Here, deification by drowning follows the model of the eternally rejuvenated Osiris and is further assimilated to the Egyptian solar cosmology where to descend into the primordial waters (West, decline, death) is necessary to rejuvenation (East, incline, life). As among early Pythagoreans and southern Italian mystery cults, continual renewal through death and revivification is mediated by a descent (katabasis) into the underworld (in Egyptian cosmology, the duat). Apotheosis and drowning therefore cohere in the praxis of initiatory death, the conditio sine qua non of rebirth into immortal life. . . .
Seth is not only the murderer but also the reviver of Osiris. [23] Upon closer inspection, the mythology of Seth-Typhon reveals a complex divinity presiding over all dangerous thresholds and ontological transitions. As such he is pivotal not only to the death (drowning, dismemberment) but also to the rebirth (resurrection) of Osiris . . . the deeper significance of drowning, as well as the overarching symbolism of all the drowning rites in the PGM, is best understood in the context of the Egyptian solar cosmogony, particularly as expressed in the underworld books. As Erik Hornung points out, “in the late period the Egyptians formally recognised the process of “divinisation by drowning”; monuments were even erected for people who had drowned in the Nile. The Egyptians could thus rest assured that an elaborate, official burial was not the crucial prerequisite for a blessed afterlife.” [25] It must be emphasised, however, that with the magical papyri we are dealing with a rite that is intended not for the common purposes of securing a blessed afterlife per se, but with the initiatic purpose of encountering death as a means to apotheosis. As shall be seen, the deeper Egyptian context of this rite only becomes explicit when one examines the nature of the sun’s nocturnal journey. . . .
As Christine Strauss has pointed out, drowning as the means to deification is ultimately bound to the cyclical rebirth of the sun-god, who descends nightly into the watery depths of Nun to be reborn again with the morning sunrise. [30] The nocturnal journey of the sun finds its most distinctive representation in the New Kingdom underworld books: the Amduat (literally, “what is in the underworld”) and the Book of Gates. [31] Depicted in royal tombs and on sarcophagi, these so-called Unterweltsbücher begin with the sun’s setting in the western horizon and conclude with its rising on the eastern horizon. During the interim, the solar barque moves through the depths of the earth, traversing the twelve hours of the night, which form the structure of the text.
The underworld (duat) is essentially a place of regeneration. It is also a place of ultimate destruction. Despite or perhaps because of such dangers, however, the nightly descent of the sun into the depths of the netherworld allows the solar divinity to be revitalised. This takes place in the primordial waters of Nun. It occurs precisely at sixth hour: the nadir of the journey, corresponding to midnight.
The fact that this is a soul journey as well as a cosmogonic processio is emphasised by the fact that, throughout the duat, the sun-god takes his nocturnal, ram-headed form. Here the ram represents the ba (psychē) of Ra; this is an onomatopoeic rebus: in addition to ‘psychē, soul,’ the word ba means ‘ram.’ [32] The essential concern of the sixth hour of the duat is the unification of the divine ba-soul with its body (ḫ.t). Whereas the ba of Ra is represented as a ram-headed divinity, the body of Ra is represented as Osiris—the corpse of the sun-god—who lies waiting in the waters of Nun to be reanimated by his ba. Interestingly, Osiris, the corpse of Ra, takes the form of a scarab, the beetle that raises the disc of the rising sun and whose hieroglyph is ḫpr: ‘to evolve, come into existence, be’ (prefiguring even in death the form of the rejuvenated, rising sun; as will be noted later, the scarab also figures in other apotheosis/drowning rites in the PGM). The resurrection of the sun thus proceeds from the moment of unification of what in alchemical terms would be called the “volatile” and the “fixed” (Ra and Osiris; soul and body). . . .
The regeneration of the drowned is one of the many parallel motifs which accompany the central motif of solar regeneration. Here, the waters in which the drowned die are assimilated to the waters by which the drowned are regenerated. In the tenth hour of the Amduat (the ninth hour in the Book of Gates), the waters of Nun are represented by a large, blue rectangle in which the naked bodies of the improperly buried dead float. By being assimilated to the primordial waters of Nun, however, the annihilating waters that cause death also enable the drowned access to the regenerating capacities of the underworld. Through their assimilation to the rejuvenating underworldly waters, the dead are offered the chance to escape ultimate destruction (represented by the chaos serpent Apophis, the inimical force which Seth conquers, evincing his positive, cosmogonic function through the facilitation of ḫpr/genesis). By partaking of the regenerating nature of the primordial waters, the drowned escape destruction and, like Osiris, become sacred (whereupon the Osirian epithet, ḥsy, ‘sacred drowned, blessed dead,’ is applied to them). . . .
