In Between the Spaces

The last few months I have been doing research on Egyptian mythology, alchemy, archetypes, alphabets, and the zodiac. My research has also taken me through the scriptures of Psalms and the prophecies of Ezekiel. Reading through parts of Ezekiel it didn’t take long before I felt like Ezekiel was talking more about Amun than YHVH, though it is clear that Amun was a force of inspiration for Jewish religious philosophies. In some of those spaces too it felt like references to Horus. I was struck with a particular interest regarding Ezekiel’s writings on “the third temple” where he describes stations or priestly representations of the bull and the ram, whose duty it is to consecrate the altar for seven days. Even the slightest familiarity with astrology will inform the reader that these are animal personifications of Taurus and Aries, whose signs are ruled by the planetary bodies Venus and Mars. I can’t help but wonder, was Ezekiel calling for a priestess and priest to perform this seven day consecration rite with heavenly host and/or sacred blood? My initial thought at this point were modern stations of the Scarlet woman and the Beast.

What’s a Pagan scholar doing musing over old testament scripture anyway? Its all old news and couldn’t possibly have any bearing on cultural consciousness or the present shapes of things, could it? Enoch, Ezekiel, Revelations of John, these are all types of scriptural doctrines I remember reading as a child. Turning back to Amun for a moment, he is often described as the invisible or hidden one, the breath of the wind. It is in the name of Amen that countless prayers and rituals of thaumaturgy and theurgy have been enacted since before the days of the temple of Solomon. Renaissance magic texts are filled with prayers addressed to the various names of God that were invoked in the practice of the Kabbalah and inspired the praxis of the later Cabala and Qabalah. Spiritual alchemy invoked in the name of the winds that rose as a shoot from the primordial waters, which is also a designation assigned to Horus.

Eliphas Levi (18th century occultist) wrote a prayer of the winds to invoke the power of the air, that same air that Isaac Luria (16th century Kabbalist) described as the flowing emanations of the liquid light of God. In the early 2000s I wrote a short essay comparing prayer and witchcraft highlighting how the goals are the same though the methods may differ. Prayer or spell incantations, anything that is spoken or sung is by virtue of the element of the air, as these are forms of communication, and prayer is an intimate form of calling forth the names of God. With this in mind, I can understand why for men like John Dee, prayer was a powerful means towards the attainment of his will. Occultists still have discourse on how to call, to intone, or to sing, or to speak, and in what languages to perform this linguistic methodology.

After reading the Prophecies of Ezekiel I thought about his writings on the third temple, on which he provides rich, detailed plans. I wonder how it is similar and different from the Temples of Solomon and Herod. This may be a new avenue of research.