appeared in turn and fell aside as well; I saw them as useful, but still, surprisingly,
peripheral to the central concept being approached. When at last all veils had been
removed, and that concept was revealed, it was so simple as to seem at first anticlimactic
and almost disappointing. It was: the phenomenon of life.
Instantly I regretted my impatience and arrogance, my lapse into easy
disappointment. Too many doors had been opened, too many forces unlocked and
unleashed for this to be the ultimate impact of the Working. Then it was as though a “test”
were passed: The basic concept of “life” became a sort of focal point, like that of a
refractor telescope, through which the energies of the Working passed. The initial
“dialectic” had reduced all to a pinpoint of fact, and now that fact, unencumbered, was
expanding to full significance.
Human beings are accustomed to thinking of “nature” as including all animate and
inanimate life forms, themselves included. It was the approach of the Church of Satan,
and later of the Temple of Set, to single out self-consciousness as the characteristic feature
of That which stood in contrast to the harmony of the natural cosmos. In fact all life has
some degree of intelligence [not to be confused with self-consciousness], and somewhere
within that intelligence is a subcomponent of self-consciousness, which only becomes
evident when the level of basic intelligence is relatively high.
The error in any operation designed to strengthen the self-consciousness necessarily
follows from the fact that self-consciousness is a function of the core intelligence, and
there are many other functions of intelligence as well. Initiation thus treats a
“symptom”, not a “cause”; this leads the “cure” in unanticipated directions.
The Church of Satan and the Temple of Set have grappled with this problem for all the
years of their existence without recognizing its actual depth. Strengthen, exalt, and
encourage the willful self, and you cannot avoid strengthening the natural instincts as
well. No human being is free from these; they may be kept in check for years, but in
eventual moments of stress, weakness, or stimulus they will break free. They may be
either creative or destructive; this is not a mere “Jekyll/Hyde” scenario.
All initiatory efforts that are not deliberate frauds from the most childish to the most
sophisticated are conceits of the self-conscious intellect. Those that profess to be natural,
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universal, nirvanic, or otherwise “Right-Hand Path” are ultimately exercises in self-
delusion, if in fact the adherents actually believe in their own rhetoric. Sooner or later the
masquerade becomes tiresome, the daydream boring, and the devotee discards it in favor
of other sensory stimuli.
The anti-natural systems of the “left-Hand Path”, on the other hand, think to suppress
some aspects of the intellect while strengthening others. What results is a condition of
strain which, should the tension become too great, will snap back to an equilibrium which
may be more or less viable than it originally was.
The intelligent mind cannot be “escaped” so easily. If it is argued, convinced,
threatened, hypnotized, drugged, or diseased into non-rational channels, then its self-
consciousness will merely reassert itself in some other form. This, I understood in the
Wewelsburg, was the “magical epitaph” of Nazi Germany: That, in fighting against certain
features of the mind, it had seemed at first to succeed but then had thus unleashed other,
even less desirable features of that same mind which had previously remained in some
rough degree of socially-controlled equilibrium before this ultimately disastrous
experiment in “conscious evolution” was attempted.
The chamber in which I stood, I now realized, was nothing less than an SS laboratory
for experiments in “conscious evolution” - a sort of “Krel machine” without computerized,
science-fiction accouterments. It was not designed to teach or educate, rather to mirror
and enhance thoughts and impulses already in existence. Hence its effect on the
consciousness could be devastating for better or for worse.
The 18-year experience of the Church of Satan and Temple of Set now began to appear
in a new perspective. Anton LaVey had thought to enhance conscious evolution by freeing
the mind from self-imposed emotional prisons. He did so, enjoyed a measure of success,
yet saw to his increasing dismay that new and more uncontrollable prisons were erected
in their place.
Whereas the initial ones had been socially imposed, however, resulting in minds more
or less tractable in society, these replacements were the product of random, unforeseen,
intellectual imbalances. In a few cases the results were those of at least temporary genius.
More often, however, the results were tragically self-destructive.
Anton LaVey erred in blaming the organization of the Church of Satan for this. That
organization per se was not at fault; if anything it was a stabilizing influence. When he
decided to exploit the organization in 1975, those working coherently within it felt
wronged, said so, and formed the Temple of Set.
The Temple of Set was intended to be the perfect initiatory organization. It exploited
no one; it offered every conceivable opportunity to everyone. Its most valuable
inheritance from the Church of Satan was a commitment to the rejection of nonsense,
occult or otherwise. The future, it seemed, was a banquet of intellectual evolution at which
to feast.
