In fact, I am devising a religion of my own which embodies what we were, are and shall be in the future. (AOS)

Kabbalah has an immense influence on modern occultism; in turn, it was influenced by Gnosticism (and Marcosians in particular), as Scholem showed in his Origins of the Kabbalah. This Judeo-Christian cultural bias is still present in many contemporary practitioners of magic, even in the so called Left-Hand Path, coming from the common interpretation of the Kabbalistic cosmogony, based on the Tree of Life (and of Knowledge). In this article, I want to propose a simple model based on the writings of Austin Osman Spare, which are directly inspired by the Gnostics and the Taoists. This model should brighten the aim and the scope of the phylaxtech project and dispel some biases, allowing for a more well-founded practice.

This model is far from perfect. Even if it has physical and biological interpretations, the model should not be discarded even in the case it should be disproven by modern scientific theories. In the end, humanity is still ignorant about the origins of the universe and life. It should be noted that this possible non-compliance to physics or history didn’t prevent occultists and scientists to formulate their theories. For example, Scholem, in his On the Kabbalah and Its Symbolism, realizes that there is a subtle difference between the process of Creation and the process of Revelation, even if there is a deep parallelism between the two and are almost identified. The sociological works of Freud, as he admits, are not scientific: history may have gone differently, but, from his point of view, the psychoanalytic interpretation of the social dynamics is correct.

Kia is the name given by Spare to the first, non-dualistic principle and is analogous to the Tao or Chaos. In can be interpreted as an omnipresent life force or as the ultimate laws of physics. The Kia can manipulate probabilities and entropy: it is not obvious, from the known primitive1 physical notions, why life actually happened on our planet, despite the Second Law of Thermodynamics. The Kia fills this gap. Kia can also be imperfectly translates as God, as the Kia is not personal. Whatever the Kia is transcedent or immanent is, at the moment, irrelevant.

Along the ages, the Kia manifests itself in impermanent structures. The Kia begins to know death, Thanatos, and, to prevent a rise in local entropy, gives the ability to reproduce themselves to the impermanent structures: then the Kia knows “sex” (reproduction), Eros, and the Zos (the Ego/Memory) is formed. The analogy between this cosmogony and a plausible abiogenesis is obvious, equating the DNA to the Zos. But the animal Zos is much more than just the DNA: informations and culture stored in the brain are an integral part of the personal Zos.

Ejaculation is death. Self-love is preservation and life. (AOS)

Then the only sin is to destroy its own Zos2. This explains the sin of Onan and some Taoist theories on semen retention. Indeed it is also possible to analyze the “sin” of Adam and Eve and the relation between humanity and the Tree of Knowledge: from this perspective it is possible to shed light on the Left-Hand Path, as it becomes a natural path to follow, without necessarily being an “evil” path.

There are two main limits in this model. I didn’t discuss the relation between Kether (“the eternal Kia”) and Chokmah (“the Kia which can be expressed by conceivable ideas”), but I feel that this problem can be fixed later. The other, bigger, limit is the subordinate role of the other planets (Jupiter, Mars, Sun, Venus, Mercury) to the Moon-Saturn duality and the Zos-Kia bipolarity.

Notes

1 A primitive notion is a concept that is not defined in terms of previously defined concepts.

2 Destroying some Zos is necessary: it is impossible to live without eating and to remember everything.

Further Reading

Austin Osman Spare, Opera Omnia

As Ramsay Dukes says in his Spare Parts, “for the nature of Spare’s writing is such that it is possible to read the whole book for the first time and gain absolutely nothing from it. However do not be discouraged, repeated reading is satisfying. At least Spare has the decency to make his books SHORT”.

While the books by Scholem are academical and not the best introduction to Kabbalah for most occultist, they give a historical and cultural context to Kabbalah, which is not an immutable theory and changed along the years.

In those books, Freud and Marcuse tried to analyze society using the methods of psychoanalysis, applying the Death (Thanatos) and Pleasure (Eros) principles.

An interesting account on the ideas about entropy and life.