Constellation: one star in the company of stars
Sam's first published essay, from 1984 — the individual star held within a wider company.
The earliest piece in the archive, from 1984, and the strangest. It is a magical record rather than an essay, written in the third person under magical mottoes — the frater called 341, and YZ, the self he became — and framed as a scribe's account with the awakened one adding commentary. It opens with 341 disposing of everything he was responsible for, taking an oath, and leaving Alpheus House for good; the crossing itself is recorded in fragments, since the working happened under a potent elixir and its central passage stays deliberately hazy.
What is recorded is the shape of the initiation. In the supernal temple at Daath the hierophant is the adversary-figure Fra. 333, who questions the aspirant three times over about free will and desire before the exchange that hands over the whole old universe in return for freedom. The ordeal that follows dissolves ordinary time and identity: YZ describes perceiving the world through everyone he knew and through the lives of many creatures, an experience he says cannot be communicated but will keep expressing itself for the rest of his life. The final test is the resolution of duality — imaged, characteristically for the period, through the Skeksis and urRu of The Dark Crystal — after which he escapes Kether, reforms in a new universe, descends into Tiphereth clothed in Ra-Hoor-Khuit, sees that his companions do not know who they are, and takes on the form of the Fool to go and wake them.
The rest of the document is the system built out of that night. Sam sets out two ways down from Kether, the Way of the Sword and the Way of the Serpent; the Solipsistic Imperative, which holds that a mage must construct and calibrate their own system rather than inherit one, with a warning about what happens to those who attempt the leap on a system they have not integrated; three temples — the Supernal Temple, the Palace of the Khabs and the Temple of the Magi — built from Buckminster Fuller's geometry, with the Isometric Vector Equilibrium Matrix and nested shells of 12, 42 and 92 spheres carrying the Qabalistic worlds; and Constellar Navigation, a method of change described in terms of frequency modulation and angular direction, with sigil and Word generation after Austin Osman Spare.
Two more strands close it out. The Space Marks project proposes a distributed working in which small groups create and bury tetrahedral markers, linked through the participants, as beacons and power stations — explicitly compared to standing stones and earth mounds. And OTAR is Sam's replacement for the formula YHVH, chosen from the permutations of ROTA and read out as the four Thelemic principles, with a full alternative Tree of Life given across four worlds and a companion rite, OUT:ABRA, offered as a Thelemic revision of the lesser hexagram ritual. A glossary of Fuller's definitions — integrity, synergy, system, structure, vector, star — is appended, which is the clearest signal of what the document is: an attempt to rebuild ceremonial magic on synergetic geometry, written by a very young mage in the immediate aftermath of the working that prompted it.
Originally published at samwebstermage.com →