Hebrew Letter: Heh: A Window

Zodiacal Attribution: Aquarius

Path Number: 15th

Atu Number: XVII

Connecting Sephiroth: Chockmah and Tiphareth

The Path of the Father to the Son

"All these letters of my Book are aright; but Tzaddi is not the Star.

AL: I-57

The Star connects Chockmah and Tiphareth, the primal energy of the All-Father with the Son, Power with Beauty. As such, we expect this path to be a conduit of tremendous, blind force directed through the vessel of the Mother to the creation of a Son. For Heh is the Mother (and the Daughter) of the Tetragrammaton. In the attribution of Heh as the mother, and in the central figure of The Star in the form of Nuit, the mother of the sky  and of the stars, we find gratifying consonance.

What of the astrological and alchemical attributions? The Star is assigned to Aquarius, which is the Water Carrier, but an Air SIgn, and so attributed with the power of discernment and division rather than synthesis. We might expect then an injection of intelligence here, of the catabolism we will see later in the Sephirah Gevurah.  Certainly, this implied intelligence is in accordance with the illumination of The Window, Heh, and so the Qabalistic scheme remains consistent.

In 777, Crowley allocates The Sun, Jupiter and Air to the 15th path. Air is certainly consistent with Aquarius, and the assigned planets are indicative of the Father (Jupiter), and the Son (in Tiphareth).

The Star is focused on a (stunningly beautiful) image of the Goddess of the Skies and Stars, Nuit, who is pouring a swirling fluid over her own head with her right hand, and another fluid into the sea of Binah with her left. It is worth noting that in the Suit of Cups, the element flowing downwards always has a source external to the the cup that dispenses it. Here, the cups seem rather to dispense the love and blessings of the universe as it already is and subsists  in this aeon - it is not received from an external source. We must presume then that the act or pouring occurs within a closed system, and that the blessings of love poured from these cups is part of the cyclical regenerative nature of all things. In 777, Crowley calls this the 'eternal renewal of the categories', but he does not explain why. But we can interpret his card and deduce that although the universe is closed, its essential substance is recycled through higher dimensions. This is really beautiful when we consider that some physicists think that consciousness arises outside our four dimensions of space and time.

In the night sky around Nuit, we see seven-pointed Venus, bathing the universe in love, and the whirling emblem of Babalon, and dominating the background, a planetary orb. Now if Crowley had wished to make this orb look like Earth, he would have done so. That he did not, is quite striking and requires a few words of explanation. In 777, he calls it the Celestial Globe.  This globe hovers in the night sky above the Sea of Binah, and is attended by the stars, by the light of Babalon and by Venus. Nuit as we see her in this card is the personification of the boundless universe, and so one possible solution to the riddle of the globe is that it is the material universe in total. This makes sense inasmuch as we can readily perceive the impact of the Sephiroth, of Eternal Binah, of The Supernal Forces upon our mundane consciousness, whilst knowing that they are not of our world in the material sense. And so, we then quite easily penetrate the mystery of The Star, as the universe recycles its energies through the glorious engine of Nuit, whilst the consciousness of our world works towards its higher calling across the Abyss through the agency of Our Lady, Babalon.

Although The Star connects Chockmah and Tiphareth, we are explicitly shown the Sea of Binah here, along with an illustration of natural law in gravity and time (which are inter-dependent in modern physics).  There is a lesson here concerning the interpenetration of all laws, all spheres, as the influence of Binah manifests on the fifteenth path.

The final and still somewhat puzzling part of this card I wish to analyse in this section is the transformation of the natural curvature of light trajectories to the geometric shapes we see emanating from the cups, and in the ice-like crystals at the feet of the Goddess. Crowley attributes this to a perceptive distortion of reality by the human mind, and we concur. However, the implication in The Star is that the distorted lens through which we perceive the universe is not entirely of our own making, but rather an inevitable flaw in our consciousness that only gradually allows perception of the truth through the application of intellect, of the primal power of Air, that is the element of this path. For if we could see all as is seen by the gods, then gods would we be - and will be.

Summary

The universe is driven by the recycling of all things by the Sky Goddess, Nuit, whilst patiently, Babalon awaits beyond the Abyss, illuminating all with her glory accepting all, denying none as they make their journey to her over the terror of time and the gulf of dispersion. The world through our eyes is a distorted dream for the seeker to rectify on his journey, for the recti-linear illusion of regularity  restricts the non-initiate from ever seeing beyond the horizon. And as we expect with the Atu, we see echoes of specific aspects of the universal structure. Here, in the heart of The Star, we see the protean, cyclic power of Netzach, the limitless love of Venus (also from Netzach), the intellect of Hod, and the timelessness of Binah.  In  higher sense, this card shows the machinery of the universe (Yesod) in a higher context incorporating all of creation both above and below the Abyss.

Before  Liber Al,  The Emperor was allocated to Heh, and The Star to Tzaddi. The most Crowley has to say on this matter is that the new allocation creates a double loop in the zodiac as we show in the figure extracted from The Book of Thoth, below (copyright OTO). Note the arrows I have penned in and the loops around Pisces and Virgo which occur due to the interchange of Aries (with The Emperor),  and Aquarius (with The Star).  It is quite clear in this drawing that without the interchange of the cards, there is an asymmetry in the sequential flow. And yet, just why the loops around Pisces and Virgo should exist at all remains something of a mystery outside of the obvious aesthetic appeal. However, in The Book of Thoth, Crowley does explain the need to maintain a technically correct sequence of the Atu whilst maintaining the correct zodiacal attribution. Explaining this will require more research by this writer and an extension to this essay - all in good time my dear friends.

To be continued...

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