Yet the Temple too began to suffer shock after shock, as often as not caused by senior
Initiates. At first these were explained as freak events and blamed upon the inadequacies
of the individuals in question. But as the phenomenon happened again and again, this
seemed more an excuse than an explanation. Finally, in the summer of XVII, a conspiracy
by several senior Initiates to pervert and degrade the Temple was only barely exposed and
stopped in time. But the damage was devastating, if not indeed fatal - not to the structure
itself, but to the assumptions concerning initiation which had formed the basis of that
structure.
The Temple of Set’s soaring hopes for the perfect initiatory medium, it seemed, had
been dashed. In curing the symptom which Anton LaVey had attacked, it had thought to
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solve the essential problem. But, just as he had focused his anger and contempt on the
wrong thing, so the Temple had poured its trust and confidence into an improvement of
that same wrong thing. The actual culprit - the disproportionately “evolved” intellect -
escaped the clear comprehension of both.
The forces that would lead to the destruction of the Church of Satan in 1975 were not
set in motion by Wayne West in 1971; they were activated on Walpurgisnacht I. Similarly
the Temple of Set, thinking that it had destroyed those forces in 1975, had succeeded only
in closing certain doors to them so that they would have to find other means of
manifestation. After an initial delay, they did.
Now, in the Hall of the Dead, I sought a solution to the dilemma of the 18-year
Working. Is the lesson of I-XVIII ultimately that there is no way out - that all initiation
&nb
sp; is merely Russian roulette in fancy dress?
But here the Understanding that had so far come so powerfully and clearly failed me.
It was as though the Wewelsburg, having discharged a “battery” that had remained
charged for 40 years, had no more current to provide.
Having drunk at this magical fountain of youth, however, I myself felt energized as I
had not since the North Solstices of V and X. The Hall of the Dead now seemed an
insulation against random discharge of this energy. Action must now give way to reaction;
how should I direct this reaction?
In considering this, my attention came to rest on the concept of the Order of the
Trapezoid. As will be recalled, this concept as employed by both the Church and the
Temple has gone through many adjustments and redefinitions over the years. Yet it has
endured and attracted because it seemed to “say something” that the Church and the
Temple could not. What might this be?
During those periods when it was not employed as a synonym for the Priesthood, the
Order has been used as a talisman to evoke a kind of diabolical Schadenfreude, a grim
enjoyment of the predicament of self-conscious humanity. “Here you are in a state of
Satanic self-awareness,” it seemed to say. “You cannot escape it; you cannot change it for
the better or for the worse. Therefore: Experience it; savor its taste, sense its exquisite
pain and pleasure. Do not wallow in it like an animal in warm mud; rather cut it as you
would a fine gem, and behold the brilliance of its facets.”
When singing this song of Lorelei, the Order has seemed oddly antithetical to the
Church of Satan and Temple of Set, both of which incorporated the premise of self-
awareness but which then promised different types of escape, change, and improvement
[thus the justification for affiliation, as well as the success-barometer of the degree
system]. As an “Ur-Doppelgänger” of these creative institutions, however, the Order’s
name and presence has waxed with their setbacks and waned with their successes. It is
not an “evil antithesis” as much as it is a mirrored image - an alternate setting for the
Graal of the Prince of Darkness.
Here in the Hall of the Dead, Heinrich Himmler’s Sanctum Sanctorum and
“Mittelpunkt der Welt”, was the Earthly focus of That which has been thus symbolized by
the Order of the Trapezoid. The reality of this chamber rushed in upon me. This was no
Hollywood set, no ordinary room painted and decorated to titillate the senses. 1,285
inmates of the Niederhagen concentration camp died during the reconstruction of the
Wewelsburg for the SS. If the Marble Hall and the Walhalla were memorials to a certain
unique quality in mankind, they also serve as grisly reminders of the penalty which
mankind pays for that quality.
I saw before me the sigil of the Order of the Trapezoid as originally designed by Anton
LaVey: the pentagram within a trapezoid extending slightly below the two lower points,
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the three curved 6s, the trident rising from the flames of Hell. I saw its later design in the
Church, the 6s and the flames now gone. I saw its first design in the Temple of Set: the
Tcham scepter with the head and forked tail of Set replacing the Satanic trident. I saw
Ronald Barrett’s subsequent concept: a simple pentagram with the four upper points
connected.
So now the principle should be completed - the Law of the Trapezoid finally and
completely fused into its emblem. There appeared then the Sigil of the Order as
reproduced here. It is a return to the initial Sigil, with the following changes: The curved-
line fires of Hell are replaced by the Black Flame, whose emanations are rays, not
flickering tongues. There are nine rays, each in strict mathematical proportion to the
pentagram or trapezoid. The source-point of the Black Flame completes the pentagram, as
called for in the Book of Coming Forth by Night. Two of the rays of the Flame complete
the inverse pentagon about the pentagram, creating a total of nine Golden Section
trapezoids in the entire sigil. The three 6s are restored, but with no curved lines. The Set-
headed and -tailed Tcham scepter of ancient Khem rises from the Black Flame, its head at
the center of the pentagram. Its tail, against the three central rays of the Flame, forms a
“W”, denoting the “Walhalla” or Hall of the Dead at Schloss Wewelsburg, the Great Gate
of the Powers of Darkness in our Time.
