Path: typhoon.sonic.net!feed.news.sonic.net!sjc70.webusenet.com!news.webusenet.com!cyclone.bc.net!news.maxwell.syr.edu!ngpeer.news.aol.com!audrey-m2.news.aol.com!not-for-mail Lines: 196 X-Admin: news@aol.com From: udumbara@aol.com (Udumbara) Newsgroups: alt.magick Date: 04 Jul 2003 22:35:42 GMT Organization: AOL http://www.aol.com Subject: 777 stuff Message-ID: <20030704183542.13292.00000091@mb-m13.aol.com> Xref: typhoon.sonic.net alt.magick:351030 "farid al-qahar" wrote > hara wrote: > > Orig-To: sacredlandscapelist@yahoogroups.com > > > >777. thats gotta do it for me. > > slim pickens where Kabbalah is concerned, > howso? maybe ya ought to consider it is an encyclopoedia, not an essay. I guess it depends in part on what one calls Kabbalah. Around the time of the Renaissance, through the translations and citations of Pico Della Miran- dola and clan ( 900 Theses - 1486 ) it passed into the mainstream of Christian speculation. Reuchlin also popularized it in "Art of the Cabala." Dee in England and Bruno in Rome ( who burnt at the stake ) developed some of the saimbology. The latter is one of the recurring (anti)heros of Joyce's Finnegans Wake ( "and you Bruno Nolan get your tongue out of your inkpot" ) and wrote the Cabala of Pegasus; Cause, Principle, and U- nity; Essays on Magic; Ash Wednesday Supper; the Expulsion of the Triumphant Beast; On the Compostion of Images, Signs, and Ideas; and other works. The early neo-Christian "Qabalists" were still heavily influ- enced by scholastic philosophical concepts, as witnessed by the attempt of Pico to trace the essential ideas of the Greeks, Latins, Arabs, and He- brews in his work, and resolve their antinomies through the style of the prac- tice of quodlibets. There were a whole host of figures who contributed to the 'hermeticisation' of the Kabbalah, which was itself, though deeply rooted in traditional midrashic, talmudic, and aggadic texts, a creation of the second millennium of the common era, and influenced by the usual gnostic and neo- platonic suspects. The actual influence of Islamic 'hermetic' thought on Christian and Jewish thought is a little more difficult to trace - although it is well known the extent to which Arab translations of Greek texts; the scientific work of the Ibn al-Safa - the Brethern of Purity - and the writings of Islamic Alchemists passed into the dark ages of the west through the scribal work of the monasteries. One ought not forget the rationalistic mysticism of Maimon- ides and his teachings on the Merkabah. Ibn al-Arabi - the prolific theosoph- ist of the Sufis ( originally from Andalusia, Spain ) writing in the 12-13th century, like later Rosicrucians era artists and symbolists in Germany, drew up his own map of the universe, assigned the different spheres of being to the 28 letters of the Abjad and attributed colours, sounds, flowers, minerals, names of God, animals, qualities of the soul, planets, elements, etc to them. The GD schema modifying and building upon the schema of Sephar Yetzirah inherits this classical approach to the science of nature as a system of correspondences and analogies, an idea exemplified in one of the Golden Verses of Pythagoras - "Nature alike in everything, is the same in every place." - In the Zohar, circa 1300, one finds the common belief that each herb growing in the earth has its virtual power in a unique star in the heavens. In Genesis ( 1:15 ) this is expressed in terms of how the lumin- aries "in the expanse of the heavens" ( BRQIO HShMYM = 777 ) "shall cause light to shine upon the earth" ( LHAIR OL-HARTz ) where the verb "shall cause light to shine" ( HAIR ) is the root AIR akin to AVR - Light - save by the replacement of the sign of being - V - with the sign of intel- lectual manifestation - I - head of YHVH. Which in the thought of D'O- livet signifies that the luminaries in the heavens are an actual cause of the arising of intelligible structure and order in the matter of the earth. That the astronomical science of the ancients may hold a few surprises in its conception for the moderns it is significant to note that the square area in degrees through which the seven sacred orbs of the seven ringed bowl of Jamshid circle - the "seven eyes of Yahovah which rove through the earth" of Joshua - being the seven variantly moving lights of the heavens visible from earth - ( sun, moon, mercury, venus, mars, jupiter, saturn ) - the area in the heavens through which these celestial bodies wander - the area in degrees of the belt of the Zodiac - equals seven factorial - 7! Although this is quite possibly coincidental I am of the mind that it is a purposeful design of the sages of antiquity. On a humorous aside note in the light of AC's remarks in the EOG that the text of TBOTL abounds in paranomasias and puns across different tongues that the HAIR of Genesis may be the very "because" of the "hair" of the "trees of eternity" of "Nuit" Besides the cross cultural fertilisation of Christian, Jewish, and Islamic thought which occured in Spain around the turn of the second millenium; and what remained from the ruins of the Library of Alexandria and that era in which Greek, Jewish, Egyptian, and Christian thought was stirred in the melting pot of the Nile ( Crowley's rewrite of the Bornless Ritual of the Goetia for his HGA rite in Liber Samech finds its original proven- ance almost word for word in the "Headless Ritual of Jeu the Hiero- glyphist" contained in the Greek Magical Papyri dating from the same era ) there were divers other creatures known and unknown who worked the different veins of thought - alchemists of Arabia - shamans of Siberia - Paracelsus of Hohenstofen - Jakob Boehme the shoe cobbler - Van Hel- mont of Mercury fame - Roger Bacon - and all the card players and artists from Indian to Italy. Although there have always been Court Magicians and Astrologers in most pre-modern societies ( Dee was Elizabeth's Astro- loger - and we all remember how Ronnie & his wife consulted the stars ) for the most part magicians and prostitutes were part of the same social strata - and one finds this conflation of occult whoredom in the writing of AC. I have always been struck by the fact that the area of France where the Kabbalah as it is known today originates - Provence - is also famous for rare herbs ! So it is not simply a