally involved animal sacrifice, and not only was that something I wasn’t too keen on, but The Priestess claimed to be all about animal rights, even making a big show of being vegetarian ever since she was a little girl because she felt bad when she found out where her chicken came from—but she was totally cool bringing chickens and pigeons and guinea fowl for our Babalawo to kill on her behalf. It wasn’t a healthy relationship, as I’ve mentioned a few times on this Stack, and I wouldn’t have been involved in Ifá if it hadn’t been for my relationship with her and some of the obligations I felt as a result.
That being said, I thought Eshu was pretty cool. A trickster. When V quipped that coyotes might come to eat those sweet potatoes, I told her that would be fitting in a way, because Coyote is a trickster just like Eshu. Then I related to her one of my favorite little bits of Eshu-related trivia while describing his nature as an orisha—a Yoruba saying about him:
“Eshu throws a stone today and kills a bird yesterday.”
With that, I put on my sandals and went out back, to the edge of our back lawn, which opens out into a huge field behind our house. I dumped the lettuce out, and then I threw the two sweet potatoes as far as I could, watching them split in half on impact. Owing to the conversation I’d just had, I even made an “offering” of sorts out them, though I wasn’t sure to whom. I genuinely infused my throws with an intent of offering to “whomever.” I emphatically wasn’t offering them to Eshu or The Warriors, because The Priestess had taken it upon herself to return them to our Babalawo one time when we were fighting, and that was that. Nonetheless, I had an abiding sense of offering them to “someone.”
Like I said above, instead of being in a great mood over the past week ever since my sobriety date, which was an important landmark, I’ve actually been pretty troubled. Preoccupied. I had a vague sense of the reason why: Getting that year of sobriety under my belt was a symbolic victory I’d been waiting for, as there was action to take once I had managed it. My problem was that I’ve been having a hard time deciding exactly what form it should take.
You see, the thing is, I know for a fact I have a Word, and I have a general game plan for what comes next as I work to develop it. The end goal involves writing a book that will condense the salient points of my story that I’ve told over the past year and a half here at Dark Twins, along with the insights that come from the research I still have before me to do. In all likelihood, it’s going to be a pretty substantial book in terms of page count. That’s years of work away from becoming a reality but the vision in my mind is crystal clear.
In the most technical sense of the term, if we go with the understanding that an initiatory grade is a state of mind, that does mean I am a Magus. Doesn’t it? How can you have a Word and not be a Magus? I’m uttering it, I see that shit unfolding every single day. It’s happening. That shit doesn’t just happen.
Still, I don’t feel like a Magus. I’m not trained like one, and even if I manage to develop the philosophy surrounding my Word sufficiently enough as to see it take shape in the minds and actions of others in the world, I’ll still personally feel like a fraud if I don’t remedy that—not least because a Magus is supposed to have a school. A Magus needs to be able to initiate and teach others. To remedy that, I need to train up.
I’ve also always felt that Enochian magic(k) would be an important part of my work, but again: To get there, I need to build a practical foundation. I’ve got most of the basic skills that would be required but I would feel a lot better if my foundation were rock solid. It’s kind of doing things backwards, but again…that’s something my guides always told me I’d be doing.
So I’ve been putting thought into what system(s) to train myself in. I’ve got a nice collection of books and a footlocker full of tools, so I’ve got options.
I’ve practiced Golden Dawn magic(k) before—that’s how I got my start (with Ceremonial Magic(k), that is). Back in Norway, I was conversant with the Pentagram rituals, Hexagram rituals, Middle Pillar and Rose Cross rituals. However, since those days, I’ve learned enough about magic(k) to know the Golden Dawn system is more bulky than it needs to be for my purposes. From the Left Hand Path viewpoint, it has a lot of extra baggage owing to the spiritual dogmas attached to it. It would be a Cadillac, whereas I’m looking for something more sporty.
