A.C.’s 777: 161 is the Heavenly Man or Exalted Man, the “Congregation of the Eternal.” 203 = Initials Of The Trinity: dead; feather; created; ambush; foreign; esoteric. 667 = “oil for lighting.” It is fortunate that 4+6+6+9 = 7. Thank Gods, it doesn’t add up to One! Then we would be in trouble!
CHAOTE — A person who recognizes the chaotic nature of our world. Most postmodern chaotes know that consensual reality is doomed. Hakim Bey refers to chaotes as “anarchs of the new paradigm.”
CHARACITH —The 18th kala. A distortion of The Chariot. The magic is the power to cast spells and the sickness associated with Characith is the danger of becoming a vampire.
CHARIOT, THE — The seventh Arcanum, lettered Cheth. The path connecting Binah and Geburah, hence, according to Nevill Drury, the warrior-like aspect of the Emperor, who, in contrast, is thought of more as a Father-God. Here his role would seem to be that of the Destroyer. Since most authorities assign Cancer to this Enigma rather than Aries (which would be more fitting for The Emperor), such a role seems questionable. Others see the Charioteer as simply the passenger of the Merkabah. The chariot in its historical sense is the vehicle of triumph.
The sleeping (referring to the unconscious mind), black and white (positive & negative) sphinxes represent the two-headed earth god, Aker. His two heads are now sphinxes, now lions. (The latter are reminiscent of the hieroglyphic “lions of yesterday and tomorrow.”) Bicephalous Aker guards the eastern and western doorways to the Underworld. He is the outer “limits” (i.e., limitations) of earth.
For Crowley The Charioteer is the balancer and controller of opposing forces — the opposite of such forces going awry, as in The Tower.
CHELA — (Hindu.) A disciple or follower of a Yoga, associated with “guru,” the teacher, hence, by extension, any student.
CHERNOBOG —The old, Pre-Vladimir Slavic black demon (lit. “Black God”) of the Variagi Russians, represented by a black dog. The similarity of the name of this demon with Chernobyl, the nuclear power plant disaster of 1987, caused great distress amongst the Russian people. Premier Gorbachev’s forehead birthmark did not help to allay Slavic uneasiness, since it was read as the Apocalyptic “mark of the beast.”
CHESED — (Or GEDULAH.) The fourth qabalistic power zone of the Tree of Life. It is the top of the pillar of “Mercy,” the feminine counterpart of Geburah on the other side. The rule of the manifest universe.
CHESS — Several metaphysicians (Crowley, Shallis, Carroll, etc.) have suggested that chess is really a medieval computer simulacrum, a magical model of the world, or of Time, in which various forces confront one another. The black and white squares are happenings of evil mixed with good, the pieces are fixed stages of mental development. The pawns are ordinary mentalities, with few choices open to them, who can move but forward in hope of eventual enlightenment (embodied in the queen). The knight is the initiate, the bishop ecclesiastical power, the castle or rook temporal power. The king, of course, is the inner self or life-force revealed at death or apotheosis, depending upon whether one wins or loses. One’s opponent’s king is the source of the tyranny of the outside world, the “other” that the self must battle. Originally the game was played with four players, each having four pieces and four pawns—with no queens.
Ithell Colquhoun notes that Yeats and the Celts before him (fidchell) had a chessboard representing the gates to the cities of the four elements and in which the squares were cromlechs — mystic upright stones. Gwenddolen, in Arthurian legend, is said to have possessed an enchanted chessboard that played by itself.
CHILIASTIC — Designating the time when the messiah will appear to establish his kingdom for a thousand years. Millennial; end of the world; end of an Aeon.
CHIROPS — Bat god — one of the mysterious “supreme” deities. (Cf. Satan’s batwings and the triliteral Arab root kh-f-sh, which, depending on the vowels can mean “bat” or “ruin, destruction.”) In Mesoamerican religions, the bat stands for enlightenment, since it awakens in the darkness. The Mayan bat god is Camazotz.
CHOKMAH — The second power chakra of the qabalistic Trinity of the Tree of Life: The male principle of light that goes out to uncover the “Hidden” Wisdom (Lux in Tenebris). It is the zone of the Magician and Ra.
CHORONZON — Guardian of and “Dweller in the Abyss” (Demon of Dispersion) = 333 (Noznoroch). Crowley called him “the first and deadliest of all the powers of Evil,” sole inhabitant of the Abyss, capable of assuming any shape, the very Lord of Chaos. In 1909 Crowley and Neuburg did battle with him on a mountaintop in Algiers, thus making Neuburg a “secret chief.” The reason he is so deadly is that his force is the opposite of M/magic(k) and he is therefore a special threat for the Magician who has to grapple with him on his own. Choronzon’s open sesame to Hell is: “Zazas, Zazas, Nasatanada, Zazas!”
CHOZZAR — The “Pig God” — Blavatsky says it is the God of the Magicians of Atlantis, one of Grant’s Typhonian teratomas or symbols of Set.
CHRISTIAN, PAUL — French occultist (1811-1877), best known for his Histoire de la Magie (1870). He regarded the “book of Thoth” as containing, in its 22 arcana, “The Science of Will, the principle of all wisdom and the source of all power.”
CHRISTOS — (Greek: “anointed.”) This is a direct translation of the Hebrew meshiach, “anointed,” which denotes a king or venerated person. The Jews were looking for such a “king” who would lead them out of servitude. The practice of smearing kings and priests with fat, oil and blood goes far back into deepest Africa, where conquering warrors painted themselves with blood and witch-doctors ritually smeared themselves with semen.
The symbolical/metaphysical Christos state of consciousness of the original Gnostics has been totally corrupted and replaced by the false “historification” of Jesus, who is a mythical composite of John the Baptist, Paul and a messianic archetype.
CHURCH OF SATAN — Founded by Anton Szandor LaVey, in San Francisco. His aeon (Anno Satanas) commences on Walpurgisnacht, 1966. It is LaVey’s contention that Satan is the “spirit of progress and liberation” and that Christianity, sanctimonious and hypocritical, is opposed equally to the body and the intellect. The traditional Black Mass, however, is outmoded, both in form and intention, and LaVey’s rituals are refreshingly different. The Church of Satan is not altruistic, is frankly selfish, however, as LaVey says, “Evil is live backwards.” The Satanic Rituals, which is the companion to The Satanic Bible, contains virtually all that any modern magician might require by way of invoking the dark gods.
CLAIRVOYANT THEORY OF PERCEPTION — (Title of a book by M. M. Moncrief.) Even in the “easily accessed” areas of cerebral/somatic color memory, the speed of response can’t encompass the range of input. We don’t always perceive which color is actually there. For instance, if you’re looking at a scene bathed in blue light, an object that is supposed to be pure white will appear blue enough, but you will see it as “white.” In other words, the merely objective color is meaningless alongside the actual subjective experience.
If the latter is true, then perhaps we do a lot more “compensating” than we generally acknowledge. A person who is hard of hearing provides a common example of ambiguous perception. How much of what he hears is actually perceived and how much is “reconstructed?” My father might hear “Did you save the milk?,” but since neither of us uses milk, he will correct that
