Monday May 8th, 2023.
Waning Gibbous in Sagittarius ♐️ , entering Capricorn ♑️ at 4:33pm.
“In this card it has been necessary to depart completely from the tradition of the cards, in order to carry on that tradition. The old card was called The Angel: or, The Last Judgment. It represented an Angel or Messenger blowing a trumpet, attached to which was a flag, bearing the symbol of the Aeon of Osiris. Below him the graves were opening, the dead rising up. There were three of them. The central one had his hands raised with right angles at the elbows and shoulders, so as to form the letter Shin, which refers to Fire. The card therefore represented the destruction of the world by Fire. This was accomplished in the year of the vulgar era 1904, when the fiery god Horus took the place of the airy god Osiris in the East as Hierophant (see Atu V). At the beginning, then, of this new Aeon, it is fit to exhibit the message of that angel who brought the news of the new Aeon to earth.
-Aleister Crowley, Book of Thoth.
As in the case of The Hierophant, “The Aeon” is a card impossible to talk about without talking about aeonic shift. In the above, Crowley describes the movement from the old “Judgement” card to his new “The Aeon” card in line with such aeonic shift. If “Judgement” signaled the end of the aeon of Osiris (bearing the cross symbol on it’s white flag), then The Aeon indicates the beginning of the new one: the aeon of Horus, the aeon of the child. In Crowley’s view, this shift occurred at the precise moment he received the Book of The Law in 1904.
Synchronistically, an account Tweeted out Crowley’s card the first day I began writing about it (May 15, 2023), along with the below quote from Carl Jung:
‘We are living in what the Greeks called the kairos, the right moment, for a ‘metamorphosis of the gods’, of the fundamental principles and symbols. This peculiarity of our time, which is certainly not of our conscious choosing, is the expression of the unconscious man within us who is changing”
“The Undiscovered Self: With Symbols and the Interpretation of Dreams". Book by Carl Jung, p. 110, 1958
I often like to start with a more personal angle or reading on the cards, but The Aeon corresponds to a fairly sophisticated idea, and in the above, Carl Jung sums it up far better than I could.
Central to Crowley’s thought, central to Jung’s thought (evidently), and really, central to “new age” line of thinking (of both high and low quality) is this notion of aeonic change: of one set of gods and organizing principles being on their way out, and a new set of gods and organizing principles being on their way in.
Call the old aeon the aeon of Osiris or Pisces, marked so well by Christianity and all of its symbols, morals, and organizing principles. Call the new aeon that of Horus or Aquarius, marked by the promise of mystics like Crowley, but perhaps still in infantile form: something not yet fully understood. Something not yet fully conscious. Whatever this aeon is has not yet reached its fully maturity, and this idea finds its way into both Crowley’s card and the Jung quote.
Jung admits that this shift in consciousness, in man’s understanding of himself, seems entirely out of our conscious choosing: it is as if it comes upon us from the outside, as a spiritual force. In the psychoanalytic account of things, I gather that this notion of an external, spiritual force might be questioned. In this school of thought you find such notions as that the unconscious is the the divine or is the spiritual, and that what appears to us to be spiritual is actually a figment of the unconscious or collective unconscious.
Crowley, for his part endeavors to bring his magikal thinking in line with the insights— and certainly the methods of— science, but may be more of a spiritual realist than Jung and other psychoanalysts.
Resolving this particular debate— whether there really is a spiritual dimension to things, or whether all such notions are emanations from the unconscious— is beyond the scope of the present essay, however. In a very real sense, the answer to this question does not matter. The experience of Aeonic shift is fundamentally the same, whether explicable by psychoanalyses or a bonafide spiritual matter. A sense that such a change is occurring— and has been occurring since at least the Second World War—must be admitted by even the most anti “new age” thinkers among us.
The key image in both the Jung quote and the Crowley card is that of a “man within a man”. For Jung, this is the “unconscious man”, changing within us. Not to bastardize Jung too much (I am hardly an expert), there is a sense here of the unconscious knowing first: of the id and/or superego adapting to the shifting aeon before the stubborn ego can. By the time the reality of the new paradigm dawns on our consciousness, it is in the form of a sudden and complete revelation. Our unconscious has already put the groundwork into understanding the new symbolic order, and all we need to do is take the final step into conscious appreciation.
We may get some notion from the foregoing of how The Aeon (and Judgement, for that matter) might function in a personal Tarot reading, as opposed to merely being cards documenting aeonic history. These are cards that indicate the shifting of paradigms (as much in our personal lives as on the grand aeonic stage). An appearance of The Aeon or The Judgement might indicate, very simply, a great personal change on the horizon.
