220A3-3.ASC She is Sakti, the Teh, the Magical Door between the Tao and the Manifested Wor
220A3-3.ASC
She is Sakti, the Teh, the Magical Door between the Tao
and the Manifested World. The great Obstacle than is if that
Door be locked up. Therefore Our Lady must be symbolized as
an Whore. (Note Daleth, the Door = Venus. The Dove; Free
flowing; all this is linked up in the symbol). Clearly, at
last, the Enemy is this Shutting up of things. Shutting the
Door is preventing the Operation of Change, i.e. of Love.
The objection to Calypso, Circe, Armida, Kundry, and Co. is
that one is liable to be shut up in their Gardens. The whole
of the Book of the Dead is a device for opening the closed
vehicles, and enabling the Osiris to go in and out at his
pleasure. On the other hand, there seems to be a Sealing Up,
for a definite period, in order to allow the Change to
proceed undisturbed. Thus Earth lies fallow; the womb is
closed during gestation; the Osiris is plugged with
talismans. But it is vital to consider this as a strictly
temporary device; and to cut out the idea of Eternal Rest.
This Nibbana-idea is the coward -- `Mother's Boy' idea; one
ought to take a refreshing dip in the Tao, no more. I think
this must be brought forward as the Cardinal Point of Our
Holy Law. Thus though Nuit cries `To me!' that is balanced by
the Formula of Hadit. `Come unto me' is a foolish word; for
it is I that go. Now the Semen is God (the going-one, as
shown by the Ankh or Sandal-strap, which He carries) because
he goes in at the Door, stays there for a specified period,
and comes out again, having flowered, and still bearing in
him that Seed of Going. (The birth of a girl is a misfortune
everywhere, because the true Going-Principle is the
Lion-Serpent, or Dragon; the Egg is only the Cavern where he
takes refuge on occasions). LIber 418 explains this
succinctly; 3rd Aethyr `Moreover, there is Mary, a
blasphemy against BABALON, for she hath shut herself up; and
therefore is she the Queen of all those wicked devils that
walk upon the earth, those that thou savest even as little
black specks that stained the Heaven of Urania. And all
these are the excrement of Choronzon.' It is this `shutting
up' that is hideous, the image of death. It is the opposite
of Going, which is God. Women under Christianity are kept
virgin for the market as Strasbourg geese are nailed to
boards till their livers putrefy. The nature of woman has
been corrupted, her hope of a soul thwarted, her proper
pleasure balked, and her mind poisoned, to titillate the
jaded palates of senile bankers and ambassadors. Why do men
insist on `innocence' in women? 1.To flatter their vanity.
2.To give themselves the best chance of (a)escaping venereal
disease, (b) propagating their noble selves. 3.To maintain
power over their slaves by their possession of Knowledge.
4.To keep them docile as long as possible by drawing out the
debauching of their innocence. A sexually pleased woman is
the best of willing helpers; one who is disappointed or
disillusioned a very psychical exzema. 5.In primitive
communities, to serve as a grard against surprise and
treachery. 6.To cover their secret shame in the matter of
sex. Hence the pretence that a woman is `pure', modest,
delicate, aesthetically beautiful and morally exalted,
ethereal and unfleshly, though in fact they know her to be
lascivious, shameless, coarse, ill-shapen, unscrupulous,
nauseatingly bestial both physically and mentally. The
advertisements of `dress shields,' perfumes, cosmetics,
anti-sweat preparations, and `Beauty Treatments' reveal
woman's nature as seen by the clear eyes of those who would
lose money if they misjudged her; and they are loathsomely
revolting to read. Her mental and moral characteristics are
those of the parrot and the monkey. Her physiology and
pathology are hideously disgusting, a sickening slime of
uncleanliness. Her virgin life is a sick ape's, her sexual
life a druken sow's, her mother life all bulging filmy eyes
and sagging udders. These are the facts about `innocence;'
to this has man's Christian Endeavour dragged her when he
should rather have made her his comrade, frank, trusty, and
gay, the tenderer self of himself, his consubstantial
complement even as Earth is to the Sun. We of Thelema say
that `Every man and every woman is a star.' We do not fool
and flatter women; we do not despise and abuse them. To us a
woman is Herself, absolute, original, independent, free,
self-justified, exactly as a man is. We dare not thwart Her
Going, Goddess she! We arrogate no right upon Her will; we
claim not to deflect Her development, to dispose of Her
desires, or to determine Her destiny. She is Her own sole
arbitar; we ask no more than to supply our strength to Her,
whose natural weakness else were prey to the world's
pressure. Nay more, it were too zealous even to guard Her in
Her Going; for She were best by Her own self-reliance to win
Her own way forth! We do not want Her as a slave; we want
Her free and royal, whether Her love fight death in our arms
by night, or Her loyalty ride by day beside us in the Charge
of the Battle of Life. `Let the woman be girt with a sword
before me!' `In her is all power given.' So sayeth this our
Book of the Law. We respect Woman in the self of Her own
nature; we do not arrogate the right to criticise her. We
welcome her as our ally, come to our camp as her Will,
free-flashing, sword-swinging, hath told Her, Welcome, thou
Woman, we hail thee, star shouting to Star! Welcome to rout
and to revel! Welcome to fray and to feast! Welcome to vigil
and victory! Welcome to war with its wounds! Welcome to
peace with its pageants! Welcome to lust and to laughter!
