From: The Cegorach Area: Thelema To: Rose Dawn 18 Nov 94 14:42:34 Subject: Re: HIYA! Rec'd UpdReq -=> Rose Dawn said to The Cegorach (16 Nov 94 12:20:55) <=- Re: Re: HIYA! RD> Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law. RD> RD> Ceg...is it really you? Yer back? Just when you thought it was safe to go back in the Net.... (Jaws theme) > Gee--what'd I miss? > > .:) Hmph. Doesn't quote well, I see. Did you get it as listed above (the smiley)? When I did it [thusly -> :) ] the dot was in the middle.... RD> I hope you missed *me*...I sure missed you, specially last Saturday!! I missed everyone, but particularly you and Sis. (Shameless flattery, eh?) RD> Actually, you're not too much further behind than I am, due to some RD> link prob's...I've apparently missed out on quite a bit of interesting RD> discussion, and hope to be able to catch up right quick here. You RD> wouldn't believe how happy I am to see yer name in a 'From' line RD> again! Drop a line, give a call, or net-crash me your current In a vague nod to topicality, I'm trying to catch back up and integrate a ritual schedule back into my work schedule. Not fun working 6-7 days a week, 10-12 hours a day. :( So I'm trying to limit my involvement net-wise, too, to essentially just the "good" echoes--ALnet/BeastNet; I've dumped VBBS for Maximus, as it does FTN much better; thus, I'll have a bit more time to hang out on THELEMA and TANTRA and HRILIU (my favorites), and will be paying more attention to ENOCHIAN, too...and not trying to keep up with 100 other echoes across 7 other nets. :) I don't have your phone # currently, but I'll probably drop by Modem Magick in the next day or two to do a few QWK packets; it looks like there's some real groovy stuff in ENOCHIAN and HRILIU that I missed. :( Anyway, when I do, I'll leave you private mail...or you can get my # from Sis...the address is still the same; she should have it, too.... RD> address/number? Kisses! Hmm...I *have* been working too much--I can't even think of a suitably witty and flirtacious response. (Although Tommy Tutone is now dogging my thoughts....) -:) Maybe it's too much reading in _A True and Faithful Relation..._; talk about some wearisome language! :) (And I *like* that sorta language...I'd have bought _A True and Faithful Relation_ for the title page alone...I love the big long titles used in Renaissance and Elizabethan works...I get off on the grotesquely complex sentences, the long and wearisome speeches, the endless meandering....) Consider: if Causabon had printed it today, it'd be called _Dark Angels_ or some such, and co-authored by Carl Raschke. ;) Anyway, give me a week or so to get caught up, and I should be back in full swing...I find that recreational BBSing tends to "recharge" me a bit; takes a lot of the dull tedium out of everyday wageslavery.... Laughing Once Again.... Larry ... Is not the starry heaven shaken as a leaf at the tremulous rapture? 201434369420143436942014343694201434369420143436942014343694718 From: Michael Aquino Area: Thelema To: Frater H.a.c.a. 14 Nov 94 08:30:12 Subject: Re: Thelemic Order of the Golden Dawn UpdReq FH> I'm a member. I don't know how it's regarded in the "thelemic community." FH> I'm sure the opinions of it run the full spectrum. I find it to be an FH> excellent organization. All I can say is that the members that I have FH> met are very serious about magick. David Cherubim is the most FH> knowledgable and dedicated magician that I personally have ever met. I FH> don't what to say. It's been good to me. Good! 201434369420143436942014343694201434369420143436942014343694718 From: Michael Aquino Area: Thelema To: Paul Hume 14 Nov 94 08:35:26 Subject: Re: Thelemic Order of the Golden Dawn UpdReq PH> While there have been several replies to your query, no one has yet PH> mentioned that there is a Thelemic GD echo available (Nuitnet or PODS, I PH> couldn't tell ya). Also, David has posted a number of TGD rituals and PH> flying rolls on the Mysteria BBS, which have migrated hither and thither PH> on the nets since. David and several of his initiates are active PH> presences on the nets and would be able to answer queries as to what TGD PH> does, etc. Thanks. I haven't seen that echo - and probably won't, as I evaporate too much time on echos/newsgroups as is & have resolved to cut back ... and spend more time on the NordicTrack! But I gather that the Hyatt G.'.D.'. is a nice, reputable outfit, such that we can refer G.'.D.'.-interested people to it, much as we do "mainstream" Thelemites to the O.T.O. 201434369420143436942014343694201434369420143436942014343694718 From: Michael Aquino Area: Thelema To: Christeos Pir 14 Nov 94 08:44:42 Subject: Re: Books UpdReq CP> Quick! Send the photos to David Geffen, in case he's casting for Anne CP> Rice's "Queen of the Damned"!" Agh! Can't stand Rice's stuff - or this _IV_ movie. My idea of the *perfect* vampire film was Coppola's _Dracula_, which literally left me in tears: a magnificent love story with "horror" only as an accent to that beautiful theme. By contrast Rice's stuff strikes me as sexually obsessive & twisted. Well, I'll admit that I also dearly love Andy Warhol's _Dracula_, particularly in its uncut version. Also the Kinski remake of _Nosferatu_. 201434369420143436942014343694201434369420143436942014343694718 From: Michael Aquino Area: Thelema To: Christeos Pir 14 Nov 94 08:48:36 Subject: Re: Thelemic Order of the Golden Dawn UpdReq CP> I've got about 1.5 meg (ZIPped) of their material on CP> disk, and can mail it if you're really interested. Thanks, but I'll pass for now; I'm buried under papers & files as is! But I do have the current info letter from them, and good comments about them on this echo to date, so that's all I need. So that I can refer interested people to them without it coming back to haunt me. 201434369420143436942014343694201434369420143436942014343694718 From: Michael Aquino Area: Thelema To: Christeos Pir 14 Nov 94 08:54:06 Subject: Re: Round up the usual suspects! UpdReq CP> Whaddaya think, folks: shall we have a contest to see who can find the CP> most errors, mis-statements, and outright lies in this gem? Having seen some of the stuff the cranks & fundamentalists have written about M.A. in the last several years, nothing surprises me anymore. It has also given me that much more appreciation of the degree of distortion that many accounts of Crowley can embody. 