BLAC1{ PEARL THE JOVRNAL Of" THE COLLEGE Of"THELEMA A~tl-i»1l1, 1998 £.v. Vol. 1, NO.4 BLACK PEARL COLLEGE OF THELEMA BlAC1{ P£ARl TH£ JOVRNA1 OFTH£ (011£C;£ OFTH£1£MA "I have descended, 0 my darling, into the black shining waters, and I have plucked Thee forth as a black pearl of infinite preciousness." - Liber LXV, Cap. III, v. 60 Founded in Service to the A:.A:. Vol. I. NO.4. Autumnal Equinox. Anno XCIV (lV~) EDITOR . ;. James A. Eshelman LEAD ARTICLE The Roots ~f the Mysteries by James A. EshelTTlf1n 3 ASSIST ANT EDITOR Anna-Kria King FEATURES'. ASSOCIA TE EDITORS Roots of the True Self.l;ry Soror Meral .............. , 8 Gregory Peters Sacred Readirigs for the. Holy Season ................ 14 Phyllis Seckler Hebrew Pronunciation by James A. Eshelman ..•~~ 17 Liber Khem by Fra. S.il.A. .....• ,,~ ........... .. .. .... 24 ART DIRECTOR Monokeros,by Edward Mason · .................... ., . ~ . 26 ' Anna-Kria King Ceremonial Magick, Part 4: Ease of Circumstances by Fra. A.H. and Fra. S. G. ......................... 29 :J'he Visioa& the Voice: .tEthyrs 21, 20 & 19 withAstralogical &: Qabalistic Commentary PUBLISHED BY by Fra. A.H. COLLEGE OF THELEMA COLUMNS Executive Director Qabalist's , ~orner: 156.py Ike Becker. .............. Phyllis Seckler '. It's In the Basics: Diaries & Dictionaries Deputy Executive Director by Frater Yod ............... : .................... : .., ... J ames A. Eshelman Newsburst Reviews by Quill ......... ; ........... ~; ... Treasurer David Shoemaker, Psy.D. Secretary Joe Larabell BLACK PEARL Vol. I, No.4, September, 1998 E.V. Published biannually, at the Equinoxes, by the College of Thelema (A Not-for-Profit Religious Corporation), 222 North Manhattan Place, Second Floor, Los Angeles, California 90004-4018. Copyright © 1998 by College of Thelema. All rights reserved. Annual subscription rate: $12.00 for two issues, postpaid (U.S.). Per issue price: $6.50, postpaid (U.S.). Second class postage paid at Los Angeles, CA and additional mailing offices. Donations, legacies, contributions and bequests made to the College of Thelema are tax deductible in the United States. Submissions of articles, artwork, poems, lyrics or other contributions are welcome. By such submission, author/creator grants to Black Pearl one-time publication rights, with all issues kept in print in perpetuity. Send editorial correspondence; review materials, manuscripts, and other submissions to: Editor, Black Pearl, at the above address. For reply and/or return of materials, enclose SASE; no responsibility is assumed for lost or unreturned submissions. Publisher assumes no responsibility for products or services advertised by anyone other than College of Thelema and/or Temple of Thelema. Opinions expressed are those of the authors or advertisers, and do not necessarily reflect those of the editors or publishers. Cover art by Angela Wixtrom. AT LAST an end of all I hoped and feared! Muttered the hermit through his elfin beard. THE HERMIT AN ATTACK ON BARBERCRAFT Then what art thou? the evil whisper whirred. I doubt me sorely if the hermit heard. To all God's questions never a word he said, But simply shook his venerable head. God sent all plagues; he laughed and heeded not, God asked him by what right he interfered; Till people took him for an idiot. He only laughed into his elfin beard. God sent all joys; he only laughed amain, When God revealed Himself to mortal prayer Till people certified him as insane. He gave a fatal opening to Voltaire. But somehow all his fellow-lunatics Our hermit had dispensed with Sinai's Began to imitate his silly tricks. thunder, But on the other hand he made no blunder; And stranger still, their prospects so enlarged That one by one the patients were discharged. He knew (no doubt) that any axiom Would furnish bricks to build some Donkeydom. But! - all who urged that hermit to confess Caught the infection of his happiness. I would it were my fate to dree his weird; I think that I will grow an elfin beard. ALEISTER CROWLEY The Winged Beetle (To Cecil Jones) 2 THE ROOTS OF THE MYSTERIES The Roots of the mysteries [As many of you already know, a comprehensive C. O. T correspondence course has been in preparation for some time, aimed especially at providing both a theoretical and practical founda­ tion in Thelemic occultism. As the project has grown, and especially as BLACK PEARL was born (requiring a great deal of our time and energy to produce twice each year), the course, Pathways to Initiation, has been delayed. We thought, though, that for this Chesed Issue, our readers might enjoy this excerptfrom one ofits early lessons, concerning the Roots ofthe Mysteries. - ED.] In opening the second chapter of his classic, The Cloud Upon the Sanctuary, Karl von Eckhartshausen summarized the nethermost roots ofthe initiatic mysteries as follows: "It is necessary ... to give you a clear idea of the interior