NOCAMAL

Nocamal, 14th of 91 Parts, 2nd of LIT. Zodiacal King: Alpudus Ministers: 2306 Mundane association: Cilicia (Southeast seacoast of Asian Turkey, abutting the Gulf of Alexander)

Friday, October 14, 1994 10:12 PM

Invoked Nocamal according to the revised procedure.

The vision opened, and I seemed to be a giant standing above the Earth. Below me I could see a fertile crescent of plain bounded on the north and west by mountains bordering a plateau. To the south was a sea; I could see waves traveling leagues to strike the shore and be refracted back again. More mountains, more like large hills, to the east.

My body shrank so that it was closer to the scale of what I was seeing. To the northeast, there was a deep gorge cutting through the mountains. To either side of its entrance high rocks jutted upwards like pylons or weather-worn pillars. The sky was overcast here, but bright light shone down the gorge from the other end.

Coming down the gorge was a procession of men, going in pairs. All of them wore belted robes with the hoods thrown back; the robes were a rich violet color. Their headgear was red, and came in many styles. Before them, riding on a white horse, came Death with his banner, as in the Tarot card.

Death reined in between the pillars, and the men continued on, one of each pair passing to either side of him. As they came into the plain, the spread out to either side so that they formed a crescent with its points facing to the southeast. Death now moved somewhat forward, so that he was near the focus of the crescent, and lowered the banner he carried in the direction he faced. On the banner was a stylized silver rose, and this rose was exactly at the focus. It seemed to me that the line of the gorge, plus the curve the men made, plus the circle of the rose together made the symbol of Pluto.

A power seemed to radiate outwards onto the plain. Like Pluto's force, it worked underneath the surface. Above ground, it was merely a great brilliance; below ground, it worked as if drawing or pushing things irresistibly upwards into the light of day.

Now hands and feet and heads began to appear out of the ground. Soon people were pushing and dragging themselves out of the ground, like drowning swimmers who had just dragged themselves out of the water, and stood there gasping for breath, in sheer amazement at still being alive. These all faced Death and bowed deeply.

Death raised his banner again and set it in a stirrup or cup on the left side of his saddle. He spoke: “It is not my power that has raised you up; only the gates of passage are mine; the lands beyond are otherwise, and there will you go.” And in an instant all present (except Death and his men) were transported to the other end of the gorge, from which the light earlier shone.

Here it was bright all around, with a sort of red-tinged brilliance. I could see no details of the land. But above in the sky was a great angel, arms held out and down at 45 degree angles, left leg crossed over right, so that he formed the symbol of alchemical sulfur. Somewhere behind his head shined a star, like one of the fiercer of the stellar brethren, so far away that it had no disk, but so brightly burning that it was nearly blinding. And around this star shimmered a ring of vibrating rays, of all the colors, concealing the Great Serpent. This ring gave the impression that the angel had a halo, but I knew it was not so.

I waited for a few minutes more, but nothing more seemed to be forthcoming, and there was no Voice. So I ended tonight's vision, to try again tomorrow.

Saturday, October 15, 1994 6:44 PM

As the vision opened, I was high above the plateau seen before. Below I could see many people streaming out of the gate to the lower seacoast plain, following a path that went through the relatively barren land here. But only a portion of the path was visible; as it passed northwards, it –and everything else – dissolved again into a brilliant featureless glow that covered the north from top to bottom.

As the people moved north, they too seemed to dissolve. First their bodies became reduced to a series of connected reflective planes – sort of a Picasso-like or post-modern rendition of a human body. Then these too dissolved, and as they approached the glowing region, they became sparks of fire and passed through.

I followed the sparks into the glowing region, and found that it was not a region at all, but simply an interface. I felt like one of those medieval images of a monk traveling through the spheres of the pre-Copernican heavens; he breaks through the sphere of the fixed stars and is suddenly confronted with the glory of God. But here that is reversed; I broke through the seeming glory of the divine, and beyond it is the blackness of space, filled with stars. The sparks coming through with me waft away on an invisible breeze, transforming into stars among the many already there.

“What is it that draws the souls of men upwards, o mage? Do you think it is the Will of God? It is not. Do you think it the encompassing nurturance of the Mother? It is not. No, it is the pure, unaltered fire, the essence of Being, reaching down into the created worlds and pulling itself to itself. For all things created are, at their root, Fire; and Fire speaks to Fire.

