Unless otherwise noted all text by Soror Amore Gnostike.
A list of quotations from Liber AL vel Legis, the Book of the Law, is appended to the end of this commentary.
Inputs to the Mass
EGC inputs
- Liber XV, The Gnostic Mass
- Reuss version of Liber XV
- Liber Al vel Legis, the Book of the Law
- Comment from Hymenaeus Beta that a woman’s mass would one day be written. The Magical Link, Fall 1997 e.v., pp. 8-10
Specific inputs
- NOTOCON priestess circle organized by T. Diotima in which all priestesses present recited the priestess oration.
- “Prayer for the Great Family” arranged by Kerry Kerowski 11/9/2012.
- Horizon Lodge “Alternate Sanctuaries” series.
Ritual influences
- Vespers for Nuit, Soror Asherah. Unpublished.
- Encountering Babalon, Deborah Woody. Unpublished.
- Thelemic Mass, James Eshelman, from Liber 776 1/2, College of Thelema, 2010.
- Grail Mass of the Ordo Arcanum Gradalis, Shadwynn, from The Crafted Cup, Llewellyn, 1994.
- Tetragrammaton Mass, Tim Maroney, Dec. 12, 2001 e.v.
Other inputs
Setting
Stele of Djed Khonsu es Ankh or other image
This stele is held by the Oriental Institute at the University of Chicago. Soror Via Amore Gnostike first viewed it in 2002. This provided the immediate revelation that the Stele of Revealing is one among many stele. Soror Via Amore Gnostike then viewed the Stele of Revealing in the Cairo Museum where it is placed among numerous other funerary stelae, many of which are the stelae of priestesses.
In her funerary stela Djed Khonsu es Ankh is shown to eternity as conducting a ritual on her own behalf to Re Horakty, with Nut and the solar disk overhead, just as in the Stele of Revealing. This stele is erected here to authorize and encourage priestesses celebrate the mysteries on our own behalf.
Another image can be substituted for this, including the Stele of Revealing, or any other image which the priestess chooses. Priest, deacon and congregation may advise the priestess and she should take their wishes into consideration but the final decision is hers.
Altar cloths
Scarlet cloth
The ground of the sun altar is the color of fresh blood. Blood is life. We are nourished by blood in the mother’s womb, born in blood, and embody blood throughout our lifetime.
Black cloth
The earth altar is covered with a black cloth. It can be thought of as the color of dried blood, indicating the gate of death through which life can be renewed.
White cloth
The moon altar is covered with a white cloth. This is the color of the moon. It also completes the triad of red-black-white, a human color scheme tens of thousands of years old.
Officiants
Priestess
A person of any gender who feels called to the role. Represents the Lady as daughter, warrior and mother, wields the grail, and contributes the egg.
Priest
A person of any gender who feels called to the role. Represents the Lord as advisor, protector and lover, wields the lance, and contributes the sperm.
Deacon
A person of any gender who feels called to the role. Represents the power of life and the spirit in which gender is latent, the combined mother-father. Represents the celebrants and leads them through the rite.
Celebrant
When the priestess asks “Is it your will to form a congregation of the Sanctuary of the Celebration?” anyone who answers “it is my will” is a celebrant. Priestess, priest and deacon are also celebrants, first among equals as well as full participants in the rite. All celebrants consume host and wine and thus embody the power of the child and the result of the rite.
Other tools
Garments
Priest, priestess and deacon each wear white robes or albs, gold and silver cinctures, and serpent crowns. Each celebrant embodies spirit in matter, children of sun, moon and earth, and wielding the royal power of regeneration.
Host
This may be a cake of light as prepared for the Gnostic Mass, or any other preparation that the autocephalous sanctuary chooses.
Liturgy of the Community
The Mass proceeds in three sections corresponding to the three sections of the Roman and Orthodox rites. The Liturgy of the Community corresponds with the introductory prayers and processions of the Christian rites.
Introit
As they enter, priest, priestess and deacon are all members of the Sanctuary of the Celebrants. They give the greeting, “Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law”. When the celebrants answer “Love is the law, love under will,” the congregation acknowledges the celebrants in those roles. This acknowledgement by the congregation is the authorization to perform the ritual; no ordination or additional authorization is required.
Sanctuary of the Celebration
Each gathering of celebrants is an autocephalous congregation of the Sanctuary of the Celebration governed by the priestess with the assistance of the priest, deacon and celebrants. If any in the gathering do not affirm their will to participate in the celebration they do not then have the status of celebrant. Each congregation may decide whether to allow non participants to audit the mass or whether each is required to be a celebrant.
Star Garnet
The Star Garnet prepares us to receive the sacrament. It establishes the practitioner as a sacred being in a sacred cosmos. The ritual explicitly recognizes the human capacity for fertility and renewal. While physical reproduction requires a physical womb, and the mass celebrates this, every human body is an alchemical retort in which the mysteries are made manifest. The Star Garnet establishes the readiness of the practitioner to engage in the transformation.
Liturgy of the Word
Hymn to Nuit
The Kemetic netjer (Egyptian goddess) Nu or Nut is the mother of the gods. The sun enters her mouth at night and is born from her womb again at sunrise. She also cares for the dead. In Heliopolis the sun Horus strode forth from between two sycamore trees described as turquoise, a clear image of birth from the mother.
Nut also provided refuge for the deceased. Her arm extends from the tree offering a vase of water, and she provides air, and her own food. She collects the several parts of body and soul so they may move and go forth by day with all the stars in the company of the gods. She is frequently depicted in tombs and on sarcophagus lids with a prayer for protection. Here is an example: “O my Mother Nut, stretch Yourself over me, that I may be placed among the imperishable stars which are in You, and that I may not die.”
