Apokalypsis #3: Krater

Krater, 21st May 2020

Yesterday I spoke about the ancestors as a result of revisiting the ancestral garden teaching. And I talked about the visitations from the ancestors prior to the retreat itself.

To begin this talk, I thought I'd relate to you what happened just before I began to deliver the teachings on the very first day.

I knew that I needed to speak on the retreat. I didn't know what I was going to talk about, a bit like these talks that I'm giving now. And as I waited in my room before stepping out on to the little terrace where I'd give the first talk, I decided to use a chair from in the room that I would take outside and sit on whilst I did the teaching.

And I'd brought with me the staff. Red staff divided at the top: this was described in the Aion Prophecy, and I discovered that staff in an antique shop. I walked into an antique shop and there it was. So I thought, ‘Well, I best buy it and I best take it with me.’ And I also had a hat because it's extraordinarily hot in Pelion in Greece.

And as I was stood in the room looking at the chair and the staff and the hat, something very strange happened. Now I knew that the chair was from the room that I was in. In fact, it's the first time I'd ever seen the chair. I knew that the stick was a stick that I had found in an antique shop like a week or two before. I knew that the hat was from a shop that I popped into on the way to the airport.

However, as I looked at the chair, I realized - or I knew directly - that the chair belonged to Adi Da, that it was Adi Da's chair. 

So this was very strange. It wasn't that I'd forgotten that the chair belonged in the room. It's that I knew that the chair was Adi Da's. I recognized it as Adi Da's, and the recognition was stronger than the retained knowledge that the chair was from the room.

As if this wasn't curious enough, I looked at the staff and the hat, and I knew that the staff and the hat belonged to Aleister Crowley. In a similar way, I didn't lose the understanding that I'd got the staff from a shop or the hat from a shop on the way to the airport. And yet the recognition, the identification of the staff and the hat as belonging to Aleister Crowley, was stronger than that recollection.

Adi Da's chair features in a number of his paintings or artworks. So if you look at some of his later work, if it involves a white chair, it's that chair.

What did this mean?

It's usually the case with reincarnation that a child is brought to possessions that used to belong to the person who's died, who is suspected of being the prior incarnation, and they identify what used to belong to them as one amongst many tests to try and ascertain whether or not this is a genuine reincarnation of the ancestor.

What was interesting about this experience was: I wasn't recognising items from a past life. Rather, the ancestors were recognising items from my life.

Adi Da was recognizing the chair as his own, Aleister Crowley was recognizing the staff and the hat as his own.

And this is what is meant by the rebirth of the ancestors or the reincarnation of the ancestors, or what it means to take up the work of the ancestors.

It's what makes the work that they continue to do after they've died something that's able to be realised in the world through us taking up that work.

And so this is what it means when we can say that the dead or the ancestors are more alive than we are.

It was then and only then that I was ready to speak on behalf of those ancestors, to speak on behalf of the lineage, to speak on behalf of the nature that those ancestors are the embodiment of, and to do the work that is inseparable from that nature.

And so this is where the magic of the teaching came from. So it didn't come from me.

The name of the teaching is Magia. Magia is an old word from antiquity. It's the root word for all the words that mean magic in the European languages. It means specifically to propitiate the spirits or the dead or the gods to intervene in the world on your behalf. That's what it means.

But the inescapable truth of that definition or that description is that the practice of Magia is the immortalisation or the deification of the soul. That's what Magia means.

It's to look to the other world, to ask the other world to come into this one through you and act in the world, to bring about a transformation in this world, in accordance with your own nature, which is none other than the nature that you're invoking.

You can see that this is a description of what I experienced before I stepped out to teach at the beginning of the Magia retreat.

Aleister Crowley offered a definition of magic. His definition of magic was the art and science of causing change to occur in conformity with will. Now, if you think about that definition, it sounds like you're pretty much describing everything. Magic goes from being what I just described: the practice of reaching out to another world in order to achieve the deification of your own soul, the immortalisation of your own soul; it slips from that to the apparent description of any kind of action any human being might do.

Or at least so it seems. The idea of Will as Crowley used it, came from a revelation of his own called The Book of the Law, and Will means the expression of your own nature in the world, to honor that nature and to consciously participate in its unfolding. That's what will meant to Crowley. So often he would call it True Will to differentiate it from the idea of what it is that you might want, because they're two different things.

Often it's the case that people want their nature to mimic someone else's and they spend their lives doing that. And it's only when we're true to our own nature that we then get to enjoy the fulfillment of that nature by getting out of our own way. To cause change to occur in conformity with one's own will actually means to say yes to that nature and no other. So if you cause change to occur in conformity with the expression of your own will, your own nature in the world, then that's magic. If you say no to doing that, then it isn't. So suddenly we're back to an idea that we find in the Magia teaching.

