XI. LUST

 The Temple of
ME Mother Earth

You Are Invit­ed To Quest Again and Ven­ture For­ward Inside
Beyond The Cur­tains of THoTH
Using the Gimp Mir­ror of Thoth The Mayet Method
Pub­lished here first for you in

Liber O The Book In The Mirror

The Book of Nothing About
&
Around The Universe of Nun.

By MargareTruth Swan 
Maצet

This Trump was for­mer­ly called Strength. But it implies far more than strength
in the ordi­nary sense of the word. Tech­ni­cal analy­sis shows that the Path
cor­re­spond­ing to the card is not the Strength of Gebu­rah, but the influ­ence
from Chesed upon Gebu­rah, the Path bal­anced both ver­ti­cal­ly and hor­i­zon­tal­ly
on the Tree of Life (see dia­gram). For this rea­son it has been thought bet­ter to
1These are the four ele­ments, summed in a fifth, Spir­it, to form the Pen­ta­gram; and
the Mag­i­cal Virtue cor­re­spond­ing is Ire, to go. “To go” is the token of God­head, as
explained in ref­er­ence to the san­dal-strap or Ankh, the Crux Ansa­ta, which in its turn
is iden­ti­cal with the astro­log­i­cal sym­bol of Venus, com­pris­ing the 10 Sephiroth.(See
dia­gram.)
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change the tra­di­tion­al title. Lust implies not only strength, but the joy of
strength exer­cised. It is vigour, and the rap­ture of vigour.
“Come forth, 0 chil­dren, under the stars, & take your fill of love! I am
above you and in you. My ecsta­sy is in yours. My joy is to see your joy.”
“Beau­ty and strength, leap­ing laugh­ter and deli­cious lan­guor, force and
fire, are of us.”
“I am the Snake that giveth Knowl­edge & Delight and bright glo­ry, and stir the
hearts of men with drunk­en­ness. To wor­ship me take wine and strange drugs
where­of I will tell my prophet, & be drunk there­of! They shall not harm ye at
all. It is a lie, this fol­ly against self. The expo­sure of inno­cence is a lie. Be
strong, 0 man! lust, enjoy all things of sense and rap­ture: fear not that any God
shall deny thee for this.”
“Behold! these be grave mys­ter­ies; for there are also of my friends who be
her­mits. Now think not to find them in the for­est or on the moun­tain; but in
beds of pur­ple, caressed by mag­nif­i­cent beasts of women with large limbs, and
fire and light in their eyes, and mass­es of flam­ing hair about them; there shall
ye find them. Ye shall see them at rule, at vic­to­ri­ous armies, at all the joy; and
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there shall be in them a joy a mil­lion times greater than this. Beware lest any
force anoth­er, King against King! Love one anoth­er with burn­ing hearts; on the
low men tram­ple in the fierce lust of your pride, in the day of your wrath.”
“There is a light before thine eyes, 0 prophet, a light unde­sired, most desir­able.
“I am uplift­ed in thine heart; and the kiss­es of the stars rain hard upon thy body.
“Thou art exhaust in the volup­tuous ful­ness of the inspi­ra­tion; the expi­ra­tion is
sweet­er than death, more rapid and laugh­ter­ful than a caress of Hel­l’s own
worm.”

This Trump is assigned to the sign of Leo in the Zodi­ac. It is the Kerub of Fire,
and is ruled by the Sun. It is the most pow­er­ful of the twelve Zodi­a­cal cards,’
and rep­re­sents the most crit­i­cal of all the oper­a­tions of mag­ick and of alche­my.
It rep­re­sents the act of
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the orig­i­nal mar­riage as it occurs in nature, as opposed to the more arti­fi­cial
form por­trayed in Atu VI; there is in this card no attempt to direct the course
of the oper­a­tion.
The main sub­ject of the card refers to the most ancient col­lec­tion of leg­ends or
fables. It is nec­es­sary here to go a lit­tle into the mag­i­cal doc­trine of the
suc­ces­sion of the Aeons, which is con­nect­ed with the pro­ces­sion of the Zodi­ac.
Thus, the last Aeon, that of Osiris, is referred to Aries and Libra, as the
pre­vi­ous Aeon, that of Isis, was espe­cial­ly con­nect­ed with the signs of Pisces
and Vir­go, while the present, that of Horus, is linked with Aquar­ius and Leo.
The cen­tral mys­tery in that past Aeon was that of Incar­na­tion; all the leg­ends
of god-men were found­ed upon some sym­bol­ic sto­ry of that kind. The essen­tial
of all such sto­ries was to deny human father­hood to the hero or god-man. In
most cas­es, the father is stat­ed to be a god in some ani­mal form, the ani­mal
being cho­sen in accor­dance with the qual­i­ties that the authors of the cult
wished to see repro­duced in the child.