Welcome to board and to bed: Welcome to trumpet and triumph;
welcome to dirge and to death! It is we of Thelema who
truly love and respect Woman, who hold her sinless and
shameless even as we are; and those who say that we despise
Her are those who shrink from the flash of our falchions as
we strike from Her limbs their foul fetters. Do we call
Woman Whore? Ay, Verily and Amen, She is that; the air
shudders and burns as we shout it, exulting and eager. O ye!
Was not this your sneer, your vile Whisper that scorned Her
and shamed Her? Was not `Whore' the truth of Her, the title
of terror that you gave Her in your fear of Her, coward
comforting coward with furtive glance and gesture? But we
fear Her not; we cry Whore, as Her armies approach us. We
beat on our shields with our swords. Earth echoes the
clamour! Is there doubt of the victory? Your hordes of
cringing slaves, afraid of themselves, afraid of their own
slaves, hostile, despised and distrusted, your only
tacticians the ostrich, the opossum, and the cuttle, will
you not break and flee at our first onset, as with levelled
lances of lust we ride at the charge, with our allies, the
Whores whom we love and acclaim, free friends by our sides in
the Battle of Life? The Book of the Law is the Charter of
Woman; the Word Thelema has opened the lock of Her `girdle
of chastity.' Your Sphinx of stone has come to life; to
know, to will, to dare and to keep silence. Yes, I, The
Beast, my Scarlet Whore bestriding me, naked and crowned,
drunk on Her golden Cup of Fornication, boasting Herself my
bedfellow, have trodden Her in the Market place, and roared
this Word that every woman is a star. And with that Word is
uttered Woman's Freedom; the fools and fribbles and flirts
have heard my voice. The fox in woman hath heard the Lion in
man; fear, fainting, flabbiness, frivolity, falsehood --
these are no more the mode. In vain will bully and brute
and braggart man, priest, lawyer, or social censor knit his
brows to devise him a new tamer's trick; once and for all
the tradition is broken; vanished the vogue of bowstring,
sack, stoning, nose-slitting, beltbuckling, cart's
tail-dragging, whipping, pillory posting, walling-up,
divorce court, eunuch, harem, mind-crippling, house-
imprisoning, menial-work-wearying, creed-stultifying, social-
ostracism marooning, Divine-wrath-scaring, and even the
device of creating and encouraging prostitution to keep one
class of women in the abyss under the heel of the police,
and the other on its brink, at the mercy of the husband's
boot at the first sign of insubordination or even of failure
to please. Man's torture-chamber had tools inexhaustibly
varied; at one end murder crude and direct to subtler, more
callous, starvation; at the other moral agonies, from
tearing her child from her breast to threatening her with a
rival when her service had blasted her beauty. Most
masterful man, yet most cunning, was not thy supreme
stratagem to band the woman's own sisters against her, to use
their knowledge of her psychology and the cruelty of their
jealousies to avenge thee on thy slave as thou thyself hadst
neither wit nor spite to do? And Woman, weak in body, and
starved in mind; woman, morally fettered by Her heroic oath
to save the race, no care of cost, helpless and hard,
endured these things, endured from age to age. Hers was no
loud spectacular sacrifice, no cross on a hill- top, with the
world agaze, and monstrous miracles to echo the applause of
heaven. She suffered and triumphed in most shameful silence;
she had no friend, no follower, none to aid or approve. For
thank she had but maudlin flatteries, and knew what cruel-
cold scorn the hearts of men scarce cared to hide. She
agonized, ridiculous and obscene; gave all her beauty and
strength of maidenhood to suffer sickness, weakness, danger
of death, choosing to live the life of a cow -- that so
Mankind might sail the seas of time. She knew that man
wanted nothing of her but service of his base appetites; in
his true manhood-life she had nor part nor lot; and all her
wage was his careless contempt. She hath been trampled thus
through all the ages, and she hath tamed them thus. Her
silence was the token of her triumph. But now the Word of
Me the Beast is this; not only art thou Woman, sworn to a
purpose not thine own; thou art thyself a star, and in
thyself a purpose to thyself. Not only mother of men art
thou, or whore to men; serf to their need of Life and Love,
not sharing in their Light and Liberty; nay, thou art Mother
and Whore for thine own pleasure; the Word I say to Man I
say to thee no less: Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of
the Law! Ay, priest, ay, lawyer, ay, censor! Will ye not
gather in secret once again, if in your hoard of juggler's
tricks there be not one untried, or in your cunning and
counsel one device new- false to save your pirate ship from
sinking? It has always been so easy up to now! What is the
blasting Magick in that Word, first thesis of the Book of
the Law, that `every woman is a star.' Alas! it is I the
Beast that roared that Word so loud, and wakened Beauty.
