Turning Things Around: The Inner Tarot Revolution Chapter 39
The Great Work Is Never Done
This is the final chapter of Inner Tarot Revolution. It feels really good to be writing it. I just paused to clap because I’m excited. I’m so proud of myself for persevering through this series until the very end. The journey was long and so meandering that, at times, I lost hope that all of this was going anywhere meaningful at all. However, if I had let it all trail off, I would never have seen this eminently satisfying ending. At times, sheer curiosity about how this would all turn out has been the only reason I’ve kept going.
Now I just went to put on a pot of coffee, and as I sat back down, I raised both of my fists and shook them in celebration, especially because of an insight that I had while I was scooping the grounds into the filter basket.
When I turned over the final two cards of this working, I just shook my head, said, “Of course,” and smiled to myself. I did this yesterday, but I made it a point to wait at least a day to let them both simmer in the back of my mind before sitting down to write this chapter. I’m glad I did. It’s good to sleep on new ideas at least once, if for no other reason than to make sure the subconscious gets to have its say.
The final Sun Card of this working is Princess of Wands.
The final Shadow Card of this working is Six of Disks: Success.
Together, they form the perfect ending to this story.
For this final chapter, I’m going to dispense with a lengthy introduction section and just get right to the cards; the more substantive intros I’ve grown accustomed to writing seem suitable for middle chapters since such a structure places so much emphasis on narrative framing; it imparts a sense of “journey-taking,” signaling that we’re still making our way somewhere. However, since this is the final chapter, the sense that seems fitting to convey is more in the character of arrival…
…though as we will see by the end of this post, when it comes to the kind of journey represented by this working, there’s simply no such thing as “arrival.”
Top/Sun Card
I love all of the Princesses of the Thoth Tarot (In Understanding Aleister Crowley’s Thoth Tarot, Lon Milo DuQuette refers to them as “The Thoth pin-up girls”), and as I mentioned in Chapter 32 when her card came up, I have a special connection with Princess of Swords because of how I once drew her as an omen when starting my very first esoteric blog. In that sense, I think of her as a “mascot” for all of my esoteric writing.
However, Princess of Wands has always held a special place in my heart, and I’ve never really been sure why. Of course, her fiery nature is likely a major reason. Fire has always been my favorite element. My Sun sign is Aries, while Sagittarius—another fire sign—is my Ascendant, and fire is by far the most dominant element in my birth chart. Another reason is that, while all of the Princesses are enigmatic by their very nature, Princess of Wands has always been the most mysterious to me. However, her appearance in this placement—especially alongside a card like Success—carries many messages for me. As soon as I turned this card over, I took it as a sign of affirmation that my hunches and theories surrounding “The Princess of Darkness” or The Twilight Princess are accurate, since she shows up here at the very end of the working, almost the same way Link is united with Princess Zelda after succeeding in his quest to defeat Ganon in The Legend of Zelda.
Her appearance here in the final chapter also nicely complements the image I used all the way back in Week 1*, the first formal chapter in this series after the opening post, in which I examined the first pair of cards for this working:
*That image has since been updated.
This image was dense with hidden meaning, most of which I’ve gone on to elaborate upon as this series has unfolded—though I’ve done so without mentioning this piece of artwork again. As such, this image was a great foreshadowing of all that was to come. However, at the time, most of that meaning was still latent within me—still somewhat vague and unformed. Now—largely because of all the writing I’ve done ever since—the meanings are much more refined and conscious. In that sense, the above image is something of a visual sigil that, by now, has developed to the point of becoming a hypersigil.
The main background component of the image is the same one from the end of the post Set Flame To The Night, which describes a two-part working I did meant to “steal” the Black Flame in a sort of Promethean sense. The first part involved making a little in-game “ceremony” out of the part of the game The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild where Link must retrieve the Blue Flame from a furnace at the base of a hill in Necluda, then bring it to the top of the hill to light the furnace of Hateno Ancient Tech Lab. In order to make it even more special (and to add some important layers of symbolic meaning), I refused to stop there, instead carrying the flame all throughout Hateno Village to light its various lanterns, and then out the front gate of the village all the way to Hateno Tower—outrunning assailing monsters the entire way—to ignite the brambles obstructing Link’s passage to the top so that he could activate the tower.
