The Yezidi people of Iraq's Nineveh province have long been accused of being "Devil worshipers." In a sense they are. The Yezidi religion, which is neither an off-shoot of Christianity nor of Islam but a parallel tradition in its own right, teaches that God left the task of creation--and governing the universe--to seven angels, emanations of Himself (a very Qabalistic concept). The leader of these angels, the Angel Most High, is Tawuse Melek, the "Peacock Angel." He rules creation on God's behalf. What gets the Yezidi into trouble with their Muslim neighbors are the parallels between Tawuse Melek and the Islamic Shaytan (aka Iblis). Both are the highest of God's angels, and both--in nearly identical stories--are brought before Adam after his creation and told to bow before him by God. In the version told in the Quran, Shaytan refuses to kneel and asks why a creature of air and fire should bow before one formed of water and clay. For that, he is condemned by Allah, and falls. But in the Yezidi telling, Tawuse Melek refuses because it is lawful to bow before only one being; God himself, and for this he is praised rather than condemned. The Yezidi acknowledge that Iblis and Tawuse Melek are one in the same, but they no not call him "Shaytan" and deny that he is evil. He is Lucifer Unfallen. And here again we come face to face with the magical theme of the mask and the mirror; if you look into the face of the Devil and see only wickedness and sin, that is because you are seeing your own wickedness and sin reflected. As the Buddhists point out, one who is enlightened can find the Buddha nature in anything. The Yezidi understanding of the Angel Most High embraces this. And so, apparently, does the work of Andrew Chumbley, who refers to the Peacock Angel throughout Qutub, and for whom the Angel Most High represents something other than temptation.
We have spent nearly three essays now on Chumbley's own version of why the Angel Most High refused to bow, and it should be clear that his Crooked Path is taking us in a direction different from either the Islamic or Yezidi stories. In all three versions, God orders the Highest Angel to bow before Adam, signifying of course that mankind is his second-in-command, the divine vice-regent of God. The Muslim Angel refuses out of wounded pride, the Yezidi Angel refuses out of love for God. Chumbley's Angel refuses because he knows a secret even the One God doesn't; Man has the capacity to rise higher than the One himself. He is not God's subordinate...God is man's subordinate.
And now the final veil is lifted from this fable, and reveals the deepest truth of all.
...from the Adept's point of view, these believers have counted down to "One" and forgotten to go all the way to "Zero." They have forgotten the Buddhist exhortation "if on the road to Enlightenment you meet the Buddha, kill the Buddha." This applies to Allah and Yahweh too...
Nearly all men--one could comfortably say 99%--are mainly atheists. Even the most pious Christian, Muslim, or Jew disbelieves in far more gods that he believes in. The Muslim or Christian denies a million gods; the 'total' atheist denies just one more god than them. But all will agree that mankind has invented countless deities throughout history to satisfy his needs. The only difference between the believer and the atheist is that the former have convinced themselves that of countless false gods, only the one they believe in is true. The believer is an atheist 99 times out of a hundred. From Chumbley's point of view, indeed from the Adept's point of view, these believers have counted down to "One" and forgotten to go all the way to "Zero." They have forgotten the Buddhist exhortation "if on the road to Enlightenment you meet the Buddha, kill the Buddha." This applies to Allah and Yahweh too.
Now, this is not to say that there isn't a "God," an ultimate reality, out there, but in the words of the Egyptian Sufi saint Dhu'l Nun, "God is the Opposite of anything you can imagine." The parade of gods marched out by organized religions are all of human manufacture, and any God the priests, imams, or rabbis can tell you about is not really God at all; because the divine is ineffable. God cannot be communicated by others. God can only be experienced directly. And by "God" we don't mean his false anthropomorphic face, "the One that men have named falsely," but the Qabalitsic Zero.
Magical power radiates from the center, and to find it, the Adept must seek the center first.
Aleister Crowley, in his Eight Lectures on Yoga, asks us to consider what the Buddha, Moses, Jesus, and Mohammad all had in common. The answer is surprisingly simple. All of them went alone into the wilderness for a period of isolation, mediation, fasting, and concentration. All of them rid themselves of distractions. All of them became emptied. All of them reached "Zero." After their withdrawal from the world they return to it different, changed by their contact with the highest levels of reality. Because for knowledge to flow in, an empty space must first be made. Magical power radiates from the center, and to find it, the Adept must seek the center first. He 'concentrates.' He reaches the point or Qutub that exists yet has no dimension or form. The point that is "without form and void."
Which brings us at last to our final destination: Genesis 1:1-2, with a brief detour first through Job.
In the Book of Job, Yahweh unashamedly launches into an extended rant about just how wonderful he is, and produces Leviathan as "Exhibit A" of his ultimate badassness...
Many of the myths in the Old Testament echo even earlier stories from Mesopotamia. The story of the ark and the flood, for example, was well known in Mesopotamia and India before Noah took it over; it is even mentioned in Gilgamesh, which precedes Genesis by many centuries. Gilgamesh also contains an earlier version of the Garden of Eden, with a man created from the dust and a woman who tempts him. Once again he accepts food from her, covers up his nakedness, and is exiled. Gilgamesh even has a snake that cheats mankind of immortality. But one of the most interesting echoes of older mythology is found in Job, and involves another serpent. And for this tale, "we are going to need a bigger boat."
