ENOCHIAN MAGIC: THE CRY OF TEX, THE 30TH AETHYR

NOTE: This is the first in a series of Enochian inspired visions.  Please read this Introduction before proceeding.

I FELL, upwards from the face of the world.  Up, up, up amongst the wheeling stars I plummeted into the night sky.  I saw the constellations moving around me like living beings of pale, blue-white fire.  Pegasus, Draco, and Scorpio moved by me.  Then I saw great wheels all around, tracing out the courses of the stars and planets.  It was as if I found myself in some great astrolabe of crystal.  Earth was at the center, around which all the heavens turned.

Then it seemed to me my eyes adapted to the dimness, for everywhere about me I could now see turning gears of transparent glass.  They were impossibly ornate, like the rose windows of a cathedral, or snowflakes.  They all moved in harmony with each other, the motion of one affecting the next, and thus maintaining the motions of the Sun, Moon, and Stars, as well as the turning of the Earth.  

Suddenly I saw the Angels all about me, everywhere.  Like ants they swarmed.  I perceived they were the engineers, maintaining the system of crystalline gears ceaselessly, diligently.  Everywhere they flew.  One of their countless number passed near me and I hailed him to stop.

He was fashioned of the same pale blue fire as the gears, but liquid and less dense.  He flamed and flickered like the blue of a gas flame.  Winged and robed, he bore no halo.  He was immaterial and ghostly.  Turning towards me he demanded my name.

SOMUE, I told him.  Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law.

Ah, said he, a Thelemite.  Then I say unto thee ‘Love is the Law, Love under Will.’

Cautious I gave the LVX signs to see if he was a hostile spirit, but he returned them with ease.  I asked him his name.

I am ZAAMPE, he replied.  I asked him to spell this for me and he did.  Then to me he asked, Why come you to this place?

I wish to walk all the Aethyrs, seeking the First.  What can you tell me of this Aethyr?

This is TEX, the Machinery of the Universe.  This is the densest of the Aethyrs, and most like unto the material world.

I recognized the phrasing.  Machinery of the Universe?  Is its character like Yesod, then?

Only distantly, he answered.  Man makes machinery of the world…machines of the animals, of the soil, of nature itself.  It is a defect in perception, seeing only half of what is.  TEX is the understanding of the Universe possessed by Man.

I considered this.  It is then only Man’s perception of the Universe, not its true character?

This Aethyr is shaped by the perceptions of those billions down below, he replied, gesturing towards the blue-green globe of the Earth hanging in the center of the void around us.  This is the machine of their making, as indeed they make we who work upon it.

What is the true nature of TEX, then?  I asked.  Can you reveal it to me?

At this, the Angel took up a great hammer.  His face suddenly bunched up in fury he swung the weapon in a great arc, shattering the closest gear.  A chain reaction spread through all the heavens.  The countless wheels screamed and shattered in a rain of jagged glass.  One by one the stars burst and faded to blackness.  The planets crumbled.  The Earth went dark.  All that was left was a desolate darkness, through which a wind howled and moaned.  

This is the true nature of things, from whence they come and to which they return.  The Void, the Angel told me.

I shivered in the darkness.  Are we to fear this?

You are to Understand and Embrace it, said the Angel.  Only this way can you cross the Abyss when that time comes to you.  The Machinery of the Universe, made by Man, with its calendars and clocks and laws is Illusion.

Suddenly, the darkness was lifted, and I beheld the stars and planets again.  The gears were back in place, restored by the angels.  They had dutifully repaired the machine.

Can you tell me any more of the nature of TEX?  I asked him.

I can only show you, he replied.  He took me by the hand and we fell downwards into the world, falling through the atmosphere and clouds, until I saw racing beneath us snow-capped mountain peaks.  So high were these jagged mountains that they seemed to touch the very sky. 

Then, on the highest of the high peaks, I beheld a terrifying figure in silhouette.  He was impossibly tall, looking like one of those towering mecha from Japanese animation, with massive, outstretched wings like an eagle and great horns upon his head.  He stood motionless on the mountain, arms reaching up like Atlas to support the sky.  We landed at his feet, tiny, like ants.

This is the essence of the Plane, the soul of TEX, my Guide informed me.

Then a great voice, like thunder or the roar of a titanic engine, boomed out.  MORTAL THING.  INSIGNIFICANCE.  COME FORWARD AND KNOW ME.  LAY YOUR PUNY HAND UPON MY FOOT IN OBEISANCE.

