APOLLYONYX

The Apollo-Apollyon Nexion & the Nike-Nezah of the Harrowing of Hell

“If you gaze long enough into the Abyss, the Abyss will gaze back into you.” — Frederick Nietzsche

“And when the Abyss looks into you — and it will — may you look back unflinching.” — Neal Shusterman

“It’s a long, hard road out of Hell.” — Brian Hugh Warner

“But the Gates of Hell are always locked from the inside.” — C.S. Lewis

To doubly paraphrase Jung: “Our Shadows’ roots run down into the Qliphoth,” and “Do not seek Daath you did not earn.” The Light of G*d cannot be extinguished _{(Jn. 1:5),} but sometimes His Light has a terrible darkness to it: Sometimes the Logos of Light speaks darkly and of dark things — and we must follow …

Per Plato, Apollo sits on a stone at the center of the Earth, just as Christ/Hokhmah, the Chief Cornerstone, centers the Earth-Heaven axis and anchors the Cosmic Cross. (“Double Nature” is gematrically equivalent to “Omphalos Stone.”) While the “Apollo Impulse” has been conceptualized as the disphysicality and feebleness of unchristianized paganism, Christ/Hokhmah and Apollo in Michelangelo’s Final Judgment in the Sistine Chapel are fearsomely (and I would say rightly) amalgamated. (Apollo is gematrically equivalent to “All Deeps are G*d” {the PANTHEOTYPE} and the doubly-Sophianic “Achamoth” of the Italic Gnostics and a cognate of [C]hokhmah). The Christ/Hokhmah/Apollo can then be contrasted to Apollyon (or Abaddon), the Destroyer _{(Rev. 9:11.)} (Apollyon is gematrically equivalent to “I AM the Truth_{” {John 14:6}} and “The Order of Angels”; Abaddon is gematrically equivalent to “Aion” and “Fire” _{{Luke 12:49}}; and Einsophia is gematrically equivalent to “Abaddon Silence.”) He can be both the Angel of the Bottomless Pit, or the Pit itself, formed in one account by the Fall of Satan that opened the Earth into Qliphotic Hell (over which King Solomon built the Capstone of the Temple — and the very Receptacle of the Holy of Holies — linking the eventual Transubstantial Dramaturgy of the Davidic Cenacle to the Lux Verum Lucifer and inverting the primeval Christ/Hokhmah’s proto-Optilogos _{{Luke 10:18}}) An axiom might be: “Apollo is the white sun / Apollyon is the black sun¹,” but it is not the Steinerian Christ-Sun/Sorath syzygy, nor the syzygy of Weorian “Opposing Lodges,” as destruction is neither good nor evil, but sometimes necessary and sometimes not.

Per Bunyan, Christian wrestles with Apollyon half a day (not unlike Jakob-Israel with YHWH or some form of angelic hypostasis, ranging from Samael to Sts. Michael or Metatron.) Per the Gnosis of the Mandaeans (sometimes called the “Christians of St. John”), there is a “Realm of Apollyons” testing man in the Mundi Tenebrarum. In one esoteric account, Apollyon — known as Muriel — is tasked with gathering the constituent elements of Adam Kadmon. He becomes both a Guardian and an Angel of Death (and Daath), venerated by angelic peers, demons, and men (and earning a deific Throne, a la St. Francis.) There is an “Apollyonic Current” in the St. Michael mythos, as his defeat of Satan earns him his own cultus, co-captaincy with Metatron in seraphicity, as well as governance of men in Death (Muriel and Mikael are also somewhat homonymic.) Apollyon was said to be present at the Resurrection of the Christ/Hokhmah (perhaps one of the Two Angels at the Tomb _{{Luke 24:4 and Jn. 20:12.}}) Later, eschatologically — being both an Angel of Death and having witnessed the Re-Enlivening of the G*d-Man (a Mystery of Daath) — Apollyon gathers men’s souls for either the Resurrection of Damnation (the Second Death) or the Resurrection of Glory into New Life, in the Valley of Josaphat.

