Suitably inspired, Roddie then had another vision of being thirteen women caressed simultaneously. Impressed that Roddie was highly “turned on,” “tuned in,” and ready for magick, Crowley set to work on an astral “working” with her.
For those who don’t know, the astrum, or star, is the name given in magic, as defined by Éliphas Lévi, for the medium through which true will expresses itself, perceived as “material” but of a completely different quality from normal assumptions of matter. To enter the astral plane is to transfer consciousness to a medium of this nature, where ideas appear primarily as images or symbols indicated by identifiable “beings.” There seems to be a connection, or possibly more than that, between this magical conception and that of psychologist Carl Jung’s idea of the “unconscious” wherein, Jung surmised, exist archetypes (proto-forms), images, and symbols that encapsulate accreted wisdom absorbed from thousands of years of conscious human experience.
The astral traveler, in brief, imagines themselves as their own figure projected before them, before willing a process of transference of consciousness from the Earth plane on which we live to this figure. Typically this figure may now rise as a conscious projection, conveying observation as, say, an astronaut radioing to base from outer space; though in this case, the implication is of a journey through “inner space.” Incidents within the protracted working that began on January 14 offer the visual idea of participants rising through the ceiling up into the night sky above Manhattan, then perhaps entering through a floor into a corridor with doors bearing symbols. Through such a door the astral body enters a scene.
The first scene Roddie entered upon is worth recording as much for its picturesque charm as anything else.
AMALANTRAH
She saw a dark farmhouse amid trees and fields. To the sound of a stream’s gurgling water, a dark yoni appeared where a house stood. Such a sudden transposition is typical of astral vision. Crowley asks where the message will come from; this she hears even though imaginatively she is “elsewhere.” Roddie sees armed soldiers lounging about, then an enthroned king resembling James T. Shotwell.*160 Roddie sees him not as an ordinary king but as an archetypal “king of the world”; this would have appealed to Crowley, because the aim of Thelema was to initiate “kings”; that is, self-mastered beings. Having seen also an egg in which turned a fleshlike substance that “might become something,” Roddie asked the king’s name. The word Ham appeared between an egg and the soldiers. Crowley thought of Noah’s curse of Ham, the race derived from Ham’s son Canaan, and the three other “Hamitic” races derived from Ham’s sons. There speaks Crowley the biblical scholar and Qabalist, but maybe it was simply Roddie’s word association: a prosaic “ham and eggs.”
A wizard, old with a gray beard in a long black gown, infinitely wise, linked his arm with the king. Such a figure is a classic Jungian archetype of wisdom; Jung himself had envisioned such a one. The king and wizard went to a cave. When Therion advised Roddie to follow them, she found them playing with a revolver. Finding the wizard under a canopy at a mountainside, she introduced herself with “shyness and awe”: “I am Eve.” To communicate, the wizard indicated that she must build a fire, which he demonstrated (this sounds like a Crowleyan explanation of “energized enthusiasm”). The building, like a ritual, involved the idea of a baby. Then “a most beautiful lion was standing by the fire.” Smiling, the wizard said, “Child.” She saw a naked boy of five or six dancing playfully in the woods. Therion asked what he would be like dressed. She said clothes were ill-fitting and uncomfortable, which Crowley took to be the formula of the “Old Aeon,” with the boy as “Horus,” king of the “new Aeon.” Roddie reckoned tiger skins would be appropriate dress for him. The old man put his arm round Roddie’s shoulder and said, “It’s all in the egg.” That pricked Crowley’s attention, because an astral working of 1911 with Soror Virakam (Mary d’Este, or Desti Sturges) led to an encounter with wizard “Ab-ul Diz,” who indicated that Crowley and his assistant needed to find an egg beneath a palm tree.5
According to Liber 729, The Amalantrah Working, at 3:00 a.m. on Sunday, January 20, Roddie asked the wizard for a message. A large A appeared; an eagle flew through it and on through woods and close to the ground of meadows. When the eagle disappeared she saw “a red Indian was running like the wind”: “Very beautiful as a picture.”
