Correspondence from Marcelo Motta to Hermann Metzger
Caixa Postal 15-09 Rio de Janeiro, GB Brasil
29 March 1963
To the chief of the Swiss [Hermann Metzger], and to the Swiss "Thelemites"—as you call yourselves! . . .
Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law.
This letter is my Greeting of the Equinox to you.
Although I asked you to stop sending me your literature—which goes as a rule straight into the nearest garbage can—you have continued to bombard me with the evidence of your folly—little folly, pray! I do not know whether this is a challenge in your part—if you mean to, as does a spoiled brat, "spit me in the eye". If so, you have succeeded beyond your wildest dreams, for in your latest symptom of insanity—your translating 666's letter to a sister with a "DU" in the holy verse—you prove to have gone down to precisely the level I warned you against. And therefore, the Outer Head of the Order will make a last attempt, one last attempt, to show you how what you think to be a challenge is but a demonstration of blindness—spiritual blindness.
In short, I propose to speak to you with common sense, horse sense, so-called; and hope thereby to awaken whatever shreds of sense of humor—which is sense of balance, which is "common" sense—there may be left in you.
You may—or may not—know that Karl Germer died late last year, a death in which the last drop of his blood left his body. You may, or may not, know what this means, and what grade that Man had accomplished. I do not know if you knew—I do not know if he ever told you—that he was A.C.'s successor, and the BAPHOMET for the whole world. He never told me, either; I had to discover it myself. Such was the man whom you disobeyed, whose initiated rendering in German of the Holy Books of THELEMA [Volume I, Volume II, Volume III] you altered, but to whom you went running—I speak to you, sir!—the moment somebody in South America held an honest error before your fool's face.
You complained to him that you had been accused of being in cahoots with Oscar Schlag, which you think is untrue. But what you do not know is that it is Schlag's influence that has been inflating your ego to the point where you have, unbeknownst to you, become a traitor to the very WORD you think yourself the carrier of! Schlag is an "Evil Adept"—which means simply that he is a man who, when doing the 5º=6o work, united himself to his Evil Persona, instead of his Holy Guardian Angel, and is now a slave to Choronzon 5º=6o—Dispersion—in the person of the Abramelin demon. He is, being an Adept, magically powerful—much more powerful than you realize—and had the help, furthermore, of the Four Princes, which, at the passing of the old Aeon, assumed leadership, and impersonate the spiritual founders of, the four main religions of the Aeon past: Osirian Christianity, Brahmanism, Buddhism and Islamism. Think for a moment, sir, of how powerful are those Entities which you, undoubtedly, have been duped into thinking that you control—by small amounts of theirs!
Now also, in your letter to the Head, the BAPHOMET, SATURNUS, that is to say in a certain sense, the DEVIL, though He was—and is—more than just that concept, you also, I repeat, protested to be "the child"—thereby proving that my letter, with its warning "mind your own business and stop trying to mind mine", probed deep into the trauma that had been carefully fostered in your ego from the moment when you allowed the Lodge to become untiled—that is to say, from the moment when you started blaspheming against AL.
But!—it is possible—it is barely possible!—that you are indeed the "child", and for this reason I write this letter. For, if you are a child of BABALON and the BEAST, that is to say, if you are now a Babe of the Abyss, it is necessary to give some bearings whereby you may chart your course, and come off the pit of Because into the Gate of the City of the Pyramids.
Know then, my poor child, that every single Thelemite who crossed the Abyss, and a great many more that never did, thought himself—of herself—that "child" of AL. And with a perfect right to do so. We are, all of us, children of THERION—the Christ—borne unto the Virgina Mundi, who is the very same as the Great Whore, the Woman Clothed With the Sun, Our Lady BABALON of the City of the Pyramids. Now, whether you are the particular child who will decipher AL II, 76, that will only be proved when and if you decipher it. Rest assured that the mystery, once cleared, shall be evident and simple to all, in the same way as was the Key 31, discovered by poor O.I.V.V.I.O. [Charles Stansfeld Jones], whose sad case I advise you to ponder carefully before you continue in your present course.
