The Church is Dead and God is in Hell...so your Freedom is Sacred

I'm sure many of my friends and blog readers know I love Lent and get super excited about it. Last year I had a pretty popular post about Ash Wednesday and my Gnostic interpretation of the meaning of Ash Wednesday vis a vis Palm Sunday. But did you know I think Holy Saturday is the most amazing day of the year? I made sure my ordination as a Gnostic Catholic Priest fell on the Saturday of the Easter Triduum for this reason, once I organized a Mass, Class, Spaghetti Dinner, and Dionysian Mystery Tradition ritual for a Holy Saturday chocked full of wonder. I think it's a day which is in itself mystically inclined...here is a discussion I had this early afternoon of why. I hope you enjoy it, and that you share it with your friends, so that you and they can go find the infinite in all that you do.

BJ: After 3pm we enter the best time of the year. Because the church is dead and god is in hell.

College Fencer: I’m sorry I must have been to the boring catholic education cause that sounds way more fun than my average Good Friday

My explanation as to why Holy Saturday is the Greatest Day of the Year for Mystics, Gnostics, and Antinomianists:

The Harrowing of Hell occurs on Good Friday after Christ's death when Christ descends into Hell and tears down its gates and in doing so conquers sin and death. In this process God essentially descends into Hell. Christ's incarnation is described as God achieving sympathy for Man by taking on Man's suffering and weakness. With the Passion on the Cross and the Harrowing of Hell God takes on all sin, all suffering and pain and descends into a moment of isolation from himself, achieving the ultimate weakness and powerlessness before then conquering it. In this moment God is closer to mankind than ever. In an almost gravitational way God sinks below man and draws man closer into a shared proximity than would seem otherwise possible.

When Christ dies the Church as his Bride dies as well. From 3pm on Good Friday until Dawn on Easter Sunday there is no Church. This is the most sacred antinomian moment. There is no institution, there is no mediation so there is only man and God. God's grace exists simultaneously with the depths of human experience and error with no Magisterium to dictate its nature or how to access it. This is shown when the veil of the Holy of Holies is rent in the temple at the moment of Christ's death. The veil separated the common man from the sanctum in which God resided, an inner sanctum in which only the High Priest could enter. With the veil torn asunder God permeates the world. With no Church and no Veil man and God stand face to face unmediated such that man directly experiences the infinite fully and unfiltered on his own terms in his own space of being. With this it can be interpreted that in this time all acts that express man's nature and his experience of the world are redeemed and are in contact with divine grace.

Death, or the withering of man from a state of perfection in which he resides within divine grace, is the price of experience and knowledge in the story of Man's exile from Eden. It is by descending into the fullness of human experience that Christ defeats death and returns the dead to paradise. Thus again, the full experience of our humanity during Holy Saturday is the experience of divine grace which allows death to be conquered and Sin to be transcendent.

So in my view, as a Gnostic Catholic, from the afternoon of Good Friday through to Dawn on Easter represents full access to the goal of mysticism, union with God and transcendence over the suffering and error of humanity such that our humanity, our drives and desires are elevated as the vehicles by which we Triumph and are resurrected with the Dawn. 

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Lent, The Holy Guardian Angel and the Calcination of Failure

I've had a bit of an interruption in my "American Gods" series of posts because of some work deadlines, but will be back to those soon. In the mean time, Lent is a really big deal to me, so I wanted to make an Ash Wednesday post. I would have liked to have made it yesterday...but...time keeps on slipping, into the future. 

Some people might wonder why Lent and Ash Wednesday would be exciting to a magician, but since I've had OTO friends literally suggest that I'm a crypto-Catholic it probably isn't too surprising. I like grimoires, and I like the pre-Reformation grimoires, I like studying Catholic liturgics and Sacraments to deepen my understanding of the grimoire practice as well as my work as a Gnostic Catholic Priest.

But I find this time of year to be one of the most exciting for a deeper reason than the appeal of traditional Catholic aesthetics. It is a time steeped in the Mysteries, in the sacramental theology and a Gnostic soteriology, so deeply that as a mystic, a Priest, and a magician I can't help but be excited by it.

It isn't a time of penitent contrition but one of anticipating Triumph. Which in my thinking is very Thelemic on its own, but when we explore this Triumph it gets even better.

