textfiles/occult/PAGAN/posture

                    THE DEATH POSTURE AND THE NEW SEXUALITY

                Taken from THE MAGICAL REVIVAL by Kenneth Grant


From the earliest times; from the mystical mummy cult of ancient Egypt to the  
ritual assumption of God forms as practised in the Golden Dawn when the Chief 
Adept simulated the role of Christian Rosencreutz and lay in the pastos, ready 
to resurrect, the concept of death has been inextricably linked with that of 
sex.

The illustration entitled The Death Posture, which forms the frontispiece to  
The Book of Pleasure, contains, in an allegorical form, the whole doctrine of 
the New Sexuality.

The figure of Zos*(1) is seated at a circular table strewn with strange       
images. His right hand is pressed to his face, sealing the mouth and hindering 
the flow of breath (life-force) to and from the nostrils; his eyes stare with 
fixed intensity at YOU- the witness. With his left hand he writes the mystic 
characters which embody his desires in sigil form. The identity of hand and 
serpent (i.e. phallus) is here made patent. About him are the innumerable 
images of past desires concealed in figures human and bestial, elemental and 
fey, some transfixed with the metal of hate, some exalted to his right hand to 
the place of love, some in attitudes of gaiety, contemplation and seductive 
surrender, another glows- an inscrutable mask of inward ecstasy, transcending 
duality in a mode of pleasure which baffles the understanding. Before Zos, 
above him, and to his left side, are the winged skulls of the dead. The skull- 
emblematic of death- is prominently featured, buried in his thick tousled 
hair. Thus, death dominates thought, or, more precisely, all thought is dead, 
utterly abolished, and a compelling intensity of voidness streams from the 
eyes which regard one hypnotically; and, under the eyes, the hand supports the 
head as a pedestal supports a chalice.

*(1) The name Zos is not only the magical name of Austin Spare, for in The    
Book of Pleasure, he writes: "The body considered as a whole I call Zos.

The two magical implements- the Eye and the Hand- are here made subject to    
death; they have accomplished their unified task and found apotheosis in 
annihilation. No breath (life-principle, prana) stirs the immobile shapes 
around them. A state of suspended activity is implied, a suspension which 
simulates Death (ONE). Death or thane is the motto of Zos, whose full magical 
motto was Zos vel Thanatos. He says, in Earth Inferno (1905); "Death is All.

All the religions and magical cults of antiquity laid emphasis upon the idea  
of death, which was interpreted as a birth on to another plane of existence. 
The tomb and the womb were interchangeable terms denoting the comings and 
goings of the ego at various levels, for the purpose of enacting the laws of 
karma decreed by destiny. Death is "the coming forth of the suppressed; the 
becoming by going; the great chance: an adventure in Will that translates into 
body". This is the key to the Death Posture, really an imposture, a simulation 
of death for the purpose of allowing the suppressed dream to emerge and 
translate into body.

But the Death Posture is more than a ritual simulation of death, just as in   
the supreme rite of Masonry there is (or should be) a true resurrection born 
of the imitated resurrection rehearsed for the purpose of externalizing the 
interior truth.

In the Alphabet of Sentient Symbols which Spare devised to form the basis of  
his Language of Desire, the sign _ (it looks like two ovals intersecting to 
form what looks like a V) symbolizes the Ego, the principle of duality, while 
_ (the exact opposite of the first, two ovals intersecting to form what looks 
like an upside down V) symbolizes the Death Posture, the dissolution of 
duality in the formless state of Absolute Consciousness.

The "preliminary sensation" of the Death Posture (see The Book of Pleasure)   
is a fine example of Spare's ability of "visualizing sensation". The figure is 
hunched upon itself in a concentration of inner awareness and bliss, and the 
six-rayed Star of Will blazes at its heart; the right hand clasps an invisible 
weapon. The hand symbolizes the Creative Will, and the Eyes, which symbolize 
both desire and imagination, are closed or covered. It is easy to interpret 
the picture as meaning intense power locked within the body, pending its 
explosive outpouring in any desired form.

It is at the junction between life and death, between the active current of   
Will and the passive current of Imagination- the junction of Hand and Eye- 
that the concept of the New Sexuality is born. A full understanding of the 
Death Posture leads to a full understanding of the primal, unmodified and 
"new" (because ever fresh) sexuality.

Spare describes the Death Posture as "a simulation of death by the utter      
negation of thought, i.e. the prevention of desire from belief, and the 
functioning of all consciousness through the sexuality".*(2)

*(2) The Focus of Life, 1921.