After that, I left my house and took a walk down 39th St. (39, like the number of this chapter, I note—which has some other meanings that also come to mind related to the theme of “Turning Things Around,” because that number is the mirror image of the eminently Thelemic number 93), crossed over from Berwyn into Lyons, and took a photo of the World War I Memorial near the Lyons Post Office. This had symbolic meaning I describe elsewhere, but won’t belabor here.
Returning to the composition of the image above, I overlaid the original background piece with a photograph of a sculpture from a nearby cemetery with a Triple Goddess motif, and a word in Hylian script: “Principesa,” which is the (misspelled) Italian word for “Princess.” Don’t ask me why I chose the Italian word. I honestly don’t know for sure, and I imagine that is something I’ll gain further insight about some day.
I performed this working on January 5th, 2023, and I did so in response to what occurred on January 3rd, when I made an oath to “The Princess of Darkness.” I didn’t share anything about that until March 28th, when I revealed it in the post Big Content Drop - And a documented, witnessed oath to the Prince(ss) of Darkness—but in a sense, the image above and the working of Set Flame to the Night were my way of artistically expressing and placing the final “seal” upon my oath.
My understanding of The Princess of Darkness has shifted over time and continues to develop, though I have a much better understanding of it now. Initially, the idea came purely from my own personal gnosis, but as I’ve continued my studies, I have seen vestiges of the concept elsewhere and can now link it to all sorts of other ideas.
My first understanding turned out to be grossly oversimplified: At first, “The Princess of Darkness” seemed to me like nothing more or less than a feminine face for The Prince of Darkness or Set, the idea being to essentially challenge the gender norm of masculinity surrounding such a figure.
Some time after that, I realized that idea didn’t exactly fit, especially as it was proving to require far too much contrived effort, philosophically, to “cram” it into place in the broader Aeonic scheme of things—and since I knew this concept to be connected with the Word of Hermekate, I knew it had to either “play well” with the Aeons, or at least justify its proposed change or “adjustment” to the Aeons with a pretty solid foundation to stand on. The concept as I understood it at that point did neither.
I was far too attached to the idea of my Word being a manifestation of the Aeon of Set, and that was the major weak point. In Chapter 38, I summarized this entire series as facilitating my Crossing of the Abyss and discussed the concept of spilling “the Blood of the Saints” and how it symbolizes dispensing with egoic attachments. This is not a mere “loss” of symbolic blood, either, but is also an “intermingling” of said blood with the “amniotic fluid” in the womb of Babalon—symbolically, a merging of one’s personal essence with the essence of the Great Mother. This fixation on the Aeon of Set was one of the major attachments I needed to let go of, and the process of doing just that was one of the main outcomes of the working. As I’ve written more recently, I began to see “The Princess of Darkness” as more of a composite being combining aspects of both Set and Ma’at, and from this, have been developing the idea that Hermekate as a Word is meant to bridge the Aeons of those two neteru. In line with this understanding, I decided to go whole-hog in expressing this idea in Zelda-related symbolism and start referring to this entity as “The Twilight Princess.”
This has worked out pretty well, though as I began speculating as of the post Hermekate and the Aeons, it would appear that Horus is involved here, too.
I now think it gets even more complicated, comprehensive, and profound than that: I now think the Word of Hermekate is meant to be the Word that most directly and specifically plays the role of synchronizing and equilibrating the energies and the activities of all of the Aeons.