Your tricks, your drowsy drugs, your lies, your hypnotic
passes -- they will not serve you. Make up your minds to be
free and fearless! For I, The Beast, am come; an end to the
evils of old, to the duping and clubbing of abject and
ailing animals, degraded to that shameful state to serve
that shameful pleasure. The essence of my Word is to declare
woman to be Herself, of, to, and for Herself; and I give
this one irresistible Weapon, the expression of Herself and
Her will through sex, to Her on precisely the same terms as
to man. Murder is no longer to be dreaded; the economic
weapon is powerless since female labour has been found
industrially valuable; and the social weapon is entirely in
her own hands. The best women have always been sexually-free,
like the best men; it is only necessary to remove the
penalties for being found out. Let Women's labour
organizations support any individual who is economically
harried on sexual grounds. Let social organizations honour
in public what their members practise in private. Most
domestic unhhappiness will disappear automatically, for its
chief cause is the sexual dissatisfaction of wives, or the
anxiety (or other mental strain engendered should they take
the remedy in their own hands. The crime of abortion will
lose its motive in all but the most exceptional cases.
Blackmail will be confined to commercial and political
offences, thus diminishing its frequency by two-thirds, at
least, maybe much more. Social scandals and jealousies will
tend to disappear. Sexual disease will be easier to track
and to combat, when it is not longer a disgrace to admit it.
Prostitution (with its attendant crimes) will tend to
disappear, as it will cease to offer exorbitant profits to
those who exploit it. The pre-occupation of the minds of the
public with sexual questions will no longer breed moral
disease and insanity, when the sex-appetite is treated as
simply as hunger. Frankness of speech and writing on sexual
questions will dispel the ignorance which entraps so many
unfortunate people; proper precaution against actual dangers
will replace unnecessary and absurd precautions against
imaginary or artificial dangers; and the quacks who trade on
fear will be put out of business. All this must follow as
the Light the night as soon as Woman, true to Herself, finds
that She can no longer be false to any man. She must hold
Herself and Her Will in honour; and She must compel the
world to accord it. The modern woman is not going to be
dupe, slave, and victim any more; the woman who gives
herself up freely to her own enjoyment, without asking
recompense, will earn the respect of her brothers, and will
openly despise her `chaste' or venal sisters, as men now
despise `milksops,' `sissies,' and `tango lizards.' Love is
to be divorced utterly and irrevocably from social and
financial agreements, especially marriage. Love is a sport,
an art, a religion, as you will; it is not an ol' clo'
Emporium. `Mary inviolate' is to be `torn upon wheels'
because tearing is the only treatment for her; and RV, a
wheel, is the name of the feminine principle. (See Liber D.)
It is her own sisters who are to punish her for the crime of
denying Her nature, not men who are to redeem her, since, as
above remarked, it is man's own false sense of guilt, his
selfishness, and his cowardice, which originally forced her
to blaspheme against herself, and so degraded her in her own
eyes, and in his. Let him attend to his own particular
business, to redeem himself -- he has surely his hands full!
Woman will save herself if she be but left alone to do it. I
see, it, I, the Beast, who have seen - who see -- the Body
of our Lady Nuith, all-pervading, and therein swallowed up,
to have found -- to find -- no soul that is not wholly of
Her. Woman! thou drawest us upward and onward for ever; and
every woman is one among women, of Woman; one star of Her
stars. I see thee, Woman, thou standest alone, High
Priestess art thou unto Love at the Altar of Life. And Man
is the Victim therein. Beneath thee, rejoicing, he lies; he
exults as he dies, burning up in the breath of thy kiss.
Yea, star rushes flaming to star; the blaze burst, splashes
the skies. There is a Cry in an unknown tongue, it resounds
through the Temple of the Universe; in its one Word is Death
and Ecstasy, and thy title of honour, o thou, to Thyself
High Priestess, Prophetess, Empress, to thyself the Goddess
whose Name means Mother and whore!
