Great book
Posted on | September 11, 2006 | No Comments
I’m reading a great book titled Mysteries of the Kabbalah by Marc-Alain Ouaknin, translated from the French by Josephine Bacon. Abbeville Press Publishers, ISBN: 0-7892-0654-4.
It’s a very refreshing approach to the subject that one does not find in most of the books on Kabbalah found on most bookstore shelves here in the U.S.
Reading this books does a great deal to reinforce my growing thought that Freemasonry is really NOT based on the traditions of the Templars, but rather on the traditions and teachings of Kabbalah. Maybe Freemasonry adopted it’s “history” of relation to the Templars in an effort to distance itself from Judaism at a time when anti-Semitism was even more prevalent than it is today. Of course, I don’t know that much about the Knight’s Templar, so maybe some of their actual “secrets” were Kabbalah-inspired, which would have been enough to piss off the Pope and lead to their demise.
Kabbalah Center
Posted on | September 6, 2006 | No Comments
I’ve been reading some things about the Kabbalah Center, and have had some experience with them that make me think they’re a bit too commercially focused. It seems like all their programs are targeted to get money from people. I could be wrong, maybe they ARE focused honestly on “receiving for the sake of sharing” – they DO share quite a bit. However, when I asked my contact there to have someone who understands Hebrew Aramaic translate “Let there be Light” (“Fiat Lux” in Latin) into Aramaic, I got absolutely NO HELP. Even after asking multiple times. I honestly felt like they were all about “sharing” when you’re paying them, and not very interested in “sharing” when money isn’t coming back their way. Maybe that’s unfair, but it’s how they made me feel.
I’ll leave their link on this site, but I’m in NO WAY giving them an endorsement, other than saying I love thier books – especially 72 Names of God – it’s one of the best books on the market, beautifully designed and written.
Hebrew Letter “Tet”
Posted on | August 18, 2006 | 7 Comments
Hebrew Letter “Tet” or Teth:
The Wisdom of the Serpent. The symbol of enlightenment. The letter/symbol associated with Leo. The sign of the Tarot Major Arcana card “Lust” – the power of passion.
Together with YOD these are the symbols of the power of creativity, wisdom, and free thought – applied with passion toward the achievement of one’s goals.
See my essay on the topic of the Serpent in the Genisis creation myth: The Bible is The Bible is The Bible: “NOT!”
Diabolicals
Posted on | August 17, 2006 | No Comments
Umberto Eco, arguably best known in the States for his book The Name of the Rose which was made into a movie starring Sean Connery and Christian Slater also wrote a great book titled Foucault’s Pendulum. In Pendulum, Eco takes on the topic of esoteric/occult knowledge. His protagonist, an expert on Knights Templar history has been working for a “vanity press” called “Manutius” (one where the authors, rather than the publisher, pay the cost of publication). Many of this press’s authors write on topics of occult knowledge, including the Knights Templar. The guys inside the press mockingly refer to these authors as “diabolicals” because their books always tend to deal with some diabolical scheme or another.
The book draws the protagonist, called “Pow” by his lover Lia in this passage, into a “real” scenario of occult power. Lia in this passage attempts (vividly) to explain to Pow why it’s so easy for people to get drawn into “hidden” power that associate with different elements of our lives.
—
Lia saved me, at least temporarily.
I told her everything – or almost – about the trip to Piedmont, and evening after evening I came home with curious new bits of information to add to my file of cross references. She said, “Eat. You’re thin as a rail.” One evening, she sat beside me at the desk. With her hair parted in the middle of her brow, she could now look straight into my eyes. She had her hands in her lap: a housewifely pose. I had never seen her sit like that before, her legs wide, skirt taut from knee to knee. An inelegant position, I though. But then I saw her face: radiant, slightly flushed. I listened to her – though I didn’t yet know why – with respect.
“Pow,” she said, “I don’t like what’s happening to you with this Manutius business. First you collected facts the way people collect seashells. Now it’s as if you were marking down lottery numbers.”
“I just enjoy myself more, with the Diabolicals.”
“It’s not enjoyment; it’s passion. There’s a difference. Be careful: they’ll make you sick.”
“Now, don’t exaggerate. They’re the sick ones, not I. You don’t go crazy because you work in an asylum.”
“That remains to be seen.”
“You know, I’ve always been suspicious of analogies. But now I find myself at a great feast of analogies, a Coney Island, a Moscow May Day, a Jubilee. Year of analogies, and I’m beginning to wonder if by any chance there isn’t a reason.”
“I’ve seen your files, Pow,” Lia said to me, “because I have to keep them in order. Whatever your Diabolicals have discovered is already here: take a good look.” And she patter her belly, her thighs, her forehead; with her spread legs drawing her skirt tight,m she sat like a wet nurse, solid and healthy – she so slim and supple – with a serene wisdom that illuminated her and gave her a matriarchal authority.
