kaos

magical evocation when it speaks of those “who are skilful to rouse up Leviathan” (the
presence of the name Leviathan is hidden in the King James version, where it is translated
as “mourning”). I am inclined to think of Coronzon as something evoked or invoked,
although not necessarily an entity. In Crowley’s Confessions, interestingly enough, one
of the transmogrifying illusory forms Choronzon took as witnessed by the scribe Victor
Neuburg, besides a woman he was once in love with, was a human-headed serpent.
Choronzon appeared to exert a powerfully disorientating phantasmagoria, as if this
was all Choronzon was, which was quelled and died down and was known to be gone
when Crowley wrote the name of Babalon, for the first time spelt this way, in the sand
with his ring. As Crowley noted:
The name of the Dweller in the Abyss is Choronzon, but he is not really an individual.
The Abyss is empty of being; it is filled with all possible forms, each equally inane, each
therefore evil in the only true sense of the word—that is, meaningless but malignant,
insofar as it craves to become real. [Confessions, p 623]
Not Lucifer, not Satan, not the Stooping Dragon, nor even Lilith the only true serpent
in the Garden, usually represented in medieval Books of Hours as a human-headed
serpent; Crowley’s skrying of the 10 th Æthyr does not read like an encounter with an
identifiable entity so much as an enchantment engulfing both participants who discover
when it is over, banished “In Nomine Babalon”, that they have been wrestling with thin
air. This picture of Choronzon is to me much more fascinating and profound than
making him a cardboard cut-out Satan in some illusory Apocalyptic drama craving to
be real just as were mere dust devils in the desert to Crowley in the name of Choronzon.
This is indeed why to cross the Abyss is to come face to face with Choronzon, for we
are fully everything we are fooled into believing is real, though it changes before our
eyes constantly. The irony is that few things seem more real than Choronzon when
encountered, or as illusory when the ordeal passes, like a storm that has decidedly moved
on.
“Thou didst shatter the heads of Leviathan, thou didst give
him as food to the desert dwellers.”
Psalms 74:14.
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