THE rituals of the orthodox Western ceremonial magick tradition conceal the technology for contacting Ultraterrestrials across barriers of time, space and ‘dimensionality’, but also for breaking such contact should this prove necessary, or for containing any force or being brought forth in this manner.
The immediate past source for such rituals are the medieval magical texts termed “grimoires” or “grammars” that is, basic instructional texts-but their sources are much older.
A clue to the origin of such texts can be found, for example, in the introductory narrative of the Clavicula Salomonis, or Key of King Solomon.
In the 1888 translation by S.L. Mathers, we are told by 'Solomon’ the purported author,
“I suddenly beheld, at the end of a thickly-shaded vista of trees, a Light in the form of a blazing Star, which said unto me with a voice of thunder: Solomon, Solomon, be not dismayed; the Lord is willing to satisfy thy desire by giving thee knowledge of whatsoever thing is most pleasant to thee.”
What follows Solomon’s request for wisdom are various techniques for conjuring Celestial Powers and Beings, of controlling their energies and of sending them back to their places of origin.
These beings are named and described in detail, as are the planets and spheres of their origin. While the antiquity of some of this material is unknown, some of it shows a knowledge of ancient Gnostic Wisdom Literature unavailable in medieval Europe, suggesting a very ancient origin.
One ritual that invokes the Power of Contact that comes from the Stars is certainly of very ancient origin.
The Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn polished the ritual as “The Bornless Ritual for the Invocation of the Higher Genius” in the late 19th Century, but a cruder version had been published in 1852 under the unappetizing title “Fragment of a Greco-Egyptian Work Upon Magic” and later reprinted by the great Egyptologist E. A. Wallis Budge in his turn-of-the-century book Egyptian Magic.1
1. Charles Wyclifie Goodwin’s translation of the ancient papyrus was published in 1852 as “Fragment of Greco-Egyptian Work Upon Magic.” Wallis-Budge reprinted it at the turn of the twentieth century in Egyptian Magic, and the Golden Dawn began using it as the “Bornless One” ritual shortly before. The Greek original was recently reprinted in the outstanding definitive edition of Book Four edited by Hymenaeus Beta. Crowley certainly worked on the ritual for a number of years, terming it “…the most helpful and exalted of all magical instructions” in his autobiography. Crowley approached the matter imperfectly (his own assessment) in The Equinox Volume I Number VIII. His perfected version, Liber Samekh, Theurgia Goetia Summa (Congressus Cum Daemone) Sub Figura DCCC was presented to one of his key students at the Abbey of Thelema in1921. It remains an instructional document of the A. A. to the present day, and, as such, may rest safely upon its stand-alone great merit.
In more recent times we have learned a great deal more about the Egyptian magical literature of the period following the conquest by Alexander the Great. Alexander, let us remember, was heir not only to the thousands of years of Egyptian occultism, but the similar traditions in Babylon and India, which nations he also conquered.
This ritual dates, therefore, at least to the last days of Egypt, but probably reflects an ancestry thousands of years earlier in Egypt, Sumer and India.
Popularly known as “The Bornless One” ritual, the title has been variously translated. The literal meaning is something like “The Headless One” but probably carries more the sense of either “the One Without Beginning” (“head” in the languages of this region often means beginning) or possibly “the one without a human head”.
The basic ritual, as translated (or interpreted) in The Golden Dawn, is intriguing enough in and of itself.
After some ritual preliminaries, the Celebrant (a Zelator Adeptus Minor), aspiring to the ‘higher Genius’ says, facing East:
Thee I invoke the Bornless One. Thee that didst create the Earth and the Heavens. Thee that didst create the Night and the Day. Thee that didst create the Darkness and the Light. Thou art Osorronophris, whom no man hath seen at any time. Thou art Iabas. Thou art Iapos. Thou hast distinguished between the Just and the Unjust. Thou dist make the female and the male. Thou didst produce the Seed and the fruit. Thou didst form men to love one another and to hate one another.
I am [name and grade] of the Order of the R.R. et A.C., thy Prophet unto whom Thou didst commit Thy Mysteries, the ceremonies of the Magic of Light. Thou didst produce the moist and the dry and that which nour-isheth all created things. Hear me Thou. For I am the Angel of Paphro Osoronophris. This is Thy true Name, handed down to the Prophets of the Sun.
What follows are ceremonial vibration of what are called “barbarous names” - largely meaningless words not unlike the “funny names” associated with contacteeism, mediumship and the lore of the Secret Chiefs.
Our interest is immediately aroused. Though “The Bornless One” (or “The One Without Human Head”) is an old ritual, with words far older than the English, as we have established, the Cipher Rules of Qabalistic analysis were in use with earlier codes used by Ultraterrestrials and Human Adepts long before the rise of modern English speaking cultures.
But there is more.
