The Eighth House - Sex and Death

The symbol on the wheel for this House is Osiris, who was an Egyptian vegetative god until he was downsized by his brother Set and took a new position as Lord of the Dead. Check out Joseph Campbell's Way of the Seeded Earth for the connection between vegetation, sex, and death, if you're confused about my use of this symbol here.

I'm not sure what I'm going to put here. This House is about transformation, so this will probably be a record of transformative experiences. Unfortunately, while I've had quite a few such experiences, I can't talk about most of them, either because of oaths involved in the experiences, or because there just aren't any words to talk about them.

In the meantime, I recommend a thorough study of Robert Anton Wilson's Cosmic Trigger: Final Secret of the Illuminati for a thoroughly articulate and vastly absorbing study of the subject of transformative experiences.

Speaking of Sex and Death...

I recently (15 Sep 98) did a performance of Crowley's Eleusinian Rite of Venus with a perv twist; I substituted (heretic that I am) some of AC's poems with some of my own, including this little meditation on the dual nature of Venus (which, I'm vain enough to think, fits a lot better than "Isis am I" in that place...):

Star of the Morning, I arise
with waxing sun, as darkness dies;
Eos bears me to azure skies in coral palms.
Then unto me, men raise their eyes and praiseful psalms.

They sing me, gold-bright from the sea,
giver and goal of ecstasy;
they pray me for my clemency while they forget
that both desire and agony weave passion's net.

Star of the Evening, by force main
I raise myself on high to reign;
men wail, and say that I have slain Apollo's light,
And pierced with countless shards of pain the modest night.

But I am all the goad ye have,
thus every man must be my slave,
for in my absence, ye would crave no thing at all.
Gracious, from the abyss I save mine every thrall.

I crack the whip, and ye obey
because it is the only way
mankind has ever known to stay oblivion;
and even pain is proof to say that ye live on.

But we were lovers, Death and I,
from even mankind's infancy.
My little death's eternity in instants spent.
So therefore, in my service, die -- and be content!

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Last modified 24 Sep 98