The original model of the Aeons as described by Aleister Crowley sums up history in the terms of the Aeons of Isis and Osiris, establishes the Aeon of Horus, and anticipates the Aeon of Ma’at; his Aeonic formula gives a general overview of where humankind’s development is headed vis-à-vis the Aeons, but doesn’t really specify how we’ll get there. Frater Achad’s Word of Ma-Ion builds a foundation for the Aeon of Ma’at, while Soror Nema’s Word of IPSOS paints a clearer picture of what it will look like, but each of these Words focuses on the Aeon of Ma’at proper without going very far to integrate it with the other Aeons. Perhaps this is because the Word of Xeper and the Aeon of Set were still missing from the picture, but are vital components of the developing Pan-Aeonic scheme of things. Still, the Aeon of Set, standing as it does in stark and defiant separation from the others, actually threw something of a monkey wrench into the works (and to be fair, such disruption is very much in keeping with Set’s very nature—so in this sense, the challenge this poses is nonetheless a necessary and important part of the process). All of these components are important, but the parts as they stand don’t function smoothly like a well-oiled machine. The purpose of the Word of Hermekate and the Age of Twilight is to rectify that.
It’ll take a slight detour to support this proposition.
As I turned over Princess of Wands and absorbed the idea of her appearance as a confirmation from The Twilight Princess herself, I began to follow some hunches rising from deep within: This time around, I just knew, it would not be sufficient to review the study material related to this chapter’s cards. I needed to “freshen up” on the very nature of the Princess cards in the Thoth deck, because they play an important role that distinctly sets them apart from the rest of the Court Cards in the deck. That role is to serve as a very important sort of “bridge” that links all the parts of the Thoth tarot together: The Major Arcana, the Minor Arcana, and the Court Cards. What this also means is that symbolically, insofar as each of the divisions of the tarot represent aspects of the universe, the Princesses basically help to tie the whole universe together, especially by linking the universal directly with the personal. In other words, they play a role in the cosmos that mirrors the role I now see the Word of Hermekate as playing with regard to the Aeons.
Standing at the epicenter of the role of the Princesses is their status as “outsiders” in the larger royal family of the court cards. The Knights, Queens, and Princes are all tied to decans of the zodiac and, in this sense, are thus tied to one another, united in a holistic way by their shared relationship with the zodiac itself. Symbolically, this also solidifies their deep relationship with the cosmos at large. Since we use the zodiac to mark the passage of time, this also links the Knights, Queens, and Princes to time.
By contrast, the Princesses each represent an entire quadrant of the sky, unbound to any particular zodiacal correspondences—which means that they are linked not with time, but with space. In particular, the Princesses are associated with their respective quadrants of the sky at the north pole, one of two points on earth—and considered to be the principal of the two points—where the four quadrants of the sky come together.
The main feature that separates the Princesses from the rest of the Court Cards is the special relationship they each hold to their corresponding Aces. The Princesses are the “thrones” of their respective Aces. At first glance, this is an extremely abstract concept that doesn’t make a whole lot of sense without understanding a lot of other concepts. I confess that it has taken me about 8 years to come to the understanding that I have now, and for most of that time, this business about Princesses and Aces was something I just had to accept at face value as true without really comprehending it at all.
The main ground for understanding the relationship between the Princesses and the Aces—which also helps connect them with insights about the nature of the Word of Hermekate and its relationship to the Aeons—is the Tetragrammaton, or the four-lettered “Name of God:” YHVH. In many ways, this word is the backbone of all Hermetic philosophy as it relates to the Qabbalah. In order to link all of the concepts that have thus far been under discussion in this post, I’ll need to explore various attributions to the letters of this name.
First, the attributions of the Court Cards to the letters: The Knights (called the Kings in traditional tarot decks) are related to the Y in YHVH (which is the English transliteration of the letter Yod in Hebrew). In terms of the Qabbalistic Tree of Life, they relate to the Sephirah of Chokmah—the second of the three Supernals. This corresponds with the principle of the Father. Elementally, they correspond with fire.
Next, the H (the Hebrew letter Heh) in YHVH corresponds with the Queens of the Court, and to the third of the Supernal Sephiroth: Binah, the Mother. Elementally, they correspond with water.
As for the V—the Hebrew letter Vav—we have the Princes (the same as the Knights of traditional tarot decks), who do some fairly heavy lifting in that they correspond with not one Sephirah, but rather the middle six of them: Chesed, Geburah, Tiphareth, Netzach, Hod, and Yesod. The Princes and the V represent the principle of the Son. They also correspond with the element of Air.
