Being and Non-Being in Occult Experience
Ian C. Edwards PhD
About the series:
Being and Non-Being in Occult Experience is a projected series of four volumes. The series serves to introduce readers to a spirituality, philosophy, existential-phenomenology, and depth psychology of occult experience through the lens of the dialectical relationship (the play) between becoming, being, and non-being. The author purports an anti-foundational “language” through which occult experience can be translated, transformed, transmuted, and ultimately (ex)communicated. Here, philosophical method in and of itself becomes alchemical and tantric, taking the reader on a transubstantiative journey into the textual flesh of writers such as:
• Aleister Crowley (The Book of the Law and Thelema) in Volume I
• Austin Osman Spare (Zos Kia Cultus) in Volume II
• Kenneth Grant (Typhonian Ordo Templi Orientis) in Volume III
• Andrew Chumbley (Cultus Sabbati) in Volume IV
Each volume will demonstrate how Logos (Being) and A-Logos (Non-Being) continually affirm and negate one another as a means to create lived space for opposition; thereby forming a circularity of becoming through both presence and absence.
In the very writing or inscribing of occult experience, the author shows how each writer ex-communicates the illusory being/non-being dichotomy so as to create a crooked path to Divinity (by way of self-overcoming via the dialectic itself). Ritual and contemplative practice, as symbolic representations, are shown to be materializations of the Being/Non-Being dialectic, which can function autonomously through experiences of possession, relationally through conversation and dialogue with one’s Holy Guardian Angel or Daemon, or intentionally through various forms of prayer, meditation, or yoga. That which is fundamental throughout is the suggestion that the speech act is the vehicle through which occult experience is both carried and transmitted, as ultimately any form of spiritual practice is conceived with an utterance, with its semantic, morphological structure serving to affirm and negate an adept’s existential reality, as that reality is lived in multiple self-referential and paradoxical worlds. Here, the author will argue that the task of the occultist is to hold the experience of paradox, opposing the inclination to create an idol out of or fetishize the Right-Hand or Left-Hand Path, White or Black Magick, Life or Death, Heaven or Hell, Nirvana or Samsara, etc., as incarnations of Being or Non-Being. By so doing, gnosis can be achieved by freeing psyche’s own polytheistic ground, transforming the aspirant into a Seer.
Dr. Edwards attained his PhD in Clinical Psychology and holds both administrative and clinical positions at Duquesne University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania (United States). He is also an Adjunct Professor of Psychology and Philosophy. Dr. Edwards also co-created and currently runs the Duquesne University Center for Student Wellbeing.
Volumes
VOLUME 1
Being and Non-Being in Occult Experience Volume I: The Book of the Law (Liber AL vel Legis)
In Volume I, the author, in his participatory epistemological encounter with Liber AL vel Legis, writes the Abyss into manifestation by transforming speech acts into magickal acts; moving from Idea to Form and from Form to Idea in a circular, bidirectional fashion. Herein lies a “key” to understanding the Cosmos’ own emergence from and disappearance into the Abyss; the becoming of Somethingness from No-thingness; the One from the None; the Logos in an eternal dialogue with the Void.
Only the heretic, the seer, the sorcerer can hold this “key”. This is a path not for the many but for the few, as this heresy is structural and methodological; a negation of all systems that are anti-organic; systems that highlight static notions of being and non-being at the expense of becoming. The Book of the Law embodies its soul into the reader, incarnating itself with each spoken or unspoken utterance, transforming itself in the act of reading, so that subject and object are inverted, displacing self and other through an engagement with radical alterity
The Book of the Law affirms an absence that erases the “who” or “what” we understand to be the subject in favor of an otherness that becomes the subject’s own most possibility for becoming; the dialectic between non-being and being as the place of presence.
The author shows how The Book of the Law is a Book of Love, a Book that tells a story; a unique mythology which describes the intimate relationship between Being and Non-Being through the use of signifiers that present and represent a myriad of archetypal images and universal notions; all the while inviting its readers to embrace the totality of the Law itself. The Law is for All because Love is All and the All is Love.
Chapters include:
· Time, Infinity, and the Ontology of No Difference
· Ouroboric Consciousness and The Summons to Love and be Loved
· The “I am” and the Circle of Becoming, Baphomet and Trans-Gender Metaphysics
· The Void: The Unity of Non-Being and Being
· The Great Mother and the Ontology of Creation
· Three Grades of Being: A Thelemic Typology of Consciousness
· Lust of Result as a Way of Being-Toward-the-World
· The Holy Whore’s Tantra
· The One Beyond God and the Void Beyond the One: Transcendental Atheism
· Liberating the Mystery from the Trappings of Karma
· And much more!
