DIALIOA

Dialioa, sixth of 91 Parts of the Earth, third of ARN. Zodiacal king: Ziracah Ministers: 8962 Derived from the Water Tablet. Mundane association: Asia Minor.

Monday, August 29, 1994 2:10 p.m.

Vibrated the Call and the appropriate names.

I first saw the sigil of the Part drawn within a circle on the ground. The name of the Part was written in both Enochian and English letters in a border around the circumference, so that the whole had the appearance of a simple talisman.

Next a woman appeared within the circle. She had blonde hair and her face was hidden behind it. She was crouched down on her right knee, her right hand on the ground. Her left arm was raised and bent back as if she was trying to remove something from the back of her neck. She wore a she wore a white summer dress of some light fabric.

Her posture reminded me of the Crowley's Tarot card “The Star”. But even more, it recalled one of Rodin's more striking sculptures, called (I believe) “The Helmet-maker's Beautiful Wife”. The sculpture shows a crone in a similar posture, and carries a tremendous freight of sorrow for lost things. The figure in the circle sends forth a sense of great sorrow, and of being one on whom an unbearable load has been placed. (I am reminded as well of another sculpture, I think also by Rodin, called “Caryatid Fallen Under Her Stone”.)

Now the figure before me cries: “Woe! Woe! And again Woe! I am beset by those above me and those below. The ones above me seek to bind me to them in unity; those below seek to disperse me into chaos. Yet in myself I am neither one nor many, and their pressure wearies my soul to death. How shall I escape these evils?”

An angel comes forward from the upper right of my field of view, dressed in violet robes. It pulls the figure out of the circle, and takes its place in the same posture. After a few moments it hardens into stone, or forms a shell of stone in its own shape, to take the load. The angel then leaves this stone figure like a ghost leaving the body, and stands beside the circle with the original occupant, who is now clearly a young woman of an airy nature.

The angel makes a sign like alchemical sulfur towards me, apparently expecting it to be returned; I do so. Then another sign like the “V” of LVX, but the impression is of a descending triangle over a cross. Again I return it.

The angel turns to the woman, and performs a series of gestures I don't recognize. But I know as they are done that they spell LILITH, followed by a gesture of releasing.

As the gestures are completed, the woman goes through an astonishing number of transformations in an instant, becoming many different women in turn. Without, seemingly, changing her essential nature. Finally she turns into a woman of some non-Semitic Middle Eastern race; long wavy black hair, dark eyes, olive skin, in the skirt-and-girdle outfit seen in some pictures of ancient priestesses. Snakes appear, curled around her wrists. Then she vanishes, absorbed into the fabric of space itself.

“Know” the angel said, “that all acts of creation act upon a pre-existing substance.” Answering a question in my mind he said, “There was no first act of creation; all has ever been in process. And this substance precedes even that process. None of any level of reality know its origins or destiny.

“This substance, protean, ever-changing, livingness itself, is that out of which all creations come. Binah is its reflection in our world, though it surpasses Binah in all ways, and surpasses the Wheel and the Point as well. And here it is reflected again in the substance of the Aethyrs, as it must be in any of its children.

“You will see her anon in other Parts, as she takes on other roles with respect to this creation. But in this place, as you have sensed, she is acted upon by the force of the other two parts within ARN, as the substance upon which each seeks to impose its form of order within the world. And so she was first seen as placed under a burden, as the pressure of one and the other sought to mold her into their preferred form.

“But in her essence she is above both, contains both, and cannot be so limited. And the action of those Parts causes to be formed instead an image, an illusory construct (of a lesser order of existence) which fulfills their intent.

“Now the previous two Parts represent, each in their way, the primary themes of the substance aspect of existence within this world. [The word “substance” was emphasized.] On the one hand, smooth motion, cyclic appearances, direct causation and spiral progressions; on the other hand, sudden jumps, indeterminacy, acausal relationship, and dynamic, mutually affective interactions.

“The lesser cannot contain the greater, and so their action is futile in the extreme; certainly no great part of the divine substance shall be formed to their will. They cannot even contact it in its essence, for their level is not high enough. But part of its manifestation [emphasized], the product of previous cycles of creation, is amenable to their intent, and visible to their eyes. And this portion they take for the whole, and press upon.

“And in the process they summon, for a time, by its intrinsic connection with Her, something of the true substance. This gives new life to the old manifestation, allowing it to mutate and change in accordance with their will, taking on the desired characteristics without losing anything of its past history. It groans like a living thing under the burden of their will, until it is changed and the changes established as a permanent nature.

“The task being complete, the summoned portion of the divine woman's power is released, and the manifest substance goes more or less its own way, in response to the subsequent promptings of the creators involved. The direct activity of the higher substance lapses, and whatever portion of its livingness was involved returns into itself.

“It is in this releasing process that we ministers of Dialioa have our work. Our task is to ensure that the higher substance does not remain, for to do so would be to give greater weight to the actions upon its manifestation than is desirable. There would be a continuing impression of the will upon the substance aspect.

“This is a subtle thing, but must be understood. The substance forms the base of a creation, and has certain characteristics inherent as a part of that creation. But the purpose of the creative act, the goal of the creator's impulse, grows out of the substance along another, different dimension. It is an overlay upon the substance, not an inherent part of it.

“To understand this, consider that the image in a painting, and the emotional, mental, and spiritual expressions built into the image, are not inherent in the paint which the artist used. The pigments have certain qualities, yes, but they are merely raw stuff of making, and it is only in their artful combination that the higher purpose is revealed. That purpose is never apparent to the consciousness of the atoms in the paint, but only to creatures of the same or higher type than the creator. It simply does not exist in the paint itself.

