Month: January 2015

abwatt:

niaskotl:

scrollofthoth:

A debate about Thelema has got me thinking. These are some ideas I’ve had so some time.

I am not a prophet. These words not holy. These words represent beliefs that are malleable and can be refined. There is nothing that is the word, only what the gods speak to us. Even then, those words are for those who hear them alone, and do not apply to anyone else.

I believe Jack Parsons was correct when he said:

“The present age is under the influence of the force called, in magical terminology, Horus. This force relates to fire, Mars, and the sun, that is, to power, violence, and energy. It also relates to a child, being innocent (i.e. undifferentiated). Its manifestations may be noted in the destruction of old institutions and ideas, the discovery and liberation of new energies, and the trend towards power governments, war, homosexuality, infantilism, and schizophrenia.

This force is completely blind, depending upon the men and women in whom it manifests and who guide it. Obviously, its guidance now tends towards catastrophe.

The catastrophic trend is due to our lack of understanding of our own natures. The hidden lusts, fears, and hatreds resulting from the warping of the love urge, which underlie the natures of all Western peoples, have taken a homicidal and suicidal direction.”

The Aeon of Horus has proven to be in the nature of its symbol—warlike, without mercy, and without forethought.

No aeon in our history directly coincides with its revelation. The prophecy either comes before or after the event. Hindsight pegs the start of the Aeon of Horus at the Enlightenment. An age that culminates with the rise of Napoleon, who introduces us to the citizen army, so that whole nations can participate in the orgy of bloodshed. Since then we have had:

The Napoleonic Wars: 3.5 million dead.

The American Civil War: 750 thousand dead.

The Russo-Japanese War: 136 thousand dead.

The Franco-Prussian War: 167 thousand dead

World War I: 16 million dead.

World War II: 60 million dead.

And the accompanying Holocaust with over 10 million dead.

None of this includes the colonial genocides of indigenous people or all the other wars before, between, or since. This is not a hiccup. These are not growing pains. This is a record indicative of a world gone mad. While war was certainly a constant in the ages before, seldom were they mass slaughter. Ancient wars are characterized by ceremonial combat and fighting between the warrior classes, with the occasional sacking of a city. The main characteristic of modern warfare is the deliberate targeting of civilians for strategic purposes. From those filled with the bloodlust of the Falcon of War, no one is safe.

Luckily, the Aeon of Horus is waning. There is every indication that the progress of aeons, like computer processing power, flows exponentially. Using our most familiar aeonic system, if you perceive the Aeon of Isis as goddess centered, hunter-gatherer, pre-history, then it lasted a good 140,000 years. If the Aeon of Osiris is god centered, agricultural, and civilized, then it lasted a mere 12,000 years at the most. How long will the Aeon of Horus last? Will it be a tenth or a hundredth of that ruled by Osiris?

I posit that the next aeon, just on the horizon, is the Aeon of Thoth. The Aeon of Information. The fact you are reading this message gives evidence of this. These words will travel around the world at the speed of light, be translatable into dozens of languages at the click of a button, and copied so many times that no fire or flood can erase them.

The Law of the Aeon of Horus is: “Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law. Love is the law, love under will.”

But doing as we will without forethought has proven to be a recipe for disaster. For the survival of our race and our planet, a new way must be found.

I propose that what comes next is not a “Law” at all, but a mantra. A way of looking at things. A meditation. A prism in which we should reflect our thoughts and actions.

KNOW THYSELF IS THE PURPOSE.

LOVE IS THE REASON.

For this simple phrase we should welcome all comment and interpretation.

I believe that we must first know ourselves and understand our True Will, before we act upon it. After understanding, the course we become clear. I believe that love, “the chance at union,” must be the goal.

I wish I could a agree, but I fear we have only yet seen a foreshadowing of the chaos and violence of this age. Technology keeps moving us forward with new understanding and power while equally important is the rise of a truly willful and belligerent ignorance that rejects the most basic understanding.

I fear we are seeing the beginning of a severe separation between those with power and those without and this will continue in a variety of forms. When we see the advent of trans-human technology we will see a schism between whether these groups so deep that one will cease to regard the other as conscious entities deserving of basic rights.

I wish we could just skip to an age of mutual understanding, but I just don’t see it.

There’s also a lot of goop out there about the age of Aquarius, Jupiter aligned with Mars, Moon in the Seventh House, yadda-yadda-bing-bing-bing. Allegedly these Astrological Ages last 2600+ years, with the Age of Pisces (again allegedly) having been the christological age (pisces = fish = ichthus = Christ anagram), the age before having been the age of Aries (the Lamb or ram of sacrifice), and before that the Bull of Heaven, and so on.

Even allowing for the idea of general Astrological Ages whose length and overarching themes are determined by precession of equinoxes, the current age should not be expected to be ruled by peace and brotherhood.  Aquarius is ruled by Saturn, the Greater Malefic, whom Thomas Taylor describes thus:

ETHERIAL father, mighty Titan, hear,
Great fire of Gods and men, whom all revere:
Endu’d with various council, pure and strong,
To whom perfection and decrease belong.
Consum’d by thee all forms that hourly die,
By thee restor’d, their former place supply;
The world immense in everlasting chains,
Strong and ineffable thy pow’r contains
Father of vast eternity, divine,
O mighty Saturn, various speech is thine:
Blossom of earth and of the starry skies,
Husband of Rhea, and Prometheus wife.

Obstetric Nature, venerable root,
From which the various forms of being shoot;
No parts peculiar can thy pow’r enclose,
Diffus’d thro’ all, from which the world arose,
O, best of beings, of a subtle mind,
Propitious hear to holy pray’rs inclin’d;
The sacred rites benevolent attend,
And grant a blameless life, a blessed end.

Perfection and decrease? Everlasting chains?  Sounds like whole lot of reduce-reuse-recycle to me.  When we examine the causes of the great conflicts of the past century and a half, additionally, we see limitation and boundaries driving conflict: Germany’s resource-depletion troubles and colonial ambitions hitting the British naval wall helped spark World War I; the drive to industrialization murdered millions upon millions more in Russia under Stalin; and more recent military disasters in Iraq have at their heart the question of resource command-and-control, and the failure thereof.

No, it seems likely to me that the Age of Horus, and the parallel Age of Aquarius, are likely to be ages of limited resources and violence resulting from or arising from those limitations.  I hope I’m wrong, of course.  Such an age will be awful.

But the evidence does not suggest that a new age of enlightened spirituality is dawning, nor that a new age of peace and love is emerging.

I hope no one implies that I believe the Aeon of Thoth will be the final eschaton, and will be without conflict. In fact, I believe that the Aeon of Thoth will require the creation of true AI. In order to know ourselves we must be able to see through a lens outside of ourselves. There will be conflict with this AI. Probably not a Terminator-esque war, but conflict that will cause suffering.