Be prepared to experience The Book of the Law like never before!
VOLUME 2
Being and Non-Being in Occult Experience Volume II: The Chiasmata of Austin Osman Spare - Toward a Participatory Epistemology of the Flesh
This volume will be an opportunity to experience the writings and art of Austin Osman Spare, in particular, The Book of Pleasure: The Psychology of Ecstasy, through the lens of thinkers such as; Friedrich Nietzsche, Martin Heidegger, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Georges Bataille, Pierre Klossowski, Jacques Lacan, and Jacques Derrida. In the contemplative traditions, Spare’s text will be compared to Taoism, the writings of Zen Buddhist Master Hui-neng, and the mystical poetry of St. John of the Cross. Whereas one of the major objectives of Being and Non-Being in Occult Experience Volume I was to push the written word to its limits, the second volume has a simpler style but is more conceptually complex. Here, readers will be introduced to what is being called an "occult grammatology" and the notion of a “Hekatian Self,” congruent with Spare’s notion of Kia or the “Inner Woman,” focusing on Hekate’s aspect as Goddess of the Crossroads, which paves the way for a unique "Hekatian Phenomenology" that includes an exploration of betweenness found in Spare’s work. Volume II will also explore:
· The Importance of Synesthetic Perception and Experience: Shifting from Synesthesia to what Spare calls, “Telesthesia.”
· The Oracular in Spare’s Writings and Art
· Kenneth Grant and the Reification of Appetence: Spare contra Freud
· The Neither-Neither as a Logos for Kia
· The Kiacization of Desire
· The Death Posture as a way of Transgressing the Law of Duality
· Between Good and Evil: The Ethics of Self-Love
· Nietzsche the “last metaphysician” and Spare the “last occultist.”
· Post-Death of God Occultism
· And more!
The book is bold, even brazen in its endeavor, which can be thought of as a vision whose text is flesh, a body without organs, and as a path with a series of path marks, a myriad of traces that signify a meeting between the past and future, opening up the possibility for a radical reappropriation of becoming, what can be called Spare’s second (be)coming, as an induction of time, the circularity of eternity that rotates through being, where it is not being that becomes but the becoming of time through being. The book shows how Spare illustrates and inscribes the intertwining of non-being, becoming, and being, with his writings and art portraying it in different forms, which transcend and transgress all ontologies that attempt to describe it as part of a metaphysics of presence. Rather than illustrate the book with Spare’s art, which has been done before with many books on his work, this volume, which offers a “new wine,” does so through “new wineskins,” through the art of Carolyn Hamilton-Giles, which complements the text and portrays in image its chiasmic structure, being a direct, immediate response to Spare, using his art and writings to invoke new forms, which follows Spare in spirit, charting a new way to experience his The Book of Pleasure.
VOLUME 3
Being and Non-Being in Occult Experience Volume III: Kenneth Grant and the Vulture’s Cry - A Dialogue and Commentary on S’lba’s Wisdom
This volume will explore many of the key notions in Kenneth Grant’s Typhonian Trilogies, in particular aspects of his occult philosophy that were more salient in his later volumes, such as,
Outside the Circles of Time, Outer Gateways, and Beyond the Mauve Zone. The introductory chapter will explore a Typhonian view of time, which brings together ontology and blasphemy. Paving the way for an occult anthropology that expands and even transgresses Martin Heidegger’s da-sein or being-in-the-world. (With Grant’s work, Edwards suggests that there is a shift from philosophical anthropology to occult anthropology). Here, the figure of Qayin is invoked as a sorcerous exemplar who “murders” a particular type of relationship to time and being, in the service of what Edwards has called, “sacravice,” as the “sacrifice of sacrifice,” andn “skinfulness” as a transgressive-transcendent relationship to “sinfulness.”
