kaos

PS: If you are at all interested in Bible references in Liber AL, note that II, v 23 appears
to be very similar to Isaiah 63:3. II, v 57 is a direct quote of Revelation 22:11. The
directions for the “cakes of light” (Liber AL III, v 23), may be compared to Leviticus 2,
Chronicles 31, and most especially Ezekiel 16. It seems to me there were others, but they
now escape me. How many Thelemites know this much Judæo-Christianity has crept
into their “new” religion, their big break with the establishment?
Hi Satyr—Well, interested that there was a story behind the beetles after all. Many
years ago I walked up “Little Bread Loaf Hill”, El Panecillo, in Quito, Ecuador. Quite
a steep trudge in the thin high Andean air. At the top is an immense metal statue of La
Virgen de Quito—an angel-winged Virgin—dominating the old city, but what has
stuck in my mind far more is that the ground surrounding the statue was covered in a
thick layer of hundreds if not thousands of dead large iridescent-blue beetles over quite
a large area. It was an amazing sight, such that one could not approach the statue
without walking over the beetles, which I didn’t do as some may still have been alive.
Dung beetles I believe they were. It would be interesting to know whether this was
unusual or a common occurrence there, it was certainly unusual to me and I thought
about it for days afterwards.
Indeed, just a few days afterwards I was involved in a train crash high in the Andes
mountains on the “autoferro”, which is a dieselbus on a railway line. The autoferro hit
the previous autoferro that had broken an axle and come off the tracks but presumably
hadn’t been reported yet, and the collision left us hanging over the side of a mountain.
Most curious was that on the way up into the mountains there were many crosses of
people who had died at the edge of the narrow line twisting around and around the
mountains into the developing mist and drizzle. We eventually came to a railside shrine
to the Virgin Mary at which we stopped and a collection was taken for the poor, and as
a blessing and protection for us, which was deposited in the glass case of the shrine.
After the crash we stumbled out of the autoferro and I was greeted by another sight I
will never forget, night was falling and the air was alive with fireflies, which I had never
seen before, and as the eye gradually followed them up they gave way to my first real
view of the southern hemisphere’s stars, so many more than I was used to seeing in the
northern hemisphere.
When I was stood looking at the twisted rails talking to a Frenchman about the
crash, I said: “So much for the collection at the Virgin’s shrine.” And he said: “I was
thinking just the opposite.” And of course I realised he was quite right, and I just sat
down and lay back and looked at the stars, not at all perturbed by our predicament, in a
state, I think, of Grace.
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