III.4

ABRAXA

Solutions of Rhythm and Liberation

While man in mortal life is “one who has departed from Being” or “one who is outside Being,” he who freezes the “waters”¹ in himself and banishes the ghosts of fog, thirst, and fever of his human existence is returning to “Being.”

The healing solution is as follows: by “Being,” you become both liberated and liberator, and the magic of Identity begins within you. That which is above and that which is below move to conjoin in a single thing, which comes from the infinite and, luminously freeing itself, goes to the infinite.

You become a participant in this process: you perceive its rhythm within your senses, your members, and your gestures, which can now support it, and you express it. At every moment you now feel like the commander of innumerable forces, present and yet invisible, as in a calm, heroic enthusiasm. You continue and complete and free their essence, and this fire that inflames every act of your new life as a Liberated One is the very fire of sacrificial Magic: a sacrifice in which “he who sacrifices, that to which he sacrifices, the thing sacrificed, and the sacrificial act are one and the same.”²

Limitation here falls away; the radiance is absolute. Whatever I have told you hitherto about magic, know it as leading to this supreme state. It should not seem remote to you, nor in vain to establish it in the spirit: for I assure you that distant things must overshadow things close by, if the beginning is to arise in them.

The quantity or degree is of no importance: it is the sense of light and sacrificial liberation, for “the energy of the divine Fire itself shines forth spontaneously in all directions, and being both self-called and self-operating, is active in like manner through all things” (Iamblichus, De Mysteriis, IV, 3).³ You should anticipate it and let it penetrate your waking soul in the first operations of detachment, of “Silence”—and in the fixed exaltation of the Mirror, or fecundating with the hard masculinity of the sulfurous Fire the sympathetic, fluid, and mercurial feminine—then in animating or projecting symbols and images and signatures and names of Power—and finally in preparing for the ritual, in the evocation, the invocation, the magic of conjuration, of salvation, of trangression.⁴

Know this: the spirit must shatter your self-image that the being of space has petrified. High magic only works when fecundated by the infinite, the breath of “that which is,” through the spiral shudders of communication. Forgetting the “human,” you act as the wind blows, as fire burns, as light shines, as pure, naked power; then the desert silence, the ocean calm, and the telluric stirring of the elements are all one in the spirit.

Think, by way of analogy, of independent rhythmic patterns that run, intersect, succeed, or overtake on the same line, yet without meeting or interfering, because their tempi or periods are different. But according to their laws, there are points at which a syntony is created: for an instant, the two rhythms become identical, and then in a flash something new results, a new series is revealed as their synthesis. These are the “solutions of rhythm.”

Now consider your human consciousness as one of those rhythmic series. It develops inside a far bigger pattern, the pattern of the rhythm of Reality. But you cannot perceive this because your “tempo” is different. Although in the very bosom of Being, you are living in the world of the “other”: the world of specters, the world that is not the world of men—until at a certain point of your life a correspondence may occur, whether through a near-fatal event, or through Art or Ritual. For an instant, your eyes open in the miracle of awakening: it is absolute vision—or absolute action. You are no longer yourself, the world no longer the world—everything is something else. Unless your ever-vigilant animal nature intervenes to draw your attention elsewhere, for a moment the mist clears: you know Knowledge—and in that knowledge, the nature of Realization and Liberation.

And if you have not chosen blind Fortuna as your Goddess, it is a matter of your inner refinement, through subtle listening to the rhythm of your consciousness, through Hermetic work and the ceaseless vigil of wisdom, patience, and instinct—all this to prepare the state in which the rhythms may meet. Likewise, it depends partly on you whether the vault closes again after the fleeting miracle, and the regimen of “sleep” returns, or whether you can establish yourself in participation in the Real.

I can tell you no more. Gather in your intellect all the symptoms and anticipations that will not fail to manifest sporadically, if you continue to practice constantly and attentively. For every glimpse, turn within to catch the state of consciousness that accompanies it, so as to discover the rhythm, and with the subtle art of love to attract and adapt your spirit to it.

The first echoes of “unison” will come from the people around you. You will think of something, and then without any intention on your part, someone else will think of it simultaneously, and unmotivated. He will be amazed, and say that you or he has “mind-read.” It is not mind-reading, much less chance: it is a new, subtle power of thought, “volatile” and sympathetic, because the chains are loosening that have kept it vibrating only in the closed prison of your ego. Now and then symptoms of telepathy, telesthesia, and intuition will emerge; fragments of distant worlds and scenes, sudden openings to an inwardness suffused with a gentle, immaterial light. And it will also happen that your states of soul, scarcely touching you, suddenly escape from you to glide into others and unexpectedly but irresistibly penetrate them.

“Alienations”: you suddenly find yourself inside the person before you. You are he. You follow his train of thought and see clearly within him, as if into a room that is suddenly filled with light: and you also “see” his consciousness, feeling how he knows nothing of himself, how he looks outward, how he is outside and cannot discern himself. Nor does he know you, in this moment when you are in him. Just a flash, then you are back in yourself. The curtain closes. The law of space returns.

All this happens at first in an unexpected way and without your will. You know it as a peripheral resonance of your effort, of the action of the rituals on the substance in which you are to awaken your sidereal senses. But as your whole being becomes hermetically habituated and harmonizes and unifies deep down, the “solutions of rhythm” will become less fortuitous and discontinuous.

They will be accompanied by fringe experiences of proximity and closure—more of the nature of clarity than flashes—and at the same time the circle will enlarge; new series, more distant and occulted, will approach the nodes of interference.