At 4:00 p.m. Therion and Roddie entered the astral plane together. She was draped in a diaphanous yellow green gown, he in a brilliant gown with gold braid, holding a scepter in one hand, a ring in the other. They went through the ceiling about 900 feet into the air, where they looked up and saw an eye in the clouds. The eye was by a platformlike building in which were many doors bearing signs, including the swastika. They approached a distant door at the end of a corridor where stood a dwarf on the right and a girl on the left. She asked the dwarf where the door led and saw a blazing column. Asking the girl, she received the reply, “Heaven,” which Crowley took to mean where they wanted to go. In another corridor light came from a distant door. There were sheep just inside this door, and on the ground below it spread out a “beautiful pastoral scene and some villages.” A beautiful lady came when they dropped down to it, blond, dressed in white. Roddie asked her name: “Eve.” That seemed wrong. Where should they go? “France.” The lady lay on the ground, her arms like fish fins, waving toward a village. A “Greek philosopher” appeared with a staff. Following the lady’s directions, they entered a village called “Pantruel.”*161 Pantruel had a church and a square fountain made of metal with cones spewing water, and afterward, fire. The king of the previous week’s vision appeared with papers, legal deeds and a topographical map of South America. The king’s message was that they see the wizard, whom they found with the child at a stream by the woods. “They both looked a little lonely.” After some quizzing, and initially giving the name “Amalantre,” the wizard finally gave the spelling of his name: “Amalantrah.”†162
This was exciting to Crowley as it added to 729, the cube of 9, as did also the Greek Qabalah of the transliterated Aramaic kēphas, or “stone” (the name given to St. “Peter” in Matthew 16:18). Lévi gave 729 as the number of “the curse of Satan” in relation to the bisexual “Baphomet” Lévi described in his Dogme et Rituel de la Haute Magie (1855), reflected in the “Devil” tarot trump. Asked to symbolize his name, Roddie saw a section of an octagonal column, which Crowley related to the figure eight and a phallus. When Roddie asked who she was, the wizard said, “part of the Tao.” Once he said, “Go”; later he said, “Egypt.”*163
Crowley wasn’t going to miss the opportunity to find the true spelling of “Baphomet”—his title as O.T.O. British head, and the name given to an idol the medieval Templars allegedly worshipped. Crowley wished to equate the eight “siddhis” of the Magus to a supposed eight original letters of the name. In Hebrew, Crowley’s interlocutor gave “BafomiTh” (with the Th a single letter tav): seven letters. Thinking to ask of the missing eighth letter, the Hebrew Reish flashed into Crowley’s mind, giving BafomiThR: which added to 729, a number already related to an eightfold column and interpreted by Crowley as a transliteration of the Greek baphē meithra, or baptism of Mithra, the militant sun god, while the letter reish means the “head of a man,” as the idol of Baphomet was said to be. The missing R then stood, in Crowley’s mind, for the missing solar, or phallic, principle in the darkness of the Old Aeon, the sun being the “father” or head of the universe whose creative analog on Earth is in Crowley’s system the phallus. Crowley believed it was given to him, the Magus, to restore the missing or obscured principle, to raise the phallic octagonal, or “fallen temple” of High Masonry, as he understood it.
In Crowley’s associative thinking, all this was suggestive of the “concealed sun,” a symbol for midnight, insofar as to “see the light,” the spiritual light, is equivalent to seeing the sun at midnight, in the spiritual darkness of the world. Crowley already associated the knowledge and conversation of the Holy Guardian
Angel with the “dawning light,” or “augoeides,” the emergence of that which was concealed. The symbolism here goes back to the Neoplatonist assessment of the divine spirit’s relation to the “vehicle,” or person, on Earth.
In Thomas Taylor’s Select Works of Porphyry (1823) regarding the “perception of intelligible natures” according to third-century philosopher Porphyry’s interpretation of Plato, when the body, at death, releases the rational soul, or “sense of ether,” it conjoins with the fire of pure ether, where a purgation occurs, rendering the purified vehicle “augoeides,” or luciform and divine, fit to dwell in the “intelligible world.” On Earth, however, the rational soul, being infused with matter and its desires, is in a falling state, which state is mortal, a desertion of the divine state. The body is not fit for the intelligible world and must be fled from: such is Neoplatonic wisdom.
