Famous Capricornians: Tycho Brahe, Carlos Castenada, Alan Watts, Humphrey Bogart, Marlene Dietrich, Gurdjieff, Mao Tse-Tung, Matisse, Nostradamus, Paracelsus, Pasteur, Woodrow Wilson, Stalin, Loyola, Joan Baez, Nixon, Albert Schweitzer, Joan of Arc, Martin Luther King, Benjamin Franklin, Poe.
CARPOCRATES — A 2nd Century Gnostic who advocated promiscuity and thereby earned the hatred of orthodox Xtianity, which in turn delighted in distorting his philosophy. What Carpocrates meant was that the flesh is of so little importance compared to the soul, that it can be used and abused for a higher purpose. Since the body was a prison, the idea was to experience the flesh and thereby transcend it, freeing oneself of all desire. Any human experience missed will simply cause reincarnation in another body. If we do not break all the divine laws we cannot be free to return to the Unbegotten. Carpocrates is credited with having said, “Nothing is evil by nature” and his ideas can be traced to Plato and Pythagoras. Another thing that made the Carpocratians unpopular with the orthodox Xtians was their idea of communal property, an early form of Communism.
CASSANDRA — This daughter of Hecuba who had inherited her mother’s gift of prophecy, rejected Apollo, who, in revenge, caused her predictions to be disbelieved by everyone. Just as no one rejects Apollo who expects popular success, so no one who cruelly paints the truth always in the harshest colors, will be heeded.
CASTANEDA, CARLOS — Author of many books on Mexican brujería, centering on the Yaquí sorceror, Don Juan Matus, a healthy championer of mescalito and peyote. Don Juan considered himself a “warrior” patiently awaiting the opportunity to use his will. He taught that we must learn how to see correctly. His three overcomings for the warrior are: Fear, Understanding and Old Age. We still ignore the lesson of the success of Xtianity which failed to historify Jesus yet prevailed all the same. Similarly, critics attempt to prove that Don Juan never existed, hoping thereby to discredit the teachings. Perhaps it’s time we admitted that fiction can take many forms, including philosophy and metaphysical initiation.
Don Juan is much like Jesus Christ: an entity of great mythic power who is only diminished by attempts to over-authenticate or historicize him.
CATECHUMEN — A pagan who has been chosen for Xtian brainwashing.
CATHARI — In 12th Century France, the Cathars were also known as the Albigensians, elsewhere sometimes equated only slightly less accurately with chiliastic Manichaeanism (the belief in a dualistic universe ruled by Good and Evil) and early Gnosticism. They held that the world was created by a blind demiurge and is under the dominion of Evil. The Albigenses (from the town of Albi), believed that Lucifer was God’s first son and Christ his second son, whose role was to bring spiritual order to Lucifer’s evil domain. Most historians persist in describing the Cathari as sexual “puritans”, when it was actually reproduction that they condemned. Their priests did not eat eggs or milk because they are the by-products of reproduction.
It is most curious that contemporary mention of this sect almost always ignores this most important aspect, viz. their insistence that human reproduction or procreation is the only unforgiveable sin. Since this world is hell, to foist existence on innocent beings is a crime. Hence, they were the first practitioners of compulsory birth control.
Some of the Cathari were quite ascetic — frequently fasting, always chaste -- and were called Parfaits or “Perfects,” hence the modern French dessert. Others believed that sodomy was a logical way of avoiding procreation. In Bulgaria, where Cathari were equated with the Bogomils, sodomy was practiced as an alternative to reproduction. Hence the origin of the word “bugger” from Bulgar.
The Cathari (and other Gnostics) understood what our postmodern world has forgotten. A society that puts all of its purpose, meaning, faith and future into its children, is a society that has lost touch with the present and with its sense of responsibility. Those least qualified to teach are always those who are most fertile. Those who grind out children like sausages cease to take an interest in the very things that their children value the most and those things with which that society most ought to be concerned and what it most needs to preserve. People who have had children no longer demand of themselves the time, energy, courage or inclination to attempt the rigorous, perilous and unpredictable experimentation essential to authentic personal, social and racial growth.
As The Catholic Church was considered by the Cathari to be strictly “the work of the Devil” and the Cross an affront to God, the Cathari were universally despised. The Church opposed this heresy vigorously to the death, so that by 1330 there were no more of them left to persecute.
CATHEXIS — Projection of psychic energy inappropriately onto some other unrelated person, thing or idea.
CETOGENIC — Of cetacean origin (as psi force, mass hallucination). According to Swigart, ufo’s are cetogenic, the last, desperate cry of the whales to man.
CHALDEAN — A synonym for “astrologer,” since it was the Chaldeans who were most advanced in this art. The following alphabet is one of 20 or 30 different Chaldean alphabets in Edmund Fry’s Pantographia (1799); it is called “celestial,” because it was believed to have been designed by ancient astrologers “from the figures of certain stars”:
CHANNELING — Very popular practice of the 1980’s. To channel is to act as an amanuensis or vox for an “etheric world intelligence.” If one acts as such a channel one allows one’s own voice to speak in a relaxed and non-interfering way. The channeler is often not aware of the meaning of the message until it has been completely written down or recorded. The knowledge so transmitted is generally of an intelligence much beyond the channeler’s. Automatic writing and ouija contact were formerly rather rare talents, but almost anyone can learn how to channel. We spend most of our time, in fact, forcing the conscious mind to close (and lock!) doors to the unconscious, to deny intuitions, to ignore telepathic intrusions, to block out all inner and outer “voices.”
CHAOS — The first step away from the Unknown Absolute. HPB says it is “the impenetrable veil between the incognizable and the Logos.” Apart from its ordinary meaning, Grant calls it “the ultimate substance of antimatter.” Its number is 156 (same as Babalon). Mostly what we call “order” is but an arbitrary arrangement of chaotic elements, as when we give an arbitrary frame of stars the name of a constellation.
Chaos is an endless fount of original realities in which anything is possible at random. Who hath in himself no chaos hath no power to create a star! However, since all things are but a repetition of the one, all things have the same creative handle on them. That is, our worlds are unpredictable as to form, but not to content — or vice-versa, depending on the morphogenetic rules. Science says of chaos, “Highs are followed by lows. Lows are followed by unpredictability.” (Which, of course, is to say nothing).
CHAOS MAGIC — Basically, it is that aspect of magic that deals with entering the “abyss” or, on the common level of understanding, facing the unknown. Chaos being simply “The Unknown” as apparently devoid of meaning. Chaos Magic was largely the invention of artist, Austin Osman Spare, in his Zos Kia Cultus. Later a form of Chaos Magick was developed by a few others in the 1980’s, as a form of the magic of solipsism. It is best expounded today by Pete Carroll in his Liber Null and comprises the magic of the “Illuminates of Thanateros,” heirs of the Argenteum Astrum and the Zos Kia.
The very mystery of being itself, says Carroll, is fundamentally connected to how we deal with chaos. We react to chaos by earthing it to its opposite. Once an action or result enters consciousness, then the chaoenergy or “cause” has to be carried all the way through to its end “effect” and hence is already implicitly manifest in the thought, even as it rises. If the impulse, however, is thwarted for any reason or scattered by ignorance, it falls back and disappears