Turning Things Around: The Inner Tarot Revolution Week 25

The Human Quest For Something Greater Than Oneself

What a week it’s been! Once I set out to do so, it took me a few days’ work to rebuild Dark Twins, get all the posts up that I wanted to keep, decide which ones to dispense with, etc. There’s a reason it was such hard work that I had put off for so long during Dark Twins’ previous run: I was definitely not “my best self” in the earlier days of my writing here, and I knew that going back to do the required editing would mean having to sift through my previous writing to substantively separate the wheat from the chaff, rather than just summarily toss it all out, which would be tantamount to pure avoidance. It would be irresponsible to just try to brush it all under the rug and pretend it never happened. If I take this work seriously (and I do), then I have to answer for the ways things had previously been done.

It was embarrassing re-reading some of the stuff I had written, especially doing so closely enough to salvage what I could from it.

I came to a decision partway through the process, however: I decided to place the majority of Inner Tarot Revolution behind a paywall, as well as entire other categories of posts here. The thinking went roughly like this: While it has always been one of the main intentions of Dark Twins to openly illustrate a mode of personal work that is most often done in private (and rarely spoken of), and editing that content too heavily would completely defeat the purpose, that doesn’t mean I need to have such flimsy boundaries that I wave all my dirty laundry around in public for all to see. Creating the direct view of this work was always going to involve making something of a personal sacrifice, but it doesn’t mean I need to be diving directly into schools of piranhas eager to flay the flesh from my bones. So, I figure, setting a subscription fee of $5/month would be a good way to strike a balance here. The only people who’d pay anything at all to read this stuff would, in fact, be my target audience: The kind of people who would be able to tell from the context of all the free and public writings I still offer here that they might have something to gain from reading it. For the work I’ve put in and the vulnerability I have taken upon myself in sharing such private details of my life, I can at least make a few bucks for the trouble. It’s never going to constitute a full-on income. Whatever money I make from it will be a mere drop in the bucket. But it’s the principle of the thing, you know? Putting it all behind a paywall signals that I have come to see the value in my work. It’s worth something. I’m finally ready to stand behind that.

However, the general trajectory of my work here is shifting. Inner Tarot Revolution is a magic(k)al working that serves both illustrative and operative purposes. As I have been much more candid about in recent posts, I hold that I have breached the territory of what are considered to be the “upper” degrees in various esoteric schools, and the main Task of a Magus is to see to the success of their Word, which means teaching it. Really, beyond that, it means embodying it, because the Word of a Magus is not a mere “preaching” of one’s ideas; it’s a direct emanation, in the fullest possible meaning of that term, of the inner essence of the Magus’ very Being, and before a certain point, finding a way to fit that kind of thing into words at all is extremely difficult.

As if the more straightforward and direct practical obstacles of an endeavor like expressing The Ineffable weren’t hard enough, as I described painstakingly in the post Fifth Grade Book Report, there are considerable ideological and cultural precedents—the Words of other Magi—to contend with as well. This is true to such an extent that, honestly, the mere achievement of actually reaching the grade isn’t even necessarily the hardest part. I am very sure there have been other people who have experienced it, but have chosen to content themselves with their own knowledge of the achievement and to live out the rest of their lives embodying it quietly—why? Because the grade is so wrapped up in certain strong personalities, in the institutions they have left behind, and the politics and power games that live within those institutions, that trying to prove one’s attainment to others is likely to be regarded by many people as not being worth the trouble…because it is trouble. The only people to whom these issues really matter tend to be people who have already more or less bought into the narrative surrounding all this woo-woo occult bullshit, let’s be real; but the people who are invested in it are often so invested in it that it forms a significant part of their very identity, and those people will defend their sacred cows. As I have illustrated already, and will continue to show in this post and other posts to come, it’s such contentious territory that I am sure there have been other people who have become Magi and instead chosen the path of minding their own business rather than to kick any beehives over it.

But that’s not what I came here to do.