Of course, there’s always Thelema, and no matter what else I end up doing, I’ll be studying plenty of Thelema anyway. The downside is that it might be even more loaded down than Golden Dawn in terms of books and documents to collect and sift through, most of which are aimed at enriching one’s study for the purposes of facilitating the actual, inner understanding of the initiatory process…and Crowley also developed a whole lot of his own “lore” and convoluted keys. He built a veritable labyrinth to protect the “Holy of Holies,” with all sorts of added initiatory blinds and stuff…and the fact of the matter is, I don’t really feel like deciphering all of that (or paying for a book that simplifies it) when I know damn well I’ve already had the initiatory experiences all of that is meant to lead to. That’s not why I’m doing all of this. If The Golden Dawn is a Cadillac, Thelema’s more like a Bentley, and that’s moving in the wrong direction entirely if I’m looking to scale back. The more basic and essential principles of initiation have been distilled from both Golden Dawn and Thelema, and what I need are those essential skills and bits of knowledge so I can synthesize my own system based on my Word.
I’ve kind of had my eye on the Feri tradition going all the way back to my time with my ex, and I’ve had Evolutionary Witchcraft by T. Thorn Coyle for years. The problem here is that while many aspects of this feel refreshing to me, the Feri philosophy holds a few tenets that directly contradict those of the Left Hand Path. It’s also scaled back a little too far for my needs, meaning I’d have to find a way to close the gap between Feri and the kind of initiatory framework I’m looking to get conversant in. Feri won’t carry me to Enochian operations. If The Golden Dawn is a Cadillac and Thelema is a Bentley, this is, like…I dunno…a tractor? Not quite the right fit. In order to make this system work for me, I’d need to find something more suited to my current needs, then work backward from there to bring this into my synthesis…and I might actually end up doing something along those lines. We’ll see.
Occasionally, a couple of books in particular have come to mind—a pair that would be perfectly suited to what I’m setting out to do. I’ve thought of them many times over the past few months, but always pushed that thought out of mind as soon as it arose. When I finally took them down from my shelf today to look them through, two things happened:
I learned something shocking that connected with the Word of Hermekate, but also raises some difficult questions that may pose an existential threat to the Word itself. This ties into the drinking I’d been doing.
Upon working through the impact of that and sitting down to read one of the books from the beginning and start my new practice, I suddenly remembered some things about this system that explain why I kept pushing thoughts of it out of my mind.
Here Be Dragons
The first book I pulled down was The Sevenfold Mystery by Michael Kelly. Kelly was a Magister IV° in Temple of Set for years, and served as Grandmaster for its Order of Leviathan (a detail which becomes important later). This would be perfectly suited for the Enochian work I’d like to do, mainly because this is an explicitly Left Hand Path system of working Enochian magic(k). Thus, it’s basically tailor-made for working with both Michael Aquino and Anton LaVey’s versions of the Enochian Keys. If that’s my goal, there’s no better choice at all, because it lays everything out meticulously. There’s basically no guesswork. None. I’ve also got Enochian Vision Magick by Lon Milo DuQuette and that might actually make a good supplemental study, but the downside there is that it’s a Thelema-based system, which would kind of pigeonhole me to that Bentley I mentioned above. Also, if memory serves (questionable, I admit), it left me with unanswered questions after my first read-through. Not ideal.
So, cool. Here was my Enochian book.
What about that magic(k)al foundation, though?
That’s where another book by Kelly comes in: The Draconian Quadrilogy. It’s a collection of four of his books, all of them focused on the Draconian magic(k)al system that was born in the crucible of The Order of Leviathan. I remember a time when I was very excited about working through this book…a time a few years ago. A time, now that I think about it, just before I had that crazy experience on the Rose Moon Eclipse. Ah, that’s right. I set it aside, because I knew at the time that a stumbling drunk, burned-out stoner like me would be wasting his time even starting. I’d have to, you know, get sober first. So I set it aside and forgot about it. I made myself forget about it. But I’d found it again.
Here was my sleek, sexy little Porsche convertible.
At any rate, I started flipping through the book, then scanned its table of contents…and my eyes stopped dead on a certain chapter title from the first book, Apophis:
“Zain - The Wordless Aeon.”
