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 Another Biblical goody two-shoes I was reading a forum thread about Liber Falxifer and came across a remark embedded in a discussion of why animal sacrifice (in this case, killing a black cat to get its blood) is called for in such a practice. The individual noted that animal sacrifice might be justified when one was trying to key into Qayin/Cain as a spiritual/magical ancestor but that sometimes it seemed to the poster that too much attention was placed on Cain’s first murderer status and that other aspects about him are ignored.
 Talk about sibling rivalry What the poster said about an over-emphasis being placed on Cain as first murderer struck me as very true, because Cain was not just the first murderer; he was also the first farmer. It was precisely his sacrifice of grain or “fruits of the field,” whatever that might be, that YHVH wasn’t so happy with. YHVH wanted a blood sacrifice, which Abel gave when Abel sacrificed the first lambs of his flock and burned their fat to YHVH, keeping the rest, I guess, to eat. It was only then that Cain got mad and killed Abel. But Abel was not killed as a sacrifice. He was just killed because Cain was mad at him and then went on to lie about it. (It has always seemed to me that his lying about it was meant to be seen as nearly as bad as the actual killing. Cain tries to trick YHVH and acts as if YHVH does not know what happened, thereby insulting YHVH, when in fact YHVH’s asking him a rhetorical question–Abel’s blood has already cried out to YHVH. And notice what does YHVH curse? Cain, of course, but also the earth itself because it swallowed Abel’s blood. Thenceforth Cain will have a difficult time getting the earth to yield, just as Eve after transgressing is cursed with having a difficult time giving birth.
Someone else picked up on the Falxifer name and said it meant “sickle bearer” and used that as an indicator of how the entities worked with in the book were bloody and murderous, although s/he did not use those words. Problem is that at no point in the Hebrew Bible is Cain ever described as using a sickle. In fact, it isn’t until his great-great-great-great-grandson Tubal-Cain that metal-working is invented. But if Cain had had a sickle, how would he have used it? Not killing Abel. Not killing animals. He would have used it for killing plants, because he was first a farmer, not first a murderer, even if he was the first murderer.
OTOH, in a review of this book (scroll down some), Nicholaj de Mattos Frisvold points out the similarity between the imagery of Cain and his sickle and Saturn and HIS sickle (interesting blog post about the differences between Chronos and Saturn). Saturn was similarly associated with the Underworld but also with the riches of the earth (and of course the being who in one version ate his children–who were then vomited up again, uninjured, much as the earth consumes seeds and throws up plants). So, that’s an interesting resonance.
Cain is held up as the originator of the Witchblood I imagine because God put a mark on him (a sign, “ot,” same as the word for letter) that set him apart from others and that protected him from being murderered himself for what he had done. A side issue that’s interesting to me is that YHVH did not think that Cain deserved to die fro having killed Abel. In fact, YHVH even even protects Cain with a sign that will prevent others from killing him, which makes me think this whole thing was supposed to happen, just as Adam and Eve HAD to eat from the Tree. Much is made about Cain’s exile as indicating his badassery, but in that exile Cain was protected by the very god he had offended. Cain also went on to found a city, so he didn’t go out to live alone. He went to live among others. IOW, he was not the only transgressor in town by a long shot and created a structure very important to subsequent humans–the city.
At any rate, if we’re talking about animal sacrifice and using the influence of Cain as justification for it, then those who sacrifice animals for magic are actually not following Cain. They are following Abel. To follow Cain, one has to sacrifice either plants or people (IMO, menstrual blood would work well for the latter, because is it not the blood that was intended to support a human life?). This makes absolute sense to me. It even makes sense of a later story in the Hebrew Bible, that of Abraham and his intended sacrifice of his son at YHVH’s behest. As a substitute, he is given a ram to sacrifice. So animals continue to be good to sacrifice to YHVH, whom many of the LHP indulge in hating or at least ignoring. In terms of animal sacrifice, LHP and the worship of the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob have a lot in common. Weird.
As a sidebar to “this had to happen,” I’d just like to point out the relative ages of Cain and Abel. Cain was the older brother. Throughout Genesis stories about the younger brother being favored abound. The idea is obviously important. What it means I don’t know, but it is most assuredly there.
The fact that Cain’s sacrifice was of plants to me symbolizes the witch’s knowledge of the plant world, not to mention that to harvest means killing the plants. John Barleycorn is dead and all that.