The Princesses—the second H in YHVH (known as “Heh Final”)—correspond with the Sephirah of Malkuth. This, too, explains a lot about just how separated the Princesses are from the rest of the royal court, as from a Qabbalistic perspective, Malkuth is considered to be uniquely separate from all of the other Sephiroth because it represents the entire material plane, while none of the other Sephiroth are fully material. Lon Milo DuQuette has described Malkuth as the “cosmic dingleberry” hanging from the rest of the Tree of Life. As such, it goes without saying that the Princesses correspond with the element of Earth. All of these culminate in the principle of the Daughter.
One detail stands out from the model above: It covers the entire Tree of Life except for one Sephirah: Kether, the highest of them all and the source of all the others. While Malkuth stands apart from the other Sephiroth in its dense materiality, Kether stands apart from the others in the complete opposite sense, as the “most spiritual” Sephirah. Rather than being connected with any of the Court Cards, it is connected instead with the four Aces.
Why do the Princesses hold such a special relationship with their Aces? This has to do with a well-known Qabbalistic axiom: “Kether is in Malkuth and Malkuth is in Kether, but after another manner.” Kether, the highest Sephirah, and Malkuth, the lowest Sephirah, are antitheses of one another and are thus closely bound together in an inscrutable sort of “loop.” They are polar reflections of one another, and the remaining eight Sephiroth can be viewed as the set of transformative phases between the state reflected by Kether and that reflected by Malkuth.
The relationship between the Princesses and the Aces embodies a deep cosmic truth: The Court Cards all represent people, while the Aces—corresponding with the most sublime and undifferentiated “root” essence of their respective elements, and being linked as they are to Kether—represent the absolute height of cosmic abstraction. In other words, the Aces are about as impersonal as one can get. As such, the linkage of the Princesses with the Aces symbolizes the ways in which each human being—while living in this remote material world in separation from the rest of the cosmos—carries within us a spark of the divine and a deep internal connection with the highest source of all spirituality. DuQuette affirms this in Chapter 11 of Understanding Aleister Crowley’s Thoth Tarot, entitled “The Holy Guardian Angel:”
You’ve probably guessed that you and I are the fairytale Princess. We are almost completely asleep to the larger spiritual reality and are restlessly thrashing around in the bed of the material plane, trying to understand everything with our laughably inadequate senses, and explain it with our laughably inadequate language. It’s kind of depressing, isn’t it?
Nevertheless, we quite literally have an ace up our sleeves, because, low as the Princess is on the Tree of Life—banished as she is from the supernal triad, separated as she is from her brother/lover the Prince in his macrocosmic principality, trapped as she is in a microcosmic tomb of matter—the Princess is the most important character in our mystic fairytale.
Her importance lies in the fact that she is the lowest of the low, and is the key to the “general doctrine that the climax of the Descent into Matter is the signal for the redintegration by Spirit” that I mentioned briefly in chapter 8. No other character in our fairytale (except the inscrutable singularity that is Kether/ace) has what the Princess has, that is, a little bit of everything from the highest-high to the lowest-low. As Proclus wrote, “The heaven is in the earth, but after an earthly manner;…and the earth is in the heaven, but after a heavenly manner.”
p. 73
Thus, the above examination of the Court Cards covers one aspect of the Tetragrammaton—that which is reflected and manifested at the level of the individual. Next, we’ll take a look at the more universal/collective aspect of the Tetragrammaton by exploring its relationship with the Aeons.
The familial relationship between the various members of the tarot Court as outlined above has its reflection in one particular family: The one upon which Aleister Crowley based his model of the Aeons, which is reflected in the threefold structure of The Book of the Law.
According to Crowley, the first Aeon was the Aeon of Isis the Mother; next was the Aeon of Osiris the Father. Lastly, Crowley himself inaugurated the Aeon of Horus, the Son. While he also anticipated the Aeon of Ma’at, he left incomplete the inclusion of the “Aeon to come” in this same familial scheme. Because of this emphasis on a “trinitarian” view of the Aeons (possibly because he still perceived the Aeon of Ma’at as latent and undeveloped) and also due to the “threefold” structure of The Book of the Law, there is a disconnect between Crowley’s Aeonic model and the Tetragrammaton.