More specifically still, we would suggest that the symbolism of white emerging from black may be more deeply understood in terms of contemporary hellenistic alchemical processes. [45] Here, black and white represent the first two phases of the alchemical transmutation—melanōsis (blackening) and leukōsis (whitening)—in which the dark, fertile prima materia (virgin earth) secretly contains and gives rise to an “occult” white or silver (virgin milk). . . .
Taken as a whole, we are dealing with a feminine (black-lunar) matrix and a masculine (golden-solar) embryo that comes to fruition within this matrix. Theologically, we are dealing with Isis as the “black virgin” who nourishes the golden divus filius (Horus) on her divine “virgin’s milk.” . . . In the Pyramid Texts, the pharaoh drinks the divine milk from the breasts of his mother Isis . . . .
In an Orphic lamella discovered in a tumulus at Thurii (southern Italy), the Bacchic initiate is identified as a kid (eriphos, a young goat), signifying the renatus regenerated from initiatory death and nourished by the milk that flows from the breasts of the goddess (in this case, Persephone). Inscribed upon a thin sheet of gold, the inscription runs: theos egenou ex anthrōpo. eriphos es gala epetes
You have become a god instead of a mortal.
A kid you fell into milk. . . .
To fall “into milk” takes on the additional meaning of “diving into the stars” and thus of joining one’s primordial, divine lineage. In effect, the milk of the goddess and the stars of the milky way are identical realities and the initiate’s descent into the underworld is simultaneously an ascent into the nocturnal heavens.
This motif of falling into milk to become a god, along with milk as an Urelement that provides the newborn divinity with its essential nourishment, brings us directly into contact with the deification motif of the magical papyri: drowning—literally, apotheosis—in the milk of a black cow. Through these connections—deification in milk, rebirth, being suckled by a goddess—we begin to discern the significance that ingesting a divine substance—an entheon—holds for the process of apotheosis; at the same time, we realise that it is explicity bound to the process of initiatic death. All of this points to a very particular paradox lying at the heart of initiation: just as one must die to be reborn, so too is it apparent that the means by which one is killed is also a deifying source of nourishment. [61] This explains why, in the Pythagorean, Orphic and Bacchic katabasis, it is Persephone, the queen of the underworld, who plays the role of divine wet-nurse and initiatrix. . . .
Repeated references in the gold lamellae to the Lake of Memory allude to the topography of the Greek underworld. The soul arrives “parched with thirst and dying” and a choice between two rivers confronts the deceased. On the left is the river Lethe (the waters of forgetfulness), which wipes one’s memory clean and casts one back into the cycle of incarnations to live out another embodied life in the “heavy, difficult circle” (kyklo barypentheos argaleoio; cf. samsara). [62] On the right is another river, which enables memory, for its waters are those of anamnesis. The memory afforded by this water, however, is of a specific kind: it is not the memory of common, accumulated, human knowledge, but of the soul’s knowledge: a knowledge of one’s true, eternal and divine nature, which is not earthly but sidereal.
In several of the gold lamellae, the Orphic initiate is admonished to “drink from the water of the river on the right,” [63] and it is evident that this remembrance―this gnosis of one’s divine origin—is tantamount to apotheosis. [64] As such, gnosis equates to victory over the forces of forgetfulness induced by the process of incarnation. For the descent into matter corresponds to amnesia (amnēsis) of one’s divine nature, just as ascent corresponds to its remembrance. . . .
As Evola emphasises, “a very widespread symbolism has seen in woman a vivifying and transfiguring power, through which it is possible to overcome the human condition.” [69] The divine via lactea, moreover, also represents the galaxy—the river of fixed stars—the white which is born from the midst of the perfect black. Just as the primordial darkness, the ocean of Nun, bears the river of eternal stars, so too are the waters of final dissolution also those of primordial deification. Initium is telos. Just as Dante’s ascent to heaven required a descent into the inferno and only proceeded upwards once he had reached the cosmic nadir—the centre of the earth, the core of hell—so too, at the root of Orphic, Egyptian and alchemical cosmology lies the perception that the underworldly journey is the gate to a celestial journey. [70] Both seek to dive into the river of rejuvenating milk by descending into the de-existentiating darkness of the underworld. And yet it is clear that the underworld is only the realm of death for mortals (with the further implication that mortality is a moral state); for those of celestial origin, it is a path home: a gate to the eternal. (Aaron Cheak)
Knowledge and Conversation is fraught with peril. "No Angel" Michael = Tiphareth = 6th Sephira = 6 Shots (The Prisoner). Polar Ice nails the man stealing the Fire of the Old Gods to the Kabbalistic Tree and invokes the Curse of the Law. Off to Grandmother's house he goes with sweets for the Queen Bey.
