Abrahadabra - The Alchemical Book of Mirrors

Abrahadabra: The Book of Mirrors: A Brief Overview


The Alchemical Book of Mirrors is a graphical exploration of the magickal formula of Abrahadabra that is seeking to arrive at a pragmatic grasp of its properties, with special emphasis on any star alchemy that can be found there since this prediction has been assigned to this word, both recently and in the distant past. The specific use of the term stars as applied to humankind is a fairly popular convention of late, but it has a deeper underlying theme is as old as mysticism itself. The usual inference is it has some special significance denoting the Body of Light and references human beings in a more universal context than their immediate surroundings. What remains to be adequately defined is what a so-called star might actually be and why this is a term that should be applied to human beings at all. If there is any outstanding alchemical merit to Liber Al vel Legis'  introductory phrase "Every man and every woman is a star", this will eventually need to be qualified according to recognizable elemental guidelines or we must finally conclude that this phrase is a colorful metaphor at best.

 

Before going any further into this subject, I had better define who I am and what might qualify me to breech this subject at all in any public sort of way. The shortest possible answer to this is probably "no one" and "nothing" of any visible consequence. I am a cloaked hermetic mage in every natural sense of the term, quite invisible to corporate radars of any kind. I have a natural aptitude for mathematics but was never able to attend college or pursue any kind of formal intellectual career as would have been my nature to do so. I fell into the study of philosophy in my early teens and eventually mysticism, tantricism and the whole gambit of occult esoterica. What I have uncovered here is something that will have to stand on its own merits since I myself could never begin to stand up under any kind of intensive academic scrutiny, nor would I be foolish enough to pretend to any formal training I do not have. I do have a special aptitude which has played an important role in all of this, sometimes referred to as "eidetic projection". This is a kind of "chunking" skill to the best of my understanding...the ability to take complex aesthetics of various kinds and reduce them to a coherent symbolic map or visual illustration. I was born with a huge dose of the stuff and I trained this restless skill on the magickal formula of Abrahadabra in my mid-twenties when I first encountered it. As Aldous Huxley might have said, the "doors of perception" were opened to me and just never closed up again, for whatever reason. The data-stream is still coming in to this very day. So the time has come to attempt to make clear what I have uncovered but it will be up to others to make all those kinds of connections that I myself am simply unable to make.

 

What we already know of the Body of Light, we know chiefly through collective, or "common" experience and  there is otherwise no known clinical way to prove its physical existence (nor any reason that we might need to do so necessarily). What information has been recorded over the centuries about the Body of Light has often been recorded in the form of pictorial maps of one kind or another. The underlying theme to most of these maps is the balancing together of things finite and infinite in a way that leaves us with a physical picture of ourselves in some harmonious relation to universe in total. So it is that the ancient hexagrams of the I Ching are at their core a meticulous mapping out of all parts of Heaven and Earth coming to balance in Man, while the western alchemists speak of the balancing of Macrocosm and Microcosm together in the Tree of Life, another glyph of Man expressed as an ascending and descending scale of light gradation. These maps take on different forms as they seek to interpret much the same thing from a variety of unique perspectives and focal objectives. By in large, the human body has been the predominant theme throughout the majority of these maps as we have sought so many times to understand just exactly how our volatile mortal frames fit in to the universal scheme of things. Many of these maps have been highly mathematical and symbolic in nature while others have been more organic in emphasis, often cloaking some underscoring sacred geometry in a more accessible imagery.

 

What makes these various maps mirror-like is that they share with the common mirror the ability to reflect our own physical and psychic statures, but do so in light of some greater universal harmonic principle. It is often said that the simple act of gazing upon such glyphs at length is sufficient to produce a higher state of consciousness resulting in varying degrees of enhanced perception and even unexpected mystical experiences. The term Mirror Wisdom, in itself, is worthy of independent study and has been used to describe the highest condition of consciousness that human beings can attain to. The wisdom of the Atman (True Self) is called Mirror Wisdom, reflecting undiluted  Brahman (Godhead).

 

The Magickal Mirror is of a class of transcendental tools such as the above mentioned, though its form has taken nearly every imaginable shape over time from simple seer stones and looking glasses to highly sophisticated talismans, glyphs and symbols. It may be useful at this point to discuss a few of the applications that the Magickal Mirror can be put to. As a meditation tool, the Magickal Mirror often serves as a visual aid and guide that may enhance and facilitate invocation and evocation processes equally. Tibetan Buddhism refers to this kind of tool as a thangka and the use of thangkas, mandalas, and similar seeing tools is well documented historically. Mystics throughout time are well accustomed to thinking of material substance in terms of degrees of light and sound vibration and the creation and implementation of instruments that enhance and accelerate visualization and chant practices, in particular, is a long-established custom. Magickal Chant, as an aside, is a relatively lost art form in western culture where it has been poorly displaced by the idea of "prayer", moreover. The principle difficulty with prayer, per se, is that it tends to be a passive rather than an active practice that very rarely assumes much conscious self-responsibility in the generation of the miraculous.

 

The use of the Magickal Mirror in chant or mantra working leads us generally to its second most common application as a scrying tool. Scrying is most commonly thought of as a "gazing" practice that would usually utilize a crystal ball or similar object as a means of peering into hidden realms of mind and matter, but scrying is more than a gazing practice alone. There are both passive and active aspects to scrying and it is the active side that is generally the least understood. Active scrying (sometimes referred to as weaving) can be more properly thought of as the proactive assertion of any visualization technique or practise. It affords us what the alchemists called "projection" and is a kind of conscious magickal scripting, whereby light and sound formulations of all kinds are deliberately woven into one or another energy matrix patterns, either for general testing purposes or to achieve some more specific aim.