201434369420143436942014343694201434369420143436942014343694718 From: Michael Aquino Area: Thelema To: Kevin Bold 14 Nov 94 08:55:26 Subject: Re: book of coming forth 2/ UpdReq KB> As long as your initiations do not include criminal activity, what you KB> do is your own business. And they don't. 201434369420143436942014343694201434369420143436942014343694718 From: Michael Aquino Area: Thelema To: Wild Hunter 14 Nov 94 08:56:44 Subject: Re: SYNTHESIS AND EXPOSIT UpdReq MA> The peasants are revolting! WH> This always reminds me of a very old Wizard of Id cartoon. The King is WH> gazing out of a castle window when a courtier runs up and yells to him; WH> "Sire! Sire! The peasants are revolting!" The King looks at him and WH> deadpans "So what else is new." Precisely. 201434369420143436942014343694201434369420143436942014343694718 From: Michael Aquino Area: Thelema To: Keith S Schurholz 14 Nov 94 09:04:32 Subject: Re: Thelemic Order of the Golden Dawn UpdReq KSS> I think that the G.D., at least for thelemites, is KSS> anarchonistic. Crowley clearly states that hedestroyed the KSS> G.D. and replaced it with the A.A. I don't think that his job Or revised/incorporated it into his more-expanded A.'.A.'. system, at any rate. I too would assume that a G.'.D.'.-focused effort would be pre-Crowley, per the approach of Westcott, Mathers, Yeats, etc. ... sort of old-line Rosicrucian-with-magic, post-SRIA. A "Thelemic Order of the G.'.D.'." sounds difficult to reconcile, sort of a "have your cake & eat it too" endeavor. But if Hyatt et al. want to have a shot at it, well, let's see what they do! 201434369420143436942014343694201434369420143436942014343694718 From: Michael Aquino Area: Thelema To: Tony Iannotti 14 Nov 94 09:14:10 Subject: Re: Thelemic Order of the Golden Dawn UpdReq Thanks for your comments. I hope that things settle down to be harmonious between the O.T.O. (a nice outfit) and the new Golden Dawn (apparently also a nice outfit, at least from its affiliates' comments posted here). I do think it would find itself on more stable ground as pre-Crowley "pure" G.'.D.'., per Westcott, Mathers, Yeats & so on; and I think that society would have much to gain from a revival of that kind of Rosicrucianism. [What have we got now? The AMORC?!] We'll see ... 201434369420143436942014343694201434369420143436942014343694718 From: Michael Aquino Area: Thelema To: Zeekram 15 Nov 94 09:41:04 Subject: Re: Book of the coming forth UpdReq Zee> Exactly, what IS the Book Of Coming Forth? There are [at least] two of them. _The Book of Coming Forth by Day_ is one of the titles of the "Egyptian Book of the Dead". _The Book of Coming Forth by Night_ is a statement by Set, on the North Solstice 1975, which was the founding document of the contemporary Temple of Set. 201434369420143436942014343694201434369420143436942014343694718 From: Michael Aquino Area: Thelema To: Tony Iannotti 15 Nov 94 10:42:18 Subject: Stargate (1 of 4) UpdReq UNLOCKING THE STARGATE (reprinted from _The Scroll of Set_, November 1994) (c) Temple of Set 1994 [On Monday, November 7, 1994 Michael Aquino and Linda Reynolds (Executive Director, Temple of Set) met at the University of California, Berkeley for a closed-circuit televideo conference with Professor Emeritus Harry I. Jones (the real "Indiana Jones" caricatured in the Lucasfilm series), Department of Archaeology, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Aquino and Reynolds had recently seen the film _Stargate_ and had pointedly-divergent opinions concerning its substance, symbolism, and significance. Also participating, from a televideo facility at the deYoung Museum of San Francisco, was a noted rock musician, here identified as "X". The following transcript of the teleconference has been edited for length.] MA: Dr. Jones, have you seen the film _Stargate_? HJ: No, I'm afraid I don't get to the movies very much. What was it about? X: It was a somewhat fictionalized account of a project I did for the U.S. Space Command at Cheyenne Mountain two years ago. It was supposed to be hush-hush, under wraps, all that sort of thing. I guess it didn't turn out to be that well-kept a secret, did it? LR: Is that why the young archaeologist in the film looked so much like you? Was that deliberate? X: Could be. Nobody asked me. I didn't even know the film was being made until I saw it advertised in the paper. HJ: What was this project? X: Back in the seventies I did quite a few songs dealing with Egypt, space travel, galactic, with an emphasis on the Andromeda Galaxy. I made some of it up, other people in the band made some of it up, but I took the basic ideas from a lot of speculation about that sort of thing that was going around in the Haight at the time. Some serious, some not so. It evidently got me on file with the Air Force, if you can believe that. LR: The Air Force contacted you about it? X: Well, the Stanford Research Institute down in Palo Alto asked me to participate in some discussions. I thought it was all civilian academic. Turned out that two of the people in the white coats wore blue ones underneath. So then in 1991 I was asked to come out to Colorado Springs. It was supposed to be a seminar sort of thing at the Air Force Academy, but when I got there, they took me up to the mountain, and then things got weird. Michael was there; he knows. MA: It was weird, all right. But let's talk about what the film did with it. In the movie some archaeologists in Egypt working in a Fourth Dynasty dig discovered a gigantic stone ring, which was found to be some sort of mechanism oriented to the constellations as they appeared during the Fourth Dynasty. It wound up in Cheyenne Mountain, given another name in the movie for whatever reason. The people SPACECOM originally brought in didn't have the hieroglyphic skills to decipher all of the inscriptions, but the X-character did, and managed to turn the thing on. It was the "stargate" of the film's title, and worked as a sort of slingshot to an unnamed planet in the vicinity of Orion. The X-character took the trip, together with a Special Forces A-team led by, um - LR: - Led by a colonel who everyone thought was a weirdo but who got pulled into the Space Command because he happened to have the mix of skills to handle something like this? X: Ha! MA: So on the Orion-planet the archaeologist and the team found a desert city of human slaves and an Egyptian-style pyramid and temple, which turned out to be a landing-site for an alien spaceship, also shaped like a pyramid. The alien was a disembodied intelligence who possessed the body of a young man, called himself "Ra", and used advanced technology to display both himself and a number of zombified human assistants as Egyptian gods - animal heads and so forth - and oppress the slave city. The team from Earth exposed the "gods" for what they were, blew up the alien in his spaceship, and returned to Earth through the stargate, minus the X- character, who decided to stay on the Orion planet. LR: The insinuation was that the alien originally