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(re: the Crowley poem)

The cross is probably meant to be read as rood; not sure about kamelon though. The only thing I can think of is: camel -> Gimel -> High Priestess -> moon -> qamar (moon in Arabic) but that's probably a massive stretch and I could be missing something simpler/more obvious. But yeah reading this man's work almost feels like trying to solve an ARG sometimes.

A rood! Oh, you're so right. — I mean, yeah, it'd be odd that a greek word should be read (in a poem) as an arabic one. I could see that being the case, though, with the rhyming structure being the clue itself.

Honestly, I already couldn't think of anything, so I'll boast your answer quoting 777, which is (!) the word just before κάμηλος in the verse: <<The Camel is only connected with the High Priestess through the letter Gimel>>.

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Reading Aleister Crowley is a form of Self-Harm

(The title is obviously playful: if you're going to be the weird kind of weird about it, consider yourself shooed away.)

A few days ago, I was reading one of Duquette's books (pretty sure it was 'Understanding the Thoth Tarot'), and he mentioned a text written by the (absolutely) Beast himself: 'The Wake World', which you can find included in the title Konx Om Pax, which means something like 'Light in Extension', apparently.

The full name of the text reads:

<<THE WAKE WORLD: A TALE FOR BABES AND SUCKLINGS (WITH EXPLANATORY NOTES IN HEBREW AND LATIN FOR THE USE OF THE WISE AND PRUDENT)>>

As per usual, it took me more time getting into it than actually reading it, but after I got a rough translation of all the stuff in the beginning it was smooth sailing.

Now, either you know the text or don't, here's the thing: either you know the Tree of Life (aka Sephiroth), or I can't be bother to 101 you into Qabalah right now. If you know what it is, but haven't read the text: it was, it seems, written for 666's second daughter, Lola, 'the Key of Delights'. In the twenty-something pages, the H.G.A. takes her up the Tree of Life. That's it, that's the whole thing; and it is awesome indeed. Even, dare I say it, cutesy at times. Very Alice Wonderlanding.

But this poem bothers me a little:

<.>

Well, what's wrong with it? Nothing, really, but it is a little frustrating that while the symbols for Sun and Fire, for example, can be replaced for the words they represent while still rhyming — golden Sun/of the One; Night/Light (L.V.X.); arisen, inspire!/frenzied Fire... — it just doesn't work for + (which should be read as cross, or maybe crosses, as far as I know and according to other Crowley's works) and κάμηλος, which is greek for camel and can also be read as is: kamēlon. Respectively, they 'should' rhyme with blood and far.

But again, I could be missing something.

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Doubts 'bout Cyclonopedia: does these mean anything?

Reza Negarestani's most famous book, Cyclonopedia (2008), is a hard one to get through. Far from impossible, though. Even if you're not following its threads closely, the main theme isn't all that missable—not by a long shot.

Perhaps I'm too invested in the book's world to be able to surmise it neatly; perhaps to do so is against its core message(s). If you have read it already, you can skip this paragraph, but if you're reading this post because you're interested in it, just give it a shot. If the preface (named 'incognitum hactenus') doesn't hook you in, maybe leave it for now. Alas, if you'd still like to be given something to chew on, its premise is that the Middle East, as a geopolitical entity, is alive; its petroil is not only sentient but also the lubrificant that gets the deleuzoguattarian Body without Organs all lubbed up and smooth so the chains flying out of these Lament Configurations called war-machines can have a good time channeling us to the Insurrectionary Other.

If you're familiar with SF at all, you'll excuse Cyclonopedia habit of presenting its terminology and lingo first, with explanations later. But you also can have it as a philosophical treatise, and a serious one at that. It has a credible bibliography, and the book's reinterpretations of its source materials are not unprecedented, either. For example, when it says the Middle East is alive, and all that jazz about oil, it is getting that off of a certain Dr. Parsani, so heavily quoted, matter of fact, you'd think he's not real, but a Theory-Fiction fabrication. But that's just not the case.