It's the choice to look, just to see. It's the test of faith. If you say no then you fail the test. If you say yes, it was never a test in the first place. Simply the unfolding of your eternal destiny, the unfolding of your inherited nature in the world.

And it's no coincidence that the human being is described as a star in Crowley's revelation. This idea of each person being a star - and you can see this in the Magia teaching - you can trace all the way back to The Mithraic Liturgy.

Therefore, the unfolding of the will can be understood as the expression of a fulfillment of your own divine nature, as a god, as a star in the night sky or the body of the goddess Nuit. So every man and every woman is a star and do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law.

Crowley's Supreme Ritual, what it is that you should do to realise your true nature in the world, was to invoke your Holy Guardian Angel. What does that mean? That means you invoke your divine self. You hand over the reins to your divine self.

Again, this idea of Magia, to look to that part of yourself that is in the other world, to manifest in this world, and then to see the unfolding of that nature here.

Now, back in 2006, I wrote a book called Advanced Magick for Beginners. Magic spelt with a K to honour the way that Crowley spelt the word magic. He added a K on the end, an old fashioned spelling. Similar to Magia being an old word for magic.

In Advanced Magick for Beginners, I saw myself as walking in the footsteps of Crowley. I was following his teaching, his revelation, and I discovered that the more I practiced practical magic, put into practice the different strategies for causing change to occur in conformity with what I thought was my will, and the more I experienced what at the time I described as synchronicities - Carl Jung's pseudoscientific description for this phenomenon, meaning the direct experience of a ritual performance having the same meaning as a corresponding event that would manifest as the magical result (so you could do a ritual to receive some money, then you would have an experience where you received that amount of money, and both events would have the same meaning) - and the more I experienced synchronicity, I began to see that the descriptions for magic being the application of a strategy to bring about a change began to less and less fit the experience. I began to experience synchronicities where I hadn't done an act of magic to make it happen. Rather I would perhaps think about something or reflect on things in a certain way, and then there'd be a corresponding event.

This prompted me at the time to reject the causal view of magic and come up with something I called the prophetic narrative, meaning we ditch explanations because explanations do nothing other than cover over the details of any experience. It's a way of looking away from the experience with the pretense of understanding the experience. So in order to try and understand something, you look at something else. That's what an explanation is. So I rejected causality and the various different kinds of pseudo-scientific models for describing why magic works in favor of what I was calling this prophetic narrative, which meant experience was based on an acausal principle, and that it was pointing towards something else. There's some other truth going on. 

When one is caught in a shadow or the beliefs of a given culture, it can be extremely difficult to see outside of them. So much so that the obvious is overlooked. Everything I've just been describing was painfully obvious just from a brief survey of the occultists or the magicians that I met at that time in London. I met individual magicians who'd written books. I went and met groups of magicians, occultists, and I was expecting something that I didn't find. Because if magic is simply the practical application of a strategy to bring about some kind of change that you desire, a perversion of Crowley's teaching or definition, then you'd expect all these magicians to be rich, well adjusted, have successful relationships, family lives, businesses. You'd think that the organizations would be well funded. And I found the opposite.

I found people who practiced magic where a result would happen, they would overlook the synchronicity and make up a fantastical result that never happened. Usually along with some far-fetched explanation. It was as if the people who appeared to be most interested in magic were engaged in the practice and the pretence of doing that, precisely because they were the people who wanted to be as far away from its reality as possible.

So I offered a definition of my own in my little book, Advanced Magick For Beginners. I describe magic as the art, science, and culture of experiencing truth.

Now, again, that is a funny definition. Maybe it sounds a little bit more like it's to do with awakening or seeing what the truth of reality might be, but you could argue, when are you not experiencing the truth?

When is that not happening?

When you're experiencing falsehood.

What does that mean? It means when you concern yourself with falsehood instead of the truth. To be experiencing the truth is to say yes to looking just to see, looking just to see something as it is, to listen to something according to its own song.

So we're back to the test of faith again.

We're back to this distinction: between the person who practices magic and the person who doesn't. The person who says yes, and the person who says no, and the extent to which you say no, you fail the test. The magicians and the occultists and the esotericists and the pagans that treat magic as if it's a strategy with an explanation, something akin to a scientific experiment used to satisfy your desires, are consistently saying no.

The practical magician doesn't follow Crowley's definition of magick, nor does the practical magician follow the definition that I gave in Advanced Magick for Beginners.

Does it make sense how both definitions are now reflected in the Magia teaching? I hope so, because now I'm going to get to the secret of magic, the secret of Magia.

Soon as one says yes, it's no longer you doing the invoking of the divine. What you find is that the divine invokes you.

