AZOTh
The symbol of the
Black Eagle in Alchemy, the Zos Kia Cultus,
Maat Magick and Incan
Sorcery
by Orryelle
Defenestrate-Bascule
As
shoulderblades are stretched back
and out with intense force, manipulated by strong hands to release prana captured
and congealed in the crevices of folded flesh, my Great Black Wings unfurl with
slow and gradual majesty. IO
BAPHOMETIS!
Double serpents twining, climbing Double-Wanded MeduZeus spine to erupt Gorgonic from the
Back of the Head, Alpha-Omega
AZOTH Black Eagle
Condor wings spread wide... what's inside??
'It all
became quite absurd, multiple tracks of information overloading my fractured
psyche. I began stuffing things into filing cabinets in an attempt to order the
chaos, actual visual compartments forming to enfold and compress the different
segments of morphing data, but the more chaos I ordered, the more I was served,
and soon I began to laugh and laugh, rolling about on the rock until I almost
rolled off its dramatic edge and dropped off into the physical abyss below,
which startled me halfway back to my (usual sense of) senses...'
-extract from Ayahuasca
trip journal, March 2000, Huaynu Picchu, Peru.
…In
my altered state, however, the fact that I almost rolled off the edge of the
great flat rock platform atop 'Young Mountain' (Waynu Picchu, sister of Macchu Picchu, 'Old Mountain') only made me
laugh even harder, so much so in fact that I began to roll around again and
almost rolled off the other side of the great rock...
...now I
muse, as I sit intent in conversation with Jada in tent of Chai and ganga -that
perhaps we are so unafraid of death in such a state because Ayahuasca releases
the same intense barrage of hallucinogenic chemicals from the brain as physical
death. So perhaps some part of us thinks we are already dead, or at least knows
that death is no threat but just, 'A great mutation to our next selves' (as AOS coined it). In such a
state of intense freedom, death can be but another absurdity in our increasing
glimpses of multiverses of infinite permutations of surreality...
'What
would happen if you did actually fall off the edge of the mountain...?' wonders Jada -who had
instigated my own recollections by his story of someone on Ayahuasca laughing
as they swayed backwards into a fire -though as if by the same magickal
protection (of the plants' own spirit?) their back though slightly burnt was
not really damaged. '...Would you just bounce down to the bottom leaving a
trail of snagged branches and pummeled foliage like some cartoon character
testing the limits of IMProbability by landing relatively unharmed from your
rapid descent...?'
Or
perhaps, I countered, I would have just landed in the soft embrace of the thick
cloud layer below my position on the top of Huanu Picchu ('Young Mountain'),
claws stretching out to nestle in their spongey surface as I alight amidst the
other Condors, great black eagles hunched in a ring upon the white mantles of
the atmosphere?
My brain
was slipping into an Ayahuasca-like understanding as I reminisced upon the
trip, and the above scenario I had spontaneously postulated suddenly seemed a
natural extension of my experience
in the Andes, a parallel reality of equal validity...
Thus it
was that I began to recall once again the power of the Condor, the shamanic totem whose
flight above and beyond the cloud layers can blur into the mists of myth...
This set
off a chain of reMembrances which connect Incan shamanism and its primary
symbol of the eight-fold Incan Cross with the Egyptian Sphinx, HruMachis, the primary 8-fold Tantric
Yantra, the Kia, the Maat Current of Magick, and the Alchemical
symbol of the Alpha and Omega -the
AZOTh or 'Black
Eagle', which
is also the name of the Native American sorceror Austin Osman Spare claimed to have been his spirit
guide. This web of interconnectivity is herein presented: ...
In my own
magickal efforts to contact the spirit known as Black Eagle I felt it as an aspect of the
Deity Baphomet,
who since Eliphas Levi's classic picture has been depicted and described as having Great
Black Wings. Spare himself drew a
wonderful rendition of Baphomet with these majestic pinions, and one wonders if
he also associated the two?
Of course
my primary experience of Black Eagle was in the context of a greater spell
which involved the direct invocation of Baphomet, so it is unsurprising that I
associate them:
The spirit
of Black Eagle came as a great black silhouette -a living shadow of sorts- and
alighted on my chest, where its talons sank deep into my flesh, melding into my
skin, until I had absorbed the entire shadowy bird within.
