Showing posts with label Kabbalah. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Kabbalah. Show all posts

Tuesday, April 17, 2018

2018: April 17th 5:22 AM

Wow. R. Lee Emery was bad, but at least he lived a full life. Harry Anderson? That sucks.



Like Cheers, Night Court is one of those iconic 80s sitcoms that is extremely nostalgic for me but also totally holds up, unlike a lot of the shows I spent too much of my youth glued to the tv for. And Harry Anderson was, obviously a huge part of that. Dead at 65 is too young.

On the other hand, THIS made me laugh out loud. Good luck sir.

Playlist from 4/16 (A lot of vinyl):

Boy Harsher - Country Girl
Japandroids - Celebration Rock
Soviet Soviet - Endless
Nirvana - Bleach
Mudhoney - March & Fuzz (disc 2)
Odonis Odonis - Post Plague
Pixies - Surfer Rosa
Iwan Rebroff - Singt Weisen von Wodka und Wein

Card for the day:


From the Grimoire: "Baggage. The Princess tries to ascend but has a massive tiger wrapped around her neck, cloying to her shoulders. Being that she is the Earthy aspect of Will, this is the Lust of Immediate Earthly Result weighing down or interfering with her Will. Sepheriothic Correspondence is Malkuth (10; Earth)."

Funny to do Hod, Chokmah, and Malkuth in a two-day span that's an interesting looking path on the Tree of Life; you can't go directly from Hod to Chokman, an ascending route, without passing through Tipareth. You can, however, take a bullet straight from Hod to Malkuth.


I'm not fluent in the Paths; perhaps I need to spend some more time on them in the near future.

Sunday, February 8, 2015

Grant Morrison & Chris Burnham's Nameless: Beneath the Panels #1



As I said in this week's edition of Thee Comic Column over on Joup, I've read Nameless #1 twice so far. Between reads I began digging around on the internet for some of the concepts Grant Morrison builds into the code that underlies the story begun in the book, and as such I've started to piece together some of what I think may be the initial ideas at work beneath the panels, so to speak.

Nameless #1 begins with a narrated series of atrocities taking place across the globe. The paneling on these first couple of pages is unique and, I'm betting, charged with some degree of subliminal meaning. After drawing them out and pondering them as distinct images by their own right I'm left with one observation and one theory.


The images, especially the first and third, bear strong resemblances to letters from the Hebrew alphabet, which is steeped in occult science and often used in the creation of 'spells'. However, despite the resemblance, after consulting a Hebrew dictionary I found myself unable to draw any direct comparisons. Stumped I thought about this some more and eventually came to a different conclusion about the shapes:

They are part of an elaborate sigil. If you are unfamiliar with sigil Magick - a concept Morrison has talked quite at length - go here and take the author's crash course.

Okay, moving out of the design aspect and into some of the direct references Morrison makes in Nameless #1, the first glaring one is during the aforementioned narrated atrocities on the very first page, we get another sigil-like image and four words:


The image is later defined by one of the characters as "the door to the anti-verse, the Gate of Az". If you google Gate of Az the search engine makes the assumption that you're abbreviating Arizona. However, if you do not search the phrase as you enter it, allowing instead the engine to use its intuitive functions you get three things, the aforementioned Arizona result, followed to more likely possibilities:

Gate of Azeroth
Gate of Hell, Azerbaijan

Here I began with the latter result, as it was something I was unfamiliar with. In a nutshell, there is a deposit of natural gas in the country of Turkmenistan known as the "Gate of Hell".



Once you reach the end of the issue you find there is definitely a parallel to be drawn in terms of what we find out this image represents in actual, physical terms to the story in Nameless. However, that's not it. Let's go back to the other search result and explore that a bit, shall we?

At first glance I misread Azeroth as Azathoth*. That is not the case; Azeroth is a setting in the World of Warcraft game. I don't think that has anything to do with what we're dealing with here. However, because Grant Morrison is as much a utilizer of pop culture in his Magick as he is occult code, this may be the point. It is not too much of a jump to consider that WoW's Azeroth derived its name from Azathoth, a character from H.P. Lovecraft's Cthulhu cycle. Morrison has utilized some of Lovecraft's lore before, and there is an entire area of Magickal practice that treats Lovecraft's mythos as something of an operating system for ritual. In his story The Dream-Quest of the Unknown Kadath, Lovecraft describes him as the following:

[O]utside the ordered universe [is] that amorphous blight of nethermost confusion which blasphemes and bubbles at the center of all infinity—the boundless daemon sultan Azathoth, whose name no lips dare speak aloud, and who gnaws hungrily in inconceivable, unlighted chambers beyond time and space amidst the muffled, maddening beating of vile drums and the thin monotonous whine of accursed flutes


I have always drawn an indirect comparison between Azathoth and Choronzon, a demon that traces its origins back to Elizabethian magician/scholars John Dee and Edward Kelley. Choronzon's entry in Watkin's Dictionary of Magic is as follows, and when juxtaposed with the definition for Azathoth above fully illustrates the reasons for my theory:

In Enochian magic, the demon of chaos and guardian of the Abyss. Aleister Crowley described Choronzon as "the first and deadliest of all the powers of evil". This point notwithstanding, Crowley invoked Choronzon while experimenting with the so-called 30 Aethyrs in a magical ritual on the top of an Algerian mountain in December 1909.