"By the Death Posture the body is allowed to manifest spontaneously and is    
arbitrary and impervious to action. Only he who is unconscious of his actions 
has courage beyond good and evil, and is pure in this wisdom of sound 
sleep."*(3)

*(3) Ibid.

In order to assume this posture successfully it is necessary to have 
remembered that remote layer of subconscious memory where knowledge reverts to 
instinct and becomes law. At this moment, which is the moment of generation of 
the Great Wish, inspiration flows from the source of sex, from the primordial 
Goddess who exists at the heart of the matter. "Inspiration is always at a 
void moment, and most discoveries are accidental, usually brought about by 
exhaustion of the mind":*(4) i.e. when conscious "knowledge" has been 
discarded and pure instinctive awareness has taken its place.

*(4) The Book of Pleasure, 1913.

The Death Posture is the summing up of the four major gestures which          
constitutes the magic spells of Zos. Will, Desire, and Belief, are a threefold 
unity capable of stirring the subconsciousness and forcing it to yield its 
content. This varies according to the nature of the desire and the amount of 
"free" belief which the sigil contains.

Methods of energizing belief vary, but imagination suggests the best means.   
In other words, be spontaneous, do not make it a matter for thought. To reify 
the dream or wish, Spare employs the hand and eye. The intense nostalgia 
reaches backwards into remote "awayness", and vivid wishfulness craves impact 
with "all otherness"- the Self with the not-Self- so that a long-forgotten 
familiar spirit arises and obsesses the conscious mind; then, and then only, 
the ancient experience is re-lived and takes on flesh.

The embodiment of resurrected selves, evoked by the yearning to know them     
once more, appears actual, luminous to the eye and tactual to the hand. In 
this manner is the body resurrected, not as a misty dream, but as palpable to 
all-feeling touch and perceptible to all-seeing vision. "Out of the Past 
cometh this new thing.

The resurrection of the body is always occurring, even in everyday life, but  
it is an involuntary resurrection, usually mistimed and therefore unwanted.
By use of the autotelic theurgy of Zos it is possible to live all lies and    
incarnate all dreams, now, at once. In the Zoetic Grimoire of Zos, Spare makes 
it plain that "identity is an obsession, a composite of personalities, all 
counterfeiting each other; a faveolated ego, a resurging catacomb where the 
phantomesque demiurgoses seek in us their reality".

Through the Death Posture our thisness is realized as identical with the      
thatness of so-called others; a quality that is really no-quality, partaking 
as it does of neither this nor that. And with the apprehension of Kia (Self) 
as Neither-Neither, is born the new aesthetic or sexual sense, which is our 
thisness in a new dimension, and the source of all thatness that we constantly 
project as female bodies.

This introduces a weird concept of sexuality which Spare used as the basis of  
his theurgy. All women are seen as forms of our desire; they are desire 
sigillized, and because of the conditioned quality of our belief, they are 
conditioned and subject to change, appearing to us as "all otherness" desiring 
union with our thisness. "Fortunate is he who absorbs his female bodies- ever 
projecting- for he aquires the extent of his body."*(5)

*(5) The Focus of Life.

Spare does not limit the meaning of the word "body" to the fleshly body; if   
this were the case there would be no sense in his declaring "Death is All", 
and in glorifying the simulation of a condition which writes finis to the 
physical organism. The phrase, "the extent of his body", involves a state of 
sentience of which the physical organism is but a single reification and 
resurrection. Spare's ultimate doctrine implies the unification of sensation 
on all planes simultaneously, so that the ego may be fully aware of its myriad 
entities and identities in a "now" and a "here" that is everlasting. This is 
what is meant by "aquiring the extent of his body".

In the Grimoire he says: "We are never fully aware of things except by the    
influx of sexual will awakening us", and the Death Posture concentrates all 
the senses and turns them back into the primal sense- the sexual- which 
infuses the bodyy with total awareness on all planes at once. Without 
knowledge of how to assume the Death Posture "entity exists in many units 
simultaneously, without consciousness of Ego as one flesh. What greater misery 
than this?"*(6)

*(6) Ibid.

In the same book, Spare asks: "For what reason is this loss of memory by      
these bewildering refractions of my original image- that I once made?" The 
Death Posture contains the answer for, by uniting vital belief (i.e. organic 
desire) and dynamic will, the "extent of his body" is aquired.

Ecstasy, perfect Self-love, attains its apotheosis in the Death Posture, for  
"when ecstasy is transcended by ecstasy, the 'I' becomes atmospheric and there 
is no place for sensuous objects to conceive differently and react".*(7)

*(7) The Book of Pleasure, 1913

And so we arrive full circle at the hindrance to conception which is the basis  
of Zos Kia Cultus, and which is implied by the sigillization of desire in a 
figure bearing no pictorial resemblance to the nature of the desire.

