MAGNA MATER

Chapter V

Today I will start a more intense going through of one of the most central archetypes of the Star of Azazel’s lodge Salome, namely the Daughter of God. In order to understand this shaktic idea, a prologue for the concept is in order. 

Chapter 5 from my book Magna Mater is suitable for such a prologue. This text has been published several times in Finnish¹ but never translated in full; however, it holds some fundamental ideas of the Star of Azazel, like the tantric interpretation of the Sun symbol ʘ, and the first appearance of the Hieroglyphic Key.

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“The cult of the black madonna belongs to two aspects of the feminine: wisdom and sexuality. Its source comes back all the way to the worship of the Great Goddess. In it, the feminine manifests as the omnipotent giver of life and the conqueror of death.”

– Koivunen: Madonna ja huora

“In all he sees and does it is the Mother who looks and acts.”

– Avalon: The Serpent Power

Every masculine essence is fundamentally a neutral point, and every feminine essence is fundamentally the radiance around that point.² The center point is the seed; the circumference is the womb. The seed, nucleus, is spirit; the circumference is body, aura, shakti. Every being in nature is formed from these two, and together they form the third – son – with their interaction, or rather, in their essential unity and collaboration. This son is the seed of a new father, and the seed has its power, which is the son’s bride. This is the eternal law of emanation: ceaseless, continuous, paratemporal casting into matter. It forms the stairway, the ladder seen by Jacob on which the angels ascend and descend,³ and by climbing these stairs, we may reach brilliant light. This is the ascension of the occultist, every soul’s distant goal and mission on the rising arch. The paths are many, seemingly, but the method for every one is ultimately the same.

The beginning is perfect nondifferentiation, in itself impossible to understand, impossible to define. It differentiates the first understandable division into two: Father, spirit; Mother, chaos. But chaos is not confusion of non-organization, but a homogeneous form of the highest, most spiritual matter – or rather, its formlessness, the pristine primal substance, filled with possibilities, without restriction or obstacle. From the two is born the third, Son, who is power and consciousness.⁴ This power of his is his bride, the birth-giver into form. These are the original triad and its radiance. In the inverted triad, they can be joined to the following four stars:

Saturn – Father: the perfect reason (potential or pattern for the intellect)

Venus – Holy Ghost, i.e. Mother: the perfect intelligence

Mars – Son: the perfect dynamic intelligence

Moon – Bride: the perfect action of intelligence

These together form one half of the whole of the seven aspects. Jupiter, Sun, and Mercury form the opposite triad that is creative instead of deconstructive. Nature of the Moon is dual, for it reflects equally from above and from below. This is “the hieroglyphic key.”

The triangle and the fourth point can be tabulated in the following manner:

Celestial power	Element	Sin	Name	Essence
Saturn	Earth5	Despair	Satan	Darkness, opposition, antithesis
Venus	Air	Pride	Lucifer	Consciousness, eye, circumference
Mars	Fire	Wrath	Azazel	Victim, redeemer, “antichrist”
Moon	Water	Lust	Lilith	Body, dream, sexuality

The two quaternities (that is to say, the two trinities and the twofold cross uniting them, in the picture above) are actually of the same unity seen in different ways. It is important for us to understand that in real nature, that difference in perception is not ethical but practical: manifestation needs both of these poles, and they will forever manifest as one holiness. That the understanding of the inverted triangle as evil, and even executed as such, follows from misunderstandings. Archetypes of Satan, Lucifer, Antichrist (Azazel), and Lilith of “the Great Harlot” (more correctly, the Great Mother [the birthgiver of everything]) will be manifested as pure and beautiful immediately when humankind manages to realize their pure, true essence. Despair, pride, wrath and lust are only masks for the energies, which, purified of their mistaken selfishness, become instruments of ascension: to lose false selfhood, to reach true self, unyielding dynamism and magnificent creative ability.

In the picture above, the turn-point is Moon (the changeling for our own planet in occultism of the old), but the picture should not be taken only as twodimensional. To the higher triangle, Moon depicts the lower trinity, which is included in it. To the triangle below – a human personality – the cross depicts the higher triangle. The cross is the meeting point, the watershed. On its sides, or rather into its core, are placed two differently directed pentagrams, our sign [the double star decagram of the Star of Azazel]. The changing of the cross, its creative rotating movement with twofold possibilities is swastika, neutral in being and feminine in its edges: its masculine element, the “Son,” is the center point of the cross, and that center point of the cross presents the quintessence for both triangles to each other.

