"When one creates phantoms for oneself, one puts vampires into the world, and one must nourish these children of a voluntary nightmare with one's blood, one's life, one's intelligence, and one's reason, without ever satisfying them." [Eliphas Lévi]

tetragrammation pentagram
animist notions, pyrodulia,
deification of fire, I reach
back to early times,

fire is ambiguous, indicated
in proverbs, "Fire is a good
servant but a bad master,"

symbol of righteousness
and truth because fire burns
forever upwards and cannot
be polluted itself, I am Jupiter's
fire,

the theory of magic resides
in the "divine ideal of the ancient
world made the civilization which
came to an end, one must not
despair of seeing the god of our
barbarous fathers become the devil
of our more enlightened children,"

and so it is what I question of
Gold and Rosenkreutz that I
may be the reincarnation of
two women who died, women
of cosmic religious prominence,
women who, for some reason,
separated from me, grooming
me for life here, through grooming
devices, an ivory handled hairbrush
and hatchel, implement with long
iron teeth set in a board, used for
combing and cleaning fibers of
flax and hemp,

it is so that it is
now a world of departed
spirits in which I derive this
reincarnatiion theory; In Crowley's
autobiography The Confessions of
Aleister Crowley — Crowley claimed
to be the reincarnation of Eliphas Lévi
and offered as evidence the statement
that Crowley was born shortly after Lévi
died. Crowley was born October 12, 1875,
slightly less than six months after Lévi's death,
meaning he was in the womb when Lévi died,

Eliphas Lévi incorporated
the Tarot cards into his magical
system, as a result the Tarot is an
important part of the paraphernalia of
Western magicians. He had a deep impact
on the magic of the Hermetic Order of the Golden
Dawn and later on the ex-Golden Dawn member
Aleister Crowley,

the dissolving of relationships,
the crumbling of stones at Stonehenge,
the blackened visage of the Assyrian, Egyptian
Sphinx, the paintings which interpret the faithful
of India the inspired pages of the Vedas and the
cryptic emblems on old books of alchemy, behind
the veil of hieratic and mystical allegories of ancient
doctrines, transcendental magic — Rider-Waite Tarot,
Baphomet, the Devil card XV, 1855, 

occultism and ritual as sane
as Marquis de Sade who was
branded falsely. Masochistic
Rosicrusianism in the hands
of the sadist...spiritualism free
from fanaticisms.

Copyright 12/26/2009 Ms. Sage Sweetwater, firebrand lesbian novelist