By Frater Adonis

Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law.

Do you remember the scene in the old Superman TV shows where he is laying helpless and dying next to a piece of Kryptonite? Jimmy Olsen or somebody runs in and throws the rock out the window and Superman not only takes off to capture the criminals, but he is ten times stronger than he was before this encounter with that shadowy substance.

In psychotherapy, the goal is to go back into your childhood and restructure the programming inherited from that shadowy time. So also do we find that Kryptonite an allusion to the short time that Superman spent on his home planet--Krypton. Here he delves deep into his vulnerability and undergoes a trial of great pain only to emerge reconstituted with greater vigor and strength.

When drilled with questions, as an assault, we might turn around and complain to our questioner that we are being given the "Third Degree". The student of Magick knows that the Third Degree is death and rebirth; a Rite of Passage or Initiation. There's really no difference betweeen the two. Any initiation is a death of the old self and the birth of the new self.

Now, initiaiton can be a formal rite leding into or through a group or society. And it can also be a spontaneous upwelling of the Divine Menstruum in the consciousness of an evolving adept. But let's take a moment and examine the darker side of that which can also wreak such havoc in our lives as it evokes all the forces of Chaos (The All-Father of Thelema).

American literary greats such as Edgar Allen Poe (whom inspired the Frenchman, Charles Baudelaire), Herman Melville, and Nathaniel Hawthorne have drawn from this bitter well. They wrote about pain and the ecstasy of this pain and are remembered as "Transcendentalists". As masters of our cultural heritage they speak out to us from a darkness that is all too foreign for our rosy pictures of initiated heaven.

In our own everyday lives, there is pain; the flip side of that permanent bliss which resides in the core of our souls. No, I am not making an arugment to validate or to apologize for some Buddhist doctrine. There is an existential reality that points to its own truths and buy which we must reckon, factually, the emotional (Ruach) truths about which we carry on moment to moment.

This that is below the Abyss is perhaps fused in some transcendental way in the supernal world above, but it still reveals a larger and stranger reality in that smooth world beyond the Abyss. Liber Legis talks about the ordeal "x". There is the dark night of the soul; as perhaps, a more familiar quotation. Even the Master Jesus sweat black blood in the Garden of Gethsemane.

True joy warrants a total and comprehensive awareness that includes all the dichotomies and paradoxes that run through our lives. So often the student looks for some "fix" from suffering only to find themselves exposed to an onslaught of agony and despair. The systems of initiation are viewed as corrupt and the ture test of a candidate's application for entry into the mysteries is closely monitored by the Secret Chiefs.

What was the outer format for initiation has proved itself the mask. The true work takes lace in the fields of the Demiurge. Her the angels and spirits have been aroused from an ancient slumber to wage a Manichean battle. They must and will eventually annihilate each other. This is the true battle in which the Warrior f the Spirit is engaged; and the supreme point of volnerability.

At such a moment Like is fighting with Darth Vader and the Emperor is so pleased. The emotions pull allstops from the palette that colors the deepest recesses of one's heart. Time is meaningless and we are "perplexed". The only choice is blind action and a raging trust for the vehicle within which we have placed the destiny of our soul. Here, the many personalities that I house in this large ego-complex run berserk not unlike the virtues and vices of Pandora' box.

Yet, when the storm subsides and the cool seas seep in like an afterthought in the wanton night of the lust of Pan, so we feel the ecstasy of relief. The wisdom gained from the experience has taught us to seek the dark and the light. To know that both are illusions in the sleeping dream of Brahma; that Vishnu and Kali are its creations, and their interplay, its recreation. Then we can say it was all for nought in the darkness of the Abyss.

Love is the law, love under will.