Cleopatra's Needle

From the great Egyptian Ritual, which so cryptically allegorizes this earthly death, we learn that the mystery of the Sphinx originated with the conception of the earth as the place of passage, of burial and rebirth, for the humanized deities. An ancient Egyptian name for the Sphinx was Akar. This was also the name for the tunnel through the underworld. And it is said that the very bones of the deities quake as the stars go on their triumphant courses through the tunnels of Akar (Pyramid Texts: Teta, 319). As the stars were the descending deities, the metaphor of stars passing through the underworld tunnels is entirely clear in its implication. The riddle of the Sphinx is but the riddle of mankind on this earth. The terms of the riddle at least become clearly defined if we know that the mystery pertains to this our mortal life, above ground, and not to our existence in some unlocalized underworld of theological fiction. (Alvin Boyd Kuhn, The Lost Light)

"Thus humanity, always mindful of its nature and origin, perseveres in the imitation of divinity; and as the Lord and Father made eternal gods, that they should be like Himself, so humanity fashioned its own gods according to the likeness of its own countenance." When this Æsculapius, to whom especially he was speaking, had answered him, and had said, "Dost thou mean the statues, O Trismegistus?"—"Yes, the statues," replied he, "however unbelieving thou art, O Æsculapius,—the statues, animated and full of sensation and spirit, and who do such great and wonderful things. . . . Dost thou not know, O Æsculapius, that Egypt is an image of heaven, or, more truly, a translation and descent of all things which are ordered and transacted there, that it is, in truth, if we may say so, to be the temple of the whole world? . . ." (Æsculapius, apud Augustine)

Neon Bible

The Two Truths of Roma Amor (Kuhn)

White (Upper Egypt) communicates her pneuma (Bel Air) to the nostrils of the immobile Red (Lower Egypt)

"World's biggest female artist recreated" = "Valentinus, according to Clemens Alexandrinus (Valentini homil. ap. Clem. Strom. iv. 13, 92), spoke of the Sophia as an artist (zographos) making this visible lower world a picture of the glorious Archetype"

Hostess Twin Keys

. . . the waters of "Cooter" have become commercialized and the falsely empowered box is in command. As if the puppet could make the strings do something. The real music is coming from the man at the piano. . . . Our carousing stupor has filled the table of Gehenna with plenty to eat. (Eugene)

Nuit swallows the Sun

Babylon and Babalon

Seal of Rey

Dahlia Split (Rhea of the two poles)

The sacred literature is filled with references to the two waters, or the water of the double source. In many myths there are two streams, two springs, two wells, two lakes. Cosmically the two indicate the original fission of God’s being into the two poles of positive and negative life, or spirit and matter. This was the divine life that emanated in two streams to fructify creation. In the lower world it is reflected in the division between the water of the air above and on the earth below, vapor and liquid, cloud on high and stream on the ground. Sometimes the goddesses representing primal fecundity are cut in two, as Tiamat, Isis, Neith, Hathor, Apt, Rerit. Thus Nut was the goddess of celestial water and Apt of the terrestrial; Isis of the heavenly, Nephthys of the earthly. . . .

Two tears in solidarity

In Egyptian and Hebrew traditions the deity is represented as shedding two creative tears, a poetic version of the two waters.

Naturally this stream of life force sweeping mankind onward marks the boundary between the animal and the spiritual kingdoms. Animal man can not cross it until he has been bathed in its waters and been purified and transformed. We are crossing this boundary line between our lower and higher natures.

The twin pools were located in Anu, the white water being southward, the red northward. In the Ritual one name for it is the "Well of Sem-Sem." Sem-Sem denotes regenesis. The Ritual says: "Inexplicable is the Sem-Sem, which is the greatest of all secrets." It was the place where sun and moon were renewed. In consequence it was a place where the deceased seeks the waters of regeneration, or fount of youth. He says (Ch. 97): "I wash in the Pool of Peace. I draw water from the Divine Pool under the two Sycamores of heaven and earth. All justification is redoubled on my behalf.". . . In plain language all this metaphorization means simply that man, a biune being, strides forward in his evolution by dipping in the experiences of both the carnal embodiment, the Pool of Natron, the "Nature" Pool, and in the god’s divine essence, the Pool of Salt, the "Spirit" Pool. . . .

