Fantastic Metropolis

The ultimate manifestation of this redaction of dualism into what had finally become a true monotheism is the Dead Sea Scrolls. (And is it me, or does the Hebrew movement from many to few to one God remind anyone else of Julian Jaynes’s The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind? I know I’ve mentioned that book before in different contexts, but the idea of God growing a sense of self fascinates me.) The Essenes (or whoever composed the Scrolls) were at once possessed of a religious desire to “turn back the clock” as it were, return to a purer Judaism that adhered to the law in opposition to what they saw as the secular corruption of the Temple at that time, and also sought the purification of the body politic of Israel. Their tales of the teacher of righteousness and the wicked priest, of Michael and the army of light against Belial and the Kittim of Ashur seem almost purely Zoroastrian. But if we keep the Book of Job in mind when we look at the Scrolls, we return to that essential component of true monotheism, the idea that mere mortals cannot apply their morality to the actions of God. It’s not merely the case that the judgements of the Lord are true and righteous always… they exist in a scale and a context humans cannot understand.

In fact, it may be the search for comprehension that creates the difficulty. Blake argues, “the ancient Poets animated all sensible objects with Gods or Geniuses, calling them by the names and adorning them with the properties of woods, rivers, mountains, lakes, cities, nations and whatever their enlarged & numerous senses could percieve. And particularly they studied the genius of each city & country, placing it under its mental deity; Till a system was formed, which some took advantage of, & enslav’d the vulgar by attempting to realize or abstract the mental deities from their objects: thus began Priesthood. Choosing forms of worship from poetic tales. And at length they pronounc’d that the Gods had order’d such things. Thus men forgot that All deities reside in the human breast.” It was, and is, a compelling notion and was especially so at its time, post-Swedenborg and his vistas of Hell… the idea that Blake had, that there is no separation between opposites, but rather a unity, was new and hadn’t really been uttered in millennia outside of a Druze meditating on the Kitab al-Hikma. But let’s look at it from a different angle for a moment. Maybe the ancient Poets didn’t animate or endow various objects with anything. Going back to our earlier conception of the Zurvanite/Qabalistic void which was simultaneously Good and Evil, spirit and matter, that created itself by means of separating essence from existence, the emanations from the all-possible which is simultanously everything and nothing… as things become real, tangible, physical objects they lose their abstract nature. Nothing in the world of Assiyah, the realm we can perceive with our senses (Blake’s means to the soul) is a Platonic ideal, all things are particular manifestations. You do not have boulder, you have a boulder. The same with mountains, rivers, trees, canaries, etc., etc. It is possible for us to conceive of mountains as an ideal, or of abstract concepts, but those things don’t dwell here, they exist up from here, or amidst the qlippothic garbage heap. Crowley expressed it as so: “In the first part we have seen all numbers as Veils of the One, emanations of and therefore corruptions of the One. It is the Universe as we know it, the static Universe. Now the Aspirant to Magic is displeased with this state of things. He finds himself but a creature, the farthest removed from the Creator, a number so complex and involved he can scarcely imagine, much less dare to hope for its reduction to the One.” Everything we see and everything we seem is but a dream within a dream, and we are not the dreamers. Everything around us, in other words, is inadequately perceived: Blake may have been correct about the unity of spirit and matter, but his argument that the five senses were “the chief inlets of Soul in this age” both allows for the possibility that there were far better inlets in the past, and far better ones to come. In attempting to ascertain the true nature of that most sublime and complicated calculation that is, essentially, one or One when you work it all out, we fracture the nature of God.

Usually, the story goes like this: there was an infinity that was both nothing and everything. It contracted itself down to one point and flared into light, illuminating all that existed and creating it at once. As existence essentially coalesces from the pure white light of the manifestation of God, or the Godhead, or the Creator, or Zurvan, or whatever word you want to make use of, it develops into the spheres and their reflection and shadow, the shells. We can belabor it at some length, but it isn’t important: part one of the essay lays them out fairly extensively, and here we only need to consider that the movement from Atziluth to Briah to Yetzirah to Assiyah mirrrors the development of the mind and its processes of thinking. The world becomes separate, becomes real, as everything in it becomes just exactly what it is, and not what it is not. We move from archetype to creation of the thought to formation of it, and finally to the translation of the thought into an action or physical creation separate and unique, and each creation therefore contains both matter and spirit just as the Ophitic serpent that climbs down the Otz Chaim and back up again. We think, and think of gods and spirits, and gods and spirits are patterned onto the world: what once was unvariated becomes variated.

The fourth is the Asiatic world, OVLM HOShIH, Olamh Ha-Asiah, the world of action, called also the world of shells, OVLM HQLIPVTh, Olamh Ha-Qlipoth, which is this world of matter, made up of the grosser elements of the other three. In it is also the abode of the evil spirits, which are called “the shells” by the Qabalah, QLIPVTH, Qlipoth, material shells. The devils are also divided into ten classes, and have suitable habitations. The demons are the grossest and most deficient of all forms. Their ten degrees answer to the decad of the Sephiroth but in inverse ratio, as darkness and impurity increase with the descent of each degree. The two first are nothing but absence of visible form and organisation. The third is the abode of darkness. Next follow seven Hells occupied by those demons which represent incarnate human vices and those who have given themselves up to such vices in earth-life. Their prince is Samael, SMAL, the angel of poison and death. His wife is the harlot, or woman of whoredom, AShTh ZNVNIM, Isheth Zenunim; and united ther are called the beast, CHIVA, Chioa. Thus the infernal trinity is completed which is, so to speak, the averse and caricature of the supernal Creative One.

—Aleister Crowley, 777 and Other Qabalistic Writings