You are—if you are a Babe of the Abyss—mightier than all the kings of the earth, because the Master of the Temple is indeed that—even if the man in which he manifests may be a street-sweeper, or, as One whom I met was, an old nigger without legs rolling in a little cart along the streets, to all appearance a beggar—yet a beggar responsible for the work and the vision—spiritual vision—of all those who were bound unto him. I refer you to LXV: " . . . and I bear the Cup of His gladness unto the weary ones of the old grey land."
Do not forget the sequel! Whether you are one of the "chosen ones" is no responsibility of yours, for He is not to be bought at the ransom of the whole Universe. Remember Sir Palamedes the Saracen—he did prodigies, he attained the highest trances, he performed the maximum feats—but only when did he confess his failure to buy "it" at the ransom of the whole Universe did the Beast come nestling to his side. . . .
Now, please, my poor friend, let me point out the symptom of schizophrenia—the beginning of Dispersion, unto whom be Restriction in the Name of BABALON!—the symptom of schizophrenia in your behavior:
You cannot both have your cake and eat it. You claim to be the "child" prophesied in AL. Then, this means that you accept AL as a Holy Book, indeed the sole Law and rule of life, divinely inspired, the work not of a man but of a God—I use this word in its technical sense of Initiation to Godhead, or whatever it may mean.
BUT: If you do accept AL as such, how can you, man, possibly, ever, disobey the most solemn injunction of the Book, repeated in every single one of the chapters, command of NUIT, HADIT, and RA-HOOR-KHUIT not to change even the style of a letter?
Liber AL is divinely inspired, divinely dictated, divinely given, and therefore the triple injunction not to change the style of the letters must be sternly and reverently obeyed.
Liber AL is an imposture perpetrated by Aleister Crowley, [illegible] was a-tout-vapeur, and in this case you cover yourself of ridicule before all straight-thinking men by claiming to be the "child" "prophesied" in it.
You can have only one of these alternatives. You cannot have both. This is simply REASON, my friend. AL is a reasonable Book—thereby proving that it cannot be the work of anything that goes about on two legs and has no feathers. Any sane book cannot be the work of the insane (=the "folk of the earth", but only in the sense of those whose Reason—Daäth—instead of being the servant of the higher faculties—tries to usurp the Place of the Most High, thereby truly becoming the "bastard of the Swastika".)
Remember that the olden Teutonic kings wore a collar about their necks the symbol of slavery—to signify that Daäth—whose site is the neck—was chained, bound and restricted by the higher faculties symbolized by their crown. "Go thou and do likewise!" That collar is the Green Line that encircles the Universe—the Girdle of Astarté the Starry.
The above is basic. I ask you to consider it most carefully, to perceive the irrational nature of your behavior, and if you think—as you surely will—but "above the Abyss nothing is true except in terms of the contradiction implied by it"—I ask you to remember that, although this is so above the Abyss, it is below the Abyss that you have been for a long time now defacing AL (think of it! ! !), despite the fact that you were warned by the O.H.O. [Outer Head of the Order], FRATER SATURNUS [Karl Germer], who happened also to be a Magister Templi of the A∴A∴ and Head of the Order of Thelema.
If, further, you think: "he is dogmatizing, he is waving the letter at me, while I am concerned only with the spirit", I advise you most earnestly to read paragraphs 28 and 29, and specially this last of Liber CLXXV Astarte vel Berylli, which bears most excellently upon your case.
I will now pass to some other considerations of why your "DU" is an improper rendering of the passage in question (I will yet remind you once more that, aside all else, to any true Thelemite, it is a blasphemy). I surmise that your reason, in writing it so, was to imply: "behold, when I say, do what thou wilt, I do not mean that you should do what your dirty, unclean, malodorous inferior selves wish to do; I mean that you should do what your Higher Selves want you to do".