“APOLLO / APOLLYON”

***

“The G*d-Image in Man was not completely destroyed by the Fall, but was only damaged and corrupted, and can be restored through G*d’s Grace. The scope of the integration is suggested by the Descensus ad Inferos — the Descent of Christ’s Soul to Hell — its work of redemption embracing even the dead.” — C.G. Jung

“Truly, it is in darkness that one finds the Light, so when we are in sorrow,

then this Light is nearest of all to us.” — Meister Eckhart

“All the darkness in the world cannot extinguish the light of a single candle.” — St. Francis of Assisi

To interpolate John (9:4), “Night is coming when no-one but Christ/Hokhmah can work.” Redemption is marked by a Double-Trinity of Kenoses and Henoses — its own kind of “Luminous Holy Trinity” — but one of many shadows and much darkness. (Kenosis is gematrically equivalent to “The King Returns,” “Archontic,” “Sephora,” and “I AM Nothing” {the ultimate Kenosis}, while Henosis is equivalent to “Breath of Life,” “Made in G*d’s Image” and “Hoshana Rabbah” — the Sukkotic feast when the Days of Judgment ‘sealed’ on Yom Kippur are ‘delivered,’ per the Zohar.) From the Supernal Spheres, Hokhmah becomes Christos — G*d becomes Man to redeem Man — the First or “Incarnational” Kenosis, hypostatically traversing the Sephiroth down to the Malkhut of worldbuilding, corporeality and ensoulment, through the Power of the Holy Ghost/Binah. The Second or “Disincarnational” Kenosis (The “Word Made Flesh Unfleshed”) — the Christ/Hokhmah’s Passion, Crucifixion, Death and Burial — is the Golgotha Event²: G*d becomes Sin to destroy Sin. This is also the “De-Theosis” — G*d “ungodding” Himself, and analogous to the alchemical Rubedo. One can never overemphasize the Cosmic Centrality (and Paradoxicality) of the Golgotha Mystery. Golgotha as Gulgalta in the Zohar is the Holiest G*dhead in which infinitudes of worldforms alchemize:

“In the Gulgalta sit thousands of myriads of worlds, and from the Gulgalta drips Dew — and the Dew fills the World, and the Dead will awaken in the World to come as the Dew comes forth. The Dew is the Light of the Ancient One: The Light of the Ancient One comes from Gulgalta and as it touches the Dead, they come to life. From Gulgalta comes the Light of G*d bringing Life to the Dead.”

In this passage, we see G*d as Creator, Redeemer, Sanctifier and Divinizer; the Supernal Source; the “Resurrection and the Life” _{(Jn. 11:25.)} It echoes the achingly beautiful Norvus Ordo Eucharistic Prayer II: “You are indeed Holy, O Lord, the Fount of all Holiness. Make holy, therefore, these Gifts, we pray, be sending down your Spirit {Holy Ghost/Binah} upon them like the dewfall, so that they may become for us the Body and Blood of our Lord, Jesus Christ {Hokhmah}.”³ Apocryphal legends speak of Christ/Hokhmah’s Precious Blood falling like dripping dew on the Skull of Adam at the Crossfoot, opening a line of communication — a Via Sanguinis — to Sts. Adam and Eve in the Underworld, the Logos speaking to our First Parents of their coming Salvation.

The Third or Katabatic Kenosis is the lightless journey into the Qliphothic Depths. (I awoke one night with a dream-statement: “G*d redeems the Serpent by traversing the Nightside.”) From the Hell of the Cross to the Hell of the Crucible, Christ/Hokhmah passes through the Alchemical Furnace to the Crow’s-Head — “G*d-Without-G*d” — the Nadir of the Netherrealm. Out of this Impossibility, Christ/Hokhmah enters his Final Refinement, First Henosis, and “Re-Theosis” out of Hell — The VAYEHI OHR — becoming the Gold of Ultimate Divinity.⁴ (Kabbalistically, “Gold” is one of the key Sacred Names of G*d _{{Haggai 2:8.}}) His Second Henosis is His “Re-Incarnation,” His Re-Enfleshment-in-Glory at the Resurrection Event and His Petite Pistis Sophia of 40 Days among His Apostles, Disciples and Mother until His Ascension — His Third Henosis — His Ultimate Apotheosis back into Heaven as His Father/Keter’s Firstborn, Chosen and Beloved _{(Mark 16:19; Acts 7:55; Heb. 1:3; 1 Cor. 15:20-28; Col. 3:1; Rev. 3:21)}. (Yet Christ/Hokhmah stays in the Ærthernic through the Holy Ghost/Binah and the Perpetual Alchemy of the Sacraments, most especially in the Holy Eucharist of the Divine Mysteries.⁵)

