Audio: Horse & Herd

This time, I thought I would talk about the symbolism inherent in the Song of the Stars, because it's a nice segue into understanding the horse and the herd. 

Summary of Magic

Just a little bit of a recap, okay?

We talked about the magical idea of the castle - how to think about magic in terms of a castle. And there's a bailey and there's a motte. And in the bailey, you could say that's the exoteric or the practical aspect of magic, and the motte is the esoteric, or the the mystery of magic itself.

And if we want to practice magic, what we want to do is discover that the motte, and therefore the entire fortification itself, was already ours in the first place.

And then proceed from there, to go back into the bailey, and do the magic. Yes.

A principle in Magia, which this is the enacting of, is this idea of a test of faith.

The test of faith: to instead say ‘yes’ to something else other than appearances and to follow that thread. And if we follow it, we discover a nature that was already ours, that was already the case.

The ritual enactment of this is called consecration.

If we look at the Solomonic tradition and the Abramelian tradition, two of the oldest in the West, you can see that they go back thousands of years, and the structure remains principally the same: consecration is always the first step. Usually involves fasting, prayer - it’s renunciation. It emphasises a genuine connection with the divine.

Expressions of this devotion to the divine take the form of anointing, the lighting of a lamp, the burning of incense. And this repeated consecrationcreates a space within which contact or experience with the divine is possible.

And it's from there that we then proceed to do other kinds of magical workings. And of course, the traditional cliche is that you then decide to boss around some demons. Something like that.

Another way of understanding this: you can sacrifice others - or try to sacrifice others, because that's really an illusion - but you can sacrifice others to try and extract something of value for yourself. That's one way of thinking about spirit trafficking, which is where we bind ourselves to a spirit or an entity to get it to do things for us. Or, we sacrifice ourselves to ourself.

Consecration is an example of sacrificing ourselves to ourself.

It's to engage with the most profound idea that we have, the highest principle we can conceive of - God, in this case - and to go beyond ourselves.

So that's the first move that we do.

Now what we have been doing with the unbinding practice initially was we were doing the prayer, lighting the lamp: this is consecration. Then we were doing the unbinding practice.

Song of the Stars

Last week, I introduced the Song of the Stars. This is commensurate with the prayer, but it's a ritual enacting of the same content, you could put it that way.

Now, technically speaking, we have this idea of a banishing ritual being required before we do workings. And it's erecting a barrier. Like we clear out what we don't like and then we erect a barrier to protect ourselves. That's how people think about banishing rituals, that's what it's called a banishing.

But if you explore any banishing ritual, such as the Lesser Banishing Ritual of the Pentagram, what you discover is that really it's an invocation of an entire cosmology, divided up into four categories.

And what this really means is that the circle that's normally drawn on the floor, which we find in traditional magic, and the banishing ritual itself, they're actually the same thing: they're a way of identifying who and what you are.

It's like going up to the motte, sitting on the throne and saying ‘I'm the king and this is my castle.’ And proceeding from there, and that's where your authority comes from.

You can think of the Song of the Stars as a banishing ritual if you like. I think it's preferable to think of it as consecration. And therefore it's like the 3D performance of a circle you might draw on the floor.

Standing in that circle and standing within the names of God that you find in traditional circles - usually depicted with an Ouroboros around the outside - is really you placing yourself at the centre of creation. And that's what this ritual does. It's a way of identifying yourself.

This principle of identifying yourself is one of the oldest ideas that we find in magic, going all the way back to the Egyptians.

Barbarous Words

Barbarous words - if anyone's ever heard of a barbarous word, and is familiar with it - these are words that don't seem to make much sense, but you find them in magical rituals, going back to Egypt.

There's this idea that barbarous words are really some form of glossolalia, that the point of them is they're supposed to be nonsensical, and the repetition of these words has like a trance-like effect, and it's about the rhythm and the repetition.

But actually what they are is a compressed, coded expression of an identity.

You could think of lots of names for different gods. And they're compressed together and put into a little formula. You can think of it as like a family tree of gods. That's really another way of expressing cosmology, but personalised. That's what a divine family is. It's just a personalised expression of cosmology. And therefore it's a way of saying where you belong in that cosmology.

The barbarous words, it's you saying who and what you are.

You saying who and what you are is also understood as a password.