(Horselover Phat)

The Eternal Being of God was by the mythicists typed by that which is most enduring and stable of all earthly things--the rock. But that everlasting Rock split itself into two at the beginning of creation. The line of cleavage runs midway through the center of its being, dividing the upper millstone of spirit from the lower one of matter. And right into that aperture between the two nodes of being deity placed man. (Kuhn)

The Queen is Dead?

[T]he serpent has become a symbol of both the fire and the water elements, and hence types both our divine and our sensual natures. "When above it was the serpent of air and fire, and when below the serpent of water and earth." . . . There is the Good Serpent, Agathodaemon, and the Evil Serpent, Kakodaemon, symbol of Satan. Water, too, became a dual sign, with a higher and lower translation. As the first it was an emblem of the outpourings of divinity, the water of life that Jesus promised to the woman at the well; as the second, it typed the fluctuating, restless, sensual nature in which the divine fire was so nearly drowned out. . . . The Ritual speaks of our baptism on earth "in the Pool of the Double Fire." . . . 

We are heavenly spirits turned upside down on earth! Earth reverses heavenly lines of motion. It reflects the pattern of things in the mount, but inverted. The highest symbols of heaven therefore fall at the very bottom of earthly tracing. . . .

There is the dragon of wisdom guarding the tree of knowledge, and there is the Apap monster, the crocodile of the waters. The latter is the "villain" of the play. But there is light in many statements that the serpent of evil is to be transformed into the serpent of good. . . . 

Likewise there is found in the northern sky the (former) pole star Alpha Draconis, and in the southern heavens the star Eta Hydri. On this dual pivot of the dragons the starry skies revolved. As in the uranograph between the two Dragons was run the line of the axis of stability for the planet, so the axis of stability in man’s life is the line of force running between the upper serpent of spiritual wisdom and the lower one of animality. All cosmic stability is fixed upon a line of force playing between the two poles of vital affinity, positive and negative, the two serpent fires. . . .

The picture of the sun-god swallowed by a great fish is very common. In the "crocodile" chapter of the Ritual we read: "I am the crocodile whose soul comes from men . . . I am the Great Fish of Horus." (Ibid.)

Playing with Magick (Reptiles in the Nile)

Some girls are bigger

Than others

(Antony and Cleopatra: New Critical Essays)

(Upper Egypt)

White

 

Quod est superius est sicut

  

(Lower Egypt)

Red

Quod est inferius

In every religious epic there is first and centrally a Holy City, a "Jerusalem," residence of the king and the eventual home of all the elect. There is next an Upper and Lower Land, typifying the dual segmentation of heaven and earth, or spirit and body, in man’s nature, which was in all systems held to be the union of a divine with an animal principle. The two sections were always connected by a river, rising in the higher mountainous sources in the Upper Kingdom and flowing thence, carrying its blessings of fertility, down into the Lower Kingdom, which is thus nourished by the living water from above. Then there was always a bordering sea, symbolical in every case of the stormy ephermeral scene of the mortal life. No less was there a smaller water. . . . to be crossed by the voyaging soul to reach the more blessed isles, or farther shore of spiritual bliss. . . . 

There was a mountain or holy hill of the Lord, and there were points of entrance and exit from and to the lower world of Amenta. . . .

"The pattern of things in the Mount," "the pattern of the heavens," has not hitherto been seen to be the Biblical analogue and symbol of Plato’s ideal forms. The Mount, the heavens, are of course the heights of divine ideation, whereon God projected his new world in thought forms before he impressed them upon matter. The heavens are the uplands of consciousness, or spheres of being, not physical localities. God formed his mental models on the Mount of Vision and Imagination before he cast them into concretion.

It requires little "proof" to ascertain that "Egypt" as used throughout the Bible has the meaning of the lower self or animal-human personality, indeed the physical body of man itself. Jerusalem means the "holy city" or the heavenly realms, which are in consciousness, not on the map. . . . 

". . . The name of Jerusalem we read as the Aarru-salem or fields of peace in the heaven of the never-setting stars. . . . Thus Jerusalem on earth was to take the place of Jerusalem above and the Aarru-hetep became Jerusalem simply as a mundane locality." . . .

A mass of legends center about the fact that in the early stages of human history an Eden of happiness was submerged under a deluge that covered the Mount. An initial Paradise was overthrown and buried under waters that flooded the earth. (Ibid.)

