The Temple of Set II

by Michael A Aquino

  foveal, macular, and peripheral vision.

  The conclusion to be drawn from all this is that the “boundary” of each human being does not end with the skin.

  Each individual possesses an unseen “personal field” - or rather variety of situational fields - which constitutes his or

  her true “boundary”. The magician who succeeds in controlling or altering another individual’s

  “personal field” thus controls or alters that person just as assuredly as though he were able to

  control his conscious personality.

  - 382 -

  As Dr. Becker’s bete noir was the high level of electro-magnetic activity in contemporary Western civilization

  [see my “From Salamander Bones to the Seven Towers of Satan”, Runes 5/85], Hall’s is the contemporary city,

  which he views as an absolute disaster for human spatial psychology. The more you jam people together, the more

  psychotic and antagonistic their behavior will become, due to intrusions within and disruptions of their personal

  fields. When high-density is disguised by sensory screens and barriers (such as apartment living), people become

  lethargic and stupid. The civilization of man has significantly muffled his FD reaction, enabling him to tolerate

  others within his FD radius. But if he is made fearful of others, the FD instinct can suddenly reassert itself with

  explosive force, resulting in the sheer savagery of inner-city crime and rioting unknown in more open environments.

  Hall concludes:

  Man and his extensions constitute one interrelated system. It is a mistake of the greatest magnitude to

  act as though man were one thing and his house or his cities, his technology or his language were something

  else. Because of the interrelationship between man and his extensions, it behooves us to pay much more

  attention to what kinds of extensions we create, not only for ourselves but for others for whom they may be

  ill-suited. The relationship of man to his extensions is simply a continuation and a specialized form of the

  relationship of organisms in general to their environment. However, when an organ or process becomes

  extended, evolution speeds up at such a rate that it is possible for the extension to take over. This is what we

  see in our cities and in automation. This is what Norbert Wiener was talking about when he foresaw dangers

  in the computer, a specialized extension of man’s brain. 138 Because extensions are numb - and often dumb

  as well - it is necessary to build feedback/research into them so that we can know what is happening,

  particularly in regard to extensions that mold or substitute for the natural environment.

  138 [M.A.A. comments:] God & Golem, Inc.: A Comment on Certain Points where Cybernetics Impinges on Religion by Norbert

  Wiener. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1964. Wiener, who coined the term “cybernetics” in 1948, later went on to consider the ultimate

  implications of artificial intelligence. A series of his lectures was consolidated into this 100-page volume, which won the National

  Book Award. The argument is one of ethics rather than of technology.

  - 383 -

  A64: Perfect Symmetry

  Book Review:

  Perfect Symmetry: The Search for the Beginning of Time

  by Heinz R. Pagels (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1985)

  - reviewed by Michael A. Aquino

  Runes #III-5, September 1985

  Order of the Trapezoid

  I suppose this could be considered one of those “Oh, geez, he’s on another of those cosmic/theoretical trips”

  book reviews, but honestly it didn’t start out that way. Having for some years been annoyed with what I can only

  term the idiotic insolence of the “big bang” theory [such insolence consisting of (a) the assumption that a primal

  ylem/firecracker “just happened to exist” and (b) the assumption that a cosmic match “just happened to be around

  to light its fuse”], I searched and searched for a cosmology which wouldn’t insult my intelligence and finally [in

  1973] found it in Dr. Oskar Klein’s infinite-time/cyclical theory of Universal oscillation. I discussed this theory in

  “Genesis II” ( Cloven Hoof #IV-7 & Appendix #57 of The Church of Satan) and went on to other matters. [Klein’s

  theory is expounded in its elegance and simplicity in Worlds-Antiworlds: Antimatter in Cosmology by Hannes

  Alfven. San Francisco: W.H. Freeman & Co., 1966.]

  Every theory has to have a hat-rack on which to hang its hat. Einstein assumed the velocity of light to be an

  absolute constant, and upon this hat-rack he proceeded to hang the rest of his relativity ideas. If you accept that hat-

  rack as a “given”, then Einstein’s conclusions drawn therefrom interrelate very nicely.

  Similarly, if you accept the literal truth of the Judaic/Christian Bible as your hat-rack, then it is possible to

  derive a large body of sub-conclusions from it which all interrelate very nicely.

  Similarly, if you accept an ylem/firecracker & cosmic match as your hat-rack, then the “big bang” theory trots

  along after it like a good doggie.

  In short, if you can get someone to buy your axiom, then you’re home free, ’cause then it’s just a question of

  filling in the nooks & crannies. Einstein was well aware of this from the success of his relativity road-show, so

  decided to go for the sweepstakes: the Grand Axiom which, if he could sell, would enable him to preside over the

  physical re-definition of the universe. This was his celebrated “unified-field theory”. When he ran this baby up the

  flagpole in 1953, however, it wasn’t saluted. To this day the UFT floats in suspended animation, like Howard

  Hughes’ “Spruce Goose”, while onlookers try to decide whether to (a) acclaim it, (b) decry it, or (c) just ignore it.