In order to escape from the cycle of rebirth we must break free from the      
transmigratory cycle of belief, for we cannot believe in any one thing for any 
length of time. Therefore, by assiduously emptying belief of its charge and by 
directing the newly released energy towards a non-necessitousness and non-
reactionary Self-love the individual negates karma*(8) and attains to the 
realm of Kia (the Atmospheric "I"). True Self control is achieved "by leaving 
things to work out their own salvation. Directly we interfere we become 
identified and subject to their desire."*(9)

*(8) Cause and effect.
*(9) Ibid.

This doctrine resembles, though it is not identical with, the philosophy of   
Advaita Vedanta or non-duality. Spare sums up with the words.

"So long as the notion remains that there is compulsory bondage in the world,  
or even in dreams, there is such bondage. Remove the conception of Freedom and 
Bondage in any world or state, by meditation on Freedom in Freedom by the 
Neither-Neither."*(10) And he adds: "There is no need for crucifixion.

*(10) Ibid. The Neither-Neither is the Neti-Neti (Not-this Not-that) of the   
Vedantins.

In order therefore to appreciate the idea of the New Sexuality it is          
necessary that the mind be merged with the Kia, and that there exist no 
stresses (i.e. thoughts) in consciousness, for thoughts modify consciousness 
and create the absurd illusion of an individual owner of consciousness.

The concept of the Universal Women,*(11) She with whom Zos "strayed into the  
path direct" is both the inceptor and preceptor of the New Sexuality which 
transcends duality. She is the glyph of perfect polarity which cancels out to 
Nought. In Crowley's Cult she is Nuit, of whom 0=2 is the mystical 
formula.*(12)

*(11) See Earth Inferno, 1905, first drawing.
*(12) See Chapter I.

Absolute Consciousness (Kia, the Self), like Infinite Space (Nuit), is        
without a boundary; it is the plenum-void, formless and unlocatable; to all 
intents and purposes- nothing at all, except that it is the sole Reality.

In the deepest recesses of the subconscious this reality resembles lightning,  
or a flashing shaft of intense brilliance. It is the hieroglyph of potential 
desire, ever ready to leap into form and become "the actualization of our late 
God", i.e. the embodiment of our latest belief.

This primal desire, this "new" or ageless sexuality, is the one sense of all  
the senses that is real. It is the one constant factor in our changefulness. 
The more this sense can be extended to embrace everything, the more the Self 
can realize itself, understand itself, know itself, and finally be itself, 
wholly, perpetually and non-necessitously. "The new law shall be the arcana of 
the mystic unbalanced 'Does not matter-need not be'; there is no 
necessitation, 'please yourself' is its creed (the Belief ever striving for 
denial is kept free by retention in this state)."*(13)

*(13) The Book of Pleasure.

This is very reminiscent of Crowley's creed of Do What Thou Wilt, but there   
is a difference. As the Negative Path of Taoism is to the Positve Path of 
traditional Hinduism, so is this creed of Self-Love and Zos-Kia to that of 
Thelema and Love under Will.

For Spare, woman symbolizes the desire to unite with "all otherness" as Self;  
not the individual manifestations of woman, but the primitive woman of which 
or of whom mortal women are refracted images.

Call this inconceivable concept sex, desire, emotion; or personify it as The  
Goddess, the Witch, the Primitive Woman, she is the cypher of all 
inbetweenness, the elusive ecstasy of the lightning pathway that Zos called 
"the precarious funambulatory way". To adore her is not achieved by 
imprisoning her in an ephemeral form and limiting her to this or that, but by 
transcending the thisness and the thatness of all things and experienceing her 
in the unity of Self-love.

Spare did not embody her arbitrarily as Astarte, Isis, Cybele, or Nuit (though  
he often drew her in these god forms), for to limit her is to turn aside from 
the path and idealize the idol which is false because partial, unreal because 
non-eternal. "The possessive personalize, idolize love, and so the morbid 
awakening ...".*(14)

*(14) The Grimoire of Zos

The use of such idols is permissible, even desirable, for the purpose of      
storing free belief during an inactive or non-creative period, when energy is 
not required. But the main objectionn to the continued use of idols is that 
"the familiar induces fatigue; fatigue induces indifference; let nothing be 
seen in such a manner; let seeing be as vision- every sight a revelation. 
Fatigue disappears when this is the constant attitude,"*(14) i.e. when the 
image is always new, and the sexuality, therefore, always stimulated afresh.