The book The Gospel of Pandemonium by Edward Pandemonium contains an entire chapter entitled “The Princess.” According to Pandemonium, Jack Parsons, one of Crowley’s successors, felt that The Book of the Law was incomplete because it didn’t fulfill the formula of the Tetragrammaton; it had chapters for the Father (Y/Hadit/Knight), Mother (H/Nuit/Queen), and Son (V/Ra-Hoor-Khuit/Prince), but not the Daughter. In order to remedy this, he channeled The Book of Babalon, thus placing Babalon as the “Daughter” or “Princess” of the formula.
In a completely separate vein, Soror Nema attributed the Aeons to the Tetragrammaton thusly:
Y: Osiris the Father
H: Isis the Mother
V: Horus the Son
H: Ma’at the Daughter
This is all well and good, but now the proverbial equation is unbalanced and things are disjointed: In other words, Parsons brought more balance to the equation by “solving for H-final” and providing an attribution for the Princess with regard to The Book of the Law; since the deities associated with its respective chapters are Thelemic deities, it makes sense to use Babalon—another Thelemic deity—to fill in this gap.
The essential point of Pandemonium’s essay, “The Princess” as I understand it is that as a result of all of this, there remains a need to reconcile the attributions of the Tetragrammaton to The Book of the Law and to the model of the Aeons, respectively. His first step in solving this is to offer a “placeholder” for Babalon from the Egyptian pantheon to bridge the Thelemic pantheon of The Book of the Law to the Egyptian one of the Aeons: The Goddess Qetesh. Then, he suggests that we can assign a dual attribution for the H-final/Daughter/Princess position of the Tetragrammaton:
So now, let us go back to the beginning and look at the formula again. In choosing to use the name of YHVH, both of the feminine elements are represented by the same sign and thus in some sense the same nature. Within Thelema itself, Babalon is the more concrete remanifestation of the abstract Nuit, which may be an esoteric sense of AL I:66 - “The Manifestation of Nuit is at an end.” In the Aeonic scheme, Maat represents a more conscious remanifestation of Isis. The Daughter, be it Qetesh or Maat, replaces the Mother and inspires the Desire of the Father to initiate a new cycle.
As an aside, within the context of the Aeon of Set, this formula and these concepts are not used except perhaps on a personal level. For the Setian, Aeons are metaphysically understood more as layers of conceptual refinement, more akin to Dee’s Aethyrs. In that sense, one might view the Aeonic progression of Isis, Osiris, Horus and Set as an evolution of conscious realization from the most natural to the most non-natural. However, even from this perspective, the relevance of this feminine remanifestation can be seen.
She replaces Isis as our foundation and inspires us to further creation.
So, yes, just as we find a composite Set-Horus in the third chapter of the Book of the Law, we can propose a composite Qetesh-Maat as its balance and complement. She is the Princess who becomes Queen and personifies the Kingdom. Moreover, this is not simply a pair of pairs but actually defines a sixfold web of Being and Becoming in dynamic Manifestation. This is the Mandala as Lamp and Pantacle conjoined in ouroboric loops of continual Becoming.
The Black Earth remanifests the Black Flame.
pp. 111-112
I think it’s neat how Pandemonium closed the above passage and the chapter about The Princess with that phrase, “The Black Earth remanifests the Black Flame,” which combines the two elements that come together in The Princess of Wands: Earth and Fire.
I daresay “The Princess” as I have known her in my personal gnosis is Princess of Wands.
Of the four Princesses, she is the one who links the “highest” element of fire with the “lowest” element of earth, which makes her the one Princess who reaches farther beyond the element of earth than the other three. She alone spans the entire spectrum of existence. She is the perfect bridge from the personal to the absolute—and this fits extremely well with the idea of bridging the Aeon of Set with the Aeon of Ma’at.