THE GARDEN OF EDEN BEFORE THE FALL (UPPER EGYPT)

At the summit are the THREE SUPERNAL Sephiroth summed up into One - AIMA ELOHIM, the Mother Supernal - The Woman of the Apocalypse . . . . From the Three Supernals follow the other Sephiroth of the Tree of Life.

Below the Tree, proceeding from Malkuth is the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, which is between the Tree of Life and the World of Assiah or Shells, represented by the Coiled Up Dragon with Seven Heads and Ten Horns - being the Seven infernal Palaces and the Ten Averse Sephiroth.

THE GARDEN OF EDEN AFTER THE FALL (LOWER EGYPT)

The Great Goddess . . . being tempted by the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge, stooped down to the Qliphoth . . . the Columns were unsupported, and the Sephirotic Scheme was shattered; and with it fell Adam the Microprosopus.

Then arose the Great Dragon with seven heads and ten horns, cutting by his folds Malkuth from the Sephiroth, and linking it to the Kingdom of the Shells. The Seven Lower Sephiroth were cut off from the Three Supernals in Daath, at the feet of AIMA ELOHIM. (Golden Dawn Knowledge Lecture)

(Philosophy as a Rite of Rebirth)

Swedenborg writes that "while man is in the world, he is in the midst between heaven and hell; and then he is kept in freedom to turn himself either to hell or to heaven." In Jeremiah (21:8) we find: "Thus saith the Lord, Behold, I set before you the way of life and the way of death." . . . 

Man on the horizon is not only nailed on the cross of matter; he is being weighed in the scales of the balance, to see if his heart is so spiritualized as to be light as a feather! . . .

The two Horus forms or lion gods are the two pillars of justice, and the judgment is the long series of decisions which the man himself renders as he journeys across. At the completion of his journey over the intervening terrain, the man hears Thoth pronounce to the gods: "Hear ye this judgment. The heart of Osiris hath in truth been weighed and his soul hath stood as witness for him; it hath been found true by trial in the Great Balance." (Kuhn)

Two Lands

The two lions are much in evidence as representatives of the two natures that are balanced on the horizon line. . . . the two lion-gods stood, one on either horizon, to guard the entry and exit gates of Amenta. And these two lion figures type something more than fanciful guardianship. They dramatize god-man himself in his two characters of deity gone to its death in the flesh, and deity re-arisen. The lion on the west border is the figure of dying divinity; the lion east is the figure of divinity born anew, conqueror of darkness and death, opener of graves, lifter-up of humanity.

The two are Horus the Elder, decrepit, wizened, disfigured, ready to die and give place to his seed; and Horus the Younger, radiant, blooming, triumphant. Dying lion and the "lion’s welp" of the Old Testament, they were the two phases of godhead at the two opposite sides of the eternal cycle of death and rebirth. At once a large segment of disguised purport in theology is opened to enlightened view when we examine the Egyptian name for these two antique lion figures. It is kherufu. This is at once seen to be the Hebrew cherub and its plural cherubim, the angelic powers that support the ark of the covenant at its two ends. And further thrilling revelation accrues from this connection through a passage in Exodus (25:22), in which it is stated that Moses (Man) was bidden to commune with deity "from between the two cherubim"! . . .

Standing on the dividing line, homo sapiens surveys the lands on both sides. In the Ritual Isis addresses the rising Horus: "Thou risest on us; thou illuminest the Two Lands. The horizon is covered with the tracks of thy passings. The faces of gods and men are turned to thee.". . . he "pacifies the Two Lands, he unites the Two Lands." As he closes the gate of heaven on the west, he opens it on the east. "Thou openest the gate of heaven leading to the horizon and the hearts of the gods rejoice at meeting thee." . . ."Thou art the lord of heaven; thou art the lord of earth . . . whom the goddess Maat embraceth at noon and at eve." . . . "He made the two Rheti goddesses, the Two Sisters of the Two Lands, to be at peace before thee. He did away with the hostility that was in their hearts, and each became reconciled to the other." . . .

"I die, and I am born again, and I renew myself and I grow young each day." The sea of earth life lying between the two cherubim guarding the gates of west and east is verily the fountain of eternal youth, whose waters impart to the bathers the potent elixir that restores a vigor agelessly fresh. . . . Horus says: "I am the twin lions, the heir of Ra" (Ch. 38). (Ibid.)