This means that no one can be taught magic. No one can be trained in it. There are no instructions for it. If you can give instruction in it, then we are dealing with the shadow of magic, of the shadow of magia, which is what we call practical magic. It's the person who clings to the fantasy that they're in charge and that through the manipulation of various ritual elements, they can master reality itself and cause whatever they desire to occur. This is someone who's failing the test of faith. This is someone who speaks about magic so they can deny its reality. And they're happy in their own little world of teaching and training people in those strategies. And all the while the real magic eludes them.

The first time I experienced this fact, the first time it was apparent to me that I wasn't at the center of the universe, occurred after I successfully invoked my Holy Guardian angel.

I did it with the ultimate delusion of the person doing their best to avoid magic. I invoked the Holy Guardian Angel thinking of it in terms of my future magical self, and that if I invoke my future magical self then I would acquire the power of that future magical self - but have it now so it'll be even more powerful!

That's what I thought I was doing, and then the inversion happened. I was now being taken somewhere. I was now being invoked. I had no idea where I was going. I didn't know what it meant. All I knew was that I was nothing in comparison to what it was that I'd invoked.

The next step was scrying the Enochian Aethyrs with my friend Duncan. This is a way of conjuring a particular kind of visionary experience. The tradition that goes along with the Enochian Aethyrs, what Crowley said himself, was that you don't go to the angels, they come to you. You might think it's your idea, but they're the ones in charge. This explains why there are so many magicians that try the Enochian Aethyrs and get nothing.

My visionary experience began and the first thing I encountered was being thrown into a cup or a chalice. And being mingled with the blood of the saints that was inside the cup or the grail. I didn't know what this meant. I know that the symbolism was part of an esoteric thread that ran behind Crowley's teaching, but wasn't explicitly taught as part of the process that you go through. It wasn't institutionalized, but nevertheless it was there. And the record of this process was symbolized in his own visionary experience with these Enochian Aethyrs. There was then a process, a symbolic process that was spelled out.

Crowley did talk about the cup as The Cup of Babalon, and the first move that you make, is that you throw yourself into the cup. And you give up every last drop of blood that you have of your own life, such that it's mingled with the blood of the saints, and then you are consumed by a great fire that leaves behind a little pile of ashes.

Now this little pile of ashes forms a pyramid, and the people that go through this process, each forming a pyramid, constitutes what's called a City of Pyramids. Now, what happens next to the ash is that it's blown across The Abyss and it's placed in an urn. And on the urn is written your word as a magician.

Your name if you like, or your essence, the name that you have in eternity.

The next step is that from the ashes in this urn, sprouts and blooms a rose, and this is the same as saying that the desert is transformed into a garden of roses. And this is the symbolic process.

I encountered these symbols, and I had no idea what they meant. Each symbol was only revealed at a specific time, in sequence.

But the cup is the same thing as the grail.  The grail being the cup that the knights search for. And there's a riddle that must be answered before you can get The Holy Grail.

And that is, ‘Whom does the grail serve?’

Whom does it serve? So the quest is to achieve that grail. You find similar symbolism in alchemy, but you have the grail myth and then you can trace that same symbol, this same idea of throwing yourself into the cup, of giving up your life or of joining the ancestors - that's who the saints are, the divinely realised human beings that came before us; our life with their life becomes inseparable, you can't tell them apart - you can trace this symbolism back all the way to Empedocles.

What did Empedocles famously do?

He became a god by throwing himself into Mount Etna, into a volcano.

This is what the grail is, a cup. It's actually what's called a Krater.

Now, there's a joke about Empedocles, which is that he went from town to town doing his healing. He gathered 10,000 followers, and he was so sick and tired of the lot of them that he ran up Mount Etna and just threw himself into the volcano, just to get away from them.

But, although it's been understood by many scholars as a description of how he died, it's actually the description of how he became a magician or how he became a god. He threw himself into the krater.

The krater is the entrance to the underworld. That's where the ancestors are. And to enter the world of the ancestors, the underworld, it means you have to die whilst you're alive, and thereby, by giving up this life, by it becoming indistinguishable from the life of the ancestors, you become immortal, deified.

This is the first step.

You may have noticed in Magia is this same process, that runs through Crowley, runs through Jung, through the alchemists, through the grail myths, all the way back through the Sufis, all the way back to the Presocratics.

After you've thrown yourself into the underworld to die whilst you are alive, to mix your life with that of the ancestors, you are consumed by a great fire. Then your remains are placed in an urn. Because now you're dead, you're in the underworld.

And what's sprouts from the ash in the urn engraved with your true name is a rose, which is the same as a desert blooming and becoming a desert of roses or a rose garden.

Fire, the Underworld and the Beloved.

So the symbolism is there in Magia. It's the three practices.

