material death it may remain with the corpse to serve as a
medium for the other emanations, or it may merely linger
near its remains. Jungians perceived the khat as the
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“earthbound” anima, and in the oriental vision of the
Golden Flower it was known as the kuei:
Tao the undivided, Great One, gives rise to two
opposite reality principles, Darkness and Light, yin and
yang. These are at first thought of only as forces of
nature apart from man. Later the sexual polarities, and
others as well, are derived from them. From yin comes
K’un, the receptive feminine principle; from yang
comes Ch’ien, the creative masculine principle. From
yin comes ming (life); from yang comes hsing
(essence).
Each individual contains a central monad which, at
the moment of conception, splits into life and essence
( ming and hsing). These two are super-individual
principles and so can be related to eros and logos.
In the personal bodily existence of the individual
they are represented by two other polarities, a p’o soul
(or anima) and a hun soul (or animus). All during the
life of the individual these two are in conflict, each
striving for mastery. At death they separate and go
different ways. The anima sinks to earth as kuei, a
ghost-being. 32
It is the khat which is drawn into or activated from
within a corpse in necromantic magical workings. As the
32 The Secret of the Golden Flower by Richard Wilhelm (Trans)
(London: Routledge & Kegan Paul Ltd, 1931. A classic of Chinese
Taoism describing the process of the attainment of transcendental
existence by the means of creating a mandala from the personal
subconscious. A key influence in the magical philosophy of Golden
Dawn Rosicrucian W.B. Yeats. Cf. also a more recent translation by
Thomas Cleary (San Francisco: HarperSan Francisco, 1991).
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reader may surmise, the khat is also the vehicle for the
zombie practices of Voodoo. 33
2. Ren
The name-emanation. The Egyptians understood
the power of names to identify, define, protect, and
empower individuals - most conspicuously in the various
names taken by each pharaoh. Collectively and separately
each name affected the very essence of the person, and
the greatest curse [as also illustrated in literature and
film] was to be denied all names. 34 Externally a name can
be used to summon or compel, whether physically
incarnate or not. The neteru also have the power and the
discretion to give names as well as take them, and
through such names to take form and voice.
33 For details of zombification see Wade E. Davis , The Serpent and
the Rainbow (New York: Warner Books, 1987), concerning Haitian
Voodoo and actual zombie creation - not by supernatural means, but
by the secret use of poisons. The book is based upon field research by
the author, who holds undergraduate degrees from Harvard
University in Ethnobotany and Biology, and a Ph.D. in Ethnobotany.
34 For example, in Bram Stoker’s The Jewel of Seven Stars, the
Egyptian priests who sought to prevent the feared sorceress-Queen
Tera from returning to incarnate life attempted to destroy all
inscriptions of her name in her tomb, as well as in other references to
her. [They failed.]
In H.P. Lovecraft’s The Case of Charles Dexter Ward, the name
and all references to the Colonial sorcerer Joseph Curwen were
tracked down and obliterated by the vigilantes who murdered him.
Elsewhere in exoteric history it was a common practice for
Egyptian pharaohs and priesthoods to attempt to deface or erase the
names, images, and monuments of feared or hated predecessors,
such as the “heretic” Akhenaten.
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3. Khabit
The shadow-emanation. This is the connection of
the still-incarnate khat with the life-forces of the natural
neteru, enabling it to function as the organizing and
controlling energy (the individual “life-field”). If the
khabit is destroyed, the life-field de-energizes and the
physical body expires. In Black Magic the khabit can also
be sent out by its owner as an instrument of influence
upon others.
After the physical body is destroyed or no longer
needed, the khabit becomes an avatar of the neter
Anubis, overseeing guidance of the [noninitiate]
consciousness through the incoherence of the Tuat into
the stabilization of Amenti. An initiated consciousness
needs no such guidance.
4. Ab
The heart-emanation. The physical locus of
individual identity and consciousness, hence the bridge
between the OU of the neteru and the SU of the four
metaphysical emanations. It is through the ab that an
individual realizes and recognizes incarnate identity and
uniqueness, and following destruction/expiration of one’s
body it is through the ab that one can reenter the OU [as
a “ghost”, through “possession” (more precisely merger
with another, incarnate ab), or through thought-
transference].