came to Egypt, on Earth, at the time of the Fourth Dynasty, was responsible for the technology required to build the Great Pyramid, didn't want the Egyptians to be literate, hence the absence of inscriptions in the Pyramid. When Michael saw the film, he got mad because he thought it was portraying the Egyptian gods as an oppressive alien fraud. I didn't agree - I thought that the alien came to Earth and saw an opportunity to impersonate the gods which the Egyptians already had, and did as effective a job of it as his technology would allow. X: And the film was full of hints, in-jokes, and nose tweaks. Budge's books were kicked around for being obsolete in the hieroglyphics department. Hoffman's _Egypt Before the Pharaohs_ got several cameo shots, although that book is fairly conventional. There was a "sarcophagus" in the alien's pyramid-ship that could bring dead humans back to life - the implication being that the mysterious coffer in the King's Chamber of the Great Pyramid was built as a ritualistic imitation of that device. HJ: Well, I'll give Hollywood credit for coming up with some wild movie fantasies. 201434369420143436942014343694201434369420143436942014343694718 From: Michael Aquino Area: Thelema To: Tony Iannotti 15 Nov 94 10:53:12 Subject: Stargate (2 of 4) UpdReq MA: Just a fantasy, then, in your opinion? HJ: So what were you guys doing at the mountain? Never mind, I don't want to get you in any trouble. But let's take a look at some of the factors which would make a movie like this possible. One - Egypt's civilization seemed to come out of nowhere, all of a sudden. One moment you've got a bunch of hunting and farming tribes wandering around the Nile Valley; the next you've got a highly- organized nation-state society doing brain surgery, writing and thinking in any number of abstractions, and erecting buildings so geographically precise, and so precisely designed, that five thousand years later we still can't duplicate them. Two - The Pyramids, and particularly the Great Pyramid. There's been any number of books written about them, as you know. Edwards. Tompkins. Lots of conventional archaeology, even more far-out stuff. Just this year another one - _The Orion Mystery_ by Bauval and Gilbert, who are going on about how if you sight up the south ventilation shaft from the King's Chamber, adjusting to 2600 BCE or so, you get Orion, and if you look at the three Giza pyramids from above, you are supposed to see something like Orion's belt. Since that book came out in 1994, I'm guessing that it's where your film got the Orion theme. But these are all just theories. Not even theories, really - just speculation. Nobody has the slightest idea, really, who built the Great Pyramid, or why, or when. Stand back and *look* at the damned thing. It's an architectural *nightmare*. It's *impossible* to build. All of its interior design features make absolutely *no* sense. The location, size, and design of the passages and chambers make no sense. The coffer - um, well, anyway you get the point. The Pyramid irritates people because it is so utterly alien to what people have usually built throughout recorded history. It's also so big that it can't be ignored. So you're going to get a procession of idiots - scholars, occultists, whatever - insisting that they can explain it. They're just pulling ideas out of the air. And, like now, you're going to get storytellers making cute movies about it. _Land of the Pharaohs_ in the fifties, _Stargate_ today, something else tomorrow. Incidentally the Egyptians were reading and writing just fine in the Fourth Dynasty. They were doing it in the *First* Dynasty! The Great Pyramid doesn't have any writing in it - LR: - The X-archaeologist in the film said that at the beginning, but he was ridiculed by an audience of Egyptologists, one of whom insisted that Khufu's name was inscribed on some of the internal building-blocks. HJ: Just scrawled graffiti. If you saw someone's handwritten name crayoned on a piece of concrete in an elevator shaft of the Empire State Building, would you assume that he built the building or that it was built to commemorate him? Hardly. That's just another instance of Egyptologists scrambling around desperately, trying to shoehorn the Pyramid into a nice, ordinary place in their books. X: A few minutes ago you mentioned Orion, and that book - LR: _The Orion Mystery_. X: _The Orion Mystery_. Apparently the authors were quite excited about Orion and the Pyramid. Any thoughts? HJ: Archaeology is a three-step process. First you find something. Then you try to figure out what it means. Finally you have to get other archaeologists to listen to you and agree with you. Late 19th Century there the director of the solar physics observatory of the Royal College of Science in London was a professor of astronomical physics by the name of Norman Lockyer. Got knighted for his Sun-studies, I think. Anyway he got interested in Egypt - decided that the Egyptian gods were in fact glyphs of solar, lunar, and stellar bodies, relationships, phenomena. He went on to apply this idea to Egyptian monuments and architecture. Wrote the whole thing up in a book called _The Dawn of Astronomy_. Pissed conventional Egyptologists off something fierce. You see, it was accepted, by which I mean entrenched in doctrine, that Egypt was a civilization too primitive and superstitious to be capable of anything like complex astronomy, to say nothing of architecture based on it. Also Lockyer was an astronomer, not a school-trained archaeologist, which meant that he was an outsider and upstart. So his book was disdainfully ignored. For years it was almost impossible to find. Shortly after the war I came across a copy, and after reading it I harassed some friends at MIT into reprinting it. Lockyer was not mind-numbed by all of the Osirian mortuary stuff that Plutarch imprinted on conventional Egyptology. He understood the original, pre-dynastic Set/Horus dichotomy - Set the celestial pole and/or the circumpolar stars, Horus the Sun which 'defeated' the night sky every dawn and was 'defeated' by it every evening. He knew that Egypt, as an agrarian culture with a seasonal river, was highly attuned to astronomical signals of the cycling of time. Do you see the point here? Lockyer's god-system *worked*. That is, his Egyptian gods did exactly what their priests *said* they would, right on time, over and over again. This wasn't one of those situations where you pray or sacrifice to a god and nothing happens. It *worked*. Lockyer also took the ponderous Osiris/Isis mythology and resolved it as neatly as could be, without all the human death-fetishism that conventional Egyptology insists upon: "I have previously