Aleister Crowley rewrote the ritual again in the early 1920s, under the name “Liber Samekh”, apparently primarily to ‘correct’ the strange nonsense words “with the significance of the BARBAROUS NAMES Etymologically or Qabalistically determined and paraphrased in English”.
Since this was the period just after Frater Achad’s Book 31, the “key” to The Book of the Law, and following Crowley’s main contacts with high-level Ultraterrestrial Chiefs including Aiwaz or Aiwass, Lam, Amalantrah and Abuldiz, such alterations might be expected to restore the old ritual to something of its Ultraterrestrial origin, and so it does.2
2. “The research community has consistently failed to address the real issues posed by flying saucers, which relate not to propulsion systems, aerodynamics and the like, but to the human psycheandthe magical currents that inform it.” -Alec Hidell in Chronicles of the Grey Lodge
When the UFOnaut Cipher is applied to all of the “barbarous names” as Crowley revised them in 1921, all but one of them produces the same values as the names given in modern Ultraterrestrial contactee cases, occult Secret Chiefs, starry wisdom, or Crowley’s own contacts with higher beings, in some readily obvious combination.
The entire argument for the Aleister Crowley (Thelemic) Canon is based upon contact with discarnate intelligences of unknown provenance. Crowley himself is quite clear upon this matter in a postscript of a letter to a student written in the mid-1940s, published in Magick Without Tears as “Do You Believe In God?”
Yet, some of the Crowlean establishment exhibits remarkable resistance to any attempts to link Crowley’s communications to the whole modern literature of trance channeling and contactism. This is true of the obviously related RA and Seth materials, as well as the more outré experiences of Rex and Ray Stanford or the late George Hunt Williamson.
This tendency reflects nothing so much as,
“… a priori fallacies full of ignoratio elenchi, non distributio medii, non sequitur, and sometimes sheer Hobson Jobson,” as Aleister Crowley put it himself.
To those few of us trained in both occultism and UFO lore over many years, the parallels are remarkable. If nothing else, we deal here with similarly constituted mythologies.
While I have no doubt that there is a most special quality in The Book of the Law, it diminishes it not at all to note that its advent was under similar circumstances to the dictation of OAHSPE a few years earlier, The Cosmic Philosophy of Max Theon contemperaneously, and the RA Material in more recent years. Quite the contrary, in fact.
The notion that such association somehow diminishes the “respect” the occult is accorded in the public mind betrays a true disconnection with general convictions; far more people in industrialized countries are apt to credit the UFO phenomenon than occultism, as major pollsters have noted for many years. The Yankelovich Partners conducted a survey on behalf of LIFE Magazine January 12-13, 2000.
They found that:
30% of Americans believe extraterrestrials have visited the Earth
1% claimed alien contact
6% claimed to know someone in contact with aliens!
6% claimed to have seen UFOs
43% thought UFOs were real (a plurality - 42% did not think so)
THESE ARE STARTLING NUMBERS FROM A MYTHIC STANDPOINT, IF NOTHING ELSE. IT AMOUNTS TO SAYING THAT NEARLY 3 MILLION AMERICANS CLAIMED UFO BEING CONTACT AT THE BEGINNING OF THE 21ST CENTURY!
The most recent scientific panel on UFOs, in fact, convened by the Society for Scientific Exploration in 1997,concluded that,
“there may be more to UFO evidence than just verbal reports of what people seeing in the sky. Some UFO evidence may be worthy of scientific investigation.”
The international panel was co-chaired by Prof. Von Eshleman of Stanford University and Dr. Thomas Holzer of the High Altitude Observatory, and included:
Stanford’s Prof. Peter Sturrock
Prof. H.J. Meloshof the University of Arizona
Prof. James Papike of the University of New Mexico
Dr. Guenther Reitz of Cologne
Dr. Bernard Veyret of the University of Bordeaux
Prof. Charles Tolbert of the University of Virginia
The subject is not taken lightly, nor should it be.
One should examine the relation, for example, between the image of the mysterious being called “Aiwass” as seen by Crowley in 1904:
“He seemed to be a tall, dark man in his thirties, well-knit, active and strong, with the face of a savage king, and eyes veiled lest their gaze should destroy what they saw,”
...and Malcolm X’s 1949 vision of the also mysterious Wallace Fard:
“He wasn’t black, and he wasn't white. He was light-brown-skinned, an Asiatic cast of countenance, and he had oily black hair.”
Or that Crowley’s rather well-known sketch of the being Lam resembles anticipates, in fact - the large headed beings described in many more recent UFO Abduction Cases. This does not denigrate Crowley’s work, but it does place it in the context of the mythos of our times, which, to my mind, enhances its plausibility.
To this I must add the foot note, meaning no personal disrespect to any parties who might identify themselves with this critique, that I personally know a number of highly placed, competent and erudite champions of magick and mysticism who are almost entirely uninformed on the subjects of UFOlogy and Forteana, and the lore of spiritualism, trance channeling and the contactee subculture that has developed over the last hundred years.