In doing this, in a sense, you were apologizing for the Law—you were ashamed of it. Yet, remember that it is written that the Scarlet Woman should be shameless before all men—if you are truly a Master of the Temple, you will understand what this means, but I will give you a hint, remember that the first ordeal is of silver, remember that the Foundation is called a Stone, remember that the Aspirants of the A∴A∴ are men, but the Brethren of the A∴A∴ are women, remember that the Nepesch purified is the Virgin of the world; this is one of the symbols drawn in the book of the Secret Symbols of the Rosicrucians: see its reproduction, if you do not have that, in Equinox II, page 275, Diagram 33, "The Garden of Eden". Surely you have this.
But there is another, and more important sense, in which "DU" is misleading. How can you possibly presume to determine how any one man shall interpret that line? Are you going to make your interpretation the interpretation for all German-speaking people? Don't you realize that you are restricting your fellow-men, checking the course of your fellow-stars. That you are, in fact, projecting the gigantic shadow of your swollen ego onto the Universe, instead of keeping it what it should be—the instrument whereby you relate yourself to the Universe.
Don't you realize that it is a syndrome composed of vanity and fear—the surest symptoms of identification with the Ego—that is behind this initiative of yours?
For behold, a fellow star may chose to interpret Do what thou wilt as doing what his smaller self wants to do. Another star may interpret it as doing what somebody else wants him to do. You say this is wrong? It is no business of yours! Every number is infinite; there is no difference! "Let there be no difference made among you between any one thing & any other thing." "argue not; convert not; talk not overmuch!"
Think also of times to come, when your wrong rendering may be the only one available to other peoples, who will translate it from the German into their own tongues, and thus multiply your error. You think to be freeing them; you are enslaving them! You are chaining them to your chariot wheels! This is the work of a black magician, not the work of a Knight of the Host of the Sun!
Think, furthermore, of the Karma you are creating. Think of the plague and the curse of Christianity when the Roman Church assumed leadership over all others, chose material growth as its way, and spread the infection of Choronzon slavery onto all lands!
Think of O.I.V.V.I.O.! Think of Tranker [Heinrich Tränker], and what he did to the O.T.O. believing he was obeying his Guardian Angel! Think of Krumm-Heller [Arnold Krumm-Heller] (the father), and the damage that he did to the O.T.O. and to anything in contact with the True Rosy Cross, believing, he also, that he was obeying his Guardian Angel, whom he thought to be the Count of Saint Germain—which was one of my past incarnations, and is only truly depicted in M. Paul Charconac's excellent French biography, which I advise you to read.
Do what thou wilt is the Law of Freedom, yet you would have me serve!—you will cry out. But, my friend, we are not free in the sense of being irresponsible. We are bound by Our Oath to serve. We are servants of the Star & the Snake. We are servants of Heru-Ra-Ha. We are servants of V.V.V.V.V. We must build ourselves, stones that we are, onto the great wall that protects mankind—our little brethren—from the onslaught of the abyss. Indeed, we are not "free"! We serve; we must humiliate ourselves; we must give up all that we are and all that we have; we must become nothing; we must work in darkness and tend our gardens; we must check our egoes with the triple chain around the neck, and we must await the Consummation—which will come when He wills Who is Appointed unto that End, and not when we think it should!
Indeed, we must die; but in dying, seeds that we are, we shall bear much fruit. We are the Rejoicing Isis; we bear the child and feed it of our substance; and our business is to feed the child; we are not the child! He is the child in us, or rather, of us! The ego must die! That is the mystery of Osiris, and of why Osiris is a black god.
You must become Osiris before you may worship Hoor. You must be crucified, slain and rise before you may shout your joy to greet the newly-born Sun. Are you not, beloved, the Son of the Sun?
