Supping at the Angel & Feathers (Part three)
The card most readily associated with Maat is Atu VIII, Adjustment, assigned to the Hebrew letter Lamed and the zodiacal sign Libra. It shows a female Harlequin figure pirouetting within a diamond or vesica shape, finely balanced. She is masked, and bears the sword and balances of adjustment. The card is loaded with Maatian symbols. Crowley’s remarks on this card reinforce the close relationship with Atu 0 – a relationship the contemplation of which does so much to convey the essence of the Aeon of Maat:
This woman-goddess is Harlequin; she is the partner and fulfilment of The Fool. She is the ultimate illusion which is manifestation; she is the dance, many-coloured, many-wiled, of Life itself. Constantly whirling, under the phantom-show of Space and Time: all things are real, the Soul is the surface, precisely because they are instantly compensated by this Adjustment. All things are harmony and beauty; all things are Truth: because they cancel out. She is the goddess Maat; she bears upon her nemyss the ostrich feathers of the Twofold Truth.
Elsewhere in the same essay, Crowley stresses that this card is the feminine complement of The Fool. The relationship is so subtle and interwoven as to suggest identity. The mingling is indicated by a further passage, this time from Liber Aleph:
Now this Ox is the letter Aleph, and is that Atu of Thoth whose Number is Zero, and whose name is Maat, Truth, or Maut, the Vulture, the All-Mother, being an image of Our Lady Nuit, but also it is called The Fool, who is Parsifal, ‘der reine Thor’, and so referreth to him that walketh in the Tao.
These passages underpin firmly the identity of Maat with The Fool, and thus give insight into the nature of Maat. However, there is more here than simply a return to an advaitic, undifferentiated innocence. Maat represents the expression of that innocence through manifestation. It is why She holds the Balance; She is poised as delicately as a feather; and, as a fine balance, She is constantly making subtle compensations and checks in order to maintain the balance – for we have here the dynamic balance of Going, or constant Becoming, rather than the Silence and Stillness of Being. Reading the above extract from the essay on Atu VIII, what shines through is a sense of Perfection, or the Perfect Ion as Achad put it. We have the consummation of manifestation: the delicate, dynamic balance of the Naught and the All. The Perfect Ion, or the Aeon of Maat, is the perfection of manifestation, its ultimate flowering. It is the redemption of matter, the Daughter raised to the throne of the Mother.
It is the crescendo, following which is the return to Silence. The letters associated with Atus 0 and VIII are Aleph and Lamed respectively. The combination of the letters gives us LA (Nothing, not) and AL (God, the), the closeness of which constitutes the key to Liber AL. Crowley considered the subtle interplay of Aleph and Lamed to be of supreme importance, the basis for “a complete Cabalistic system of greater depth and sublimity than any other”. He went on to say that the details of this system had not yet been revealed; whether it was completed but remains unpublished, or whether its earthing by him was never finished, is not known. The most comprehensive account published is in the text of Liber V vel Reguli; it demonstrates the intimacy and complementary nature of the relation between Aleph and Lamed, Atus 0 and VIII, The Fool and Adjustment, conveying the essential flavour of the Aeon of Maat. It also makes apparent the expression of the Aeon of Maat in terms of the Tetragrammaton, in particular as Hé final; and there are three short, interesting passages from The Book of Thoth which bear on this aspect: The Union of the Father and Mother produces Twins, the son going forward to the daughter, the daughter returning the energy to the father; by this cycle of change the stability and eternity of the Universe are assured.
He [Harpocrates] is also the mystical absorption of the work of creation; the Hé final of Tetragrammaton. The Princesses represent the Hé final of the name. They represent the ultimate issue of the original Energy in its completion, its crystallization, its materialization. They also represent the counter-balancing, the reabsorption of the Energy. They represent the Silence into which all things return. They are thus at the same time permanent and non-existent. Within the context of the Tetragrammaton, Maat is the Hé final, the “ultimate issue” of the “original Energy”, as well as its absorption. Again, Maat is the perfection, the Perfect Aeon, the flower at its peak. As Atu VIII She is glyphed by the poised, delicately balanced figure who pirouettes about a point – the point of return. She is the Perfect expression of the infinite potential of The Fool. Having flowered into perfection, She is poised on the edge of return or reabsorption – the Fool on the edge of the Abyss. This balance is to be seen in terms not of time, but of a perpetual and dynamic balance of being and non-being, of becoming. These ideas are tenuous and fleeting to the terrestrial mind, which is conditioned by duality and time. By a process of contemplation rather than intellectual grasping, however, these glyphs act as receivers, earthing flashes of insight which remain forever inexpressible in terms of reason, but which hover on the edge of awareness. Horus and Maat constitute a Double Current; they are twin aeons – the Twins of Tetragrammaton, the Son and the Daughter, the Vau and the Hé final.