  In the case of Klein’s theory, the hat-rack was the principle (or neter) of symmetry. In its simplest sense this

  principle implies that nothing in the natural universe exists without a “mirror image” co-existing. Statement of this

  principle was not original to Klein; it was crucial to Egyptian cosmology, was [re]discovered with toots & whistles by

  Newton, and even acquired occult credentials as Aleister Crowley’s “0=2” equation.

  The tricky thing about symmetry is that the “positive” and “negative” sides of a given substance will not

  necessarily appear the same. If you saw “0” suddenly “split” into a “+6” and a “-6”, it would be pretty easy to put the

  “+6” and the “-6” on opposite sides of a symmetrical relationship. But suppose you walked into a universe consisting

  of 3,1,1,4,2. You’d have to mess around awhile before coming up with 3x2=4+1+1 ... or 6=6. Anyone who’s survived

  high school chemistry remembers the sheer terror of being presented with one side of a chemical equation, and one

  changed part of the other side, and being required to figure out the rest in configurations that were not molecular

  insanity.

  If you expand your universe beyond matter and energy - for example into time and mind - symmetry becomes

  almost impossible to trace. Where is the “negative Michael Aquino”? Is it some weird Doppelgänger, with whom I

  may someday accidentally collide and mutually implode? Far more probably my “opposite half” is a mixture of time,

  mind, matter, and energy which may be scattered among galaxies and diffused over æons of time. So symmetry is

  one of those neteru/Platonic Forms which is visible and even demonstrable as a simple concept, but which quickly

  becomes elusive as it is carried to its ultimate implications.

  An eternally oscillating objective universe i
s symmetrical. A “big bang” universe is not symmetrical, as it

  presupposes the spontaneous appearance of only one side of the equation - a sort of cosmic “horn of plenty” in

  which a whole lot of goodies continue to tumble out of the open end of a conical basket whose other end shrinks into

  a point. To my simple brain this is just so much cat shit.

  So by now you’ve probably deduced why I began to wiggle my nose and wag my tail when I saw a book titled

  Perfect Symmetry on the shelf. Here, it seemed, might be the Cosmic Graal I was questing for. Is it?

  No and yes. The first 3/4 of the book consists of ho-hum chapters in Physics #1A, Astronomy #1A, and Rah Rah

  Einstein, and I began to think I had wasted another $18.95. But then Pagels (Executive Director of the New York

  Academy of Sciences) took his necktie off and got into a discussion of GUTs (Grand Unified Theories) and their

  implications, which is what universal symmetry is all about. There are still big holes in GUTs, the most notorious of

  which is gravity (which to date hasn’t been explained, much less shown as convertible into anything else). And until

  your GUT is complete, you can’t use it as a hat-rack.

  - 384 -

  Perhaps most infuriating to physicists [but not to Setians, who have an appropriate ace up their sleeves] is the

  “Catch-22” of GUTs: that human intelligence, being a component of the Master Law, would by definition be

  inadequate to apprehend it. In this sense, conventional physics ultimately comes around to the same hat-rack as

  religion: that the nature of “God” cannot be apprehended by human minds, hence must be acknowledged and

  obeyed as an act of faith.

  Pagels is not deterred by such petty potholes. For example:

  In 1968, even before GUTs were invented, Andrei Sakharov, a Soviet scientist, realized that if baryon

  number is not conserved, it would explain in part how the matter-antimatter asymmetry we see today could

  have arisen from a state of perfect symmetry. Sakharov also realized that baryonic-number non-

  conservation, while a necessary condition for the creation of matter, was not sufficient. Other conditions

  had to be met.

  The first of these conditions is that the universe has to make more matter than antimatter. In order for

  it to do this, matter and antimatter, which are through-the-looking-glass versions of each other, have to be

  distinguished by some interaction that tells us on which side of the looking-glass the present universe is.

  Experimentalists have actually detected such interactions (they are called time reversal-violating

  interactions), so this condition is met.

  Another condition is that the universe must, during a very early stage of its development when the

  baryon-number-violating processes are most effective, be in a state of non-equilibrium. This means that at

  some time in its early history, the universe must undergo a “phase transition”, a change of its basic state

  which happens so rapidly that the rate of collisions between the quantum particles in the primordial gas

  cannot keep up with it. If such a phase transition occurs, any matter-antimatter asymmetry that gets

  generated during the transition also gets to stay, because once the transition is over, the baryon-number-

  violating processes become less effective and baryon- number conservation is effectively restored. The

  “extra” protons and neutrons, generated out of nothing, are now locked into the universe.

  In summary, a matter-antimatter symmetry could be generated starting from a symmetric state

  provided that (1) baryon number was not conserved, (2) time-reversal-violating interactions exist, (3) the

  universe was once in a non-equilibrium state of extreme expansion. In the standard model neither condition

  #1 nor #3 is met, and hence the origin of visible matter remains a puzzle in this model. However GUTs,

  which go beyond the standard model, can violate baryon-number conservation. This led to a revival of

  interest in explaining the observed matter-antimatter symmetry. By 1978 many theoretical physicists,

  realizing that this old puzzle could now be explained in the context of GUTs, were hard at work calculating

  the symmetry to see if it would agree with observation.