matter of AC letting the Jews "fuck" his mind with their ideas ( inseminate his virgin plymouth brethern brain - no doubt where the real rape occured ) - he let the whole world "fuck" his mind It is tragic that the American bombing of Baghdad "by the Rivers of Babylon" and the "Garden of Eden" in an Apocalypse of John vision of the Chariot of Ezekial precipitated the burning of the National Library of Iraq which essentially inherited many of the rare and untranslated works written and scribed during height of Islamic civilization. We may never know what Egyptian works translated into Greek passed into Muslim hands and were translated and preserved in Arabic. Although one finds systematic strains of thought in traditional Levitic and Judaic works - most of what I have studied is homiletic; didactic; gnomic; and relatively heterogeneous in composition; for the most part examining verses of the Torah from different angles; adducing the opinion of this Rabbi and that Rabbi; elaborating on the onto- logy, cosmology, and ethics of the letters and numbers; ever changing; even scintillating - the idea of the obscurity and diversity of cloudy gradations of being of the rainbow clearing in colours; points and maxims - with a very strong emphasis on character ethics; performance of mitzvah; proverbs; and the like. Since ethics were absolutely ( or for the most part ) anathema to Crowley - rebelling as he was against his strict upbringing - and attaching himself to the sensualist, pantheistic, and decadent currents of the romantics and the French poets and symbolist school - as well as the biological determinism of the social darwinists and the "will to power" of the uberman and the suscribing to the theory quite prevalent at the time that War and bloodshed is a great cleansing & strengthening of a nation and a race ( in this at least "Jehovah is a man of War" agreed ) there thus exists a fundamental difference - all other differences and deficiencies and baroque edifices aside - between traditional Kabbalah and the Qabalah practice by Crowley ( which was more oft then not permutations of numerical ciphers - a tiny practice in traditional Kabbalah - and a mating of Greek mythology with Christian Apocalyptic thought, Egyptian theogony; Merkabah mysticism; Pantheism; Bestiality; Drug induced trances and ecstasies and addictions; sexual marathons, mountain climbing exhilarations; poetic infatuations; ceremonial invocations, allusion to mystery; and a perfunctory scientific relativism adduced as proof of the impossibility of arriving at absolute truth through thought. Since these few remarks are not a systematic meticulous examination of the ideas, prejudices, beliefs, opinions, pronouncements, allusions, contradictions, vanities, and philosophy of the man - one ought not read too much into them. I am only reflecting upon a few points which strike me years later after my childhood infatuation with his teaching. As has been remarked he was very much a product of his time - he adopted in his personal life many of the mannerisms and attitudes common among the British at the height of empire - if not racial ( although there is a subtext of it in his thought ) superiority - at the least the superiority of a colonial power whose might is proof of their superiority over the natives they have sub- jugated ) What is genuinely striking is how little Crowley actually cites the Old and New Testament - especially since he claimed that he was capably of finding any verse cited within seconds as a child... I fear I have lost focus in examining the provenance of 777 type schemas in the Rabelasian "tennis match" of the riddle of the abbey of Thelema In reference to the accusation of anti-semitism contained in 777 leveled against AC - I think the writer is referring to the introduction to Sepher Sepiroth where Crowley writes: "CAN any good thing come out of Palestine? is the broader anti-Semitic retort to the sneer cast by the Jews themselves against the harmless and natural Nazarene; one more example of the poetic justice of History. And no doubt such opponents of the modern Jew will acclaim this volume as an admirable disproof of that thesis which it purports to uphold. The dissimilarities, amounting in some cases to sheer contradiction, which mark many numbers, will appear proof positive that there is nothing in the numerical Qabalah, especially as we may presume that by filling up this dictionary from the ordinary Hebrew Lexicon one would arrive at a mere hotch-pot. Apart from this, there is a deeper-lying objection to the Qabalah; viz., that the theory is an example of the fallacy Post hoc propter hoc. Are we to believe, asks the sceptic, that a number of learned men deliberately sat down and chose words for the sake of their numerical value? Language is a living thing, with many sources and diverse; can it be moulded in any such arbitrary fashion? The only reply seems to be a mere assertion that to some extent it certainly is so. Examples of a word being spelt deliberately wrong do occur; and such a jugglery as the changing of the names of Abram and Sarai to Abraham and Sarah can hardly be purposeless. Once admit the end of such a wedge, and it is difficult to say whether it may not be driven home so far as to split asunder the Tree of Knowledge, if not the Tree of Life. Another line of argument is the historical. We do not here refer to the alleged forgery of the Qabalah by Rabbi Moses ben Leon --- was it not? --- but to the general position of the ethnologist that the Jews were an entirely barbarous race, incapable of any spiritual pursuit. That they were polytheists is clear from the very first verse of Genesis; that Adonai Melekh is identical with "Moloch" is known to every Hebraist. The "Old Testament" is mainly the history of the struggle of the phallic Jehovah against the rest of the Elohim, and that his sacrifices were of blood, and human blood at that, is indisputable. Human sacrifices are to-day still practised by the Jews of Eastern Europe, as is set forth at length by the late Sir Richard Burton in the MS. which the wealthy Jews of England have compassed heaven and earth to suppress, and evidenced by the ever-recurring Pogroms against which so senseless an outcry is made by those who live among those degenerate Jews who are at least not cannibals."