A sermon by Pastor Johnny given at Church of the Morningstar on 4/17/2021

This is the legend:

Aleister Crowley and his magical apprentice cum boy toy Victor Neuberg had been wandering through the Sahara desert for weeks. They took strange drugs. They recited prayers and incantations. Neuberg had shaved his head completely except for two bits of hair that he spiked up to look like devil horns. Frequently Crowley led him naked on a leash. They must have presented quite a picture. 

At night, Crowley took out his scrying stone and cried out to the Enochian aethyrs, then peered into each one and narrated what he saw, as Neuberg frantically scribbled notes. This was their procedure.

When they came to the cursed tenth aethyr, their method had to change, for the tenth aethyr was also the abyss, Da’ath. The abyss is the final veil between the lower planes and the realm of the divine, Atziluth. To cross the abyss was the most important and the most dangerous work a magician could undertake, for it would open his eyes to ultimate reality. 

But also, the abyss had a guardian, the duplicitous demon Choronzon.

Crowley and Neuberg drew a magic circle, in which Neuberg took up his position with a ceremonial dagger for self-defense. They also drew a summoning triangle, and slew a dove at each corner. Crowley himself stepped into the triangle, and became inhabited by Choronzon. 

Choronzon distracted Neuberg with nonsensical babble, then kicked sand over the triangle and the circle and attacked. Neuberg was able to subdue Choronzon in a physical struggle. 

The details of what happened next are sketchy. Pages of Crowley’s magical record describing this part of the operation are missing. This is probably because homosexuality was still extremely illegal in Britain at the time. The trial of Oscar Wilde was a recent memory. So what lives on is speculation and legend, and according to that legend, Neuberg sodomized Crowley. 

Remember that this was the 1910s and Crowley was an upper-class British male. He was no stranger by then to passive homosexual intercourse, but apparently the power of transgressing his social and gender roles in this way had not faded. Crowley, demon possessed and anally penetrated, in the midst of the desert night far from anyone else, probably drug addled and definitely high on ceremonial magick, found this experience so intense, so mind-breaking, that he was able to cross the abyss. 

That’s the legend. Reality is more complicated. Acccording to Crowley’s autohagiography, he had been crossing the abyss for months. His entry into this realm of dissolution had actually been triggered by the death of his young daughter and his wife’s subsequent descent into alcoholism. He did not conquer the abyss in a single feverish night of ritual and rough gay sex—the abyss had lived in him for a long, long time.

His story is both striking and cautionary. Crossing the abyss is supposed to be an experience of ego death. Crowley either failed dramatically at this, or else he became a living example of why having an ego is good, actually. Let us not confuse the different senses of “ego” here. We are not talking about pride and conceit, which Crowley certainly retained. We are talking about “ego” in a Freudian or Jungian sense—ego as selfhood, as a mask or container that allows our complicated, multidimensional beings to interact functionally with the world. 

Having encountered the abyss myself, I now think Crowley may have actually succeeded in losing his ego. And it wasn’t a good thing. 

Crowley spoke, in disturbingly racialized-sounding terms, of the “Black Brothers of the Left Hand Path,” a phrase I’d love to never hear again except possibly as a future Zeal & Ardor album title. This “brotherhood” that he so vilified was made up of those who entered the abyss and still retained selfhood. To Crowley, who was unexpectedly right-hand path, this was the ultimate sin. The goal to him was absolute union with everything (combined with the realization that all things, even God itself, were actually nothing). He aimed at a spiritual solipsistic nihilism, and strove to dissolve all boundary between self and other. Since a radical lack of boundaries characterized the rest of his life, by his own standards he may have succeeded. He treated others as poorly as he treated himself, and acted as if their belongings and money were actually his. So much for enlightenment. 

Why am I talking so much about goddamn Aleister Crowley? Because he is one of my teachers—one who teaches me what NOT to do as often as he teaches me what TO do. As much as I craft my Satanism in dialectical opposition to Christianity, I also craft it in dialectical opposition with Crowley. If someone wants to call me a reverse Christian, they better call me a reverse Thelemite too. 