Regardless, it’s such a daunting prospect that, yes, I have held in reserve the act of openly discussing the meaning and content of my Word because if I am going to risk casting such pearls before swine, knowing the backlash it will inevitably cause, I wanted to be damn sure that I had a firm enough grasp of it to clearly express it in such a way that at least one person reading my writing in good faith could understand the Word. That is the whole point of a Word. However, given the way these things have always been done so far, there are many people who have many reasons to be very personally invested in shooting my Word down. If I succeed in my aims, it will force many people to re-think their own commitments to certain sacred cows; certain people who have given large parts of their time and energy to certain schools (especially Magi and clergy in those same schools) may feel “ripped off.” This is all territory I plan to explore more closely in upcoming posts, but it still remains a veritable dogma in occulture at the present moment that this isn’t solo work.

All of this is to say: The main purpose, up to this point, of the working behind Inner Tarot Revolution has been to provide a magic(k)al framework for preparing myself to undertake what I have now begun to undertake: Communicating my Word.

This means I’ve lost a bit of my steam for Inner Tarot Revolution itself; as my readers now know, Week 23 of the Working culminated in the closing of my “Theater of the Word,” a spiritual experience that is meant to help a Magus consolidate the understanding of their Word and to “sweep up” certain “Initiatory dust” that might still be left in one’s inner work. That phenomenon has been the thing I aimed to document here. Now that it’s done, those more personal purposes of Inner Tarot Revolution have now been served.

That’s alright, because it looks like the “fated” turn of my cards has thus far supported me in my efforts; just as I am now laying the foundation for the actual communication of the Word of Hermekate, this week’s cards lead me to take a firm step in the direction of addressing the more transpersonal aspects of this Working. This week’s Top/Sun Card is The Aeon, a card that has almost no meaning without taking wider transpersonal contexts into account. The relationship between Words and Aeons is very strong; Words initiate, refine, and support the Aeons to which they are connected.

My Shadow Card, Queen of Cups, will force me to examine some of the more crucial impediments I must now face and address if I want my work to succeed…so, more “cleanup” work.

While I have decided to put this series behind a paywall, I have also made a firm resolution that any posts I write here that have direct bearing on The Word of Hermekate or matters related to its expression must remain freely available to the public, and so last week’s chapter, along with this week’s chapter, are still “freebies.” If nothing else, they can serve as samples of the work contained in the rest of the series, because I think there’s some very good writing to be found there.

Now, let’s do cards.

Top/Sun Card

Ssshhhhh!

My Sun Card, The Aeon, is one of the most mysterious cards in the deck, for more reasons than one. To this day, when it comes up for me in a reading, I sometimes have trouble interpreting it without reverting to the traditional divinatory meanings of the card it replaced: Judgement.

That’s right, The Aeon is basically the Thoth tarot’s version of Judgement, but Aleister Crowley decided to just throw out a card that had been a standard part of the tarot deck for hundreds of years and put The Aeon in its place, and it all has to do with that troublesome Word of his. This change was one he made as a direct consequence of his Word of Thelema, and that makes the story behind The Aeon a very good case study in the kind of “trouble” I alluded to in the opening of this post. That makes this post something of a “companion piece” to Fifth Grade Book Report, because I said I would be addressing the relationship between Aeons, Words, and Magi in this section of this post.

It’s such a deep and nuanced issue that, in Understanding Aleister Crowley’s Thoth Tarot, Lon Milo DuQuette didn’t have room to go into it all in his actual entry about this card; he had to write an entire dedicated chapter covering the issue, as we can see from this quote which briefly summarizes it:

In chapter 6, which is actually an expanded commentary on this card, I attempted to explain why Crowley replaced The Last Judgement with the Aeon in the Thoth Tarot. The reader who has not yet read that chapter is strongly advised to do so now. I will sum up what I wrote there simply by saying that, according to Crowley, the Last Judgement trump is now obsolete. The event that it depicted (the destruction of the world by fire) has already occurred. The world we are talking about, of course, is the spiritual Age of Osiris. The Aeon card of the Thoth Tarot depicts the spiritual forces that initiated the next age, the Aeon of Horus.

pp. 150-151

So, yeah…this is evidently pretty serious stuff, because the replacement of Judgement—a card depicting the end of the world—with The Aeon is making a very strong statement. Now, obviously, when we consult our history books (or YouTube channels), we see that the world has not been destroyed by fire; we’re all still here. So clearly, if such an event has occurred, it was a spiritual fire, which is also suggested by the Hebrew letter corresponding with this card, Shin, which literally means “tooth,” but is the letter of fire and transformation.