Wai-….wait a minute. “Wordless Aeon?” That makes me think of Song of Hermekate—where I first called Hermekate “the Word to end Words.” My concept of the “Song,” a kind of Word manifesting through multiple Magi, that I boldly claimed was utterly beyond the very principle of Logos.
Well, I had to read up on that.
So I flipped to page 77 and dug right in. It wasn’t an overly long chapter, but it began with Kelly’s definition of the term Aeon. Then he does the same with the concept of Words, which emanate from Aeons and are uttered by Magi. He gives a kind of historical run-through of the Logos-centric tradition of “Words of Power” similar to what I’d done multiple times here at Dark Twins Then he covers Zain.
I already recognized Zain as the Hebrew letter, meaning “sword” and attributed to the tarot card The Lovers, and Kelly explains that.
Then he introduces the concept of the “Aeon of Zain,” which was evidently first referenced in Kenneth Grant’s Typhonian Trilogies. It’s attributed to Zain and The Lovers because the Path of Zain crosses The Abyss on the Qabbalistic Tree of Life, bridging Tiphareth with Binah. As Kelly explains:
Zain is a Wordless Aeon (or perhaps more accurately, an Anti-Aeon) simply because it cannot be expressed. It is ever-potential and always a shadow in the future, never yet manifest. As soon as it Comes Into Being and its indeterminacy is resolved, it has become something else. Yet an Anti-Magus may perhaps show its terrors through veils of Silence, through the act of Not-Uttering.
pp. 77-78
So it’s a Wordless Aeon because it’s entirely beyond expression? In other words, it’s “ineffable.”
My first reaction to reading this was heartbreak, because here’s the truth: I had read that at least once before. It was during my heavy alcoholism and I honestly probably just skimmed it, and I have never again consciously thought about the concept, but I had read it before. This raises the possibility that my concept of Hermekate being a “Word to end Words” could be completely unoriginal, and instead an example of cryptomnesia. Cryptomnesia is a phenomenon wherein a person reads or otherwise learns something, then forgets that they know it, and it later resurfaces from their subconscious mind, but without any conscious connection to the previous learning. As a result, the person ends up believing the idea is their own when it isn’t.
I have no choice now but to admit that this is a possibility. And that puts all of my work in jeopardy.
This, my friends, is one of the major problems with doing esoteric practice and study while in the throes of alcoholism and addiction. There are quite a few other reasons—all in all, you’re just basically not in control of yourself while habitually taking mind-altering substances, but this tendency of certain substances to interfere with memory can become a big liability when you’re trying to navigate the deeper waters of initiation such as…oh, I dunno, The ABYSS. The initiate needs to have their wits about them.
Also, shit like this can happen.
I need to spend time reflecting and confront that possibility. However, there is all sorts of silver lining here, and this is where things get weird.
Bat Country
So, The Aeon of Zain, or “The Wordless Aeon,” is a thing I read about prior to formulating the theory of The Song, which renders Hermekate “The Word to end Words.” The Aeon is “Wordless” because it’s associated with a path across The Abyss.
However…
…I first heard the Word of Hermekate way back in 2015—long before I had even heard of Michael Kelly and well before I had read anything by Kenneth Grant…and not long after that happened and I began to think it might be an Aeonic Word, I started a blog named after Hermekate and its tagline was…get this: “Eff the ineffable.” “Ineffable” means “inexpressible” and is thus directly analogous to something that is “wordless” because it’s beyond any capacity for actual expression. None of that could have been fed to me by this book or any other book—it happened on its own, about 5 years before I could ever have read about this.
Further, I have long attributed Hermekate to a different path on the Tree of Life, one that also crosses the Abyss: The path of Cheth. This attribution comes via the Chariot card, Atu VII (the one immediately following The Lovers in sequence). This would help to account for both the similarities and the differences between the idea expressed by Kelly in Apophis—because there are differences.
