Qliphoth

In the autumn of 1909, Crowley and his pupil Victor Neuburg were systematically passing through the thirty Aethyrs of the Enochian system — the immaterial planes described to John Dee by angels in the 16th century. Each Aethyr concealed an entity or a principle; the work proceeded from below upward, from the thirtieth toward the first. The tenth Aethyr — ZAX — was different.

At dawn, in the Algerian desert, Crowley drew a triangle in the sand and sat inside it. Neuburg took up his position outside the triangle, within a protective circle. The operation assumed that Crowley would enter a state in which the entity of the Aethyr could speak through him, while Neuburg would record and hold the perimeter. In ZAX dwells Choronzon — the «Dweller in the Abyss», whose number is 333.

What happened next Neuburg set down in his journal, and Crowley afterwards published in The Vision and the Voice (Liber CDXVIII). Choronzon spoke through Crowley, taking on guises by turns: first a woman whom Neuburg knew and desired; then an old teacher whose words were convincing; then a formless despair. Each time the aim was one: to make Neuburg leave the circle. Neuburg did not leave.

Then the figure broke out of the triangle physically — threw itself upon Neuburg, knocking him into the sand. Neuburg fought, speaking the names from the Enochian Keys. The being drew back. The operation was completed when Neuburg gave it a Name and sealed it within the triangle.

Sabbatai Zevi proclaimed himself Messiah in 1665 — and was heard. A wave of messianic expectation passed through the Jewish communities from Morocco to Poland. His prophet, Nathan of Gaza, worked out the theology of a new Exodus: the Messiah descends into the Qliphoth to release the sparks of light caught in the shells since the breaking of the vessels. The darker the place, the higher the spark held within it.

In September 1666, summoned to Adrianople and placed before the choice — death or Islam — Sabbatai Zevi accepted Islam. He took the name Aziz Mehmed Efendi. He put on the turban.

Most of the followers were destroyed by this event. But not Nathan. Nathan wrote that the conversion was not apostasy but the fulfilment of the plan: the Messiah had to descend into the deepest of the Qliphoth — the shell of Ishmael, the sphere of Islam in the Kabbalistic geography — in order to free the sparks held there. One cannot free a prisoner from outside. One must enter the cell.

This theology survived. Secret Sabbateans went on practising the deliberate violation of prohibitions — not from licentiousness, but from doctrine: every prohibition conceals a spark; the breaking of the law in the right state of consciousness frees that spark from the shell. Jacob Frank, in the 18th century, took this to its limit.

From March 1582 the mathematician and adviser to Elizabeth I, John Dee, began daily sessions with the medium Edward Kelley. The protocol was unvarying: Kelley looked into a crystal sphere or a black mirror; angels spoke to him there; Dee recorded every word. Over seven years the records accumulated to thousands of pages. The entities transmitted to Dee a language — Enochian — in which, by their account, Adam had spoken with God before the Fall.

But from the start, something was wrong. The entities contradicted themselves. They gave instructions, and then denied them. They opened secrets, and then said they had lied. One of the principal entities — Madimi, who appeared first as a little girl in 1582 and gradually grew into a woman by the end — in April 1587 gave an instruction that shook both men: Dee and Kelley were to share their wives. Dee recorded in his diary his «unspeakable grief». Both ultimately complied. The partnership soon fell apart.

Kenneth Grant, in Nightside of Eden, gave these events another reading. The Enochian system in his interpretation is not angelic, but tunnel-bound. The thirty Aethyrs that Crowley would later pass through in sequence correspond to the Tunnels of Set. Dee and Kelley, without a map and without intent, entered the space this archive calls the Night Side. They did not know where they were. That is precisely why the entities had such power over them.

Spare did not work with the Qliphoth. He used neither Kabbalistic terminology nor Goetic structures. His system — Zos and Kia — spoke another language: atavistic resurgence, the death of the ego, the return to the pre-human. But it was precisely Grant who insisted: Spare was doing what Crowley did in Algeria — only without a map.

Spare's technique was called the «death posture» — a combination of physical tension, breath suspension, and fixation of the gaze on a sigil until consciousness collapses into a trance state. In that state he drew. His drawings — human figures dissolving into the inhuman; faces emerging out of emptiness; creatures that cannot be classified as people, animals or demons.

The central figure of his system was Mrs Paterson — an old woman whom he had known in his childhood in Bethnal Green and considered a natural witch. After her death she continued to appear to him in trance. Spare said of her: she showed me that the boundary between the living and the dead, between the human and the inhuman, is administrative, not ontological. Grant set it down: Paterson was the conductor to what he called «the Abyss of the subjective» — the inward counterpart of the outward Abyss whose crossing Crowley sought in the desert.

Towards the end of his life Spare lived in poverty in a basement in Southwark. Grant visited him. The drawings of that period are the least human of the whole corpus.