So you see in ancient Egyptian magic, this concern with the afterlife. In the Egyptian afterlife, you will be judged and you will have to pass a number of gateways with guardians. And the aim is to get to a promised eternal life, and become like the gods at the end. But the only way you get there is by having the password for each gateway.

Those passwords are a way of you saying who and what you are - you know who and what you are, and therefore that's why it's appropriate for you to pass. If your nature is not of the eternal nature that you're aimed at, then you have no right to be there. Yes?

You can think of Song of the Stars, cosmology, circle on the floor, consecration - these are all like variations of a barbarous word, or a way of saying who and what you are. And then you proceed from that authority.

Symbolism of the Song of the Stars

The symbolism - now, I don't know if people noticed, but the text for the ritual comes straight out of the Magia prophecy.

So the Magia prophecy contained this invocation. It was an invocation in a prophecy, before Magia came along. Then when Magia came along, I enacted the invocation. I played it out on the Magia retreat.

Now the promise of the tradition, or the aim of the tradition, is this realisation of the mystery of the divine human being - the men and women of alabaster.

Why Alabaster? Alabaster is a stone that won't burn in the fire. So it can contain the fire, but it lets the light through. ‘There is a man made of alabaster, white as stone, clothed in robes’. Why is it white as stone? Because he's made of alabaster. Why is he made of alabaster? To let the light shine through. ‘He holds a book and a staff’.

With the prayer, we speak to God, speak to Aion, and ask him to give us the strength to be his avatars. So that's a way of saying, bringing God into this world so that we can act as the men and women of alabaster.

So we can allow the light to shine through us, as is appropriate - yes? - without being destroyed by it, or without destroying that which might come into contact with the fire that it would be inappropriate for it to do so.

So you can see there's this is the invocation of that principle. This is how we magically invoke or rather enact being an avatar.

The mystery of the divine human being is the mystery that's at the center of Magia.

So there are three other mysteries: there's the mystery of magical reality, the mystery of eternal creation and the mystery of divine self.

All three of those are unified in the mystery of the divine human being.

So we have four quarters in the ritual:

We start off facing west, then we turn north.

So in the north, we have ‘He does not burn, the stone sustains him’. This is the mystery of magical reality. And it is also the son in a magical family.

Then in the east, there is ‘the book filled with good words’. This is the mystery of eternal creation. This is the daughter.

Then, in the south, there is ‘the staff’. This is the mystery of divine self. And this is the father.

And then finally in the west there is ‘the magical speech’, and this is the mystery of the divine human being and the mother.

The Tetragrammaton of AION

So these are symbols for the mysteries in each direction, but also the formula of Aion.

So Aion is the name for God. We translate it now to mean something like ‘eternity’ or ‘a great span of time’, ‘an age’.

Further back in time you go, the meaning changes to something like ‘for as long as you shall live’. Now, ‘for as long as you shall live’ and ‘eternity’ might sound opposites. But they also sound like the same thing, don't they? Provided we understand who and what we are.

And then there's also a relationship between Aion and the magical child.

But, that's the superficial view - we start off with Aion being that name. Now the tendency is for us to want to look back in time to see how people related to the god Aion in the past. And you'll find statues of Aion, you'll find composites of Aion with other gods, and, as tempting as it is to do that, I think that would be a bad idea.

It's always better to understand something by studying the thing itself, instead of everything but the thing itself.

So if we look to the past, through the lens of dubious scholarship, and what little remains of that ancient world, we might make a big mistake. When instead, God is actually present, something that we can participate in and understand.

We can divide the name Aion into a tetragrammaton. That's a fancy word for saying four things that can be understood as a magical family: father, mother, son, and daughter.

The process of creation can be thought of as a descent and then an ascent. To create - the descent, we might say - the correct formula would be: father, mother, son, and daughter.

Father, mother, son, and daughter.

But what we're interested in doing, because we've already incarnated, is to make the return trip. That's the movement that we're making. When we say ‘yes’ to the silent knowing, to realise eternity in time, we're actually making the trip back home, yes? Dying whilst we're alive. So the formula for that is different.

The formula for that is: son, daughter, father, mother.

Son, daughter, father, mother.

The son can be understood as the human being, the fool that makes the practical first step.

The daughter could be understood as the butterfly or the soul, that part of us that's divine. It's what we realise e when we wake up: a nature that has no boundaries, within which this is arising.