 

This is sometimes simply referred to as energy working but there is nothing simple about its activity and it is decidedly one of the strangest and most remarkable things that human beings are inclined to do. When the Magickal Mirror is used in conjunction with scrying, it tends to serve both as an energy amplification and storage devise, useful not only in building up a magickal charge but also in directing that charge in an infinite variety of ways. This transforms the Magickal Mirror into a Magickal Talisman, which can be programmed for any number of physical energy-manipulation operations. Typically, it might serve primarily as a Magickal Shield but is also capable of assertion in any of the traditional magickal tool categories such as the Lamp, the Wand, the Sword and the Cup. It could be easily argued that the Magickal Mirror is the only tool a practicing magician might ever really need as it contains so much within itself, though there yet remains much to be said for a well-constructed athame, staff, or wand.

 

What we actually know of Abrahadabra to date, we could just about print on a postage stamp with room to spare. We know that it has historical roots in the word Abracadabra, which may (or may not) have its roots in the word Abraxas from the Gnostics. The Greek form of the word Abraxas is Abrasax and there has been some scholarly suggestion that Abracadabra may ultimately derive from the word Abrasadabra via the Greek. The historical record is oblique at best, but the words' internal geometry is at least reflective of ancient Greek cosmogony and recognizable metaphysical tenets. It would almost certainly have been of great interest to one like Pythagoras, for instance, on account of the preponderance of the Tetractys of the Decad running through it, or the fact that it is a triadic representation of the Qamea of Earth with its 10 x 10 magickal square numeration. Indeed, there is even mention of the eleven gradations of the tetractys dating to Pythagoras' time and Abrahadabra is an eleven-level word with the Tetractys of the Decad visibly omnipresent, but most of this is essentially random speculation thus far. There does not appear to be any comprehensive treatment of its properties anywhere to be found, in any magickal or alchemical writings available to us, and yet its reputation is somehow legendary. As Abracadabra it was heralded as the Word of the Aeon (of Pisces) and as Abrahadabra has been called the Glyph of the Great Work Accomplished, though no one has convincingly demonstrated how or why any of this merit should be especially reflective of its formula. It appears that this word has had a great deal of magickal acclaim piled upon it in a predictive vein rather than for its actual recognized properties. Such acclaim may or may not stand up to careful scrutiny and this word's ultimate right to such a prestigious reputation is just one of the things we still need to flesh out.

 

Probably the single most compelling reason for wanting to resolve the magickal formula of Abrahadabra is the off-chance that we might also resolve the question of stars in the process. While the conceptual notion of human beings as stars is not entirely new, the language of stardom has been relatively weak over the millennia and has usually been paraded in symbolism much closer to the average person's archetypal comfort zones.  As far back as ancient Sumer we find the terms gods and stars used interchangeably but this relationship seems mostly to have eroded over the ages and along with it the notion of stars as conscious entities. By the time we get to the dawn of the Aeon of Pisces, this view of universe seems to have waned significantly from its former status as a mainstream view of reality. Humankind, generally, has long been identified as a balanced microcosm of universe (or macrocosm) in some way or another, by many philosophical thinkers but a comprehensive mapping of this star-ness has not been clearly achieved by any of them that we know of. This is not to say that significant maps have not been devised but that none of these maps typically display a degree of anatomical universality sufficient to qualify them as star maps by any standard that we can clearly recognize. It is a difficult point to qualify in some ways but there is an overriding principle at play in the human psyche that requires that it clearly recognize its idealized self as a necessary precursor to achieving this balance. Thus the first rule of Hermetic Philosophy has always been to Know Thyself since one cannot venture to deal effectively in  the pursuit of Completion by any other means.

 

The lack of any clear model of the human equivalent of stars poses a potential dilemma for human beings, who may be irrevocably committed to being literal star intelligences, for better or for worse. We seem to be the only animal we know capable of comprehending whole universe and it is a near mathematical certainly that we will soon be inhabiting it as well. If we are pitted, in some sense, against our own "true selves" in the worlds below the abyss (as the qabbalists might say), then it is possible that the root cause of all human suffering may ultimately derive from having fallen dangerously out of sync with this first universal nature. As the I Ching reminds us, "it furthers one to have somewhere to go", yet we seem to be a race of beings headed pell-mell towards global self-destruction. Failure to correct this type of schism could very easily impact our ultimate survival in the end, since it is highly uncertain just how long we can survive our collective "unconscious ignorance" in a post-nuclear environment. But all doom-saying aside, the fact remains that, at present, we are generally unable to conclude much of anything definitive regarding the persistent matter of stars, aside from what some of us might happen to believe. What is needed at this time and place is an analytically compelling definition of stars especially adapted to human psychology and physiology in some way. If human beings are literal stars in light of some hidden scheme of things, we need to know what this means and we need to have some tenable notion of how to access it in a deliberate and conscious manner. The magickal formula of Abrahadabra presents us with a possible and a logically tight explanation of what stars we may actually be alongside some fairly explicit guidelines for mastering it.

 

Perseverance Furthers

 

m1thr0s

 

 

 
 

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