Chapter 1
Death and God
God is many things to many people. For me, skipping ahead a bit, God has two primary faces. One is masculine and the other feminine. Both for me are linked to death. Neither is everything that death is. They also are more than death as well.
To begin, I am going to step outside of those faces and talk about God as I believe it is behind the faces we ascribe to it. These are just my opinions, and though I hope you learn something from my opinions, I am not infallible or some kind of new cult leader.
I come by my belief in God by proof. I suggest Aristotle as a good place to find evidence of the scientific reality of the existence divinity. To some people God is just a psychological construct and magick is just an active way to get at the parts of the brain that are either subconscious or dormant. I do not follow this school of thought. Truly I am a Deist and believe that God is a real, yet detached truth.
God is real, and as I indicated earlier, this leaves me open to being accused of being a little, okay, a lot crazy. God is beyond our comprehension in this reality. He can no more be known than the square root of Pi. God is unknowable. When I use the word “he,” you should also understand that I believe that God is neither male nor female, but English lacks a good neutral word. “It” to me implies something less personal than “he” or “she.” So he is beyond what we conceive as the universe. God does not follow the rules we understand as science. He is not good, evil, both, or neither. As I said, God is unknowable.
To those of you reading this with some kabalistic background, this should make sense to you. As I have said, my background is in ceremonial magick. God is the crown of heaven. In Hebrew the word for crown is Kether. As laid out in the book “The Sepher Yetzirah,” Kether is the abode of God, or more truthfully it is the pure state of Godhead.
In Kabala there are ten layers of existence called sephirah, and Kether is the highest. Some, including the “Sepher Yetzirah,” say that Kether is unattainable. I do not know. Obviously I am not united with God.
Underneath Kether is Chochmah, which is Hebrew for “wisdom,” and Binah is “understanding.” These three sephirah are called the Supernal Triad. They constitute the purest forms of God. Separating them from the other seven sephirah is something called Daath. It is the abyss. Daath is a Hebrew word for “knowledge.” As I said, you cannot know God.
In my opinion, anyone who wants to find God must go through Binah. This means you need to try to understand Him. I should say Her, because to magickal kabalists Binah is feminine. Binah, as with all existence under Kether, is just a face of God and not the totality of God. It is much closer to that true face than most.
The sephirah Binah has a variety of traditional attributions. Among them is the color black, the planet Saturn (though I personally think that Saturn is Daath), and the number three.
In many western cultures the color black is associated with death. This makes us think of death when looking at Binah, although in other cultures many other colors are associated with death. Black is important to our understanding of Binah, pun intended. Although in truth black is not a color, neither are white or grey, the colors of Kether and Chochmah. It is a shade. The other sephirah have colors associated with them. For the supernals it is one or another shade.
Binah is seen by many as being the combination of everything below Daath. I like that way of looking at Binah from beneath the abyss. It is a wonderful illusion to think that if you combine everything from Malkuth to Chesed you arrive at Binah. This untruth would go on to say that you have then found God when you have experienced everything in this reality. It is, as I have said, a nice idea, but false.
As I said earlier, the only true face of the totality of creation that is God resides in Kether. This residence of God includes things that are not in the known universe. Therefore Binah is not Kether, nor is the combination of everything before Binah. This sephirah is not the end of the journey.
Yes, black is the combination of all pigments, and it can be argued that Binah is the true representation of the lower Tree of Life as seen whole. The reason that I said that this was the view from beneath the abyss is simple. Kether is light and black is the absence of light. The real divine heavenly light is seen in Kether and is still present even in the grey of Chochmah. Binah is, and the other sephirah through Binah are, so far from that light that it is difficult to see. Does this mean that Binah is the absence of God? No, but it is not the fullness of God either. It is a beginning of awareness of God.
Binah is associated with death in that it is supposed that if you reach into Binah, the part of your soul that makes you whoever you are disappears into something else. If you move into Binah, who you are dies. It moves into that supernal triad. You really begin to get at being part of God.
In Binah something deeper than your body dies. If Binah truly is the physical universe, then of course you will no longer be able to exist here. Remember, after Daath the rules change. You and everything that is your universe as understood by you dies.
All of these lofty thoughts are all contained in the study of the planet Saturn. Although I myself see Daath as Saturn, I cannot help seeing that some lingering saturnine qualities can be found in Binah. The final death is in Binah.
Many can justifiably argue that death is Netzach, the sephirah of Venus. They point to one of the paths off of Netzach. In the Tarot, the death card is that path. The same people who argue that this path is the place of true death tell people that the death card seldom means real death, but is just the end of something. To bring those people into agreement with me, the solution is simple. Reincarnation is the truth for most people. If you have not explored the halls of the sephirah Tiphareth, then you will reincarnate. Death will be repeated over and over until you do. This death is the body, but “you” continue on.