Later in the thread, the individual who brought up the meaning of of the word Falxifer says that Liber Falxifer focuses on three aspects of Cain: as plant knower, as killer, and as death–the idea being that Cain buried his brother. Thing is that no mention of him burying Abel is made in the story. God says “his blood cries out from the earth.” Yes, the blood that was spilled on it, not the body that was supposedly buried in it. In fact, God curses the earth for swallowing that blood, kind of being complicit in the murder.
Btw, I do not have Liber Falxifer, so I can’t check whether it is true that a ritual in it requires the killing of a black cat to get its blood. I was sent Liber Falxifer II as a very kind gift. I do not pretend for one moment to understand the system behind these books and have only paged through LFII and read things here and there so far, but it has a lot of neat recipes in it and I am enjoying looking it over. It does mention animal sacrifice, but these are of traditional food animals, not pets. Doesn’t make it okay, just seems to contradict the black cat thing. Personally, I have always thought there is a lot of human vanity involved in killing animals. But that aside, in some ways LFII it reminds me of Viridarium Umbris–the great focus on plants and having entries for individual ones as well as individual sigils for plants, for example. I turned to VU the other day and once again read the poem about the Hermit, which I really like. It set me off down a rabbit hole with Chumbley’s ”The Hermit” essay from Opuscula Magica. Volume I and an essay of his that is floating around the net, “Seven Shades of Solitude,” which is wonderful and which I highly recommend.
Re animal blood, I saw an interesting remark the other day from someone who used a lancet to get a drop of blood from an animal when she needed blood for magic. Can’t remember where I saw that, but I thought it was original and thoughtful. This would be the kind of spring-operated lancet that is used for testing blood glucose, and then as described, the drop of blood was mixed with some carrier, much as I do with the alcohol that preserves a couple of mandrake roots of mine and that I use to add real mandrake root to incense. I did love the wonderful lancet thingie that the Witch of Forest Grove made some time back, but I think it would hurt a lot more.:) Meanwhile, I will stick with sacrificing plants, thanks, especially the ones with good scents. As far as I am concerned, this puts me much more in line with Qayin.
 Spirit Vehicle Last night the spirit vehicle that has appeared in my dreams as a strange sort of black and silver electric bicycle returned as a black and steel locomotive. In this dream, I was being pursued by people who meant me ill (as usual!) and for some reason I ended up at my old house in Horseheads, which was empty (in fact, someone lives there). I stood in the dirt drive wondering what I was going to do. I was so far from town, and I knew that my pursuers would be turning up shortly. Suddenly there appeared in the driveway a huge black and steel locomotive. As soon as I saw it, I knew I had dreamed of it 3-4 times previously and each time it had rescued me from attackers. The scene I recalled best occurred in some vast brick-paved intersection lined with old-fashioned brick buildings of the sort one sometimes sees in Europe (I know we have nothing like them here). Masses of people were coming towards me, and suddenly there was the locomotive, waiting for me. It frightened my pursuers and whisked me away.
It looked somewhat like a locomotive but did not appear to have any wheels, nor did it need to run on any track. It didn’t sound like a regular locomotive either, just having a sort of quiet rumbling sound. It didn’t have any smell, like a real locomotive would. I noticed that especially when I got inside.
I climbed onto the locomotive and slid through a steel slit-like opening in the side. It was barely wide enough to slide sideways through. Although its door was nothing but a metal flap and did not even have a latch, I knew that no one else could fit through that door. It was for me only. (Despite the Freudian uses of locomotives and slits, I don’t think there was anything sexual about my dream.:))
Inside the locomotive was the cab, but unlike a physical locomotive, it had no levers, dials, no chain attached to the whistle, no old-time coal-fired boiler, not even a seat. It was simply black steel with a black rubber floor, very industrial. The floor was a little dirty with good honest dirt from outside, not grime, like someone had come in there many times on rainy days. The windows were very dark so that they appeared simply black from the exterior, but it was easy enough to see through them from inside. However, they did not open
As in the previous dreams about the bicycle, the vehicle had some sinister aspects. I felt a little uneasy that there was no steering mechanism. As a child, I was afraid of locomotives and had a recurring nightmare about being unable to escape being run over by one. As I grew up, I lost my fear of them and got interested in trains, but I still feel a little intimidated by these large, powerful, noisy things up close.