But that does not end the strange, dark Glory of the Harrowing of Hell. Like Christ/Hokhmah’s Funerary Shroud, the Qliphoth can be folded under the Sephiroth and cinctured together with the Cross of the Christ Mystery, putting the Golgotha Event outside of Time, in both salvific Daath and, correspondingly, the rejection of Salvation, the Qliphothic Belial. It allows for the ascended Christ/Hokhmah to be at the “Right Hand of the Father/Keter,” while simultaneously pleading for souls in Hell (a la Balthasar), allowing an ‘ontological potentiality’ (versus actuality) for a true Apokatastasis⁶ — a radical co-soteriology of hyper-Calvinistic or -Jansenian “pan-perditionism” (all are damned) and salvific Universalism (this finds in an occultic analog in Crowley’s definition of Fate being the hypostasis of destiny and free will.)

In Gnostic Voudon, Voltigeurs are aeonic entities who travel secret paths on the Trees of Life and Death on arcane pilgrimages for Penetralia and Gnosis. The Holy Ghost/Binah-guided Kenotic Christ/Hokhmah is a kind of “Master Voltigeur” in Katabasis, searching for Lost Souls⁷ (“holy sparks”) in the tortuous and torturous Qliphothic Hells — The Shadow of the Good Shepherd moving in Arcanum Vias.⁸ (There are even intimations of this {and the Via Sanguinis} in the Sumerian legends of Dumuzid, the “Red Shepherd.”) As the “Master Voltigeur of Divine Mercy,” Christ/Hokhmah can be summed up in this statement I found in the marginalia of one of my notebooks: “G*d has opened Heaven beneath your Feet — and Hell above His Head — and He is haunted with a desire to save you at all costs.”

I would like to introduce one more short and seemingly disparate concept — this one from a true despiser of Kabbalah (who virulently puts Erasmus’ disdain to shame.) Hitlerian Occultist Savitri Devi (1905 – 1982) conceptualized a “Man Against Time” as a mystical Avatar conquering Nature itself and triumphantly crushing Chronos down Kairotically until History’s consummation, transmutationally alchemizing the Golden Age of Krita Satya Yuga from the base metal of absolute depravity.⁹ I am intrigued by this conceptualization, as it dovetails Chaosmos and the Christ Impulse all at once incarnating, staving off and immanentizing the Ezkaton explored in Kabbalah & a Somewhat Anthroposophized Parousia. However, Devi formulates this Avatar as the opposite of a Judeo-Christian Messianic Christ-Figure — but in reality, the Solar Logos of the Qliphoth-harrowing Christ/Hokhmah on the Merkabah of Megiddo annihilating the Sitra Achra is closer to her formulation (and infinitely beyond it) than any Aryan Messiah. It is Christ/Hokhmah — born of a (seemingly) simple Hebrew girl — Who rises above the Age while both raging in it and against it and fulfilling it, changing the very course of “History’s bloodstream,” blazing the trails of Blood and Travail, Christus Triumphans transubstantiating the Aeon.

For the Ineffable G*dhead, History is completely known, and still unfolding in unlimited possibility: By multifariously traversing the Sephiroth and Qliphoth, the G*d-Man, Christ/Hokhmah, dynamically exists in, above, outside and beyond Time — all at the same Time — the Qliphoth-freeing, Kali Yuga-killing Convergence of the Sophia-concretizing Singularity, the “LogoSophianic” Hypersynchronicity, the Alpha/Omega Point, and the Circle Whose Circumference is nowhere, but Whose Centermost Point is everywhere — the numinous nexion of Apollo/Apollyon and Chronos/Kairos — the Dragonic Egg and the Sacre Coeur.

To quote Chesterton, Christ/Hokhmah is the “Prince of Peace Who Brought a Sword”: In this case, a sword of Emanational Light than can cut through the gordian knot of rotten Qliphothic tubers and find the luminosity-shorn Lost Sheep, all while the remaining Fold rest safely in the Sephiroth _{(Luke 15; Matt. 18:12-14.)} And to interpolate Stevenson’s magnificent Epitaph: “(Christ/Hokhmah) the Hunter (of Holy Sparks in the Qliphoth) is home (in the heavenly Sephiroth) from the Hill (of the Golgotha Mystery.”) It is Christ/Hokhmah that is truly Devi’s “Lightning and Sun who lives forever and ever.”