(Paradise Lost)

(Arthur Waite)

Beside the pairs of contending brothers, mythology presents the many pairs of the two women . . . The solar heroes have ever two mothers, a heavenly and an earthly one. The one conceives the son, the other bears him. "The Two Daughters of the king of the north gave birth to thee, the great ladies of his head." . . .

"The Hall of the two Maat Goddesses, the two Goddesses of Truth, shows one goddess presiding over Upper and the other over Lower Egypt. One guards the soul, the other the body." (Kuhn)

As the living rivers flow forth out of the heart of eternal matter, the womb of all life, the godly nutriment is again proffered to man streaming from the breast of the Mother Isis or Hathor. "She giveth him her breast and he suckleth thereat.". . . The ancient mother source was portrayed as twofold, a breathing land-animal in front, a water-animal behind, typing the elements of water and air. . . . The Hindu goddess Maya hovers over the waters, and presses her two breasts with both hands, ejecting the twofold stream of living nutriment. (Ibid.)

Book of What is in Her Tuat:

Linda Faux (UBIK Trash)

When the deceased is making his way through Amenta, Hathor, the Egyptian Venus, goddess of Love, emerges from the trees and offers him a drink of fruit juice, which she prepared to woo him with. By accepting this gift he is bound to remain the guest of the goddess and return no more to the world of the living, unless by her permission. This fruit is not that which is sent down gratuitously from heaven, but the fruit of the soul’s living experience on earth, yet it is the same thing in the end. . . . 

Eve and Hathor are identical figures. They offer to virgin spiritual units and to animal man the opportunity to live, grow and create, out of which cycle they will emerge as gods, through knowledge of good and evil. And the temptation is baited with the promise, "yet shall not surely die." The fruit of earthly life is divinization. Says Massey:

Live for the Now (Pharaoh Pepi-Cola)

"Hathor was the goddess draped in golden vesture, who drew men with the cords of a love that was irresistible."

"Instead of being damned eternally through eating the fruit of the tree, the Manes in Amenta are divinized piecemeal as the result of eating it." (Rit., Ch. 82). . . .

The Ritual speaks eloquently again in one of its chapter titles: "Of drinking water in the underworld." And in this chapter the Manes prays: "May there be granted to me mastery over the water courses as over the members of Set (Sut)." . . . There were various pools and lakes which the Manes was to cross on his journey through the underworld. Pepi, the soul, is called "the efflux of the celestial water, and he appeared when Nu came into being." (Ibid.)

Red, White, Blue's in the skies (Lip Phil 'Er Injection)

Red as the color of blood, and white, the color of milk, emblem the two natures of man, his bodily birth through the mother’s blood, and his later nourishment through her milk. Red is connected closely with the first Adam, whose name means in one interpretation, Red Earth, that is, physical matter mixed with red blood. In this character he would be the answer to the Bible’s query, "Who is this that comes from Edom, with his garments crimson in Bozrah?" Edom was this man Adam, red earth, mortal clay mixed with the life essence of divinity typed by the blood, in which the Old Testament affirms several times the life of the soul is to be found. And he who comes out of Edom may be taken as the Christ, the Son of Man. For the first Adam is to give birth to the second Adam. Blood here types the divine part of man, as contrasted with earth or with water. Jesus emblems the two births as those of "water and the blood." But when the blood is used to typify the lower natural man then it is contrasted with the white essence, the mother’s milk, a higher nutriment than her blood . . . White universally types that which is spiritually highest, up to the shining white raiment of the redeemed. Perfection being the synthesis of all lower or divided natures in original unity, white represents that perfection, as it is the synthesis of the colors. . . . "The immortal liquor is the Solar Light." . . . 

The union of the white of divinity with the red of nature produces the new birth. . . . So the first or natural man, born of the blood, the first Adam or "red earth," is raised to his status of spiritual new birth by "the white liquor which the glorified ones love." . . . Our divinization turns us from red to white. . . .

We have seen that this interchange of influences underlay one meaning of the baptism, god and man reciprocally baptizing each other, the one with water, the other with fire. It could be extended to the deluge symbolism. Likewise god and man intoxicate each other, the one with spiritual, the other with sensual, wine of life. The gods were almost submerged under the mighty tide of sensuality that swept in upon their souls at their entry into animal bodies. . . .

Reconciliation is attested in the following: "Pepi is the uniter of the Two Lands." (Ibid.)

