Tag: Crowley

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11 May 1943 – Finances, Leadership of Agape Lodge

1003 S. Orange Grove ave
Pasadena, Cal.
May 11, 1943

Dear Brother Germer,
93,

Enclosed find $75 for this month’s contributions. I have been late in arranging this month’s finances, hence the delay.
Have been working night and day, and am taking a breathing spell to write in haste. Wilfred, Helen and the baby have left for the ranch. There is much clearing of the atmosphere, and a happier spirit. Am working on four new prospects.

Fredric has been informing all and sundry (by implication) that he is a far superior man to run the Lodge. Something went to his head, He is entirely objective in regard to everything that does not affect him, and completely subjective in regard to everything that does. I am a little amused, since he has given less in efforts or contribution than anyone now present. However, he has his good points and his uses. If I can only keep him from boring people. I am enclosing part of a letter which I started last week, which takes up some details. This is all I can write at present. Will let you know of developments.

93 93/93

P.S. Helen is still Treasurer of the Church of Thelema. If I send my donations through the church, I can benefit in income tax. This will be quite a saving, I would like your advice. I should think that the Church of Thelema would be brought under the Jurisdiction of the Order, or else that the Order should be incorporated here and the Church disbanded. I do not like the idea of separate organization handling our finances. I should like to handle finances directly here. The Church is now practically inoperative. However the religious liberty angle should also be considered.

J.

I know what you mean when you say you are over-burdened. I am in the same situation. In a way I like it, but it results in inefficiency. You simply cannot hold down 24 stops with 10 fingers. But its fun trying.

I misworded my last letter in regard to Wilfred’s position. What I was thinking was that Jane could not accept the responsibility of the position, and I did not have the authority to do so.
Your appointment makes my present position quite clear, and I will make every effort to justify your confidence.

Wilfred has an entirely changed attitude in regard to yourself and Baphomet. He sees the necessity of leaving and is, in fact, anxious to go. There is a great improvement in the general atmosphere, and I am much encouraged and hopeful for the future.

Recently Brother Culling offered Wilfred the facilities of his ranch, a small place near San Diego. He can occupy it after may 7, next week. I believe this would be an excellent arrangement.

Personally, I do not believe that he should get a job, unless it were something extraordinary. He is perfectly capable of establishing another routine, and driving down the rut of an ordinary job from now till doomsday. His great difficulty is that his drive controls him and paralyses his higher faculties, rather than he controlling the drive. He must somehow break the rationalizing that leads him ever to the same cul-de-sac.

His small stature and unhappy childhood have produced in him the automatic reflexed of defenses and negative aggression. He takes refuge in a petty routine in which he can find some relief from the torment of his mind, and at least pretend that he is doing something effectively. All this is only a cloud over his tremendous devotion and real ability. When it is removed, he will really shine. He now realizes some of this, and that is half the battle.

If he took an ordinary job, he would come to work late, put his feet on the desk, and slap the boss on the back, He should strike up acquaintances in bars, hire halls and give lectures, stand on his head in public, anything to get over his lack of confidence and dear of people.

But that will take readjustment, and I think a period at the ranch with his new point of view and vital intention to really accomplish something, is the best start. I will, of course, want your opinion on this.

In regard to the brethren who qualified the pledge, I think some time on my part and a word from you will change their point of view. Let me know when you write.

Forman has spoken often you, he says that he sees things more clearly since his visit, I can understand this.
I wish you were here, and I hope you are right in your hunch that A.C. will come over soon. If I could only see him once. Otherwise I may try to arrange my business so that I can get to England late this year.

I should like your advice as to how I might arrange my insurance and will so that the Order would benefit to best advantage. I am not clear on this. We are not incorporated in this country, and the world future seems very uncertain.
I have been seriously considering asking Brother Max to visit here and possibly attend Lodge. What is your opinion?

 

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LETTERS TO KARL GERMER (FRATER SATURNUS)

May 1943  to  November 1952

Karl Germer, aka Frater Saturnus,  was a German-born publisher, Freemason, Thelemite, and student of Aleister Crowley and successor of Crowley as the Outer Head of the Order (OHO) of Ordo Templi Orientis and head of the Argentum Astrum (A.: A.:) from 1947 until his death in 1962.

He survived periodic imprisonment in Nazi and Vichy French concentration camps from 1935 – 1941 for being a Freemason and his connection to Thelema and Crowley. Upon his release in 1941, he emigrated to the United States. From 1942 – 1947 he served as the Grand Treasurer for the OTO, and then succeeded Crowley following the Master Therion’s death in 1947.

He exchanged correspondences with Jack Parsons for many years, including mediating a dispute within the Agape Lodge Parsons was leading as the acting Master. They continued their correspondence even after Parsons resigned from the OTO in 1947, until Parsons death in 1952.