The number three is also important when we examine Binah. Three is used in several associations with death, as you will see. Many death gods use the number as a sacred number. Gede is a good example. How many people do you know that say death comes in threes? What is meant by this is that three people you know will die at approximately the same time. I do not buy this one. If you said three people will die in the same week and it worked out, maybe. I have witnessed people go out of their way to find this to be true. They will say it after a couple people they know die, and then six months later someone else dies and they will say, “Well, there’s the third.” I think that is absurd.
I prefer to see the number three as again more connection to Binah and its connection to the physical realm. We do live in the third dimension. Science postulates several, but we live here in the third.
Numerically three is much easier than one or two for us to understand. One at this time is impossible for me really to get philosophically. You might question how by saying, “This is one apple.” Philosophically, one is everything that is. This is a big universe, and trying to see it as all together one thing is beyond me yet. I can believe in the existence of that oneness, but to try to imagine it is a different matter. Even to scientists who have a far greater concept of the universe have trouble with it.
Two seems as though it would be easier. The idea of you, the individual, and everything else is two things. It is assumed that you should be able to within reason understand yourself. If you can understand you, then everything else is the unknown. Really!! I have not even the first clue as to why I do some of the stupid things I do. Sometimes I get angry and do not even know why. So if I have to understand myself before understanding everything that is not me, then I am screwed.
I do not understand two. There are males and females, right? Until you factor in that some people are born with traits of both sexes or neither. What about transgender? Although these kinds of people are few, they throw a wrench in using sex to determine the idea of two.
What about science, can we get some help? Science knows everything, right? If you want to see a scientist’s head explode, ask them where the first atom came from. The real answer is they do not know. You might get one who will talk about this energy that comes in the form of lines and circles. This is something called string theory. Finally we have two things, circles and lines, to explain the universe -- except if you ask what is in the circle or between the lines. Sometimes you get the answer “nothing.” I think that the absence of existence might not be all that scientific. “Nothing” is not a good answer.
Hopefully I have made my point that two is difficult to get our heads around. How is three any easier? I certainly am not yet in Binah, at least the totality of Binah. Therefore I am not quite to the point where I can really fully understand Binah, but circles, lines, and the space in between begins to break down to something, someday, which I might, and science certainly will, be able to explain.
In Hinduism they conceive the universe using the concept of three gods. These gods are Brahma, the creator, Shiva, the destroyer, and Vishnu, the sustainer. I again can wrap my head around that to a degree. At least I have some hope to.
So what do all these numbers have to do with death? I needed to explain why three matters to Binah, which I stated was linked to death. Now finally I can get away for a moment from this Kabalistic mumbo jumbo and get into how Binah affects me personally and death specifically. In other words, I can get past what I know about Binah and dive into what I feel about it. After that you might be able to process why I love these gods of death.
Binah is the holy sephirah of understanding. This place is key to my being. It certainly is the home for many of the spirits I hold most dear. The first of these is Babalon the Beautiful, or if you please, The Mother of Abominations. Many of my readers at this point might be confused. I have been talking at length about God, love, and many nice things. How does my writing now turn to The Mother of Abominations, the Holy Whore?
Babalon is scorned by Christians and feared by many who call themselves Pagan. She is Binah and certainly is the gateway to it. The name Babalon as you see here spelled was recognized by Aleister Crowley in his work, “The Vision and the Voice.” This book is the description of his work with Enochian Aethyrs. These Aethyrs, or Airs, are similar to working up the Tree of Life. There are thirty levels of consciousness. Later in these workings, which I find to be some of Crowley’s best work, he receives information about a goddess he called Babylon and was later corrected in the spelling.
Babalon is much more important to me than she appears to have been for Crowley. In fact, if anyone until the last decade or so gave her any real attention, it was Jack Parsons. He was a Thelemite who in the 1960’s happened to literally have been a rocket scientist. It was his work that landed the United States on the moon.
Parsons performed an invocation with the help of a few others designed to invoke Babalon. His work has influenced me a lot and I suggest anything you can read by him. What likely influenced me the most was his poem, “The Birth of Babalon.” This poem stirs my heart even after hearing and reciting it many times. To read it follow this link-https://liberbabalon.gydja.com/birth.html
So the name Babalon and many of the attributes of this goddess are new. Her energy on the other hand is not. Inanna was her name in Sumer. It was Ishtar in Babylon. She was Isis in Egypt. Kali is the name for her in India. All of these goddesses and many more from the ancient world have her energy. They were not entirely her. They were not nearly Babalon.
