The Cry of the 3rd Aethyr - The Vision and the Voice
The Cry of the
3rd Aethyr,
Which is Called ZON
There is an angr now it is become
In the centre is that minute point of light which is
the true Sun, and in the circumference is the Emerald
Snake. And joining them are the rays which are the plumes
of Maat, and because the distance is infinite, therefore
are they parallel from the circumference, although they
diverge from the centre.
In all this is no voice and no motion.
And yet it seems that the great Snake feedeth upon the
plumes of Truth as upon itself, so that it contracteth3.
But ever so little as it contracteth, without it gloweth
the golden rim, which is that minute point in the centre.
And all this is the sigil of the Aethyr, gold and
azure and green. Yet also these are the Severities.
It is only in the first three Aethyrs that we find the
pure essence, for all the other Aethyrs are but as
Malkuth to complete these three triads, as hath before
been said. And this being the second reflection,
therefore is it the palace of two hundred and eighty
judgments.
For all these paths
are in the course of the Flaming Sword from the side of
Severity. And the other two paths are Zayin, which is a
and Shin, which is a tooth. These are then the
five severities which are 280.
All this is communicated to the Seer interiorly.
&And the eye of His benignancy is closed. Let it
not be opened upon the Aethyr, lest the severities be
mitigated, and the house fall.&
Shall not the house fall, and the Dragon sink? Verily all
things have been swallow and Chaos
hath opened his jaws and crushed the Universe as a
Bacchanal crusheth a grape between her teeth. Shall not
destruction swallow up destruction, and annihilation
confound annihilation? Twenty and two are the mansions7 of
the House of my Father, but there cometh an ox8
that shall set his forehead against the House, and it
shall fall. For all these things are the toys of the
and the Maker of Illusions, that barreth the
Understanding from the Crown.
O thou that hast beheld the City of the Pyramids, how
shouldst thou behold the House of the Juggler10?
For he is wisdom, and by wisdom hath he made the Worlds,
and from that wisdom issue judgements 70 by 4, that are
the 4 eyes of the double- that are the 4
devils, Satan, Lucifer, Leviathan, Belial, that are the
great princes of the evil of the world.
And Satan is worshipped by men under the name of
J and Lucifer is worshipped by men under the name of
B and Leviathan is worshipped by men under the name
of A and Belial is worshipped by men under the name
of Buddha.
(This is the meaning of the passage in Liber Legis,
Chap. III.)
Moreover, there is Mary, a blasphemy against BABALON,
and therefore is she the Queen of all those wicked devils
that walk upon the earth, those that thou sawest even as
little black specks that stained the Heaven of Urania.
And all these are the excrement of Choronzon.
And for this is BABALON under the power of the
Magician, that she hath submitted h
and she guardeth the Abyss.
And in her is a perfect purity of
yet she is sent as the Redeemer to them that are below.
For there is no other way into the Supernal Mystery but
through her, and the Beast and the
Magician is set beyond her to deceive the brothers of
blackness, lest they should make unto themselves a crown15;
for if there were two crowns, then should Ygdrasil, that
ancient tree, be cast out into the Abyss, uprooted and
cast down into the Outermost Abyss, and the Arcanum which
is in the Adytu and the Ark should
be touched, and the Lodge spied upon by them that are not
masters, and the bread of the Sacrament should be the
dung of C and the wine of the Sacrament should
be the water of C and the incense should be
and the fire upon the Altar should be hate.
B stand, play the man, for behold!
there shall be revealed unto thee the Great Terror, the
thing of awe that hath no name.
And this is the mystery that I declare unto thee: that
from the Crown itself spring the t
Aleph is madness, and Beth is falsehood, and Gimel is
And these three be greater than all, for they are beyond
the words that I how much more therefore
are they beyond the words that thou transmittest unto
Behold! the Veil of the Aethyr sundereth, and is torn,
like a sail by the breath of the tempest, and thou shalt
see him as from afar off. This is that which is written,
&Confound her understanding with darkness,& for
thou canst not speak this thing.
