Don’t read a book about Hamlet to understand Hamlet. Read Hamlet. Then ask yourself what you feel. There’s your answer. There’s your truth. There’s the sum of your current understanding, all you need in order to progress. Take the interpretations of others and throw them out. They are not yours. They mean nothing to you. Listen instead to your heart with bravery and sincerity. That is how to set foot on the path of understanding, of initiation. It’s where all meaning begins, evolves, and remains. It’s where Hamlet as a living thing can take root and grow into your life. Everything else is a maze of lies and self-deceit.
We can say the same things about the occult, which is real but more elusive than most people imagine, so long as they search for power with their minds. True power is not to be found in the forms, attestations, and concepts of others (even in this text), but in the essential salts, which is to say in the alchemy of the body, in the vitality of life in motion, in desire, and in its fulfillment. In other words: true power is in you. You find the truth, your truth, nowhere but in yourself.
In The Red Book, Jung writes, “There is only one way and that is your way. You seek the path? I warn you away from my own. It can also be the wrong path for you. May each go his own way” and “The way is within us, but not in Gods, nor in teachings, nor in laws. Within us is the way, the truth, and the life.” This is the meaning of “essential salts”—the crystallization of who and how you are in essence.
It is your way, but you have to develop the capacity to perceive and feel it. And so there are things like wacky new-age belief systems, religions, cults, books of magic, taboos, red-light districts, prayer circles, sororities, orthodoxies. They all provide opportunities for honing self-directed perception because they frustrate and limit freedom. That intensifies desire and gives the individual a chance to refine himself. But they are not repositories of truth.
This is also what Anton LaVey means when he writes, “Satan has been the best friend the Church has ever had, as he has kept it in business all these years!” The Church, or more broadly, Christianity in the West, has always been a striptease, a pantomime, and a magic show, the ultimate Command to Look. It says, “There is something forbidden in you. Desire it, but admit that you are not worthy of having it” or “There is something forbidden in the life around you. Desire it, but fear it.” There is always something hidden behind the tabernacle curtain. And that something is always the Devil, the embodiment and unification of what we want but cannot have. The Devil is the eternal dance of indulgence and abstinence in a single character.
In this sense, Christianity has done more for the fulfillment of desire, for the intensification of vital life force, than any other belief system in human history. It functions entirely on the Law of the Forbidden (LaVey, in The Satanic Witch, puts it like this: “Nothing is so fascinating as that which is not meant to be seen,” but we might refine his definition by replacing “seen” with “enjoyed”). Knowing this, when we hear someone praising the lord, we might wonder which one—the lord of light, judgment, and things-as-they-are or the lord of darkness, release, and things-as-we-wish-they-could-be. Or perhaps there is only one vital life force, one orgone, one dao, one way, truth, and life in each of us. And when we find it, it proves out indivisible from us after all.
Consider the imagery of Oswald Wirth’s baphomet circumscribed by an ouroboros (or encircled in an equivalent but more abstract way by the Hebrew five-letter name of Leviathan, the great sea monster), the unification of earth, air, fire, and water in a single image, the bottom point of the inverted pentagram often representing the individual in which these essences are brought to bear. It’s meant to be a sensational and threatening image, but get beyond that initial reaction (also notice I didn’t say dismiss that initial reaction—note it, take it in, but don’t stop there). Try to see it as a symbolic map of the Self, as a kind of “spiritual anatomy.” How could it be a doorway to a more occult understanding?
The reason certain powerful methods and realizations are “occult” and elusive is not that they’re concealed in arcane grimoires or otherwise held back from public consumption by shadowy groups. Nothing is actually hidden. All the secrets are on display. They’re as evident as an image brought up by an internet search (or by looking in the mirror).
If you can accept this, you are definitely in the Place of the Other. You have become alien to the thought processes of most people. And it is with this thought and the following quote from The Satanic Bible, that I will end this three-part series on initiation, alienation, and the inherent adversity of the Left-Hand Path: “Then all thy bones shall say pridefully, 'Who is like unto me? Have I not been too strong for mine adversaries? Have I not delivered MYSELF by mine own brain and body?'”