Then there's a relationship between the soul and the origin of that soul, or the source - that's the father.

But, in the Holy of Holies, in the middle of the temple, we will find the goddess (the mother).

And the journey of initiation is for the son to travel all the way back to the goddess. Going through those steps.

Where do these formulas come from?

Where do these formulas come from, or the source of them?

Tetragrammaton is a very old idea. Yod Heh Vow Heh is the qabalistic version. Father, mother, son, daughter. And then to describe the actual process and how it works in terms of creation is quite incestuous.

But, it's simply a way of understanding the process of creation, personalised and put into a human family form.

How to destroy initiation

I think it's extraordinarily important for those elements to be there in the understanding of the nature of God: father, mother, son and daughter. See it might sound like it's arbitrary and you could put this any way you like or use whatever symbols you like, but it just doesn't work like that.

If I wanted to make sure there was no such thing as initiation, all I need to do is get rid of the mother and then there's no such thing.

That's something that's happened in the world.

The magical act of speaking, coming from a source, this is the father. This is the speaking, the conjuring. The opposite of speech that's required for speech to be possible - the invitation to speak - is silence.

This is why the tradition is that the goddess remains unnamed.

This is why she's the mystery. This is why she's wisdom. This is why you'd get rid of her, if you wanted to get rid of initiation. 

AION is the formula of initiation

If we try and treat the goddess in the same way that we treat the god, to get her name and treat it the same way is like trying to possess her, and she's not for possessing in that way.

The way that we say her name, therefore, is we say Aion.

That's how we would say her name, because in the centre of the formula of AION, at the centre in the Holy of Holies, is the goddess. Yes?

So we don't profane her by saying her name; we say his name and, by doing that, we honour her.

Now, what's also important about this formula, you understand that you're a human being, but you also have to understand you have a soul. You also have to understand that soul has a source. You also have to understand that there's something beyond all of that. If you take any one of these pieces out it all becomes nonsensical.

I'll try and say it again - if I say the name Aion, it sounds like I'm talking about the god. The speech itself enacts the meaning that it has. To say the name is an expression, is a demonstration, of the nature of what's being said. If I say Aion, I'm demonstrating the nature of Aion. Does that make sense?

If I was to try and do the equivalent with the goddess, I would not be enacting her nature. I would be profaning it.

By saying Aion, you can't help but honour the goddess because she's in the centre of the Holy of Holies, if Aion is - a procession into a temple, think of it that way. The son, the daughter, the father, then the mother - that's a process of initiation. You could imagine, architecturally speaking, a temple or a church might have this structure where you go through different stages and at the center, in the middle, in the Holy of Holies, there's the goddess.

You can't escape this formula, by the way. I don't know if you've noticed in a church, who stands in front of the Holy of Holies? There's a priest. What's the priest's name? What's the priest called?

The father. There's the father. I'm sure you could look at the rest of the structure and work it out yourself.

Review of Song of the Stars Symbolism 

To understand this then, just to back up. Symbolically speaking, we've got four directions. In each direction there's a description of a symbolic element of the man of alabaster.

Each one of these symbolic elements represents one of the mysteries and also an aspect of understanding Aion as a divine family, or what the process of initiation is.

So it's a very condensed, concentrated cosmological act that you're performing when you move in these four directions. That's something to unfold as you do the ritual, for you to appreciate.

In what way is, for instance, the ‘book filled with good words’, what's that got to do with the mystery of eternal creation?

What about the stone that sustains the man of alabaster, what does that have to do with magical reality? And so on.

The directions, for instance - when you get back round and you're facing west again, why is that the mystery of the divine human being, and the goddess? In the West. Why is that?

Now you can see after describing these different elements and creating the cosmology and identifying yourself with who and what you are, what you've said ‘yes’ to, identifying yourself in the act of calling forth the man of alabaster- ‘The man is here with us now, and I have called him by describing him.’ - you can only do that if you were the man of alabaster.

And then you speak from the first person: ‘I am the one that comes from the direction of the setting sun. I'm the one that stands by the water and watches as the sun goes down. I'm encircled by the stars and I give them to you.’

Now, you might wonder in the text, when that comes up in the prophecy, is that Aion speaking or is it the man of alabaster?

