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103: What Lies Beyond the Gateway

"And the Elder Lords opened Their eyes and beheld the abominations of Those that ravaged the Earth. In Their wrath They set their hand against the Old Ones, staying Them in the midst of Their iniquity and casting Them forth from the Earth to the Void beyond the planes where chaos reigns and form abideth not. And the Elder Lords set Their seal upon the Gateway and the power of the Old Ones prevailest not against its might."

From the opening of the Necronomicon (which is, if one believes those who believe that Lovecraft wasn't completely having one over on us, derived from the tables of Dr. John Dee's Liber Logaeth). This passage struck me this morning as having some resemblance to another Old School Mystical Text.

"There were giants in the earth in those days; and also after that, when the sons of God came in unto the daughters of men, and they bare [children] to them, the same [became] mighty men which [were] of old, men of renown. And GOD saw that the wickedness of man [was] great in the earth, and [that] every imagination of the thoughts of his heart [was] only evil continually. And it repented the LORD that he had made man on the earth, and it grieved him at his heart. And the LORD said, I will destroy man whom I have created from the face of the earth; both man, and beast, and the creeping thing, and the fowls of the air; for it repenteth me that I have made them." [Genesis 6:4-7]

And we can also find a parallel in Greek mythology where Zeus rose up against the Titans, bound them, and flung them into darkness. In all of these passages, there is, essentially, the separation of That Which Is Evil from the rest of the world and it is sectioned off behind a permanent Gateway where it spends Eternity trying to break free.

Dr. Paul A. LaViolette subscribes to a notion of subquantum kinetics, a vision of reality that is process-driven. One of his arguments is that ancient mythology wasn't just stories but also a coding of scientific knowledge about how the world works into language (or symbolism in this case) that could be passed down to later generations so that the true knowledge wouldn't be lost. These parallel events across the mythology of the world are key details of the True Science; they are more than just coincidences, they are what every ancient scientist knew to be true: all things are in flux, working in a cyclical system.

So, we've bound off Evil and hidden it behind a Portal where it must remain for all Time. Yet, Evil is part of the system. It is a Definitional Concept: it is Black to White, Ying to Yang, Down to Up. It is, I believe, the distinction between Man in his Fallen State and the Angelic Grace which existed in Heaven before the Fall. Evil, bound off and hidden away, cannot be destroyed because, without it, there is no concept of Good.

Dr. LaViolette highlights the Egyptian cycle of Osiris. Osiris must die, must be disemboweled and strewn to the four winds, in order for Horus to come into his inheritance and defeat Set. When Set is defeated (entropy and disintegration overcome), Horus goes to the underworld and is imbued with the power of his father: he is made the Living Creative Energy. Out of Darkness comes Light.

Which leads to an interesting point of discussion: must we free the Old Ones and defeat them in order to be granted Power over the world? Is that our Inheritance? A bit of an undertaking that is slightly more complicated than going to the store for coffee filters and pound cake.

I love this note of warning from the Necronomicon: "Mark ye well that ye maketh ye Elder Sign at their appearence, lest the tendrils of darkness enter thy soul."

Posted by Teppo at 09:13 AM | Comments (1) September 20, 2004

102: The Invention of Manuscripts

I'm still ruminating on the Book of Soyga (and actually managed to scare up a link to the actual tables from the book [well, corrected versions anyway]). The initial value of each table is a single six-letter word which runs down the left-hand edge (forward and then backward and forward and so on). The remaining letters of the table are generated using the formula elucidated by Jim Reed (with the first line utilizing a more rudimentary version of the formula). The first twelve six-letter words are reversed for the second twelve and the final batch of twelve are, well, something else.

It's this question of where things come from which has sent me scurrying across the Internet tonight. And, since I don't find much on the Book of Soyga's structure, I get distracted by discussion on the Liber Logaeth, one of Dee's other books; in this case, one that was dictated to him by the angels. The Liber Logaeth is nothing more than a series of tables and it is from these tables, it is said, that the Necronomicon was formed. Since the calls only utilizes somewhere in the neighborhood of 700 characters from the Liber Logaeth, the remaining 239,000 or so letters may have had other permutations and combinations. Some argue that the Necronomicon was one of these other permutations.

Some. Others argue that the Necronomicon was written much earlier and came into Dee's hands around 1586 while he was in Prague. Upon translating the book, Dee's scrying took a interesting turn and became more focused on the transmission of information between the angels and the good Doctor. If we subscribe to this route, was the information in the Necronomicon of the sort which allowed Dee to finally convince the angels that he could be trusted with their knowledge? Or, as is argued elsewhere, was it Kelly who had access to the Necronomicon and he used it to fool Dee into thinking that Dee was receiving information from the angels when actually it was just memorized passages from the book of the Mad Arab.

Of course, the Necronomicon is fake, right? It was an invention of Howard Philips Lovecraft and it was his "fiction" of connecting Dee with it that was an attempt to provide his mystery text some legitimacy. It's all a myth, really. Everything you know is untrue. It's all just a big lie, a story told to keep you wondering and to keep you scared.

Posted by Teppo at 10:52 PM | Comments (0) September 13, 2004

101: Aldaraia sive Soyga vocor

The Book of Soyga is an anonymous 16th century magical treatise that is first mentioned by Dr. John Dee during one of his initial encounters with the angels of the skrying stones. "Oh, my great and long desyre hath byn to be hable to read those tables of Soyga," Dee said to Uriel. "Et haec revelantur in virtute et veritate non vi," Uriel replied, deferring any further conversation about the Book of Soyga to the archangel Michael who "est Angelus, qui illuminat gressus tuos."