It is the figure of the Magus of the T and in his right
arm the torch of the fl in his left
the cup of poison, a cataract into Hell. And upon his
head the evil talisman, blasphemy and blasphemy and
blasphemy, in the form of a circle. That is the greatest
blasphemy of all.
On his feet hath he the scythes an
every sharp thing, --- a
millionfold, and all in one. And before him is the Table
that is a Table of wickedness, and 42-fold Table. This
Table is connected with the 42 Assessors of the Dead, for
they are the Accursers, whom
with the 42-fold name of God, for this is the Mystery of
Iniquity, that there was ever a beginning at all21.
And this Magus casteth forth, by the might of his four
weapons, a thousand shining colours,
ripping and tearing the Aethyr, so that it is like jagged
saws, or like broken teeth in the face of a young girl,
or like disruption, or madness. There is a horrible
grinding sound, maddening. This is the mill in which the
Universal Substance, which is ether, was ground down into
The Seer prayeth that a cloud may come between him and
the sun, so that he may shut out the terror of the
vision. A he and no
help can come to him, for the shew-stone blazeth ever
with the fury and the torment and the blackness, and the
stench of human flesh. The bowels of little children are
torn out and thrust into his mouth, and a poison is
dropped into his eyes. And Lilith, a black monkey
crawling with filth, running with open sores, an eye torn
out, eaten of worms, her teeth rotten, her nose eaten
away, her mouth a putrid mass of green slime, her dugs
dropping and cancerous, clings to him, kisses him.
(Kill me! kill me!)
There is a mocking voice: Thou art become immortal.
Thou wouldst look upon the face of the Magician and thou
hast not beheld him because of his Magick veils.
(Don't torture me!)
Thus are all they fallen into the power of Lilith, who
have dared to look upon his face.
The shew-stone is all black and corrupt. O filth!
filth! filth!
And this is her great blasphemy: that she hath taken
the name of the First Aethyr,
and bound it on her brow, and added thereunto the
shameless yod and the tau for the sign of the Cross.
She it is that squatteth upon the Crucifix, for the
nastiness of her pleasure. So that they that worship
Christ suck up her filth upon their tongues, and
therefore their breaths stink.
I was saved from that Horror by a black shining
Triangle, with apex upwards,
that came upon the face of the sun.
And now the shew-stone is all clear and beautiful
The pure pale gold of a fair maiden's hair, and the
green of her girdle, and the deep soft blue of her eyes.
Note. --- In this the gold is Kether, the blue
is Chokmah, the green is Binah.
Thus she appeareth in the Aethyr, adorned with flowers
and gems. It seems that she hath incarnated herself upon
earth, and that she will appear manifest in a certain
office in the Temple.
I have seen some p I cannot think
what picture. It is a piquant face, with smiling eyes and
the ears are small and pink, the complexion is
fair, not as fair as one would
expect from the hair and eyes. It is rather an impudent
face, rather small, the nose very slightly
less than straight, well- proportioned, rather large
nostrils. Full of vitality, the whole thing. Now very
tall, rath a good dancer.
There is another girl behind her, with sparkling eyes,
mischievous, a smile showing b an
ideal Spanish girl, but fair. Very vivacious. Only her
head is visible, and now it is veiled by a black sun,
casting forth dull rays of black and gold.
Then the disk of the sun is a pair of balances, held
and twined about the central pole of the balance
is the little green poisonous snake, with a long forked
tongue rapidly darting.
And the Angel that hath spoken with me before, saith
to me: The eye of His
veileth he thine eyes from the vision. Manfully hast thou
yet, hast thou been man, th
and hadst thou been wholly that which thou art, thou
shouldst have been caught up in the full vision that is
unspeakable for Horror. And thou shouldst have beheld the
face of the Magician that thou hast not been able to
behold, - of him from whom issue forth the severities
that are upon Malkuth, and his name is Misericordia Dei.