“Take away that Fire, and creation dissolves into nothingness. Bring that Fire, and creation also dissolves, but after another manner, gradually, and with the gains and experience of its many lives retained.

“Now, in this Part, as in all the others, we are concerned not with powers and principalities, not with things, but instead with transitions and relationships, the movement [emphasized] from one state to another. And what greater movement is there than this, the drawing of souls out of matter, and their return into the heavens from which they came?

“Fire is Life. This is the word of Chokmah. But Fire is also Light, and this is the greater word of Kether. The one creates, the other returns, and brings about return. And who can say if they are truly two and not one? Not I, nor any of my kind.

“In the early stages of this vision, you saw the hidden Fire, that fire which is at the core of all finite things. And the power of Pluto is like unto the power that draws those fires out of their insulating nests, their comfortable abodes, and frees them once more to stand above the worlds.”

Here my attention was directed back to the moment in yesterday's vision when Death radiated his force into the Earth. Then it was focused upon a single particle within the Earth. It seemed to me that in this state the sparks of Fire were in a form of stasis, or a deep sleep, in which they did not expend any of their intrinsic energy. When the Pluto-like energy touched a spark, it was brought into a state of activity and began expending its energy. Its “insulation”, its material form, somehow sealed it off from drawing in more energy to replace that being spent; thus the sense of drowning – more properly, suffocation – that I had noticed. The spark (which is a human soul, in some cases) forces itself upwards in order to have free access to that which it needs to renew itself.

“In the next stage of the transition, the sparks are free of their containers, yet retain the memories thereof, and the patterns of action established there. They live within the greater Fire, and draw sustenance therefrom, but are still in some ways not purely of fire themselves. Here the greater Fire acts to reduce them, to abstract them burning out the dross, purifying, converting the memories of matter into patterns of energy. This is the reduction of life-experience to a set of symbolic relationships, as is done by those in the so-called “adept” grades, which the Thelemites call the “Lover” grade.

“And eventually even these are burned away, turned to vapor and dissipated. And there is nothing left but a spark of Fire, indistinguishable from any other, indistinguishable from the Greater Fire itself, but still unique. And this spark passes back into the realms from which it was sent in the beginning.

“Thus, you might call this Part the Part of Sublimation by Burning. That which enters under its power is made more rarefied, closer to its own essence, by the power of Fire.

“There is nothing here of great import to your personal work at this time; you have seen this power at work many times before, and the lesson has been learned. In the future you will see it again, but not yet.

“And thus we complete this vision of the Part. We are done.”

Seer's comments:

Here we return again to the Path of Fire, connecting Kether with Tiphereth in Achad's Tree of Life. But at a somewhat lower level than in the previous contact. What was seen here covers the path's action in the region between the two horizontal paths it crosses: that of Aquarius between Chokmah and Binah, and that of Scorpio between Chesed and Geburah.

The sigil of Nocamal bears a surprising resemblance to the shape of the Part's mundane association. The starting point of the sigil would be at about the location of ancient Antioch; the next two lines would be the seacoast of Cilicia, the remaining lines the Taurus Mountains separating it from the rest of Anatolia. Tarsus, the city of the apostle Paul's birth, would be just about at the point of the sigil's upper “v”.

The gorge of the opening image and its gate-like entrance are a poetic rendering of the Cilician Gates, a pass through the mountains that was, and still is, one of the main routes into the middle east from Anatolia and Europe. Here it is used as a metaphor for the Path of Fire. The connection with Paul is perhaps apropos, since a blinding light is seen later in the vision.

As in the Part Pothnir, the vision suggests an interaction between the descending path and the path it crosses, so that the Fire is transformed by the Scorpio influence into a generative or re-generative power. The “dead” are raised up out of their coffins of matter, as in the Tarot card “Judgment”, but this is done through the process of death itself, acting as a front for the fiery power.

The final image of Friday's vision confirms the path being dealt with by showing a somewhat modified image of the Judgment card. Some elements from the previous vision of this path are repeated to affirm that it is a continuous process.

Saturday's vision continues the confirmation. The people pass through the gates and enter into the Wasteland, the region of the so-called Abyss. Beyond the Wasteland there seems to be only light; perhaps an expression of the way the divine is perceived from the finite levels. But the light turns out to be another front; from “above” the Abyss, the divine is seen not to end in some conclusive oneness, but instead opens up into a region of infinite possibilities.

The Voice explains the remaining aspects of the vision well enough.