My understanding of her is that she is manifest divinity. She is the world around us, the link to God that is all around us. From deep within the cities to the far untouched parts of the wilderness, all of it is her.
This all sounds great, but why did I use the titles “Mother of Abominations” and “Holy Whore”? The most important reason is that those titles are accurate. She is the mother of everything in this world. Many things in this world are abominations to someone. There are murders and rapes every day, just to name a few. War, disease, famine, is all over this world.
That is not the entire reason, though. In Revelations, in the Bible, it speaks about Babylon in relation to the Great Beast. Yes, it is spelled different. Many argue as well that it is actually talking about a city. She gets this title from the connection. This does bring me to how they are connected, though.
Crowley writes about there being different Aeons and believed there to have been three that humanity have experienced. The First was Matriarchal and really early in the history of the human race. I would go as far as saying that man barely was part of that Aeon. Crowley attributes Isis as the ruler of this time.
The second Aeon is Patriarchal and is ruled by Osiris. We know much more about this Aeon because it takes place in the rise of humanity and civilization as we know it. It follows the formula of the dying god. The focus in this Aeon was on science, the intellect, and everything else that man has been doing.
The final Aeon is that which Crowley believed he initiated in 1904 with the writing of his holy book called, “The Book of the Law.” This new Aeon is ruled by Horus, the son of Isis and Osiris. What the character of this Aeon will be remains to be seen. It is my belief as well that the Aeons overlap quite a lot and we are still feeling the influence of the previous Aeon.
As the first apparent mystical effect of this Aeon, there seems to be a bit of a rebalancing of energy. The goddess is rising again in power. It can be seen in many cultures and tendencies in the world. Here in the west we have seen the rise of the New Age movement, of Wicca with a focus on the divine feminine, and the worldwide adoration of Mary. In particular women are rising with the goddess out of the shadow of men. We see a particular kind of goddess taking hold of the thoughts on men and women alike. This goddess is strong, passionate, and she certainly is the Queen of Heaven. To many of us her name is Babalon.
I believe this rise was foretold early in the last Aeon. What St. John, as he wrote Revelations, was seeing was the world we live in. He saw the personification of this world and what he called Babylon and the Beast. His pious mind could not have seen our world in any other way. He was religious and zealous in the Aeon of Osiris. To his eyes our world could be nothing but evil.
The reason that Babalon was evil to him is simple. She is the enemy of his view of religion. His god is jealous, controlling, and makes contradictory commands that change from moment to moment. The Christian god that he believed in, and many others like him believe in still, has killed lots of people. In the Bible there are many murders by this god, and his followers have followed suit in the millions. His god claims lordship over all things, including man. Man to him seems to be just a plaything. The god that is all over the Bible is an almighty tyrant that has no respect for the liberty of man. Obviously I am not a Christian and am not all that fond of the religion. Just as an aside, I do not have ill will and actually love the god named Jesus. It is my belief that Jesus would not like many of his followers much either.
Babalon stands against these things. She has come into her strength in our time. Those Osirian Aeonic forces and energies are not about to give up easily. They certainly are beginning their death rattle, though. This makes this time dangerous for those of us who are already embracing the freedom of thought that the Aeon of Horus has to offer.
But still She is becoming more and more powerful. Liberty is stirring in the hearts of man as Horus takes his seat in the east. Babalon and that hawk-headed mystical lord will be victorious. People will be released from their self-imposed bondage. They will cast aside slavery and move towards a society based on voluntary cooperation and self-ownership. We will walk away from force and violence, whether that aggression comes from a person, spirit, or government.
All of this war cry of mine aside, Babalon is not the same as the gods of old. She is not a goddess of salvation. This goddess is not your or my hero. The Holy Whore is the lustful queen who calls all who will listen to free themselves.
Is Babalon dangerous? Many years ago I was friends with a woman who came to me with a similar question. She asked, “Is magick dangerous?” Her husband, who did not want her practicing magick, had told her that it was. I without pause both then and now answer both of those questions: Yes, absolutely, Magick and its Queen, Babalon, are the most dangerous things you can do. Madness sometimes befalls those who walk a magickal path. You can find your mistakes coming back to haunt you, literally. Looking at all of your demons both figuratively and actually is part of the magician’s path. Yes, Babalon is dangerous.
Why do I practice magick and seek out the Mother of Abominations? Binah, Babalon’s home, as I said before, is not God. It is the first step across the abyss to finding God, whether you see that God within or without. I have an unending need to unite myself and my soul with God.
Babalon is different than any other deity I have experienced or read about. She only expects one thing from you. Most gods want all sorts of things. Many of the spirits in this book want things. Babalon only wants one thing. She wants everything you are!
That’s right, everything you are.