And because he is the dyad, thou mayest yet understand
in two ways. Of first way, the Mercy of God is that Mercy
which Jehovah showed to the A and the second
way is utterly beyond thine understanding, for it is the
upright, and thou knowest nothing but the averse, - until
Wisdom shall inform thine Understanding, and upon the
base of the Ultimate triangle arise the smooth point29.
Veil therefore thine eyes, for that thou canst not
master the Aethyr, unless thy Mystery match Its Mystery.
Seal up thy mouth also, for thou canst not master the
voice of the Aethyr, save only by Silence.
And thou shalt give the sign of the Mother, for
BABALON is thy fortress against the iniquity of the
Abyss, for the iniquity of that which bindeth her unto
the Crown,
and barreth her from the C for not until thou art
made one with CHAOS
canst thou begin that last, that most terrible
projection, the three-fold Regimen which alone
constitutes the Great Work.
For Choronzon is as it were the shell or excrement of
these three paths, and therefore is his head raised unto
Dath, and therefore have the Black Brotherhood declared
him to be the child of Wisdom and Understanding, who is
but the bastard of the Svastika. And this is that which
is written in the Holy Qabalah, concerning the Whirlpool
and Leviathan, and the Great Stone.
Thus long have I talked with thee in bidding thee
depart, that the memory of the Ae
for hadst thou come back suddenly into thy mortal frame,
thou hadst fallen into madness or death. For the vision
is not such that any may endure it.
But now thy sense is dull, and the shew-stone but a
stone. Therefore awake, and give secretly and apart the
sign of the Mother, and call four times upon the name of
that is the four-fold word that is equal to her
seven-fold word. And then shalt thou purify thyself, and
return into the World.
So I did that which was commanded me, and returned.
December 17,
- 11:30 a.m.
The last three
Aethyrs are so tremendously sublime that comment
is only too likely to mar the effect upon the
reader. They must be read as masterpieces of Art,
and their full magical import apprehended as
such. This remark, indeed applies to the whole
series, though not so formidably. The proper way
is first to study the book in detail, so as to
assimilate perfectly its intellectual content,
and then to read it (so to say) ceremonially.
♌♎♏ The Sun, the Balance, and
the Snake. See text of Aire.
Cf. the doctrine
of the Snake Ananta.
The letters of
Judgment, those that have a final form, מ
כ נ פ צ, all
add to 280.
ל and נ (☉, ♎ and
♏), the Sun, the Balance or plumes of
Maat, and the Snake. Added they make 280.
Note this. If the
Seer had seen this vision truly, he should have
become a Magus right then. The vision following
was really a Guard to the Aethyr.
Beth, an house.
The letter Aleph.
The path of
☿, Beth, which joins and separates Kether
and Binah.
See the Book
of the Sacred Magic of Abramelin the Mage.
666's later
annotation to this: &My own silly
She seeks to
resist Change, which is Life, she refuses the
Formula, &love under will.& Yet
Μ&A&R&I
&E (Greek) = 156.
She is Binah,
ruled by the path of Beth.
Meaning, to
construct a true Tree, of which Dath should be
the summit. This is in fact the great error of
the rationalists - both in science, like Bchner,
and in religion, like Buddha. Knowledge is not,
and cannot be, the crown of Consciousness, if
only because the Logic beyond the Abyss convicts
it of essential self contradiction. Dath, as seen
by the Magister Templi, is so far from being the
opposite of Ignorance that it is actually a
demonstration that the Intellect is incapable of
incapacity to apprehend --- the absence of any
steady truth. (א = {Air}, the
volatile). Beth is the assertion of false
relations, even in the illusion of the dyad.
(ב = ☿) And Gimel is the clouding
of aspiration by the marsh miasma of desire
(ג = ☾). Such are the evil and
averse counterparts of the three highest
faculties of the Soul: Aleph, the inspiration of
Beth, the virtue of
Truthfulness without
Gimel, the direct link of the human with the
divine Consciousness.
The Seer was
being warned all the time that he was seeing only
Atu I. This is
Mayan, the Great Magician, he who has created the
Dyad (ב = 2) and thus made possible the
conception of Opposition, and hence of
&Evil&. He is to be distinguished from
Chokma, the creative Mercury who transmits the
Essence of Kether as a Logos, that Kether may
become intelligible to Himself through Binah.