noted the symbolism of Sirius-Hathor as a cow in a boat associated with the constellation of Orion. There is a point connected with this which I did not then refer to, but which is of extreme importance for a complete discussion of the question now occupying us. We get associated with the cow in the boat, Orion (Sah) as Horus, but in other inscriptions we get Orion as a mummy - that is to say, in the course of Egyptian history the same constellation is symbolized as a rising sun at one time and a setting sun at another. Now, that must have been so if the Egyptian mythology were consistent and rested on an astronomical basis, because Sah rose in the dawn in one case and faded at dawn in the other. From the table giving a generalized statement with regard to Osiris, similar to that we have already considered for Isis, it looks as if the mythology connected with Osiris is simply the mythology connected with any celestial body becoming invisible. We have the sun setting, the moon waning, a planet setting, stars setting, constellations fading at dawn. We see, therefore, that the Egyptian mythology was absolutely and completely consistent with the astronomical conditions by which they were surrounded; that, although it is wonderfully poetical, in no case is the poetry allowed to interfere with the strictest and most accurate reference to the astronomical phenomena which had to be dealt with. The argument, then, for the use of 'Isis' as a generic name is greatly strengthened by the similar way in which the term 'Osiris', which is acknowledged to be a generic name, is employed." 201434369420143436942014343694201434369420143436942014343694718 From: Michael Aquino Area: Thelema To: Tony Iannotti 15 Nov 94 11:01:16 Subject: Stargate (3 of 4) UpdReq LR: And the point of the Orion azimuth-channel in the Pyramid? HJ: _The Orion Mystery_ assumes that the Pyramid was in fact Khufu's tomb, and that his spirit expected to go to the stars to merge with Osiris after his body's death, and that the Orion-constellation represented Osiris. Presumably the southern air-vent in the King's Chamber was to give Khufu a running start in the right direction. The authors conveniently ignore the northern, polar-stars-oriented vent, to be sure. MA: You don't think there's anything to their theory? HJ: It's *absurd* to consider the Pyramid a tomb. One look at its internal design is enough to dispel that notion. The Egyptians designed and decorated their tombs methodically and elaborately. The coffer in the King's Chamber is an inch or so wider than the passages to that part of the Pyramid. Nor does it have a lid. And of course when Al Mamun's men got into the King's Chamber for the first time, i.e. by boring through solid rock around the sealed granite- plugged passages in 813 CE, there was nothing there except the empty coffer. Makes no difference: Since then conventional Egyptologists have been insisting that the Pyramid was Khufu's tomb, because that's the only way they can fit it into their equally-conventional image of Egypt. LR: About those shafts in the King's Chamber, let me read you something from _The Orion Mystery_: "Badawy's architectural studies had shown that the ancient Egyptians did not ventilate tombs ... Badawy pointed out: 'To ventilate the burial chamber of Cheops channels running horizontally at the level of the ceiling would have been more adequate than the inclined shafts ... One should add to this inadequacy in the design all the constructional problems involved in the building of the two inclined shafts through all the courses, a process which could have been avoided by building them through one horizontal course.'" HJ: If the Egyptians didn't ventilate tombs, it stands to reason that the Pyramid wasn't designed as a tomb, doesn't it? Why provide any air-access to a sealed tomb? Also, as the descending, ascending, and Grand Gallery passages clearly show, the Pyramid-builders weren't in the least deterred by constructing inclined passages. All of those could have been made level, or stepped, if inclines presented a problem. Incidentally you cannot look through either vent-shaft and see the sky, Orion or otherwise, for the simple reason that the shafts do not run in a straight line from the walls of the King's Chamber. They both run horizontally through the chamber walls, only then bend upwards. In daytime, and with all interior lights in the Pyramid turned off, they do admit two faint beams of light, however, but that's all I'm going to say about *that* for now. X: In _Stargate_ the implication is the Great Pyramid was Fourth Dynasty, i.e. Khufu. When do you think it was built? HJ: According to the Arab historian Abu-Zeyd-el-Balkhy, inscriptions on the now-destroyed exteriors of the Giza pyramids give their time of construction as when Lyra was in the sign of Cancer. That would have been about 73,000 years ago, in the late-middle Palaeolithic. X: Well, what about that book they were using at Cheyenne - the one that also got cameoed in _Stargate_? MA: Hoffman's _Egypt Before the Pharaohs_ - HJ: I know it well; I know Mike Hoffman. He and I used to go drinking at Virginia when I was a Visiting Professor there a few years back. Yeah, the book's sound as far as it goes, but remember that it's based on what you'd call the "normal range" of archaeological supporting data: geological digs, climate calculations, pottery, tools, hut ruins, that sort of thing. It found just what you would normally expect to find in a mideast precivilization of that time period. Point is Hoffman assumes, not unreasonably, that there was nothing else sitting around the Nile while the Gerzean Egyptians were building huts and carving flints - something like the Pyramid, for instance. Hoffman has no way of knowing that it was not there all the while, looming over the Gerzeans. Hoffman brings out in his book that the hook we hang Egyptian dynastic dating on, particularly the early dynasties, is a list from Manetho, an Egyptian priest at Sebennytos in the Nile Delta around 280 BCE. We have it today only in fragments, but it's still the hook, so to speak. That's how we get the usual 30 dynasties, and conventional Egyptologists are more or less happy with that. What they're *not* so happy about is that Manetho's list goes on quite a ways before Menes, before the accepted date of 3100 BCE - going backwards: 350 years Thinites; 1,790 years other Memphite kings; 1,817 years other kings; 1,255 years "Heroes"; and before that 13,900 years in which the neteru - the "gods" - reigned physically on Earth. That's where Manetho stops. LR: But Egypt is full of other pyramids which have been reliably dated to the Old Kingdom. HJ: But not by any stretch of the same construction quality. Most of them are just crumbling piles of rock. They could just as easily be imitations of a pre-existing, mysterious, and impressive Great Pyramid. 