who had unity would be a God.”
Baphomet has his own tetramorph: Dog, Bull, Ass and Goat, representing perversions of the cardinal signs.
BARAKA BASHAD — (Sufi.) “Blessed Be.” (A “baraka” is a blessing or power used by the Sufis.) Baraka is another name for the X-Factor, conceived as a “magical fluid” that pours forth from the saints.
BARATCHIAL — The guardian of the 12th tunnel. The “ape-headed” or cynocephalous distortion of The Magician. Baratchial does not carry a caduceus, but instead struggles himself, with great difficulty, to control the writhing serpents. Since he is fork-tongued, Baratchial’s affliction is impediments of speech and his magic is the “Gift of Tongues.”
BAT — (See CHIROPS.) The bat is also the glyph of the pathway of the Hanged Man, and the totem of the Voodoo worshipers. In popular thinking it is the soul of the unenlightened, because it dwells in darkness and feeds indiscriminately on all life. In China, however, where many things are reversed, the word fu means either “a bat” or “a blessing.”
Since the bat sleeps upside-down he affords an important avenue to “reversion of consciousness.” (See VAMPIRE.)
BEELZEBUB — Literally, “Lord of the Flies,” that is, the Canaanite demon ruling over corruption, filth and death. Originally he was a God worshiped in temples free of flies. The conversion of the emblem of his purity into the tag of his destruction is typical of the progression of any God rejected by established religion.
BELIEF — What KG calls a “primal obsession” and in Aleister Crowley and The Hidden God, he says, “Every magician must discover the word that conceals his dominant obsession, must vibrate it until its energizing elemental is awakened.” Myths are never intended to be believed. They are opportunities to restructure our values and lead us to new insights. Goblins need not be “real” in order to be real. No magician ever believes anything. That includes the current reality consensus. Gurdjieff went so far as to say, “Believe nothing, not even yourself.” Feelings — unless one have trained intuitional talents — can never be trusted to reflect reality. The alternative to believing is simply experiencing or knowing.
It is not “belief that acts as a placebo, it is the absence of doubt. This is the real meaning of Gnosticism which had no truck with belief, but was concerned solely with knowing (from Gk. gnostikos, “good at knowing”). You “know” something by direct experience of the body and the mind, not through second-hand “evidence” or teaching or belief. Healing has nothing to do with struggling against disbelief, it is a relaxing into the experience itself and accepting, without giving way to despair, that whatever happens “is all right.” When patients say they “believe,” they really mean they have learned how to relax on the tightrope without falling off. If they had to keep forcing themselves to “believe,” they’d quickly wither and fail.
Meanwhile, 19th Century rationalism is paling to insignificance. Our Xtian children, reared in frustration and boredom, soon desert their native religions and run away to sex and drugs. Then, after burning themselves out, they return in the mantle of shame that we force them to wear, offering themselves to be brainwashed anew in our guilt-ridden, mind-murdering belief factories.
There is a deplorable tendency for our society to mention “religion” and “magic” in the same breath, as though they were synonyms. Of course, nothing could be further from the truth. Admittedly, it is an idiosyncrasy of some magi to bristle at religion, chiefly because it is authoritarian, rigid, ignorant and oppressive, and also because it belittles and persecutes creativity. However a sharp line between magic and religion must be strongly drawn. We are told that magic “goes beyond belief.” It does nothing of the kind — it shuns belief like the pox! If religion is 100% belief, magic is based in equal parts upon knowledge, originality, perseverance and boldness. Where confusion arises in the popular mind is over sorcery, which uses the trappings of magic and religion indiscriminately, is based on belief and subordination, but at the same time brazenly seeks selfish material gain and ego enhancement. Sorcery is really a kind of credulous business transaction, whose motto might well be “the ends glorify the means.”
Although Judaism and Buddhism are special cases, in Xtianity and Islam, the purpose of religion is individual salvation in the Hereafter. These belief-based religions assure salvation through fixing one’s faith on a God or a Paraclete which is other than the self and, which, in fact, erases the self altogether. The purpose of magic, on the other hand, is frankly the transmogrification — in whole or in part, with or without the invocation of Gods — of the hell that our world really is. Since the magician always dwells at the chaotic, creative edge of the present, this transmogrification concerns itself with means as much as ends. He rings in the changes as he goes along, extemporaneously. Nor does the magician cringe and subordinate himself, but acts on equal footing with the pantheistic and holonomic principle that each part is equal to, if not greater than, the whole. Since, moreover, any part, in a sense, is equal to any other part, the magician himself is neither more nor less valuable than anyone or anything else. The individual self is merely unique in the meaning and interpretation of its contribution. Therefore, the magician is always willing to sacrifice himself in any manner that may prove necessary to his work.
BELL’S THEOREM — “Particles once in common continue to influence one another instantaneously, even across the light-year stretches of galaxies.”
BELPHAGOR — (Lit. “Corpse-Lord” or “Decay.”) The demon (female or gynander?) of inventions and discoveries. In Punic myth, Bel or Baal (“Lord”) is nearly equal to El, god of fertility and plant life (winter flood). Necrophilia with slain virgins, practiced by Atlantidean sorcerors and Asiatic secret societies alike, is also reflected in this name. Beings created by orgasm or Todpunkt all become zombies to Death Magic practitioners.
BERESHITH — “Bereshith bara elohim et hashamayim et ha-aretz,” the first sentence of Genesis in Hebrew. The Theosophists point out that it has two meanings. If the division is made thusly, beresh yithbara, be-resh (i.e., “head, wisdom, knowledge, higher part, first in a series”) Made Itself (Into) Heaven and Earth (out of previously present material?) That is, “The gods, through wisdom, carved (yithbara) the heaven and the material sphere.”
BESQUL — A Lovecraftian gosub of the qliphotic Qulielfi path, falling away so rapidly, into the infinity of the Abyss, that it even has its own dark qabalahs. In the normal Tarot, Qulielfi is replaced by the Moon.
BILAL — First convert to Islam and first muezzin, a negro slave.
BIBRANCHING —The simplest form of fractalling into a Y.
BINAH — The third qabalistic power chakra of the Tree of Life. The “old woman.” Female principle of darkness. Also symbolized by Isis. It is part of the upper triad of the Qabalah (see SEPHIROTH), the only one which lies within human understanding, hence it is the “Mother” and “The Creation.” This is the abode of the High-Priestess, Isis.
BIODES — Organic entities as receptors; obstacles to higher, non-organic or artificial intelligence.
BIONS — Wilhelm Reich called these energy vesicles, ever-arising representatives of a stage midway between organic and inorganic matter. As molecules decompose, orgone energy infuses them with life and they can evolve into bacilli and amoebae. (See HOMUNCULUS.)
BLACK HOLE — The opposite of an explosion. As a dying star collapses in upon itself,