While Kelly derives the concept of an “Anti-Magus” from the Aeon of Zain—essentially describing a Magus who remains silent and refrains from uttering anything—the concept of the Song that I derived from my Word of Hermekate is different from this. In many ways, it’s the same situation Kelly describes, only turned inside-out. While Kelly’s concept addresses the ineffable nature of The Void by suggesting the Magus refrain from uttering a Word and thus anchoring their magic(k)al influence in the “unshaped future,” Hermekate addresses it by distributing the utterance among multiple Magi who, working in concert, can anchor and manifest a Song in the World of Becoming, or the cosmos below The Abyss. In other words, the formula of the Song allows a sort of collective action that can transcend the principle of Logos while nonetheless calling forth the patterns of the Song into manifestation.
They can “eff the ineffable.”
Further, this contrast shows itself in the symbolism of the two letters:
Zain, meaning “sword,” suggests a cutting or severing action, and the Anti-Magus does just that: Cuts oneself off from the utterance and opts for silence, focusing on the unshaped future of the Void. Its associated card, The Lovers, shows the lovers in question standing apart from one another, just as the Anti-Magus stands apart from the Word.
Cheth is the letter of life, because the words chayim (“life”) and chaya (“living”) begin with the letter Cheth. Likewise, the letter itself is shaped somewhat like a door, and so the letter is considered to be the door of life. This fits well with its Qabalistic attributions since it connects two feminine sephiroth (both on the left-hand Pillar of Severity)—one above the Abyss and one below it. It thus connects the unmanifest world with the manifest world. Without being crude, this would make the path of Cheth something like a cosmic “birth canal” (Zain doesn’t share this wholly feminine quality because it runs diagonally to the middle-pillar Sephirah of Tiphareth, which is gender-neutral). All of this connects with the impulse of the Word of Hermekate toward manifesting the unmanifest against all odds. This is, of course, ultimately impossible to do in any pure sense because, as Kelly noted, once anything crosses the line from the unmanifest into the manifest, it is undeniably “effed” and no longer ineffable; and that’s okay because another meaning of the word “Cheth” is “sin,” stemming from a root that means “to aim and miss.” This suggests that a Song isn’t really uttered in the sense that a Word is, the difference being that by manifesting via the actions of multiple Magi, it nonetheless leaves just enough of a ripple in causation that something resembling its form can be discerned by one observant enough to see the pattern. This ends up acting almost like “sonar,” which connects with the sonic principle already attributed to the Word in the post Song of Hermekate.
So, it’s different from Zain, but also closely related since both paths cross the Abyss.
However, there does seem to be some “bleed-through,” because after all: I named this site “Dark Twins,” which is more reminiscent of The Lovers and Zain than it is of Hermekate and Cheth (fun little Easter Egg: In this site’s logo, I used photos of my face and V’s face, so it’s a definite Lovers vibe). There are also some other connections to the Lovers: I’ve previously stated ad nauseam that the Word of Hermekate connects the Aeons of Set and Ma’at, and while the two were not paired together historically, I have often thought of them in a sort of neo-mythological way as being connected in a way reminiscent of The Lovers—I even depicted them as such in the image I created for the post Hermekate and The Aeons:
For more fun with twins, soon after I learned about all of this, I of course Googled “Aeon of Zain” to see what would come up, and I found an old, old webpage from 1994 called Star Magick that apparently connects the Aeon of Zain with The Marassa—the “lwa who aren’t really lwa” from Haitian Vodou:
The Marassa are not lwa in the same sense as the others. They represent a fundamental cosmic structure inside which natural forces (the lwa) operate; if the lwa are actors, the Marassa are the stage. If we liken the lwa to the objects in the physical universe, the Marassa would be likened to spacetime.
I couldn’t help but think of those sweet potatoes I had thrown out in the back field and offered to “someone;” evidently I threw two sweet potatoes in the morning, and fed The Marassa that afternoon.
Also—interestingly—the Marassa are syncretized with the Christian Saints Cosmas and Damian, whose traditional signature colors are light blue and light pink. You might notice the blue and pink coloring in the image above; that was done intentionally. You also might notice that all of the Featured Images for every single post since then (not to mention quite a few before that) have been rendered in a similar cyan-and-magenta color scheme.
There’s a lot of meaning to that. The specific tones can vary quite a bit, but I basically connect that color pairing with various phenomena that issue forth from The Abyss…and apparently, so do a lot of other people, including Will Moor.