201434369420143436942014343694201434369420143436942014343694718 From: Michael Aquino Area: Thelema To: Tony Iannotti 15 Nov 94 11:07:26 Subject: Stargate (4 of 4) UpdReq X: At Cheyenne we began by using a computer-modeling program to take the sky back to the coded references we were given to work with. But the initial conclusion was that something was wrong with the data, with the inscriptions, because the reconstructed sky went back around 25,000 years. HJ: According to Hoffman, you had just basic tool-making culture at that time. X: That thing at Cheyenne wasn't any piece of chipped flint! LR: Was it like the stargate? In the film, I mean. MA: Actually we couldn't figure out *what* the hell it was. It came from Egypt, but we weren't told exactly from where. It's a mechanical device - moving parts of some sort - non-organic, so it couldn't be carbon-dated - and X did in fact discover that several of the symbols on it corresponded to the 25,000-year-old sky; but that's where the project came to a halt. In fact the 25,000-figure was considered invalid somehow, because the archaeological advisors of the project were quite certain that Egyptian civilization only went back to 3100 BCE. So that sent them off in other directions, and X went home and I was assigned back to regular J2 duties. I thought the whole thing had been dropped as a dead end. Looks like someone got the bright idea to use it as the basis for a movie, including X's involvement - though it's nice to see that you aren't marooned somewhere around Orion, X! X: Looked like fun in the film. Almost wish I were. LR: The project was halted, you said, but the film implied that the device was in fact a - a jumping device between Earth and the Orion planet, and that evidence of an alien masquerading as an Egyptian god showed up there. X: My fault, probably. At Cheyenne I was going on about some of the themes in my music, and we got into some interesting bull sessions on all of that, and I guess someone was making notes. Did you ever hear "The Wheel", "Point Zero", some of the older stuff, as from _Bark_: "Egyptian kings they sing of Gods and pyramids of stone, And they left the deserts clean, and they left the deserts golden And shining as a beacon for those who need a road Into the day and through the night we go and find our way home ..." - that sort of thing? Quite a lot of it, really. MA: One thing in the film surprised me - why the alien chose to impersonate Ra. Why not Set, who in the kind of lightweight Egyptian mythology used in _Orion Mystery_, and the film, is cast as the "evil god"? Not that I'm complaining. But why not Osiris, who _Orion Mystery_ insists was associated with Orion? Ra was the Sun-god, more specifically Earth's Sun-god, and as I recall he was not particularly nasty. LR: Could be because Ra was famous for being a "traveling" god - in his barque across the heavens every day - which would have supported this alien's use of his spaceship. HJ: Also you said that the film dated this character to the Fourth Dynasty. I don't know whether they got that technical about it, but it wasn't until much later in dynastic history that Osiris became anything more than a god of the dead, and to begin with a minor one, for in the underworld he was subordinate to Ra, or Auf, the "dead Sun", during the hours of darkness. LR: We're about out of time here. Any closing comments? X: I'd like to go back to Cheyenne and try that gadget out, if that's how it works. MA: I'm rather fascinated to see that there's so much data hiding behind the facade of the movie, even if some of it's off in left field. Looks like at least some hard thinking went into it, and possibly got derailed later in the editorial process - for example, the need to turn it into a monster-movie with a bad alien instead of portraying Ra as a more benevolent type of superalien - Michael Rennie in a nemyss, whatever. HJ: Amazing the lengths some people will go to write a crazy story about the Great Pyramid. LR: Thank you all. 201434369420143436942014343694201434369420143436942014343694718 From: Michelle Hass Area: Thelema To: Tony Iannotti 17 Nov 94 10:28:02 Subject: Crowley on CDROM? UpdReq MH> I had heard rumors that the reason why the works of AC were being MH> electronically transcribed was that the OTO had plans to issue the MH> complete works of Uncle Al on CD ROM. MH> What's up with that??? TI>Well, prices being what they are now, I would not be surprised to see it TI>available soon. The price of the project was close to $50K TI>a couple of years ago, when it was first widely perceived TI>as a "good thing." Now the machines are down to 2K, and the TI>duplication costs are small. I still don't know how to TI>gauge the demand, though. I know a few hundred would go TI>quickly, but don't know if a few thousand would. MH>A .ZIP reader would be a perfect front-end, and I suspect if everything MH>was stored on disc in zipped form there would be no probs getting MH>everything on one disc. TI>Right now, we are thinking hypertext in Framemaker, with reader included TI>That way you can produce one CD for many platforms, though TI>I think Zip is pretty unicursal these days, from MacZip to TI>gzip, etc. So it's going to happen? JOY!!! I gotta get my upgrade now! 386 or 486 DX motherboard, 8Meg Ram, CD Rom drive, SVGA monitor and card....please Goddess please Goddess please please please!!!!! TI>Have you seen the Book of the Law in Windows TI>help text format? Links from each verse to the manuscript TI>page and the commentaries. MS pages are just 300dpi, but TI>cool, nonetheless. Color scans of the actual MS next. No I haven't...at least not yet. I'm still running on an XT clone. 93, Bro... --.