The author of this volume has spent some thirty five years studying these phenomena, both in terms of the literature and inextensive field research efforts. I have spent nearly as long a time in the study of magick, mysticism and parapsychology. My challenge to those skeptical of the linkage between these fields on either side of the question is to cross reference with some diligence before dismissing what, for some of us, is obviously a part of one continuum.
For example, in the core ritual given above, the phrases,
“Thou art Osorronophris, whom no man hath seen at any time. Thou art Iabas. Thou art Iapos,”
...becomes, in Crowley’s version,
“Thou art ASAR UN-NEFER (“Myself made Perfect”): Whom no man has seen at any time. Thou art IA-BESZ (“the truth of the matter”). Thou art IA-APOPHRASZ (“the Truth in Motion”).”
These yield the values in NAEQ6 of 144, or STAR KNOWLEDGE, 82 or A LEAGUE, and 114, or THE NAME, a standard Hebrew euphemism for the unutterable four-fold name of Deity. (It also has the same value as our “old friend” from the Mark Probert channelings, MAHARAJA NATCHA.)
Keeping in mind that the latter, which I once termed “the silliest of the silly names” refers to one of Sixteen Transtemporal Ascended Human Adepts who form A LEAGUE called the Guardians of Humanity outside of Time and Space in the contacts of Probert some decades after Crowley’s revisions, and that Probert worked with Meade Layne, a one-time adept of a rival body to Crowley’s A. A., descended from the Golden Dawn, we read this as,
“Thou art STAR KNOWLEDGE, whom no man hath seen at any time. Thou art of A LEAGUE. Thou art THE NAME. Thou art PROTECTOR OF EARTH.”
(“Maharaja Natcha” may also be decoded as the less humorous “of the Sixteen Protectors of Earth” because of the double name’s cipher values 114 = THE NAME).
The intriguing phrase,
“Hear me Thou. For I am the Angel of Paphro Osoronophris. This is Thy true Name, handed down to the Prophets of the Sun”
...in the Golden Dawn version becomes, for Crowley,
“Hear Thou Me, for I am the Angel of PTAH-APOPHRASZ-RA: this is Thy True Name, handed down to the Prophets of KHEM.”
Now PTAH-APO-PHRASZ-RA has the value 158, or that of Crowley’s own major Ultraterrestrial contacts AMALANTRAH & ABULDIZ, but why does he switch the phrase “Prophets of the Sun” - a phrase consistent with Crowley’s own philosophy, for “Prophets of KHEM” with the capitalization in the original?
If we recall that, in the Hindu mythos, the sky god Brahma rides a ‘swan’ which makes the sound “Aum”, both the change in “The Bornless One” ritual, and Crowley’s mysterious advice on keeping a personal magical book quoted at the beginning of this section begin to make sense.
He said,
“Let the pen with which the writing is done be the feather of a young male swan - that swan whose name is Aum. And let the ink be made of the gall of a fish, the fish Oannes.”
The name of that book is given as “Thelema,” or “Will”. All of this tells us that Crowley certainly was privy to the legend of the “fish god” of Sirius, Oannes, the originator of writing, flying from the heavens in a bird-like vehicle making a strange humming sound.
Some of the more interesting “barbarous words” offered by Crowley:
“Thoron” is an anagram; it could be made out as “Jesus beware” as well, but, also, the mantram for calling UFOs only recently received by a modern contactee, SOLIM SOLARA.
The whole term DIATHARNA (86) THORON (68) is of exceptional interest in our quest. The reversal of numbers 86 & 68 is probably a Cipher “Flag” to initiates to pay special attention. We can nevertheless become quite impressed with its depth, especially as it shows up ONLY in connection with Crowley’s version with the words “corrected”.
SOTHIS FISH MAN, or fish-being of Sirius is one cipher meaning of DIATHARNA THORON, as is the related FISH MAN JESUS (recalling the original association between Jesus, John and immersion in water). TITAN CRAFT is another meaning.
We find names familiar from the modern contactee lore:
ASALON-AI = 54 = CARL ARDO
AEOOU = 57 = BALORAN
ISCHURE = 99 = GREGORNO
ABRAFT = 76 = KIMI
BAS-AUMGN = 90 = GARCIA SAI
SABRIAM = 83 = FIRKON, etc.
Lest anyone think this forced or coincidental, keep in mind that this comes from a standardized list of ONLY ABOUT THIRTY of the most common contact names, most of them listed as such in The Revolt of the Free, pp 105-107.
Virtually all of them show up. But, for occultists, most interesting is the name “FF” having the value 36 = AIWAZ, the original name for what Crowley called, “mine own guardian angel.”
“Mine Angel! Mine initiator! Thou one with me - the Sixfold Star!”.
