Theosexuality
[From Approaching Babalon: Essays for the Abyss by Georgia van Raalte]
Sex is an illusion, a collapsing boundary. Truth is not phallic, but hermaphroditic, bisexual—not either/or, but always both/and. Ultimately, there is only the I/thou of the other—the other person, the other God. The two, which is zero. We are stars.
We live in a world where men are systematically dissociated from their emotions and empathy from childhood. The same can be said for women and their relationship with their own physicality. Therefore the forms of trauma experienced by men and women are different, as are their reactions towards it. We have two choices, at this juncture. We can argue all relationality is inherently traumatic, and be done with it, or we can understand our trauma as a sign of how far we have drifted from the ideal of intermingled star-hood, and try to envision something better, and work towards it.
“How can I be responsible for the unknown depths of the other?” You ask. You cannot—and yet this is what love asks of you. As we examine these subjects we quickly come to see that our whole understanding of dating, of sexuality, of love, is deeply out of sync with the rest of our practice. Reading Crowley’s diaries, we quickly see that he thought every sexual act was an act of Sex Magic, and I am brought up short by the question: why has Sex Magic fallen out of fashion? It should be the centre of our work, and of the way we understand both sexuality and relationality. Further, why is Sex Magic missing from the conversation about abuse? For we cannot properly understand magical sexuality, and thus the problems with consent and abuse within occult social structures, without understanding Sex Magic.
Sex Magic has been the reason for a lot of Magic’s bad press, from the black lodges of the occult revival to the satanic panic of the seventies. These reactions indicate the unparalleled power of sacred approaches to sexuality in the modern world. Yet our response been to stop speaking about them, to stop emphasising the centre of our art; but all this has done is leave more space for misunderstanding and abuse. It is ambivalence towards Sex Magic that has reinforced our ambivalence towards sex and sexuality, and has left us stumbling to keep up with social progress, rather than being at its vanguard. There are historical reasons for this ambivalence, which was at times necessary, but now is the time to move forward. We must come, once more, to see sex as sacred. This is the whole focus of occultism, of mysticism—it always has been. This is our Great Mystery of manifestation and energy, as it appears in Malkuth, veiled in nature. This metaphor does not just apply to women, but to all the energies invoked by the dynamic interplay of sexual difference.
Sexual liberation has led to an idea of sex as natural—but this is a fallacy. Human sex is unnatural—the ‘sexier’ it is, the further dissociated from its reproductive basis. The only way we can understand sex properly is within the divine context. Lack of this divine understanding has led to the ubiquitous pornographisation of sex. We have to aim at Adepthood. We have to see the other as divine, as irrevocably divine—how else are we to understand the divinity in ourselves? We must learn that the other is infinitely different from oneself, and yet also as divine as oneself is.
Now, we adore Our Lady Babalon for She is the ultimate fetish of fetishes—yet do we understand her? Truly? The proliferation of artwork inspired by her suggests that we do not. There is such sad irony in the fact that the Red Goddess vision of Babalon has been such a powerful and inspiring figure, for She has incited a renaissance of lipstick feminism. She is not a figure of authentic feminine sexuality, but the absorption of the masculine vision, the reproduction of the male gaze. She is easy to swallow, for She requires only a culturally sanctioned version of emasculation. Why has this sexy, bodacious figure taken over, rather than the visceral, dripping, disgusting image of power and destruction, as She was originally conceived? A whitewashed hyperreal Babalon—a “sexually liberated” Babalon—that represses women by demanding all their selves be sexual. This is a shame, not only because so many people have been so influenced by this figure. The hyperreal vision of female beauty which is ubiquitous across the art and literature of Babalon is something distinctly modern, distinctly artificial. It pretends to be about fertility and ancient slaves, but it is really about hairlessness, and regimented physicality, and red dye.
I said earlier that sex is not natural, and neither is beauty. Amazing things can be done when beauty is offered to the Gods, but it must not be this plastic vision—this male vision. Nature is disgusting, the apocalypse is disgusting. We have to find new ways to deal with the natural fallacy, and we have to discover beauty in the disgusting. This is the deeper meaning of Crowley’s Scarlet Woman, and the method of Liber Ararita. Rip away the perfect, painted face and find underneath a lewd, chattering monkey. The Ape of Thoth tells lies that obscure the truth, yet obscure it no more than those muttered by the bearded Moloch. The truth is neither one nor the other; it is both as much as it is anything. Thus we see what is really at stake if we fail to raise our Goddess to the same pinnacle as our God: we will forget that these both are but illusion.
We are Gods now. We are Gods as we are children. We are Gods when we shit, and we cry, and we curse, and above all, we are Gods when we fuck, whether we fuck in filthy carparks or in feather beds. We are Gods now. Embrace your Starhood, but remember that the other before you is a Star as well; they too have this divine potential of Godhead. Then know the power of the Gaze, as well as the Touch—as we are divine, so we are able to draw divinity out of the other, as the Kteis that Calls. Fuck Gods.