56. It is obvious to the physiologist that beauty (that
is, the natural attraction between things whose union
satisfies both) need for fulfilment absolute spontaneity and
freedom from restriction. A tree grows deformed if it be
crowded by other trees or by masonry; and gunpowder will not
explode it its particles are separated by much sand. If we
are to have Beauty and Love, whether in begetting children
or works of art, or what not, we must have perfect freedom
to act, without fear or shame or any falsity. Spontaneity,
the most important factor in creation, because it is
evidence of the magnetic intensity and propriety of the will
to create, depends almost wholly on the absolute freedom of
the agent. Gulliver must have no bonds of packthread. These
conditions have been so rare in the past, especially with
regard to love, that their occurrence has usually marked
something like an epoch. Practically all men work with fear
of result or lust of result, and the `child' is a dwarf or
still-born. It is within the experience of most people that
pleasure- parties and the like, if organized on the spur of
the moment, are always a success, while the most elaborate
entertainments, prepared with all possible car, often fall
flat. Now one cannot exactly give rules for producing a
`genius' to order, a genius in this sense being one who has
the Idea, and is fortified with power to enflame the
enthusiasm of the crowd, with wit to know, and initiative to
seize, the psychological moment. But one can specify certain
conditions, incompatible with the manifestation of this
spontaneity; and the first of these is evidently absolute
freedom from obstacles, internal or external, to the idea of
the `genius.' It is clear that a woman cannot love
naturally, freely, wholesomely, if she is bound to
contaminate the purity of her impulse with thoughts of her
social, economical, and spiritual status. When such things
restrain her, Love may conquer, as often enough it does; but
the Beauty engendered is usually stunted or wierd, assuming
a tragic or cynic mask. The history of the world is full of
such stories; it is, one may almost say, the chief motive of
Romance. I need only mention Tristan, Paolo, Romeo, Othello,
Paris Edward the Second, Abelard, Tannhauser, of old, and
recently Mrs. ASquith, Maud Allan, Charles Stuart Parnell,
Sir Charles Dilke, Lord Henry Somerset, and Oscar Wilde,
Down to `Fatty' Arbuckle! Men and women have to face actual
ruin, as well as the probability of scandal and disgust, or
consent to love within limits which concern not love in the
least. The chance of spontaneity is therefore a small one;
and, should it occur and be seized, the lawyers hasten to
hide under the bridal bed, while the Families, gluing eye to
chink and keyhole, intrude their discordant yowls on the
Dust. Then, when love dies, as it must if either party have
more imagination than a lump of putty, the fetters are
fixed. He or she must go through the sordid farce of divorce
if the chance of free choice is to be recovered; and even at
that the fetters always leave an incurable ulcer; it is no
good playing the game of respectability after one is
divorced. Thus we find that almost the only love-affairs
which breed no annoyance, and leave no scar, are those
between people who have accepted the Law of Thelema, and
broken for good with the tabus of the slave-gods. The true
artist, loving his art and nothing else, can enjoy a series
of spontaneous liaisons, all his life long, yet never suffer
himself, or cause any other to suffer. Of such liaisons
Beauty is ever the child; the wholesome attitude of the
clean simple mind, free from all complications alien to
Love, assures it. Just as a woman's body is deformed and
diseased by the corset demanded by Jaganath Fashion, so is
her soul by the compression of convention, which is a
fashion as fitful, arbitrary, and senseless as that of the
man-milliner, though they call him God, and his freakish
Fiat pass for Everlasting Law. The English Bible sanctions
the polygamy and concubinage of Abraham, Solomon and others,
the incest of Lot, the wholesale rape of captured virgins,
as well as the promiscuity of the first Christians, the
prostitution of temple servants, men and women, the
relations of Johannes with his master, and the putting of
wandering Prophets to stud, as well as the celibacy of such
people as Paul. Jehovah went so far as to slay Onan because
he balked at fertilizing his brother's widow, condoned the
adultery, with murder of the husband, of David, and
commanded Hosea to intrigue with a `wife of whoredom.' He
only drew the moral line at any self-assertion on the part
of a woman. In the past man has bludgeoned Woman into
gratifying the lust of her loathed tyrant, and trampled the
flower of her own love into the mire; making her rape more
beastly by calling her antipathy Chastity, and proving her
an unclean thing on the evidence of the torn soiled blossom.
She has had no chance to Love unless she first renounced the
respect of society, and found a way to drive the wolf of
hunger from her door. Her chance is come! In any Abbey of
Thelema any woman is welcome; there she is free to do her
will, and held in honour for the doing. the child of love is
a star, even as all are stars; but such an one we specially
cherish; it is a trophy of battle fought and won!
E-Mail Fredric L. Rice / The Skeptic Tank