There is a quote from Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises that is often misatributed as a personal quote from F. Scott Fitzgerland and parsed like the below:
”At first you go bankrupt slowly, then all at once.”
Bankruptcy aside, this is a good way to think about the kind of paradigm shifts (whether aeonic or smaller-scale) captured by Trump XX.
Changes occur slowly at first: you see the hairline cracks in the bowl, the glimmer of something over the horizon. Then all of a sudden the bowl shatters into a million pieces. Or all of a sudden it’s daybreak.1 When Trump XX comes up in a reading, expect that such a change is in the works: either building behind the scenes, or just dawning on your consciousness.
I have also heard Trump XX described as a call to decisive action: to stop sitting on the fence. To make a decision and embrace the consequences. To let the new era begin.
The “man within a man” notion in Crowley’s card is similar but different than in Jung’s quote. I have already written a bit about this in my write up on The Hierophant. From that piece:
The child in the foreground of Crowley’s card is Horus, but “known under his special name, Heru-ra-ha….a double god; his extraverted form is Ra-hoor-khuit; and his passive or introverted form Hoor-pa kraat” [Harpocrates in the Hellenization]This composite, double-God Heru-ra-ha is a form of Horus birthed not by Isis and Osiris but by Nuit and Hadit. This line of deities corresponds with Crowley’s Prophecy of 1904, The Book of the Law, which he evidently viewed as the beginning of the reign of Horus (see the reference to 1904 above).
For our purposes here we can view of the offspring of Nuit and Hadit (Her-ra-ha) as being analogous/ interchangeable with the offspring of Isis and Osiris (Horus).
And yet Heru-ra-ha has an interesting difference with Horus as merely the child God. For while Heru-ra-ha has a passive, child-God, side by way of Hoor-pa kraat, he also a more active and “grown up” aspect by way of Ra-hoor-khuit called “'Lord of the Aeon' or 'The Crowned and Conquering Child'“I unpack this rather religiously dense material merely to point out the possible, inverse analogy: just as Re-Hoor-Khuit exists within Hoor-pa-kraat in Crowley’s The Aeon, the child teacher exists within the Hierophant in The Hierophant. The teacher becomes the child, the child becomes the teacher, God becomes a child, the child becomes God, and on and on through the aeons
Crowley doesn’t identify Hoor-pa kraat, Horus the child, explicitly with the unconscious but certainly there is a sense that this innocent child (seen as the larger, translucent figure in Crowley’s card) is a libidinous and naive being. He sucks his right finger, making what is sometimes called the sign of Horus, or the sign of silence.
This gesture, found in Egyptian antiquity, is now understood as a sign of youth: of sucking on one’s finger, or of childishly indicating the desire to be fed. It is analogous with the Egyptian hieroglyphic indicating child:
A curious thing happened when Horus the Child (Hoor-pa kraat) was adopted as deity by the Ancient Greeks to become “Harpocrates” (seen in sculpture form below):
The finger on the mouth was misinterpreted to the be the '“SHHH” sign. The sign of silence. Thus Harpocrates became the God of silence and secrecy based on a creative misinterpretation.
This sign of silence was later adopted by such magikal institutions as The Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn (through which Crowley came up) and integrated into rituals such as the Lesser Banishing Ritual of the Pentagram.
The usage of the sign of silence, generally speaking, is to cut off the channel of energy made after charging a symbol. This is often done right after making the sign of the enterer (see below). This to keep it from rebounding upon the practitioner…. a good breakdown on all of this here.
Conspiracy theorists like to speculate that the sign of silence also has an exclusionary function: a way for practitioners to signal their secret knowledge of esoteric principles to others while maintaining an oath to stay silent. The fun of the conspiracy theories is looking for this symbol in the history of art and in modern celebrity culture. This idea has it’s own kind of appeal, but I don’t have a source for it in actual magikal literature.
Speaking of celebrities, though, a fun idea from discordianism holds that Harpo Marx was a modern incarnation of Harpocrates. The synchronicity of the names aside, Through his miming, Harpo fulfilled the role of both Harpocrates as god of silence and Harpocrates as a childish trickster god.
The interpretations of Harpocrates as a god of silence and a god of childhood are not necessarily mutually exclusive.
The tendency to stick one’s finger in one’s mouth is indicative of what Freud would have called an “oral fixation” a libidinal desire to pop something in your mouth rooted to the primal desire for food.
We find ourselves children of the new aeon, wanting our mommies and daddies, dominated by our libidinal desires. This state of immaturity has an innocence and pleasurable new energy to it. Unfortunately, it is also vulnerable to manipulation and control.