In the dream, almost as soon as I got into the locomotive, regardless of the fact that it lacked any steering mechanism, it turned and began heading with immense speed back to town. The people who had been pursuing me and who were scattered along the road and in the woods were terrified of it, which made me smile. I knew they would not ever locate me once the locomotive took me home (and then disappeared). I also knew as in the dreams about the bicycle that the locomotive was not there because I had asked it to come. It had either been sent or knew that I needed help and came to aid me.
Unlike the dreams of the electric bicycle, when I was outside of it, a few times the locomotive flickered into a human figure, a man wearing a black suit, white shirt, black overcoat, and black fedora, along with a beard–much like a frummie from Chabad (a Jewish sect especially into Kabbalah and known for their often deliberately humorous attempts to get secular Jews to be observant). I knew he was not a human being, though. For one thing, he had no face. I have dreamed of faceless beings before, but right now I can’t remember the content of these dreams. In Judaism, sometimes angels are said not to have a face, but I’m not sure if that’s not just some artistic convention or what. As for Chabad and frummies, I have known a number of people in Chabad but no frummies. I have never been tempted to join that particular sect. If I joined any Hasidic sect, it would be Breslov. At this point in my life, I have no intention of joining any sect, but I have been studying Kabbalah quite a bit, and perhaps that is why this being appeared in this form.
 SATOR AREPO talisman In the previous dreams, the spirit helper vehicle is all speed and lightness. Here it is power and massiveness. There is something very Saturnian about the locomotive–black, heavy, powerful, although it is not slow by any means. I’ve been asking for the help of Saturn quite a bit lately, but that is something I have been doing for the past couple of years. I feel that the dreams I had years ago now of the Dark Spirit of the Crossroads were somehow connected to Saturn. Because Saturn is on the one hand the deity of the dead but also of growing things (riches from the earth), this is an entity I have long felt close to, and I have gotten a lot of help on traditionally Saturnian tasks like discipline and limits. I’m not sure if these spirit vehicles are associated with Saturn, but the colors fit, especially in terms of a talisman I made a while ago for Saturn, which was a SATOR AREPO square in Hebrew letters on a black goatskin with silver (“lead”) ink. The SATOR AREPO square is quite old ( older than the Lord’s Prayer that some Christians would like to say it represents). Its earliest appearance was in Pompeii, and there were no Christians or Latin Our Fathers there. In fact, no one is sure exactly what it does mean, but one interpretation appealed to me–that Sator was a version of Saturnus, and that it was a reference to plowing up treasures from the earth, the domain of Saturn. When I made the talisman, I focused on it as a conduit for Saturn’s protection and help. At around the same time, I also made a Saturn protection talisman which I have taken with me when traveling–same colors.
The imagery of these dreams is very tangled for me. This morning I wondered if the frummie spirit was there because that would be a form that would fit culturally for me–IOW, that the spirit itself or the spiritual energy is not particularly Jewish but just appearing to me in that form. Just as it is not a locomotive or a bicycle.
 Four of Disks: Power Recently I read my cards on an issue that has been perplexing me–whether I should move away from NY to be closer to my friends in Chicago or stay here, perhaps moving to a different town in NY, one I like better than Elmira. The card for the outcome of staying in NY was the Four of Disks. I thought this card was positive–it certainly represents a lot of stability and power–although it could also be the top view not only of a fortress but of a prison. I think this kind of matches the locomotive, which has a cab with no controls–although it clearly takes me where I want to go. But does it have to? There is something locomotive-like about the sturdiness and even to some extent the coloration (black) of the object on the card. It also shows a somewhat slit-like gate, which I had not noticed before. The image on this card just came to mind when I got thinking about the spirit locomotive. I am not sure if they are related.
I do think that the vehicles in the dreams are in fact representations of spirits or spirit energy. I am just not sure who or what this is. Early Modern witches generally identified their familiars as animals similar to but not the same as a rabbit or a dog; these are machines that are similar to but not the same as electric bicycles and locomotives. According to what I’ve read about Early Modern witches, they did not call for or ask for a familiar. The familiar just turned up one day. Familiars at that time were certainly not the slavish beings of Hollywood depictions of witches. Instead, they were a bit ambiguous. They were independent and had their own wishes, even though they would help the witch. I wonder if this is indicated in my dreams with the locomotive not having any steering equipment. It will take me where I want to go but will not be a mere tool or servant, as steering and brakes would imply. It will work with me but not be controlled by me. It will take me home because I ask, not because I command. That certainly fits with the way many modern magicians work with spirits. I guess I wonder what this spirit machine gets in return.