This lower Mercury asserts the Dyad as Reality,
and denies alike Kether and the Ain. Hence its
issue is in Materialism.
i.e., that the
circle should be profaned. The evil circle is of
three concentric rings. The circle demands the
square (or Cross) to fulfill it.
Curiously, for
his retirement in New Hampshire (An XII) the Seer
bought an axe, knife, and a saw for his magical
weapons. He had completely forgotten this
passage. P.S. (☉ in ♌, ☾ in
♋) (An XII) I have just realized (after
some days woodcarving) that the use of a knife is
to fashion shapeless things into Beauty. This is
then the task of a Magus which, in my then Grade,
I could not see. Now, O Lord, let me behold the
true Vision of the Magus as he is.
42 = 2 x 21. 21 =
היהא, God-name
of K thus 42 asserts the Dyad as against
the Monad, and denies Love. 42 = א
מ א, the Mother unfertilized,
the Virgin-on-principle -- the feminine
equivalent of the Black Brothers.
תיליל
= 480 = ת י ע = Malkuth,
of the 42-fold name in Yetzirah. Also 480
=ת ו ע ד,
Dath, in the Plural. Lilith is etymologically
&The Woman of Night&; but is diversely
described by different authorities. To one she
is, &from the head to the navel, a woman ---
from the navel to the feet of her, a man&.
To another, &lovely shape that concealeth a
black monkey, even as a figure that draweth with
her hands small images of men down into
hell& (Liber Ararita II, 10). She is
also the &first wife of Adam& i.e. the
succubus who visits in their sleep those boys and
men who have not previously purified themselves
by Right Coitus. The whole world of demons was in
fact created (according to Rabbinical tradition)
by the nocturnal pollutions of Adam. This is a
true parable. For every sexual act produces its
natural effect on all planes. All forms of
spiritual experience may be obtained in this
manner, according to the Magical Knowledge and
Skill of the Operator. And there is always a
Child begotten on some plane or other, as the
conditions of the experiment decide. (Note. ---
A.C. added the following here in his copy of Eqx.
I, No. 5. &Doris Gomez who came just before
Jeanne Foster. It's a perfect description of her
normal nature. Add Laura Brown for the sake of
completeness. What about Alostrael?&)
The Seer was
physically overwhelmed by the horror of this
experience. It may seem surprising that such
phenomena should occur above the Abyss. But this
Lilith is a positive form created by the M
whereas, Choronzon is the breaking-up of all
coherence. Here also is a mystery of mysteries.
Lilith is truly Babalon, as imagined by this
energy of Mayan.
Christian, obsessed by Mayan, sees Love in this
obscene form. It is all a matter of the
point-of-view.
This is the Sigil
of Binah in one of Her forms. It instantly
destroys the illusion of Lilith, who now appears
in her tru a corporeal
imagine of BABALON, recalling the maiden of the
9th Aethyr. (Note. --- in A.C.'s Eqx.
here to the para. beginning &I have seen
some picture& he notes in the margin
&Hilarion, Jeanne Robert Foster&. ---
To the para. beginning &then the disk of the
sun&, he notes &Alice Ethel
Coomaraswamy. She has Libra rising and Sol in
Scorpio and she is mad about green.& --- To
the para. beginning &There is another
girl&, he notes &Helen Westley? - or
Myriam Deroxe.&)
It would be
improper in this place to comment upon these
prophecies. The student may seek enlightenment in
&The Urn&.
An XII. Now I
understand. It's the fashioning I missed. All my
life I have been cutting to destroy. Now I'll cut
to create.
All this passage
is typical of the supernal Logic.
The path of Beth.
The mystery of
CHAOS is beyond the comprehension of any but
Masters of the Temple. One can only hint that
this is at once the Formula of the Feminine
Trinity and of the All-Father.
The student is
advised to study these matters in the original
documents.
סועכ