Lent anticipates not just Christ's Triumph over death but our Triumph by way of participation in his death and resurrection. We experience the Mystery of the resurrection and likewise become an initiate who has conquered death. The whole Lenten season is steeped in the act of embodying the Passion within the experience of the people. The connection to the Passion Death and Resurrection is subtly built in the people every time they take the Eucharist - just as ours builds within us the sacred marriage of Earth and Heaven and with it communion with the angel; but Lent steps up the experience by immersing the people in reflection through the Stations of the Cross.

Triumphing over Death. This is central in most contemporary Mystery Traditions. The Wica explore this in the Descent of the Goddess, the Masons in the story of Hiram Abiff, the OTO in...well...I'll just say it's public knowledge that our Master Magicians explore the mysteries of death. This is such an important element of the Mysteries that we see it all throughout Europe and the Near East going back at least 3000 years.

But, we're not just conquering Death, with Life, we're conquering Falsehood with Truth. Liber AL tells us death is a lie. The Mysteries expose for us that we are the same light as the source, and death is not the submission of that light to darkness but rather the revelation of that light as it rejoins eternity. This idea touches both on the sacramental ideal f Ash Wednesday and the Gnostic soteriology of Easter Saturday.

Ash Wednesday is the beginning of a sort of alchemy. The ash in a traditional context is made from Palm leaves saved from Palm Sunday. This is often interpreted as wearing the ashes of penance while recalling the impending victory of Palm Sunday and the Triumphal entry into Jerusalem.

But Palm Sunday isn't Victory. It is a Pseudo-Thronosis, or false enthroning - a common act in initiatory passion plays. In these rituals the initiate is elevated and perceives success but the success isn't real. Being caught up in that falsehood we miss the reality of our situation and get caught in the snares and traps of life, but if we dig deep beyond the appearance of darkness and difficulty we can find that truth remains.

At Ash Wednesday we burn the Palms; we burn the falsehood. In alchemy one of the first phases is calcination or burning the material to ash. For the alchemist that which burns away is the dross, the false material that that hides the valued and true components of the material. That which is true survives fire, that which is false can not endure.

From a Gnostic and sacramental perspective this gives us an interesting liturgical moment from which to work. In the RCC Penance is one of the seven Sacraments. Tau Apiryon has said that the EGC equivalent of this is Will. I personally interpret this to mean that rather than seeking forgiveness we assess our shortcomings, our failures...the falsehoods which hold onto us and prevent us from succeeding at knowing truth and expressing that truth by doing our Wills. This flips the idea of penance on its head and instead of finding fault we find strength. We recognize that we aren't just our actions and instead of crapping on ourselves for not being perfect we can recognize our potential, we can seek divine inspiration, we can commit to being awesome.

Ritually I've applied this idea by writing a confession, not of sins but of ways I haven't committed to the Work and to my success. I've then burned the confession. Once the confession is burned I make prayers to my angel and reconstitute the "salt" or the ash of the confession with the "sulfur" or "soul" using Abramelin Oil. So my ash doesn't just have ash, but like Chrism it has fire. 

This confession first played out for me while doing the Abramelin Working, which contains a confession and wearing of ash. This idea of confessing to falling short of the Work seemed a fitting way to work on committing to it. From there, reflections on Ash Wednesday and Lent led to this association between the act and the season. It is of course something you can do at any time, and I personally keep my "angel ash" around as a means to connect with my angel through material imposition. It is a very refreshing meditative and spiritual practice. 

This connection to the angel brings me to my last part, the Gnostic soteriology. Soteriology is a theology or doctrine of salvation. In traditional Christianity Christ replaces the sacrifice and becomes the scapegoat. He takes on our sins and as a result, unlike the goat who is taken by the spirits of the wilderness, he descends to Hell weighed down by our sins, but he conquers Satan and Death and rises again so that our sin no longer has the power of death, since sin is what lead to death originally in Eden. He transforms the game by being awesome for us so that we can ride along and get into heaven based on his awesomeness. There are some interesting ideas at play here, but I don't want to get into most of them. 

From a Gnostic perspective it works a little differently. 

Jesus said these things:

"(13) Jesus said to his disciples, "Compare me to someone and tell me whom I am like." 

Simon Peter said to him, "You are like a righteous angel."
Matthew said to him, "You are like a wise philosopher."
Thomas said to him, "Master, my mouth is wholly incapable of saying whom you are like."
Jesus said, "I am not your master. Because you have drunk, you have become intoxicated from the bubbling spring which I have measured out."
And he took him and withdrew and told him three things. When Thomas returned to his companions, they asked him, "What did Jesus say to you?"