Then the
wings burst out my back, as my head morphed into that of a goat, great horns
spiralling up and out from my hairy black forehead.
In the
physical realm I had donned the skin of Mandrake the Goat, a deceased familiar who had
burnt down a house I used to live in in the rainforests of New South Wales (see
IMPious #2),
which had wedgetail-eagle wings sewn into it at shoulder-level. I now felt as
if I had sloughed off most of my regular human skin in favour of this
Baphometic montage, as I tattooed a sigil of the Word of Maat IPSOS on my upper chest with a
feather Quill.
So
it was an interesting confirmation when sending the transmission that resulted
from this rite (Liber Pennae-Ultim-Atum: www.horusmaat.com/LPUC.htm) to Maatian
priestess Nema,
that she revealed in reply that in her vision of the 'priest of Maat' receiving
this Word upon his skin he actually placed his own hide upon the altar quite
literally. When a few moonths later I saw her painting of this vision, I was
moved to find the form of Baphomet within the 'quillplume' therein.
Which
brings me to my next point -the very point of the Quill, from which the Ink of inspiration drips forth: The
distinct connections between the modern magickal current of Maat (as expounded by Frater
Achad, Nema, Kenneth Grant) and that of AOSpare's
Zos Kia Kultus:
Spare uses
the Vulture
as a symbol for the Kia (his term for the 'atmospheric I' or realm of spirit) in several
of his magickal pictures, and the vulture is also Maut, an Egyptian Goddess of both
death and motherhood (vultures are very proctective of their young), whose
great black form in Nema's Liber Pennae Praenumbra (www.horusmaat.com/liberPP.htm)
faces the gathered priesthood with 'gorestained beak' to confirm 'each has made of death a brother'. Maut the
vulture is a form of Maat, and it is through Her mysteries that the Kia is
apprehended. For what but Death
-whether of a physical, mystical or sexual ('the little death' of orgasm) nature- can lead one
to the spirit realms?
One of
Spare's few direct uses of the
Egyptian pantheon (his usual preference being for his own unique individual
system) is his employment of the Godforms Bes (a dwarf-God also important to
the Maatian gnosis) and Maut in his 'Bes-na-Maut' rite of transubstantiation by
facing 'the ugly ecstasies'.
Could it be then that the ZosKia famulus 'Black Eagle' is related then to the Vulture
as a symbol of the Kia? And yet
there is another great black bird which brings these two even closer together
-a dark bird of prey which has attributes of both eagle and vulture: The
Condor, that
sentinel of shamanic consciousness in the journeywork of Incan and other South
American sorceries.
The human
sorceror, 'Black Eagle' whose spirit Spare was in contact with, was apparently an American
Indian shaman, very evident in AOS' portrait of this Medicine Man. But was he
perhaps a South rather than North American Indian shaman, a human avatar of the
Condor or Black Eagle?
Spare was
obviously not ignorant of the Arts of Alchemy and its esoteric symbolism, and
his use of an alchemical term to name his 'spirit guide' is probably not
arbitrary (yet not necessarily a
fully conscious decision either!) -for the Black Eagle in Alchemy symbolizes
the AZOTh,
or first and last, and Spare's primary Evocation is his, 'Alpha-Omega
Evocation'. AZOTh is the principal of beginning
and end as one, for the Word is made of the first letters of the three primary
ancient alphabets (Arabic/English A, Greek Alpha, Hebrew Aleph) and the last
letters of the same (Arabic/English Z, Greek Omega, Hebrew Tau). This is the
principle of opposites meeting, of apparent polarites being ultimately equable.
It is the formula behind Spare's Alphabet of Desire and the underpinning of much of
his work, and a Sabbatic Tradition that has been continued through the works of
Andrew Chumbley
in his, 'AZOETIA'
(Xoanan). Like the Order of ChAOS, Chumbley's Cultus Sabbatai are one of the
contemporary heirs of the Zos
Kia gnosis,
while the Maat current runs
parallel and congruent.
The Complete AZOTh Essay, including visual and textual presentation of ‘The HruMachis Yantra’, appears
in