In articulating a phenomenology of the transmission experience, in the sense of a being receiving wisdom or transmitted knowledge from one Universe to the next, what Grant and Michael Bertiaux would describe as Universe A and Universe B, the book will explore terrestrial and non-terrestrial (extra-terrestrial) being, space, and time. It will look at the idea of the “dead name” as put forward in H.P. Lovecraft’s Necronomicon and apply it to names, such as, Aiwass (Crowley), Aossic (Grant), and Al Hazred (Lovecraft). Volume 3 will explore Grant’s understanding of “dream control” and look at the Mauve Zone as a perspective or vantage point that a magician or sorcerer can take relative to their position in each world or Universe and learn to “dream while awake.” The essence of the book will be a dialogue on the Wisdom of S’lba, a transmitted text that was received by Grant and the Nu-Isis Lodge as early as 1939 and published in Outer Gateways, which is a Mauve Zone (or beyond) “commentary” that is being called, “The Vulture’s Cry.”
The Vulture’s Cry was written from a mauve zone perspective, using Grant’s “dream control” technique and Martin Heidegger’s “meditative thinking.” Edwards abandons his own name as an author, putting it under erasure, assuming the dead name, “(Q)ayin-Mu,” to dialogue with Grant’s Aossic. The commentary, both in content and style is faithful to Grant’s suggestion that,
“Words are a magician’s magical instruments, and their vibrations must produce not merely arbitrary noise but an elaborate symphony of tonal vibrations, which trigger a series of increasingly profound echoes in the consciousness of his readers. One cannot over-emphasize or over-estimate this subtle form of alchemy, for it is in the nuances and not necessarily in the rational meanings of the words and numbers employed that magick resides.”
The commentary is not interested in reducing meaning to what can be “understood” or “comprehended.” Rather, it is interested in exploring Austin Osman Spare’s “Neither-Neither” as found in language and the absolute irreducibility of the signified by using signifiers that shock the reader into thinking beyond the word, moving from Logos to ALogos. This exploration of the irreducibility and betweenness of language is what Edwards has called his, “Mu Working.”
The Vulture’s Cry is written as a series of brief meditations that serve as a compendium of occult evocations rather than instructions. Rather than a path to be followed, the evocations are intended to call the reader toward discovering their own path, their own will, their own “law,” all under the guise of wearing one of S’lba’s “masques.” Meditations in the commentary include:
Palms into Psalms
The Joy in Contemplating S’lba
The Universal Joke
Puppets of Clay
There is no God where I am
On Madness
Rapture and Bliss
S’lba’s Yoga
Metaphysical Menopauses
The New Sexuality
The Sigil of S’lba
The Backward Darkness
The Prayer to Divine Silence
The Name of Death
The Cup of Babalon
The Stone of Lucifer’s Crown
Lam (The Way)
And much more! Over 200 meditations in all.
The Vulture’s Cry contains many footnotes, connecting the commentary to the writings of Dogen, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Emil Cioran, and Jacques Lacan to name only a few. The book concludes with a “Profession of Faithlessness,” which is an inversion of the Catholic “Profession of Faith.”
The Vulture’s Cry requires that it not be believed for it to be “true.” This is a variation of Spare’s “true belief” and is in keeping with Cioran’s atheism, “I will only believe in a god that doesn’t believe in himself.” In essence, the book is an invitation to believe through not believing. If some books are to be burned after they have been written and read, this one is not to be believed. And like Crowley’s Book of Lies as a book of “breaks”, The Vulture’s Cry is a book of “nots.”
Volume 4
Being and Non-Being in Occult Experience Volume IV: Tarrying with the Impossible: The Aporetic Aphorisms of Andrew D. Chumbley
Tarrying with the Impossible, the final volume in the Being and Non-Being in Occult Experience series, will explore the metaphysical impasses in Andrew D. Chumbley’s posthumously published, Khiazmos: A Book Without Pages. These metaphysical impasses can be best described as aporias, which defy the law of non-contradiction. Tarrying with the Impossible begins with an “Uncanny Prologue” that sets the tone and lays the foundation for the rest of the book. Here, Edwards starts with a mythopoetic reading of Khôra as the womb of becoming and being, an an-0ther beginning, a mythic alternative to the Genesis account with Chumbley as Khôra’s scribe, who writes from the Other-side, transmitting silences into words.
Throughout the book, Edwards is guided by Chumbley’s aphorism, “Let the contradictions be: seek not Unity, it is here now!” While this aphorism is one of many, Edwards shows how it winds its way through each and is integral to Chumbley’s Crooked Path Sorcery as a whole. The introductory chapters situate Khiazmos from the perspective of Jacques Derrida’s deconstructive reading of both Khôra and Aporia and then in relation to George Bataille’s Acéphale as described in The Sacred Conspiracy. Edwards also compares Chumbley’s “The New Flesh” in Khiazmos with Giles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s “Body without Organs” in Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia.