I absented myself from doing any 'behind the scenes' research on Cyclonopedia, though. At least, for now. I finished it some weeks ago and am currently past the 200-page mark of Fanged Noumena. But it still has its little mysteries, and I still wonder what these Plot Holes are yet successfully withholding from me. And that's what I need help with.

Assuming you have read it, you know Cyclonopedia doesn't tell you everything. Quick example: 'incognitum hactenus' gives the reader two links, but it doesn't tell what they're for. It matters little, nonetheless: one is a time zone converter and the other is a Not Found page (unless you erase part of it so you're directed to a 'Computer Science student web server'?).

But, of course, there's more. There's the '2th 3St', 2 and S being character's names, but still, it doesn't come up again in this equation form, so what's up with that?

Following, I give the ones that really stuck with me along these weeks I thought I put it to rest. Needless to say, this is a cry for help.

I. This footnote:

II. This other footnote, which might be Persian:

III. Also this one:

IV. On page 39 (and the previous one), you see these strings of 'random' bracketed numbers (the footnote talks about PGPs):

V. And finally, there's a footnote on page 37 where someone (Reza?) is at the hotel room 302, bothered by someone (the preface's author) wearing a DFA 1979 shirt. But if we go back to the preface, it is she who is at the 302 room. There, you read:

// SSS ['S' is the same person Reza? is adressing in the 37 footnote] Try to change my room as 302 is really getting to me. There is someone [Reza?] in the window across the way who keeps looking at me.

//

I'm wondering if this is an overlook (it seems that way), or a time-space shenanigans scenario, since the preface gives us this graph:

I'm sure other minor things could also be adressed, and even these ones shouldn't make too much of a difference, if at all, but—at the same time I don't want to sign up a reddit account to ask this, and will therefore shout into the tumblr void—engaging in a community manner with Cyclonopedia, CCRU or CCRU-adjacent material is, probably, the better way to do it and proceed.

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Are the Nephilims Cain's lineage?

So, I am new to Nephilim discourse, which is to say I am out of the loop, but still—hear me out.

And: if you don't know anything about this, they are the famous giants from the Bible. Remember David and the Giant (Goliath) and you should be more or less set.

Like I said previously, in the last post I made, I am reading the English translation—of the French translation—of an Italian manuscript written in latin called De Dæmonialitate, et Incubis, et Succubis.

The text is—or so it seems, I am not through it yet—arguing that Incubi and Succubi are born, live among us, have a soul (that can ascend to Heaven or descend to Hell) and, of course, die, all like us. Also, the author argues against the general belief that they can't reproduce by themselves alone, but need the sperm of a man, that is to be, then, passed to a woman.

This post here only exists because I disagree with the author in the following; here's what he says at page 22:

<<We also read in the Testament, Genesis, chap. 6, verse 4, that giants were born when the sons of God came in unto the daughters of men: that is the very letter of the sacred text. Now, those giants were men of great stature, [...] and far superior to other men. Not only were they distinguished by their huge size, but also by their physical power, their plundering habits and their tyranny. Through their criminal excesses the Giants were the primary and principal cause of the Flood, according to Cornelius [...] in his Commentary on Genesis. Some contend that by Sons of God are meant the sons of Seth, and by Daughters of men the daughters of Cain, because the former practiced piety, religion and every other virtue, whilst the descendants of Cain were quite the reverse; but [...] it must be conceded that it clashes with the obvious meaning of the text [does it?]. Scripture says, in fact, that of the conjunction of the above mentioned were born men of huge bodily size: consequently, those giants were not previously in existence, and if their birth was the result of that conjunction, it cannot be ascribed to the intercourse of the sons of Seth with the daughters of Cain, who being themselves of ordinary stature, could but procreate children of ordinary stature.>>

I guess that my argument is that the giants were, just plain and simple, part of the genetic pool of Men. From Adam, through Seth, to Noah, we have 10 generations, and only a few of names are ever mentioned (this is to say we don't know, from early on, who's everybody). More specifically, it is said (Genesis 5:3 ESV): "When Adam had lived 130 years, he fathered a son in his own likeness, after his image, and named him Seth."