I did as he bade me, stepping forward through the deep drifts of snow.  I felt ridiculously small as I approached his massive right foot.  I saw now that his body was made of rusting iron plates, all haphazardly riveted together, piece by piece.  As I reached out to touch this Machine God, the rusted iron crumbled beneath my fingers.  The crumbling spread, and soon the entire statue was raining down upon me in jagged pieces and iron dust.  I caught one fragment in my hand.  The Eye of Horus was etched into the metal, inside a Triangle.  

That which ceases to move becomes stagnant, my Guide whispered in my ear.  Subject to entropy and decay.

As the great juggernaut disintegrated, the sky came crashing down with it.

September 30th, 2004     

ENOCHIAN MAGIC: SCRYING THE AETHYRS

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.

Aleister Crowley

Visions.

Whether you view them as psychic explorations of higher planes or something more akin to Jungian active imagining, visions are an essential part of any magician's career.  It's the oldest magic, really, with roots deep in the shamanic experience.  To cross over into the Otherworld (however you wish to define it) and bring back treasures is the core of the magic experience.  It is what makes a magician a magician.

It's also a nearly universal motif, a classic feature of what Eliade, Campbell, Leeming, and Vogler understood as the Monomyth, or Hero's Journey.  The Hero sets out of his quest, and at some crucial point crosses over into the Unknown, which can be represented as an Underworld, an Otherworld, or an Inner or Outer world.  There he faces challenges and trials, gains wisdom and strength, at at some crucial point crosses an Abyss that leaves him irrevocably transformed.

Magic is interacting with Myth as much as anything else.  The magician deals habitually with gods, demons, and spirits liberated from story and fable.  For those seeking such visionary experiences, there are scores of systems available to the modern practitioner.  For my part, I have always had extraordinary success with the "Enochian" magic of John Dee.  I have operated other methodologies with varying degrees of success, but invariably and without fail, the process of chanting an Enochian Key or Call lights up my brain.  By the end I am flying.  The visions are the most coherent, the most vivid, the most intense.  And they have also had the most profound effect upon me.  Naturally I do not expect this to be true for everyone, and magicians all need to experiment to find which techniques best trigger visions for them.  I am hardly alone, however, in attesting the efficacy of the Enochian Calls.

I have been scrying the 30 Enochian Aethyrs or Aires for thirteen years now, keeping careful records of these sessions, as well as work with the spirits or "angels" of the Watchtowers, in notebooks set aside purely for Enochian work.  Recently, I crossed the 10th Aethyr, which in the Enochian cosmology is the Abyss, the gulf or chasm separating the phenomenal universe from the noumenal one. This was a transformational experience, reordering my priorities and changing the way I view things.  One side effect of the experience is the decision to share my experiences of scrying the Aethyrs, not with dogmatic intent but to--as Crowley states above--"convince seekers after truth that there is beyond doubt something worth while seeking, attainable by methods more or less like mine."  By making these records public, I hope to show others the type of experience that is possible, fully aware that these experiences are mine and naturally cannot mean to others what they mean to me.

I invite the reader to check out the links above first, to familiarize himself or herself with the Enochian system and cosmos.  The short version, however, is a gnostic cosmology in which the physical world is surrounded by 30 concentric "Aires" or "Aethyrs," the 30th being the innermost and closest to physical reality, the 1st bordering on the Divine, or "Ultimate Reality."  The Enochian magician experiences each in a series of visions, moving ever outwards.  The best example of this is probably Aleister Crowley's The Vision and the Voice, which provided many crucial elements of his system of Thelema.

In subsequent posts, I will be sharing abridged journal entries of my own journey across the Aethyrs, starting with the 30th Aethyr of TEX back in 2004 and moving forward.  My methodology has been more or less consistent.  I perform a banishing/purification followed by an invocation.  In my case, these are specifically The Star Ruby and The Star Sapphire, but again any equivalent rituals will do.  I then recite the 19th Enochian Call or Key, inserting the name of the Aethyr I intend to visit.  This is followed by intoning the names of the Governors associated with that Aethyr with my eyes closed.  The vision usually comes on fairly quickly.

I tend to narrate what I see and hear aloud, either recording myself or working with a partner who keeps a record.  

In the next post, we will start out journey with TEX.