But also, something about the legend of his crossing of the abyss resonated with me. It’s so raw, so visceral, so melodramatic, and so, so, fucking GAY. I recognized my own ritual style in it—though I personally don’t engage in animal sacrifice. That balls to the wall craziness of making the leap, just diving right in the deep end of experience. 

Thelemic rocket scientist and fellow bisexual Jack Parsons was also like that, at his best— his magic was as dangerous and cutting-edge as his work with rocketry and explosives, and he aimed just as high with both. 

That spirit of daring occult experimentation inspires me. In this one sense, I strive to follow in both their footsteps. In some powerful way, my own masculinity feels bound up in this type of esoteric risk-taking. And part of that macho risk-taking is, paradoxically, gender transgression. 

Enough about these others guys. Let’s talk about me. I sit here before you today having recently entered Da’ath myself, along with my lovely fiance Vix. Hi from the abyss! It’s weird in here. 

What the fuck is the abyss? This is a pretty damn esoteric topic that involves knowledge of multiple schools of Kabbalah, and also of the Tree of Klipot. I’m going to try my best to talk about Da’ath in a way that is accessible to as many of you as possible. If you have questions, please feel free to ask me later. 

But also, even if you know all that shit, the abyss is nearly impossible to describe. It has to be experienced to be understood. This is what every magician I know who has reached it has told me. I agree with them. 

As simply as I can put it, Da’ath is a stage that one may reach after many prior stages of initiation. It’s a place where one’s self-conception must be radically challenged. One’s model of reality may also fall apart. It’s a cataclysmic stage of self-growth, of spiritual death and rebirth. That’s one of the things Da’ath is. 

Da’ath means knowledge. It can be seen to represent the plucked fruit of the Tree of Knowledge. According to the serpent of genesis, to eat of it means to become as gods, knowing good and evil. It’s the apple bearing the marks of Eve’s and Adam’s teeth. 

Da’ath is a realm of limitless potential– a place where all things that are unreal and imaginary reside, a chaotic realm of ideas and figments and words without meaning. Everything that doesn’t exist belongs to Da’ath. 

But also, everything that DOES exist may also belong in Da’ath. According to some schools of more traditional Jewish Kabbalah, Da’ath is the container of all the other spheres on the tree of life. 

That sort of makes sense. Everything we experience is experienced through our own thoughts, though knowledge. Without a brain we can’t perceive the universe. So in some ways, Da’ath is the mind. 

On the body, however, Da’ath is most often assigned to the throat. It’s associated with speech and words, whether they make sense or not. Speech and words are also a big part of how we conceptualize existence, and their link to the mind is obvious. Da’ath is verbal.

But Da’ath is a wild, Dionysian manifestation of mind and of words. Da’ath is so crowded with things and ideas and sounds that it doesn’t make sense. It can’t. 

Da’ath is also sometimes conceived of as the hole in Yahweh’s orderly universe that was caused when Lucifer rebelled. Da’ath is the cosmic wind howling in the ears of falling angels and their agonized screams. 

Da’ath is also a desert, a wasteland, a place of spiritual retreat and arduous ordeal and testing. 

And on an emotional and spiritual level, this is where I am now. I don’t know who I will be on the other side. I am willing to be ground down to dust and reconstituted. But I am not willing to do what Crowley would have me do, and relinquish the core particle of what makes me who I am. I am not willing to exist permanently in dissolution. That probably makes me a member of the Brotherhood he so vilified, but since I don’t want any part of what he called the White Lodge, I’m fine with that. 

This process is familiar to me, in some ways. It reminds me of gender transition. You could actually say that I’ve been through many transitions. I realized that I was a man more than a decade ago, but my approach to being a man has been highly experimental. I’ve gone on and off of testosterone repeatedly, and have wildly varied my gender presentation. My gender, like my selfhood, is in a radical state of flux. I sometimes feel that I have been many people and lived many lifetimes within this single incarnation. Yet there remains a kernel of something essential in my identity as in my gender. I am always a man, and I am always myself, no matter how many times I dissolve and am reconstituted. The abyss may be a more intense experience of this dissolution. 