The same is not (!) said for Cain or Abel; so what gives? If the giants were excepcionally tall, then they're not like Adam. And we just demonstrated that Cain was not like his father: and also was the first murderer, putting him, honestly, pretty much in the spot for any anomaly spotted.

Cain, though, received a mark from God, which is very dramatic and makes viable the reading of him and his children as "sons of God". And maybe the Flood was God's way of undermining these that he did put, previously, under protection.

Said differently, God made Adam in his image, and Seth was the imagine of his father. But for Cain, who were to have a short lineage, the Bible remains somewhat silent. But, even after the Flood, the giants, who "were on the earth in those days" (Genesis 6:4 ESV), were and are still in our genetic code, if its expression being even more rare only.

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That feeling when the Chad is demonic

De Dæmonialitate, et Incubis, et Succubis is an Italian manuscript written in latin by the Franciscan Ludovico Maria Sinistrari (born in 1622 CE). Isidore Lisieux than found it in a modest bookshop, after the owner bought it in an auction after an English Collector died.

The version I am reading is the English translation of the French Translation by Lisieux, under the name of 'Demoniality: Or, Incubi and Succubi' (ebook by Global Grey, please check 'em out).

Here's a long excerpt from it (p. 16-17, the bolded sentences are mine), relating something the author claims to have actually witnessed:

<<Weary however of such painful and persistent molestation [from an Incubus that bake her cake and is trying to take her], taking the advice of her Confessor and other grave men, she had herself exorcised by experienced Exorcists, in order to ascertain whether perchance she was not possessed. Having found in her no trace of the evil Spirit, they blessed the house, the bed-room, the bed, and enjoined on the Incubus to discontinue his molestations. All to no purpose: he kept on worse than ever, pretending to be love-sick, weeping and moaning in order to melt the heart of the lady, who however, by the grace of God, remained unconquered. The Incubus then went another way to work: he appeared in the shape of a lad or little man of great beauty, with golden locks, a flaxen beard that shone like gold, sea-green eyes calling to mind the flax-flower, and arrayed in a fancy Spanish dress. Besides he appeared to her even when in company, whimpering, after the fashion of lovers, kissing his hand to her, and endeavouring by every means to obtain her embraces. She alone saw and heard him: for every body else, he was not to be seen.>>

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:today i downloaded a couple of (global grey) ebooks, mostly just so i can take my head off from what will be my next research, because i am a little tired after writing on agrippa. oh, but i simply have so much to read—just, like, all the time. really envying that scene of 'only lovers left alive' where vampire tilda swinton is reading books just by touching the pages with her fingers:

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Poor Abel

The Bible sure is kind of... Abel-ist.

Some while back, I was looking at the genealogical tree since Adam and Eve and it took me one second to remember why Abel had nothing.

Sadness.

Now, reading through Genesis, I noticed in the chapter 4 (ESV):

<<Now Adam knew Eve his wife, and she conceived and bore Cain, saying, “I have gotten a man with the help of the Lord.” And again, she bore his brother Abel [with the help of the Lord?]. Now Abel was a keeper of sheep, and Cain a worker of the ground.>>

The KJV give us the same:

<<And Adam knew Eve his wife; and she conceived, and bare Cain, and said, I have gotten a man from the Lord. And she again bare his brother Abel [ditto?]. And Abel was a keeper of sheep, but Cain was a tiller of the ground.>>

If you barely glossed over the Bible, you know it don't miss on repetitions, so this is significant. It is a way, it seems like, of downplaying someone's near death ex post facto.

Abel was killed by being good to God instead of the blessed firstborned Cain, fine—but not a single further note on that? Maybe something about he being in Heaven would be nice, as far as his character goes.