Departing momentarily from this concept of Aeons, one notes that the letter Shin (depicted at the bottom of the card) is also associated with the concept of Shlemut, which refers to the completion of one’s “inner task” by way of arriving at one’s telos, which is a state in which one can “act in the image of God.” As one can see, on a more personal level, these associations hold a great deal of resonance with the concepts of a Magus and an Ipsissimus; a Magus is one who has, at the very least, gained enough of an apprehension of their “task", their “telos,” that they can confidently move forward in achieving it. An Ipsissimus, in this sense, is one who has completed their “task.”

These concepts all get so deep that even the entire chapter DuQuette gives to it is a meager offering; I have based much of my work on the book Overthrowing the Old Gods by Don Webb, and taken as a whole, that entire book (numbering 332 pages) is basically about examining all of these same connections between the Magus, the Word, and the Aeon. It has deeply informed everything I’ve done here at Dark Twins.

This card is basically a visual stand-in for such very lofty, complex ideas.

To make a long story short, though, the idea of Aeons as Crowley understood it (and as Lon Milo DuQuette continues to teach it to this day) is that an Aeon is basically a way of describing a long span of history related to certain wider developments in human consciousness; it’s a unit of time defined by humankind’s understanding of itself and the world around itself during that span of time.

DuQuette is a well-known and highly respected leader of considerable rank in one of the best-known esoteric schools (Ordo Templi Orientis) that is rooted firmly in the Aeon of Horus, and this particular understanding of Aeons. This means that the world is full of students of the occult who still view things this way, and this means those people basically buy into the idea that Aleister Crowley was such an important man that his existence and life activities were responsible for ushering in a new Aeon, or a new global age of overall historical note and relevance to all humankind, and such is the magnitude of the work he did as the Aeon of Horus’ Magus.

As I briefly covered in Fifth Grade Book Report, along came Anton LaVey, who didn’t believe in any gods, Aeons, or anything spiritual like this, and who basically called “bullshit,” declaring instead the Age of Satan (also a global age of great significance to all of humanity), and in so many words, daring people like Crowley to put their money where their mouth is. And he also called himself that Age’s Magus.

And as arrogant and, frankly, silly as this all may look to anyone who doesn’t buy into the occult at all, one thing can’t be argued with: Both men spearheaded significant movements, and history remembers them both. A great many people at least know what they are famous for, even if they don’t care much at all about it or see it the same way they did.

That is the level of significance most people associate with the Grade of Magus.

Anyway, in LaVey’s wake came Michael Aquino, who founded the Temple of Set and in his book of the same title, pointed out how the entire concept of Aeons as Crowley taught it—and the one that is still upheld and repeated by people like Lon Milo DuQuette, and entire schools like Ordo Templi Orientis—was wrong.

As he wrote in Temple of Set Vol. I:

In his own writings Crowley does not indicate where he came by his concept of “aeons” or exactly what is meant by it. A little detective work, however, takes us back to the days of the Golden Dawn and the writing of a book entitled Egyptian Magic (#101) by Florence Farr, Scribe of the G.’.D.’. in 1896. This book, part of a 10-volume series Collectanea Hermetica edited by W.W. Westcott, contained a very interesting chapter called “The Gnostic Magic of Egypt,” from which the following quote:

”Let us first consider the essential principles of Gnosticism, which are briefly as follows: First - A denial of the dogma of a personal supreme God, and the assertion of a supreme divine essence consisting of the purest light and pervading that boundless space of perfected matter which the Greeks called the Pleroma. This light called into existence the great father and the great mother whose children were the aeons of god-spirits. That is to say from the supreme issues the nous or divine mind and thence successive emanations, each less sublime than the preceding….”

p. 200

The quote from Florence Farr (a woman, and Crowley’s teacher in the Golden Dawn) continues for quite a while after the cutoff point I utilized, but it’s clear enough by this point that the definition of “Aeons” pertaining to a period of history that we attribute mainly to Crowley’s teachings is not quite correct. He probably should have listened to his teacher instead of trying so hard to get her in bed…but anyway. Ahem.

For those interested in learning more about Farr, who is arguably the person we should all be paying more attention to than Crowley, I submit the post Florence Farr, Midwife of the Aeons at Setemheb.

