kaos

his head unto Daäth”, there was an explosion, his head was blasted, and the ashes were
dispersed throughout the 10 th Æthyr. And the phrase “The Piercing of the Coils of the
Stooping Dragon” appears in The Rite of Mercury, which in Liber Israfel is given as “The
Piercing of the Scales of the Crocodile”. None of this is graced with the merest glimmer
of explanation. There are echoes in Isaiah 51:9 in the cutting of Rahab and the piercing
of the “dragon” (King James), represented by the word tannin, which Heidel again
suggests should here be taken as “crocodile”, although it should be pointed out that the
term tannin also occurs in the Ras Shamra tablets where it is equated with “Shalyat of
the seven heads”. (Absorption of a mythical monster into an ordinary creature also
occurs in Chinese literature, where the river dragon Chiao is later demythologised and
seen as a crocodile.) In Job 26:12–13 there is a curious mention of the “fleeing serpent”
or “crooked serpent” that in the King James version disguises a further reference to the
name Rahab by translating “he smiteth Rahab” as “he smiteth through the proud”.
Alexander Heidel provides a convincing argument to show that Rahab, besides being a
designation of Egypt, is synonymous with Leviathan (The Babylonian Genesis, pp 102–
114; coincidentally Rahab is the name of a harlot in Joshua 2:1–7 and 6:17–25), which
in turn appears to have been the seven-headed serpent Lotan, although clearly we see
in the various references the crumbling away of the original legendary material, and
that process of mythic erosion is further continued in the references to fabulous ophidian
beings in Revelation. And curiously enough we can see a similar process at work in the
emergence of the “Stooping Dragon” via the skrying of Kelly and Dee which is further
elaborated in Crowley’s skrying of the Æthyrs in terms of an explosion of a dragon’s
head in Daäth with the debris being scattered in the 10 th Æthyr and the creation of the
modern demon Choronzon.
Straining my own credulity somewhat, could the dragon’s exploding head explain
how Austin Spare’s curious eight-headed dragon, one of the heads being shown in
Daäth being hit by the lightning bolt, became the seven-headed dragon of Revelation?
Kenneth Grant, in Nightside of Eden, is similarly obscure. On p 8 he says that Daäth is
“the Eighth Head of the Stooping Dragon, raised up when the Tree of Life was shattered
and Macroprosopus set a flaming sword against Microprosopus”. On p 43 Grant explains
(I use the word loosely): “The Dragon whose eighth head reigns in Daäth is identical
with the Beast 666. The male half is Shugal (333), the howler in the Desert of Set; the
female half is Choronzon (333) or Typhon, the prototype of Babalon, the Scarlet
Woman.” There are further obscurities on the eight-headed dragon on pages 56 and 81
(“…blah blah Lovecraft… blah blah Cthulhu… blah blah Tunnels of Set…”).
Well, there is undoubtedly something of interest in all of this, but the thing I find
odd about both Crowley’s and Grant’s mentions of the Stooping Dragon is that they
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