You can hear my conversation with Chris Gabriel (Meme Analysis) on this here (from 57:40 to 1:13:40).
Chris lays out the shift from the aeon of Osiris to the aeon of Horus— Pisces to Aquarius— as a struggle behind much of the chaos in the world today. In the Hindu tradition such a civilizational phase is called Kali Yuga. The old god is dead and everyone is looking for the new one. But some would hamper this project: Pisceans, the older generation.
This interference is happening both as the struggle of a large scale aeonic shift (very specific to shifting from Pisces to Aquarius), but also in line with a more timeless battle between generations. The old seek to stifle the young to remain in control, so the young must find a new way to actualize themselves. When they do find a way to actualize themselves, they produce a new generation, become the older generation, and on and on. This is happening now, every bit as much as it was happening during the previous aeon, even at its most fixed point; the added layer of broader aeonic shift only brings the struggle in line with a larger and broader shift.
It is not necessarily as if the Pisceans sit in their high tower deciding whose dreams will be made and whose will be crushed, as seen in Mulholland Drive. But certain technologies and innovations have been brought into existence which—wether by conscious or unconscious design—do an extremely efficient job of keeping the energy of youth muted and spent. I’m thinking most specifically of the internet, which Meme Analysis/Chris Gabriel describes frequently as a digital anima: “this idea that our collective desires come together to form an archetype: an archetypal digital mother, who in truth like many human creation comes into it’s own power over us.”
Chris also likes to use the fairy tale of Tom Thumb to make sense of the shifting of the aeons, and shifting of generations. Tom Thumb being the thumb-sized forever boy of English folklore. He never grows up, and thus his story is the story of every new aeon. The swallow cycle he goes through is Zodiacal— a cow, a fish, etc. Per Chris (in the above linked podcast), in the new age of Aquarius, Thumb finds himself in the pudding: a gelatinous or aquarian force indeed.
Tom Thumb is smothered in the pudding, just as every element of our experience is now mediated through the internet. The pot containing the pudding in the Tom Thumb myth is the aeon itself, and indeed Aquarius—the water bearer— is often symbolized as a vase:
If the Pisceans have their way, the energy of the aquarians will remain rooted and controlled forever. As CG highlights in the above: the matrix may not be a metaphysical reality, but we can make it one through such innovations as unchecked internet and computing. Perhaps we already have. The Pisceans will create an indefinite dark age if that can, and right now they might be winning. The myth of Tom Thumb—of a boy at constant threat of being devoured— is the echo of every aeonic story. A new child is born that is always at risk of being destroyed. This is the story of Herod hunting for Christ, of Moses placed in a basket. It his corollaries also with the story of Hercules and Krishna. Perhaps the most clear representation of all is in the book of Revelation
A great sign appeared in heaven: a woman clothed with the sun, with the moon under her feet and a crown of twelve stars on her head. She was pregnant and cried out in pain as she was about to give birth. Then another sign appeared in heaven: an enormous red dragon with seven heads and ten horns and seven crowns on its heads. Its tail swept a third of the stars out of the sky and flung them to the earth. The dragon stood in front of the woman who was about to give birth, so that it might devour her child the moment he was born. She gave birth to a son, a male child, who “will rule all the nations with an iron scepter.”And her child was snatched up to God and to his throne. The woman fled into the wilderness to a place prepared for her by God… — Revelation 12: 1-6
Crowley identifies the child of his new Aeon as Harpocrates- Horus the child. For Horus too is threatened by Set, but overcomes him.
The Age of Horus is, in it’s entirety, the age of the child, but that doesn’t mean the child never reaches a maturity. As we see in the above: Horus the elder exists within Horus the child. They are one and the same and emanate together. Like Jung’s “unconscious man within us who is changing”, Horus the elder grows within Horus the child.
What keeps him from taking his place as the triumphant and mature? He needs mentors and guides to grow in wisdom, but instead of providing him with this, his mentors prefer to keep him coddled and smothered in pudding.
To comment on other aspects of the card: Crowley tells us that the dark, arched, female figure at the top of the card is Nuith— the star goddess of unlimited possibility. Her mate is Hadit. Crowley describes Hadit as, “the ubiquitous point-of- view, the only philosophically tenable conception of Reality. He is represented by a globe of fire, representing eternal energy; winged, to show his power of Going.”
It is the the marriage of these two things— the combining of the energy of endless possibility eternal energy (fire) that produces the child Horus.
Indeed the card is attributed to fire:
The ideogram of which is described in Chris Gabriel’s deck as the depiction of a “rising flame”.
The card’s other attribution is to the Hebrew Letter Shin:
…which makes the sound of “SHHH” of course. In line with the sign of silence.