\\<-H-- * SLMR 2.1a * Warning: this is a lame attempt to write a clever tagline 201434369420143436942014343694201434369420143436942014343694718 From: Michelle Hass Area: Thelema To: Christeos Pir 17 Nov 94 10:37:04 Subject: Baloney about Unca' Al UpdReq CP> Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law. CP> Probably still using my other "craft name" which I generally reserve CP> for Order stuff these days, _Vitriol_. V.I.T.R.I.O.L. with full stops? If you are who I think you are, then I'm glad I'm back in touch with you! Hi Bro! MH> I am currently mostly writing on mundane matters...I am continuing my MH> work as a freelance journalist, and I am attempting to get a zine of MH> my own going about cutting-edge animation. There will be a sample issue MH> ready of this zine, called FRAME ZERO, probably around the end of MH> January. CP> Best of luck! I'm not a animation-type, I'm afraid. I do still have CP> some of your earlier writing, including an intro to mystery religions CP> and that poem to Alastor. God...those were crummy pieces of work...in fact one wasn't even entirely mine! MH> However, I *did* recently do an interpretive paraphrase of the Dao MH>Deh Jing called "Of The Dao, Empowerment and The Force of Life" MH>which you can check out excerpts of if you get the echo MH>Tao_Study. I may or may not publish it wider...I am still MH>ambivalent about its correctness as a rendering of the Ancient MH>Child's words. However, I feel it is a better rendering of MH>the Dao Deh Jing from a Thelemic perspective than Crowley's MH>Liber 157, which often times misses the spirit of Lao Tzu's MH>words and awkwardly tries to stuff them into Crowley's own mindset. MH> The Dao Deh Jing is Thelemic enough of a document without having to MH> force it into a shape it does not have. CP> I agree, AC's version is somewhat procrustean, though I enjoy it as an CP> interesting -if aberrant- variation. My personal fave would have to be CP> the old coffee-table edition by Feng Gia-Fu and Jane English. I don't CP> get that echo, but I'd love to read your piece ... hint hint ... Do you have access to Internet e-mail? Send me your snailmail address to michelle.hass@ledge.com or if you only have access to Fido netmail, Netmail me at 1:102/943 MH> Good god, man...you _have_ been digging in obscure corners! What used MH> bookstore did you find _that_ in? ;-) CP> Nah... just digging through the public library. It bothers me that CP> stuff like that, and Raschke's _Painted Black_, are on the shelf, but CP> not one mention of Uncle Al in the catalog. In some areas they don't do CP> too badly: the material on Gnosticism, for example, is pretty good. And CP> I was impressed to actually see tarot _cards_ on the shelf. But CP> generally, you can write off all of section 133. Maybe if and when Wm. CP> Blake Camp gets on its financial feet, we'll start a book-donation CP> program! Sometimes I actually buy books like that from used bookstores, just for a good laugh. --.\\<-H-- * SLMR 2.1a * Warning: this is a lame attempt to write a clever tagline 201434369420143436942014343694201434369420143436942014343694718 From: Michelle Hass Area: Thelema To: Michael Aquino 17 Nov 94 10:50:06 Subject: Stargate (2 of 4) UpdReq MA>Two - The Pyramids, and particularly the Great Pyramid. There's been MA>any number of books written about them, as you know. Edwards. MA>Tompkins. Lots of conventional archaeology, even more far-out stuff. MA>Just this year another one - _The Orion Mystery_ by Bauval and MA>Gilbert, who are going on about how if you sight up the south MA>ventilation shaft from the King's Chamber, adjusting to 2600 BCE or MA>so, you get Orion, and if you look at the three Giza pyramids from MA>above, you are supposed to see something like Orion's belt. Since MA>that book came out in 1994, I'm guessing that it's where your film MA>got the Orion theme. I thought the ventilation shaft in question was oriented to view the star Sirius. MA>"I have previously noted the symbolism of Sirius-Hathor as a cow in MA>a boat associated with the constellation of Orion. There is a point MA>connected with this which I did not then refer to, but which is of MA>extreme importance for a complete discussion of the question now MA>occupying us. We get associated with the cow in the boat, Orion MA>(Sah) as Horus, One thing that might be interesting to you is that the Tongva Native Americans who lived in what is now Los Angeles had a deity named Chiniginish who was identified with Orion and with the Hawk. It is said that the Eagle Rock (a hawk-head like rock in the community of the same name which also bears a marking which looks like a red-tail hawk in flight) was one of their most sacred sites. In the Tongvan legends, Chiniginish taught the first shamans of the Tongva people how to survive, how to pray, how to dance and how to basically comport themselves. When his work was done, he danced himself into the heavens, and looks down on his people as the constellation Orion. Chiniginish is often depicted as having a hawk's head or as an anthropomorphic hawk. He appeared to the shamanka Toypurina in the late 1700s, and told her to lead her people in a revolt against the authorities at San Gabriel Mission. The mission was partially destroyed but the revolt was routed and many were executed. Toypurina was forceably wed to a soldier and relocated to the Presidio in San Francisco, where she later died. Just food for thought... --.\\<-H-- * SLMR 2.1a * Warning: this is a lame attempt to write a clever tagline 201434369420143436942014343694201434369420143436942014343694718 From: Josh Norton Area: Thelema To: Zepher 17 Nov 94 14:33:06 Subject: book of coming forth UpdReq Hi Zepher! The current that prompts me into these forays against the ToS seems to have reached a point of equilibrium for the moment, and I'm ready to get on with my other work again. But a few points in your notes are worth responding to for general interest. JN> I think that people get too hung up on the Ineffability Of It JN> All. Z> What do you mean by "Ineffability" - inaffability (not being easy Z> to speak to)? "ineffable" means "hard or impossible to describe". "Inaffable" means "unfriendly". ;-> JN> As a Magister Templi, Z> Would your mentioning this constitute "waving" a "supposed" grade? Yep. But I've also supplied substantial means for people to judge for themselves whether it's justified, both here on the net and in formal papers and magickal records. And since I'm not recruiting followers or even offering a "system of initiation", it matters much less than it does in Michael's case. I've given away everything that I think is generally useful, and people can take it, leave it, or change it to suit their own conditions. JN> I know perfectly well that anything I say about the JN> transcendental realms -- indeed, about any level of initiation JN> -- is going to be incomplete, and therefor a lie. And is going JN> to be misinterpreted by those not yet at that level. Despite JN> this, simply keeping silence or saying "it's beyond your JN> grade" or (like Michael) "it's a secret" is, to me, a cop-out, JN> an abandonment of our obligations in the Great Work. Z> If you consider your own musings or remarks in regards to your own Z> experiences as lies what then would you consider that of others? Z> The primary word is "incomplete", not "lie". It doesn't take a Master of the Temple to understand this -- see Korzybski's book "Science and Sanity". Or S.I. Hayakawa's "Language in Action". It's impossible to approach a complete description of any given level. But