Anyway, here are some further thoughts from Michael Aquino’s Temple of Set Vol. I regarding Aeons, informed by a deeper study of the subject than Crowley could be bothered to put on his to-do list:

Now we are beginning to see this term aeon in a new light, if I may be excused the expression. The Aeon of Horus is not just a period of time when ideas symbolized by Horus are dominant. Rather it is a Ding an sich*, a noumenon: something of purely rational apprehension, not perception by the senses.

Thus in what one might term the LBM sense, an aeon is simply an attitude which one chooses or is conditioned to adopt. This is what is meant by saying that different people “exist in different aeons”: That a Jew, Christian or Moslem exists in the Aeon of Osiris, a Wiccan in that of Isis, and a Thelemite in that of Horus.

Accordingly, while while aeons are “pyramidal” in sophistication, after the fashion of Plato’s “pyramid of thought”, there is no reason to consider them time-sequential, with each new one superseding and obliterating the one before it.

In an LBM sense, therefore, the population of the world continues overwhelmingly in the grip of the Aeon of Osiris, the best intentions of Aiwass notwithstanding. The Aeon of Isis is the next influential, followed by that of Horus. The Aeon of Set, highest on the pyramid and most difficult to comprehend and indwell, is the “smallest” and most exclusive of all.

p. 201

*Ding an sich means “thing in itself,” and describing an aeon as a Ding-an-sich is a way of saying that an aeon is a “thing” that exists very much apart from one’s understanding or apprehension of the thing. It exists and it does what it does whether or not we are aware of it and regardless of whether or not our understanding of it is even accurate.

The standard “lore” surrounding Words and Magi is that any given Word tends to partake of a specific Aeon; at one point (Crowley’s point), the whole point of a Word was to singlehandedly spearhead and establish the dawning of an Aeon in human consciousness. Later, the idea was formed and accepted that other Words could arise, but the association with Aeons is still universally held to be a given: A Word must relate to an Aeon; in fact, based on other understandings of the term which I will go into next, A Word is basically the emanation of an Aeon, along with the Magus who Utters it; the Magus Utters the Word by apprehending the Aeon directly and expressing what he or she sees in verbal form. In other words, so the convention goes, the Magus, the Aeon, and the Word form a “sacred triangle” of connection, one to another, and all three must exist together in any given context. No Aeon, no Word, and no Magus.

Of course, rather conveniently, while Aquino finally put an end to the egocentric errors of Crowley and LaVey, who thought their Words needed to “obliterate” the paradigms they replaced by refining the understanding of Words to Aeons and pointing out that Aeons actually co-exist and overlap, one cannot help but notice that he decided to “rank” the Aeons in “order of sophistication” in such a way that just happened to make him the Magus of the “most sophisticated” Aeon at “the top of the pyramid.”

And that’s…definitely a matter of opinion, isn’t it? And of course, it’s a very high opinion to hold of oneself. Does it hold up?

Much of occulture in the present day seems to think it does. I know that when I first came across these teachings myself, it was hard for me to deny it. Who was I to say otherwise? Aquino was one very intelligent, very thoughtful, very charismatic man and to apply any bone of contention to such a claim would mean starting an argument with him. Not something I’d really want to do, that’s for sure!

As a school founded within this most sophisticated Aeon of Set, Temple of Set is widely regarded as the “custodian” of its Aeon, since it was founded by that Aeon’s Chief Magus, and since that’s basically the way things have always been done; and this is where the qualification from the quote above where Aquino says he is speaking “in the LBM sense” becomes important: LBM stands for Lesser Black Magick, which can basically be described (very crudely, I admit) as “the art of propaganda.” LBM is the manipulation of ideas and symbols to mold the thought and influence the behavior of others.

So in the LBM sense, the Temple of Set “calls the shots” as far as its associated Aeon, that of Set, is concerned. Due to its (well-deserved) level of prestige, the assumption basically gets made by most people who are interested in all of this stuff that nothing happens within the Aeon of Set without oversight by the Temple. The Temple is the Aeon.

One thing ToS does differently from Aeon of Horus schools is that it has built-in ways of addressing and integrating the Coming Into Being of Magi other than its founder; the Temple acknowledges the Grade of Magus (and even of Ipsissimus) when one of its members meets certain criteria, which include the Uttering of a Word that is agreed upon by the entire Council of Nine to be resonant with, and supportive of, the Aeon of Set.