I know this section has gotten long and laborious, but there is a reason I’ve included all of the above, and it’s to tie all of this with the Word of Hermekate. I’m grateful to Edward Pandemonium for writing his chapter on The Princess because it provides an important set of missing links that inform my understanding of Hermekate in absolutely crucial ways; I would not have made these connections if I hadn’t persevered in writing this series, so I consider this to be my reward for doing so. At the same time, it’s also the major “fruit” of this work that makes the effort I have put into this series of writings worthwhile in terms of what it will ultimately provide for the greater esoteric community.
To review my developing understanding of the entity I have known as “The Princess of Darkness” or The Twilight Princess: First I saw her merely as the feminine aspect of The Prince of Darkness, but felt that was an oversimplification; next, I saw her as a composite of Set and Ma’at, but had difficulty seeing how that would work or fit into the bigger picture. Finally, I began to think of it as a “triad” linking Ma’at with both Set and Horus—but that relationship is inherently unbalanced if left to stand on its own. The necessary key is provided by Edward Pandemonium’s formula that establishes a composite of Qetesh-Ma’at to balance out the composite of Set-Horus.
As such, here is how it all fits in with the Word of Hermekate:
Consisting as it does of the names of both Hermes and Hekate, I have long suspected the connection of my Word with the concept of heiros gamos, and one of my earlier ideas was to take this literally as representing the union of Hermes and Hekate. Later, I began to see that what was more important was the pattern. The workings of mind and spirit can be inscrutable, and for whatever reason, this is the form the Word took when it was first revealed to me in 2015(ish), but I no longer think it’s meant to be taken that literally.
All I really needed in order to balance my model linking Hermekate to Set, Horus, and Ma’at was Pandemonium’s introduction of Qetesh into this picture.
Hermekate takes the model established by Pandemonium and advances it one step further: It establishes a composite of Set/Qetesh and Horus/Ma’at, unifying all four of them. In so doing, its activity accomplishes two main things that serve to further balance the Aeonic formula:
By unifying both pairings identified by Edward Pandemonium, Hermekate enacts the sacred marriage of the Daughter and the Son of the Tetragrammaton formula.
By fusing the pairings of Set-Qetesh and Horus-Maat, it serves to more tightly incorporate the Aeon of Set into the greater Aeonic formula (even though its adherents think of it as the “outlier” and the “exception to the rule.”) The linking of Set and Ma’at in particular plays an important role in the awakening of N’Aton; for as Edward Pandemonium himself observed: “Where Crowley failed Thelema by failing to distinguish its Left-Hand Path nature, both Jones and Ingalls failed in being even more Right-Hand oriented than Crowley.” And as much as I love Nema’s work, I have to agree. It is just as I said in Hermekate and the Aeons: If there’s a “twin current” linking Horus and Ma’at, then there must be a “dark twin current” linking Set and Ma’at.
In short, it could be said that the Word of Hermekate does indeed establish the Dark Twin Current, and serves as the cornerstone of the “Left Hand of N’Aton.”
I have a considerable amount of study and reflection to do in order to better develop and solidify this understanding, but I feel pretty confident in the basic blueprint I see forming here. I look forward to working on this.
Shadow Card
Phew! This is it: The last card! All my hard work is vindicated!
It was a relief to see this card come up in the final pair of this working. Success is a really nice way to cap off a project that’s involved so much hard work. Now I can pat myself on the back for a job well done. Right?
Right?
Aw, shit—there’s a catch: The card appears in the Shadow Stack. I take this is having at least a threefold meaning.
First off, there’s an aspect of this that I’ve openly acknowledged all throughout this series: Success does very much belong in my Shadow. I have a very difficult time conceiving of myself as a “successful” person, or as one who is deserving of the same. This goes to illustrate one of the most universal lessons of the Abyss:
Often times, our greatest obstacle is ourselves, or at least our limited attitudes and beliefs as they relate to ourselves. In truth, changing this basic aspect of myself has been one of the most important objectives behind this work—and given the results above, I think it has gone a long way in accomplishing that.
That’s Choronzon in a nutshell: The “Dweller on the Threshold,” the greatest enemy to the realization of our True Will, is our very own Shadow: The limited sense of self that serves as a dark little corner for all of our fears to hide within.