And there's no difference because they're the same thing. What image do we have for God?

The human being. There is no other image for God, except the human being.

A very, very old understanding. In some traditions, they say that human being is green, but a very old understanding. So that's why we don't have statues.

This is what avoiding idolatry means.

It's a wonderful way of expressing the entirety of creation contained within the heart of the created or the human being. And that is the image of God.

Which is another way of saying that the human being is the ultimate expression of a symbol for sacrificing yourself to yourself. 

Hopefully you can see that it contains the entire journey of the soul to God in the description of Aion. It's got the initiatory process, it's got all the mysteries, in each of the symbolic elements that makes up the man of alabaster.

It's a way of identifying who and what you are. You invoke by recognising who and what you are. And then you act. Then you act. ‘I'm encircled by the stars and I give them to you’. That's Aion, that's the god of eternal time, doing that. 

No instructions are given. In terms of what colour or what texture - if that's the right way of putting it - you might visualise for the pentagrams. That's up to you.

What is a pentagram? A pentagram is the shape of a human being, isn't it? But it's also a star.

The gods stand in the fire of eternity and cast their shadows into time. Why do they do that? Because they're stars.

Which brings us to, ‘We turn slowly and we burn.’ This is another reason why Aion is the name for God, a true name for God, because, ‘We turn slowly and we burn’. ‘We’, the stars. So again, it's layers upon layers of identification. All condensed down into a ritual. 

The Opening of the Temple

At the beginning, we start with the sign of silence. That's the sign of the goddess, isn't it?

And then, like it says in the good book, in ‘the book filled with good words’, the first word to leave your lips is Magia. It's the first word that leaves our lips.

The Turning of the Age

Then there is this curious enacting of three signs. The sign of the temple, the sign of the cross, and the sign of the gods.

This part is called the turning of the ages. This is from a vision that I received after a six day fast. And, at one level, the first sign of the temple, is actually the fire practice. Sign of the cross is the underworld, and sign of the gods is the beloved. So we've got the three unbinding practices.

The temple is also the mountain. The cross is also where the two worlds are found one through the other, and the sign of the gods, that's also the stars - circling around of the stars. It can also represent the sun.

Going from the temple to the cross to the gods, also is a pre-expression of the formula of AION as the family: the son, the daughter, the father, and the mother, that process of returning, going back up again.

An initiatory expression as opposed to a creative one. An initiatory journey to return back to the top isn't creation itself. Creation itself is coming back down the mountain, the other side. So the circle's complete.

The turning of the ages, what does this mean?

It means that this temple - which also represents earth, which also represents manifestation, which is the same thing as the fire, same thing as the mountain - to travel up the temple means conflict, means war, means existence, that's another way of expressing it.

But at the top of the temple we find an expression of the holiest of mysteries. So at first this is Christ on the cross.

So at the top of the temple we find Christ on the cross. This was the age of Pisces.

The temple is the prior age, the age of Aries.

Why the temple for the fire practice? Because it's an offering. It's where we make an offering, it's where we say ‘yes’ to offering up ourselves, right? It's the pyre that we talked about last time when I talked about the donkey and the pyre. So it's the temple, it's an offering, it's the fire.

With Christ on the cross, on top of it where eternity and time meet, where one is found through the other - why would it be appropriate for it to be the underworld? Because when you do the underworld practice, you are specifically concerning yourself with the drama of existing and its relationship to eternity.

Christ's death on the cross is a symbol for human suffering, isn't it? The suffering of existence. And found at the heart of that suffering is eternity, the promise of eternal life.

Now what was accomplished on the cross was accomplished. It’s already the case.

But we've progressed now from that age to the next step and the next step is the sign of the gods or the oroboros, which is the symbol for the gods that cast shadows of themselves into time, take those shadows to be themselves, and then they go through this process and complete the circle of creation. And the oroboros is what holds creation together.

Another way of thinking about it, and this is a very old understanding of Christ: you have serpents that represent evil or poison or something like that. And what you need to defeat those serpents is a bigger serpent. The perfect serpent which eats the smaller serpents. That perfect serpent is Christ. The perfect serpent is a dragon, the same thing as the oroboros, which holds the creation together.

The next step, the age that we find ourselves in now, is being concerned with each one of us being a star or a god and realising who and what we are.

