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To: alt.magick
From: bloodofenoch@goddamnfruit.com (Andralphus)
Subject: Enochian, Qabalah, Lovecraft, etc. (was Enochian in-depth)
Date: 28 Apr 2002 16:46:56 -0700

osirified_skorpion@yahoo.com (Scorpion-of-Osiris) wrote in message news:<3876d067.0204271306.1579a9f4@posting.google.com>...

[snip]

> First, (again...my opinion),Golden Dawn/Crowley/Schueler have NO clue
> what to do with enochian magick. 

I don't think it's fair to lump Schueler in with GD/Crowley.  The
Schueler's system is as diffrent from the GD one as it is from
'Enochian purism'.

> They put it in a mode where every one
> now blindlessly follow their set example/structure of enochian magick.
> They leave most of the work collecting dust. I'm 100% sure that to
> evoke angels/angles you do NOT use pentagrams! C'mon, lets be
> reasonable here, thats lame. The Holy Table, Sigils, etc., are just
> cast off to the side with their 'techniques'. 
>
> Tyson is off the mark
> too mainly because he is trying to turn it into apocalyptic mumbo
> jumbo, and makes it seem more Lovecraftian than Enochian.

We're in agreement on this point.

> Benjamin Rowe seems to unravel alot of the info, however. 
> What I am searching for is the system the angels/angles would have
> wanted. There's enough Qabala in the world, so why a repeat? Enochian
> IS a complete and separate system, not to be shared with Khemetic
> dieties, etc.

I. On the subject of Enochian being a "complete and separate system":

A. Is it complete?

I would say no.  For instance, Dee's table gives the names of the
angels and the names of God under which they may be invoked.  There
are calls designed to invoke groups of these angels.  But there is
not, to my knowledge, any specified method of invoking a single angel
in any of Dee's diaries.

Therefore, I would say that the system is not complete.  Should a
practitioner wish to invoke a single spirit, he would have to invent
some method on his own.  Whether this method involved K/Qabalistic or
Khemetic imagery or tried to be truer to the Christian Apocalypticism
of Dee's writings, it would be an innovation.

(NB: when I say 'Christian Apocalypticism', I am not at all endorsing
Tyson's theories; just pointing out the fact that there is a great
deal of influence from the Book of Revelation and similar sources in
Dee.)

Lon Milo Duquette suggests using a form of Crowley's Enochian
translation of the first evocation of the Goetia; this strikes me as
overweening even for a Thelemite.  (No disrespect to Maestro Lon
intended).

B. Is it separate?

Since the system is not complete in all its parts, something else must
be added to it from outside.  Whether or not this something else
strives to be faithful to Dee's imagery, it will be not-Dee. 
Therefore the system cannot be separate if every part of it is to be
worked.  I'll address this in a bit more depth in the next section,
but what it comes down to is basically:

1. Personal taste
2. What works for the individual operator

II. On the subject of K/Qabalah and Enochian:

One thing that bothers me about a lot of Hermetic Qabalah is that it
boils down to nothing more than using the Tree of Life as an immense
filing system.

I am not one of those who holds that Kabbalah should only be used by
devout members of Orthodox Judaism, but I do think a comparison with
Kosher Kabbalah is in order here:

Jewish Kabbalah is about the attainment of Union with God through
intense meditation on the Jewish Scriptures and the Hebrew alphabet. 
The preliminary stages involve allegorical interpretation of scripture
through devices like gematria and notariqon.  It is from this

interpretation that doctrines like the Tree of Life are reached; they
have a sense and context in Hebrew Kabbalah, and any Kabbalist can go
back to the relevant passages and re-derive the doctrines using the
proper methods; in Hermetic Qabalah, they often must simply be taken
for granted.

Once these exegetical exercises are mastered, the Kabbalist has an
intense, erotic knowledge of the Hebrew letters - as if they were
people - and of how they behave as personalities in the Scriptures,
which reflect the mind of God.  At the highest levels, a Kabbalist can
effect the union of the male and female letters in erotic meditation,
by means of which the Presence of God makes itself manifest.

What a difference there is between these two systems!  One is a cold
system of classification, the other is a full and powerful system of
mystical attainment.

So I think you're right in objecting to hammering Enochian magick onto
Qabalah.  To do so arbitrarily would bastardize both systems.  But I
do think something could be gained by a confrontation between Qabalah
and Enochian.

All mystical experiences have some things in common.  Dee's visions,
the meditations of the Kabbalists, the raptures of the Christian
mystics, the visions of Swedenborg, the dreams Lovecraft wrote down as
pulp fiction - all of them represent a confrontation between humanity
and something we might call 'God' or 'the Absolute'.

Therefore, there must be genuine points of analogy between Enochian
and Kabbalah and Egyptian religion.  And, for that matter, Swedenborg
and Martinism and Catholic mysticism and Taoism and Gnosticism and
everything else.  Because they all have a common basis in the
Absolute, whatever that might be.

That being said, there are important differences among mystical
experiences that cannot easily be papered over.  Some might represent
distortions by contemporary prejudice; some might represent different
levels of attainment; a lot of them must simply result from the fact
that different observers observe things differently.

Let's take as an example the attempt by Kenneth Grant and others to
combine Lovecraft and Qabalah.  Since both the Cthulu mythos and
Qabalah attempt to describe the Absolute, certain analogies can be
made.  For instance, Grant equates Azathoth and Adam Qadmon.  I don't
know much about Adam Qadmon, but the analogy sounds like it could
work.  You could probably come up with quite a few others, the making
of which would be instructive on both Qabalah and Lovecraft.  Quite
different from this is the attempt to hammer both systems into a
comprehensive table of complete analogy; for instance:

http://www.kiva.net/~julianus/hplqbl1.html

One doesn't have to look at the table for very long to see that most
of the equations are pretty tenuous, and that it doesn't tell one much
about either Qabalah or Lovecraft.

I think the same would apply to Enochian.  There have to be valid (by
valid I mean instructive) analogies to be made between the system of
Dee & Kelley and the Qabalah.  This kind of use of Qabalah could make
Enochian an even better system.  But to arbitrarily equate every item
in one system to an item in the other would at best be a waste of
time, and would at worst ruin both systems.

III. My two cents

One aspect of the GD Enochian system that gets a lot of flak from Dee
purists is the pyramid meditation system, where one visualizes a
square of the table as a pyramid, imagines oneself inside it, and
attempts to obtain converstation with the ruling spirit of that
square.

I think this exercise, correctly understood, has a lot more validity
than it gets credit for.  Jewish Kabbalah is such a poweful system
because the Kabbalist comes to know the Hebrew letters personally, as
it were, by getting to know their behavior in the scriptures
intimately.  Most Hermetic magicians have neither the time nor the
inclination to get to know the Scriptures in the original Hebrew, so
this exercise, the foundation of the Kabbalistic system, is
unavailable.

We do, however, have the Enochian tables.  And by methods like the
pyramid meditation we can get to know the tables as intimately as the
Kabbalists know Genesis.  The thing is, we only have the beginning of
the system.  The completion of the Enochian system, I think, would be
a method of combining the various letters one had already gotten to
know by the pyramid method by means of erotic meditation.

Just my $0.02

> If anybody wants to go into detail, email me. The emailbox was screwy
> last few days and I'm thinking whatever mail I have gotten over the
> last week was deleted, but I think I fixed it now -LOL.

Was your inbox full?  I had that problem a week or so ago.