dissemination of descriptions of how it looks to different people would provide a substantial base on which to eventually formulate better descriptions. And the more different viewpoints are expressed, the more likely that someone coming along later will find something that clicks with his own needs. JN> In Western systems, the information available about various JN> initiations -- especially in the higher levels -- is the work JN> of a very few people, and is often reaching us at several JN> removes from its originator. This means that the descriptions JN> don't point to the essence of the experience. Z> To gain first-hand knowledge and understanding on the essence of Z> the experience of Initiation I would think you would have to Z> partake in the event itself. Yes. But the more information is spread, the more possible means of getting to that experience are available to those who seek it. Z> This leads me to the following thought. If everything is revealed Z> to the public in regards to the attainment, perception, and any Z> other characteristic that defines a particular State of Being what Z> then would be used as a barometer to evaluate and authenticate a Z> State of Being? Everyone would have a "cheat sheet" and in fact Z> "pass the test". If so, the title of Magister Templi (or any Z> other) would hold no validity. The parallel case would be one of the Eastern systems, (e.g., Mahayana Buddhists) wherein various "grades" are described in detail. Historical evidence from those systems shows your objection does not happen in practice. Fakers can't keep up a deception well enough among intelligent people. Remember Maharaj-Ji, the sixteen-year-old "perfect master"? ___ X SPEED 1.30 [NR] X 201434369420143436942014343694201434369420143436942014343694718 From: Josh Norton Area: Thelema To: Zepher 17 Nov 94 14:40:08 Subject: book of coming forth 1/ UpdReq Z> On 3 Nov 94 01:49pm, Josh Norton wrote to Zepher: Z> [ ...Continued From Previous Message ] Z> Hello again, JN> This being the case, I feel that those who have experience JN> have an obligation to give the best descriptions they can JN> manage of the levels they have attained, and to dispel the JN> misperceptions that have accumulated around past descriptions. Z> Why do you so strongly feel that this is an obligation for you and Z> insist that it's for others as well? 1. It's beneficial to those who do it. Giving away the knowledge, power, and understanding you get from initiation, unconditionally and without expectation of any return, always results in the giver getting _more_ knowledge, power, and understanding to replace it. 2. It's beneficial to those who receive it. Unconditionally given power and knowledge finds its own channels, and can be adapted to the circumstances of the receiver much more readily than when the giver insists on trying to keep some sort of "control" over it, or tries to distribute it selectively. 3. It's beneficial to the world at large. The more knowledge available in any given field, the more rapidly it gets integrated into the psychic environment, producing a general adaptation of humanity's consciousness in that area. This in turn enables individuals working ahead of the general run of humanity to go farther than they would otherwise be able. JN> Now, in the case of Michael Aquino and the Temple of Set it is JN> even more important that they attempt to provide clear, JN> unambiguous descriptions of their initiations. This is because JN> they specifically deny the validity and necessity of certain JN> events that appear in practically every other major initiation JN> system in the world, east and west. (Most notably, they deny JN> the loss of identification with the individualized self that JN> precedes the grade of Master of the Temple.) Z> How can you gain mastery over the Universe when you previously Z> relinquished your intellect and merged your consciousness with it? Z> You in effect detract into an undistinguishable ingredient Z> intermixed in a quagmire of non-consciousness. The very pith of Z> what made you distinct from everything else is dissolved. There's too many misconceptions in that statement for me to handle them in detail. A couple of points: 1. You never have had, and never will have, complete mastery over the universe. And no being, no matter what its level, ever will. If you think otherwise, you are seriously deluded. 2. Your conception of what it means to be "enlightened" in the traditional sense has little or nothing to do with the facts of the case. Note the words "loss of identification" in my paragraph above. When an awareness "identifies" itself with something, it believes itself to _be_ that thing, and acts as if it were that thing. When it ceases to identify, it no longer believes itself to be that thing, and is freed from the necessity of acting within the limits that thing places on it. When I say that the enlightened awareness no longer identifies with the individualized self, I am simply saying that it is no longer constrained by that self's limited forms of awareness and activity. This does _not_ mean that the structures of individuality and intellect disappear, or that the awareness ceases to exist. Simply that the awareness recognizes that individualized selfhood is not the highest state of being it is capable of assuming, and can assume other states more or less at will. (Conditions in that higher-than-individualized state of being sound paradoxical and strange when rendered into the terminology of the Ruach. A lot of the misconceptions -- such as this ego-destruction thing -- are a consequence of the drastically different conditions on those higher levels. It's really quite simple and self-consistent when you actually get there.) Obviously enlightened persons still maintain a personality aspect. When they act within the world they still appear as individuals with distinct characteristics. But they use their individualized part as a tool or a suit of clothes, without perceiving it to be the essence of their being. .pg [ Continued In Next Message... ] ___ X SPEED 1.30 [NR] X 201434369420143436942014343694201434369420143436942014343694718 From: Josh Norton Area: Thelema To: Zepher 17 Nov 94 14:40:10 Subject: book of coming forth 2/ UpdReq [ ...Continued From Previous Message ] Z> If in the process of attainment of Master of the Temple one loses Z> intellect & consciousness to the Universe and then claims a State Z> of Being which now declares mastery over the Universe a Z> contradiction of that State of Being exists. Z> If I wish to honor my total Being, to maintain, nourish, Z> strengthen, and cultivate it how would forfeiting my intellect, my Z> soul, my very essence aid in this endeavor? Forfeiting