This means that modern Left Hand Path practitioners who hold faith in The Aeon of Set and the Word of Xeper basically defer to the Temple of Set in the Recognition of Magi and of Words; and if they don’t think a Word resonates with or significantly adds to the meaning of the Aeon of Set, it does not get Recognized. Thus, on the modern Left Hand Path, if you believe you have advanced into the degree of Magus and you want to contribute to the Aeon…at least “in the LBM sense,” as Michael Aquino put it…you need to play ball with The Temple.

To claim otherwise is to challenge the Temple of Set as a whole, and a great deal of what it stands for.

It’s not a thing you do unless certain adverse outcomes are anticipated in advance, actively planned for, and accepted as par for the course.

Fortunately, that covers me.

However, there is another sense in which the term “Aeon” applies, one which has already been alluded to in Aquino’s description of the same as a “Ding an sich:” The GBM sense. For reference, “GBM” stands for “Greater Black Magick,” and it refers to a type of magick that is practiced on an individual basis, for the purposes of one’s own Becoming.

A final quote from Temple of Set Vol. I:

Above I made a reference to aeons “in an LBM sense”. Is there a “GBM sense” as well? Indeed there is, but - like Her-Bak - you are going to have to reflect very carefully on it to apprehend it.

Seen through the lens of GBM, an aeon is in fact a living entity, in which its initiates are “cells”. This is the secret which the Gnostics brought from antiquity, and which so frightened the Christian dogmatists. The “god” of an aeon is thus a creature of the total magical and philosophical energy of material beings who are initiates of that aeon, i.e., who are aware that they are “components of the god”. [Are you now beginning to see the ancient origins of Hegel’s concept of an “overmind”?]

Understood in this sense, a GBM working is a way of the “part’s” reaching out to contact, experience, and/or express the “whole”. This is why true GBM is not even remotely like “prayer” as the profane practice it. Nor is it mere meditation, in which the mind of the meditator merely extends to its own limits. It is the greatest secret, and the greatest fulfillment, of unique existence.

pp. 201-202

So Aquino himself pretty much spells out that Aeons are real “things-in-themselves,” and furthermore, are like unto living entities, gods even, and that those who “partake” of an Aeon are deeply connected with that “god.” He himself professed that Set is the “god” of its corresponding Aeon, and when he performed the North Solstice Working that resulted in The Book of Coming Forth By Night and the foundation of The Temple of Set, he did so on the basis of the authority he draws by his connection with the Aeon and the god, Set.

Though he did not ask Anton LaVey’s “permission” to do this, in “the LBM sense,” the lion’s share of his clout for making those claims came through Aquino’s close association with LaVey and his reputation in The Church of Satan.

LaVey did not believe in a literal Satan. His entire philosophy found such a notion both ridiculous and poisonous; and yet, Michael Aquino very much held the view that even so, LaVey, as Magus of the Word of Indulgence, was acting on behalf of the same Aeon, that of Set. It didn’t even matter that LaVey didn’t believe it; his belief, as Morpheus put it in The Matrix, was not required.

In Uttering my Word of Hermekate, I am staking a claim on the same authority…to some Aeon. Is it the Aeon of Set? Of Horus? Some other Aeon, as-yet unnamed? Honestly, I’m not sure. And much like LaVey, I’m not even sure if I care. If I have a Word, I don’t need to understand which Aeon it partakes of—Aquino stated it himself. But one thing I do know: It’s not up to anyone in Temple of Set if it does happen to draw from the Aeon of Set. They can run their LBM game on it, but they can’t touch my GBM.

If it’s true, it does not matter if no one in Temple of Set believes it, any more than it mattered to Aquino himself that LaVey found the concept of a literal Satan laughable.

I think that’s enough on the matter for the time being.

Shadow Card

Isis, Veiled

This card definitely belongs in my Shadow Stack, and my exploration of its meaning this week will clearly explain why.

I have mentioned elsewhere that in the Thoth tarot system, the Court Cards are each assigned a date range, and if your birthdate falls within a given card’s range, that card is held to be your “Significator.” Well, as it happens, this card is none other than Lon Milo DuQuette’s own Significator!