“Pow, archetypes don’t exist; the body exists. The belly inside is beautiful, because the baby grows there, because your sweet cock, all bright and jolly, thrusts there, and good tasty food descends there, and for this reason the cavern, the grotto, the tunnel are beautiful and important, and the labyrinth, too, which is made in the image of oru wonderful intestines. When somebody wants to invent something beautiful and important, it has to come from there, because you also came from there the day you were born, because fertility always comes from inside a cavity, where first something roths and then, lo and behold, there’s a little man, a date, a baobab.
“And high is better than low, because if you have your head down, the blood goes to your brain, because feet stink and hair doesn’t stink as much, because it’s better to climb a tree and pick fruit than end up underground, food for worms, and because you rarely hurt yourself hitting something above-you really have to be in an attic – while you often hurt yourself falling. That’s why up is angelic and down is devilish.
“But because what I said before, about my belly, is also true, both things are true, down and inside are beautiful, and up and outside are beautiful, and the spirit of Mercury and Manicheanism have nothing to do with it. Fire keeps you warm and cold gives you bronchial pneumonia, especially if you’re a scholar four thousand years ago, and therefore fire has mysterious virtues besides its ability to cook your chicken. But cold preserves that same chicken, and fire, if you touch it, give you a blister this big; therefore, if you thin of something preserved for millennia, like wisdom, you have to think of it on a mountain, up, high (and high is good), but also in a cavern (which is good, too) and in the eternal cold of the Tibetan snows (best of all). And if you then want to know why wisdom comes from the Orient and not from the Swiss Alps, it’s because the body of your ancestors in the morning, when it woke and there was still darkness, looked to the east hoping the sun would rise and there wouldn’t be rain.”
“Yes, Mama.”
“Yes indeed, my child. The sun is good because it does the body good, and because it has the sense to reappear every day; therefore, whatever returns is good, not what passes and is done with. The easiest way to return from where you’ve been without retracing your steps is to walk in a circle. The animal that coils in a circle is the serpent; that’s why so many cults and myths of the serpent exist, because it’s hard to represent the return of the sun by the coiling of a hippopotamus. Furthermore, if you have to make a ceremony to invoke the sun, it’s best to move in a circle, because if you go in a straight line, you move away from home, which means the ceremony will have to be kept short. The circle is the most convenient arrangement for any rite, even the fire-eaters in the marketplace know this, because in a circle everybody can see the one who’s in the center, whereas if a whole tribe formed a straight line, like a squad of soldiers, the people at the ends wouldn’t see. And that’s why the circle and the rotary motion and cyclic return are fundamental to every cult and every rite.
“Yes, Mama.”
“We move on to the magic numbers your authors are so fond of. You are one and not two, your cock is one and my cunt is one, and we have one nose and one heart; so you see how many important things come in ones. But we have tow eyes, two ears, two nostrils, my breasts, your balls, legs, arms and buttocks. Three is the most magical of all, because our body doesn’t know that number; we don’t have three of anything, and it should be a very mysterious number that we attribute to God, wherever we live. But if you think about it, I have one cunt and you have one cock – shut up and don’t joke – and if we put these two together, a new thing is made, and we become three. So you don’t have to be a university professor or use a computer to discover that all cultures on earth have ternary structures, trinities.
“But two arms and two legs make four, and four is a beautiful number when you consider that animals have four legs and little children go on all fours, as the Sphinx knew. We hardly have to discuss five, because the fingers of the hand and then with both hands you get that other sacred number, ten. There have to be ten commandments because, if there were twelve, when the priest counts one, two, three, holding up his fingers, and comes to the last two, he’d have to borrow a hand from the sacristan.
“Now, if you take the body and count all the things that grow from the trunk, arms, legs, head, and cock, you get six, but for women it’s seven. For this reason, it seams to me that among your authors six is never taken seriously, except as the double of three, because it’s familiar to the males, who don’t have any seven. So when the males rule, they prefer to see seven as the mysterious sacred number, forgetting about women’s tits, but what the hell.
“Eight… eight… give me a minute… If arms and legs don’t count as one apiece but two, because of elbows and knees, you have eight parts that move; add the torso and you have nine, add the head and you have ten. Just sticking with the body, you can get all the numbers you want. The orifices, for example.”
“The orifices?”
“Yes. How many holes does the body have?”
I counted. “Eyes, nostrils, ears, mouth, ass: eight.”
