Meditation on the seventh Jupiter Pentacle

Mathers wrote: “This pentacle has great power if you consider it with the verse “he raises the poor from the dust and lifts the needy from the ash heap Dunghill” This pentacle does not have an angel associated with it and Mathers claims that it will stop the angels and demons who are protecting treasure from falling into your hands. In short it is the key to material wealth.

So lets look at this verse and see what it means.

Adam was made from the 'dust of the earth'. Cabbalistically this means that the scattering of light within creation. This light was gathered by god and ensouled with the divine breath. The light has to pulls the first is toward unity and the second is the illusion of separateness.

On the material plane, humans are not born equal. Socially some have money others do not. God has decided who does and who doesn't. The majority of the rich are the Paris Hiltons of this world. They do not create their wealth and power. It belonged to an ancestor and they inherited it. If that power was lost they would not have the ability to get it back. The dust of the earth gathered by their ancestors will erode down the generations.

However to the poor it is impossible to get enough material dust. Power appears to them in small chunks and therefore they cannot get enough of the very substance they were created from. They sit on dung hills of small materiality begging for other people's power.

However they may be taken out of this state. The One, YHVH, takes away this. Its nature is to bring things together so the beggar is raised up and power (money) is drawn to him. This does not mean that the self made man is enlightened, just that he has aligned himself to the same forces that draw more of the sparks that he has inside towards him.

Occultists are notoriously poor and often lacking in power. Why is it that a beggar wins the lottery and squanders the lot and ends up poor again? The answer is that they are not in tune enough with their Higher Self or YHVH. The poor occultist exists because they do not believe they should be concentrating on the dust, the beggar who wins the lottery fails to see God's hand in his transformation and seeks to return to his dung heap.

But we are not prisoners to the whims of an idiosyncratic God. We are made in its image of a God which is bigger than that. We are are reflection of the God that is beyond the rim of the Universe, Ayn Soph Aur. So it is the spirit in man (HVShHY) that lifts us from our dung heaps. The god within draws the sparks of matter of what we need towards us. It is not a matter of 'trusting in God' that will help us win the lottery but attuning ourselves to our higher selves to draw all things needful toward us. This is why he six rayed star is at the top of he wheel. This seal tunes us by its symbolism towards our higher self. But not in just a spiritual way, a material way.

In the centre of the seal is eight spokes with different signs on them. These are like spokes in a wheel which have been frozen for an instant. What these are we cannot be sure. On one is a triangle so we know we are looking at some form of manifestation. There is a hebrew yod which means that this is like a closed fist and meant to rotate. Yod is a symbol of the tarot key the hermit.

Two of them are crescent moons, perhaps suggesting that there is an unconscious change required in the person. However despite this maybe we do not need to know what it means. The symbols speak deep inside us. As we watch the wheel turn (like the Wheel of Fortune in Tarot which is ascribed to Jupiter), it brings its own revelations.

There are 25 letters in the verse. This number is attributed to Sagittarius, the archer and the Tarot Key Temperance which happens to be ruled by Jupiter. The 25^th path connects Yesod to the Higher Self at Tiphareth. 25 is also the number of the Rose.

So by transmuting ourselves to the Gold of Tiphareth we are lifted from begging dust on top of a material dung heap. We draw what we need by aligning ourselves to our higher self on the path of Temperance. The reason occultists are powerless and therefore poor, is because they live in the Yesod consciousness which is only marginally above the dunghill that is the rest of humanity. They need to soar upwards further up the path of Sagittarius and behold their Higher Selves. From there they can draw all things needful, both spiritual and material.

Life of Brian was the beginning of my spiritual path

Monty Python’s Life of Brian opened on August 17, 1979 in New York and Los Angeles. At the time I was a 14 year old fundamentalist Christian and I was told by our leaders not to see the film.

"I am sorry, I really didn't think that you could have a
mass initiation in the 5=6

We were told that it insulted Jesus, it was blasphemous and above all it was cruel to all those who followed Christ. Life of Brian was banned in several countries, including Norway (say no more!)

When it appeared in New Zealand some of my mates went out and picketed it. I remember one guy even bought his own cross. When the reporters asked if he had seen it yet he said “you do not need go and see a sewer to know that it smell's bad.”

In fact many of them were parroting what other people had told them about the film. None of them ever saw it, because they feared what would happen if they snuck in and formed their own opinion.

I made a mistake when I happened to say something similar about the film to my Dad. Dad is not religious, but something seemed to really bother him about it all. He knew how much I really liked Monty Python. So much so that a Monty Python ban was one of the best ways to make me behave.

In one of the few moments I can think of where he ever made me do something I would not have done, he made sure I went to the movie. In New Zealand it was an R16 and I was 14 so he went with me in case there was any trouble.

Our crack suicide squad is prepared
to kill itself if anyone reads
King over the Water

It is still one of the funniest movies of all time.

On the train home Dad had one of those sorts of conversations that fathers have with their sons about the nature of censorship. We agreed that Life of Brian did not take the piss out of Jesus but mocked those followed it. But it also lead me to question those who had demanded the film censored without seeing it. They had become like those who were too eager to throw stones at the wrong target because he had said Jehovah. Those who don't need to see sewers to know they smell bad, had missed a crucial point. Those who are ignorant should be informed before they speak. Moreover, those who are ignorant should not outsource their opinions to others however much they respect them.