Thomas said to them, "If I tell you one of the things which he told me, you will pick up stones and throw them at me; a fire will come out of the stones and burn you up.""

"(108) Jesus said, "He who will drink from my mouth will become like me. I myself shall become he, and the things that are hidden will be revealed to him.""

"(50) Jesus said, "If they say to you, 'Where did you come from?', say to them, 'We came from the light, the place where the light came into being on its own accord and established itself and became manifest through their image.' If they say to you, 'Is it you?', say, 'We are its children, we are the elect of the living father.' If they ask you, 'What is the sign of your father in you?', say to them, 'It is movement and repose.'""

(The Gospel of Thomas)

Jesus compares his teachings to a bubbling stream of which his followers may drink and become drunk thereof if they truly understand, as does Thomas. He elaborates that there is no difference between himself and the one who carries his spirit by becoming drunk on his teachings. He further elaborates that the Father is the Light that established itself of its own volition, that man is a child of this light and as a child has the light in him and that this presence of the light is what makes man living. This presence of the light is likewise the basis of the teachings of the Word. 

Jesus stresses in many other instances understanding the living and the dead, and the relationship between the living and the dead and that one should not focus simply on the dead but appreciate the living Word which is before them, and which is the message they take in in order to become living themselves. A steady theme is the overlapping equation of Jesus, his message, life, and the Father. Each part in some way relates to another. But ultimately salvation for the Gnostic is not being saved by the act of another, salvation is recognizing death, seeking life through that recognition, and coming alive by embodying the Word and therefore becoming the same as the Word and therefore an expression of the Father. 

Salvation is the knowledge that we may uncover Truth and conquer death. 

In modern magic a key component of this is developing a relationship with the Holy Guardian Angel. In some ways Jesus's experience in the desert, like Moses's experience on Mt. Horeb, has a lot of similarity to encountering one's Holy Guardian Angel. Jesus continues this exploration further in the Pascal narrative with the Gethsemane. Jesus slowly uncovers and accepts his Will even if there are moments which are blinding flashes, not unlike the experience of a mystic or magician. Much of Lent suits itself to communing with the Holy Guardian Angel, which would reflect the Pentacostal imagery of initiation and the reception of the Holy Spirit, it is similarly hinted at in Christ's baptism, and of course his struggles in the desert and at Gethsemane to understand and accept who he is and what his calling is. But outside of the mythos, the ritual narrative plays this out for us as well. 

We burn away what we aren't as we seek to commit to what we are. This is the commitment we make when we seek the angel ardently for the purpose of making a firm commitment to on going communion. The angel speaks to us, and pours out the bubbling stream which changes and anoints us. The angel leads us through our Gethsemane moments, to Triumph through our own Golgatha and understand the light within ourselves. 

Ultimately this is the crowning moment of Lent. Not the joy of the resurrection, but the dark moment in which man can lose himself to distraction and terror or in which he can know that he is a child of the Light and that the light resides within him and is with him even in those moments in which we are most alone. As Jesus dies the veil of the Holy of Holies is torn asunder. The imagery calls to mind the leader of the Sanhedrin tearing his garments in protest as if God angrily shakes his temple and tears apart a symbol of His sacred presence in protest of his son's death. 

But this isn't what's happening at all. 

The veil kept people away from the adytum. The people couldn't directly experience God. But God became a man. In fact, God became man so hard that he died, an excruciating death, full of embarrassment, shame, fear, pain, and sin...so...much...sin, that you couldn't ever imagine having the weight of guilt, anxiety, self doubt, and confusion that God experienced. In that moment of death God is so infinitely human that the entirety of the experience of God is held within the experience of Man. God is ultimately alone in the darkness in a way which is the opposite of his infinite nature (which is likewise alone in the darkness), Which is what we are by virtue of being human. But here we see the divinity in that experience because here, for a moment, God is drawn into the lowest expression of our existence and therefore is closer to us than any other time. 

In a Liturgical sense the Roman Catholic Church recognizes this as the death of the Church. It is often explained that since Jesus is dead, and the Church exists as his Bride than she has no existence in that time that he is in Hell. But more than the Bride of Christ, the Church is an intermediary between Man and Christ, between Man and God. The intermediary dies because God is so deep in the muck with us that there is nothing to mediate anymore. We're there together alone in the darkness, and we just have to open up and realize the Light. 

We have to burn the Palms.

