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“… ashes to iron, stardust to stardust…”

~ The Book of Common Prayer

13,000,000,000 B.C: Vicinity of Gamma Ray Burst 090423 (artist's conception).

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I.

hirteen billion years ago, something exploded in our young universe. Then, in one of those astrophysical quirks begotten by Einstein, 73 seconds later a spacecraft orbiting our own Earth trained its telescopic eye onto the flash in the sky, and snapped its picture.

The Something responsible for this rude outburst of counterintuitive chronology, the oldest Thing now known to mankind, is believed to be a member of the second or third generation of stars formed after the beginning of the Universe, meaning it belongs not to the first-generation Titans of the ancient Greeks, but rather to the Titans’ offspring, the Olympians, who overthrew the Titanic regime and set about ruling the cosmos themselves.

The Titan named Chronos, from whom we derive “chronology,” is known today primarily by his Latin appellation, Saturn. Saturn was an interesting guy: he castrated his own father, King Uranus, with a scythe in order to usurp his Phallic power as universal ruler; whence Saturn, fearing the same treatment at the hands of his own progeny, took to eating them. However, Saturn’s wife (and sister) Rhea took pity on one of their children, Zeus (Latin: Jupiter), and so hid him away from her rampaging pedophagic husband/brother. Later, when Zeus reached maturity, he tricked his father into ingesting an extreme emetic which induced sufficient vomiting to regurgitate all of Zeus’ previously-eaten siblings: thus did the Gods of ancient Greece come to be.

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When one walks away, the ash is left in the thurible, and one is a step closer to apotheosis…

Tandem Phoenix: Hot Wife can be seen on the left.

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II.

At the same time that star was busy exploding and weaving an infrared afterglow into our sky, another one—according to the aphorism Every man and every woman is a star—was busy engaging in a form of ritual pedophagy in his living room, facing the afterglow of the setting sun in the west.

The Mass of the Phoenix is a solo ritual written by Aleister Crowley, whose rubric calls for both the ritual immolation and ritual consumption of a self-made Eucharist which, according to the most widespread reading of the above-quoted central text of Thelema, is supposed to have one’s own sexual fluids baked into it. The ritual also calls for the drawing of one’s own blood using a sharp metal instrument, and to daub said Eucharist with it immediately prior to eating it. The idea is to use the “lower life to feed the higher life,” according to Crowley’s commentary on the Mass, following the logic of a transubstantiation of human blood (and sexual effluvia) into divine light.

There are, as intimated, actually two Eucharists called for in the ritual, the first one being burnt upon the fire in the thurible. Given that a thurible is a kind of incense-burner used in religious ceremonies, one might pay special attention to the smoke produced by the burning cake of light, as if to highlight the chemical change that is taking place: there is a separation occuring between the grossest and finest parts of the matter in question, the process reducing that matter to its uttermost in both directions vertically: That Which Rises, and That Which Sinks (or: What Remains).

Indeed, if the ritual is successful, that chemical change becomes an alchemical change, one which is mirrored in the celebrant through the act of ritually consuming the transubstantiated host. One of the best-known of the medieval mottos of alchemy is solve et coagula: “separate, and join together.” The substance of an object is “elementalized,” and each elemental substance is shorn of its purely accidental features, prior to being re-combined in its essential state. The whole process is ideally a transphysical analogue of the process which, for instance, generates steel from iron ore.

Within the consecrated space of the ritual, and via the connection of sympathy implied by the duplicate Eucharist, what is “separated” (solve) in the first cake is “rejoined” (coagula) in the second in a valorized form, indeed using a substance known for its propensity for “coagulation”: living blood. When one walks away, the ash is left in the thurible, and one is a step closer to apotheosis… in theory [1].

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Iron could truthfully be said to be time’s precipitate, where both science and myth converge, the elemental tears of samsara spilt onto the white marble of the universal agora by futile deities—foremost among them, Man.

From Gold to Iron to Blood.

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III.

The narrative action of the Mass of the Phoenix closely mirrors the lifecycle of stars themselves (particularly stars large enough to go supernova when they die), supposing the uttermost organic matter left after the ritual (carbon ash) has an inorganic, macrocosmic analogue in the heavy element iron (i.e., that which is Left Behind in a star’s lifecycle). In fact, the lifecycle of the universe itself is thus mirrored.

During a star’s life, lighter elements such as hydrogen and helium are gradually fused into progressively heavier elements through stellar nucleosynthesis, until much of the hydrogen the star began with has been transmuted into iron. During this time, light and heat are created in abundance, without which all life as we know it would be impossible, making iron a forensic artifact of the possibility of life in our universe. And at the end of its life a large star recycles the entire elemental legacy of its lifecycle, including iron, into the interstellar medium when it explodes as a supernova, which in turn seeds the next generation of stars with heavier elements, making each stellar generation heavier than the last. Thus, the whole universe is slowly being turned into iron [2].

While the astrophysical sciences have evolved to the point of being able make such an empirical prognostication only during the mid-20th century, the ancient Greeks would appear to have been aware of this universal destiny circa 800 B.C. The Hesiod who relates the familial and generational intrigues of the Titanic and Olympian Gods is the same Hesiod from whom we know the ancient Greeks posited a cosmology which begins with a Golden Age, and ends with an Age of Iron.

The Golden Age is a period of mythical “time” [3] with analogues across many cultures and mythologies, immediately succeeding the Creation in most cases. It is a time when God or the Gods dwelt with Man, and universal peace and the lasting bliss of plenty were the sole law. But, of course, Something always goes awry: it might be something catastrophic, as in the Semitic faiths where Man disobeys God and precipitates his own immediate and lasting expulsion from Paradise; or it might be something much more gradual, as in the Indo-European myths with their descending ages or “yugas” each lasting thousands or millions of years.