Crowley was familiar with Blavatsky’s reading of the status of the divine spirit in man. She distinguished between the Neoplatonist position—where a luciform augoeides is not entrapped but instead sheds its radiance on the aspiring inner man from outside the phenomenal universe, calling man forth to his intelligible source—and the belief of Christian Qabalists, akin to radical gnosis, that the spirit was catastrophically detached from the pleroma, imprisoned in the “astral capsule” of earthly life, such being the meaning of the “fall of man.” Clearly, Crowley accepted the pagan Neoplatonist position, allowing access to the light of the higher being through invocation or mystical theurgy.
Having said “goodbye” to Amalantrah, Roddie and Therion bathed in the pool of a spring, sank through its bottom, and emerged “directly over Manhattan” and back into their bodies. The record states that “much later” Roddie asked for the king’s name and was told “Eosonophon.” The etymology here is interesting.
Eos was Greek goddess of dawn, a Titaness (Crowley had had a dream of Hilarion as a Titaness), sister of Selene (moon) and Helios (sun). Her son was called Eosphoros—that is, the “Morning Star” or dawn bringer. In Babylonian mythology the morning star is the eightfold star, symbol of Ishtar, divine mother. The dawn conception may then correspond to augoeides, luciform or luminous body, where the Greek eidos means “form” or “type” and augos means “morning light,” root of augere, the Latin verb “to increase”: hence Augustus the great, the name Octavian gave to him-self and to the eighth month, when the sun is in the lion. “Eosonophon” then suggests the voice of dawn from phōnē, meaning “voice”; that is, the “higher Genius,” or “daimon.” We are of course familiar with the Saxon Eostre: goddess of dawn, origin of our word Easter, the raising of the light.
It seems the genius of this vision shared Crowley’s peculiar sense of humor, for when asked the name of the boy, Roddie was given “Augustus Fioncharo.” August we now recognize; fion is French for “arsehole,” while the name “Charo” is derived from the Italian chiari, which means “bright” or “luminous”! We are in “Eye of Hoor” territory again. Incidentally, Crowley believed that Satan was originally simply another word for the sun of our system—a Lucifer or light-bringer when at its greatest intensity, which state was eventually perceived as negative, on account of a conflict of solar priests, and the facts of Egyptian geography, where the “burning sun” in the south was called “Seth,” later identified with the Greek Typhon, and considered a “Devil” of storms. This idea is consistent with the first appearance of the “Satan” or “Adversary” in the biblical Job, where as prosecuting counsel, the Satan points the finger of perilous accusation at the accused, and one may think of the darts of the withering sun, directed at burning away defenses by light of truth.
Astral interviewing of Amalantrah continued on Sunday, January 27. Roddie met a tall Moor called Athanan in an oasis called Oseika near Marrakesh. From him she learned her name in his language was Ahita, which had the value of 317; this Crowley found resonated with the Hebrew for “olive” and Noah’s ark, and with his own spelling of the Hebrew Chiva, as Achiha, for “Beast.” Roddie became “Achitha” or “Ahitha” for further communications.
Crowley asked the wizard a series of down-to-earth questions about Therion’s formal relations with the Theosophical Society. He learned that Annie Besant was not close to death; that he ought to approach prominent TS member Carl Henrik Bjerregaard (1845–1922), chief librarian at the Astor Library’s reading room.*164 It was also recommended that he contact someone called “Elsie Gray Parker,” allegedly a friend of Aimée Gouraud, living in a private house on or near Fifth Avenue. Crowley made assiduous efforts with spiritist Bert Reece to locate the “woman,” but she was never found, if she ever existed on the plane of Earth. Amalantrah also proved unreliable as to the “rich man of the west,” who would pour his gold on Crowley according to The Book of the Law. The wizard said that he was an Austrian who would turn up that year. If he did somewhere, Crowley missed him, but then, Crowley felt that he had made mistakes with his magick in 1918.
Amalantrah was pumped for more information on February 3. They were to go to Egypt for the key, a small golden key, possibly to be found in the egg when broken. The name “Arctaeon” was important: someone who would preach the Law. Crowley applied it to C. S. Jones when Jones turned up at West 19th Street in March.