Aquarius, which is the age that we're in, is characterised by the fate or the destiny concerned with humanity as a whole.

So a pathological expression of Aquarius: ‘I love humanity, but I hate people’. What does that mean? It means you've got to think about everyone altogether, and the best way of going about helping everyone, the human race, humanity as a whole, is for them to suffer: to do what they don't want to do, you have to force them to do it. So ‘I love humanity, but I hate people’. That's like the pathological expression of it.

The ideal expression of it is something that's been expressed by a number of ancestors beforehand. Jung spoke about individuation, which is not individuality. Individuation, that means remembering who and what you are, giving birth to the divine child in yourself.

Parallel with Crowley. So his expression of the true will: Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law. That's another way of describing what individuation means. I've spoken about how Magia is an expression of the same thing. 

We can see then these three actions demonstrate the turning of the age, how one moves to the next.

Each age represents certain possibilities and certain things become impossible. Because it's not the season. This is why there are appropriate teachings at appropriate ages.

The work that is done in each age is accomplished regardless of the number of people who recognise it or not.

Another thing I would say - I don't know if this is too much symbolism. I hope it's okay - the temple, the cross, and the circle: that's the same thing as the snake traveling up the tree.

When we do unbinding practice, we start off at the bottom, with the soil, with the darkness, with existence, with time. We move to its opposite. That's understood to be breaking through the soil. It's the trunk of a tree. It's one, instead of being many like the roots.

One is found through the other. That's the expression of branches, because what are branches? It's the one, the trunk, expressed as a multiplicity.

One found in the other, and then there's the fruit that pops from the tree.

There's a tree and there's a fruit, and something travels up it. So it's not any element of the tree that we're fixating on, there's something else that's travelling up it. That's the serpent travelling up the tree.

That's another way of understanding Christ on the cross. Sometimes you see in iconography Christ depicted in a zig-zag fashion, because it was understood that he was a serpent going back up the tree. The serpent that came down the tree in the Garden of Eden is actually Christ going back up the tree when he's on the cross. And that's the circle of creation. Yes.

So the serpent has gone back up the tree. That's what we do when we do unbinding practice. It's what we do when we do binding practice. Something travels through that, doesn't it? That's the serpent. Who is the serpent? The god that goes. What's a god that goes? A star. So now we're going back into familiar territory when it comes to Crowley symbolism.

The Wild Horse

Now in the vision that I had of the turning of the age, I was shown, symbolically, a way of understanding Aquarius using the symbolism of the horse. Two ways of understanding the possible destiny and the possible fate being played out in this age. 

So I saw the horse stood on top of the temple. Another symbolic variation of the circle that’s at the top - the circle of stars, the sun. The horse was stood there. Singular. A wild horse.

In Chinese alchemy, the wild horse is the symbol used for understanding your own fundamental nature. A wild horse is not tamed. A wild horse enacts its own nature without hesitation. You could say it engenders the qualities expressed in the idea of individuation.

So, in Chinese alchemy, there's usually another way of thinking about horses that goes hand in hand with this expression, sometimes it's expressed as taming the wild horse. But it's an unrelated concept. What it really means is taming the unruly horse. That might be a better way of putting it. And meditation is thought of in these terms. So you have the horse, and it's out of control. And you have to learn how to control it, until eventually you can ride it.

Separate to that is this expression of your own fundamental nature being like the wild horse. Something that can't be captured. Something that moves in terms of its own natural instinct.

Its nature is the effortless expression of its own activity. 

So the promise of Aquarius: the action of the human being as the free expression of our own fundamental nature.

That's the horse, the wild horse. 

The Drowning Herd

I was then shown an opposite movement to the horse that's on top of the temple, the wild horse.

At first it looked like the pouring out of a dark liquid. A black liquid all over the temple. So that means the covering of the earth in this.

But then I realised that what looked like a flood of this black liquid being poured out of Aquarius - which by the way, the constellation of Aquarius is found where the sun sets. So again, another reason why Aion is the true name for god, right? - this black liquid was actually a herd of horses. Crazed horses. A drowning herd, and they totally engulfed the temple, pouring down.

We've already touched on a number of ideas for understanding this herd. Hopefully it's making sense that in all of these talks I'm giving a pair of symbols, but each pair is really only talking about two things, from different perspectives. Does that make sense?