It is also in the ab that the strength and quality of
one’s maat (inclination to “good” or “evil”) reposes. This
is echoed in the later Indian mythologies of karma, and
was the reason for the posthumous “weighing of the heart
against a feather” in Egypt. After bodily death the maat
within the ab overwhelms it completely, so that any
subsequent manifestation in the OU is likely to be an
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extreme concentration of either beneficence or
malevolence.
5. Ba
The core-emanation. This is each sentient being’s
sense of self-awareness, of unique and absolute
distinction from everything else (both other sentient
beings and the entire OU). Thus it is the manifestation, or
Gift, of Set, the neter of non-nature, in each so-conscious
entity.
The ba becomes stronger through increased self-
exploration and -realization: the initiatory process of
Xeper. Unlike natural initiation, which draws the
individual into alignment, harmony, and ultimately
conscious absorption into and indistinction from one or
more of the natural neteru, Xeper of the ba does not
dissolve the self into Set, but attains and sustains a
cohesive essence of its own.
The anamnesis or “remembered knowledge”
experienced by the slave boy in Plato’s Meno is perhaps
more accurately described as the physical-process,
stimulus/response brain reaching in to the ba for bits of
its immortal, eternal wisdom. But this is akin to reaching
for a coal in a hot fire. It is stressful to do, and the result
can be held only for a fleeting moment without further
stress. The superficial/physical “self”, which through
material “hits” continuously reassures itself that it is the
only self, is shaken by exposure to its falseness
, its
nothingness. It backs away from such “close encounters”,
dismisses them as “illusions”, “fantasy”, “imagination”,
etc., and hastens to rebuild its fortress of material-
sensation walls.
Absent Setian orientation and initiation, a ba simply
continues as one’s sense of identity, thus the “essential
self” around which all of the other souls coalesce and
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recognize themselves. Within noninitiates this results in
the ba being sensed as a dreamy, meditative “state of
being” which, if indulged in with persistence and
intensity, leads to its overwhelming the other souls, hence
“nirvana” and similar states of ba-ecstasy.
6. Ka
The transmigration-emanation. The ka is the
complete mirror-image of all eight natural and non-
natural emanations, fused into an avatar, Doppelgänger,
or Horla, a completely metaphysical remanifestation of
oneself which can exist and displace without limit, both
within the non-natural universe generated by one’s ba
and within the physical universe of the natural neteru as
well.
It is the ka that, through the ab, enters the natural
universe through “identity gates” such as pictures or
statues of the individual, or utterance of the individual’s
name(s) (the ren), as well as through conducive locales
such as temples and geological & architectural anomalies.
While the ba may, particularly posthumously, lose
awareness of itself through the paradoxical expansion of
that consciousness into its entire perceptive field, the ka
remains immortally finite, distinct, and otherness-
separate. Thus in an expressive, active sense it becomes
the externally-identifiable individual beyond physical
death.
Nowhere is the ka better illustrated than in initiate
Bram Stoker’s The Jewel of Seven Stars. Film treatments
of this work, such as Hammer’s Blood from the Mummy’s
Tomb and the more recent The Awakening, have done it
a grotesque disservice. In Stoker’s original text it is in no
sense a horror story, but rather a fascinating and
romantic mystery: Who was Tera of ancient Egypt, this
marvelous sorceress-queen who took with her to her
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tomb only a ruby scarab inscribed with the constellation
of the Thigh of Set (our “Great Bear”) and the hieroglyphs
mer (love) and men ab (patience)? Listen to the words of
the woman of our own era with whose ka Tera came
gently to merge:
I can see her in her loneliness and in the silence of
her mighty pride, dreaming her own dream of things
far different from those around her. Of some other
land, far away under the canopy of the silent night, lit
by the cool, beautiful light of the stars. A land under
that Northern star, whence blew the sweet winds that
cooled the feverish desert air. A land of wholesome
greenery, far, far away. Where were no scheming and
malignant priesthood; whose ideas were to lead to
power through gloomy temples and more gloomy
caverns of the dead, through an endless ritual of death!
A land where love was not base, but a divine possession
of the soul! Where there might be some one kindred
spirit which could speak to hers through mortal lips
like her own; whose being could merge with hers in a
sweet communion of soul to soul, even as their breaths
could mingle in the ambient air! I know the feeling, for
I have shared it myself. I may speak of it now, since the
blessing has come into my own life. I may speak of it
since it enables me to interpret the feelings, the very
longing soul, of that sweet and lovely Queen, so
different from her surroundings, so high above her
time! Whose nature, put into a word, could control the
forces of the Under World; and the name of whose
aspiration, though but graven on a star-lit jewel, could
command all the powers in the Pantheon of the High
Gods. And in the realisation of that dream she will
surely be content to rest!