Ideogrammically, this symbol is said to be the shape of a tooth. This particular ideogram doesn’t make it’s way into the interpretation of The Aeon, but the letter itself finds it’s way onto the bottom of the card (look at golden lines, containing three human forms).
Crowley says:
At the bottom of the card we see the letter Shin itself in a form suggestive of a flower; the three Yods are occupied by three human figures arising to partake in the Essence of the new Aeon.
Behind this is the symbol of Libra, which Crowley describes as a symbol of the double-wanded one, and a foreshadowing of the aeon which is to follow the present. This in line with a prophecy from the book of the law and in contrast with the astrological schema of the age of Aquarius moving into the age of Capricorn:
Behind this letter is a symbolic representation of the Sign of Libra; this is the forth-shadowing of the Aeon which is to follow this present one, presumably in about 2,000 years-"the fall of the Great Equinox; when Hrumachis shall arise and the double-wanded one assume my throne and place". The present Aeon is too young to give a more definite representation of this future event. But in this connection attention must be drawn to the figure of Ra-hoor-khuit: "I am the Lord of the Double Wand of Power; the wand of the Force of Coph Nia; but my left hand is empty, for I have crushed an Universe; & nought remains. There are many other details with regard to the Lord of the Aeon which should be studied in the Book of the Law.
Crowley goes on to say that this card, and indeed the whole of the Thoth deck, can be appreciated as a “series of illustrations to the Book of the Law; the doctrine of that Book is everywhere implicit.” His final words on the matter cosign on the foregoing fear of a dawning dark age, although he expresses some optimism that his ilk represent the torch bearers of the future, and will ameliorate the situation beyond what it was during the dark ages of yore:
It is also important to study very thoroughly, and meditate upon, this Book, in order to appreciate the spiritual, moral, and material events which have marked the catastrophic transition from the Aeon of Osiris. The time for the birth of an Aeon seems to be indicated by great concentration of political power with the accompanying improvements in the means of travel and communication, with a general advance in philosophy and science, with a general need of consolida tion in religious thought. It is very instructive to compare the events of the five hundred years preceding and following the crisis of approxi mately 2,000 years ago, with those of similar periods centred in 1904 of the old era. It is a thought far from comforting to the present generation, that 500 years of Dark Ages are likely to be upon us. But, if the analogy holds, that is the case. Fortunately, today we have brighter torches and more torchbearers.”
On Judgement ( the old card).
The basic scene in both cards is the same: a Judeo-Christian depiction of the resurrection/ final judgement.
The angel blowing the horn in the Rider-Waite card is thought to be Israfil: the angel who blows in trumpet signifying the day of judgement in Islam, commonly thought to be the equivalent of Raphael.
The Hermetic card replaces this angel with a man (or different angel) blowing a Shofar: an ancient horn blown in Judaism during Holidays and services as a reminder of God’s final judgement (among other things).
The scene of pale dead rising from coffins calls to mind Revelation 20:13:
And the sea gave up the dead who were in it, Death and Hades gave up the dead who were in them, and they were judged, each one of them, according to what they had done.
While the the raising of the dead references Revelations, the blowing of the Trumpet references the 15th chapter of 1 Corinthians:
Listen, I tell you a mystery: We will not all sleep, but we will all be changed— in a flash, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trumpet. For the trumpet will sound, the dead will be raised imperishable, and we will be changed.
The white flag emanating from the Trumpet (described earlier as bearing the flag of the aeon of Osiris. This flag is otherwise known as the flag of St. George or St. George’s Cross.
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recurrence:
Monday May 15th.
Moon a waning crescent in Aries.
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On the Music.
I wanted this Psychic TV song, but it isn’t on Tik Tok for some reason:
Went with something a little more generic and vibey— the instrumental "‘L.A." from Pagan Days.
Xiu Xiu is one of the most significant bands to me. Their album “Le Foret” (2005) is somewhat low-key compared to most of the rest of their discography, but at times makes for the perfect, somber, listen. “Ale” is among its best songs. The melon is led by a wistful clarinet (or something that sounds like a clarinet, I am no expert on woodwinds), and the lyrics contain brutal burns.
Le Foret was among the first albums I bought upon making my first pilgrimage to Amoeba records after moving to L.A.
I was 22 and Xiu Xiu obsessed. I’d seen Amoeba for years on a YouTube series called “What’s in My Bag” where musicians and others would talk about their selections from the crates.
I talk about both a broken bowl and daybreak because changes can be both good and bad. It’s also worth adding the constant caveat with Tarot: things that are ostensibly bad can be affirmed and made good; those that are good can soon lead to stagnation.