Let’s see what he says about it in Understanding Aleister Crowley’s Thoth Tarot:

Water of Water is tantamount to saying reflection of reflection, or mirror to mirror. The Queen of Cups is popular and makes friends easily because, when others look at her, they see only themselves. Crowley tells us that “She is the perfect agent and patient, able to receive and transmit everything without herself being affected thereby.”

There have been times when I was “popular” and “made friends easily,” and it was largely due to qualities I shared in common with the Queen of Cups. That has all changed in recent years, and I gotta be real, my experience in The Theater of the Word has been a major factor. I have pushed away several friends just because of the way some of their words hit me during my time in the Theater, and now that I have come to understand how unfounded my suspicions may have been, I feel it’s probably too late to reach back out to them now and try to explain it. I write them off as a loss.

This card is a perfect “Shadow Card” for me because I no longer see its positive qualities in myself, and I now have a habit of pushing people away and keeping them at arm’s length. Again, this is somewhat a personal trait, and somewhat a consequence of the Theater.

The name for this Substack, Dark Twins, is drawn somewhat directly from the Hexorian Movement—specifically, its god, Maakari, who first emerged around the same time I was gearing up to write here.

I’ve been interested in the Hexorian Movement for quite a while, having done a lot of my own “city magic.” As it happens, I also came to view the movement as one of the first examples I had spotted “in the wild” of a Song, a concept I introduce in Song of Hermekate as being one of the core components of my Word of Hermekate.

I started hanging out in their Facebook Group, and made friends with some of the leading lights in the community. I was hanging out in a group chat with them, adding them as Friends on Facebook, and I was invited to write at The Red Queen’s Loresraat to add to their body of teachings and lore.

I just couldn’t buy it. I didn’t trust them. I thought they were putting me on and making me the butt of their jokes. I didn’t think highly enough of myself to be included in what they were asking me to do. I had some self-esteem issues to iron out. I honestly thought the whole thing was like that movie Dinner For Schmucks, and that I was the Schmuck. Even if that wasn’t true, I also recognized the pressing nature of the Initiatory experience I was going through, and realized that even if they did think highly of me, I was too wrapped up in my own drama to be of much real service to them.

So when Paolo Scarpelli issued his thoughts about the emerging entity Maakari and noted that there seemed to be a “Dark Twin” associated with them, I soon identified with that Dark Twin. I went with the narrative that I stood at a crossroads, and that by throwing my lot in with them, I would be choosing the Right Hand Path, and by going off on my own, I would be demonstrating my alignment with the Prince of Darkness—or, as I understand that entity, as “the Princess of Darkness,” or even one further, “the Twilight Princess.” As such, going against Paolo’s urgings and embracing Maakari’s Dark Twin aspect became one of my early declarations of alignment with the Twilight Princess (since, as Webb said of The Theater of The Word in Overthrowing the Old Gods, “The symbolic act becomes real.”)

Months later, the founder of The Loresraat tracked Dark Twins down, read all my posts, and submitted a very long comment expressing his admiration of me as a magician and begging me to come back to The Loresraat.

I still couldn’t see it.

Yes, I have a “PR problem” if I hope for my Word to succeed. I’ve also recently cut off certain Temple of Set people who had added me as Friends on Facebook, then never interacted with me—but I would see their interactions with their other ToS buddies all the time, and I felt that I couldn’t trust the motives of these people in friending me.

ToS Initiates are an extremely cliquish and insular group of people, to an extent that I personally find very snooty and almost ridiculous; like only other Initiates are worth engaging with regularly. I’ve tried for years to think of more generous reasons than pure snobbery that it might be the case, but found it very difficult.

I have both current and even former ToS members—people who have left—that I don’t really trust very much because of the way they behave. I don’t reach out much, let’s put it that way; and I go about my writing here without running stuff by them, because I know I’m just going to get the runaround anyway.

Some of this is probably my own attitude, my own Shadow, being reflected back at me. But some of it, as well, is just part of the very lonely path I have chosen.

Making the claims that I do is not likely to win me many friends, and it may threaten some of the few friendships I have left.

So Mote It Be; I am Magus of Hermekate and I am committed to the success of my Word.

This is bigger than me.