I'm just standing in a doorway
I'm just trying to make some sense
– "Waiting On A Friend," The Rolling Stones
So also is the end of the book, and the Lord Adonai is about it on all sides like a Thunderbolt,and a Pylon, and a Snake and a Phallus, and in the midst thereof He is like the Woman that jetteth out the milk of the stars from her paps; yea, the milk of the stars from her paps.
– The Book of the Heart Girt with the Serpent, Aleister Crowley
Not terribly long ago Gregory Arnott reminded me of an adage Robert Anton Wilson wrote in "The "Wilderness Diaries of Sigismundo Celine" found in Nature's God: "You are precisely as big as what you love and precisely as small as what annoys you." The big part of this equation recalls the function of the Rosy Cross operation mentioned in the previous Night of Pan post.
It's worth revisiting the opening of Wilson's Schrödinger's Cat trilogy to investigate the matter further. As mentioned previously, it opens with a quote on the title page attributed to Jesus from the apocryphal Gospel of St. Thomas:
Not until the male become female and the female becomes male shall ye enter the Kingdom of Heaven.
This reversal corresponds to the number 69. Above this quote is the title of the first book of the trilogy:
The Universe Next Door
69 holds a great deal of significance in other ways. See chapter 69 in The Book of Lies for more on that.
Adding the initials (known as Notarikon) of The Universe Next Door gives 69. But "Door" also indicates the path of daleth, the path the connects the two highest forms of the male and female principals on the Tree of Life: Chokmah and Binah. This path corresponds with Venus, the goddess of LOVE.
Taking "Door" out of the Notarikon addition gives 65 which represents the Holy Guardian Angel. We find it described in chapter 65 from The Book of Lies is called "Sic Transeat ––" In the commentary Crowley writes: The chapter title means, 'So may he pass away', the blank obviously referring to NEMO. Nemo translates as "no-man". Sic Transeat also = 69.
Chapter 65 mentions the "moon-pool of silver" which Crowley says is the Path of Gimel, leading from Tiphareth to Kether. In the commentary to the The Book of the Heart Girt with the Serpent Crowley writes that the Path of gimel is the position of the Holy Guardian Angel. The first book of Schrödinger's Cat qabalistically shows a cross with The Unverse Next = gimel; Door = daleth. It looks like this:
The first section is titled "Don't Look Back." All the sections have titles, but being unnumbered, I don't think of them as chapters. The first sentence reads: "The majority of Terrans were six-legged." The phrase "six-legged" appears three times on the first page. Qabalistically, this immediately suggests Tiphareth-6, but looking at the whole phrase we get 6 + l (lamed = 30) = 36 which, of course, is 6 squared (6 x 6). The notarikon of "Don't Look Back" also = 36. The number 36 shows up four times on the first page; 4 x 36 = 144 = 12 squared. 12 is the key number for the path of beth which goes between Kether and Binah and corresponds to The Magus tarot card. We can look at 144 as practicing Magick.
This may seem fanciful to those who don't know Wilson or wish to deny his Cabala. The book Maybe Magick, scheduled for release at the end of this month (October, 2026) has a couple of articles (at least) that illustrate the complexity of his Cabalistic reckoning. Another example can be found in the introduction I wrote for Lion of Light.
Relative to the Rosy Cross practice, we connect the four 36s with Chapter 36, "The Star Sapphire" from The Book of Lies. The Star Sapphire describes a ritual that seems one iteration of the Rosy Cross. Indeed, the first instruction reads: Let the Adept be armed with his Magick Rood [and provided with his Mystic Rose].
A rood is an old English word that refers to a crucifix. The ritual begins by suggesting the Rosy Cross.
It's not my intention to provide instructions for performing the Star Sapphire ritual, but rather to illustrate its connection with the Rosy Cross and the Night of Pan. The best help for this ritual that I know of is found in The Magick of Aleister Crowley by Lon Milo Duquette. This book seems indispensable for anyone practically working with Thelemic rituals.
The second instruction asks the practitioner to give either the L.V.X. signs, or if they're ready, the N.O.X. signs. The latter indicates the Night of Pan.
The next four instructions concern drawing hexagrams in the four quarters and appear related to the YHVH formula as given in The Book of Thoth. Each of those instructions ends with ARARITA which is an acronym of the sentence: "One is His Beginning; one is His Individuality; His Permutation One."
Following the hexagrams we : Let him return to the Centre, and so to the Centre of All [making the ROSY CROSS as he may know how] saying ARARITA, ARARITA, ARARITA
Studying and practicing the rest of the Star Sapphire can provide more insight into the Rosy Cross; it describes shows one way of doing it. As mentioned in the last post, it can be practiced ex tempore, anytime, anywhere. I suspect that one reason it's numbered 36 is because it = 6 x 6. Bruce Springsteen may have been alluding to this practice when he sang: two hearts are better than one, two hearts can get the job done. It requires a partner, but the partner doesn't need to be physically present, or even be consciously aware of the working. The Night of Pan part – the feminine approach to phallic generation – comes in with how one works the Rosy Cross. Learning to master this balance seems a great, but difficult art.
I digress for a moment to address a misconception. The word phallus seems widely considered a synonym for the penis. It comes from the Greek word phallos which "referred to the image of an erect penis or a carving symbolizing generative power" not the organ itself. (emphasis added). The phallus, as this image, applies to both male and female. You can be a female or become-woman (as Deleuze puts it) and have tremendous phallic power – essentially, the creative force in nature. In Logic of Sense Gilles Deleuze makes the same point, but in the context of an infant maturing – growing its body.
It is this zone which must bind all the other partial zones, thanks to the phallus. And the phallus, in this respect, does not play the role of an organ, but rather that of a particular image projected, in the case of the little girl as well as the little boy, onto this privileged (genital)zone. By genital he means not only the reproductive organs, but also in terms of genesis, causing things to grow and come into being.
Back to the Cat: "Don't Look Back" makes great advice for the Thelemic crisis known as Crossing the Abyss; Wilson will symbolically allude to this crisis elsewhere in SC.
The character's name Epicene Wildeblood suggests the function of the Rosy Cross. Epicene means having characteristics of both male and female genders. Blood symbolizes life force, a product of the Rosy Cross. The Gematria of blood = 44. Crowley calls this a special number of Horus (Book of Lies, chapter 44). Epicene begins as a gay male in the novel then gets gender reassignment to become a woman and changes her name to Mary Margaret Wildeblood.
* * * * * *
Behold! I am a butterfly at the Source of Creation; let me die before the hour, falling dead into Thine infinite stream! – The Book of the Heart Girt with the Serpent, Aleister Crowley
Another facet of the Rosy Cross multiplicity gets shown through the number 68 often qabalistically expressed with the SC letter combination. Schrödingers Cat Part One opens with a quote from a Christopher Smart poem. Christopher ties into the cross image and to the Jesus quote. Wilson has "caste system" in the second sentence which could seem a solution to the other major problems listed in that sentence like war.
I've barely scratched the surface regarding the wealth of Hermetic material in Schrödinger's Cat. I look forward to the reading group about this Manual of Shamanism looking to commence in the not too distant future over at Rawillumination.com.