Corollaries for the wild horse might be the pyre, might be the motte, might be Leviathan, might be the mountain and so on.

The drowning herd lines up with the bailey and so on. But for our purposes during this talk, the best thing to think about is the donkey deity.

Dialectic

What do you mean when you say corollary?

The logical point made by something else being proven. That's one way of thinking what dialectic is.

Think about the tree, if you make one of those statements in the tree, if it was a logical statement, it proves all the other three that go with it. And they just need unfolding. That's what dialectic is.

The donkey god - so if you remember, we talked about the donkey god. You have a group of people who all worship the appearance of a god that promises them what they care about. But secretly, they're not really worshipping the god they think they're worshipping. It's the donkey god.

Or even a nameless god. For if it was named, it could not be believed anymore.

But that donkey god is in there, right? And it's misleading the crowd with promises. It never delivers on the promises. Instead, it leads the crowd to their doom.

If you uncover the truth about the donkey deity, either you remain silent, because it's better not to say anything, or you speak and you get murdered by the crowd. You get sacrificed by the crowd because the crowd is possessed by the laws given by this donkey deity, laws given. As opposed to faith, as opposed to being the snake that goes up the tree, as opposed to following the silent knowing. Instead, you follow the laws or rather you enact the appearances.

Whenever we enact appearances, it's another way of saying playing roles in a drama, we get the opposite of what it is that we hope to get by doing so. 

In certain instances, when you have a crowd doing this, that becomes the drowning herd.

What's the drowning herd?

We've seen it happen a number of times in the recent past. We saw it happen with catastrophic results at the beginning of the 20th century. Jung described it as an eruption of Aquarius. Crowley described it as the world being bathed in blood, necessary for the start of the new age.

But it's the beginning of that new age appearing, and people becoming this drowning herd, and it's characterised by complete possession by some form of ideology that posits the herd itself as that which is more important than anything else. Such that others, and even yourself, will be sacrificed for it to persist.

And that drowning herd will run itself off a cliff. It will destroy anyone who's a part of it, it will destroy anyone who stands against it. Until eventually it just destroys itself.

And what's left over?

What's left over are the wild horses who are moving in the opposite direction.

There are lots of things that you can say about the drowning herd. It operates in an emotional atmosphere of fear, shame, and scapegoating.

Fear, shame, and scapegoating.

If you try and engage with the drowning herd, you start drowning.

I'll give you an example. If you are accused of standing against the herd, the shame of doing so will cause you to fall into the same states of mind. The fear of being scapegoated will cause you to fall into the same states of mind, and then you're part of the herd, whether you like it or not.

This is why you often find people who fall prey to accusations from the herd eventually become the people in the herd making the accusations.

So we saw this erupt at the beginning of the 20th century with lots of different movements that did it. We've seen it happen recently, on repeat, a number of times.

The more it happens, the more people are primed for it to happen.

Which means worse things are possible from the herd than were possible before.

The perfect environment for engendering herds would be something like what we just experienced globally for two years.

If you really wanted to really get it going, you would build some kind of digital infrastructure that everyone has access to to exacerbate the states that make it possible. 

The Horse & The Herd

Those prone to falling into the herd will destroy themselves and everyone around them, those who like a wild horse, or even a dark horse - a dark horse is the horse in a race that you wouldn't bet on, because they don't look like they should win the race. They don't look like the horse that you should bet on. But it turns out they have those qualities. Anyway - those horses find each other. The other ones run off a cliff.

We can expect that dynamic to be a feature going forwards of the collapse of the last expression for the last age, the horse and the herd. 

How to navigate the herd

So the herd is completely unstoppable? 

That's not the right way of thinking about it. The horse and the herd, if you changed it to the bailey and the motte, or you changed it to the donkey and the pyre, remember what I talked about?

You grow what you care about, you don't fight with shadows.

Now, there is something to be said about the action of the wild horse.

The action of wild horses makes it less likely for a herd to be produced in the domain of the wild horse.

That means the more you grow what you care about, the less likely it is that others in your proximity will do the wrong thing in terms of fighting with shadows, sufficiently - because it takes some time to get there - sufficiently that they end up in a herd.

So that's another way of saying, it's extraordinarily important to light your lamp.

It's extraordinarily important to light your lamp and to follow the light. That's extremely important. 

To honour reality in situations where it's still possible to do so, you should do that. Makes it less likely. 