I’m interested in hearing whether folks out there have had experience with a familiar. How did it come to you? Or did you ask it to come? Did you choose it, or did it choose you? Is it a living being or a dream/vision form like my bicycles and trains?
One reason why I could never get into Kabbalah in the past (or perhaps I should say Qabalah, since I was then approaching it solely from the perspective of “magick”) was because of the whole symmetry thing of the Tree. It just offended my sensibilities. Symmetry just seems unnatural to me, so like industrial culture. Dualistic, you know? One side of the Tree is Mercy (Male) and the other side is Judgment (Female). Etc. Something so pat about it and so unenlightening. How much of our lived experience is so very symmetrical, so extreme? Not much, I’d say. So how could this conception of God be helpful? I didn’t see it.
 Then we get this Tree of Death concept being put forward as a klippotic (or qliphothic–I’m going to use the traditional Jewish word throughout here, because the other one looks too Victorian to me). The klippotic Tree of Death is counter to the Tree of Life, a mirror reflection that reaches down into the nasty depths just as the Tree of Life reaches up into the unknowable realms. To me this just seemed completely bogus and human-invented as opposed to discovered through actual practice.
It is true that another conception of the Other Side, as some call it, is that it grows out of the side of the Tree of Life. The female side of course. Where else? Women are evil, stupid, foolish, don’t have souls, choose your insult. And it grows out of the side I’m thinking because according to one of the creation stories in Genesis, God made woman out of a part God took from Adam’s side. So you can see the implications for the Tree of Life–it’s a boy! Although I didn’t think this conception of the klippotic tree was helpful either, it seemed at least more believable because it WASN’T so symmetrical.
Then I ran across this quote from the Zohar re klippot: “Without a shell, no fruit can be had.” It’s been knocking around in my brain ever since then. The idea that a klippah is a nutshell in relationship to the divine spark it encapsulates implies that there cannot be any mirror tree. Instead, the klippotic tree has got to be more like the dark side of the Moon–something inseparable from the thing itself. This makes good sense in Judaism, too, where God and evil are not separate. God created evil. There’s no devil to shift it off on, no separation (although separation is in itself seen as not good).
But then let’s go a bit farther. The nutshell metaphor for the klippot means that the “husks” basically give form to what they encapsulate, no? They limit what they contain but they also define it, perhaps thus making the divine spark comprehensible to us. If you grind up what is inside the shell, it might be hard to determine what it is. If you just remove the husk, you know what it is right away–a Brazil nut, an almond, a hazelnut. But you also know what it is with the husk on. It’s the husk that gives it its shape, according to the Zohar, not that the spark is making the shape that the husk forms around. And we know that’s true going back to the nut metaphor, since a nut doesn’t quit being a nut when it is ground up. If you remove the klippah from what it contains, the nut retains the shape the klippah has given it. It’s as if the divine spark is never free of the klippot that form it, that it retains the memory of its time held by a klippa. It almost makes it sound like form is in itself klippotic, that only some kind of amorphous, free-wheeling shapelessness and formlessness is purely divine. Yet we can’t as humans or mortals take in something like that–at least, not easily; thus the fact that no one can conceptualize Kether, all modern mages’ claims to be meditating on Kether all the time to the contrary. We need form to comprehend and interact with the universe. Does that makes us somehow evil? I suspect some might say so. However, I would say that form is not evil but simply not nutritious in itself–without the content it gives shape to, it is not nutritive. Through its form we can identify what is nutritious, a good nut to eat. But the shape of the nut is there for the sake of convenience–the convenience of the plant but also of the animals that eat the nut; only by separating the nut from its shell can we be nourished by it. The implication of this metaphor is that we are being asked to look past form to see some kind of fundamental “stuff” that nevertheless does not shake off the forming it experienced when wed to klippa, but also that we realize klippot cannot be evil, that klippot are necessary in order not only for us to comprehend the world but for the world to exist. IOW, klippot are inextricable from the world as we experience it: Malkuth. I have indeed seen that said about klippot and the divine sparks, that they are so intertwined (with the conclusion being that the world is evil OR that it is our job to rescue the divine sparks from the contaminating klippot). But if you think about it, klippot are necessary for the world to exist at all, because without them, there would be no form and therefore we would not be able to distinguish anything. When we look at the Hebrew Bible and the beginning of the universe, what did God do but give life form. Without that form, we are just an indistinguishable pile of meat (or clay).