“You see? Another reason eight is a beautiful number. But I have nine! And with that ninth I bring you into the world, therefore nine is holier than eight! Or, if you like, take the anatomy of your menhir, which your authors are always talking about. Standing up during the day, lying down at night – your thing too. No, don’t tell me whit it does at night. The fact is that erect it works and prone it rests. So the vertical position is life, pointing sunward, and obelisks stand as trees stand, while the horizontal position and night are sleep, death. All cultures worship menhirs, monoliths, pyramids, columns, but nobody bows down to balconies and railings. Did you ever hear of an archaic cult of the sacred banister? You see? And another point: if you worship vertical stone, even if there are a lot of you, you can all see it; but if you worship, instead, a horizontal stone, only those in the front row can see it, and the other start pushing, me too, metoo, which is not a fitting sight for a magical ceremony…”
“But rivers…”
“Rivers are worshiped not because they’re horizontal, but because there’s water in them, and you don’t need me to explain to you the relation between water and the body…Anyway, that’s how we’re put together, all of us, and that’s why we work out the same symbols millions of kilometers apart, and naturally they all resemble one another. Thus you see that people with a brain in their head, if they’re shown an alchemist’s oven, all shut up and warm inside, think of the belly of the mama making a baby, and only your Diabolicals think that the Madonna about to have a Child is a reference to the alchemist’s oven. They spent thousands of years looking for a message, and it was there all the time: they just had to look at themselves in the mirror.”
“You always tell me the truth. You see my Mirrored Me, my Self seen by You. I want to discover all the secret archetypes of the body.” That evening we inaugurated the expression “discovering archetypes” to indicate our moments of greatest intimacy.
I was half-asleep when Lia touched my shoulder. “I almost forgot,” she said. “I’m pregnant.”
—
I love that passage. There’s some real truth there.
Excerpt from THE MISTS OF AVALON
Posted on | August 14, 2006 | No Comments
From The Mists of Avalon
“… – is that an evil thing, when mankind has forgotten the Mysteries?’
“They have not forgotten the mysteries,” she said, “they have found them too difficult, They want a God who will care for them, who will not demand that they struggle for enlightenment, but who will accept them just as they are, with all their sins, and take away their sins with repentance. It is not so, it will never be so, but perhaps it is the only way the unenlightened can bear to think of their Gods.”
Lancelot smiled bitterly. “Perhaps a religion which demands that every man must work thorough lifetime after lifetime for his own salvation is too much for mankind. They want not to wait for God’s justice, but to see it now. And that is the lure which this new breed of priests has promised them.”
Excerpt from THE SECRET TEACHINGS…
Posted on | August 14, 2006 | No Comments
Hall, Manly P. – The Secret Teachings of All Ages
- Initiations only on Solstices and Equinoxes
- Winter Solstice –
- Christmas
- Birth of Adonis
- Birth of Mithras
- Birth of Osirus
- Birth of Jesus
- Spring Equinox
- Easter
- Death + 3 days = Resurrection
- Adonis
- Virgin Mother = ?
- Osirus
- Virgin Mother = Isis
- Mithras
- Virgin Mother = ?
- Jesus
- Virgin Mother = Mary
Gnostics: Interpreted Christianity (Christian Mysteries) according to Pagan Symbolism.
- Nous = Mind
- Logos = Word
- Phonesis = Intelligence
- Sophia = Wisdom
- Dynamis = Strength
Labyinths were symbolic of the involvements and illusions of the lower world through which wanders the soul of man in search for truth.
Wisdom can die in many ways at the same time.
The swan is the symbol of the initiates of the Mysteries.
Both the cross and the serpent were Atlantean emblems of divine wisdom.
Pg 291:
Contrary to the dictates of reason, a standard has been established which affirms the innocence bread of ignorance is more to be desired than virtue born of knowledge. Eventually, however, man will learn that he need never be ashamed of truth.
From the Conclusion Chapter
Materialistic thought is as hopeless a code of life as commercialism itself. The power to think true is the savior of humanity. The mythological and historical Redeamers of every age were all personifications of that power. He who has little more rationality than his neighbor is a little better than his neighbor. He who functions on a higher plane of rationality than the rest of the world is termed the greatest thinker. He who functions on a lower plane is regarded as a barbarian. Thus comparative rational development is the true gauge of the individuals evolutionary status.
The supreme source of power, this attainment of knowledge, this unfolding of the god within, is concealed under the epigrammatic statement of the philosophic life. This was the key to the Great Work, the mystery of the philosopher’s stone, for it meant that alchemical transmutation had been accomplished. Thus ancient philosophy was primarily the living of a life; secondarily, and intellectual method. He alone can becaome a philosopher in the highest sense who lives the philosophic life. When man lives he comes to know. Consequently, a great philosopher is one whose threefold life – physical, mental, and spiritual – is WHOLLY devoted to and completely permeated by his rationality.
Hence right action, right feeling and right thinking are the prerequisites of right knowing, and the attainment of philosophic power is possible only to such as have harmonized their thinking with their living.
