Quotes

I want to undress you, vulgarize you a bit.

Everything which we do not distinguish falleth into the pleroma and is made void by its opposite. If, therefore,
we do not distinguish god, effective fullness is for us extinguished. Moreover god is the pleroma itself, as
likewise each smallest point in the created and uncreated is pleroma itself. Effective void is the nature of the
devil. God and devil are the first manifestations of nothingness, which we call the pleroma. It is indifferent
whether the pleroma is or is not, since in everything it is balanced and void. Not so creatura. In so far as god
and devil are creatura they do not extinguish each other, but stand one against the other as effective opposites.
We need no proof of their existence. It is enough that we must always be speaking of them. Even if both were
not, creatura, of its own essential distinctiveness, would forever distinguish them anew out of the pleroma.
Everything that discrimination taketh out of the pleroma is a pair of opposites. To god, therefore, always
belongeth the devil. This inseparability is as close and, as your own life hath made you see, as indissoluble as
the pleroma itself. Thus it is that both stand very close to the pleroma, in which all opposites are extinguished
and joined.
God and devil are distinguished by the qualities of fullness and emptiness, generation and destruction.
EFFECTIVENESS is common to both. Effectiveness joineth them. Effectiveness, therefore, standeth above both;
is a god above god, since in its effect it uniteth fullness and emptiness. This is a god whom ye knew not, for
mankind forgot it. We name it by its name: ABRAXAS. It is more indefinite still than god and devil. That god
may be distinguished from it, we name the god HELIOS or sun. Abraxas is effect. Nothing standeth opposed to
it but the ineffective; hence its effective nature freely unfoldeth itself. The ineffective is not, therefore resisteth
not. Abraxas standeth above the sun and above the devil. It is improbable probability, unreal reality. Had the
pleroma a being, Abraxas would be its manifestation. It is the effective itself, nor any particular effect, but effect
in general.

O people of the Earth, men born and made of the elements, but with the spirit of the Divine man within you, rise from your sleep of ignorance! Be sober and thoughtful. Realize that your home is not in the Earth but in the Light. Why have you delivered yourselves over unto death, having power to partake of immortality? Repent, and change your minds. Depart from the dark light and forsake corruption forever. Prepare yourselves to climb through the seven rings to blend your souls with the Eternal Light. Where fall the footsteps of the Master, the ears of those ready for His teaching, open wide. When the ears of the students are ready to hear, then cometh the lips to fill them with wisdom.

Intellectual, imaginative, romantic, emotional. This is what gives sex its surprising textures, its subtle transformations, its aphrodisiac elements. Sex loses all its power and magic when it becomes explicit, mechanical, overdone, when it becomes a mechanistic obsession. It becomes a bore. You are shrinking your world of sensations. You are withering it, starving it, draining its blood. If you nourished your sexual life with all the excitements and adventures which love injects into sensuality, you would be the most potent human being in the world. The source of sexual power is curiosity, passion. You are watching its little flame die of asphyxiation. Sex does not thrive on monotony. Sex must be mixed with tears, laughter, words, promises, scenes, jealousy, envy, all of the spices of fear, foreign travel, new faces, novels, stories, dreams, fantasies, music, dancing, opium, wine.

Christianity did not destroy Paganism, it adopted it.

The brain is one multiperson ajna chakra, which one day as a unitary totality will open, discerning and annihilating (the 3rd eye of Shiva). (Herdsman of the souls.) All who participate in it will then see as I saw; they will be inside the eye; everything outside will be blasted, “burned like chaff,” i.e., cease to exist. At that point the brain will generate its own world out of itself. It, collectively, will totally control its world – the PTG.

● Not a perfect soul, I am perfecting. Not a human being, I am a human becoming

● My body is but wax and wick for flame. When the candle burns out, the light shines elsewhere

● Name yourself in your heart and know who you are

● In my heart are the deeds my body has done and my heart has been weighed in the balance

● In the beat of a heart, the suck of a breath, you are the universe

– The Egyptian Book of the Dead

An art is the most durable good, the best wealth, which no thief can steal, no fire, no water, destroy; and if someone took my body away, he still would not have my art, for it is hidden in me, a possession that defies seizure.

Let me tell you something ladies and gentlemen: no spiritual leader person is going to come here and be a dancing monkey to help a bunch of rich capitalists talk about the fact that they can have a more compassionate workplace and meditation rooms while not dealing with the moral calling and the moral invitation of our species to deal with the fact that we have so much and so many have so little…

Only in modern America could we come up with some ersatz version of spirituality that gives us a pass on addressing the unnecessary human suffering in our midst.

When the alchemist speaks of Mercurius, on the face of it he means quicksilver (mercury), but inwardly he means the world-creating spirit concealed or imprisoned in matter. The dragon is probably the oldest pictoral symbol in alchemy of which we have documentary evidence. It appears as the Ouroboros, the tail-eater, in the Codex Marcianus, which dates from the tenth or eleventh century, together with the legend ‘the One, the All’. Time and again the alchemists reiterate that the opus proceeds from the one and leads back to the one, that it is a sort of circle like a dragon biting its own tail. For this reason the opus was often called circulare (circular) or else rota (the wheel). Mercurius stands at the beginning and end of the work: he is the prima materia, the caput corvi, the nigredo; as dragon he devours himself and as dragon he dies, to rise again in the lapis. He is the play of colours in the cauda pavonis and the division into the four elements. He is the hermaphrodite that was in the beginning, that splits into the classical brother-sister duality and is reunited in the coniunctio, to appear once again at the end in the radiant form of the lumen novum, the stone. He is metallic yet liquid, matter yet spirit, cold yet fiery, poison and yet healing draught – a symbol uniting all the opposites.