Thus, Romu­lus and Remus were twins begot­ten upon a vir­gin by the god Mars,
and they were suck­led by a wolf. On this the whole mag­i­cal for­mu­la of the city
Rome was found­ed.
Ref­er­ence has already been made in this essay to the leg­ends of Her­mes and
Diony­sus.
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The father of Gau­ta­ma Bud­dha was said to be an ele­phant with six tusks,
appear­ing to his moth­er in a dream.
There is also the leg­end of the Holy Ghost in the form of a dove, impreguat­ing
the Vir­gin Mary. There is here a ref­er­ence to the dove of Noah’s Ark, bring­ing
glad tid­ings of the sal­va­tion of the world from the waters. (The dwellers in the
Ark are the foe­tus, the waters the amni­ot­ic flu­id.)
Sim­i­lar fables are to be found in every reli­gion of the Aeon of Osiris: it is the
typ­i­cal for­mu­la of the Dying God.
In this card, there­fore, appears the leg­end of the woman and the lion, or rather
lion-ser­pent. (This card is attrib­uted to the let­ter Teth, which means a ser­pent.)
The seers in the ear­ly days of the Aeon of Osiris fore­saw the Man­i­fes­ta­tion of
this com­ing Aeon in which we now live, and they regard­ed it with intense
hor­ror and fear, not under­stand­ing the
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pre­ces­sion of the Aeons, and regard­ing every change as cat­a­stro­phe. This is the
real inter­pre­ta­tion of, and the rea­son for, the dia­tribes against the Beast and
the Scar­let Woman in the XIII, XVIl and XVI­II-th chap­ters of the Apoc­a­lypse; but
on the Tree of Life, the path of Gimel, the Moon, descend­ing from the high­est,
cuts the path of Teth, Leo, the house of the Sun, so that the Woman in the card
may be regard­ed as a form of the Moon, very ful­ly illu­mi­nat­ed by the Sun, and
inti­mate­ly unit­ed with him in such wise as to pro­duce, incar­nate in human
form, the rep­re­sen­ta­tive or rep­re­sen­ta­tives of the Lord of the Aeon.
She rides astride the Beast; in her left hand she holds the reins, rep­re­sent­ing
the pas­sion which unites them. In her right she holds aloft the cup, the Holy
Grail aflame with love and death. In this cup are min­gled the ele­ments of the
sacra­ment of the Aeon. The Book of Lies devotes one chap­ter to this sym­bol.

Waratah-Blos­som
Sev­en are the veils of the danc­ing-girl in the harem of IT.
Sev­en are the names, and sev­en are the lamps beside Her bed.
Sev­en eunuchs guard Her with drawn swords; No man may come nigh unto Her.
In Her wine-cup are sev­en streams of the blood of the Sev­en Spir­its of God.
Sev­en are the heads of THE BEAST where­on She rideth.
The head of an Angel: the head of a Saint: the head of a Poet:
the head of an Adul­ter­ous Woman: the head of a Man of Val­our:

the head of a Satyr: and the head of a Lion-Ser­pent.
Sev­en let­ters hath Her holi­est name; and it is

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This is the Seal upon the Ring that is on the Fore­fin­ger of IT:
and it is the Seal upon the Tombs of them whom She hath slain,.
Here is Wis­dom. Let him that hath Under­stand­ing count the Num­ber of Our
Lady; for it is the Num­ber of a Woman; and Her Num­ber is
An Hun­dred and Fifty and Six.
There is a fur­ther descrip­tion in The Vision and the Voice. (See Appen­dix.)
There is in this card a divine drunk­en­ness or ecsta­sy. The woman is shown as
more than a lit­tle drunk, and more than a lit­tle mad; and the lion also is aflame
with lust. This sig­ni­fies that the type of ener­gy described is of the prim­i­tive,
cre­ative order; it is com­plete­ly inde­pen­dent of the crit­i­cism of rea­son. This
card por­trays the will of the Aeon. In the back­ground are the blood­less images
of the saints, on whom this image trav­els, for their whole life has been
absorbed into the Holy’ Grail.
“Now ye shall know that the cho­sen priest & apos­tle of infi­nite space is the
prince-priest the Beast; and in his woman called the Scar­let Woman all pow­er is
giv­en. They shall gath­er my chil­dren into their fold; they shall bring the glo­ry of
the stars into the hearts of men.
“For he is ever a sun, and she a moon. But to him is the winged secret flame,

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and to her the stoop­ing starlight.”
This sacra­ment is the phys­i­cal-mag­i­cal for­mu­la for attain­ing ini­ti­a­tion, for the
accom­plish­ment of the Great Work. It is in alche­my the process of dis­til­la­tion,
oper­at­ed by inter­nal fer­ment, and the in flu­ence of the Sun and Moon.
Behind the fig­ures of the Beast and his Bride are ten lumi­nous rayed cir­cles;
they are the Sephi­roth latent and not yet in order, for every new Aeon
demands a new sys­tem of clas­si­fi­ca­tion of the Uni­verse.
At the top of the card is shown an emblem of the new light, with ten horns of
the Beast, which are ser­pents, sent forth in every direc tion to destroy and recre­ate the world.
Fur­ther study of this card may be made by close exam­i­na­tion of Liber XV
(Mag­ick, pp.345 sqq.).