When Dee flees to Europe in the last few years of the 16th century, he is forced to leave behind his immense library which is pillaged. Presumably Dee took the Book of Soyga with him (records indicate that there were a number of crates shipped along his route to Eastern Europe and back) which meant that the manuscript wasn't necessarily one of the ones that was surreptitiously purloined. Though, between 1583 and 1595, Dee had misplaced his copy of the Book of Soyga. There are two copies of the manuscript in existance now: one in the Bodleian collection at the University of Oxford (Bodleian 8) and one in the Sloane collection at the British Museum (Sloane 8). Jim Reed, in his discussion of the Soyga manuscript, argues that Sloane 8 is Dee's personal copy.

How the manuscript hid in plain view for nearly four hundred years is a simple matter of the title page which bore the inscription "Aldaraia sive Soyga vocor" (the manuscript was catalogued as being the Book of "Aldaraia" and, well, there are lots of books catalogued out there). While portion of the Book of Soyga deals with the fairly standard fare of the era (tables of names of angels and demons, astrological charts, conjurations and invocations), a good portion of its emphasis is on the permutations and combinations of letter values, including the heretofore undeciphered tables in the back. (It is Reed who cracks the code by which these tables are generated, though no one has been able to explain the use of these tables. Reed connects them with the spreading fascination in that era with Cabala -- the Catholic version of Kabalah.) Eight of these tables show up in Dee's Book of Enoch (Sloane 3189), a clear demonstration of the Book of Soyga's influence on Dee's Enochian system.

One of Reed's arguments is that, due to the transcription errors which appear in Sloane 8 and Bodleian 308, the existent copies of the Book of Soyga are generation "C" removed from an original "A." Reed's formula for the tables -- X = N + f(W) where f(W) is taken modulo 23 -- demonstrates errors in the existing tables and his comparison reveals enough common errors to argue that both versions were copied from the same "B" iteration (with the divergent errors in Sloane 8 and Bodleian 308 arising from their transcription).

So, we've got an anonymous 16th century manuscript that appears without any antecedents and with no authorial attribution and which concerns itself with the essential combination and re-combination of language and which is based on an even more mysterious manuscript that is still unknown. Most of the commentary I've been able to find on the Book of Soyga concerns itself with the contents of the manuscript and not its history. Or its use.

Well, gee, I've got a few ideas.

Posted by Teppo at 08:04 AM | Comments (2) September 02, 2004

100: Books

One of the professions given to John Dee, when one is busy listing all the ways in which the Renaissance Man left a mark on history and culture, is that of bibliographer. He made an extensive effort to build a vast and impressive collection of texts -- both scientific and occult -- during his lifetime, trying to collate the sum of human knowledge in a way that England would have access to the secrets held therein. It's all, you know, about synthesizing the totality of human expression, after all. Shortly before his flight from England, he cataloged his collection at Mortlake, a bibliography than ran 170 pages.

I've been poking around in Dee's life these last few days, making notes here and there, and finding books that I might want to investigate:

Ramon Lull's Liber experimentorum. Lull was a 13th century Franciscan who laid a great deal of the groundwork for the combination of rational thought, philosophy, and spiritual consideration of the nature of the universe and man's place in it. It's probably overstretching to call him an occultist, but he was considered a "Doctor Illuminatus" and the Lullists ran hot and heavy in Spain for a while after his death. However, due to the revolutionary nature of his writings, even though he was martyred, he has never been canonized. Lost saint, in the end. Still, influential to Dee and the Cabalists and the Renaissance as a while.

Johannes Trithemius' Steganographia. Three books, two of which were finished (it can be found here) and which detail a method of long-distance communication using spirits and other summoned creatures to carry messages. The third part was all in code which wasn't broken until 1998 by Jim Reeds. His paper can be found here. The fact that the Internet coughs that up for me is amazing.

Jacopo Silvestri's Opus Novum... principibus maxime vtilissimum pro cipharis. An early work on the use of ciphers, including the Caesar cipher. Dee referenced this book on more than one occasion as a tool for learning about codes. (An early history of Cryptology is here, part of an extensive discussion about who wrote the Shakespearean plays.)

The Book of Soyga. The book is first referenced during one of the first encounters between Dee and the Angels where he asked of the original and meaning of the text. The book was thought lost until 1994 when it was discovered bearing an alternate title. Transcript and discussion of the text can be found here.

Doctoris Dee Mysteriorum Libri Quinti (Dee's Five Books of Mystery). These are the transcripts of his "actions," his investigations into the angelic mysteries by means of the "shewing stone" and the medium of Edward Kelly. This is generally known as Sloane MS 3188. Scans of the pages can be found here.

48 Claves Angelicae. The 48 keys are the Calls by which the Enochian Angels are summoned. Crowley got his hands on them during the early 20th century and added his own spin. One version is here.

Voynich Manuscript. While named after the collector who "discovered" it in 1912, there is some evidence that Dee had this at one time and sold it to Rudolf II, the Holy Roman Emperor who Dee visited in Prague after his flight from England. It is still untranslated and, look at this, there is a whole domain detailing its mysteries.

I need to get my Latin back up to speed.

Posted by Teppo at 09:47 PM | Comments (0)