In short, brother, if you are a Babe of the Abyss, you will soon become a Zelator of the A∴A∴, a Stone of the Watch Towers, a Keeper of the mysteries. This Initiation transcends Assiah, for the first time, into Yetzirah, the Angelic World. The Initiation of Adeptus Minor which you think you accomplished before was of Tiphereth of Malkuth, and was in Assiah. The Work of accomplishing the Knowledge and Conversation of your Holy Guardian Angel lies before you—not behind! You must accomplish it to the fulness of power and light that is described in The Book of the Sacred Magic and in "John St. John" in the EQUINOX I, i. The True Orgia of Theurgy, the Great Work, lies in Tiphereth of Tipheret—and do not forget that the Magus of the Aeon, the CHRIST, the Lord THERION, is crucified in Tiphereth of Chokmah, and the Adepts quaff His blood and eat His flesh for sustenance.
And the Greater Work—the Crossing of the Abyss between Kether of Chesed and Malkuth of Binah—still lies very far ahead of you. Or me, for that matter.
Do you understand, child? You have accomplished much; but it would be so little if you did not see how much more is left to accomplish!
Please act from the perspective of your newly-acquired point of view. Obey your superior, which now I am. What does he ask you? Does he ask you to do anything repugnant to your pride as a man, or to your right as a brother? He asks you that you obey, not him, but the Book of the Law itself; he asks you that, when you next edit that Canon Mass of the O.T.O., you bind it in red and gold, which are the heraldic colors of the Rosy Cross (the O.T.O. is a Rosicrucian Order, one of the few such—did you know it? . . . ), instead of the black of the Romans and their bastard child the Protestants. And he asks you to do nothing else. If you do not care to acknowledge my authority, I have no intention of imposing it upon you with threats or coercion. But I warn you, once again, that you are doing wrong to yourself and to your fellowmen by misquoting AL, and now also the Master THERION! If you continue doing this you will surely be destroyed; and since you boasted once, in similar circumstances to our then Superior, SATURNUS, that "your publications go now into forty different countries", or some such number, I will remind you that to gather goods in Malkuth is not the same thing as to become a Stone in Yesod—that the formula of manipulation of matter on only one plane is the formula of ALIM, not of ALHIM—and that the Roman Church, also, grew to become the most powerful temporal power in the world—and look what it did to mankind as a result! "What profiteth it a man if he gain the whole world and lose his eternal soul?"
You can only act efficiently on a plane if you work from the plane above it. It is only then that you introduce a new, truly creative, factor in the equation. Otherwise you but permutate the already existing terms. You are bound to the Wheel of Samsara—get off it! The Karma of the lunar man (see the Upanishads for this "lunar" man) is always a vicious circle. But the serpentine power is the Spiral!
The Black Brethren, the Demonic Legions and Choronzon attack and can attack only through the ego. I repeat this so you will understand, perhaps, why your disobedience is not a symptom of independence, but of personality-disorder. You are proud, also, of the material increase of your movement; but no chain is stronger than its weakest link, and look what yourself, the leader of your movement, are doing when you blaspheme AL, misquote the Master THERION, and ignore the Heraldic Colors of the Host of the Sun! Please, please, try to realize that this is the effect of the constant stream of demonic currents that are daily attacking your ego; don't you realize that there are Jesuit priests detailed out only to stalk you, to try to overthrow you. Don't you know that masses of "Jesus"—that is to say, the Great Prince of the Evil of this World that Abramelin callas Satan—are daily, perhaps hourly, being said "for your soul"? These forces of the waters of death continuously assail your personality and impinge themselves upon their weakness-reflexions in your aura. They are useful to you in this sense: they provide symptoms which indicate what points of the Ego it is still necessary to destroy, what shreds of matter still cling to the Solar Body which by your aspiration and works you are beginning to form inside your human chrysalis. But you must pass unto the Waters beyond Death and beyond Life!
It is no coincidence that Schlag is living in Switzerland. I understand you mail your material to him. Another example of your blindness! Can't you see that this means that you voluntarily link yourselves to him? Don't you realize you are giving him satisfactions of what you do? Does he send you his material? He has done as much harm to THELEMA as he can here in Brazil; and when I started my own work here, I wanted to put people interested in the O.T.O. here in contact with you—but how can I? I am forced to warn them against you, because of your blasphemy and your folly, and because you are doing exactly what the demonic world wants you to do!