I’ve achieved an important milestone here, but the appearance of this card serves as a reminder of where I came from and of why I had to take this step in the first place. It’s also a reminder that now that I’ve done so, there is no turning back. That fearful and self-limiting version of myself is now a thing of the past.
This leads to the second interpretation of the card: A solid, much-needed marker that my journey across the Abyss is now officially complete. Despite the undeniable and irreversible growth I’ve achieved up to this point, the journey could not be considered to be complete until I took every last concrete step and formally completed this working. This is true for two reasons:
That’s the way magic(k) works: You’ve got to follow through and finish what you start. As Gurdjieff remarked, “There is only one kind of magic and this is ‘doing.’”
Going through the motions and doing all the footwork—even when the rewards aren’t readily apparent—is, if nothing else, a demonstration of commitment.
That being said, the placement in the Shadow Stack signals something important: Every apparent ending is really a beginning. In this sense, it’s fitting that this card is one of the sixes of the Minor Arcana, connecting it with Tiphareth, because that is the Sephirah associated with the Knowledge and Conversation of the Holy Guardian Angel. This carries some significant suggestions.
Early on in one’s initiatory career, attainment of the Knowledge and Conversation is generally the central goal: It’s the sun around which the path revolves. It’s everything, and aspirants lust after it with all of their being. It seems like such a lofty goal and one of the major obstacles to achieving it is to despair of ever making it that far.
Then you get there, and you realize: “Shit. I’m only about halfway up the Tree.” There’s still farther to go.
Beyond this task, the Crossing of the Abyss is held to be the next major concern, an achievement that honestly makes the Knowledge and Conversation pale in comparison. This is then seen to be the real pinnacle. In many ways, this step is a reflection of the Knowledge and Conversation itself; there are many parallels. It could be said that the two stages are the same in essence, but vastly different in scope. The Crossing of the Abyss deepens and intensifies the same process carried out in the Knowledge and Conversation, but to an exponentially more extensive degree. You need the K&C to get to that point, but it turns out to be mere training wheels for the real task.
Now you’ve reached the mountaintop. Now you’re done, right?
Right?
In the words of John Bender in The Breakfast Club:
Not. Even. Close…bud.
The truth is that even at this point, the initiate is just getting started. Neither the Knowledge and Conversation nor The Crossing of the Abyss are static goals in and of themselves. Rather, they are each but preliminaries to doing one’s True Will. While the nature of the True Will is initially revealed in Tiphareth, it’s fully clarified in painstaking detail in Da’ath. Until then, you don’t even really know what your True Will is. As such, it goes without saying that it isn’t until you’ve completed both operations that you’re even fully equipped to truly begin your portion of The Great Work.
Humility is so fucking important.
I did a pretty good job in the section above suggesting the over-arching objective of the work I’ve got cut out for me. I’ve had some important revelations about the nature of the Word of Hermekate, and now it’s my job to realize and ground them more fully in a way that helps others on their path. The way to doing that remains for me to decide, but I’ve got some very specific next steps outlined already.
First, I have some clarification work to do when it comes to the Word of Hermekate, and there’s a specific challenge in that regard that I identified several months ago. Meeting it will also go hand-in-hand with helping someone else with their own work.
I’ve recently made friends with the author of the Substack Without Authority, Alice Adora Spurlock. She’s doing some really great work that I think is of tremendous importance: A trained analytic philosopher, she’s developing a formal Philosophy of Magic to match existing fields such as Philosophy of Science and Philosophy of Religion. I think this is important for quite a few reasons.
For one, it will help to further legitimize the field of magic as a serious, functional, and useful field of knowledge—a sincere way of understanding and interacting with reality rather than an insane and maladaptive diversion or escape from reality. Second, it should also go a long way toward fostering further unity among disparate magic(k)al practitioners, which is also one of the sub-objectives of the Word of Hermekate. Put simply, we are all living in a strange ontological shitshow these days. There’s a culture war afoot, which is but one facet of the wider Spiritual War connected with the Aeon of Horus that I have been writing about so much lately. There are so many competing worldviews right now that it’s not even funny, and the state of information technology these days is effectively serving to cordon people off into diverse echo chambers. This serves to keep us cut off from one another (Divide et impera), which in turn serves to erode our autonomy as individuals. Generally speaking, this is done in the service of two main forces, neither of which is ultimately meant to benefit us on a collective level:
The consolidation of political power.