… none can attain to the highest in the science of knowing until first he has attained to the highest in the science of living. Philosophic power is the natural outgrowth of the philosophic life.
The establishment of a the philosophic rhythm in the nature of an individual ordinarily requires from fifteen to twenty years.
[This started for me when my dad died in 1991 – it’s now 2006 – I’m right at 15 years into this journey.]
Well has it been said that no individual can succeed until he has developed his philosophy of life.
- Knowledge = the condition of knowing.
- Virtue = the condition of being.
- Utility = the condition of doing.
Ignorance of ignorance, then, is that self-satisfied state of unawareness in which man, knowing nothing outside the limited area of his physical senses, bumptiously declares there is nothing more to know! He who knows no life save the physical is merely ignorant; but he who declares physical life to be all-important and elevates it to the position of supreme reality – such a one is ignorant of his own ignorance.
- Religion wanders aimlessly in the maze of thological speculation.
- Science batters itself impotently against the barriers of the unknown.
- Only transcendental philosophy knows the path. Only the illuminated reason can carry the understanding part of man upward to the light. Only philosophy can teach man to be born well, to live well, to die well, and in perfect measure to be born again.
Hebrew Letter Yod
Posted on | August 11, 2006 | 1 Comment
Hebrew Letter “Yod” (Yode):
The Creative Hand/Spark of God.
The symbol of the spark of divinity in Man “Christ in you” communicated via the 14th degree of Scottish Rite Freemasonry. The letter/symbol associated with Virgo. Also the sign associated with the Tarot Major Arcana card “The Hermit” – the bringer of light.
My birthday is August 23, so I’m a cusp between Virgo and Leo.
Resources:
From Albert Pike’s Morals and Dogma (the basis of Scotish Rite Freemasonry):
In the East of the Lodge, over the Master, inclosed in a triangle, is the Hebrew letter YOD. In the English and American Lodges the Letter G.’. is substituted for this, as the initial of the word GOD, with as little reason as if the letter D., initial of DIEU, were used in French Lodges instead of the proper letter. YOD is, in the Kabalah, the symbol of Unity, of the Supreme Deity, the first letter of the Holy Name; and also a symbol of the Great Kabalistic Triads. To understand its mystic meanings, you must open the pages of the Sohar and Siphra de Zeniutha, and other kabalistic books, and ponder deeply on their meaning. It must suffice to say, that it is the Creative Energy of the Deity, is represented as a point, and that point in the centre of the Circle of immensity. It is to us in this Degree, the symbol of that unmanifested Deity, the Absolute, who has no name.??Our French Brethren place this letter YOD in the centre of the Blazing Star. And in the old Lectures, our ancient English Brethren said, “The Blazing Star or Glory in the centre refers us to that grand luminary, the Sun, which enlightens the earth, and by its genial influence dispenses blessings to mankind.” They called it also in the same lectures, an emblem of PRUDENCE. The word Prudentia means, in its original and fullest signification, Foresight; and, accordingly, the Blazing Star has been regarded as an emblem of Omniscience, or the All-seeing Eye, which to the Egyptian Initiates was the emblem of Osiris, the Creator. With the YOD in the centre, it has the kabalistic meaning of the Divine Energy, manifested as Light, creating the Universe.
Fiat Lux
Posted on | July 28, 2006 | 1 Comment
Here’s an image I’m working on…
“Fiat Lux” means “Let there be light.”
Here’s a higher-resolution version (PDF)
Imagination Works Miracles
Posted on | July 27, 2006 | 1 Comment
“When one knows and when one wills, one ought to have the courage to dare.
Imagination is the Creative Power. God is the Imagination of Nature. She has her dreams and her nightmares, but these do not prevent her Epos from being glorious. THe architects of the Middle Ages have sketched its outline in their magnificent Cathedrals where the carved sputs, corbels and florid ornamentation serve to bring out the pure lines of the Ogives and the placidity of the Saints. These great artists had guessed the enigma of good and evil; they understood light and its shadows.
It is the Imagination which works miracles…”
Eliphas Levi
Paradoxes of the Highest Science
ISBN: 0-89254-085-0
From “The Secret” by Michael Berg
Posted on | June 23, 2006 | No Comments
The Creator’s essence is one of sharing. Therefore, to become like Him, we need to tranform our essence and nature from one of receiving to one of sharing.
(p. 49)
The difficulty of the task vanishes before the desire for the objective.
(p. 61)
For more books by Berg visit: www.kabbalah.com
Book Recommendations
About Kevin
Kevin E. Houchin is an attorney, artist, teacher, author, and principal of
Houchin Consulting, PLLC, a copyright, trademark, arts & entertainment,
business development, and branding firm located in Scottsdale, Arizona.
To schedule Kevin for keynote speeches, workshops, or seminars, call 970.231.2426
or email
kevin@kevinhouchin.com.