***

Sometimes our Angels of Light —(our Angeli de Lumine Veritatis)— speak Truth —(the Alētheia of Illumination)— loudest through our demons of darkness: Sometimes a raging Apollyonic fire is needed to destroy the Qliphotic deadwood of our old, sin-rotted selves to allow the Apollonian light of Sephirothic Grace to shine through anew. Sometimes impenetrable onyx curtains fall around us, and we are so trammeled in sin — so dragged down to that non-entitive Sorathic nadir — that only the Solar Word, the Sol Soter, the Sun-Genius Himself, can bless us with the necessary conflagration _{(Rev. 19:12-16).} For no-one — not even Satan himself — knows the darkness the Christ/Hokhmah experienced.

And only He knows the Way out.

It is Himself.

I AM the Way, the Truth, and the Life:

No-one comes to the Father/Keter, but through Me _{(John 14:6).}

—

“Who then devised the torment? Love.

Love is the unfamiliar Name

Behind the hands that wove

The intolerable shirt of flame

Which human power cannot remove.

We only live, only suspire

Consumed by either fire or fire.”

— T.S. Eliot, Four Quartets

“AUT IGNIS AUT IGNIS”

*1. Apollyon as the Black Sun is numerically harmonic with Matrosophia, an allusion to the destructive power of the Dark Mother and the Primordial Deep. Within the Christic/Hokhmahic Cipher of 777 there is a nexion of the destructive Apollyon and the generative Sancta Anima, as it is gematrically equivalent to “Abaddon the Green King is the Oracle of Light” — a ‘Burning Bush’ motif. It is also equivalent to “The Cube of Saturn,” an occultic reference to Saturn’s descent and entrapment in Tartarus — correspondingly, Christ/Hokhmah descends and frees the “holy sparks” of redeemable souls trapped in the Qliphoth.

*2. Counterintuitively, Duncan associates Tiferet — Beauty — with “Mystical Experiences of the Crucifixion,” recapitulating John F. Deane’s conceit.

*3. Kabbalistically, the Father/Keter is also known as the “Dew of Hermon” (Psalm 133:3.) “G*d, with Wisdom/Hokhmah created the earth, with Intelligence/Binah, He formed the skies. Due to His Science/Daath, the fonts spring forth and the clouds yield dew.” (Prov. 3:19-20, Raphael translation)

*4. This Gold is not unlike Green’s “Adamantine Particles” and Sapho’s conceit. The Christic/Hokhmahic Cipher of 777 is also gematrically equivalent to the solar and alchemical pun: “Sun of G*d: The Lord is Gold.” Per the 1,012 Questions, “Pure Gold is the Mystery of the Father (i.e., Keter.)” Daath as the alchemical Nigredo becomes an “ONYX MIRROR” reflecting the Apollonian Light of the Aurelion G*dhead across the entirety of the Sephiroth-Qliphoth nexion.

*5. This katabatic Arc can also be conceptualized as Christ/Hokhmah as the Baphometic Scapegoat in the Qliphotic Desert brought up by the ‘Avenging Angel’ of the Holy Ghost/Binah , blotting out the sins of the Ecclesia Universalis of the Cosmic Israel.

*6. This allows for radical choice (“The doors* of Hell have no locks” — C.S. Lewis) and for radical hope (“Dare we hope** all men be saved?” — Von Balthasar); for the Massa Damnata of the Patristics and for the Divina Misericordia of Faustina; for souls to fall like snow (a la Our Lady of Fatima) and Our Lord as the Christus Hiems Venator to hunt down his holy winterkill.

I have nothing that approximates David Bentley Hart’s erudition (and though my own theodicies may be labyrinthine), I know people reject people all the time, and permanently so. And though divine and deifically double-natured, Christ/Hokhmah, is still a person. Hell is real. I have seen it firsthand as a psychologist. “The shadows of our souls reach down to Hell.” — C.G. Jung

6. Emendation: *Doors may be stained glass and ** Hope is a Thomistic defect

*7. “He went and preached unto the spirits in prison.” (1 Pet. 3:19).