We are talking about the titanic sea serpent Leviathan. In the Book of Job, Yahweh unashamedly launches into an extended rant about just how wonderful he is, and produces Leviathan as "Exhibit A" of his ultimate badassness;
"Can you pull in the Leviathan with a fishhook or tie down his tongue with a rope? Can you put a cord through his nose or pierce his jaw with a hook? Will he keep begging you for mercy? Will he speak to you with gentle words? Will he make an agreement with you for you to take him as your slave for life? Can you make a pet of him like a bird or put him on a leash for your girls?" (Job 41)
...aside from the comical imagery of God leading his pet dragon around on a leash to impress girls, we might well be asking ourselves why exactly we are expected to be impressed with this feat...
Basically, the Lord God is pleased with himself for having made Leviathan his bitch. Now aside from the comical imagery of God leading his pet dragon around on a leash to impress girls, we might well be asking ourselves why exactly we are expected to be impressed with this feat. After all, in Psalm 104 we are told God made all things, including Leviathan. Are we really supposed to praise God for beating up on something he himself created? It's a bit like a father swaggering around patting himself on the back for smacking down his five-year-old. The whole episode is absurd.
Unless you look at it in the light of earlier versions.
In the Babylonian creation epic, for example, the titanic sea serpent is the cosmic dragon goddess Tiamat, the embodiment of the Primordial Chaos that exists before Creation. Tiamat is before all things, the oldest of all that exists, and gives birth to the other gods. Another of her forms is the ocean, the ultimate symbol in ancient times for the "negative existence" the universe arose from. One of Tiamat's children is the warrior chief Marduk, who rises up and defeats her, and from her immense body fashions the universe. He splits her corpse into two halves to fashion heaven and earth. Marduk becomes the creator of the universe by defeating his dragon and shaping her Primal Chaos.
Before receiving the ultimate promotion Yahweh was neither the only god nor the first. It took the Babylonian Captivity, and prolonged exposure to Zoroastrianism, to put that idea into Hebrew-speaking heads.
Yahweh's boast makes a lot more sense if we step back and remind ourselves that monotheism is a late comer to his party. He wasn't always the One God; he started out as just one god. He was a very typical Near Eastern "divine warrior chief," like Marduk, Ninurta, or Indra, all of whom conquer dragons to prove their might. In the ancient kingdoms of Israel and Judah, Yahweh was the patron of the royal court and the leader of a pantheon that included El, Baal, and his consort Asherah. Over time (from about the tenth century BC forward) his cult became increasingly intolerant of rivals, until finally in the sixth century BC the authors of Isaiah proclaimed Yahweh as the sole deity and creator of the universe. Before receiving the ultimate promotion Yahweh was neither the only god nor the first. It took the Babylonian Captivity, and prolonged exposure to Zoroastrianism, to put that idea into Hebrew-speaking heads.
If Yahweh did not create Leviathan, if the dragon was there before him like Tiamat and Marduk, his boast suddenly starts to make sense. Indeed, there is some indication of this right there in the very beginning of Genesis; "In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth. And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep." The Hebrew word for "the deep" in that sentence was tehom, derived from the same source as "Tiamat." Read with this in mind, Yahweh, like Marduk, becomes the creator when he fashions heaven and earth from her body. He becomes the Creator by shaping the Primordial Chaos that comes before him.
...in order to do this he needs to ignore the One and go on to Zero; he cannot stop and worship any god invented by man, but push forward into that ineffable silence which exists before all things.
And if Yahweh can become God by shaping Primal Chaos, surely the being that invented him is capable of the same.
Chumbley very explicitly tells us all this. "... in the Fullness of Time Man would claim for Himself the substance of his own Creation and Know Himself as the One True-born of the Elder Gods." But in order to do this he needs to ignore the One and go on to Zero; he cannot stop and worship any god invented by man, but push forward into that ineffable silence which exists before all things. This is what the Indians called samadhi, and what Jesus, Moses, the Buddha, Mohammad, and others seem to have achieved by becoming empty in the wilderness. It is what transforms the substance of a man into an Adept. It is what modern Chaos Magicians refer to as "Gnosis." Chumbley's Angel Most High is telling us not to make idols and of those who achieve this state, but rather to seek it ourselves.
In this he echoes Aleister Crowley again. In his Confessions he writes;
"I admit that my visions can never mean to other men as much as they do to me. I do not regret this. All I ask is that my results should convince seekers after truth that there is beyond doubt something worth while seeking, attainable by methods more or less like mine. I do not want to father a flock, to be the fetish of fools and fanatics, or the founder of a faith whose followers are content to echo my opinions. I want each man to cut his own way through the jungle."
Crowley was adamant about this. His Book of the Law, which he conspired a piece of "divinely inspired writing," came with the warning that every reader had to interpret it for themselves. It was forbidden for anyone to preach about its meaning. This is because the Adept knows that truth must be won, it can not be echoed and passed down. Again it is a core way that Magick differs from religion, which claims not only to be able to interpret scriptures for you, but to have the accurate interpretation of their meaning.
Chumbley's Angel Most High is thus a Shadow, a dark reflection that is, in fact, Nothing. It is the emissary of emptiness. But it leads us towards emptiness--samadhi--Gnosis with a very specific purpose. Again, from Chumbley's Commentary on the Qutub;
Or in the words of famed artists and magician Austin Spare; "Demand equality of God--usurp!"
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