And what do we do with the practices? A Test of Faith every time we lie down. This is what it means to throw yourself into the volcano, the entrance to the underworld. This is what it means to pursue the grail. It's what it means to mingle your life with the blood of the saints each and every time you do it.

Whom does the grail serve? When you answer that riddle, it means it becomes possible for you to achieve the grail. The truth of this tradition is that to achieve the grail is actually to become the grail. You become the holy grail. You become that which you were pursuing.

And whom does the grail serve? The grail serves the divine, it doesn't serve you. So again, you'll never achieve the grail, if all you're interested in is serving yourself. It will allude you, just like the teaching will allude you, just like genuine magic will allude you, whilst you entertain the delusion that you're doing something like being a grail knight with your practical magical strategies and your occultism and so on.

So you become the krater, you become the entrance to the underworld. You become that which others will mingle their own blood with, such that your lives become inseparable.

The teacher becomes the entrance to the underworld. In the teacher is found the ancestors. And remember, it's through the living teacher that the ancestors act in the world, that their work can be continued in the world.

Now interestingly, we can also see that each person is reduced to a pile of ash in the shape of a pyramid. What is a pyramid? It's a mountain and the gods make a city of pyramids. It's a multitude of mountains. And in the Mystery of Magia or The Mystery of the Divine Human Being we are told that the secret shape of the divine human being is the mountain or rather they're the secret shape of each other. Such that the mountain can remain the mountain and the human being can remain the human being.

If you remember yesterday, I spoke about what the light bringer means. Someone who brings the light, what a lamp is. The person who brings the light, for sure brings the light into the darkness, but they're not the light themselves. They're part of the darkness. Thereby the light can remain the light, the darkness remains the darkness. 

This is the Mystery of the Divine Human Being. The human being remains the human being, and the mountain remains the mountain, but you find one in the other. It's the mountain that calls us up, and it's on behalf of the mountain that we speak when we come down. And by doing so, the mountain can remain the mountain.

None of the magic, the manifestation of eternity in time, none of the miraculous actions of the divine, come from the human being or come from the practical strategies, or can be acquired through training or learning or book reading. It's not a matter of technical explanation or even practice.

If what we're engaged in, the teaching itself, the nature of the teacher and the student - because there is no student if the student doesn't do what the teacher does, the student has to be doing the same thing as the teacher - if all of creation has its origin in a nature that isn't bound by appearance, isn't bound by practical strategies, then all we can say is that everything that's experienced is a result of the action of magic.

Everything has its origin there.

The shadows that we cast and the playing of the roles in our many dramas, whether familial or cultural or existential, are a result of mistaking a shadow for your will or for your own divine nature, or for what it is that you actually care about.

Were it not for the case of mistaken identity, all we find is the experiencing of truth, or all we find is the causing of change to occur in conformity with will.

This means the delusions that we find ourself toiling under in our civilisation, whether it's the idea that we can do away with magic altogether - which is the culture that we currently live in; or whether it's the delusion that we're rational individual human beings with free will to make our own informed choices, social contracts; or the delusion that someone's going to take responsibility for what it is that we've done; whatever the delusion, it all has its origin in magic.

And in fact, that's what the nature of a delusion is, it's an incantation.

And that's the genuine appreciation of the power of magic, what Magia is, or the Mystery of Magical Reality. There isn't anything else except the delusion that there is, which has its origin in magic.

At the beginning of the Magia retreat, the ancestors recognized the items that belong to me, that is theirs. Not the other way around. The ancestors invoked me, not the other way around. The teaching, Magia, invoked me, spoke me, not the other way around. The unfolding of the magical events that happened on the six days that I gave the teaching, where I would speak and what was spoken would manifest, it was Magia that was speaking me as part of that. As a lamp, I was bringing the light, but I'm not the light itself.

Because all of my life, at the beginning of the first step in this process, was given up and mingled with the blood of the saints in the cup.

This is how you can understand the path that you're on if you're following this teaching. This is how you can understand what it is when you do your practice, when you lie down. You are being called by something. And if you say yes to that, then your life isn't yours anymore. It belongs to the ancestors. It belongs to Magia, which it turns out is none other than your own nature. 

One last thing I want to say, based on everything that I've talked about: you should always be suspicious if you come across any teaching or lineage - or any presentation by something that purports to speak on behalf of a lineage or a teacher - that denigrates magic.

That thinks it's done away with it or that magic is the debasement of spirituality. You should always be suspicious of that.

Because the truth of this process, and I've said it many times, is the increasing encounter with a nature that's miraculous by degrees, and it's always surprising like a serpent. It has that nature to it, which by the way is why a serpent is associated with the magician.

If magic is seen as something that can be gotten rid of, or is seen as the worst version or debasement of a spiritual teaching, you have to ask the question: what is it that they're encountering then in this tradition?