Now there is King over the Water, which some on Amazon have insisted is “burnt” because it is an “insult” to a modern AO order. They have formed his opinion because someone has told them that it insults their order.Yesterday a writer called Frater Barabas even claimed that “ Public Interpretation is a Writer’s Responsibility” This is quite an alarming concept. It means that those who called for the death of Salmon Rushdie were actually right. It also implies that the public interpretation of your writing is automatically informed and right. In the case of Frater Barabas he is relying on the opinion of someone who regular readers of this blog will know fudged a quote to start a flame war. Barabas admits that he had never read the book either. 

So tell us oh leader, which book shall we burn today?

Like the guy outside the Embassy theatre with his cross, Barabas does not need to see a sewer to know it smells. He just needs to be told it smells and he will provide the intellectual frame work.

Barabas should also be aware of the dangers of anyone who turns up on the side which bays for blood. Choices made on the basis of a hysterical crowd meant that his name sake was chosen over Jesus. It does not mean that public mis-interpretation of his teaching was Jesus's fault, simply that the crowd was wiped up by a bunch of people who wanted him dead.

Likewise the readers of King over the Water have universally liked it and understand what it is getting at.  It is not attacking Mathers, or any modern order which claims it is the AO at all.  It is just presenting the historical facts about Mathers and his Order which closed in the 1940s.  If you read it for yourself you can make your own conclusion.  And, having read it, you might want to wonder why someone has gone so far as demanding the book was burnt.

Occultists do not follow crowds, nor do they parrot opinions of group leaders. After Life of Brian I started to question.  Two years later I was away from the fundamentalist Christian view point for good. It might have been that Life of Brian really was the start of my occult path.

Why I am not a Christian.

Organised religion for me is problematic. I started out at aged ten falling into a born again cult which lasted for nearly seven years. During that period I learnt a lot about the bible and organised religion, but I did not like what I had become. There were loads of people telling me what was truth and telling me that someone called Jesus wanted me to be intolerant. Then when I was 16 was in a deep meditation and I suddenly realised that the problem was that I was looking at the world as if Christianity was actually the ONLY way of seeing things. I knew there was a god but I was not convinced that it could only be seen in one way. If there was a God then it was never really going to appear in an organised way because infinity could not be expressed by an absolute. The same thing applied to all religions, however old, because they were not going to be completely true either.

Because I left Christianity on friendly terms, I did not go through the stage of hating it which I think has blighted many who have left it. You have to remember also that I didnt grow up in America or some place where fundamentalism exists as a form of social conditioning. In fact the first thing I did was read a book called Real Magic by Isaac Bonewits* and get a Deck of Tarot cards. I was soon involved in with BOTA. The appeal of that sort of occultism was that although there was a structure it was not absolute. In fact many of the discovers about the divine were to be found within the person rather than in the structure.

When I met the Whare Ra people a good percentage of them were Christians. They were not orthodox ones but they saw magic through Christian beliefs. Others were more like me and were looking for their own understanding of the One Thing.

Within the modern Golden Dawn there was a mixture of different beliefs. There were christians but equally there were a large number of Christians of various flavours. Indeed a belief in some religion helped a lot of them understand where the system was taking them. The only people who suffered where the atheists. If you do not believe in a God and you are called to surrender to something bigger, in my experience people who do not believe in a God tend to place their own ego in its place. This leads to ego inflation and a tendency to start referring to themselves in megalomaniac terms.

Those who are searching for their own beliefs through occultism end up in a different place. I found myself hit by walls of things that I did not believe in rather than I did. I could not find an anthropomorphism intellectually useful yet at the same time I tended to see God as a reflection of humanity. The closest I came to expressing what I believed was in my novel TreeFalls.

 There was a lot of Golden Dawn ideas in that book, something I did not really twig until after I wrote it. God effectively wakes up in darkness and decides to create so that it can understand itself. Humanity are sparks of that God which are interacting with creation and become trapped by the illusion. I called the God “Jeff”, because Nigel would be a silly name for a major deity. It was half joke, half me trying to say something. People do not die for a god called Jeff, nor do they say “Jeff has ordered me to to kill you”. Indeed no one can say that Jeff ordered someone to treat women like second class citizens, or invade another country. Jeff is a fairly laid back God who only calls for people to be stoned if they can get really good stuff.

Jeff is not a god which tells you what to think, he just wants you to think. Your thinking is part of his process of understanding. The biggest sin against Jeff is to go through life not thinking about anything and outsourcing the control of your life to other people.  Of course he would never tell you off for it, or pack you off to hell. He would just assume that there was a part of him that thought Reality TV was important even though he could not understand why.

So on the whole it would be a pretty good “religion.” But one of the reasons I keep silent about Jeff is because there is no point converting anyone. All roads lead to Jeff and the fact you are following a path is also part of Jeff's understanding of the universe. When you worship Jesus, Allah, the Goddess, or JHVH it is just Jeff with another hat on.

The best way to worship Jeff then is over a glass of wine or beer discussing the nature of the universe. It seems that when two or more of you open alcohol Jeff is among you learning a bit more of the nature of things.

Your higher self then is the spark of you which is Jeff and knows its true nature. It is that which occultism leads you towards.

Anyway it might not be true. It does not matter if it isn't. But Jeffism encourages others to find their own way to the One Thing. Because it helps an infinite deity understand itself. What ever you do, and what ever you find, helps that process.

* Thanks to Donald Kraig for reminding me that Issac  and Ra Bonewitz were not the same person.