Thursday, March 14, 2013

Primas Res

You should know, my dearest brother, that the best and most noble gift that God has given to humanity in this world is knowledge. By knowledge we become acquainted with ancient things, and the causes of everything in the world, and what more immediate causes are causes of other things, and how one thing corresponds to another. By this we can know everything that is and why it is, and why one thing is raised above another in due order, and in what place exists the root and beginning of all the things of this world: that thing by which all things are dissolved, and through which everything new and old is made known. 
For this truly is the first, and it lacks nothing, nor does it need anything else except itself; it is the cause of all other things, and does not receive its qualities from another. It is not a material body, nor is it compounded of material bodies, nor is it mixed with anything other than itself, but rather is all things in itself. Therefore it may not be called anything except the One. 
Properly speaking, it is the sole truth and unique unity, and from it, anything united receives its unity. It is also the primal truth, and does not receive its truth from another; rather, everything receives truth from it.
The Picatrix, Book 1, Chapter 1

THAT THING.

That is the thing. That thing. That's what I'm after in my Work. I've sniffed it out through the ancient mysteries, and I've sniffed it out through the aethers. I've conjured spirits of the Celestial Heavens, and I've conjured dark entities who roam the darkest underworld, and they pointed me to the Way of the Primas Res, the Way of the First Things.

Call anything you can imagine, from cosmologies to deities to spirits to friends to your very own self  "It." It starts in darkness, as a light. The light grows and the darkness recedes, and its shape can be known. It reaches its potential, and the light fades, and the darkness grows, and it returns to the nothing it came from.

It passes through a non-existent veil, a membrane between the unmanifest and the manifest as it comes into being, it passes through again as it returns. There is a friction, a frission that is sexual and orgasmic as it passes through, penetrating deep into the womb of the Earth, the Mother of us all. It is sexual, orgasmic. Those are adjectives, metaphors. I'll make them similes so it's clear: It comes into being in a process that is like sex, in that it is a pleasurable, highly energized, wonderful insertion of the eternal into the temporal; It is made manifest in a moment of planting, of sowing that is like an orgasm, bursting outward all at once in radiance, leaving the awareness completely calm and centered and focused.

And like the sex act, after the orgasm, the participants can fall gently into sleep, deep enough to dream of the thing they have created, and what it means, and implies, and represents. We experience the situations, the results, the manifestations of that thing as It comes into being.

This experience of It is its consumption. Little by little it returns to the unmanifest, filtered through our senses, digested back through that membrane, moving from materia to memory, traveling down through our underworld rivers of forgetfulness and pools of remembrance. Father Time, Kronos, consumes his children, and the things that we have brought through his gate into manifestation return through his gate to the realms from which they sprang.

Our lives are manifestations of It, of that thing, that primum materia, primum mobil, the universal substrate that is the framework of everything and the universal solvent that flows through and around the substrate. And then through us It also manifests more of Itself. We are Light in Extension, extending more light yet again.

Think of Agrippa's Three Orders of the Elements, the pure essences, the first combinations thereof, and the near-infinite levels of possible mixtures you can imagine. The mother and father individually, the married unit, their offspring. The King and Queen, the Hermaphrodite, AZOTH. We purify the lens so the light within can be focused into the world at our fingertips.

Three realms, represented in your mind and thoughts and plans and ideas, and in your awareness of the moment and interaction between that inner world and all the senses of the flesh through which you perceive and interface with the events of your life, and in the material things and people outside your fingertips that you have brought into being. Through the three realms a ray of light streams and takes form in your mind, the world around you, and the mediative sensate realm that processes the flow of stuff through time through your skin. That light is manifest in all the things you create, sustain, nurture, and consume moment by moment, returning it all to the source, enriched with the joy of existence.

All of this stuff we do with magic, that's why we do it, and how we do it. That's what we do.

3 comments:

  1. This is what makes Picatrix special as a grimoire, while it has plenty of practical "recipes" it is also a treasure store of Hermetic and Neoplatonic philosophy. It's not just how to do magic, but why it works!

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  2. What are your thoughts on why Venus is given the attribution of sexuality, when sex in the context you're writing about is much larger than a specific sphere?

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