There is no part of me that is not of the Gods; when the Gods fuck, so do we. We do not speak in analogy, nor do we envision scales and similarities. The Whore was raised from Malkuth to Binah and now my coming is the spilling of Babalon; my sleep, her silence. Pan does not exist somewhere separate from me; he is in me always. He does not have sex; he is my sex. It is not that through sex we become one with the cosmos, or participate in divine ecstasy, or any such formulation. The microcosm and macrocosm are not united in this moment; it is not thus we become Gods. Sex is not a different order of thing from any other thing; nor is divinity a different order of thing from any other thing. Yet sex and divinity are one, as far as our pathetic grammar can hope to circumscribe it.
“For I am divided for love’s sake, for the chance of union. This is the creation of the world, that the pain of division is as nothing, and the joy of dissolution all.”
Every moment of manifest existence is the confluence of Nuit and Hadit. Thus existence is pure joy. We fuck Gods. We fuck their shards and lenses, the little chips of light inside us. But it is only when we realise that we are all partial objects, Gods included, that we can come to appreciate the Joy of this. It is necessary, for we are separate for the Joy of Unity, and thus we are all partial things, yearning.
Our yearning for the other, our yearning for love, our yearning to heal our self, our yearning for God, these are all lenses of the same persistent feeling, that drive toward dissolution. Yet we only ever experience this dissolute Joy for moments and glimpses, and come to realise that it is in the nature of Joy to be temporary. We can only ever catch glimpses of the original unity because the original unity was only every a glimpse. It is in its nature to resist extension in time, for extension and time are opposed to dissolute Joy. We operate in a binary paradigm, yet all the best things lie in the in-between.
Rightly understood, in a divine society, we would constantly exist in sexual circuit. Within profane society divinity is enshrined, set apart. Sex ended up on the wrong side of this equation, tarred with the brush of “nature,” and thus our concept of Godhood has been lacking its centre for two thousand years. We must reorient ourselves to understand our erotic desire as divine desire, and our desire for God as theoeroticism. Remember we are helpless but to chase the primal splintering, for we know that in the breaking apart and the putting together lie Gods. We talk of limit experiences—we like to challenge our sense of taboo, our sensation of programming, but this is all a fetish for the real limit experience: the dissolution point, when one can feel the skin no more.
The dissolution point—so vulnerable, so terrifying, so awe-full. Thus we shore ourselves up with promises, and fidelity, and trust, but this is so much noise, for there can be no safety here. Indeed, the only guarantee of making it out is to throw oneself forward, topple head first into the Abyss spilling dust and dirty handkerchiefs. To say, “Look at this thrusting phallus, breaking my carefully cultivated lines.” There is no I left to protect, and thus neither He nor the Abyss can hurt me, so long as I throw myself forward and say, “What I beyond the moaning and lowing?”
Thus I enter, and thus I crawl back out the pit, languorous in the lapping embrace of my consort. I have conquered. I am enthroned. Mine is the kteis that calls. I have made myself vulnerable, and in doing so I have found the strength beyond strength. I have found the force and fire that cannot be penetrated, for it winds as a snake or flower about the phallus.
I do not desire men. Men fall, men are frail. I crave Gods.
Only the Gods know how to worship. The Angels worshipped beautiful women long before jealous men worshipped the Gods.
***
You came to me with your body of stars and begged me for release. I told you to take back your bloody heart, for I am not the Beast nor am I his consort. I am not she who entered, but she who came out the other side. I am two-in-none, none-in-two: the primary division united into something not. Oh Beast, I offer release but not the release that you expect: not freedom from pain and doubt but the lesson within these, the fluttering beat that declares: “existence is pure joy.”
There are two paths, you see, through the Abyss: The Bold Brave Leap of the No-man who desires Naught; he will reach the Crown, or else he will stumble, spilling ashes, and doubts, and skin, and he will fall and fall and penetrate the whole. Interrogate the walls of the cavern. Become Chorozon. Legion. He of monstrous evolution from one moment to the next. Divine lack of I that knows not sanctity, only sin, secrets that have left Her with sharpened teeth and a lecherous grin. For at the bottom there can be no niche, no individuality. The languorous stretch of worms becoming circles, and at the centre of the circle, for a moment, gleams a light. For just as there are two approaches to the Abyss, there are two paths out of it. Why fear to spill your dust? Unless you remember that the Abyss is constructed of uterine linings and children’s shells.
These mysteries have been forgotten and re-forgotten, but thou shalt not co-opt the age of my Crowned and Conquering Child into a new age of man. This is the Aeon of the Children.