A peculiar aspect of Gnostic mythology is the notion of the repentant Demiurge--Man is Shiva, but he has forgotten, and he is only as powerful as his Shakti--Mindy. ALS is Aleph being goaded to its consummation in Tav (ISIS).
Peter's petrified Joker Kings multiply like a contagious virus to mask the Universal Sorrow in Babalon's cup of ice. The Ba calls him back from the darkness, when he learns how to whistle for her in Amenti. Old Hollywood in the West (Gods of Zep Tepi in the Golden Years) being a shadowing-forth of the opulence of the Pleroma in the lower world of the Kenoma.
We live in Amenti. Seth MacFarlane is an avatar of the Egyptian deity Seth, that is, Satan, in his regressive aspect. Christ said "Get thee behind me, Satan!" to Peter, founder of the Outer Church; the Church of Peter Griffin. Seth/Satan's great sorcery and/or Killing Joke is that of the American so-called Middle Class of the "American Dad," or, rather, the Slave Class of contented prisoners of his cave, dutifully observing televisual shadows.
World's Greatest Dad is a coded condemnation of Petrine Christianity; the idiot Son who hangs himself on the cross of shame becomes an icon of veneration for those who dwell in the Outer Church and worship the cruci-fiction that the Father-God has created for his subjects. The Father's redemption comes when he repents of the great Lie he has created and immerses himself in the waters, a repetition of the original hanging on an esoteric, rather than exoteric, level. The viewing of "zombie movies," as the patterns of those still drowning in Lethe, is the most that the clear-eyed Initiate can hope to achieve in this world. Or so the film seems to suggest.
The Nazis have the World Cup; this Grail is filled with poison and bitterness that no one wishes to confront. Paranoia is met with paranoia and the cycle continues. Tribalistic hatred and prejudice is always welling up beneath the surface, looking for any outlet it can in an Other. There is no awakening without making the darkness conscious, but few will progress beyond this. The Path to the Omega Point above the Abyss is a long and torturous one for humanity lost in space and time.
Nephthys rules the descending pole of concretization; Isis rules the ascending pole of integration. Man builds towers to satisfy his intellectual vanity, and thus ignores Her voice in the silence as the Seed calling from beyond the Abyss of the material. Paranoia manifests the ego's desire to see itself as superior to the world and thus engages in extreme Shadow-projection of its own unconscious aspects. Yet in a certain sense all these things are true; the centers of power in London and Rome declare the Law of Karmic and religious servitude of the Outer Church.
Fascism paints the Iron Sky black on both sides of
apartheid Zion (the Jerusalem Below in bondage with her children). Sophia's Black Son rising is further evidence of the descending Veil of Isis, falling heavy upon empty hearts and impenetrable walls in this night-mare. If the Lamb of God on the cross (a Beast bludgeoning himself to death) wishes to act as the Hierophant of Sophia, he is
Challenged to kill the root of evil within himself, for Her. She sends him a strong delusion; the fascistic impulse as Ra-Hoor Khuit (a "God of war and vengeance") is first revealed as the Man of Sin, so that he may more perfectly attain to the Final Dissolution in the body of Nuit -- the Book of the Law is most properly read backwards to Her final unveiling. The Greater Jihad is therefore a reflektion of the Lesser Jihad.
Airstrikes (magic from Kether to Malkuth) lift the black Veil of Isis as She is led through Ordeal X; Babylon the Bride being broken down and built up by the Beast. Iraq is Troy, the externalized projection where one fights for a pretty face (Babylon), glimpsed when the Twin Pillars of the High Priestess fell on September 11, 2001. Iraq is also Ithaca, where one fights for the unveiling of Penelope in Zep Tepi (Babalon), when that which is Without You becomes that which is Within You. That which is displayed openly becomes that which is concealed, when Object becomes Subject. The chemical wedding is a song of Ice and Fire.
