Serpent Power

And of all these Things the subtlest and most terrible, Enemies without pity, destructive to thy Will, and a Menace and a Tyranny even to thy Self, are the Ideals and Standards of the Slave-gods, false Religions, false Ethics, even false Science.
— Aleister Crowley, Liber Aleph: The Book of Wisdom or Folly

Gestern Schlangekraft, Heute Schlangekraft, Morgen Schlangekraft — immer Schlangekraft! Ja, ewige Schlangekraft!
— Adam Weishaupt, Uber Weltspielen, Funfwissenschaft und Strip Schnipp-Schnapp

You are God, Remember?
— Timothy Leary, The Politics of Ecstacy

Nixon keeps getting better and better.
— Headline, San Francisco Examiner, July 17, 1973

Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law.
This is not an article. It is an escape kit. All earth is (as Ginsberg predicted in Howl, 1957) an Armed Madhouse. Nixon still bombs & bugs & burgles & the U.S. government is definitely armed and dangerous. The only way out is straight UP: we must grow.

“All these mysteries appear to come from the same source, having a complete cosmogony and an explanation of the primitive nature and origin of man. Everywhere appeared the impure genii of paganism, for all their myths had their obscene side as well as cosmogonic, and these nocturnal festivals were full of impure songs and ceremonies … Hallucination was one of the great methods of Egyptian theurgy; burnt opium, datura, henbane, hashish, cinnamon, and laurel formed the vapors which caused the frenzy of the pythoness or initiate.”
— Ms. Inquire Within (Caroline Stoddard), The Trail of the Serpent, Christian Book Club of America, Hawthorne, Cal., 1969

“The Serpent, inspirer of disobedience, of insubordination and revolt … was honored among initiates … To become like unto Divinity, such was the goal of the Ancient Mysteries … Today the program of initiation has not changed.”
— Oswald Wirth, Le Livre du Compagnon

“In the African systems of Obeah and Voodoo, this Light is known as Aub or Qb (root of Obeah). The word Ob means serpent. It is the serpent called Kundali or Kundalini in the Indian Mysteries … Another point of contact between Tantra and (Aleister Crowley’s) Thelema is contained in the Thelemic aphorism: ‘There is no god but man!’ This is not an expression of atheism, but a statement of fact directly dependent upon … a natural order of phenomena.”
— Kenneth Grant, The Magical Revival, Weiser, New York, 1973

“Allah’s the athiest! Allah hath no Allah!”
— The Bagh-i-Muatar (Scented Garden)

“I am alone: There is no God where I am … I am the Snake that give the 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 thee at all.”
— Liber Al vel Legis (The Book of the Law.)

EXPERIMENT ONE: Get ye slightly stoned (on fairly typical, i.e. mediocre, standard American weed nothing fancy, no Columbian, no hashish. We don’t want you too far out for this.) Sit ye in a comfortable position, but with the spine erect as in yoga. Move the mind through your body as follows, one step for each word: “There” (navel) “is” (chest) “no” (neck) “God” (crown of head) pause and fully understand, grok, that there is no God, not in the exoteric Christian or philosophical sense, a being of “external” sense-experience like a whale or a NASA rocket or the man named Spiro Agnew. Nowhere, no how, no such God. Now, move the mind rapidly down to the right nipple thinking “except,” and over to the left nipple “God.” Imagine: there is a God, but not in the area of experience where you normally look, no, in a different direction, inward and downward. Now, repeat the same words with a visual image of the mind moving upward belly-to-crown as a white light inside you, turning, descending at a 45 degree angle, still as a white light, and making the path across the breast as a more brilliant white light. The pattern is a reverse 4:

Keep at it until the light pattern becomes quite bright, quite distinct, and quite warm subjectively. You are activating several chakras, but never mind that; just keep the light flowing let it pour. Always stop at the top (the crown) and understand fully that “there is no God” — then go on to “except God!”

This traditional Sufi exercise is quite mathematically and geometrically precise. Mind is not what we think it is; it is something else, something vaster. The traditional images of the Inner Light, Serpent, the Sun, the Pyramid are quite accurate and specific, too, but don’t look for them. Do the exercise and observe what happens. Then read the rest of this escape kit.