Likewise, they are Ra-Hoor-Khuit and Hoor-paar-kraat, the manifest and unmanifest twins which are Perfection: and Perfection, being Silence, is Zain, the Wordless Aeon.
These twins are shadowed forth in Atu VI, assigned to Gemini; and contemplation of this card sheds further light on their interplay. Atu VI depicts the closeness of the Twins; it also, though, emphasises the disintegrative or purgative side of the formula solve et coagula – the breakdown into constituent elements, prior to their synthesis or reintegration. In the Atu this is suggested by the arrow, which is about to be shot by the figure of Eros or Cupid towards the Twins. The arrow is a symbol of direction, and shows the dynamic of True Will – which is not being but going, not individual but universal. The arrow pierces all points simultaneously in a perpetual orgasm; it is tipped with poison, an all-penetrant toxin capable of dissolving the illusion of separateness.
The complement of Atu VI is Atu XIV, Art, which depicts the flight of the arrow beyond its disintegrative stage. The Two are now resolved into their synthesis, which is Perfection. The arrow is soaring Beyond, piercing the rainbow. There is no goal, only the dynamic of the flight. The flight is towards Perfection, as we gather from the Vision of the Fifth Aethyr: And having known these [Isis and Nephthys] there are the wings of Maut the Vulture. Thou mayest draw to an head the bow of thy magical will; thou mayest loose the shaft and pierce her to the heart.
Maut the Vulture is a glyph of Maat, and Maat is Perfection: the perfection or redemption of matter, the perfection of Zero as Two. The arrow, as the magical will, has its own dynamic; it is on the return flight, soaring to its reabsorption into the undifferentiated consciousness from where it was loosed, that undifferentiated consciousness itself preparing to melt back into the Naught. This is representative of the Hé final, the original Energy in its completion; and in its counter-balancing, the reabsorption: the Silence from which all things issue forth, and into which they are poised to return.
In 1974, Liber Pennae Praenumbra (The Book of the Foreshadowing of the Feather) was earthed. Often in opulent language, and expressed in flowing imagery, it is cast as a transmission from the Aeon of Maat – hence the title. The feather is a symbol of Maat, glyphing the weight against which the heart was judged in Amenta. The principal mantra from this text is IPSOS, ‘by the same mouth’:
By the same mouth, O Mother of the Sun, is the word breathed forth and the nectar received. By the same breath, O Counterweight of the Heart, is the manifest created and destroyed.
“Mouth” suggests the Hebrew letter Pé, associated with which is Atu XVI, The Tower. This is a glyph of many intermingling ideas – the phallus erupting, the aspirant being shattered by the flash of illumination, and the dissolution of individuality at the impact of the cosmic. There is, however, another aspect – that of the pregnant Womb of the Mother. Liber 777 gives a correspondence for Pé as ‘The Crowned and Conquering Children emerging from the Womb’; later in the same section of 777 these children are referred to as Horus and Harpocrates. Crowley makes a more explicit reference to this aspect of Atu XVI in the course of his Comment on Liber LXV.
Pé is the letter of Atu XVI the ‘House of God’ or ‘Blasted Tower’. The hieroglyph represents a Tower – symbolic of the ego in its phallic aspect, yet shut up, i.e. separate. This Tower is smitten by the Lightning Flash of Illumination, the impact of the H.G.A. and the Flaming Sword of the Energy that proceeds from Kether to Malkuth. Thence are cast forth two figures representing by their attitude the letter Ayin: these are the twins (Horus and Harpocrates) born at the breaking open of the Womb of the Mother (the second aspect of The Tower as “a spring shut up, a fountain sealed”).
