Date: Sat, 14 Aug 93 18:59:11 PDT _Liber Wizardus_ by Frater Nigris Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law. The word of Sin is Restriction. What is Wizardry? What would magick and mysticism be without the greatest of life's experiences - love? Ah but love is the greatest secret and the greatest pain. The wizard must know as much about love as about hirself. Let hir learn well the ways of the Heart, for it is said that Gnosis shall reside therein. ----- "Touch me in secret places no one has reached before, in silent places where words only interfere, in sad places where only whispering makes sense. Touch me...in the morning when night still clings, at midday when confusion crowds upon me, as twilight as I begin to know who I am, in the evening when I see you and hear you - best of all. Touch me...like a child who will never have enough love, for I am an adult who has known enough pain to love, a child who wants to be lost in your arms, a parent who sometimes is strong enough to give. Touch me...in crowds when a single lood tells everything, in solitude when it's too dark to even look, in absence when I reach for you through time and miles. Touch me...when I ask, when I'm afraid to ask. Touch me...with your lips, your hands, your words, your presence in the room. Touch me...gently for I am fragile, firmly for I am strong, often for I am alone." [Author unknown] ----- Crowley crooned 'AGAPE!' after the countless theologians of the Western Way. Buddhists pit 'compassion' against the wisdom of nonattachment. What a travesty never to come to know oneself. What a calamity never to come to know another. Like Sun and Moon, these are one and the same, and our quest to plumb the depths of experience shall lead us past the Pillar of Will into the very deepest Pool of Love. What is Wizardry? Wizardry is the Art and Science - the Magick - of love, and the Baptism of Tear s which love brings to our Heart. ===== What is Wizardry? What would magick be without compatriots and lovers? Yet who is this that stands before me, kneels beside me, lays upon my altar in all hir glory? What manner of mystery is this person who comes before my temple and deigns to shine hir majesty upon me? How shall I honor this gift? ----- "Listening is a magnetic and strange thing, a creative force. The friends who listen to us are the ones we move toward, and we want to sit in their radius. When we are listened to, it creates us, makes us unfold and expand. I discovered this a few years ago. Before that, when I went to a party I would think anxiously: 'Now try hard. Be lively.' But now I tell myself to listen with affection to anyone who talks to me. This person is showing me his soul.... He will show his true self; will be wonderfully alive." Karl Menninger ----- "The soul is a veiled light. Neglect it, and it will dim and die. Fuel it with the sacred oil of love and it will burn with an immortal flame." [Sung at the Temples of Ammon-Ra] ----- I know not what is this 'soul', yet having walked into the dank corners of urban sprawl, having climbed unto the hilltops around the valley of my home, having sat and wondered at the feet of madmen and artisans, I cannot understate the power of simple listening. It brings out the divinity of everything. What is Wizardry? Wizardry is the clear perception of Beauty, the melding of mind and body into an open channel for deeply real connections. What is Wizardry? What would magick and philosophy be like without knowledge? Yet the Mother of true knowledge is query, and the beginning of query is Doubt. ----- "Doubt. Doubt thyself. Doubt even if thou doubt thyself. Doubt all. Doubt even if thou doubtest all. It seems sometimes as if beneath all conscious doubt there lay some deepest certainty. O kill it! Slay the snake! The horn of the Doubt-Goat be exalted! Dive deeper, ever deeper, into the Abyss of Mind until thou unearth the fox THAT. On, hounds! Yoicks! Tally-ho!" Frater Purdurabo ----- Upon certainty one dies. This is the distinguishing characteristic of the Wizard: that having played with words and concepts, after a masterful display of intellectual swordplay in which she is shown in a blaze of glory, she then sheaths her weapon before the altar of Truth. For Doubt is the Anvil which makes the folly we call 'reason' possible. What is Wizardry? It is the central humor which permeates every act of the Wizard, no matter how serious in effect; the brief flash of inspiration followed by the smile of