For example, in an instant of inner light, when opening your eyes you may see the thick clouds open for a moment on a free and clear sky. Abyssal forces are released inside you: with a start such as you have never felt before, you will see your half-darkened room invaded by the red glow of a fire raging in the distance. The pace of something you are doing will accelerate and then stop—and your attention will turn to the voices of frightened people in the street, around a tram that at this moment has unexpectedly stopped. In your thought or your desire there suddenly arises “Let this happen”—and instantly it happens. You may be ignorant of many things that happen in the wider world, but when you learn of them afterward, the certainty of the correspondence arises in you, together with a strange and profound sense, indefinable, indelible, and disturbing, that it is no chance. The tempi of the two rhythms have met at a single and fateful point of unison, becoming simultaneously symbol, reality, significance; interiority and exteriority, will and reality.

It is a small step from there to the spontaneous awakening of the intellect in your spirit, through the miracle of transformation latent in the symbols, correspondences, and analogies of our Science. The confluence of multiple meanings, multiple orders, in a single symbol, which confuses the unknowing, is the potential for a synthesis that can lead you to “solutions of rhythm”: to peaks of absolute vision or absolute magic. For example, there are the Three—the Seven—the Twelve: signs which recur, return, and coincide analogically in the inner and the outer, in nature and the soul, in the above and the below, in space and time, in elements and in the body, in individual events and historical events, preparing circuits of unison and fulgurations that conclude in your being, in the Liberation of your being.

Moreover, in the sensation of your own body and its powers, through “unisons” and more radical resolutions, forms of cosmic consciousness begin to flash. In the oldest Tradition you learn that the Word, freed from death, becomes knowledge of the Fire; the sense of smell, freed from death, becomes the Wind; the Eye, freed from death, becomes the Sun; the Ear, freed from death, becomes Space; the Intellect, freed from death, becomes the splendor of the Moon; Blood and Sperm, freed from death, become Water.⁵ Others will show you new ways of communication in the Metals: they tell of the Man of Copper, the Man of Iron, the Man of Mercury, the Man of Gold sleeping inside your body as elemental and planetary powers.

While the series converge, separating and reuniting, repelling and attracting each other as in a respiration of light, you will also see the same unity beginning to reproduce itself in your gestures, so that they spontaneously assume a ritual structure. In a given instant you surprise yourself in a certain position, and in a flash you perceive that it corresponds exactly to a symbol: like a shuddering wind it passes through your bones, and again the curtain moves aside, the lighting flashes: you see and you are.⁶

Thereafter you will begin to understand the meaning of the sacred postures whose traces are still remembered in the statuary of the ancient Western priesthood, or indicated by Indian yoga, and you will learn their science. New things emerge from the shadows and shed light on a broader background. Nature and history themselves begin to speak to you in the language of ritual and symbol. The signatures that are Wisdoms and seal the being of Man glow silently through geographical situations and zoological structures, and also express themselves in dramatic form in social and temporal events and institutions. And the zodiacal Twelve that you find in the centers of life and death of your mortal body are also twelve cities, twelve disciples, twelve nations. The “black pole” at the base of the sidereal axis of initiation in the East is the Kabbalistic luz at the base of the sacral bone and of the spinal column, called “germ of resurrection”—and it is the “black stone” placed in the Forum at the beginning of the pagan sacred way. The Virgin birth, the Passion, the Ascent of the mountain, the Walking on the waters, the Crucifixion on the elements, and the Resurrection actually become visible episodes of a historical and lived life. Through those and innumerable other significant points that you will gradually discover, reality near or far becomes symbolic again, and the symbol becomes reality; the physical becomes metaphysical, and the metaphysical physical. Through the fixation of the frozen “waters” the depth gradually becomes transparent, though invisible through the tumult of agitation or the fever of intoxication.

In this way you progress from the magical knowledge of the Ritual which I have already taught you (Introduction to Magic, vol. II, chap. I.3) to the knowledge of the Ritual as sacrificial action. Once reintegration is achieved and the paths are opened, contact is integral and identity perfect. The force of things passes into man, while the light and the liberation of man transfuse into the world of the Real—and these are the flames of the Cosmic Fire, the “assignations of immortality” according to the magical Alliance.

The Supreme Mystery of the Initiations—that is what you now hear: in man is the liberation and the immortality of the gods. The god realizes the man—the man liberates the god.

Kremmerz says: you who undertake magical awakening are the center of a great multitude of invisible beings desirous of immortality—because they are all beings of fire, they are thirsty, and you have the water to quench their thirst. In the sacrificial action your consecration as one Detached, Unchained, Escaped—as I told you—arrests the blind course of the elemental forces composed of desire, of spontaneity all exhausted in the act that constitutes them—and produces the transformation of light, through which all the invisible worlds rejoice. The two rhythms coincide and the whole series is then one illumination.

The course of the seasons, of the Sun by day and the Moon by month, the burning of Fire, the motion of the Wind, the growth of vegetation, the consistence of the things that are—they are born in you, and you join and disjoin them in the sacrificial rituals, which in the archaic priesthood actually accompanied the great phases of natural phenomena, sustained them, strengthened them, and transposed them into light by solutions of rhythm and of liberation.

Thus it was written: “In the beginning Prajapāti, having created together men and the sacrifice, said: ‘With this sustain the gods, and the gods will sustain you, so that together you will attain the supreme good.’”⁷

And also: “When he sacrifices, the ātmā is the seat of the gods, and Supreme Wisdom.”