Church ... which is scattered throughout the world, but is governed by one truth and united in one purpose. This community of light has existed since the first day of the world's creation .. .. From all time ... there has been a hidden assembly ... ofthose who sought for and had capacity for light. " We shall return to von Eckhartshausen's "interior Church" often and more deeply in this course. Our present point is only this, that the roots of the Mysteries have always been necessarily and unavoidably lost in the mists of antiquity; for they are one with humanity'S own origins. From the first human generation, within our breed has been a "leading edge." As the baseline of human consciousness has evolved, so has the definition of its Adepts (or" leading edge") changed as welL All that has ever been written on the ancient roots of the world's systems of initiation amounts to no more than a footnote in the enormous unwritten chronicle of humanity's past. To the small extent that this chroni­ cle could be written as history, it would best trace the development of human thought and language about religious ideas, as a means of charting the unfoldment of human consciousness itself. Much better for our present purpose is to examine those primitive stages through the power of myth. A tracing of our species' evolvement survives in each of us, our growth from fertilized ovum to mature adult recapitulating the functional history of human phylogeny. Changing organic form reflects our changing form ofthought. The tracing ofthis, retained in subconsciousness, is usually out of a person's reach. How­ ever, the seeds of myth, fortified by meditation, plant themselves more deeply into subconsciousness than do simple facts, and often give a more lucid way both of accessing and of describing subconscious contents. For our mythic description of the roots of the Mysteries, we employ a teaching, from Aleister Crowley, that eight individuals are known, from history, who each, in his respective time and place, incarnated the quintessence of humanity's highest emerging Truth. These men are known as the Eight Magi. To each is attributed a Word, or verbal concentration of the essence of his doctrine. Some of these figures may have been entirely mythic or even fictional; this is unimportant, since what matters is the progressive doctrine conceived and expressed by humanity itself at each step. The summary that now follows is necessarily brief - an entire large book must one day be addressed to this topic - but should serve sufficiently to stimulate thought on the earliest accessible roots of the Mysteries. Most ancient ofthese is eight is KRISHNA, who dates from an unknown antiquity in India. His Word, Aum, is the oldest and most catholic spiritual formula known to us, from which all others ultimately derive. 3 BLACK PEARL Aum is the first letter of the Sanskrit alphabet. Its triliteral structure expresses the entire course of sound in the mouth, from the unconditioned expression of voice (from deep in the throat) of the" A," through an intervening focused and sustained vowel, to its termination in the labial "M," ending in silence. Creator, Preserver, and Destroyer. Therefore, Swami Vivekananda rightly called Aum a sound which is "the basis of all sounds ... It denotes the whole range and possibility of all the words that can be uttered." As the meta­ phorical root of all possible words, it expresses the first primitive articulation of ideas, potentially contain­ ing all thoughts and expressions whatsoever. The classic work recording Krishna's teachings is the Bhagavad-Gita ("Song of the Lord"), a Sanskrit work dating from no earlier than c. 300 BCE, generally considered the most essential text of Hinduism, and founded primarily on the Samkhya philosophy and the much older Upanishads. It is foremost an instruction in union with the Divine through devotion (Bhakti Yoga). In Krishna's insistence that one must first be true to one's duty and intrinsic role in life (Karma Yoga) are the roots of the later Thelemic philosophy. TheAum of Krishna became theAmoun ofTAHUTI or THOTH, who is credited as the creator of writ­ ing and (based thereon) of science, including magick. Following upon Krishna, he represents a more com­ plete emergence of self-conscious thought and mental capacity from the sea of preverbal consciousness. It is in the inventing of writing - the recording of ideas, the preservation of words - that he is deemed founder of civilization. "He shewed," Crowley wrote in Liber Aleph, "how by the Mind it was possible to direct the Operations of the Will." He is thus more of a magical than mystical expression of Wisdom. By inventing mathematics, he is credited with establishing the mystical rudiments on which the Qabalah was later founded, and is the "Hermes" later titled Trismegistus ("Thrice-Great"), after whom all of the "Hermetic" sciences are named.