The Mechanics of Creation:

 The Mechanics of Creation:

24. DE VOLUPTATE POENARUM. (On the Joy of Sorrows)

Go forth, o my Son, o Son of the Sun, rejoicing in thy Strength, as a Warrior, as a Bridegroom, to take thy Pleasure upon the Earth, and in every Palace of the Mind, moving ever from the crass to the subtle, from the coarse to the fine. Conquer every Repulsion in thy self, subdue every Aversion. Assimilate all Poison, for therein only is there Profit. Seek constantly therefore to know what is painful and to cleave thereunto, for by Pain cometh true Pleasure. Those who avoid Pain physical or mental remain little Men, and there is no Virtue in them. Yet be thou ware lest thou fall into the Heresy which maketh Pain, and Self-sacrifice as it were Bribes to corrupt God, to secure some future Pleasure in an imagined After-life. Nay, also of the other Part, fear not to destroy thy Complexes, thinking dreadfully thereby to lose the Power of creating Joy by their Distinction.

Yet in each Marriage be thou bold to affirm the spiritual Ardour of the Orgasm, fixing it in some Talisman, whether it be Art, or Magick, or Theurgy.

Liber Aleph: Aleister Crowley-

The source of creation is nothingness, the light issuing forth from the negative veil is revealed by its counterpart Naught without whom the light would remain as she is. Nothing is related to death as it is that to which we return. The ontology of the god of light Phanes, being born from the womb of Night too symbolizes this idea. Hecate the lunar goddess of witchcraft was by the ancient Greek theologians seen as an aspect of Isis, and to them she was the goddess of death as well as fertility. This goddess was for a long time worshipped as the highest, even for the ancient Egyptians the counterpart of the Sun represented the divine feminine in her highest form. Today we worship Nuit who is both everything and nothing but not the self, that perhaps in her character has the goddess reached perfection.

The goddess was worshipped as a goddess of fertility by the rite of human sacrifice, more specifically the sacrifice of a male child. There is a reason for this owing to the magickal thinking of primitive people, and the difficulty of child birth having been a mortal ordeal for both the mother and her child. Suppose then, that children represented in the minds of these people the future prosperity of the tribe, of course, as they ensured the perpetuation of the race, that a new life was most valuable, not only to them but certainly to the goddess as well. This reasoning sets the stage for the murder of a mother and her child by a vengeful goddess who had not yet been appeased at childbirth, who Thus, out of necessity the tradition of sacrifice was created, perhaps reasoning, that it is better to lose one or a few and prevent the death of many or all unborn children and mothers, (as a demon she is Lilith, who was turned into a monster by the Jews inferentially owing to their patriarchal take on religion and their degradation of women in general, even impotence accordingly attributed to her stealing the man's semen). I am certain that human sacrifice didn’t work to appease any demons or goddesses, of course not, this superstition did nothing to help the outcome, they merely became more aware and vigilant owing to their ponderings and this influenced their preparation for the ordeal, also, it is simply natural to bear more children with every passing generation, thus an increase in numbers and a more prosperous harvest must follow. But the mythic significance of this savagery still lingers, and we have since then associated creativity with death and not with life, but as a gift emanating from the divine.

Now then for ecstasy, peering into the cellar of the collective mind one turns back inspired from what he has uncovered with a compulsion to reveal it. But what is this thing, how does ecstasy enable within the seeker new insights that affect creativity and what makes it a source of such inspired creation? It is certainly a death, and a death means a re-transfiguration, a reincarnation if you will, a position from where the limits of his previous perception have been transgressed owing to the experience and the imprint has been left upon his soul. One may need to get psychoanalytic in order to understand the relationship between the senses and the ego better, however, to speculate that an overstimulation of the senses have a tendency to bring to the surface certain parts locked away as part of the shadow, causing an increase in the number of elements inquired into when questioning the nature of Being, may just be, a reasonable hypothesis. This type of thing, when it occurs due to extreme trauma, is in many cases unresolvable and sees the subject drift in and out of normalcy until he or she is finally overwhelmed by the consequences of the initial sensory overload, as not having been capable of assimilation through understanding. In other words, an ecstatic experience, likened to a death, leaves one confused and causes one to ask questions about the nature of reality and existence, that prior to the experience the seeker was blind to. This questioning is the result of a new perception that must be integrated, and one outlet for this integration is creating, whether through art or other means, the creative pursuit serves to put the puzzle pieces together and make sense of this new life the magician is born into.