How did I get here? In some ways, I used a similar method to what Crowley used: gender fuckery, sexual transgression, and blurring of selfhood through demonic possession.

The first thing I did was hack off all my hair. It felt necessary. I loved my long hair but I knew I had to relinquish parts of who I have become. Those parts of me may return, the way that hair grows back. Or they may not. It was a ritual sacrifice. 

Then I dressed in drag, a stark contrast to my suddenly more masculine haircut. It was trashy, messy, punk drag— ripped fishnets and a black slip dress and thick dark smudged eyeliner.  

In this outfit, I channeled Choronzon. More accurately, I allowed myself to become possessed. 

Choronzon is not, I think, a demon. He’s certainly not a fallen angel. He’s not even a he, I merely call him that by convenience since I experienced him mainly through my own he-pronouned body. Choronzon is not a personality. He is a conglomeration of incoherent and contradictory ideas and energies, a whirlwind of cosmic garbage and treasure. He is an embodiment of pure chaos, neither creative nor destructive, but infinitely all-encompassing. 

In short, he has no ego. 

When he took possession of me, I lost all control of my body and voice. I drooled, I twitched, I thrashed, I babbled. It was a little like speaking in tongues, but less linguistic. Just repetitive, meaningless syllables. Components of speech, of language, totally unorganized in any way. No cooperation between them. No cooperation between my limbs and my brain. I myself could observe, but I couldn’t do much more. Fortunately Vix was there to wrangle me. I had put on restraints, in preparation for the possession, fearing Choronzon might attack. He didn’t. He didn’t have it together enough to do that. Not even close. The restraints didn’t end up being needed but it was still a good instinct– I was at risk of hurting myself or Vix by simply flailing. 

It was a ritual of sex magick. I do not want to give TMI because I am your pastor. Suffice it to say this: for Crowley, the taboo of bottoming, of being penetrated, was what got him into the abyss. For me, my fear, my chaos, my abject, lies in the active role. I have a huge fear of unleashing violence and toxic masculinity. Choronzon, in me, ending up embodying the most piggish, degraded, phallic sexuality. A masculine sexuality that doesn’t even enjoy itself– that just wants to conquer and penetrate to score points. A mindless, mechanical urge to fuck. 

Chaos and the abyss are often gendered as feminine by male occultists. That’s a bit Jordan Peterson in my mind. They probably gender chaos that way simply because to them, anything not purely male looks female. The abyss is no gender and all genders. I used a chaotic, abject form of masculinity to alienate myself from myself– becoming the thing I fear, the thing that disgusts me, caused me to vacate my being enough that I could experience a total lack of self. 

When I came out of it– when Vix pulled me out of it– I was shaken. I had experienced selflessness and It wasn’t bliss. It wasn’t pure, divine, universal love. There was nothing in me that could love. No me to do the loving. It was more like being an asteroid belt– just a bunch of space rocks smashing aimlessly into each other. A collection of things with no purpose.

I’m very happy to have a self again. 

I am aware that in the abyss, who I think I am may be challenged. I may come out the other side of this as a completely different person. In fact, I hope I do. But the goal, in my opinion, should never be complete loss of ego. How much of one’s personality one needs to shed, quite frankly, depends on the personality in question. I know I am far from perfect. I hope, in this struggle, to become more perfect. I have already agreed to relinquish everything that is not of my higher self, of my inner God. That is my goal, and I will probably fall short. 

And even if I become ground down to that single divine spark, I’m going to have to rebuild an edifice around it, a vessel of personality to navigate the world. 

Egos are like genders. They might ultimately be constructs, but it’s very important to inhabit one that feels reasonably comfortable. They can be fluid, they can change over time. They can also be works of art. A self is a beautiful thing to have. 

This is my message from the abyss today. I hope it spoke to some of you. Ideally I hope it spoke to all of you, and gave everyone at least something to think about.

I don’t know what’s going to happen to me in here. I may change radically in ways that all of you can see, or the changes may be far more personal and internal. The only thing I can commit to is not being a dick while I’m in flux.