What was the function of the Monkey Officer? “To operate through the abstract law of Obsession.” Was Roddie a Scarlet Woman? Yes. Were they working in the right way? No, they were not energetic or focused enough. Did Therion fall down on solve, or coagula? The latter. He should be sterner and more comprehensive.
On February 7, a sexual rite with Walter and Anna aimed at physical strength; the Amalantrah Working was exhausting. Roddie complained through the wizard of Crowley’s insensitivity to her feelings and real motives: “Later, as we talk along, T[herion] attacks me again for having caressed him in the night. I had done this in order to forget the differences of points of view that we seemed to have. His remarks here take my breath away for he seemed to be so far from understanding the whole underlying truth.”6 The wizard laughed and said she ought not trouble Therion or she’d get her fingers burned; she needed not to care about his ways and moods.
One of the curiosities of the astral workings was not only that the seer, without occult expertise, found means to convey Hebrew letters and symbols to Crowley but also how Roddie could grasp answers from Amalantrah even when the question was put by Therion as an acronym, namely, “IGMWF?”—“Shall I get my work filmed?”—to which Amalantrah replied through Roddie, “Yes that is the way.”
“Does Dorothy Troxel play any great part in the work in the near future?” “Yes.” “Has Faith Baldwin any part in the work?”*165 “No.” “Will Miss L be of use?”—probably Elsa Lincke, who joined the next session. “I see a moon, a full moon and an obelisk. Yes.” “A pretty blond woman in a beautiful blouse comes in to eat at the table. I can see her as a bride of some future date. I think of Jeanne Foster.”*166 Therion asked, “Will Ricker help?”†167
The February 11 working duly included Mrs. Elsa Lincke, whom Amalantrah called Barzedon, whose symbol was the toad, and from whom much was to be learned.‡168
“Would the wizard be pleased to take B[arzedon] on the astral plane now?” “Yes.”
Dorothy Troxel joined the operation on Sunday, February 24. “Give me the true magical name of DT [Troxel]” “Wesrun.”§169 “Are there any definite orders for the work?” This and Therion’s subsequent question were linked to a chain of events that may strike us as a unique case of synchronicity nearly a century later.
ENTER SAMUEL AIWAZ JACOBS
Ahitha answered, “I see T[herion] in his office, also with a flower in his coat. He is rather happy. He is at his desk. There are many letters. One to DT[roxel]. I also see two books which were mailed. . . . 9:30 p.m. T[herion] asks for A[malantrah] to spell Therion which he does. [ThiriAan].”8 The gematria of Amalantrah’s spelling meant nothing to Crowley. Shortly, Crowley lost his temper and all communications ceased. The working resumed lat
er, but it proved useless.
On the Monday morning, Crowley went to his office at 1123 Broadway to check over his mail. A coal famine prompted an order that offices should not be heated on Mondays, so a chilled Crowley left early. The next day he returned to find a letter picked up the previous day by Viereck and then left for Crowley to deal with. The letter, which answered Crowley’s question put to Amalantrah on the Sunday, must have been posted about the same time the question was put to the discarnate wizard.
BETH NAHARIN (MESOPOTAMIA)
2-24-18
Nahon Elias Palak
Editor and Publisher
210 Getty Avenue
Patterson, New Jersey
George Sylvester Viereck Esq.
Editor
The International
1123 Broadway
New York City
My dear Bokh. Viereck!
I miss your plays in the Magazine: I mean those written by yourself, and yet no other publication furnishes anything half as good to feed my soul with—and I am not capricious a bit or an Idiot either, as there will be many others who will agree with me along these points as true:
(1) That The Philistine, The Fra, The Phoenix were the only magazines that furnished food for brain until recently when can be found in The International hardly better stuff than the Pearsons’ does except Bokh. Frank Harris’ own stuff. . . .
Please inform your readers that I, Shmuel bar Aiwaz bie Yackou de Sherabad, have counted the number of the Beast, and it is the number of a man.
What Samuel Aiwaz Jacobs thought he was responding to was the last line of Crowley’s series The Revival of Magick on page 332 of November’s International.
Do you wish to find Him?
Aleister Crowley in America Page 56