The direction of the Working’s reaction seemed clear before me; I thus cast forth the
full existence of the Order of the Trapezoid into the world. After 18 years the Key has been
forged in the Word of Set, and the Gate of the Wewelsburg is opened.
Where the Church of Satan and Temple of Set have appeared, so has the shadow of
That signified by the Order been reflected. Now it has been loosed in its full force.
Whether or not the sacred Priesthood continues to exist, the Order will do so: for its
release is an inevitable legacy of the I-XVIII Working. Mankind received the utopian
visions of the Church of Satan and Temple of Set only as it strived to be worthy of them; it
will continue to receive them only as it continues to prove itself so worthy.
But the Order of the Trapezoid, whether known by its true name or by countless
others, will always exist - not as a visible institution, but as a principle in the intelligent
mind. Anton Szandor LaVey’s Law of the Trapezoid will endure as well: Those who
recognize the principle will be able to turn it to their deliberate use [whether to their
ultimate benefit or detriment]; those who do not will nonetheless be subject to it [whether
So It Is Done.
Soon thereafter I announced the reformation of the Order of the Trapezoid in the Crystal
Tablet of Set:
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Order of the Trapezoid
When once the restraining talisman of the Christian cross is broken in Germany, then
the fury of the ancient warriors, the berserk rage of which the Nordic poets sang, will surge
up again. The old stone gods will rise from long-forgotten ruins and rub the dust of a
thousand years from their eyes; and Thor with his giant hammer will leap up and smash
the Gothic cathedrals. And when that crash comes, it will be like nothing heard before in
history. - Heinrich Heine, 1834
The “mainstream” of the Western magical tradition may be said to have a
Mediterranean origin: Egypt, Mesopotamia, Greece, and Rome - and the later syntheses
of these ancient cultures through the Medieval, Renaissance, and Enlightenment eras.
In marked contrast to the Mediterranean tradition is the school of thought which
originated in the northern areas of Europe and Scandinavia: the Nordic or Germanic
tradition. Most notable in this tradition, of course, is its lack of features either derivative
of Judaeo/Christianity or prior to and prototypical of it. The Germanic metaphysics
developed in an alien environment, remained largely isolated from the Mediterranean
influence during the Roman Empire, and were suppressed rather than assimilated during
the Christian centuries which followed.
It was in the late 19th century CE that this ancient Germanic tradition returned to play
more than a mere mythol
ogical part in European affairs. It is perhaps not surprising that
it surfaced during the Second Reich of Kaiser Wilhelm I and Otto von Bismarck. Until
their unification by Prussia, the Germanic states had been weak and unstable in
comparison to the larger nation-states of the continent. Periodically ravaged by foreign
armies, Germany had earned the unenviable title of the “battleground of Europe”.
The 19th century heralded the onset of a new movement in European culture:
Romanticism. It was a reaction to and a rejection of the methodical, practical - but just as
often frustrating and stifling - scientific materialism which had resulted from the
industrial revolution. In its original, more transcultural sense, Romanticism implied
uninhibited individualism. In German, however, it gripped the imagination to a
somewhat deeper degree. Gustau Pauli, in Dehio’s Geschichte der deutschen Kunst
(1919-1934), states:
Romanticism is Germanic and reached its purest expression in those territories which
are most free from Roman colonization. Everything that is regarded as an essential aspect
of the romantic spirit: irrationalism, the mystic welding-together of subject and object, the
tendency to intermingle the arts, the longing for the faraway and the strange, the feeling
for the infinite and the continuity of historic development - all these are characteristic of
German Romanticism, and so much so that their union remains unintelligible to the
Latins. What is known as Romanticism in France has only its name in common with
German Romanticism.
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Crucial also to German Romanticism were the concepts of dynamism and life-
worship. The former term represents an urge towards constant movement and
evolution, whether intellectual, artistic, or social. It differs from the Setian concept of
Xeper in that Romantic dynamism is non-Platonic; it is supra-rational rather than guided
by logic, ethics, and nœtic apprehension.
German Romantic life-worship was not love and respect for the phenomenon of life
per se, but rather a compulsion to exercise one’s own life - to “really live” rather than to
simply exist. Again this is commendable, but as with dynamism it can be dangerous in
excess - when one’s “rage to live” interrupts and consumes the lives of others.