BABALON — Crowley’s numerologically-derived spelling. Another name for the “Scarlet Woman” (i.e., a fire elemental). But it is also the city of “Babylon” in its greatness, before its relegation to the New Testament’s “whoredom.” Ba is the Egyptian soul and its repetition in Baba-lon indicates the “double-wanded” one’s “double-path.”
BAILEY, ALICE — Authoress of A Treatise on Cosmic Fire (and numerous other works). Died in 1949 at age 69. She was a Theosophist who also, it is claimed, maintained a fundamentalist Xtian belief (quite unlike HPB) and the conviction that she (like HPB) was in contact with the Secret Chiefs of the Inner Plane, especially Koot Hoomi. It is difficult, however, to assign much importance to any possible Galilean influences on her serious work. Her writings are highly arcane and abstract, containing insights into Hindu, Tibetan and Buddhist metaphysics of a profundity, and frequently of an opacity, rarely encountered elsewhere.
BALCHIPUSHTI — Literally, “Lord of the cockroaches” (King of the Jebusites).
BALKH — “All roads lead to Balkh” (mysterious Near Eastern city) said by Gurdjieff, referring to the Sufic origin of all systems.
BAPHOMET — Idol (chiefly its head) said to have been worshiped by the Templars. It is also the God of the Sabbath of Sorcerors. Its obvious association with “Mohamet” is possibly the result of unexamined Islam. It’s also a symbol of Gnosticism. The Knights Templars (1118-1300) were involved with Gnosticism, Cathars, Albigensians, Manichaeans, and many other groups.
Since the Tarot appears in the 14th Century and since it bears some indications of Muslim origin (primarily the word, Al-Tariqa, or “the way”) and the “Naipes” of Spain < Arabic nabi, “prophet,” then perhaps Baphomet was supposed to be Mohammad. Crowley’s “Devil” Baphomet certainly is alchemical, phallic and capric enough (with a 3rd eye).
Lévi: “To know how to extract from all matter the pure salt concealed therein is to possess the secret of the Stone that the Qabalists gave to their Mercury, the personification of Hermanubis and to Sulphur, the Templar’s Baphomet. The name can also be given backwards: TEM OPH AB “Templi Omnium Hominis Pacis Abbas.”
Satan, in an important sense, has no existence. He’s perennially invented by a perverse will again and again, strictly for evil purposes. All inferior magicians worship the devil. The Devil, says Crowley, is created by the Black Brothers “to imply a unity in their ignorant muddle of dispersions. A devil who had unity would be a God.”
Baphomet has his own tetramorph: Dog, Bull, Ass and Goat, representing perversions of the cardinal signs.
BARAKA BASHAD — (Sufi.) “Blessed Be.” (A “baraka” is a blessing or power used by the Sufis.) Baraka is another name for the X-Factor, conceived as a “magical fluid” that pours forth from the saints.
BARATCHIAL — The guardian of the 12th tunnel. The “ape-headed” or cynocephalous distortion of The Magician. Baratchial does not carry a caduceus, but instead struggles himself, with great difficulty, to control the writhing serpents. Since he is fork-tongued, Baratchial’s affliction is impediments of speech and his magic is the “Gift of Tongues.”
BAT — (See CHIROPS.) The bat is also the glyph of the pathway of the Hanged Man, and the totem of the Voodoo worshipers. In popular thinking it is the soul of the unenlightened, because it dwells in darkness and feeds indiscriminately on all life. In China, however, where many things are reversed, the word fu means either “a bat” or “a blessing.”
Since the bat sleeps upside-down he affords an important avenue to “reversion of consciousness.” (See VAMPIRE.)
BEELZEBUB — Literally, “Lord of the Flies,” that is, the Canaanite demon ruling over corruption, filth and death. Originally he was a God worshiped in temples free of flies. The conversion of the emblem of his purity into the tag of his destruction is typical of the progression of any God rejected by established religion.
BELIEF — What KG calls a “primal obsession” and in Aleister Crowley and The Hidden God, he says, “Every magician must discover the word that conceals his dominant obsession, must vibrate it until its energizing elemental is awakened.” Myths are never intended to be believed. They are opportunities to restructure our values and lead us to new insights. Goblins need not be “real” in order to be real. No magician ever believes anything. That includes the current reality consensus. Gurdjieff went so far as to say, “Believe nothing, not even yourself.” Feelings — unless one have trained intuitional talents — can never be trusted to reflect reality. The alternative to believing is simply experiencing or knowing.
It is not “belief that acts as a placebo, it is the absence of doubt. This is the real meaning of Gnosticism which had no truck with belief, but was concerned solely with knowing (from Gk. gnostikos, “good at knowing”). You “know” something by direct experience of the body and the mind, not through second-hand “evidence” or teaching or belief. Healing has nothing to do with struggling against disbelief, it is a relaxing into the experience itself and accepting, without giving way to despair, that whatever happens “is all right.” When patients say they “believe,” they really mean they have learned how to relax on the tightrope without falling off. If they had to keep forcing themselves to “believe,” they’d quickly wither and fail.
Meanwhile, 19th Century rationalism is paling to insignificance. Our Xtian children, reared in frustration and boredom, soon desert their native religions and run away to sex and drugs. Then, after burning themselves out, they return in the mantle of shame that we force them to wear, offering themselves to be brainwashed anew in our guilt-ridden, mind-murdering belief factories.
There is a deplorable tendency for our society to mention “religion” and “magic” in the same breath, as though they were synonyms. Of course, nothing could be further from the truth. Admittedly, it is an idiosyncrasy of some magi to bristle at religion, chiefly because it is authoritarian, rigid, ignorant and oppressive, and also because it belittles and persecutes creativity. However a sharp line between magic and religion must be strongly drawn. We are told that magic “goes beyond belief.” It does nothing of the kind — it shuns belief like the pox! If religion is 100% belief, magic is based in equal parts upon knowledge, originality, perseverance and boldness. Where confusion arises in the popular mind is over sorcery, which uses the trappings of magic and religion indiscriminately, is based on belief and subordination, but at the same time brazenly seeks selfish material gain and ego enhancement. Sorcery is really a kind of credulous business transaction, whose motto might well be “the ends glorify the means.”
Although Judaism and Buddhism are special cases, in Xtianity and Islam, the purpose of religion is individual salvation in the Hereafter. These belief-based religions assure salvation through fixing one’s faith on a God or a Paraclete which is other than the self and, which, in fact, erases the self altogether. The purpose of magic, on the other hand, is frankly the transmogrification — in whole or in part, with or without the invocation of Gods — of the hell that our world really is. Since the magician always dwells at the chaotic, creative edge of the present, this transmogrification concerns itself with means as much as ends. He rings in the changes as he goes along, extemporaneously. Nor does the magician cringe and subordinate himself, but acts on equal footing with the pantheistic and holonomic principle that each part is equal to, if not greater than, the whole. Since, moreover, any part, in a sense, is equal to any other part, the magician himself is neither more nor less valuable than anyone or anything else. The individual self is merely unique in the meaning and interpretation of its contribution. Therefore,