The consolidation of corporate power.
We are awash in a sea of dissonant contexts and this is making it ever-more difficult for many people to consciously navigate our lives and the very landscape of our minds. We are increasingly confused between reality and hyper-reality. There is so much noise in the sphere of most people’s perception that techniques and practices for maintaining control of one’s mind—to be the captains of our own lives—are more important than ever before.
This is the kind of environment for which magic(k) is very well-tailored.
Magicians are those who seek to make themselves expert in navigating the waters of conflicting context. That’s basically what defines us. As such, it goes without saying that magic(k)al people will play an increasing role as leaders in the world that humanity is birthing at this time.
It behooves us to work together.
A working Philosophy of Magick is a crucial step in that direction that will help magicians to sufficiently stay on the same page.
Alice has published a bunch of posts developing the Philosophy of Magick, and in Part Six, Paradigmatic Values, she has outlined a set of criteria for evaluating the validity and efficacy of magickal paradigms.
I’ve been eager to take it for a spin by applying those criteria to the magic(k)al paradigm of the Song of Hermekate. It will help me by serving as something of a “trial by fire” that should not only test, but help me to refine and sharpen my own theories. It will help Soror Alice by providing her with an applied proof-of-concept by a third party. It will help the esoteric community at large by serving both of those ends, helping me to deliver a better understanding of the Word of Hermekate while serving as an example for other magic(k)al practitioners to apply Alice’s model themselves.
This will be one of my next projects.
Secondly, I’ve done a lot of writing here at Dark Twins that has helped me to generate new ideas and better flesh out my developing theories; it’s great stuff, but it’s currently spread throughout a ridiculously large body of work with a lot of my own personal garbage stuffed in between. No one’s gonna read all this stuff. I’m thankful to my readers who have followed along so far—their sitting in as an audience has helped inspire me to keep going, because somehow, all of this writing has managed to hold their attention all this time, proving that there’s potential in my ideas. I know some of my readers with an appreciation for what’s been unfolding here have probably geeked out at the opportunity to watch an Aeonic Word unfold in real-time, but those people are…well (no offense), geeks. I know this isn’t everyone’s cup of tea.
The next step is to mine all of this material and also to use the refinement that applying Soror Alice’s Paradigmatic Values will bring to condense the most useful bits from Dark Twins into published written works that will render all of this more accessible and digestible for others.
That’s going to take a lot of work.
Fortunately, this card serves as a positive sign that I’m on the right track with my conception of The Twilight Princess; as DuQuette said of the Six of Disks in Understanding Aleister Crowley’s Thoth Tarot:
In a tarot reading, this card acts somewhat like a Midas touch—bringing to neighboring cards the prospect of actually manifesting their qualities on the material plane.
p. 264
Long live The Twilight Princess!
Lastly, there is the third and final meaning of this card:
The Great Work is never really complete. I definitely have a lot of work to do and for now, the very specific steps I’ve outlined so far are easily enough to keep me busy for years to come. However, as I bring each of these visions into manifestation, I will undoubtedly be inspired with ideas for new projects, with novel ways of expressing the Word and building upon each step I take.
Words are Platonic Forms that exist in the World of Being; the thing about that is that Forms can never be perfectly expressed in the World of Becoming. There’s no such thing as a perfect circle. This means that no matter what I do to exhaust my expression of The Great Work, there will always be more ways to embody it. Meanwhile, each individual continues to learn and grow so long as we dwell on the material plane. As long as we draw breath, we’re Becoming.
This is Xeper without end. We will each of us die rolling our ball of dung across the vast desert of life.
What forms will the Word of Hermekate take in the future?
Time will tell.
Thank you for reading Inner Tarot Revolution. I’ll catch you on the flipside.