“Dying” is explored as “waiting at the limits of truth” and “death” as going beyond those limits, the path of peran, the path to the beyond, a way of dying before one dies. Edwards connects death and dying in the aforementioned sense with waiting at the crossroads for the Other’s arrival and then as a sorcerous practice of being carried beyond to the Other side. He shows how this leads to a type of “Sitra Achra perception” situated within a phenomenology where being is serpentine, or in the words of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, “winding”.
Following from previous volumes in the Being and Non-Being in Occult Experience series, Edwards further expands upon his notion of the nullpunkt as the zero-point at the center of the crossroads of non-being, becoming, and being. He looks at the nullpunkt from the perspective of Chumbley’s “Point,” “Qutub,” or “I” and develops a new understanding of Heidegger’s dasein as “sorcerous being”, a type of “Acéphalic dasein”. Edwards also relates many of the key ideas in Khiazmos to Aleister Crowley’s Liber AL vel Legis, Austin Osman Spare’s The Book of Pleasure, Kenneth Grant’s Wisdom of S’lba, and C.G. Jung’s Liber Novus: The Red Book.
The essence of the book involves a careful reading of Khiazmos that integrates fundamental aspects of deconstruction and Acéphalic mysticism. Edwards titled this chapter, “Introduction to the Without Life,” a sort of a play on St. Francis de Sales, Introduction to the Devout Life. The sections in this chapter adhere closely to Chumbley’s own style. Edwards didn’t simply write about Khiazmos but ventured to write from the place that Khiazmos was written, as a “transmission through the Oracle of Silence.” The sections in the chapter explore the intersection between what Edwards calls “aporiosis,” kenosis, and apotheosis, Chumbley’s Al Q’Mu as a Cypher for the Nameless, “Silence Knowing Itself,” Chumbley’s “My Body” as Transition, The Path of the Sanctified Devil, and “The Other: From the Symbolic to the Real”. In his “Introduction to the Without Life,” Edwards highlights the importance of what he believes to be the central notions in Khiazmos – the importance Chumbley places on “Becoming Magic,” his “Godless Apotheosis,” the Geminus – Absence-in-Presence/Presence-in-Absence, and the New Flesh.
At the back of the book, there is a special Appendix section. In this section, divided into four Appendices, Edwards introduces 1) Four Acephalic Meditations that he created, using Chumbley’s “Four Excellences” as a foundation; 2) his “Thirty-One Parapraxes of the Sacred”; 3) “Schizes and Flows,” which is a brief meditation on the work of Antonin Artaud, concluding with the development of what Edwards calls his “Magic Theatre,” patterned after Hermann Hesse’s Steppenwolf, consisting of five “Collective Monologues” between Chumbley as “Alogos,” Artaud as “Artaud the Momo,” and Edwards as “(Q)ayin-Mu”, an inverted “trinity” representing the Sanctified Devil; and 4) “Vocatus atque non vocatus Deus absentia”, as what Edwards calls an “Adversarial Mantra” that the reader is invited to pray using special instructions. (This is an inversion of Jung’s famous, Vocatus atque non vocatus Deus aderit, which Edwards views as a “Geminus,” using Chumbley’s term).
Tarrying with the Impossible evocatively concludes with what Edwards calls a “Concluding Incomprehensible Postscript,” which is a play on Soren Kierkegaard’s “Concluding Unscientific Postscript.” The Postscript is more than just a conclusion to Volume IV but serves as a conclusion to Being and Non-Being in Occult Experience as a whole. In this section, Edwards explores his own “becoming magick,” and dare he say, “Apotheosis.” He notes that his realization, the “telos that guided his vision” in Being and Non-Being in Occult Experience was to heal himself from, to quote Jung from The Red Book, “the God (who) appears as our sickness…since he is our heaviest wound” and to articulate that “the practice of magic consists in making what is not understood understandable in an incomprehensible manner.” Edwards writes,
“With my scythe, letters of otherness were torn into the page, lacerating each word with the Impossible. I wounded the word to reclaim magick from the shadow of the comprehensible, returning it to the Oracle of Silence who spoke the Inceptual Wordless Word.”