Ecstasy is referred to in the vignette as an orgasm, which of course, with the symbol’s sexual connotation birth and creativity are clear progressions, as symbolically sympathetic. But as mentioned earlier in this essay, so is death owing to the connotation of no-thing becoming some-thing or everything and the mythical relationship this holds to Diana and Hecate. Diana is Isis to the Egyptians and we find her in the formula of I.A.O. as representing life, and Apophis as the ecstasy which leads to death symbolized in Osiris. It is during putrefaction that the magician moves into assimilating those things that Apophis has shown him. Again, we may recall the unfortunate trauma victim, who paralyzed in death fruitlessly awaits a resurrection that may only lead to damnation. Magick is the means by which the self is reconstituted from the dissolving of the ego that results from ecstatic experience, but not necessarily for psychic trauma, as in the case of magick, the ecstasy and the pain are always received in a controlled manner, lessening the shock upon the subject's faculties. whereas for the trauma, he or she is entirely unprepared. Apophis is sometimes associated with purification, such as in the Fire Opal, which is a ritual given to initiates of the A.’.A.’. and symbolizes in a sense confronting the complexes, that when destroyed, one is presented with a fuller view of the world incorporating parts that were prior to this purifying obscured to the magician’s sight. Therefore, ecstasy brings to light the complexes within this experience, and the super ego abdicates as it is overwhelmed, as a result of the lesser parts of the ego and the id having taken control of the self, making the conscious mind acutely aware of these parts of the psyche that were locked away, many out of necessity.

Here we see that the sacrifice written of at the start of this essay is now symbolic of archetypal forces that shape the magician’s consciousness and ego. That the one sacrificed is the magician and that it is a willing self-sacrifice that unlocks the deeper mysteries of our tradition. Anyone who hasn’t experience the formula of I.A.O. remains blind to its significance and character and such a person is usually easily identified by their lack of insight. That it is not something that can be gleaned by erudite means, but must be experienced for oneself. Although in no way glamorous there is still danger in the reward obtained by way of suffering, as it may lead to glorifying the act of self-sacrifice. This formula keeps repeating itself throughout as it is the means by which one’s perceptual circumference is increased, and as pertaining to these major shifts, suffering as a means to attainment is often glorified, even seen as holy. If this is taken to an extreme a magician has fallen into the trap which Crowley warns about, of course, the greater the suffering the greater the reward, but such a self-sacrificial attitude to the work will not move the work forward, rather, it is the motivation that comes from realizing that life is temporal and that our time here is short which may lead to a deeper appreciation for the ecstasy of living, appreciating the experience of now—finding meaning in the joy of being alive even the suffering, instead of chasing the thrill of dying for some imagined future glory, or believing it to be a virtue.

Since being alive is ecstasy also, it stands to reason that similar effects shouldn’t be achieved by being present. To illustrate this point, psychoanalysis has shown that at every moment of being confronted with the semiotic there occurs a type of sublimation of the ego, a small death, from where reality is reconstituted upon the foundation of meaning. This meaning is constantly shifting as one’s relationship to the symbolic order is constantly changing. Hence there is a constant re-emergence of the ego, a recalibration of the self, owing to its relationship to the stimulus it is confronted with. The reason for the ego’s sublimation, is that as soon as one is confronted with a sign the mind starts identifying it and this is done by establishing a relationship between it and all the signs it forms a relationship with, since the ego is entirely reliant on the world as a reflection thereof, at this point of identification the relationship is negated and with this negation so is the ego. This theory shows that life is ecstatic in the magickal sense and that the fluidity of meaning and the ego’s inescapable reliance on such for navigating its place through the world, is in perfect harmony with the formula of I.A.O..

Although, this is to be taken into consideration there is pain in life, and it may be that the painful aspects of living are the one’s from which we see the most of ourselves. It is from pain that the self is revealed in its clearest form, and when we find ourselves under such conditions, Crowley says not to shy away from them and to hold onto the pain. Of course, this is pointed out in the vignette as the more we assimilate the greater the reward. The reward here are the insights we gain into Nature and Being, that when such suffering is experienced, the shadow rises to the occasion as a comfort and the complexes are seen in a clear light. Hence, the more we experience under the pressure of ecstasy, the more we are able to comprehend and the greater the force we may fix to our talismans. If these experiences force us to look closer at existence and to ask questions we have never considered as having been beyond our peripheral, then certainly, the creative expression of these insights would be of equal character.