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BA 
The Atman,
the Egyptian soul, depicted as a bird with a human head, though apparently not
the very similar bennu-bird. After death, it splits apart into the akh,
which is a temporary spirit in the form of a bird that flies to the Afterworld
where it turns back into the ka, or double. The ba remains behind
with the mummy. The ba is incarnation, the ka is the vitalizing power and the
akh (symbolized by the ibis) is light. On the spirit level they correspond to
the uas, ankh and djed.
BAAL SHEM TOV
Lord of the Good Name. This phrase
is involved in the Hebrew banishing and exorcism of the demons of black magic.
BABALON
Crowley's numerologically-derived spelling.
Another name for the Scarlet Woman (i.e., a fire elemental). It is also the city
of Babylon in its greatness, before its relegation to the New Testaments
whoredom. Ba is the Egyptian soul and its repetition in Baba-lon indicates the
double-wanded one's double path.
BAILEY, ALICE
Authoress of A Treatise on Cosmic
Fire (and numerous other works). Died in 1949 at age 69. She was a
Theosophist who also, it is claimed, maintained a fundamentalist Xtian belief
(quite unlike HPB) and the conviction that she (like HPB) was in contact with
the Secret Chiefs of the Inner Plane, especially Koot Hoomi. It is difficult,
however, to assign much importance to any possible Galilean influences on her
serious work. Her writings are largely arcane and abstract, containing insights
into Hindu, Tibetan and Buddhist metaphysics of a profundity, and frequently of
an opacity, rarely encountered elsewhere.
BALCHIPUSHTI
Literally, Lord of the
Cockroaches. King of the Jebusites.
BALKH
All roads lead to Balkh (mysterious Near Eastern
city), said by Gurdjieff, referring to the Sufic origin of all systems.
BAPHOMET
Idol (chiefly its head) said to have been
worshipped by the Templars. It is also the God of the Sabbath of Sorcerers. Its
obvious association with Mohamet is possibly the result of unexamined Islam. Its
also a symbol of Gnosticism. The Knights Templars (1118-1300) were involved with
Gnosticism, Cathars, Albigensians, Manichaeans, and many other groups.
Since the Tarot appears in the 14th Century and since it bears some
indications of Muslim origin (primarily the word, Al-Tariqa, or the way)
and the Naipes of Spain (Arabic nabi, prophet), then perhaps Baphomet was
supposed to be Mohammed. Crowley's Devil Baphomet certainly is alchemical,
phallic and capric enough (with a 3rd eye).
Lévi: "To know how to extract from all matter the pure salt concealed therein
is to possess the secret of the Stone that the Qabalists gave to their Mercury,
the personification of Hermanubis and to Sulfur, the Templars' Baphomet." The
name can also be given backwards: TEM OPH AB, Templum Omnium Hominum Pacis
Abbas.
Satan, in an important sense, has no existence. He's perennially invented by
a perverse will again and again, strictly for evil purposes. All inferior
magicians worship the devil. The Devil, says Crowley, is created by the Black
Brothers to imply a unity in their ignorant muddle of dispersions. A devil 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 magickal 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, 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 worshipped 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 every
God rejected by established religion. Incidentally, Beelzebud or
Beelzebuth is, Legge suggests, a Valentinian play on Jabezebuth
(but which came first? Chicken Beelzebub or egg Beelzebuth? -
"Lord of Flies" or "Lord of Gifts"?) Jab- means "desire." Things are
never quite what they appear to be, in the Gnostic world at least. And at this
point in history demons and gods were in such a state of flux, linguistically
and pneumatically, that almost any theurgic word or name could mutate in many
different directions.
BEHDET
Egypt's northernmost city, city of Horus,
became in Arabic, Baghdad.
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 consensus. Gurdjieff went so
far as to say, "Believe nothing, not even yourself." Feelings, unless one has
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 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, theyd quickly wither and fall.
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 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
sorcerers 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) Head
or knowledge 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
Quliefi path, falling away so rapidly into the infinity of the Abyss that
it even has its own dark qabalahs. In the normal Tarot, Quliefi is replaced by
the Moon.
BILAL
First convert to Islam and first muezzin, a
negro slave.
BIBRANCHING
The simplest form of fractaling 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 state midway between 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, becoming progressively denser and smaller,
it eventually acquires a mass that is so heavy that not even light particles can
escape from it. Indeed, even space is drawn into it, slowly and inexorably.
Objects at the edge of a black hole seem to be motionless and frozen. Since they
are invisible, however, black holes are almost impossibly difficult to detect.