In either case a “fall” is the dominant metaphor, a succumbing on a grand scale to what Nietzsche called the “spirit of gravity,” that tendency for all Things to sink (and for some to go with them). Nothing can be done about this universal devolution. Even mighty Saturn, Supreme and Terrible Monarch of the Golden Age after his usurpation of his father’s throne, was unable to halt this infernal congress of gravitation by measures as extreme as eating his own children [4].

Thus, Iron could truthfully be said to be time’s precipitate, where both science and myth converge, the elemental tears of samsara spilt onto the white marble of the universal agora by futile deities—foremost among them, Man.

And, through modesty or embarrassment or amnesia, the term “Iron Age” has come to mean something very different for us than it did for the Greeks of Hesiod’s time: the “Iron Age” for us is that archaeological period during which homo sapiens sapiens first began using iron implements (which was approximately contemporaneous with Hesiod). The “Iron Age” is thus present in the Mass of the Phoenix according to this scheme as well, being that the prescribed means to draw one’s blood is an iron implement normally used for inscribing or engraving (a “burin”). The sympathetic resonance goes deeper when one recalls why blood is red: because of the iron-richness of its hemoglobin.

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Both iron and gold are to be tested—by fire. And that which rises is that which gives rise to life itself, whether in a physical sense as in the photon blessings from our own star, or in a metaphysical sense as in a personal transformation divineward.

Find a home for an invincible flame!

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IV.

As I wrote not too long ago, we’re all slaves, and one reason is because we’re all 100% subject to this eternal economy of rise and fall. Nothing ever stands still, or on its own.

The spirit of gravity is thus abundantly manifest not just in myth, occultism and astrophysics, but in human society as well. Several days ago an article was published by Scientific American, looking at rise and fall as a social phenomenon, which demonstrated the existence of self-reinforcing psychological mechanisms behind social status:

Henry assessed survey data from over 1,500 Americans. In this nationally representative sample, low-socioeconomic status (low-SES) individuals reported far more psychological defensiveness in terms of considering themselves more likely to be taken advantage of and trusting people less… Although this pattern of low-status compensation is important on its own, it is also unfortunate given a separate body of research on how people actually attain higher status. This research, recently summarized in an article by psychologists, Cameron Anderson and Gavin J Kilduff, shows that those who are effective in attaining status do so through behaving generously and helpfully to bolster their value to their group. In other words, low-status individuals’ aggressive and violent behavior is precisely the opposite of what they should be doing to ascend the societal totem pole.

Clearly, if mind is not over matter (i.e., willing to rise), mind begins to exhibit matter’s same tendency (i.e., to sink). The problem is, once it starts to sink, it wants to keep sinking.

Think of the most recent deeply negative thought you had. Chances are, if you are a relatively low-SES individual like myself (and I think the last couple of years might have seen a boom in our kind, at least in the USA), you didn’t immediately banish it, but continued to chase that scenario and follow it out to its conclusion. Why? Because it was entertaining. Something in us low-SES folks actually gets off on feeling bad, on seeing the world as a bad place, specifically as a bad place for poor me. While we might not be aware that’s how we see the world, if we’re playing these mind-games, then that is the world our subconscious has internalized, whether based on a trend in external circumstances, or whether by internal predisposition, or both. If we’re persistently approaching reality from a defensive, aggressive posture, we will be aggressive even against ourselves as a form of leisure [5].

This negative self-reinforcement isn’t something you or I do in isolation. As I’ve tried to show, it is a matter of blind adherence to a universal law: we’re following the vector of all dense matter, simply by being too grave, by succumbing to the spirit of gravity. And if the myths of the ancients have anything left to teach us (after pre-empting astrophysics by a couple of millennia), then the arrow of time is aimed at increasing “gravity.” If it sometimes feels as though the weight of the universe is behind our negativity, our feelings of “heaviness,” then that’s because in a very real sense it is—and it’s only getting worse.

However, the processes which produce the Things Which Sink, as we’ll recall from the examples of the Mass of the Phoenix and stellar nucleosynthesis, also essentialize and produce the Things Which Rise. Both iron and gold are to be tested—by fire. And that which rises is that which gives rise to life itself, whether in a physical sense as in the photon blessings from our own star, or in a metaphysical sense as in a personal transformation divineward (it is not by accident that much of the literature of transformative experience makes ample use of the metaphor of fire [6]). The same gravitational force of a star which is responsible for pulling down and inward also creates the pressures at the star’s core which ignite and sustain the fusion reactions powering nucleosynthesis, which in turn create the outward pressure generating the light and heat so beloved of all life.

Indeed, “every man and every woman is a star.” And the unimaginably powerful nuclear inferno which threshes the light from the iron in the heart of a star, for hundreds of millions of years without cease, is the ideal symbol of the sovereignty of will which unfurls itself in the act of separating the higher from the lower in oneself: that willful “NO” to the morbid, self-indulgent gratification of emotional masochism; or alternately and at least as effectively, that faithful “YES” to a Higher Power to effect that change for us [7].

Though gravity may be universal, every star’s gravity well, however steep, has an escape velocity [8], and every escape begins with a decisive act. A friend reports he found the following serendipitously scrawled in a math book he once borrowed:

Having sown action you reap habit;
Having sown habit you reap character;
Having sown character you reap destiny.

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Notes:

All artwork & photography
Copyright © 2009 Michael Lujan.

Tags: aleister crowley, ancient greeks, blood & light, death death goose, hesiod, iron age, mass of the phoenix, matter, olympians, ritual magick, saturn, sexual effluvia, stars, supernova, thelema, titans, universe