My Polyamorous Relationship with Jesus

Something that has come to mind frequently is the place of Christ in my identity as a Gnostic. I'm a hard polytheist, I believe in various gods and spirits as actual beings. In the minds of most people, believing in Jesus and believing in Dionysos, or Othin, or Lugh don't go together.

I know some Gnostics who are pretty ecumenical in their inclusion of various divinities in their work because they don't believe in them as actual personal divine beings.

I know some Gnostics that don't believe that Gnosticism has a Christian component, and that particular symbol set doesn't need to be part of their Gnosticism, or if it is, they don't need to acknowledge it as more than a symbol even if they believe in other gods.

That can work for them, and that's great.

But I definitely confuse my friends, because I think most of them know I'm a hardline polytheist. On the flip side, I'm pretty borderline Catholic.  I had an OTO friend admit that he initially thought I was a secret Catholic priest sent to spy on the OTO. When I celebrated the marriage of my best friend and his wife several Roman Catholics came up to tell me how Catholic my celebration of the ceremony felt. I have a major hard on for the Jesuits, and kind of style some of my thinking after theirs, and I frequently read works by Jesuits to develop myself as a priest. I've had Catholics tell me that I'm so Catholic they don't understand why I don't just convert.

My friends and I occasionally take pause when my answers to things that come up sound more like a Catholic priest than an EGC priest or a sorcerer.

Which kind of gets to why I don't convert. I hold Gnostic views on religion. I practice magic. I believe in other gods. I'm ok with people having whatever flexibility or direction they need in their sexuality. So I probably wouldn't make it as a standard Catholic. Because I'm not one.

I had a dream once where I had to perform an exorcism, and the spirits taunted me that I couldn't do it because I wasn't a Christian and was trying to exorcise them as a Catholic priest would.

When I woke up, it definitely left me with questions about what I believe and how it all fits.

Similarly when I ask my Johannite friends about their church and coming to check out what they've got going on, I ask myself about how their priests seem to navigate being part of a Christian Gnostic tradition and then also working with Pagan Gods and non-Christian sorcery, and I ask myself about how I think and feel about such creative theology.

Because I'm cool with the idea of running around like a Valentinian and bringing the Living Gnosis to mainstream Christians and Gnostics alike, but at the same time I'm a Thelemite, I organize some of the best Dionysian spiritual revelries, and I like to hang in the woods with Druids and chat up Odin from time to time.

At the same time, I do believe in Christ as a divine being equally with the other gods. Recognizing and accepting that was pretty easy and kind of nullified the need to question stuff. But I've run into a lot of people who do question how that works, and whether or not it's something that works for them, or if it was going to how it would work.

Recently there was some joking online about being married to Christ, but it being difficult for people who want to commit to other gods too. Which is where the title of this post came from.

The thing is, from a Gnostic perspective it's really not that weird. The Living Jesus of Gnosticism isn't the singular son of a singular divine being, sharing the same divine presence in three persons. Christ is part of an overall collective of divine beings. These divine beings all stem from a non-personal divinity not far off from what we see as the One and the Good in Neoplatonism. Depending upon the nature of the divine being they might exist within different levels of emanation from the source, they might have different natures or functions or powers as well. Christ is just one of many whose purpose was to come deliver a message to enlighten the world, but he's not necessarily the principle deity or the one that people will necessarily need to work with most of the time. In fact, the whole message of the Gnostic Christ is that his message makes you the same as him. Once you're the same as him, the real work involves the other gods and spirits with whom you would interact as you enlighten yourself and enlighten the world.

From my perspective, as I thought about it more, my polyamorous relationship with Jesus is one in which he's not my primary. I dig the places he hangs out, and I like some of his lifestyle choices, but not all of them. There are other gods with whom I am closer, and with whom I've spent more time and built deeper connections. Still, as a kid I had a really deep relationship with Christ, even as I began learning magic. As a teenager when I got deeper into magic and paganism I stayed further from Christianity until I was an adult and realized that religious experience can draw from a lot of sources to inform each other and those sources don't have to disrupt each other.

I've always believed that vocation is a calling towards a universal service to the spirituality of mankind. I've always believed that religion isn't necessarily about a particular religious expression so much as the overarching divine harmony expressed through the prism of man's thoughts and actions. With that being the case, human religion is in my mind a swirling interlocking series of expressions that can speak to us in different ways for different purposes, each answering different questions of life and experience.