In Love and Patience we are taught the secret of true
immortality - not the repulsive reanimation of corpses
( anastasis nekron) of Christianity, nor the vague
confusion of reincarnationists - but the infinite radiance
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of one’s MS by its most magnificent expression, and with
a serene transcendence of natural time.
The last two souls are unique in that they must arise
from the individual, and require initiate consciousness to
do so, per the formula Xepera Xeper Xeperu (“I Have
Come Into Being and Created That Which Has Come Into
Being.”).
7. Sekhem
The neter-emanation. While the term sekhem is
ordinarily translated as “power”, this is misleading,
because it is power in a very rarified sense - that
emanating from the neteru themselves. For this reason it
is also described as “the power of the stars” through
which the neteru manifest in the natural universe. The
sekhem combines with the ab (as, in effect, a temple
within one’s consciousness), to draw down the essence of
one or more adored neteru to indwell therein.
Activation of the sekhem has another effect: every
incidence infuses the Initiate with more of the neter
invoked, to the cumulative degree that the Initiate’s
personality becomes accented by the neter’s: seeing as
acting as that neter would act. Hence it is the sekhem
which makes possible, and ultimately consecrates
priesthood of a neter in the individual so aligned. Once
this transformation has taken place, it cannot be undone;
at most it may be sublimated or repressed, but only at
great cost to the priest’s or priestess’ very sanity.
8. Akh
The star-emanation. Beyond the priesthood of the
sekhem is the akh, in which the Initiate rises to the
company of the neteru as one of their essence, if not of
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them absolutely. Such one is indistinguishable from the
actual neteru except by the neteru themselves. Such a
mode of existence departs completely from all concern
with physical displacement within natural-universal
references or boundaries, manifestation, or action, and
affects otherness only by the radiance of its presence.
While it does not destroy any of the other emanations, it
permeates all of them, such that henceforth they all exist
in conformity and concert with it.
9. Conventionalist Blinders
What conventional Egyptology calls the “Egyptian
soul” varies from three to eleven “parts” taken arbitrarily
from the multitude of Old & New Kingdom magical and
funerary texts favored by the Egyptologist offering his
“translation”. What quickly becomes commonly evident is
that these treat the entire subject, as indeed the rest of
&nbs
p; Egyptian metaphysics, as nothing more than a primitive
fairytale: an entertaining curiosity but certainly nothing
to take seriously or apply as a key to reality. Only from
the Symbolists, who do not make the fatal mistake of
regarding hieroglyphs as nothing more than an alphabet,
can the modern mind move, as herein, beyond the
superficial and “quaintly silly” to the authentically
experiential: the apprehension of the true, immortal, and
eternal MS. All one need do is to focus one’s conscious
past the physical-sensory prison of the khat.
As you seek and find each emanation, you will realize
it suprarationally, beyond the limitations of khat-
realm alphabetics. Expect this; don’t make the mistake of
dismissing it as “mere imagination”. You are unlocking a
far greater reality, not merely corrupting the most crude
and confining physical-sensory illusion of it.
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Chapter 6: MindStar Activity
... And travellers now within that valley,
Through the red-litten windows see
Vast forms that move fantastically
To a discordant melody;
While, like a rapid ghastly river,
Through the pale door;
A hideous throng rush out forever,
And laugh - but smile no more.
- Edgar Allan Poe
The Fall of the House of Usher
A. Metaphysical Evidence
To this point we have discarded inaccurate and
incoherent representations of the “soul”, discussed how a
purely-metaphysical locus of conscious existence (MS)
can interact with an incarnate body in the OU through
field functionality, and returned through anamnesis to
the original Egyptian MS emanations.
Within its familiar realm of OU-studies, physical
science identifies and classifies phenomena, the natural
laws governing them, through observation and repeat-
experimentation (the “scientific method”).
How can the purely-metaphysical MS be similarly
verified and “tracked” if it cannot be compared and
contrasted to anything besides itself? The answer is that
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if incarnate humans cannot “see” the MS through any OU
medium, they can accomplish the same identification and
validation by looking at its “reflection”: its activity in the
course of both individual and group events.
Once again the ancient Greeks, after their Egyptian