11 May 1943 – Finances, Leadership of Agape Lodge

1 Jun 1949 – Book payments

11 Jun 1949 – Mention of important Magickal working

19 Jun 1949 – Explanation of current Magickal work, personal challenges

5 Sep 1949 – Magickal debts

11 Nov 1949 – Illness, payments, and difficulties

31 Mar 1950 – Church of Thelema status

3 Oct 1951 – Fragment mentioning preparation of magickal ordeal

29 Apr 1952 – Mention of Crossing the Abyss Operation, New Name

2 Nov 1952 – Jack Parson’s Last Letter, Post-dated after His Death

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9 Feb 1950 – On gods, and spiritual independence and growth

9 Feb 1950

Dear Candida

You will now have a part of Part 4 of Magick and I suggest your turning to the section on the Holy Graal which pertains to Babalon, and to the section called Astarte vel Berylli, which pertains to your method of work. Now hints on the nature of a god.

1. A god is a barrier. No unready person can pass (i.e. know) a god or his temple. Of course physical and mental contact is possible – but the spiritual – the essential part must remain outside until one has partaken somewhat of the nature of the god.

2. A god is a gateway. The conversation and knowledge of the god confers initiation – allows one to pass beyond all the opposites thereof that the god presents.

3. A god is a universe, i.e. the god includes, reconciles, and transcends all the classes of his class, and all the opposites thereof. He is therefore a complete cosmos, or the macrocosm expressed – as man. ‘A microcosm is a macrocosm implied.’

It is essential to grasp the dual nature of a god and its function. The good and evil, well and ill defined aspect, since it is the god’s position as reconciler that is most important. The terrible gods – Hitzilipoctly, Kali, Baal, Moloch and Jahve are intended to portray the diversity – the rightness – of the appearance of evil just as the good, mild gods portray and reconcile the other aspects. The reconciliation annihilates the split schizoid ego, which has divided the aspects of the parental image into a split, warring, and disastrous cosmos. The evil gods do not demand blood sacrifice – that is the grisly error of the partial soul.

They only demand the perception of eternity behind even the appearance of evil. The acceptance of trans- human and trans-logical values for the standards of impurity. The blood sacrifice in society is a national [cleavage?] of the split ego, but even Mars himself always offers the kindly alternative of a transcendent union wherein the god is otherwise – Mars Venemis (?), the God of the Wood.

When you visit a god on his appropriate plane (country) in the astral, you may find that the country is also the god. This is the experience of some rare types of nature mystics, who, adventuring in a familiar place come suddenly upon a landscape of Arcady, a brief intrusion of the upland meadows of forever in the plainer fields we know. The place is the God, the God is the place, the seen and the seer are one.

My dear, do not think you are alone. The legions are with you that tried and hoped, those now trying and typing – the unborn to come, dreaming of a world to be – all, all are with you. The gods themselves bend and whisper at your doorway, and your windows are portentous with the possible hour. I have heard Aldeberan speak to you of Rigel, and the Pleiades whisper your name that is to be. All that I have and all that I am am flared up in the birth fires that time and left me just three tasks: to guide in infancy, to counsel in adolescence, to renounce in maturity – to go onwards whence I came.

If I was the one you could love, yet it was needful for you to learn contempt and hatred, and to equilibrate those again with love. You have done it, and passed that fine passing. You have needed to know loneliness and terror and despair. You burn there, and it is passing. And now you come to the last unspeakable barrier, the ultimate thule, that you may labour long and painfully to kindle a small spark that will consume all you have – that will burn down the heavens as a torch until even the black stars burn with furious joy.

If you only knew the ache to dissolve, to pass away, to go, to be one – to drink utterly of the cup men call death or madness – to be away, at rest, at peace. But I will endure. I will do what must be done to the last [moment?] of putrefying flesh, to the last pulsation of the dying brain. Not for myself, not for you, but for the vision that I saw once – that is for ever.

One day my hands will fall away, and you will go alone into the regions that I cannot follow – take the sky in wings I have only known in dream.
God knows, it is not my body that now speaks to you, that is a tedious thing of days – of dim awareness in the half-shadow. It is my spirit – that spoke to you in the beginning, that speaks to you again now, that will always be with you, until we meet and fuse in the darkness of which light is a shadow.

Love, Jack

P.S. You can see that you must some time renounce all reliance upon me, that that is a critical point in the adventure. I do not mean that the time has come – but will you will know when it comes. In the great acts of creation and destruction, timing is of the essence. A teacher, like a god, must be surpassed. He is something to come up to, but who, for the adept in his critical moment steps aside, or is pushed aside, so that the initiate can go beyond – into the void. Once you are at that point, the problems are how to pass over into the deep world, how to dwell there, and how to return. Here the individual can only rely on his own supernatural [sic], it is a purely individual matter.

