Feminine Initiation: the Intertwining of Snakes
[From Approaching Babalon: Essays for the Abyss by Georgia van Raalte]
Allow me to take us back to that mythic seductress and siren of all ages, the face that launched a thousand ships and burnt the topless towers of Ilium. Picture before you that face, that temptation. This woman who sold her kingdom for desire: all praise be unto Her.
Zig-zagging across the face of temporal structure we find Eve laughing in the garden—and the trail of two millennia of tortured women springing from her starry cunt. This is the horror of Eve, and Her glory—yet the gnostics knew. They had felt the snake for themselves, they had seen the jealousy of the demiurge, who wracks young bodies with ancient pain. They had seen what was at stake: knowledge, truth, life, and gnosis. Verily, to become a living God. Thus the Moloch-deity cursed Her—but we few have always known the truth.
This truth has a certain distinctive structure, a pattern which can be traced throughout the ages. Levi-Strauss and the great anthropologists had a saw through a veil, darkly—if only they had turned to face Her. For human experience tends to particular structures. What else is culture but the calcification of these, myth their crystallisation, religion their fossilization?
We approach the divine, ineffable and inexpressible, with a basketful of metaphors—some new, some well-worn, all tracing patterns upon patterns. We find the hexagram on a whiskey glass, and project a tessellating tree of life. We know our patterns. We know dying Gods rise again. We know whores must be redeemed. So we turn to face our Lady Helen of Troy, she who is also called Sophia. All for the sake of a name? Nay—for the memory of a legacy. A redemption. A redemption from what? The innate sinfulness of 50% of the species? Precisely—from the crevice into which She has been thrust by the man who would be Her saviour.
It is true, She is to be raised up from Her filth; but verily I say to thee, not until She has given the Priest the fire Qadosh—not until Her licence, and lasciviousness, and Her vicious unholy beauty has filled Him with the Diving Fire. Then, transformed in the vision of Her, then, in the sudden confluence of the Least and the Highest—verily, only then might He approach Her. Seeing Herself mirrored in His eyes, seeing Herself transformed in His vision, She raises Herself. No Man places Her upon the altar; Her chains are too heavy for any mortal to shift. Nay, only a God, shining with the Godhead She has given Him, may assist Her as She removes Her golden chains, link by link. Link by link, thread by thread She removes them, and lays them upon the Altar.
These secret mysteries: the truth of Initiation, Magic, Sex, verily the truth of Life itself, of all Divinity and Joy—these were forgotten, left to become half-truths. Thus we find the legend of Mary the mother of Jesus, and of Mary Magdalene, who are, and always were, One. What is the Magdalene, but another woman redeemed? Verily, it was Christ’s vision of Her, Christ’s Understanding of Her, that gave him Godhead. What would the crucifixion be without the mourning, hysterical lovers grouped around the bottom of the rood, to be showered in the rich, fresh blood that flows from his most holy wound—he, who would always be the male androgyne, patriarchy absorbing and negating the feminine into itself. Christianity would deny woman Her place, place above Her this monumental, statuesque, cunt-as-wound male androgyne—this jealous caricature of Her redeeming, life-giving power. Everything in Christianity comes with a catch.
The feminine secrets lay hidden: the great Gnostic Sacrament became the bloody, kteic wound of Christ, flowing into Magdalene’s womb-like cup, to be hidden in the Templar Palace, inside Mount Abiegnus, in the troubadour’s plaintive song.
When I was a child, I was obsessed with the knights of the circle and their quest for the Holy Grail. Yet the shame of Guinevere and the shame of Igraine ran about my young ears, and I left the path of the Sun to chase the fancies of the Moon. Thus I stumbled onto Kundry, and Her realm of phantasie, and Her wicked prison cunt, but something had been lost in translation. There was too much fear, too much jealousy, and though Kundry may be redeemed, the truth has been forgotten.
Look—see the way our pattern once again fills in the empty space. Initiation is not a single path, nor does it travel straight—no matter what the yearning cabbalists would tell thee. It is two snakes, wrapt round one another, twisting and turning, and we’ve spent 2000 years gilding one, while the other rots and withers, and takes on new and monstrous forms.
