Cipher 1000

For the study and development of New Aeon English Qabalah

Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law

• Friday, June 5th 2009
• 7:30 PM - 10:00 PM
• 1409 SE Stark St.

"Freedom of will is the highest human good; and it is impossible to have both that freedom and an intervening divinity.... The separate games of chess I play with existence have different rules from your and every other game; the only similarity is that each of our games always has rules. The gifts, inherited and acquired, that are special to me are the rules of the game; and the situation I am in at any given moment is the situation of the game. My freedom is the choice of action and the power of enactment I have within the rules and situation of the game.... To accept one’s limited freedom, to accept one’s isolation, to accept this responsibility, to learn one’s particular powers, and then with them to humanize the whole: that is best for the situation." -- John Fowles

The film being shown this week has been changed from that originally listed on the SML calendar. It will be instead 'The Magus', based on the novel by John Fowles.

The Magus was an important and mind-altering film for me when I first saw it and I persist in that opinion, the comments of Woody Allen* notwithstanding.

It tells the story of Nicholas Urfe, a callous young English teacher who takes a position at the Lord Byron School on the Greek island of Phraxos as a means of escaping from his failed life. There he encounters a wealthy hermit/trickster named Maurice Conchis who gradually draws Urfe into an elaborate labyrinth of paradoxical "godgames" that grow increasingly dark and intense, eventually undermining Urfe's sense of identity and reality.

One reviewer called Fowles' novel "A splendidly sustained piece of mystification...such as could otherwise only have been devised by a literary team fielding the Marquis de Sade, Arthur Edward Waite, Sir James Frazer, Gurdjieff, Madame Blavatsky, C.G. Jung, Aleister Crowley, Franz Kafka."

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* Woody Allen once quipped, "If I had my life to live again, I'd do everything exactly the same, except I wouldn't see 'The Magus'."

to live in the way that he wills to do:
to work as he will:
to play as he will:
to rest as he will:
to die when and how he will.

to drink what he will:
to dwell where he will:
to move as he will on the face of the earth.

to speak what he will:
to write what he will:
to draw, paint, carve, etch, mould, build as he will:
to dress as he will.

"take your fill and will of love as ye will,
when, where, and with whom ye will."—AL I:51

"the slaves shall serve."—AL II:58
"Love is the law, love under will."—AL I:57