BLACK KNIGHT
A mysterious satellite in 1960
which shadowed Sputnik, believed to have been of extraterrestrial origin that
signaled back old radio waves from the 1920s and 1930s before it disappeared. In
short wave patterns analyzed by astronomer Duncan Lunan, it revealed its origin
as Epsilon Boötes (or the star system as it was 13,000 years ago).
BLACK MAGIC
Sorcery or Goetia. Eliphas Lévi said
it was but the shadow of white magic and that, in greater wisdom, we can see
that the light and the dark are the same thing. On the simplest level, White
Magic is the work of the conscious mind, with Black Magic the work of the
unconscious. Or, as Jung put it, white magic serves the self and black magic the
ego. For Alice Bailey, on more complicated levels, white magic deals with the
soul, the positive electrical energies, transmutation through radiation and the
self-induced development of the Central Self. Black magic deals with the outer
form, negative electrical energy, reduction of the human sphere.
But in popular belief black magic frankly isnt just simply intended to harm
others more than that, its the worship and glorification of the negative. Said
Crowley in a 1933 newspaper article quoted by Grant (The Magical
Revival): "To practice black magic you have to violate every principle of
science, decency and intelligence. You must be obsessed with an insane idea of
the importance of the petty object or your wretched and selfish desires ... I
despise the thing to such an extent that I can hardly believe in the existence
of people so debased and idiotic as to practise it."
Historians insist that the idea of black magic derives originally from a word
in the Arabian version of magic, from a confusion of fehm, black, with
fehm, understanding or wisdom. In general, the idea of black or forbidden magic
simply arose as a designation for the unofficial or unorthodox. In our
predominantly masculine culture, black magic is that which relates to the
feminine principle.
HPB designates the symbols of black magic to be the Moon and the inverted
pentagram as opposed to white magics sun symbol and point-uppermost star. Black
magic, she tells us, is concerned with form and matter, whereas white magic
seeks the life and spirit within the form. Black magic uses the astral light to
deceive, to seduce and to serve the purposes of involution, whereas white magic
uses the same light to instruct others and to aid evolution. For HPB, black
magic, furthermore, sought to degrade sex, whereas white magic sought to
transmute it to higher creative thought.
Remember that magic is a completely different path from religion or science.
Its sometimes called the Middle Pillar. It matters little where you choose to
begin. The vodounist, for instance, who thinks he'll just drop in for a lesson
in where to stick the pins into the doll will soon discover that sorcery is
clumsy and ineffective according to its distance from higher principles of
responsibility and inter-relationship with all consciousness, both higher and
lower. The person who is merely curious will soon discover that he has a genuine
thirst for understanding and his curiosity will blossom into a consuming passion
for enlightenment. Consider the life of Tibetan yogi Milarepa, who started out
as an evil black magician only to become, eventually, a great saint!
Since the proper goal of magic is to deliver the world from its infernal
condition, there is a tendency to view any magic but one's own as black or evil.
However, strictly speaking, there is no such thing as black magic. All paths are
sacred. The initiate does not distinguish between self and other. Rather than
calling white the magic of charity and black the magic of self, we would do
better to think of all magic as that which seeks wisdom and designate as leading
to evil, sorcery, only that which acts in ignorance. By that definition, most
contemporary religion is black magic.
The dark path, Vama Marg or left-hand path, is merely one side of the
caduceus, in contrast to the other, and as light is brought into darkness, it
ceases to be dark. The phrase, Lux in tenebris, can refer to the light
being brought to the darkness, or to the darkness itself acting as light. Like
the scientist, the true magician does not shrink from exploring all avenues of
the manifest and the unmanifest. Some magicians say that we are actually unable
to choose anything but white magic (or enlightenment), since in order for any
magical operation to work, one has to refine one's understanding and purify
one's vision. In practice, however, the followers of Satanism supposedly align
themselves to the development of the individual ego for the sake of personal
power. In order to strengthen the ego, detachment is learned through
controversial rites. One of the preoccupations of magic is to enlist gods,
spirits, elementals, etc. to do one's bidding and to release their power to the
practitioner. But the black magician seeks unlimited power, not to borrow, but
to appropriate for himself not in order to better the world or himself, but to
satisfy his personal greed and to establish his ambitious tyranny. Moreover,
real magicians know better than to wallow in close-minded ignorance and
self-perpetuating superstition. They certainly arent going to go to all the
trouble of throwing out Jesus just so that he can sneak in through the back door
wearing the cloak of Satanism.