such things Z> contradicts my very Will to evolve as a distinct Being. See above. The "temple" of which the MoT is "master" is the Ruach, that part of being that makes up the individualized self. He is master of it because his awareness is no longer controlled by it. He is not a "Master of the Universe" -- that's a comic book character. Just in case it's gotten lost in all this brouhaha, I would like to point out again that the "traditional" magickal systems don't expect people to jump right from an unenlighted state into a state of identification with the divine. There are typically three major stages: -- First you have to become an individual, divorcing yourself from the conditioning placed on you by childhood training and social pressure, and freeing yourself from identification with your means of relationship to the world, i.e., the senses, emotions, intellect, and self-image. -- Next you have to understand the nature of your specific individuality in detail, and apply that nature to the world in the most effective and spiritually "positive" way possible. You nourish it, strengthen it, and cultivate it, precisely as you say you want to do. -- Knowing your individuality eventually leads, as a _natural_ consequence, to a point where it becomes constraining to the awareness. It is only when the awareness realizes the limitations individualization places on it that it begins to cease identifying with it, and to work at freeing itself from the self. When it accomplishes this, it becomes a "Master of the Temple", the lowest of the three "enlightened" grades. As far as I can tell from their limited public utterances, the ToS differs from other initiatory groups in that they deny that this last stage exists. They turn their backs on the natural progression, and decide that the secondary stage is the highest stage. Their system is not truly a "left-hand path" presenting a system different from equal to the tradition "right-hand" (their term, not mine) systems. Instead it is simply the traditional system, truncated before it gets to the goal. ___ X SPEED 1.30 [NR] X 201434369420143436942014343694201434369420143436942014343694718 From: JOSEPH MAX Area: Thelema To: KEVIN BOLD 15 Nov 94 11:41:00 Subject: RE: THELEMIC MEANINGS UpdReq -=> Quoting Kevin Bold to Joseph Max <=- KB> 93! JM> Hey, he asked me "if it was okay with me". Well, yes, it is okay with me. JM> I never claimed to be the original author or "copyright holder". In case JM> you missed it, I even said so when posting it... KB> Earlier this morning I looked at your original post. Using the "log" KB> feature of my version of ProComm Plus, I was able to turn it into a KB> text file and save it on my hard disk as I read it. The original post KB> made no mention of it being the work of anyone other than yourself. KB> 93--93/93... Look again in the messages concerning it immediately afterward. I pointed out that a few of the quips were mine but the bulk came from a posting on the Internet. Again I apologise for the confusion. ___ Blue Wave/QWK v2.12 201434369420143436942014343694201434369420143436942014343694718 From: StarChild Area: Thelema To: Kevin Bold 17 Nov 94 20:09:26 Subject: Questions? UpdReq KB> 93! KB> S> ...Masonry definitely has several Middle-Eastern roots. KB> You better believe it, especially Sufism by way of the KB> Knights Templar. And if anyone doubts this, they need KB> only read _The Sufis_ by Idries Shah, _The Temple and KB> The Lodge_ by Michael Baigent and Richard Leigh, and KB> _Born in Blood: The Lost Secrets of Freemasonry_ and KB> _Dungeon, Fire, and Sword_, both by John Robinson. Thank you for the references! I'll be glad to look them up! BTW: Ya might wanna send these notes off to Boniface too, if he hasn't got most of them already. :) BB Ed 201434369420143436942014343694201434369420143436942014343694718 From: Martin Krogh-Poulsen Area: Thelema To: everybody 11 Nov 94 17:04:04 Subject: Copy-rights... UpdReq Greetings everybody! Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law. Does anybody have a list of the Copy-Rights on the different Crowley writings? It's pretty much a chaos of dates and different countries laws, etc. as far as I have heard. I would be much obliged if someone could help me :) Love is the Law, love under will. Martin Krogh-Poulsen 201434369420143436942014343694201434369420143436942014343694718 From: Martin Krogh-Poulsen Area: Thelema To: To Meta Therion 14 Nov 94 07:33:16 Subject: Thelemic Order of the Golden Dawn UpdReq well, hi To Meta Therion! Do what thou wilt shal be the whole of the Law. it was around Tuesday November 08 1994 that To Meta Therion informed Michael Aquino: TMT> I received a letter from them some time ago, and have recently sent them TMT> a list of questions that I hope they will answer concerning the purpose TMT> and direction of their order. It appears that they may have taken TMT> A.'.A.'. grades and ascribed them to an order that is more easily TMT> contacted and open. I haven't talked to anyone involved in the order on TMT> the net yet, but I'm sure somebody has to be out there lurking about. They have a lot of material out on Internet. Megs actually! There they also have different so-called 'Manifesto''s. It seems to be more or less like Hyatt's G,',D,',, just within a Thelemic context, but I wouldn't be able to say if thats totally positive. Also, they seem to have some kind of complex self-initiation system. They also use the 3-division of their initiation system (Man of earth/Lover/Hermit). All this is in the Newsletter I guess. Well, around here they havn't manifested yet, but Hyatt's G,',D,', has! BTW: Isn't there something about the A,',A,', not being able to be a "Static, Under one roof" Order, since just as soon it becomes an Order, it looses it's "status" as being A,',A,',? That's the argument I've heard against COT & TOT, they being very A,',A,', too. Love is the Law, love under will. Martin Krogh-Poulsen 201434369420143436942014343694201434369420143436942014343694718 From: Tony Iannotti Area: Thelema To: Keith S Schurholz 6 Nov 94 12:55:36 Subject: Re: C.F. Russell and Michael Bertiaux UpdReq KSS> Hiya Tony I. Yes there is a slew (sp.?) of new material re: KSS> both C.F. and Krum-Heller. I am on the verge of getting two Hi again! The Caliph is here in town on business, and we were discussing K-H and FRA. Did you know that we have gotten in touch with Parzival? We had a chance to interview him at his home, and find out a lot about how K-H left things, both OTO and FRA. Is your source of Mass information the same, or from the other Gnostic Bishops? Jes' curious. Things might dovetail in interesting ways...... 201434369420143436942014343694201434369420143436942014343694718