Here's the important thing about the drowning herd - or really, you could say this is one of the things that's being repeated over and over but in different ways - you could think of the world in binary terms. You could do that. But they're not the binary terms of culture. They're not the binary terms of appearance, right? What it's supposed to be is something like left versus right or whatever the thing is, right? We're presented with binaries and people argue with each other. That's not what's important. The content of the herd could be anything. Could be anything.

The people in the herd always think they're good, and doing the right thing. That's why they're self righteous. They always think that they're good, and doing the good thing. Those people that worship the false god, but don't know that they're doing it, think they're following divine laws, and therefore, their self righteousness is divinely appointed. They always think they're doing good things. This is why it's so foolish to fixate on the content.

Don't fixate on the content, fixate on the structure.

See what people are doing.

This might be another way of putting it: all the things that you think represent you in terms of appearance that you agree with, that could be the content of a herd. Just as much as your apparent enemy on the other side, their content could be a herd. What we want to look out for is the herd dynamic.

Where is the herd and where's the wild horse? Which is which.

That requires a reorientation, doesn't it?

Bow, don’t kneel

In the Magia book, there's a way of thinking about this, and this distinction is actually fundamental, and it's always been the case, but, a true teacher and a false teacher, or true religion and false religion, and it comes down to this principle, which you can sum up as something like, Bow, don't kneel.

Bow, don't kneel.

The thread that leads back into the House of God isn't coercive. There's no compulsion. You have to say ‘yes’ to it. It's never forced on you. It cannot be captured by appearance.

Christ said to pray in a secret room with all the doors and windows closed, where no one can see you, because it's not about an outward expression of things. There should just be a genuine relationship with the divine.

You could go out on the street corner, couldn't you? And pray and give an appearance of being pious, but we don't know what your relationship is.

This is one of the problems with guru yoga. It's not that guru yoga can't be genuine, but you can fake the activity, can't you? And that could be co-opted for all kinds of reasons. How do you know that the person is doing it for the right reason? Or even have the right relationship?

And that's true with any teaching. You could dress up in the right way, adopt the lingo, do the practices, right? But why is it that people who belong to traditions that promise awakening for instance, have never even had a sniff of it after 20 years, but they practice every day? Why is that? What have they been doing?

Why is it so many people who work in mental health have the worst mental health issues? Why is that? And so on.

It's because exoteric appearance doesn't mean anything. There's an esoteric relationship. And the only person who can know the nature of that is the person who has the relationship.

So if I come to you and I say, ‘You must behave in this way and appear this way and say these things, otherwise you get sacrificed to the group who all act this way’, right? That's another way of saying there's some false teacher at work. This is false religion. It's what false religion looks like.

False religion could be anything that is a religion to anything that has that structure. So by this definition, you could say that communism was a false religion. But only in the sense that it follows that structure.

The symbolism of bow don't kneel - you can kneel when you're bowing and you can bow when you're kneeling, right? Again, the outward form doesn't mean anything, but just the symbols for understanding what I mean by it - you should never say ‘yes’ to something you know to be false, out of fear, or fear of being scapegoated or something like that. You don't kneel because you're coerced to.

If you do that, you start to lose part of your soul. It starts straightaway. You're now enacting a lie in these states, and now you're becoming part of the herd whether you want to be or not.

It doesn't necessarily mean that you can't get out of the herd again, but it's moving in that direction, isn't it?

Bowing is the symbolic expression of recognising the divine self in the other.

So even if they're in a herd, you recognise the divine self in them. Which means you afford them the dignity of doing what it is that they're doing.

You can afford them the dignity of drowning. As curious as that sounds.

So you bow, that's like being respectful, affording dignity, humility, and so on, but you don't kneel.

Now, I don't want you to take that as an injunction and you go around bowing to people. But it expresses a similar idea, does that make sense? It's that structure, that's the orientation, that's what to look out for.

If there was one way for you to understand metis or cunning, it would be this. In terms of Magia, it would be this. What do you see in front of you? Past the appearances? What's the structure? What is it that's being enacted?

And this is the concern of the age that we're now in. 

Who knows what the content of the herds will be coming down the pipeline? I don't know. But if we don't understand the difference now, there's no use complaining when the herd further down the road contains elements you don't like, appearance-wise.