I know your wife, and she wouldn't mind

We made it out to the other side

Phoenix Stone (A Pyramid Unfinished)

(Kuhn)

Spinning Wheel

The Garden

Horselover Fat in the Palm Tree Garden (Walking on Air)

The spirit of God outbreathed as air or breath, from which was precipitated the water of life on earth. Rain is distilled out of the bosom of the air. In the form of vapor, visible or invisible, the upper heaven holds the celestial water, the type of divine life embosomed in air--emotions germinally latent in thoughts. And when this water has fallen to earth, it takes the action of fiery spirit to convert it back again to heavenly state, and this can only be done by the superior energy transmuting its nature from liquid to vapor or "spirit" form.

 

The deceased, awaiting his resurrection, cries to Nu: "Give me water and the breath of life!". . .

A Norse myth tells of the division of a single primal world into two halves, or the separation of the two waters of the firmament, as in Genesis. The one was a world of water, the other of air, and the beings in the lower water ascend by night to breathe the pure air of the upper half; and it is said the sun consumes them like vapor. This would restate the Assumption of the Virgin. . . . It might be said that after every day and every incarnation man ascends to inhale refreshing draughts of spiritual air on an upper plane. . . . 

Lack of air, or smothering, was a twin type with drowning for the limitations of incarnation. A phrase of the Ritual indicates this: "whose throat stinketh for lack of air." In descending to seek her lost brother and husband Osiris, Isis is claimed to have "made light appear from her feathers; she made air to come into being by means of her two wings,"--another personation of the fanner or winnower. The god fans the mortal to keep him from being suffocated for lack of air, mind. (Kuhn)

Water so obviously presented a menace to life by drowning that it becomes the focus of ideas emphasizing an escape from evil. As such it is not the water of life, but the water of death. It signified the lower life of generation, or life in "death." Water stops our breathing and perils the air-sustained life of deity. . . .

Being born of water, avers Massey, is but to be borne upon it. As man was not able to live under water, life was pictured as a coming out of it or a floating upon it. To be born into life, therefore, was to escape from the water, and come up where breath was obtainable. The very first act of the babe new-born out of the water of the womb is to catch its first breath! Immersed in the waters of generation, of sense and desire, man can not come to his real life, or second birth, until he can rise out of the "water" to breathe the more vivifying air of the heaven of mind and spirit. . . .

The mummy was ferried over the water to the western mount where Hathor-Isis or the Cow-Goddess awaited the solar god and the crowd of Manes with him. This was in preparation for his burial--fittingly on the west side where the sun sank--and the body was placed in a mausoleum there.

But the journey of the Manes across the sea of this life, over the "waters beneath," was from west to east, from the gate of entry to the underworld on the west to the gate of resurrection on the east. That which dies in the west must rise again in the east. The level stretch of "water" between, over which the voyage is made, is the "sea of life." . . .

A perfect storm

The "dead" are described as those who have voyaged in the boat at night, bound for the city of Akhemu at the polar Paradise. . . . The mast is described as "he who bringeth back the great lady after she hath gone away.". . . In life the material body is the ark in which the soul is carried over the sea of sense and realism; in the heavenly state the ark is the spiritual body that enwombs the seeds of physical creation. (Ibid.)

Horse Lover (Black Beauty)

Dark Horus

Two Truths (Pussy and Pussy)

Then the horse [Osiris] is slaughtered . . . The chief queen [Isis] ritually calls on the king's fellow wives for pity. The queens walk around the dead horse reciting mantras. The chief queen then has to mimic copulation with the dead horse [= the body of Osiris] . . . On the next morning, the priests raise the queen from the place where she has spent the night [in the Underworld] with the horse. ("Ashvamedha")
 

Dear John,

The King in Memphis

Trash Magick

The banquets of the gods, the Passover feasts, the funerary meals, the last suppers and the Totemic repasts were all forms of a primary Eucharist. Man was given the transcendent privilege of feeding upon the life of the [old] gods! . . .

God must be ground between the teeth of wild animals, our animal bodies, to be made the pure bread of Christ. . . . Man is literally to eat his Lord’s body . . . we can partake of a spiritual essence or body of divinity. The absorption and transmutation of currents of deific life in our own nature is as possible as our digestion of food. . . . The juice of the grape was the blood of Horus or Osiris, in the Egyptian Eucharist. . . . .