This Mouth is the Gate through which manifestation issues forth, and to which it returns; by the same mouth is the word uttered and absorbed. There is a clear connection with the foregoing remarks about Tetragrammaton, and in particular with the Twins – the Son and the Daughter, the Vau and the Hé final. The hieroglyphs coalesce; none can be pinned down and assigned a definite, clear and unambiguous meaning.
The four elements of the Tetragrammaton have meaning only in relation to each other;that meaning is dynamic – moving, flowing, shifting. We are dealing with the formulae as they have been refracted through terrestrial mind, with inevitable interpretation in terms of duality and time. The essence of glyph and symbol is conveyed intuitively, in a flash of insight. It is no more than a flash, because once the mind attempts to grasp the insight, it is gone. The flash is the refraction of the insight in terrestrial mind, a fleeting glimpse of the infinite and eternal.
Maat is the Mouth both of ingress and of egress, of manifestation and of non-manifestation, of flowering and of reabsorption. It is the matrix from which everything springs, and to which everything returns. The Harlequin figure of Atu VIII is masked because She is the nothingness which masks itself with the play of form.
She is perfectly balanced, Perfection itself, the supreme balance of Zero and Two – their utter and perfect equivalence. ALIL, ‘the image of nothingness and silence which is a fulfilment of the aspiration’ is mirrored as LILA, the play of manifestation. The Aeon of Maat is not something distant in time – a future aeon some two thousand years hence, which somehow reaches back to us; it is here and now, and we need only to perceive it. It is the pellucidity of innocent, undifferentiated awareness, which is at the same time the perfection of manifestation: a perfection which is not something perhaps capable of attainment at some future time, but is already here – has always been, and will always be. It is the clarity and freedom of jivanmukta – liberation whilst yet living. The liberation is not of the terrestrial vehicle – which is a child of space and time, and thus subject to its limitations – but of consciousness, no longer shackled to the vehicle through which it has formerly focused, but able to expand and soar beyond its former confines.
Maat is at the core of matter or manifestation. It the background from which everything springs, in which it is nourished, with which it is infused, and to which it returns: undifferentiated awareness which lies forever beyond the boundaries of terrestrial awareness – boundaries which have no reality, are self-imposed and self-limiting. Initiation is the widening and deepening of awareness, the remembrance or re-membering of a pan-dimensional, cosmic state. The Aeons are states of initiation, the unveiling of awareness, which become apparent when the aspirant is ready to perceive; not uniform spans of time, but of indeterminate length. They are not successive, but simultaneous; likewise, Naught and Two are not merely different aspects of the same thing, but are utterly identical – “the soul is the surface, and the surface is the soul”. The Naught is not superior to the Two, nor the Two a progression from the Naught. This is a Truth which remains forever a closed book to the rational mind, but which flowers intuitively in the silence of contemplation.
It is with this continuum, this matrix, that we traffic when making ‘alien’ contact. As we become increasingly alive to those vast reaches of awareness which lie beyond the terrestrial, so there is a corresponding awareness that we are not confined to the terrestrial vehicle through which we have habitually focussed. This diffusion of identity may seem a strange, threatening idea to our rational way of thinking, conditioned as it is by language to perceive in terms of contraries such as subject and object, inner and outer, me and not-me. However, at deeper levels of awareness we know this to be a shallow superstructure. There is a sensation of recognition, of remembrance, of experiencing again an intrinsic state which had slipped awhile beyond conscious recall.
This state remains as a substratum, the hidden stream or current which powers the fountain. The Angel dwells at this point, where the terrestrial merges into the infinite and eternal; it is the point which is everywhere and at all times, veiled by the chimera of terrestrial identity, revealed by the dissolution of that identity. The Angel is ever present, infinite and eternal, a fountain of living waters from which we can drink at any time; all that is needed is to listen to the Voice of the Silence.
The Knowledge and Conversation of the Holy Guardian Angel, and the Aeon of Maat, are identical; this identity can be experienced at first hand by, quite simply, communing with the Angel. Magical and mystical experience is the life-blood of initiation, by which we are eternally supping at the Angel & Feathers.
Text: Michael Staley (with kind permission) – Starfire Publishing
“Mother of the Sun” – Matt Baldwin-Ives
“Jivanmukta” – Matt Baldwin-Ives
“Aeon of Maat” – Matt Baldwin-Ives
“Pan-dimensional Cosmic States” – Matt Baldwin-Ives