measured reflection. ===== What is Wizardry? What would magick be without the self? That marvellous creature of advent and tragedy! Yet what do we really know of ourselves? Where shall we look when we wish to see the Eye of Vision? ----- "We are unknown to ourselves, we men of knowledge -- and with good reason. We have never sought ourselves -- how could it happen that we should ever FIND ourselves? It has rightly been said : 'Where your treasure is, there will your heart be also.' (Matt. 6:21); OUR treasure is where the beehives of our knowledge are. We are constantly making for them, being by nature winged creatures and honey-gatherers of the spirit; there is one thing alone we really care about from the heart -- 'experiences' -- which of us has sufficient earnestness for them? Or sufficient time? Present experience has, I am afraid, always found us 'absent-minded': we cannot give our hearts to it -- not even our ears! Rather, as one divinely preoccupied and immersed in himself into whose ear the bell has just boomed with all its strength the twelve beats of noon suddenly starts up and asks himself: 'what really was that which just struck?' and so we sometimes rub our ears AFTERWARD and ask, utterly surprised and disconcerted, 'what really was that which we have just experienced?' and moreover: 'who ARE we really?' and, afterward as aforesaid, count the twelve trembling bell-strokes of our experience, our life, our BEING -- and alas! miscount them. So we are necessarily strangers to ourselves, we do not comprehend ourselves, we HAVE to misunderstand ourselves, for us the law 'Each is furthest from himself' applies to all eternity -- we are not 'men of knowledge' with respect to ourselves." Friedrich Nietzsche ----- The Taoist mage recites Lao Tzu: 'Those who speak do not know, those who know do not speak'. The Western mage thinks of the Sphinx, of riddles, of Silence and of the tremendous burden of proof. The self is proof of itself. Those who know themselves are truly masters of magick. ----- "'Yes, I am white now,' said Gandalf. 'Indeed I am Saruman, one might also say, Saruman as he should have been. But come now, tell me of yourselves! I have passed through fire and deep water, since we parted. I have forgotten much that I thought I knew, and learned again much that I had forgotten. I can see many things far off, but many things that are close at hand I cannot see. Tell me of yourselves!'" J.R.R. Tolkien ----- When shall we begin our telling? When will our fateful journey to Mt. Doom begin? When asked to tell of ourselves, do we not revel?! Do we not leap with anxiety and joy?! Do we not face the pain of fear and the pleasure of self-indulgence? The Wizard asks all to 'tell of themselves', for in this activity she comes to experience the power of peace and the wisdom of forgetting. ----- "As a boy, Ogion like all boys had thought it would be a very pleasant game to take by art-magic whatever shape one liked, man or beast, tree or cloud, and so to play at a thousand beings. But as a wizard he had learned the price of the game, which is the peril of losing one's self, playing away the truth. The longer a man stays in a form not his own, the greater his peril. Every prentice-sorcerer learns the tale of the wizard Bordger of Way, who delighted in taking bear's shape, and did so more and more often until the bear grew in him and the man died away, and he became a bear, and killed his own little son in the forests, and was hunted down and slain. And no one knows how many of th e dolphins that leap in the waters of the Inmost Sea were men once, wise men, who forgot their wisdom and their name in the joy of the restless sea." Ursula K. Le Guin ----- Shape-changers Wizards are indeed. Forget the self, however, and the mage is lost. Then again, being 'lost' in oceanic frolic is sometimes more pleasant that being 'found' within the cities of business. The first leads to abandonme nt and joy, the last to the pain of self-discovery. What is Wizardry? It is the unreserved quest for self-knowledge, and the continual dumping of the Buffer of Experience, lest we mistake information for wisdom. --------------------------------------------------------------------- "Free love! Right now!" - Voice Farm Invoke me under my stars. Love is the law, love under will. I am I! 9303.03 e.v. Frater (I) Nigris (666) 333 Tyagi Nagasiva (C) 1993 Tyagi@HouseOfKAos.Abyss.com House of Kaos 871 Ironwood Dr. San Jose, Kali Fornica 95125-2815