In the Greek Mystery play the candidate for initiation underwent the taurobolium or bull’s-blood bath. He stood under a grating and received upon his naked body the dripping blood of the sacrificial bull, in token that his nature was being suffused with the shed blood of the [old] god. . . .

Eating Fire

The principle of soul, says the Oracle, is the operator and giver of life-bearing fire. It fills the vivific bosom of Hecate (the lower nature) and pours on the linked natures of matter and spirit the fertile strength of a fire endured with mighty power. . . .

And the mystery becomes awesome when we realize that our own life is more than analogous to fire; it is of kindred nature with it. The soul within us is a spark of divine flame.

The origin of the word is of interest. It goes back to the Greek pur(pyr). Massey traces the word "pyramid" from the stem, plus the Egyptian met, meaning "ten" or "a measure," giving us pyramet. (Kuhn)

"The word Pyramidos has been translated as 'Fire In The Middle'."

Candidate for the A.'. A.'. (playing with Magick)

The City of the Pyramids is the home to those adepts that have crossed the great Abyss, having spilled all their blood in the Graal of Babalon. They have destroyed their earthly ego-identities, becoming nothing more than piles of dust (i.e. the remaining aspects of their True Selves without the self-sense of "I"). Within, they take on the name or title of Saint or Nemo (Latin for No-Man). In the system of A.'.A.'. they are called Masters of the Temple. ("Thelemic Mysticism")

(Antony and Cleopatra: New Critical Essays)

Riddle of the Sphinx

Plato reports the Demiurgus in the notable speech to the legions of devas in the Timaeus as saying that "whatever is immortal and divine" in the human makeup, "of that I will furnish the seed and the beginning. It is your business to do the rest; to weave together mortal and immortal natures." The upper plane furnishes the seeds of godhood, the lower furnishes the soil or garden. Divinity is planted in "the garden of the world." It is the seminal soul of divine mind, destined to germinate and eventually blossom in the ground of humanity. . . .

Very apt, then, is the story of Isis and Osiris. Their infant, Horus, was suckled by Isis in solitude. She reared him in secret, and his limbs grew strong in the hidden land. None knew the hiding place, but it was somewhere in the marshes of Amenta, the lower Egypt of the mythos. . . . 

Likewise it is the background of the "flight into Egypt" of Jesus in the Gospels. The divine child had to be taken down into "Egypt" until the Herut menace was passed and in order that the son of God might be brought up out of it. As the angel of the Lord says to Joseph, "Arise and take the young child and his mother and flee into Egypt," so at the birth of Horus the god Taht says to the mother, "Come, thou goddess Isis, hide thyself with thy child." She is bidden to take him down into the marshes of Lower Egypt, called Kheb or Khebt. . . . 

Following the statement that heaven is pregnant with wine, it is said that "Nut maketh herself to give birth to her daughter, the Morning Star." . . .

Birth is delivery from some womb. Matter is the mother of the gods and the body of physical man is the womb of the god who is struggling to come to being in it. (Ibid.)

Night Mare Boy

The lower man’s immediate relation to his soul permits him to drink of that immortalizing nectar, and as it was always Eve, or Hathor, or Ishtar, a goddess, a woman, who offers to man the tempting cup, the inference is that mundane experience with matter, the mother of life, is the brimming chalice for our deification. . . .

[W]ine-pressing symbols the crushing and division of unity to flow into multiplicity and spiritize divided creatural life. What is most singular is that Taylor likens this process to another oft-used typology, that of fleece, stating that the Greek word for "wool," lenos, is practically identical with that for a "winepress," lenôs. The tearing and carding of wool matches the liquidation of the grape for purposes of typism. Should it be deemed strange, then, that Gideon, found threshing wheat in the winepress, should immediately ask the Eternal to authenticate his commission to him by the test of the dew on the fleece? It need hardly be pointed out what strength these symbols of wine and fleece, along with flour, bring to the theory of dismemberment. . . . Fleece, says Taylor, is the symbol of laceration or distribution of intellect, or Dionysus, into matter; and he adds that Isidorus traces lana (Latin: "wool") from laniando, "tearing," as vellus (Latin: "fleece") from vellendo, also "tearing." "Delano," "to tear asunder," he uses "in relation to Bacchic discerption." (Ibid.)