*8. In Hellboy in Hell, there are religious orders who still roam the Dark Realms preaching the Good News to self-damned souls. In Christian Kabbalah, the Qliphoth is defined by the darkness resulting from its complete disconnect from any Sephirothic emanation, but the Sephiroth is not defined by its difference from Qliphothic darkness: I.e., they are neither dualistically dependent nor co-eternal (evil itself is not entitive, nor necessary, nor can a good be corrupted by anything other than an evil.) The Qliphoth is a consequence of the Angelical and Edenic Falls, but still created ex nihilo, recalling Dante’s description of Hell as a “creation of Justice” (Gevurah) executed “by Divine Omnipotence (Keter) in Highest Wisdom (Binah) with Primal Love (Hokhmah)” before all other things: It is sempiternal, not eternal — but, paradoxically, it is the first sempiternal creation. “Created things are darkness insofar as they proceed from nothing.” — St. Thomas Aquinas

Aquinas was the angelic doctor, and Kabbalah is a treasure trove of literal and metaphorical angelology. If Aquinas “tripped the light alchemic” with titans Bacon and Albertus, interiorized the Aurora Consurgens and was willing to happily weep and burn his own theological masterpieces as straw before the true Gold of the G*dhead, I have little doubt had he lived two centuries later, Aquinas would have constructed his own Christian ‘Kabbalah Theologica’ of Philos and Sophia — and utterly decimated Pico and his progeny. Perhaps it is good for us living today that Aquinas and Kabbalah never met, for such a Force Majeure might have proved a Third Testament, a rebuilt Temple heralding The End, and we might not have been born.

8 Emendation: In the Thomistic sense, G*d is the unmoved Mover, the First Cause, highest Love and best Good. But could G*d also be “Self-creating,” as in Esoteric Buddhism and some forms of Hinduism? (There are intimations of this in Jesus Purusha: A Vedanta-based Doctrine of Jesus by Ian Davie.) Could G*d’s “First Cause” be a kind of “an infinitely inmost singularity” within G*d’s Self? And could the byproduct of G*d’s Self-Creation be creation itself? Creation in the sense of all that is not-G*d: Time, eternality, consciousness, the unconscious, temporal and sempiternal beings, potentiality and actuality, being and nothingness? That is, could G*d in the Thomistic sense be the Ein Sof and G*d in the Eastern sense by the Sephiroth, even unfurling into the Qliphoth in a cascade of Kenoses and atemporal and temporal falls and, which then furls back to the Ein Sof in a kind of Self-reflective circular Self-Apokatastasis, returning by gradations to the highest Love and best Good? (The caveats would be that the byproduct is made from 1.] an infinite surfeit of G*d’s Love 2.] that is completely dependent upon G*d, and 3.] G*d is still complete within G*d’s Self, needing nothing.)

*9. This seems like an odd inclusion, but like St. Peter’s Cross and the Pentalphas of Arthuriana and Eliphas Levi, in researching this book, I have come across what can only be called a kind of “Qliphoth Worship,” especially among antisemitic sources, such as NSBM bands, Esoteric Hitlerists and others. (There is a great meme of Aleister Crowley proclaiming, “Do what thou wilt — unless you are a Jew.”) I also include Devi’s conceptualization of a “Man Against Time” as it bears intimations of the interpenetration of the Sephiroth/Qliphoth and Chronos/Kairos nexions which I explore in “The Divine Quadrinity” vis-à-vis the angelical intelligence Samael.

___

* ‘Apollyonyx’ — a portmanteau of the Destroyer and the stone that is variously the dross of fallen stars, the receptacle of demons (a la the Solomonic ring), a tool of psychometry, or the Cupid-transmogrified fingernails of Venus. ‘Apollyonyx’ is gematrically equivalent to Death’s “Pale Horse” and the “Final Plague of the Apocalypse,” but, conversely, “Unconditional Love” and the “Deliverance Message of G*d.” It comes from a dream in which I chiseled away at a black stone angel and finding a white Venus underneath in a slow-motion spray of blood, soaking me in a “red baptism.” As Silenus said, combining the Primeval Statement of Divine Consciousness and the crucifixionally exsanguinous Incarnation: “I AM the Blood!”