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Star and Snake

Essays and articles on Esoteric Thelema, philosophy, ritual magick, yoga and mysticism.

Oliver St. John

The man who writes books on a Thelema that no beast shall divine. Founding member of Ordo Astri, Thelemic Magical
Collegium. Member of Ordo Typhonis since 2000 e.v. More articles and essays are posted at https://ordoastri.org/ and
https://tantrika.co.uk/
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Friday, 18 December 2015 Places of Interest

Ordo Astri
The Priest-Kings of Thelema
Tantrika Books
On the 27th November 2015 the Cairo Post published the following item: “The Temple of Babalon Podcast
sarcophagus of the priest Ankh-f-n-khonsu has been unearthed in Cairo.” The story Tantrika Twitter
spread like wildfire.
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► 2018 (1)
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The Priest-Kings of Thelema
Thelemites are well aware that the (Egyptian) Book of the Law transmission was
► October (1)
activated by Aleister and Rose Crowley’s discovery of a funeral stele numbered ‘666’
in the Bulaq museum in Cairo. When the news story was released, thousands assumed ► September (1)
the sarcophagus must have belonged to Ankh-af-na-khonsu of the Stele of Revealing. ► August (1)
Not so, pointed out the experts, since the sarcophagus of the priest and scribe of the ► June (1)
Stele is already known about and it is not this one. The rumour was thus quickly
► May (1)
squashed. The newly unearthed sarcophagus was centuries earlier than that of the
man named Ankh-af-na-khonsu that is associated with the Book of the Law. ► April (2)
► March (1)
[This essay is part of the collection, Babalon Unveiled! Thelemic
► February (1)
Monographs.]
► 2014 (11)
However, the newly unearthed sarcophagus was that of a member of the same Theban
► 2013 (17)
cult. Initiates of the cult took the eponymous title, ‘Ankh-af-na-khonsu’. The name of
the prophet Ankh-af-na-khonsu refers to all members of the initiatic cult—centuries ► 2012 (9)
before the 26th Dynasty of Egypt.
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There is a distinction between Aleister Crowley as the scribe of Liber AL and the
Ankh-af-na-khonsu that is referred to as “prophet and scribe” in the book. Crowley Emai Submit
l add
believed in reincarnation, a common belief with occultists of the 20th century. He ress...
assumed that Ankh-af-na-khonsu was himself in a ‘past life’. Those of us who wish to Search This Blog
follow the teachings of Aiwass, the communicating intelligence of the book, need not
Search The Thoth
accept this. We are thus free to understand Thelema as timeless wisdom, embedded in
Tarot Spread
the land of Khem. Perhaps one more “secret that has not yet been revealed” (Liber AL, The Fifteen-
II: 2) has now been disclosed. Aleister and Rose Crowley succeeded in breaking open card or ‘Thoth’
an inner-plane time capsule. Tarot spread
seems to have
been devised
The transmission from Aiwass reveals the secret knowledge of the Setian cult of Ankh- by the
publisher of
af-na-khonsu, whose name literally means, ‘Life of the Sky-rider’. The Rider of the Sky
some early
was an Egyptian name for the Moon, in particular, the god Khonsu, the child of Mut editions of the
and Amoun. To the Theban cult, Khonsu assumed all the attributes of other gods such Crowley-
Harris Thoth
as Atem Ra, Horus and Amoun, and carried the Left-eye of the Moon as his totem
de...
hieroglyph. The Theban cult revered Khonsu as a type of the Holy Guardian Angel, the
soul that has united with the Angel, whose word is truth. Such a soul is able to stand
before Horus as the Lord of the Last Judgement on the day of be-with-us and say,
while looking straight into his fearsome hawk’s eye,

I am the Lord of Thebes, and I Ain Soph Aur:

The inspired forth-speaker of Mentu; LVX or NOX?
For me unveils the veilèd sky, Aleister
Crowley
The self-slain Ankh-af-na-khonsu
defined
Whose words are truth.[1] magick as the
“Science and
A prophetic revelation will always be open to interpretation, for prophecy is akin to Art of causing
Change to
divination and has nothing to do with prediction—though the two things are
occur in
frequently confused. Crowley saw himself as the prophet of a New Aeon. Kenneth conformity
Grant, Crowley’s nearest lineal successor, also sought to form his own cult, woven with Will”.[1]
from the fabric of his imagination and helped along by the works of Gerard Massey, However, all
magical
Robert Temple and even the fantastical tales of Howard P. Lovecraft.[2] Grant, whom workin...
Crowley admonished for going off on a “pipe-dream”, focussed his work entirely on
the Qliphoth, an intensely dualistic aspect of the Qabalah that classifies a world of
demons inhabiting an inverse Tree of Knowledge in the shadow of the Tree of Life.
Both men were successful, in various ways, in forming cults of Thelema based on their
own highly sexualised, modernist variations on the Hermetic Magnum Opus. Both
versions of Thelema bear little if any relation to the source work’s roots in an ancient The Magick of
Pisces
Egyptian initiatory cult.
The Thoth
Tarot trump
Liber AL vel Legis is in some ways an anti-scripture, in that the matter of the book for Pisces and
insists that all religions are ‘crapulous creeds’ (AL, III: 54). That is to say, religious the 29th path
of the Tree of
belief based on scriptural law is a condition of being intoxicated, as is the human ego Life is The
in love with itself. It is ironic that a religion of Thelema was founded long after the Moon XVIII .
death of Aleister Crowley in 1947 and somewhat against his wishes. Crowley made his The esoteric
title of the
position clear in Magick Without Tears, ‘Religion: Is Thelema a New Religion?’ After trump is Ruler
exploring what the term ‘religion’ means, he concludes the letter with the following of Flux...
statement.

Call it a new religion, then, if it so please your Gracious Majesty; but I

confess that I fail to see what you will have gained by so doing, and I feel
bound to add that you might easily cause a great deal of
misunderstanding, and work a rather stupid kind of mischief. The word Magick of the
Planetary
does not occur in The Book of the Law. Hours
Time is a vital
The Book of the Law goes further than merely eschewing all religious beliefs. By factor in
denouncing human rationality as an instrument of the personal ego, the book declares magical
war on all dogma, including that of material science. It would not have been operations
such as the
necessary, in the 26th dynasty of Egypt, to include such repudiation in any knowledge consecration
transmission. Only a small portion of the book’s content, though, is uninterrupted by of talismans.
thoughts and questions from Crowley. The spiritual and magical doctrine of the cult of The Chaldean
planetary
Ankh-af-na-khonsu is clearly expounded in the first thirteen verses of the first hours are a
chapter. Through the second and third chapters, the tone of Aiwass becomes means of
increasingly hostile and the knowledge cryptic. In fact, a verdict seems to have been reserving p...
reached as early as I: 17, when it is flatly declared, “But ye are not so chosen.” In the
context of the preceding verses, Crowley is warned not to make the error of personally
identifying himself with the “prince-priest the Beast”, the “chosen apostle of infinite
space” (I: 15). He sought a way out of this by later suggesting that ‘ye’ must refer to
others, not him!
Enochian
It is best if we do not confuse the symbol with its concrete meaning, or the metaphor Magick and
with that which it alludes to. The true identity of the Beast and Scarlet Woman is Hermetic
Initiation
poetically revealed in Liber AL, I: 16.
It is
sometimes
For he is ever a sun, and she a moon. But to him is the winged secret
said, and with
flame, and to her the stooping starlight. great
conviction,
This is clearly a description of cosmic principles. Even the soul that has attained that the
supreme liberation cannot be Ishvara, supreme Lord of the Universe, as was system of
Thirty Aethyrs
explained by Swami Vivekananda.[2] The immortal stone or star can never be a new cannot be
religion, doomed to merely rearrange the symbolism of previous religions and then equated to the
magical
insist the new image of Ishvara, or his man-god-prophet, is ‘The Truth’. It should be grades. The
view is a s...
clear from the generic cult name, Ankh-af-na-khonsu, that to associate Thelema with
any individual human personality is an error of a magnitude—indeed, it is a
catastrophe for the soul, for such a belief confounds the whole matter of the work.

Notes Magical
1. Liber AL, III: 37. Pathworking
the Tree of
2. Robert Temple, The Sirius Mystery—New Scientific Evidence for Alien Contact
Life
5000 Years Ago (1976) was a particularly powerful influence on the works of Kenneth There is a
Grant. plethora of
3. Various doctrinal views on Ishvara are discussed by Swami Vivekananda. See, ‘The books dealing
with
Philosophy of Ishvara’, in his treatise on Bhakti Yoga. pathworkings
of the Tree of
© Oliver St. John, 2015, revised 2018 Life, though
much of it is
This essay is part of the collection, Babalon Unveiled! Thelemic Monographs.
quite dismal
stuff. The
Related articles (Star and Snake): guided
visualisati...
Prophecy of Liber AL Fulfilled
Aleister Crowley Legacy: Boleskine Tribute
The Law of Thelema: Quantum Yoga

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The ‘Z’
Posted by Oliver St. John at 12:20
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Labels: Aleister Crowley, Ankh af-na-khonsu, Ankh f-n-khonsu, Babalon Unveiled, Book of the Magick of
Law, Boulak Cairo, Kenneth Grant, Liber AL vel Legis, magick, Stele of Revealing, Thelema Light is the
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