Let him look upon the cup whose blood is mingled therein, for the wine of the cup is the blood of the saints. . . . With the breath of her kisses hath she fermented it, and it hath become the wine of the Sacrament, the wine of the Sabbath; and in the Holy Assembly hath she poured it out for her worshipers, and they had become drunken thereon, so that face to face they beheld my Father. Thus are they made worthy to become partakers of the Mystery of this holy vessel, for the blood is the life. So sitteth she from age to age, and the righteous are never weary of her kisses, and by her murders and fornications she seduceth the world. ("Babalon")

Shin and Mem make Welch's Groupname for Grapejuice and Pepsi-Cola

The "spirit" in wine is a graphic figure of the other spirit. Wine is water that has in it the fire of spirit, and in American pioneer days it was often called "fire-water." Fire universally typed spirit. Grape juice is just water of earth that has had injected in it a power engendered by the sun, again the type of spirit, as it passed through the length of the vine to be deposited in the berry at the end. The sun, like the Christ it symboled in his "miracle" at Cana, turns water into wine in any vineyard! . . .

The soul is, or causes, the divine ferment in the body of life, developed there, as in the vine, by the sun of man’s spiritual self. Drink and divinity are thus found under one name, as were fleece and grape . . . .

Unveiled

A beautiful girl enters the earth, and it is said of her that her body glistened, for she was like brass in her pristine purity; but she took black earth and smeared her body with it. She was then seen, very dirty and soiled, to enter a pool, from which she emerged with all her radiance restored and body shining. . . . rising into spirit . . . divested . . . of these "filthy rags" . . . (Kuhn)

Water types soul in body, or the god in matter. Baptism with water, then, is just the experience of the god in this bodily life. It means what the incarnation means, and nothing more. The ceremonial of sprinkling or immersion is but the dramatic representation of the fact of this life itself. By the application of the Law of the Two Truths it can be made to typify the baptism of the lower nature by the celestial water. . . .

The twice-born were the twice-baptized, first in water, then in fire. Says Irenaeus (Bk. I, Ch. 21:2): "The two baptisms of the Gnostics were recognized by them as the animal and the spiritual." . . .

The ceremonial purity so often insisted on in the texts of the Ritual is acquired by the Manes after he

"purifies himself in the Lake of the Country of Reeds. Horus dries his body, Thoth dries his feet, Shu raises him up, and the Heaven-goddess Nut gives him her hand. He appears in the Field of Reeds and purifies himself therein." . . .

The moon stands between man and total darkness, yet she has no light to give of herself. She but transmits the brightness of one higher than herself. . . . The Egyptians said that Osiris copulated with the dead body of Isis and impregnated it and that the touch of his sperm revived it--all in the dark, out of sight. Another version is that Isis drew the seed from Osiris’ dead body and impregnated herself, giving birth to Horus. . . . 

The tale of the Sleeping Beauty is but a form of this tropology. The beautiful maiden is the moon-goddess, waiting in a state of negativity until awakened to reproductive life by the lover’s kiss--the sun’s rays. (Ibid.)

(Religion and Drama in Early Modern England)

The coming forth by day then must refer to the final transfer of the imprisoned soul from this darkness to the Elysian meadows of supernal delight. . . .

"My soul shall not be fettered to my body at the gates of the underworld; but I shall enter in peace and I shall come forth in peace." These and similar phrases of promise are to be fulfilled on that great day, the name of which is itself significant--the day of "Come thou to me," or "the day of ‘Come unto us,’" or "Come thou hither." This was to be the opening day of the resplendent new creation. Revelation speaks of the same grand inaugural: "The spirit and the bride say ‘Come’!" (Ch. 20:11). Spirit and matter, calling from the horizon, bid us come to the crowning. . . . Isis bewails:
 
"Come to thine abode! Come to thine abode!
God An, come to thine abode!
Look at me; I am thy sister that loveth thee.
Do not stay from me, O beautiful youth;
Come to thine abode, with haste, with haste.
Mine eyes seek thee;
I seek thee to behold thee.
Will it be long ere I see thee?
Beholding thee is happiness." . . .

Then the two goddesses sing the song of the resurrection as a magical means of raising their beloved from the dead. A form of this song is to be found in the evocations addressed to the dead Osiris by the two sisters, who say:

"Thy two sisters are near thee, protecting thy funeral bed, calling thee in weeping, thou who art prostrate on thy funeral bed" . . . . (Kuhn)