Later, it is said (KJV):

<<And Adam knew his wife again; and she bare a son, and called his name Seth: For God, said she, hath appointed me another seed instead of Abel, whom Cain slew.>>

Cold.

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Only in a Jodorowsky's movie

Santa Sangre (1989); directed by Alejandro Jodorowsky, starring Thelma Tixou.

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Igniting Plato's Forms Through Atomic Shenanigans

(Or: Uh oh, this might be Bad.)

I. Plan 9 from Outer Space is a bad movie from 1957. The brief rundown is that aliens are trying to intervene on Earth because we came to represent a threat to the entire Universe. Now, hold that thought for a moment.

(I shall never know how and why they would drag Béla Lugosi into this mess of a movie. If you didn't see it and now is wondering why there's vampires in the film, the answer is: yes.)

II. Platonism holds that there is a continuum between the One, as an absolute limit, and the many, i.e., the rest, us, the material world. Think about it as Qabalah's Ein Sof, only after the divine emanation, or self-manifestation successively degraded towards humanity. There is no ontological gap, for short, between divine and human.

(I'm taking Plato here to a manner rather informal and so, so (!) broad, which is clear but also just so—I know that—you know.)

Well, again, for Plato, one could image the material world as the fat and flesh of its real Reality, which can be thought as being geometrical; and Geometry being, which is to say the same, not abstracted in the way we usually conceive abstraction, but this latter as what is fundamentally True. This points the Cosmos as one vast Architectural Project, and one absolutely, completely interlinked at that.

Well, the thing is: wouldn't it be funny if the whole thing could catch fire? Metaphysically—but not metaphorically—speaking, of course. Not that it is supposed to; on the contrary.

But maybe they just didn't know, back then, about atomic volatilities. That's a fair and profoundly naïve argument. Nevertheless, it is not that we even need to say these could cross the gap between material and its Forms or Ideas, for we said there isn't one. Still, let's push further.

III. Okay, so—here's the thing: there is actually an interesting conversation late in the movie. One of the very human-like aliens that are trying to kill the whole sum of humans explains why we are such a threat. He/it says:

<<First was your firecracker, a harmless explosive. Then your hand grenade. They began to kill your own people a few at a time. Then the bomb, then a larger bomb. Many people are killed at one time. Then your scientists stumbled upon the atom bomb. Split the atom. Then the hydrogen bomb, where you actually explode the air itself. […] The only explosion left is the solaronite. […] Your scientists will stumble upon it as they have all the others. […] The solaronite is a way to explode the actual particles of sunlight. […] Take a can of your gasoline. Say this can of gasoline is the Sun. Now, you spread a thin line of it to a ball, representing the Earth. Now, the gasoline represents the sunlight, the Sun particles. […] Then we put a flame to the ball. The flame will speedily travel around the Earth, back along the line of gasoline, to the can, or the Sun itself. It will explode this source, and spread to every place that gasoline, our sunlight, touches. Explode the sunlight here, gentlemen, and you explode the Universe.>>

Taking atomic bombs as the prelude of something else, more destructive, is pretty inventive. And, as far as I am concerned, the "Sun itself" could mean something like the agathon, "the word with which Plato denoted the supreme Form, the spiritual analogue to the Sun in the visible world" (Salaman et al., p. 14). And I don't think the result of it would be the Apocalypse, but much more akin of a mythical death of Divinity, at least as we know it.

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Heraclitus Deserves Better: like, in general

Not that I know loads of him, but that's the thing. It is almost like he came too soon to be big a part of most History of Philosophy textbooks. Enough about entering twice in the same river, c'mon!