C.G. Jung has explained it all in great detail. As he himself says, he will not be understood for nearly 100 years. 40 years of the period has passed and the Bollingen Society has done much to hasten the day. Crowley’s hints on techniques and viewpoints are invaluable, and Joseph Campbell has done an excellent job of simplifying Jung’s concept of the nature and function of the hero- adept in the cosmic myths cycle.

However, it may be possible to know too much on these matters. The important thing is to get to work and find your own way. You will find the information you really need is usually available. Of course, there have been people – like Joan of Arc, Mary Baker Eddy, and even Aimee Semple Macpherson. But in these cases also the quality of the force and mentality was commensurate with the spiritual state. There is a balance that goes far deeper than appearances.

One trouble is understanding and explaining all this in the abstract quality of speech and thought. No speech or thought can describe or communicate the deep creative and destructive processes that go on within the organism, let alone the ultimate force that lies behind them both. Even objectively there is no description of the growth of a bean, much less a man. It is all by analogy – if we have felt the same we know what the other person means. But even the feeling is done with an unknown and indescribable organ or field of organs.
But some kinds of speed, actions, situations can touch the deep forces, and there you see the awesome spectacle of an individual or a group – or sometimes an entire race, moving in the supernal rhythms of a cosmic circle.

Civilization is an […], the animal is in the culture – he is the culture. Touch that and he moves. But all the intellectual – the reasonable approaches elicit no more response than would sucking on a rubber prick.

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27 Jan 1950 – On Disaster and Tragedy

27 Jan 50

Dear Candida

I have suffered some vicious astral attacks lately and my skryings indicate that they relate to a fruition of one aspect of the Babalon working, and this because I have willfully and knowingly accepted the counter charge. It is now four years since I saw the words of destiny in blood and fire, and transcribed to my own disaster. I should have died that time, what lived has had one purpose, to teach and to transmit.

Crowley is dead, Max Schneider dead of a stroke, Roy Leffingwell paralyzed with a stroke, Jones insane – you see – this is a strong magic – and Germer and Smith both old and in bad health. I do not know who else stirs in Her womb, but you are the only hope I know. If you only had with you an image of Kali – or could spend some time with Ixcunia[?] in Mexico City – to comprehend the intolerable self – the vile, frightful aspects of the mother that yet lifts up the upholding hand in the immemorial gesture of – peace, child, all is well.
It is in the passage of the barrier that lies just one inch beyond the possible that the attainment is made – the going down of the ego between the adamant or malefic back [black?] sides of the gods, that the fusion of infinity takes place.

To go deep you must reject each phenomenon, each illumination, each ecstasy, going ever downward, until you reach the last avatars of the symbols that are also the racial archetypes. In this sacrifice to the abysmal gods is the apotheosis that transmutes them to the beauty and power that is your eternity, and the redemption of mankind.

Neurosis and initiation are the same thing, except that neurosis stops short of apotheosis, and the tremendous forces that mold all life are encysted – short circuited and turned poisonous. Psychoanalysis transforms the false ego symbols – it is a confusion of conformity and cure in terms of group behavior. But initiation must go on until the barrier is passed, the misty bastions of infantile Trawenfells in to the rocks and crags of eternity, the garden of Klingsor in to the City of God.

The apotheosis is in short the translation of good and evil in terms of the father and mother Imago into Isis and Christ, Swa and Panita [?] and duad beyond duality and causality, above the abyss – and these in turn to the One that is beyond speech and sight and knowledge.

Tragedy is diurnal, comedy annual [?], the laughter and dance of the great year, where all crucifixions are only birthday parties of the Gods. Change and death are the song of the immortal, incarnate spirit, and the triple flame of greed, lust and hate no more than its mortal vestment.

But we are here all diurnal, tragedy to us, however hysterical, is real. That is why we must for ever have the message, ever old, ever new, that we are portions of eternity. We must have it as a sacrament from the great noble ego that goes down to its own crucifixion and returns an immortal spirit with celestial song. You, Cinderella of the Wastelands, have chosen the way of the hero – and the gods alone may guess the end of your path. You are, as Bolitho [?] says, “Camped out with Mystery” with only Karma-Maya and the archetypes for your companions. All the eyes of the secret world are on you, wondering and hoping. May you win through.

Love, Jack

P.S. Do you fully understand the nature of your magical relation with Freya?

P.P.S. Your show had some short press notices, which I thought I sent you, but perhaps didn’t. I haven’t written about it probably because I felt badly at the time. I don’t think that Tato’s [?] is a very good place to show – or the Coast at all.

Re the divorce. I would have preferred that you get it, but it seemed important to take decisive action in order to clear up the loose ends of the past. My lawyer says it would help if you furnished a letter stating that you are in accord with the divorce proceedings. Can you do this?

There is some literature and MSS that you should have. If you wish, I will list and tell you how to get them.

93 93/93 J.