So yeah, Jesus and I can be bros swept up in a tenuous homosocial love affair, which bolsters my ability to call upon the divine names associated with him as I engage in Jewish and Christian sorcery, or to find meaning in the mystical explorations of God through NeoPlatonic, Gnostic, and Hermetic models which influenced the development of Christian thought. At the same time, I can help hold off the twilight of the Gods through living as a good traveling partner and following the virtues and behaviors the Gods want for man, and enjoy community within the traditional folk cultures which call to me. I can be equally swept up with the gods of my ancestors, or whatever other gods I encounter and groove with.

When did you work for the Secret Chiefs?

Facebook has my previous employer as the Secret Chiefs. Currently it has down that I work at the Gnostic Catholic Church. But it asks frequently "When did you work at the Secret Chiefs." It wants to complete my profile info by knowing when I did the job, that wasn't a job.

The question is weird in a couple ways. One, it's Facebook being invasive so it can figure out how to better connect me to stuff. But for two, the question just looks funny when asked, like if it were a conventional job what would your job be? Are you like their liaison, or agent who goes on missions for them? The page who takes memos from one ascended master to another? What would a job working for them look like? Would they have a big top floor group of offices in a skyscraper? Would it be the 11^th floor of a building with an elevator with no button numbered 11?

The real odd part of the question though is the word “when.” Working for the Secret Chiefs is the sort of thing that doesn't have a start and stop, it just is. You might think of it along the lines of the point where you join an organization committed the the Great Work, or to initiation or spiritual development, but that presumes that the Secret Chiefs operate purely through clean cut lines of temporal agency.

They don't.

Cutting away the mythology of ascended masters, or of a secret continental fraternity of masonic occult initiates, we can approach the idea of secret chiefs in a way that is useful and makes more sense. There are two ways I like to look at the idea of the Secret Chiefs.

The first of these is more temporal in nature. Initiates who reach the third order of initiation, or the Order of the SS would be counted amongst the Secret Chiefs. Now this does not refer to a specific order's curriculum or way of doing things, but rather the specific initiatic experience of unifying the ego of the manifest self with the fullness of the unmanifest divine. Any organization led by people in this state of initiation would be a Fully Contacted order in communion with the Secret Chiefs.

That said, this does not mean that everyone who has achieved this level of initiation is in communication with each other. It does not mean that there is a secret group of initiates playing poker in a hidden temple in the Himalayas and deciding the spiritual affairs of mankind.

It means that anyone operating from this perspective is operating in communion with the Harmony which underlies the universe. Their own individual expression of that Harmony will be unique to them, but it will still be an expression of the same source. So their guidance of their students, or of their particular spiritual order or school will still stem from that Invisible College of Masters even if these Masters don't get together and discuss plans and curricula. There is a unity beyond temporal ideas of unity expressed through corporeal agency.

The other half of the coin is the divine fullness, or the pleroma. In traditional Gnosticism the pleroma is an understanding of god which is unified and transcendent but also manifest and individuated. The ultimate God of Gnosticism is like that of Hermeticism or NeoPlatonism, a non-anthropomorphized non-characterized God who is undivided and complete. The pleroma is the movement of this divinity towards manifestation. This is the collective of the divine forces within the whole. The forces within the pleroma are individual divine beings, but the pleroma itself is a singular transcendent nature.

The unity a master has with divinity is a unity with this element of divinity, the full Harmony of the forces of creation united into a singular coalescent whole. Like the metals and planets of alchemy, iron is the manifestation of a particular force within the world, and Mars is the manifestation of the same force within the Heavens, so the planets and the metals form a bridge expressing the communication of the forces embodied in the stars into the elemental sphere of the world. Masters and the forces of the pleroma share a similar relationship.

So then anyone who is in a system being led by one of these Masters works for the Secret Chiefs right? Maybe, maybe not.

Sometimes people join orders, or become students without fully engaging the Work because it just isn't where they are going, or this particular expression might not be the way they're getting there. So working under that Master might not be a situation where an individual is doing the Great Work.

On the flip side, someone called to the Work, is working for the Secret Chiefs as soon as they begin movement towards answering that calling. That same Harmony which represents a component of the concept of the Secret Chiefs and works in tune with Masters might inspire, and draw, and guide people who might eventually become Masters even if they haven't realized they are that at this point in life. So anyone earnestly engaged in the Work, operating under inspiration from Truth, is in the employ of the Secret Chiefs, even if they don't yet realize they're doing the Work. So long as they continue on that path they still work with the Secret Chiefs.

So in the end, there really is no “when.”