Saturn is the highest and the first; Venus works within him. The essence of Venus and Mars is a shared one when they shape the celestial cross over the Moon – i.e. into that picture, the cross in the circle, which is the symbol of our prison world. Thus let us understand Venus as the horizontal line, Mars as the vertical line, both creating in their own way that mystery of the matter-bound Son of God, whose great passion play is our world.⁶ When this profound tragedy has been realized, catharsis and power follow. At first, that power works purely under the dominion of Father: it is cold, it is suffering, but in time from that cold will sprout a might that nothing can sway.

Let us investigate the essence of the celestial powers and see their core. The old time believed that there are two evil stars, Saturn and Mars. But evil such as this is the highest good, so lofty, that the present diminutive human creature cannot even grasp its hem. This must not be misunderstood! There are two kinds of evil: the one which is good only by its essence and core, but impure on the surface, because its channel is on the descending path; and the one that is understood, spiritual, lofty and perfect both in essence and its outward being, for its mediator is on the path of ascension – because it is in conscious union with its original, primal archetypes. A human being bound to his own personality, base, arrogant, ignorant, foolish and without reverence is also a channel of our Lord but cannot fathom it himself.⁷ Even while he works as nature does, he lacks the beauty of nature and remains responsible even in his ignorance.

He who errs concerning the two directions and falls, acting on the impulse of matter with selfish and damaging actions, will have to pay the price for his soul. The collectors of that price will be demonic beings, some of whom are of human origin: lucifuge, incinerators and the agents of karma, who have not been able to attain aptitude or willingness to escape the sphere of earth’s heavy gravity. These elementaries, as they are sometimes called, are of many classes and different groups, each with a nature of their own, guiding their actions from their attractions. They are remnants from the souls of both elements and human beings, who have been drawn to a powerful astral vortex, losing part of their individuality, their soul. This is our destiny if we cannot understand the sweetness of the cross we bear – namely humanity, its suffering and diminutiveness – and instead cast away that ordeal. Satan, the Lord and hierophant of our world, always leads consciousness to a form [of afterlife] that fascinates it the most: into spirit and fulfillment, if the eyes of one’s souls did seek it; or into matter and torment, if the human being surrenders to becoming an instrument of pain, giving forth one’s suffering. The hardest things – despair, pride, wrath and lust – must all be learned and realized in an instructive, spiritualizing way. Or the mighty magnetism of matter will realize them through us in twisted and damaging ways; we can cast away no single problem that pertains to the world.

¹ [2005 in Fosforos ja muita kirjoituksia, 2009 as a revised edition on its own, 2020 in Apocrypha Lucifera, with the chapter mottos included for the first time.]

² These two form the astrological symbol of the Sun, which indicates all manifesting wholeness that is made fruitful, luminous double polarity, and which by this symbolic correspondence is always united to the archetypism of the cross. The reversibility of the two triangles in the types of matter and spirit still expresses the same. Thus the sign of the Sun is, except for nuances, identical to the double triangle with a center point marked.

³ Genesis 28:12.

⁴ Son means the thinker, organizer, the forming principle in creation or manifestation. Thus it depicts both the manifesting divinity – the sum of the “angels” or deities – and humanity. It is Adam and Adam Qadmon and Christ, the redeemed form of humanity.

⁵ Or ice, the solid element.

⁶ Like the unity and union of the two fundamental principles is seen in the cross shape of these two, it is also seen in both of them separately as the poles required for the lines of which they consist.

⁷ Like any manifestation belongs to the possibilities of the manifestation of the absolute, the universe also uses mistaken deeds to develop the souls. This is the greatest mystery of our existence – its question the actual raison d’être for our planet. The wrongdoer indeed does wrong; there is no doubt in that. A murderer or a rapist does indeed murder and rape, and no psychological, metaphysical or theological reason can justify the deed. And yet, that evil will be merged into the system in order to develop it, and this we can call the great secret of the mask of Satan. Cf. Matthew 18:7.