There is a great visual recreation of Crowley's ritual with Victor Neuburg in Alan Moore and JH Williams, III's Promethea, specifically issue #20, where the characters are on a multiple issue long trek through the spheres of the Kabbalhistic Tree of Life and fall through Daath, the abyss. Here they encounter Choronzon and are torn to pieces. Bringing this back around to Nameless #1, the Abyss - or Daath - could be the "anti-verse" discussed in the final pages, where we learn the harbinger of this Gate of Az is an asteroid on a collision course with Earth and thus inevitably going to destroy it, or rip it to pieces, the same way Choronzon or Azathoth obliterate those who encounter them in their respective mythological contexts.

Okay, I've barely even scratched the surface of this first issue but this is proving to be a much bigger project than I originally thought it would be. I'll continue with more decoding of Nameless #1 in a few days, in the meantime here are a few links for further study of the ideas I've discussed thus far:




...........
* Another possibility, although less likely, is Astaroth. A quick referral to The Goetia and you will find the following definition for Astaroth:

The twenty-ninth Spirit is Astaroth. He is a Mighty, Strong Duke, and appeareth in the Form of an hurtful Angel riding on an Infernal Beast like a Dragon, and carrying in his right hand a Viper. Thou must in no wise let him approach unto thee, lest he do thee damage by his Noisome Breath. Wherefore the Magician must hld the Magical Ring near his face, and that will defend him. He giveth true answers of things Past, Present and to Come, and can discover all Secrets. He will declare wittingly how the Spirits fell, if desired, and the reason of his own fall. He can make men wonderfully knowing in all Liberal Sciences. He ruleth 40 Legions of Spirits. His Seal is this, which wear thou as a Lamen before thee, or else he will not appear nor yet obey thee, etc.  






Sunday, February 13, 2011

Alan Moore's Course in Magick...

...appears in five volumes at $14.99 a piece. You didn't know Moore had a course on Magick? Yep, it's a series of graphic novels entitled Promethea and it is wonderful.

Basically Moore disguises his teachings/theories as a slightly futurist superhero comic following protagonist Sophie Bangs as she comes to grips with being chosen to be the new incarnation of ancient god/force Promethea, essentially The Scarlet Women. The entire series is packed with Magick, however the real gem is from issue 12 to about 20 where Moore walks Sophie through the Kabbalistic Tree of Life, the ancient map of the Universe that the Tarot of the Egyptians is based on. It is brilliantly rendered in word and in art, J.H. Williams III and Mick Gray really pulling out all the stops and bringing each Sephira to life with the different colors, images and other associations.

In keeping with this, more for my own benefit really, because writing stuff like this helps me consolidate and streamline my own understanding, I'm going to write out the Major Arcana and brief definitions according to Moore.

............................

0 The Fool - Nothing. The Void. Ain Soph.
1 The Magus - The Father, the initial spark of creation.
2 The High Priestess - The womb in which that spark gestates.
3 The Empress - The Motherly crafting/nurturing of life.
4 The Emperor - The governing body of rules for that life = DNA.
5 The Hierophant - Something... more that guides that life. Birth of the idea of God or Higher Consciousness.
6 The Lovers - Life splits, Adam and Eve, the Protozic Amoebas. The Brothers, Cane and Abel. This Life thing gets complicated as life proliferates and takes on many new forms. Survival becomes you either kill or get killed.
7 The Chariot - The Holy Graal the dawn of man's exploration of imagination and enlightenment
8 Adjustment (formerly Justice) - Ying and Yang; Laws, compromise & cooperation. The first faint lines of civilization
9 The Hermit - A dark period of withdrawal and gestation. Re-grouping.
10 Fortune (formerly The Wheel) - Civilization: Empires come and go.
11 Lust - an undying drive that propels life further in spite of itself
12 The Hanged Man - Four points over one*: the triumph of reason and matter over the Spiritual
13 Death - A change of states.
14 Art (formerly Temperance) - The flip of card 6; alchemical mixing of Will and Imagination (Silver and Gold).
15 The Devil - Materialization over Spirit
16 The Tower - What goes up must come down (the Industrial Revolution).
17 The Star - The Path to enlightenment. The dawn of Spiritualism in the late 19th century.
18 The Moon - Hidden meanings. The Unconscious Mind.
19 The Sun - True Enlightenment.; revelation.
20 The Aeon - N.O.W. - Information age; Aeons turnover quicker and quicker. Eschaton.
21 The Universe - The Dance of Life. The mirror of card 0 - Everything.