There is the idea in Kabbalah that the klippot get their life from the divine sparks they contain or encapsulate, the assumption being that without the divine spark, the klippot will disintegrate and die away. But the nutshell metaphor implies something else–the shell is not given life by the nut. Instead, both the shell and the fruit arise as an expression of another force of which they are both the products. Maybe that force is Kether, I don’t know. One thing is for sure–it is hidden from us, maybe because our minds are in fact a superstructure built on matter.
Likewise, the metaphor of the shell and the nut implies that there is no Mirror Tree (which was made popular in magic thanks apparently to Israel Regardie and Waite). A nutshell grows around the nut, contains it, gives it shape. It doesn’t stand off somewhere and regard the nut or imitate the shape of a nut without any nut inside. There is instead one Tree–the Tree of Life and Death, the Tree of the Universe. I think of it as a tree from which planets hang. Focusing on one of those, the dark side of the Moon is inextricable from the lit side. It isn’t qualitatively different so much as a different perspective–in the case of the Moon, one that is always hidden from us but which nevertheless always gives form to the Moon. Without the dark side, the Moon would be a husk that would falll apart.
So then I would take this metaphor even farther and say that just as there is no Tree of Death that is a mere mirror reflection of the Tree of Life, so evil does not exist out there by itself–and we cannot view the klippot as evil personified. We cannot say that evil exists over there, in the dark, whereas we are in the light, safe. Remember the demon who walks at noonday (Psalms). Instead, like Saturn (which also IMO gets a bum rap as purely malific), the klippot are limiting but therefore defining and thence necessary. One of the reason why this vision of the universe appeals to me so much is precisely because it is NOT symmetrical. It is lopsided, complicated, can’t be easily separated into its components, doesn’t come with directions, etc.
Now all this is stuff I am mostly pulling from this one metaphor. And you might say, “Guy, you are being way too literal about this nutshell metaphor. You are taking it too far. It is just a metaphor! Quit being a stoopit nerd.” The thing is that in Jewish study of sacred texts, it is precisely the practice to take it too far, to the limit of nerddom. That is one way to discover hidden secrets in these texts or in the universe. So yeah, I will nail this nutshell into the fricking ground.
That said, I’m no sage and am not even in the Golden Dawn (wink), nor do I follow any other sort of magical practice that claims to advance one spiritually as well as magically. I am just stumbling along, cobbling together a practice that suits me as I go. But I think one of the problems that we have as magical practitioners–and maybe just as people in the world–is seeing evil as something over there, something separate and generally easily identifiable, something “dark,” “negative,” etc., when in fact it is inseperable from our daily, lived experience and even contributes to our being able to conceive the world.
Likewise, I think we tend to see limits as not good. Re that, I remember taking a course on formal poetry when I was in college where we had to read sonnets, a highly formal type of poetry which exists stretched on a Procrustean bed of limits. I thought this meant the poems would be arid and boring, but I found that sonnets can be very beautiful and moving and passionate. The limits themselves provided the opportunity to shape beauty and passion. Perhaps klippot serve the save purpose in our universe–allowing for beauty, passion, life itself to be expressed.
This is not to say that ethics can be jettisoned because, like, d00d, everything is everything. No. I don’t believe that at all. I believe, though, it is precisely subtlety that helps us distinguish for our own selves when a practice is wrong and when it is right–not a rule somewhere out there, not a lodge telling us what to do, not a tradition handed down. Instead, right here, right now, us in the thick of lived experience using our ability to recognize the inextricability of klippot and divine spark, so that we can ourselves get to the point where we can judge “No, this is too much nutshell and not enough nut; i.e., wrong.”
I’m still feeling my way on this ground. I expect to be posting more on klippot in the future, since I am working on some art around the topic (in order precisely to make it clearer to myself) and reading more about them (including re-reading the Karlsson book, which is actually the best book on Kabbalah I have seen come out of the occult world and I hope they print the second edition soon). Meanwhile, I would be glad to hear what anyone out there thinks of the extension of the nutshell metaphor re klippot, the Tree of Death and its relationship to the Tree of Life, evil vs. good, etc.
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