  A few years ago a T-shirt with the slogan “COSMOLOGY TAKES GUTs” enjoyed modest popularity

  among cosmologists. The slogan meant that GUTs could solve the problem of the origin of the matter-

  antimatter symmetry and thus explain the genesis of the visible universe. Yet another meaning of the slogan

  is that many GUTs imply that the neutrinos are not strictly massless and hence could make up the dark

  matter of the cosmos. GUTs might provide the answer to the origin not only of visible matter, but of the

  invisible matter as well.

  This is a good first shot; it is as though a person trying to navigate a room while blindfolded and hopping on one

  foot has decided to stand on both feet. Until he takes off the blindfold [of Einsteinian relativity], however, he’s got a

  few more walls to crash into.

  In subsequent chapters, Pagels goes into what are charmingly called “SUSY GUTs”, or super-symmetry GUTs.

  These are highly theoretical GUTs including complex assumptions concerning gravity, and a quote from this part of

  the book would probably leave you more dazed than the above one, unless you had first warmed up to it by the

  extended discussion in the text:

  Kaluza demonstrated the unification of gravity and electromagnetism by means of his compact 5th

  dimension only by making several restrictive assumptions in solving Einstein’s equations. In 1926 Oskar

  Klein significantly advanced this theory by showing that these restrictive assumptions were completely

  unnecessary. Furthermore Klein calculated the radius of the little circle in the 5th dimension in terms of the

  known quantities, the Planck distance scale, and the electronic charge, and found this radius to be about

  10-30 cm - an extremely small radius ensuring that the 5th dimension is safely out of sight. But in spite of

  its small size, the freedom that fields have in moving around that tiny circle is always present at every point

  in ordinary space, and that freedom is all that is needed to guarantee the existence of the electromagnetic

  field.After the 1930s the Kaluza-Klein idea fell out of favor, and for many years it lay dormant. But recently,

  as physicists searched out every possible avenue for the unification of gravity with other forces, it has again

  sprung to prominence. Today, in contrast to the 1920s, physicists are challenged to do more than unify

  gravity with just electromagnetism - they want to unify gravity with the weak and strong interactions as

  well. This requires even more dimensions, beyond the 5th.

  - 385 -

  Theoretical physicists have generalized the original 5-dimensional theory into an arbitrary number of

  higher dimensions. All the higher dimensions are compact; they are curled up into a tiny multi-dimensional

  space that exists at each point of ordinary space and hence is unobservable. But the freedom of moving

  around these compact, tiny spaces with symmetries more general than the simple symmetry of a circle

  corresponds exactly to the freedom of performing Yang-Mills gauge transformations. Remarkably the local

  gauge symmetries are precisely the symmetries of the compact higher-dimensional space. Because of this

  mathematical fact, all the gauge theories of Yang-Mills fields can be interpreted purely geometrically in

  terms of such higher-dimensional space
s.

  Sadly, this exciting discussion is followed by a rather violent crash into the wall as our noble author endeavors

  to jam the stepsister-foot of the “big bang” into the glass slipper of symmetry theory. Actually he does this in a

  rather cute way. To simplify: If you can say that time “goes to zero” at the moment before the “big bang”, then you’ve

  got an infinitely-contracting variable on that side of the symmetry equation, so you can shrink the other side down

  to an infinite contraction as well. This is kind of shaggy-dog physics, and Pagels - to his credit - concedes as much.

  But on the whole I would say he deserves a round of applause for what is ultimately a courageous charge into

  frontiers that conventional minds fear to approach.

  - 386 -

  A65: Nautical Twilight Zone

  - by Michael A. Aquino VI°, GM.Tr.

  Runes #IV-2, March 1986

  Order of the Trapezoid

  In mid-1984 moviegoers were treated to an unusual science-fiction film entitled The Philadelphia Experiment.

  In that film the destroyer-escort U.S.S. Eldridge vanished from sight at the Philadelphia Navy Yard in October of

  1943 into a sort of time/space-warp - the result of an experiment in electromagnetic-field-generated radar-

  invisibility which accidentally activated dimensional forces beyond those anticipated. Two sailors who jumped

  overboard wound up not in the water, but in 1984! The rest of the story recounted the Navy’s efforts to locate them,

  and to send one of them back through the time/space-warp to shut down the machinery aboard the Eldridge and

  return her to 1943 - albeit with hideous after-effects on the crew, some of whose molecular displacements had

  become entangled with that of the destroyer.

  What most of those who saw the movie do not know is that the story of the “Philadelphia Experiment” is not

  necessarily fictional. For some years it has been a staple side-show in that amusing but rickety collection of

  curiosities, enigmas, and tall-tales that are periodically re-floated in van Däniken-style paperbacks. After you've

  read the first dozen such books, the goggle-eyed astonishment tends to wear thin - and after the second dozen [if

  you're really bored with what else is available on the rack] you can scan accounts of Earthwoman rape by UFO