I understand your father was head of the Swiss secret police, and that you were thus able to gather a very exact file on Schlag's activities. I ask you as a favor to send me a copy of this; I intend to publish it along with a small booklet on the way of work of the Black Lodge. Schlag is going around with a handwritten copy of AL by A.C.'s hand, written when A.C. knew no better and given as a present to a pupil, and saying it is the original of AL (Schlag purchased it for a fat amount from the original owner—you may already know this). Why? I refer you to AL III, 39 and 47. As you can see, Schlag evinces more faith in AL—in his way—than you do. He wants to defile the Book—and you are helping him at it. He wants to destroy Thelema, for he thinks himself the re-incarnation of St. Germain—the "Master R." of the Theosophists. . . . Indeed, it was his Evil Persona which appeared in its astral body, to Franker and to Arnold Krumm-Heller, and passed itself for their Guardian Angels. On this subject, read the Book of the Sacred Magic on the subject of the "man of majestic appearance" that appears at the beginning of the Operation and "promises you many wonderful things".
I repeat to you that I am the "re-incarnation of St. Germain", and that most stories about that life of mine are the wildest possible lies. Charconac's book is the only sane one on the subject.
Do not think, however, that Schlag, in himself, is important. He is only the dupe and puppet of his Evil Angel—an Abramelin demon, as I already told you.
In THE VISION AND THE VOICE, Equinox I, v, Supplement, page 143, paragraphs 1 and 2, is written:
"And Satan is worshipped by men under the name of Jesus; and Lucifer is worshipped by men under the name of Brahma; and Leviathan is worshipped by men under the name of Allah; and Belial is worshipped by men under the name of Buddha.
"(This is the meaning of the passage in Liber Legis, Chap. III)"
Conceive then, my friend, of the power of those four Entities called the Great Princes of the Evil of this World by Abramelin the Mage. Conceive of the Task of the Adeptus Minor, to overcome and subject them through the intercession of his Holy Guardian Angel! Conceive that the forces arrayed against us include practically all of mankind and the "spiritual" leaders of mankind; the most powerful Egregorae formed through generations and generations of worship; the demons of the Qliphoth; and our own egoes besides!
How can any one withstand that attack by the favor and with the blessing of Ra-Hoor-Khuit? And yet you blaspheme Him and the Book of the Law! How can you expect to do any good work for THELEMA in these circumstances?
And as if that were not enough, you have started misquoting THERION also! You are a member of a Christian Order—and you insult the Christ!
Dismiss the idea that material increase is proof of the success of your folly; you are gathering sand; and if "Satan is divided against Satan, how will his kingdoms stand?" Through you, be assured, if you persist in your present course, the demons, the slaves of Choronzon, will produce a curse more terrible than even the one that the Roman Church produced.
Disregard the lower planes! Look to the higher! Submit yourself unto the Authority of the A∴A∴! You may lose material following, but your work will go on as goes all true work of the Masters—silently, as the Tao.
You are, in fact, confusing the planes by your present course—with deadly results to mankind, whom—if you are a Brother of the A∴A∴—you are sworn to help.
This is my last letter to you. I will not write you again unless I receive some kind of evidence that you have come to yourself—your True Self—at last. Remember that the true symptom of the first ordeal—of silver—is what is happening to you; and remember that triumph in the ordeal is shown by the desire to serve. "Dienen, dienen" says Kundry regenerated in Parsival—the Virgina Mundi, no longer the Lilith, Queen Demon of the Qliphoth of Malkuth.
You can be of the greatest service to Thelema, to Your Self, and therefore also to myself, if you do your will. But you may be sure that to deface AL, to misquote Therion, and to insult the Blood and Gold of the Sun cannot be your Will, or the Will of your Guardian Angel, or the Will of any single sane living thing in the Universe!
Love is the law, love under will.
Fraternally—meanwhile,
M.
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