“Thus also with the manifest portion of the divine woman's substance. If her essence were to remain in the manifest substance beyond the time when it has been prepared as the raw material of a creative act, then the material would attempt to respond to the higher purpose of the creator, and attempt to build that purpose into itself. This is not desirable, for if it attuned to one stage of the creative act, then it could not properly respond to the later stages.

“It would be as if a glob of red paint became infused with an indelible quality of “violence”, so that it could never be used except in paintings of a violent nature. Were the artist to attempt to use it to paint, say, a rose in the hand of a young girl as an expression of innocent appreciation of beauty, then the violence of the paint would send the artist's intent awry. The artist wishes his material to have just those generic qualities that make it widely useful, and no more.”

Here a pause of a few minutes.

“Now is this woman, this Lilith who takes all things into herself and gives them substance, too much to be known within a single Part – or even within a single Aethyr. The Pan behind Pan is she; he is a silly country bumpkin by comparison. Nuit she is, and Babalon of the Thelemites, and many others; and none of these images touch even the hem of her garment. The entire universe descends out of her womb, yet she is not stretched or strained thereby. Time before time, Space before space, being that precedes all being is she. One Mother to whom the many Fathers apply themselves, she remains yet virgin. No one truly knows her, yet all descends from her, is contained in her, all is maintained out of her life.

“Endless – literally endless – superlatives could be applied to her, and leave none the wiser. Therefore will we cease. But she will come again, in many forms, as we continue this path of the Parts. And she will come to you again in time, as she has in past times.

“We are done.”

Seer's comments:

The appearance of Lilith in this vision struck me as familiar, so I dug out my copy of Vision and the Voice and re-read the section for ARN. There are some general similarities of symbol, despite a contrast in the details. My own symbol-set is substantially different from Crowley's, and this of course affects the results. As well, A.C. was working his way up through the Aethyrs, trying to force a return to unity against the general flow of their force. Here we are working from top to bottom, in line with the flow.

The zodiacal king ruling this Part is again Ziracah, Aquarius. Thus the opening image reflects the Water-Bearer of the Tarot card. But there is a strong Saturnian element in the aura of burden, oppression, and sorrow that surrounds her, and this expands into a more general Binah nature.

The cry of the figure supports this position; “those above” are Kether and Chokmah, whose force descends and gives form to the unconditioned primal substance of Binah. “Those below” represent the dispersal of the Abyss, and the transformation from transcendental wholeness into the myriad of finite events that make up existence in the lower, non-transcendental spheres. She is neither one nor many because the distinguishing characteristic of the primal substance is its total lack of distinguishing characteristics. It is NOT anything that can be comprehended or imagined by a finite consciousness.

Finally a minister of the Part appears and (being like in nature to the Part) takes the place of the woman for the completion of the transformation into finite form. Just as the Saturn aspect represents a minor and lesser part of Binah. The creation of a finite form having been completed, the angel releases the remaining substance back into its transcendental state by invoking the yet higher state of which it is a reflection.

My own conception of Lilith comes from the goddess-religions of the age of Taurus; she has nothing of the demonic aspects added by the male-oriented cultures of the following Aries age and perpetuated by the fears of the Piscean age. She is an aspect of Innana or Ishtar as All-goddess, specifically the starry night-sky, as her name LIL-ITh might be translated as “night's essence”. The last form she takes in the vision before vanishing is the form of that goddess. This same form appeared in Crowley's vision, but he interpreted it in terms of the corrupted tale of Eve and the Serpent.

The function of the priestess of Lilith was to attract men to the temple for the performance of the sacred rites. In Thelemic terms, she is the priestess calling “To me! To me!” And each woman, in her initiation into the temple, took on the role of Lilith with some man, invoking her “under her stars”, becoming the goddess for a period of time. Any child issuing from such union was considered a child of the goddess and some god, not of the human bodies through whom the act was performed.

In the higher aspect represented here, she is the primordial “stuff” out of which all creative entities form their creations. The creative, “male” counterparts are the multiple entities of the region Pacasna, a multitude of Hadits to her Nuit. To make the connection between Lilith and Nuit even firmer, the former name might be interpreted as LI-LITh. “LI” means “To me” or “unto me”, the call of Nuit; LITh means “none”, Nuit's nature.

The remainder of the vision deals with aspects of the divine creative process, and is best understood through meditation. I believe that the overall nature of this Part can be summarized as concretion of essence followed by release of any excess essence.

This completes the regions of the Aethyr ARN.

It has occurred to me while re-reading the visions that there is some connection with Achad's Tree being developed here. The visions of LIL might represent the descent of the creative force from Kether to Chokmah, via the path of Jupiter. Thus representing the initial imbalance that results from movement away from the Still Point.

The first region of ARN, with its heavy Saturnian flavor, is the secondary descent from Kether to Binah, via the path of Saturn. Note the resemblance between the “grid” of that vision, and the grid surrounding the hermaphrodite in Crowley's version of the card, or the bindings of the wreath around the herm in other versions.

The second region of ARN, strongly Aquarian-Uranian, would then represent the passing of the male creative power from Chokmah into Binah via the path of Aquarius. The final region is Binah itself, the primordial stuff reflected into the lesser area of creation that is the Earth.

Obviously, with 91 Parts there is going to be a lot of overlap somewhere along the way, in any correlation between them and the Tree. It seems more likely to me that the Parts will only occasionally become congruent with the Tree, and that the rest of the time they will touch on things outside that matrix.