Serious magicians consider true Satanism (mere Devil Worship, that is) to be
shallow and ultimately self-defeating. Power and freedom accrue in direct
proportion to the shedding of the ego, not to its inflation. Initiates see
Satanism as a pathetic rebellion that merely exalts the other side of the coin
of Xtianity. In any case, Satanism is more in the nature of a religion than a
magical system, since it is based upon belief and worship. Seeing that Xtianity
tars all variance from itself with the same brush, it has become necessary to
discourage the childish triflers by labeling dark that which is most holy.
Finally, for the last word on the subject, here is a graffito copied from a
San Francisco sidewalk, circa 1987: White witchcraft which fools condemn. Turns
to black and crushes them.
BLACK SUN
One the other side of Daäth, the reverse
of beauty, the hideous God, Baphomet, the Black Sun (or Black Snake) is the
opposite equivalent of Tiphareth, Osiris or Apollo. The Black Sun and The Black
Moon may also stand for the names of secret societies known to very few.
BODDHISATTVA
A saint who has forgone Nirvana
and reincarnates in order to help mankind.
BÖN or BÖNPA
The aboriginal magicians of Tibet, prior to
Buddhism, at first much opposed to the Lamas, but eventually joining them in
their adoption of Tantric Buddhism. Like all major movements, Buddhism did not
become popular until it learned how to take in and alter local beliefs. Dhyana
(meditation) was used in Tibet before passing to Japan as Zen, though one cant
be sure if its a non-stop link from Tibet to Japan. If it is, then why not
Obon/Bon equivalence, as well? Bon was (is) very back-woodsy and little is known
about it. Christmas Humphreys says it has roots in Asiatic (Mongol) Shamanism:
nature worship, sex magic and psychic arts. Modern Bon are called black hats and
are sorcerers of the Dug-pa sects of Bhutan and Ladak.
BONEWITZ, PHILIP
First holder of a B.A. degree in
Magic from U.C. Berkeley, 1970. His goal is to modernize and scientize
M/magic(k) of all kinds.
BOOK OF THOTH
Crowleys term for the Tarot. He
didn't necessarily, however, assume an Egyptian origin for the Tarot, as some
believe. Thoth is interchangeable with Hermes and Tarot is part of the Hermetic
Tradition.
BRUNO, GIORDANO
A Dominican monk, absolute pantheist
and an early promoter of unbridled sexual freedom. Best known for his work on
the art of memory, which was essential for scholars in the 16th Century.
Briefly, it consisted of using architecture, classical literature, religions
ritual, etc., as vast mnemonic devices. Bruno's heady and bizarre occult ideas
soon outdistanced his practical appeal and had him defrocked and on the run.
Bruno was burned at the stake in 1600. Aleister Crowley claimed that Bruno was
one of his former incarnations.
BUDDHISM
Since we waste our youth suffering from
boundless ignorance and unfulfilled desire and since age is mostly a time of
physical hardship and blunted hopes, it seems clear that life, for all its
promises, is more a burden than a joy. Since, however, to die is to be instantly
reborn into life, death is apparently an even more absolute cheat. Considering
also that all things have arisen in the Mind, in the midst of the Void, and
since we are ourselves our own creators and gods (in a multiplicity of aspects
and a simultaneous gallimaufry of forms), there is no escaping from the
inevitability of either the existing or the potential cosmos. Indeed, it is
this very weariness which Reality seeks to assuage by confusing itself as to its
own identity.
The Buddha, sensing the horror and outrage of life on earth, wants to lead us
to the perfection of the Absolute. 
He teaches that birth and death (the wheel of
Samsara), together with the Karmic burden, can be dropped in enlightenment and
we can enter into Nirvana directly. In an even deeper understanding we are shown
that Samsara and Nirvana are already one so there is not even any need for
enlightenment! (But of course you have to be enlightened before you can
understand that you are already enlightened!)
To the average westerner this seems fairly tame stuff and much too
intellectual for his taste. He doesnt want contemplation, he wants action. But
he should understand that Buddhism is a discipline of conscious mind and is
meant to accompany action, not to take its place. It is serenity of the mind
which enables creative work to be done and acceptance of life to take place. The
other thing the westerner sometimes fails to recognize is that death and
reincarnation are as much a part of his belief system as they are that of a
Hindu philosopher. What, after all, is Heaven but the prospect of rebirth on a
higher plane? What is Hell but the karma of past lives?
BUFOTENIN
A hallucinogenic derived from the active
ingredient in the fluid taken from toad warts.
Preface A
B
C
D
E
F
G
H
I
J
K
L
M
N
O
P
Q
R
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T
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V
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X
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Z