Magick is the science and art of causing change to occur in conformity with Will.
— Crowley, Magick in Theory and Practise

Man is not subject to the angels, nor even to death entirely, save by failure of his will.
— Glanville, Demonolatrie

Will is not a power, but it is all the power there is.
— Hazrat Inayat Khan, Cosmic Language

Say the magic word and the duck will come down and pay you $100.
— Marx, You Bet Your Life

Teotihuacan, the ancient capital of Mexico, was called by the Aztecs “the place where the Serpent learned to fly” or “the place where Men became Gods.” it is the center of magic mushroom country,” and statues indicative of worship of the divine mushroom, from around that area, have been dated at 1000 to 2000 B.C.

The earliest Egyptian religion, like surviving African and West Indian voodoo, seems to have centered on serpent-power, the art and science of “raising the kundalini,” i.e. stopping the world in the middle of sexual ecstasy so that the “sun behind the sun,” the evolutionary DNA blueprint within the sexual-chemical-magnetic force of the man and woman, can flow upward and outward.

The Emerald Tablet of Hermes Trismegistos, used by the Illuminati from Gnostic times to the present, says “That which is below is that which is above, and that which is above is that which is below, to accomplish the miracle of One Thing. Separate the fire from the earth, the fine from the gross” – that is, bring the evolutionary future blueprint up out of the present sexual ecstasy up to the head – “and ascend with great sagacity from the mundane to the heavenly planes; then descend again to earth and unite that which is above with that which is below” — bring the energy back from the brain to the genital and pour out your love for your partner — “Thus you will possess the Light of the whole universe.”

“The five ‘sacraments’ partaken of by the practioners of Tantric rites are usually known as the five M’s. They are matsya (fish), mamsa (meat), madya (any alcoholic beverage), mudra (ritual gesture) and maithuna (sexual intercourse). The participants in the rite also take hemp (i.e. cannabis indica, which contains more of the essential alkaloid than cannabis america, the American variety …) … In spite of many statements to the contrary made by present-day puri­tanically inclined devotees of Transcendental Medi­tation and other syncrestic religious cults of oriental origin there is no doubt whatsoever that many early Buddhists and Hindus used psychedelic drugs as one of the many means of inducing ecstatic mystical states.”
— Francis King, Sexuality, Magic and Per­version, Citadel Press, Secaucus, 1972.

In 1776, various Master Masons, including Caligiostro (representing the Grand Orient lodges, pledged to a secred vendetta against the French crown), Adam Weishaupt (Grand Master of the Order of Illuminati, the secret occult-revolutionary group within German freemasonry), Franz Anton Mesmer (who tried to obtain scientific recognition for the Obeah or Kundalini force by calling it “animal magnetism” and demonstrating its workings before the French Med­ical Society) and the heirs of Martinez Pasquali and Saint-Martin (the Illuminati within the Parisian free­masonry), probably aided and abetted by the Friars of Saint Frances (vulgarly known as the Hell-Fire Club, the Thelemic lodge within the English Parliament, representing revolutionary and pro-American conspir­ators; their Abbey, like Crowley’s in Sicily in 1919, had “Do What Thou Wilt” over the doorway) were agreed that “the lost Mason word was ‘Mankind’” — i.e. that the illumination of all humanity was the next step in evolution, that the principle of hierarchy (submission) was in an occult sense dead and useless, that the principle of liberty (Will) was the occult power of the new Aeon, and that the governments of the world had to be torn down vertabrae by vertabrae.

Details of this “conspiracy” as seen from a par­anoid right-wing viewpoint are to be found in World Revolution: The Plot Against Civilization, by Nesta Webster; as seen by an Anglo-Catholic prude, in The Trail of the Serpent, op. cit. by Caroline Stoddard, under the pen-name Inquire Within, the latter is closer to the truth. The aim of the Illuminati was not political in the narrow sense, but psychoneurological: they aimed to open the Ecstasy Circuit, making the “sun behind the sun,” the God Within, perceptable to humanity as a whole. The aim was not to overthrow Authority, but to outgrow it. To liberate people one at a time by turning them on.

The Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn be­came the fountainhead of modern occultism, via Crowley, Waite, Yeats and Machen; it was planted in England by Anna Sprenger, a high Bavarian adept. The Ordo Templi Orientis, of Tantric and Sufi origin with voodoo elements supplied by the black Am­erican adept Philip Randolph and the Weishaupt-Cagliostro current supervised by the revived order of the Illuminati under Leopold Engel, was planted at the same time, for the same purpose. Wagner’s Parsifal is a gigantic enlargement on the planes of music and drama of the central IX° rite of sex-magick used in the Ordo Templi Orientis. Crowley, originally in­itiated in the Golden Dawn, graduated to the Ordo Templi Orientis to complete his training.

“We did not realize until Brian Barritt told us months later that we were following exactly the route which Aleister Crowley took on his search for desert illumination. The eerie synchronicities between our lives and that of Crowley, which were later to pre­occupy us, were still unfolding … We made elaborate plans for scientific experiments in which B.B. would act as a receiver and I as transmitter. Aleister Crowley claimed to belong to the same line of magical mani­festation.”
— Timothy Leary, Confessions of a Hope Fiend

EXPERIMENT TWO: Timothy may still be acting as transmitter. The vibes seem strongest around 7 pm (California time) which would be 9 pm in the midwest. Sunday seems the strongest night. Try tuning in. Do the backwards-4 “There is no God//exept God” about twenty-three times, then try to empty the mind by listening only to the single note of your internal hummm, aummm, until the mind is fairly clean of words and word-clusters. About ten minutes is all you can expect to do, unless you’re already very advanced in yogic concentration.

In the province of the mind what is be­lieved true is true or becomes true, within limits to be learned by experience and experiment. These limits are further be­liefs to be transcended. Within the pro­vince of the mind there are no limits.
— John Lilly, M.D., Center of the Cyclone

The grid of culture, the geometry of socially-conditioned consciousness, acts so as to make only part of a man or woman discernable. We are giants, but interact culturally in ways that makes only a dwarfish shadow of each of us visible …
— Robert Anton Wilson, Occult Dig­est, Vol 3, No 1

There is no Grace, there is no Guilt. This is the Law: Do What Thou Wilt!
— Aleister Crowley, The Book Of Lies

Unless ye become as little children ye shall not enter the Kingdom of Heaven.
— Anon.

The reason that Prof. Rhine’s research in para­psychology remains “interesting” and does not be­come overwhelming is that he has left out the two most important keys to mind expansion: sex and dope.

“Several Adepts in the past attempted this re­habilitation (of the Gnostic tradition), among them Adam Weishaupt, Cagliostro, Eliphas Levi and Helena Blavatasky. For one reason or another they all failed to effect a complete restoration of the ancient doc­trines. If Crowley has succeeded it will be due to his scientific and magical use of sex and drugs …”
— Kenneth Grant, The Magical Revival, op. cit.

According to Dr. Leary’s latest and most im­portant booklet, Neurologic, Joanna Leary, San Francisco, 1973, 1000 copies) there are seven circuits in the human nervous system, to wit:

1. The Bio-Survival Circuit (forward-back), con­cerned with advancing or retreating, depending on whether the environment is scanned as safe or unsafe. This circuit is imprinted very soon after birth; given a loving ambience, the forward movement will become normal, save in real danger; but with an unloving ambience, the infant will imprint “unsafe” reflexes and retreat chronically into autism or primary schizo­phrenia.
2. The Emotion-Locomotion Circuit (up-down), concerned with domination or submission. This is imprinted with the child’s “role” in the upper or lower segment of the hierarchical social game; ed­ucation later reinforces such class or status roles, and thus the giant mind available in potential at birth (Dr. Lilly’s “general purpose bio-computer,” with which we are born) becomes the dwarf mind encoun­tered in daily life.
3. The Mental-manipulative Circuit (touch-and-don’t touch), concerned with handling the environ­ment or being handled by it. In Christian culture, due to Sex Taboo, this imprinting is almost always tragic­ally negative and destructive.
4. The Socio-Sexual Circuit (good-evil), con­cerned with strutting, mating, orgasm, child-care, etc. Imprinted before adolescense, this narrows the polymorphous pan-sexual infant into the adult with a definite restricted sex-role. The cross-currents of Christian prudery and Sexual Revolution have so con­fused the imprinting here that the latter half of the reflex-pattern, dealing with responsibility for one’s role and any offspring therefrom, seldom functions sanely; thus we live in an age of sexual irresponsibility, which the Womens Liberation movement (bliss­fully unaware of the same pattern in themselves) calls “male chauvinism” and attributes to men solely.