So what can account for the bit of apparent “crossover” in symbolism between Zain and Cheth? Easy-peasy.
I actually had a little chat not long ago with Dr. Peter Duchemin about the Principle of Proximity, which proposes the transposition of various standard attributions on the Tree of Life; one of those transpositions involves switching the attributions for The Lovers and The Chariot, so that The Lovers connect Geburah to Binah instead of The Chariot, and The Chariot connects Tiphareth to Binah instead of The Lovers. You can read our exchange in the comments under a post he made about it on the Meta Magic Matrix Facebook Page.
To me, this “bleed-through” seems to validate the Principle of Proximity while also explaining some of these apparent symbolic inconsistencies that are showing up in my work and the work of others.
Plus, you know, being in The Abyss and all, well…there’s no real separation there anyway, is there? So things are bound to look a little mixed up as we gaze up into the Abyss from down here in Malkuth.
Unholy Trinity
Believe it or not, things get more interesting still. Before I wrap this up, I’m going to delve more into just why I’ve been pushing thoughts of these two books out of my mind.
As I cracked open Apophis from the beginning this evening and began studying it, I was quickly faced with something just a little bit unsettling, and I finally remembered that it was the driving force behind my original eagerness to work with this material.
In Chapter 1, Kelly introduces “The Unholy Trinity,” a set of three archetypes that he says are absolutely foundational for the entire Draconian system of initiation—most elements of the system are more idiosyncratic and can be swapped out, adjusted or tailored to the individual, but he said that these three archetypes are absolutely necessary:
The Lord of Darkness
The Scarlet Woman
The Serpent
I remembered, then, that as I read through the descriptions of what these archetypes are, what they symbolize, and how they act and manifest for the Draconian magician, I nearly dropped the book.
Why?
I know this post is already very long and you don’t necessarily have to read it now because I will also summarize here, but the best way to understand would be to read the post When They Talk Back.
That post introduces the “spirit guides” I’ve mentioned above…all three of them. As it happens, the three of them line up extremely well with the three archetypes of the Draconian system:
The Lord of Darkness fits directly with Minora.
The Scarlet Woman fits perfectly with Rose.
The Serpent fits perfectly with Ilyas.
It gets even weirder.
As I mentioned above, this system of initiation was originally the work of The Order of Leviathan in The Temple of Set. The Order was founded by James Lewis, the Magus who Uttered the Word of Remanifest. To explain that Word would be a whole blog post all its own, but in short, it’s a Word that has connotations somewhat similar to the concept of reincarnation, but not quite the same thing. It describes a pattern of eternal cyclicity, but also deals with the concept of immortality and the consciousness surviving after the death of the physical body; if, theoretically speaking, someone were to achieve one of the major goals of the Left Hand Path—that is, self-deification, thus gaining immortality—and then choose to come back to Earth in another human body—that would be a potential example of Remanifest in action. James Lewis is keenly interested, as an initiate, in the concept of life after death. An essay that he wrote about it is included in The Temple of Set Vol. II.
As we’ve already seen, Draconian initiation takes ideas like this for granted, and works comfortably with The Abyss, with the concept of states of existence that completely transcend time and space.
Well. As I describe in When They Talk Back, my spirit guides said the same thing about themselves. And they also said the same thing about me.
More specifically, one of Ilyas’ main messages to me was that I, too, was “normally” like them—dwelling in the same world beyond time and space as him—but that I specifically chose to incarnate here, at the time and place that I did, in order to do very specific work. Later on, he also went on to say I am him. Given the situation he alleges, that would basically mean he was myself, talking to me from my own “future” (although since he said he was fully outside time, he could just as well be me before incarnating—or “Remanifesting,” I guess. Technically, he’d have to be both, wouldn’t he?).
Yeah.