By not permitting free belief to be locked in a particular god form, the      
impact of sight as revelation is easily inculcated and sterility abolished. It 
is one of Spare's fundamental maxims that "the familiar is always 
sterile",*(14) one cannot breed from familiar images. Familiarity leads to 
devitalization, laziness, and conventional attitudes- the easy way out of 
difficulties. "Let me overcome this cursed fatigue and I will become a 
God."*(14)

The mind must be trained to see ever freshly, and Spare's formula for         
achieving this is to "provoke consciousness in touch, ecstasy in vision . . . 
Let thy highest virtue be Insatiety of desire, brave self-indulgence and 
primaeval sexualism.

The key to primaeval sexualism, or the New Sexuality, is given in The Focus   
of Life where Zos exclaims: "Dispense with all means to an end." It is the 
path of Immediacy as against the procrastination of reality in an un-energized 
"as if" simulation: "Do it now, not eventually . . . for desire except by the 
act shall in nowise obtain."*(15)

*(15) The Anathema of Zos, 1927.

And, again: "Realization is not by the mere utterance of the words 'I am I',  
nor by self-abuse, but by the living act." Self-abuse is here used as 
synonymous with simulation; do not pretend to be "I", be the Self absolutely, 
wholly and in reality, now.

This is the theurgy of making the Word flesh. In The Book of Pleasure, he     
asks: "Why assume ceremonial robes and masks, and simulate attitudes of the 
Gods?"*(16) Most emphatically, there is no need for repetition or feeble 
imitation. You are alive!" This is the reason for his rebuking magicians and 
those who merely "rehearse" reality, while mocking the very vitaltiy they 
embody, and desire, by a simulation which in itself denies it.

*(16) This is, no doubt a direct criticism by Spare of the ceremonial         
techniques and the assumption of god forms practised in the Golden Dawn, of 
which he was a member in 1910. His motto was Yihoveaum.

Spare claims that magic merely ruins the reality by positing a moment, even,  
when the Self is not real and vital, when it is not all things, or, rather, 
when the power of becoming all things is not inherent in it. People "praise 
ceremonial magic and are supposed to suffer much ecstasy! Our asylums are 
crowded and the stage is over-run. Is it by symbolizing that we become the 
symbolized? Were I to crown myself King, should I be King? Rather should I be 
an object of disgust of pity."*(17)

*(17) The Book of Pleasure

These teachings, evolved by Spare before the First World War, are very close  
to the doctrines of the Sudden School of Ch'an Buddhism, the texts of which 
have only recently be made generally available.

To dispense with all means to an end is simply said, but not so simply done.  
A full development of the aesthetic sense is required, for without it it is 
not even possible to accept the doctrine of the New Sexuality, either 
intellectually or symbolically. It may be done by saturating the body-mind 
complex in the subtle effluvia of Zos Kia Cultus, by following the thread of 
Spare's work into the deep and dimly illumined cells of the subconsciousness; 
by acquiring an ultra-sensitive awareness to events and things, as being not 
different from the Self. Spare understands all Nature (the objective universe) 
as the sum of our past, symbolized, crystallized apparently outside ourselves. 
The potential, alone, at the lightning-swift instant of its transudation is to 
be seized and be-lived (i.e. believed) in an ecstatic immediacy, for "when 
ecstasy is transcended by ecstasy, the 'I' becomes atmospheric and there is no 
place for sensuous objects to conceive differently . . .

But one cannot locate the Supreme Belief in Nature, because as soon as the    
Word has been uttered, the reality is of the past, is no longer reality now, 
can but live in resurrection when re-utterance makes it flesh; it is neither 
what is uttered nor he who utters, nor is it the utterance, but a vague and 
subtle inbetweenness concept that renders reality at the split-second of its 
actual transudation. "There is no spoken truth that is not past- more wisely 
forgotten."*(18)

*(18) The Anathema of Zos, 1927.

In the Grimoire he says: "The fractional second is the path I would open . . "
This path and the path of lightning-swift assimilation are synonymous terms 
describing an indescribable state which is conceptless- the Neither-Neither, 
Self-love, Kia, or the New Sexuality.

Spare's art is not widely known, nor has it received the appreciation it      
deserves, and his intensely personal system of sorcery has not yet woven its 
way into the structure of present-day occultism. There are signs, however, 
that it will not be long before the "as if" simulations and the "as now' 
ecstasies give a powerful impetus to the magical current of the New Aeon, for 
if anyone sensed and interpreted this current right at its inception it was 
certainly Austin Osman Spare.