These are all the circuits a human being “needs” for survival in a social role in a given place (here-now). The remaining three circuits deal with evolution-in-time, contain the DNA blueprint for the future of the species (which the Sufis call “the Next Step”), when Awakening or Cosmic Consciousness will be normal and our present insane society will be remembered as a transition from the animal horde. These latter circuits are activated and imprinted only by accident, or by various magick and yogic neurological gimmicks invented over the ages, including the crucial sex-dope gimmicks:

5. e Rapture Circuit, which transcends or suspends the symmetry (dualism) of the older, animal circuits (forward/back, up/down, touch/don’t touch, good/evil.) The best way to open this circuit is via Tantric sex, stopping the world thorugh passive (yin) acceptance of the sexual mechanism instead of trying to actively (yang) govern it; this leads to Reich’s super-orgasms (or to no orgasm at all!), to Brown’s “polymorphous perversity,” to dilation of time in which one can, for instance, understand the Zen Master’s challenge “Stop that boat moving on the horizon!” (and actually stop it.)
6. The Ecstasy Circuit, which transcends and suspends all the neural circuits, allowing continuous creative imprinting, re-imprinting, serial imprinting, etc. This taps the “infinite conditionally” which Korzybski predicted existed somewhere in the cortex, and also explains Dr. Lilly’s messianic aphorism, “In the province of the mind there are no limits.” Most acid-trippers pass through too rapidly to make any use of this circuit: it is the White Light-buzz-flash place, and the Hindus claim that you can never hold it and use it until you first get rid of your karmic bad habits. Yositani Roshi, of the Rinzai Zen sect, adds that we all pass through it every night in sleep (during the “vacant” interludes between the four dream or REM periods); the trick is to remain conscious while it is happening. Many, like Dr. Lilly, have several experiences of being there, and getting thrown out by the Guardian Angels, before the crucial exper­ience of learning how to live there.
7. The Neurogenetic Circuit, which usually only opens at death or in total emergency when the or­ganism thinks it’s about to die. Not having been there yet, I’m not about to say much about this. Crowley thought that Buddha, Lao-Tse, Krishna, Moses and other major seers of history hadn’t gotten there, but he had; Leary and Lilly both sound as if they’ve been there, and it seems to have something to do with certain “discarnate intelligences” (Gods?) existing somewhere outside our solar system, who evidently planted the DNA code here on earth 3 billion years ago. (Crowley kept it a carefully guarded secret of the A.A. the most arcane secret society of all the secret societies he organized that these Beings are located in or around Sirius, the giant star known as Sothis to the Egyptians and identified by them with Set or the serpent-power of the DNA spiral itself.) Leary thinks that the purpose of the Neurogenetic Circuit is to lead us home, i.e. to the source of the DNA, out there in the stars.

EXPERIMENT THREE: Turn on the Rapture Circuit. The best manuals for this delicate, intricate, complex but (extremely!) pleasant art are Sex and Drugs: A Journey Beyond Limits, by Robert Anton Wilson; A Manual of Sex Magick, by Louis T. Culling; the middle part of Psychedelic Prayers from the TAO TE CHING by Dr. Leary himself, and Tantra: The Yoga of Sex, by Omar Garrison. When you have some ability to maintain the Rapture Cir­cuit, meditate on Crowley’s mantra “Every man and every woman is a Star,” until you understand it.

You have come to the end of part one.
PART THE SECOND OF TWO

Serpent Power
by Robert Anton Wilson, High Priest, Order of the Illuminati appeared in The Chicago Seed, Volume 9, Issue 7 (July 1973).
Tom Jackson (RAWIllumination.net) found the article 2011.