Anyway, as time went on and my work with these spirits progressed, I reached a point many years ago at which they were clearly pointing toward initiatory work as my reason for incarnating; Ilyas started describing himself as my “Aiwass,” he and Rose saying I would be doing similar work to Crowley’s, even advancing his work. As I gradually came to understand magic(k)al work, that meant Magus territory at least. For many years, I simply didn’t even believe it was possible, because at that time, most occultists I knew followed the Golden Dawn model saying you couldn’t even reach those grades while living in the flesh. The reason I had to be born in a specific time and place to do the work, as Rose eventually told me, was because my work would depend on certain technological advancements (by which she meant computers and the internet).
And indeed, as I understand the Word of Hermekate and the principle of the Song, that pretty much adds up. For illustrated examples of how Songs unfold and how computing technology acts as a medium for Songs, read Song of Twilight when you have some time.
As for Minora, he used to tell me I was a member of a “dark brotherhood” of black magicians in a past life, and I usually didn’t believe him. But from where I sit now, I’ve seen how my Word reflects basically all of the Words of the Aeon of Set that I’m aware of. Ilyas and Rose used to spend a lot of time telling me cool and trippy things about how all this stuff works when the highest aspects of ourselves are outside of time; for example, they would tell me how, from their point of view, they could see my entire lifetime from start to finish, all at once, the same way I could see all of a diorama by looking down at it from above; and this didn’t necessarily indicate determinism because they said my future was always in flux, but nonetheless they could perceive all possible outcomes—including the ripples of causation sent all across time and space by my actions—so they were constantly responding to every decision I made in life as they worked with me, so as to keep me on course. The way they explained it to me, if they had to, they could even make “upstream” adjustments to events in my relative past (even long, long before I was born) if that was necessary in order to keep my “mission” in an acceptable window of success. If they could send “agents” to any point in time and space the same way I chose when to be born, then theoretically they could basically move heaven and earth for me.
Given the out-of-time perspective, Ilyas also said that meant he could see all of his incarnations at once. All of them were happening in parallel from his point of view.
And since that was true, it meant my various incarnations didn’t even need to be sequential; I could theoretically be incarnated as two different people at the same time—even two people who potentially knew each other.
I once pushed him all the way to the farthest imaginable conclusion: If that were all true…then…was it possible that he was everyone? Usually, at that point, he would stop answering me and tell me to worry about something more imminent. He suggested that was too big for me to wrap my head around (except, like, I was the one who was asking him about it, but whatever, ILYAS).
However, knowing what I know now about what the Temple of Set teaches—with Set or The Prince of Darkness being the Platonic Form related to individual consciousness—that’s basically implying something similar, isn’t it?
But even if that weren’t what Ilyas meant, I’ll tell ya…sometimes I wonder, now—based on what Minora said—could The Temple of Set, or perhaps some other group, be the very same “dark brotherhood” he claims I was part of?
Maybe I know the person I was in my “past” incarnation, and see them on Facebook every day. Ha! Wouldn’t that be a hoot?
Anyway.
All of this helps explain why it’s so easy for me to just kinda…press these books out of my mind. It’s all a little bit overwhelming. I’m only dealing with it now because, again…the last few years have been insane. I can handle just about any level of High Weirdness now.
Working with a narrative like this takes a careful, calculated grip on reality: Not too tight, not too loose. You’ve got to be able to believe just enough in it to flow with it, but not so much that you slip into total delulu territory or get yourself locked up. You have to have a little bit of chill, you know?
At this point, I’ve pretty much laid the entire blueprint out. All that’s left now is details. You know what I need to do now, don’t you?
I need to work on my initiatory foundation, fill in those gaps, and earn my stripes so I can call myself a Magus without my chest sinking.
Meanwhile, I need to work on that manuscript I’ve been mentioning.
Then, I need to do more research and scry the Enochian Aethyrs to complete the picture of the Word of Hermekate. My readers here have gotten a nice sneak peek, and anyone on the internet with the time, patience and interest to read through 124 Substack posts can get a pretty good sense of what my second book will cover…but realistically, no one’s gonna sit and read all that on a screen, which is why I need to write that second book. It will be boiled down, condensed, rendered as clear and linear in form as I can, and people will be able to cozy up in their armchairs and read it all comfortably.
And then?
Who knows what dreams may come?