As I was reading through The Corpus Hermeticum: Book 4 (Salaman et al.), specifically page 32:

<<The perceptions of these people are like those of dumb animals, having a mixture of rage and lust, they do not value things worthy of their attention, but turn to the pleasures and appetites of the body, believing that man was born for that reason.>>

It straight up whiplashed me back to one article I did read last year, I think, called Heraclitus: The Postmodern Presocratic? (Waugh, 1991). There, the author quotes embodying B 87 as part of his argument (p. 618):

<<Still, if Heraclitus' choice of the saying was dictated not only by the desire to be appreciated and remembered by his audience, but also because the saying has, or can be made to have, different meanings or different levels of meaning, then, perhaps, we should be hesitant in taking the "cosmological fragments" too seriously, or more seriously than we take the others. We would not want to be like a stupid person who gets all worked up over every statement he hears[".]>>

As I hold, not alone, that Postmodernism is an arbitrary and derogatory term, if at times useful—like Waugh's sensible chronological comparison—, I find it not prosaically true a claim of Heraclitus as a sort of early post-structuralist thinker. Let us reread this:

<<Still, if Heraclitus' choice of the saying was dictated not only by the desire to be appreciated and remembered by his audience, but also because the saying has, or can be made to have, different meanings or different levels of meaning, then [...]>>

Now, that is exactly Paul de Man's core argument in Semiology and Rhetoric (1973). Take:

<<Jacques Derrida for instance, who asks the question "What is the Difference"—and we cannot even tell from his grammar whether he "really" wants to know "what" difference is or is just telling us that we shouldn't even try to find out. Confronted with the question of the difference between grammar and rhetoric [not the persuasion kind, that is], grammar allows us to ask the question, but the sentence by means of which we ask it may deny the very possibility of asking. For what is the use of asking, I ask, when we cannot even authoritatively decide whether a question asks or doesn't ask? (p. 29)>>

There is such a greater philosofical joy under the figure that Heraclitus came to be held as. Even the example I gave is just highly anecdotal.

(Just in case you're wondering what the "cosmological fragments" are, relax, they are the ones where Heraclitus talks about... you guessed it, the cosmos.)

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My favorite parts of Confessio Fraternitatis, the 2nd Rosicrucian Manifesto

They say so, that:

As Adam had, and then lost in Paradise, such things as "truth, light, life, and glory", we now have, on the other hand, "servitude, falsehood, lies, and darkness" into the totality of human affairs, with even the "wisest of all" having troubles "to know whose doctrine and opinion [s/]he should follow and embrace, and could not [as it is] well and easily be discerned".

And:

"Although that great book of nature stands open to all men, yet there are but few that can read and understand the same. For as there is given to man two instruments to hear, likewise two to see, and two to smell, but only one to speak, and it were but vain to expect speech from the ears, or hearing from the eyes. So there hath been ages or times which have seen, there have also been ages that have heard, smelt, and tasted. Now there remains yet that which [...] shall be likewise given to the tongue [...]; what before times hath been seen, heard, and smelt, now finally shall be spoken and uttered forth, when the World shall awake out of her heavy and drowsy sleep."

Of course, they mention explicitly the "Babylonical confusion", that being the reason the group are not fluent in all the languages, but the own they forged, a language where "is expressed and declared the nature of all things". All of this doesn't go without any rhetorical problems, as far as I am concerned; but, as a trope, is such a fecund one.

(Note that in the famous Rosicrucian image above, the temple, not tower, is by Heaven's Hand hung, and interpretation goes that it isn't, even, to be taken as an physical place.)

In Genesis 11:6-7—in the ESV edition (curiously, the KJV is not really poetic here)—, it is stated:

And the Lord said, “Behold, they are one people, and they have all one language, and this is only the beginning of what they will do. And nothing that they propose to do will now be impossible for them. Come, let us go down and there confuse their language, so that they may not understand one another's speech.

NB: in the image above, there are 7 (arguably) circles of increasing light, for which is hard not to argue it being representative of the ye olden 7 planets of alchemists of yore.

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Skunk (2023) / Silent Hill 2 remake

I'm watching Skunk (2023) right now and I just can't believe this isn't Angela Orosco. Like, are you actually kidding me?

Look at her!

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA

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Traci Lords | Cry-Baby