We question and we cry, “Why is our world this way?” We look at horror as though we do not understand it. We call our rapists monsters, because we cannot call them brother, but our brother is what they are. Sex is our secret. It is Holy. It is Desecrated. Nothing in this world will change until we have restored our greatest sacrament unto its seat in the Holy of Holies. So let us play Medusa, and Philomel. Let us scream and torture; let us be monstrous, for the monster is closer to the Gods than we are. Ay, I would rather be a Minotaur than a worm.
Look—for now She comes. Now She comes, and there is nothing left to hold Her. She has been working, patiently, with a silver file, and now the final links and chains have been worn away. Our Lady has traversed the Darkness of the Abyss. She has made Her home here; She knows its every crack and crevice, has tended it, as if it were a garden in the dark.
Our Lady, who treads upon this Earth,
Hallowed be thy names.
Thy Queendom has come.
Thy Will be done.
On Earth, as it is in Heaven.
Give us this day our daily Wine.
And forgive us our stasis.
As we forgive those who are trapped in their cages.
And lead us into temptation.
For we shall deliver ourselves from evil.
In the name of the Mother, the Daughter, and the Fire Qadosh.
We find ourselves before the ancient Tree, standing at the centre of the Garden. They told us that history’s lack of symmetry is Her primordial fault, and that it is His path to redeem the fallen Daughter, that we all might be redeemed. I say, you are making of the greatest, deepest mysteries of life something flat and plastic. There is no fault, no balance, no symmetry—only circuit, and pressure.
What are we seeking to restore? The divinity of Form: our Lady of Sorrows, She whose Lord is Chaos. We are not restoring equilibrium. We are not searching for equality, balance, the edge of the knife—nay, just the limitless, egoless lack of everything, and lack of nothing: the refutation of everything signified by the emotional ego-sense, that which can only be achieved after a thousand years in Her dark garden.
We call it restoration because we like metaphor. Yet this is not some finite process, but the very path of Life itself. It is our ontology, the structure of being. For being is in communion, movement, going—yes, the joy is in the going. Look at our Mass, listen to our Prophet. We are all nothing, which is everything, 0=2—everyman and everywoman, ants and grey worms squirming on the face of the desecrated earth.
We must come to understand, things are not as they seem. The primary movement is that of the Woman. It is She who calls. Softly, imperceptibly, She sings Her Siren song, the song of the Cup, the song of emptiness to be filled. The sea cave calling to the water—fill me! Yes, She calls out the Serpent Power within Him so that He rises to stand before Her. Seeing Her regard, He begins to feel the God within Him, the God that She has called. The Godhead fills Him, and shining forth from His eyes, He sees Her—sees the power She has given Him. He looks at Her with new eyes, and the chains and jewels of Her Whoredom become the regalia of the office of the Priestess. Now the pair can approach one another as Gods, and the divine dance of rapture can begin.
Verily I say to thee that these two twining snakes lie in each of us, and none can consider themselves a magician until they have mastered the movement of both. Verily I say to thee that the work of the Priest and the work of the Priestess both lie inside of you. You may choose to emphasise one, and lose the other, yet then all your work will be as nothing. Yet the twisting twists again; for, although those two may lie inside of you, it is a very rare Magus indeed who can achieve this transcendence alone.
“We are self-sufficient!” we cry. “A magician need work only on his own!”—but we are wrong. Why do we fear the other so? I tell you that fear is the source of all our problems, and I tell you that fear is the source of all our joys. How can we not fear the God in the other, mortal as we are? Fear is our stimulus—why must we fear fear so? It is quite the most natural thing, and in refusing and refuting fear—in leaping forward into the mouth of the Abyss, following that sneaky voice that says to crash the car, jump from the bridge, or drown in the sea—we do not reject fear, but embrace it, revel in it, dive into the inky black coated in the thick white fat of fear. Only then might we become fearless, as the Gods are. Only then might we become Gods.
So rise, Son, and raise your Daughter—and in that lift from the hips and setting upon the altar feel a circuitry enacted a thousand times before: the primary manifestation of worship, the primary manifestation of Godhood, the primary manifestation of the human.
There is naught else, naught else but the infinite moment of kill or be killed, as one contemplates the eternal Abyss hidden within the skin of the other. There is only fear, and unknowing—until the leap is made, and the God called to, and the seeker falls without a hope. Only then might the God come, to catch.