Nut stretches herself over the funerary stele of Ankh-af-na-khonsu. After encountering this stele Aleister and Rose Kelly Crowley received the Book of the Law in which Aiwass dictates the words of Nuit. This prayer reminds us her promise in AL 1:58, “I give unimaginable joys on earth: certainty, not faith, while in life, upon death; peace unutterable, rest, ecstasy; nor do I demand aught in sacrifice.”
Hymn to Babalon
This hymn roots in the history of Babalon in the Babylon of Revelation who was a despised and rejected image of the Great Mother of the Mediterranean and of her priestesses and their free sexuality. The hymn invokes Babalon in two aspects, the fierce warrior and the beneficent lover and mother. The green womb of the earth is an image from Hildegard de Bingen.
Mater Deum Magna
Imagery drawn from the Orphic Hymns to the great mother, particularly the Hymn to Phusis.
Hymn to the Lord
This is the lord of the matriarchy, the male force who partners with the Lady, who supports women in exercising magical and secular power in a patriarchal world, and who supports people of all genders in resisting violence and exemplifying friendship and love.
Pater – father, Patron – guide, Praemonstrator – instructor. As the father he is Amun who authorizes the daughter’s authority. As the advisor and instructor he is Thoth and Hermes, the indispensable advisor to the queen who will help her chart her course in a hostile world.
Proeliator – warrior. As the son he is Horus as protector of Isis and Ganesh as protector of Parvati. As the warrior he is Ares who arms women and prosecutes those who attempt violence against them.
Amour – lover. Dumuzi to Inanna, Horus to Hathor, Reshep and Min to Qadesh, Dionysos to Ariadne, Ares to Aphrodite, Krishna to Radha, Shiva to Parvati, Hadit to Nuit.
Hymn to the Powers of Life
Unlike the trinity of father, son and holy spirit, the triple powers of life invoked here are not gendered, but active in every living being. The powers described here articulate the triple powers of vegetable life, animal life and life of the spirit described in both Neo-Platonic and Tantric understandings of life.
Hildegard de Bingen wrote extensively on viriditas, a river of green pooling in the green womb of the earth. She understood viriditas to exist also in the blood and in the Word, called out here separately as the river of blood and the crystal river of wisdom.
The Word can be understood as the Christian word-made-flesh, and the Sanskrit Devi Vak or sound which becomes Saraswati, the river of wisdom.
Liturgy of the Eucharist
The Journey
We go on a journey with the priestess. This journey is patterned on the Mithras Liturgy in which the soul journeys from the earth, bypasses the moon, and ascends to the sun. In this ritual the soul then meets with her lover from the stars. At each stage the priestess invokes one of the theurgic teletarchs to assist on the journey: Pistis, Aleitheia, and Eros.
During the journey the relationship between priest and priestess changes. At the earth altar the priest is the Lord as advisor and the priestess is the Lady as daughter and soul who undertakes the journey. At the moon altar the priest is the Lord as protector and the priestess is the Lady as the warrior who persists in the journey. At the sun altar the priest is the Lord as lover. The priestess responds as the lover who becomes the Lady as mother and Goddess of the Cosmos.
Ceremony of the elements
Pistis is sometimes translated as faith, however this word has a specific meaning in Christian religion which is not intended here. Theurgic colleagues have suggested trust as a more accurate theurgic translation.
The priest replies to the priestess with the words that begin the Mithras Liturgy in which a father instructs his daughter on the theurgic technique of ascent to the sun.
The two elemental prayers are adapted from the Chaldean Oracles.
- Gi eis nero. Earth to water.
- Aeras eis photia. Air to fire.
Ceremony of the gate
The theurgic ascent requires a password. “I am a child of earth and starry heaven” is the password given to Orphic initiates.
Ceremony of love
The speech of the priestess recalls the torment of Radha separated from Krishna, and the woman from the Song of Songs. The priest speaks the words of Hadit from the Book of the Law.
Anamnesis
Anamnesis recalls the words of Christ at the last supper, “do
this is remembrance of me.” The Christian Mass and Gnostic Mass also contain these words:
- Touto esti to soma mou, this is my body.
- Touto esti to poterion to haimatos mou, this is the cup of my blood.
Fractio and particulate
The Gnostic Mass differs from the Christian Mass with the addition of this phrase: Touto esti to sperma mou, this is my seed.
The Mass of the Priestess differs from the Gnostic Mass with the addition of this phrase: Touto esti ta oion mou, this is my egg. Tim Maroney first included this phrase in his Tetragrammaton Mass.
Ousia eis pneuma, matter to spirit. This completes the triad of alchemical combinations which began with the ceremony of the elements.
Touto esti to hagios pneuma ensarkose. This is the holy spirit incarnate. This echoes John 1:14, “And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us”, “logos egeneto sarx eskenosen en hemin”.
Communion
Syndeo. Synthesis. This completes the personal magical working which began with the Star Garnet.
Epiclesis
Excerpted and adapted from The Thunder, Perfect Mind, Nag Hammadi Library, translated by George W. MacRae.
Benediction
At the conclusion of the Mass the Sanctuary of the Celebrants dissolves until it reforms with the celebrants at the next performance of the Mass.
Book of the Law Quotations
- Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law. Liber AL 1:40.
- Love is the law, love under will. Liber AL 1:57.
- For I am divided for love’s sake, for the chance of union. Liber AL 1:29.
- Come unto me is a foolish word, for it is I who go.
- Remember all ye that existence is pure joy; that all the sorrows are but as shadows; they pass & are done; but there is that which remains. Liber AL II:9.
- I am the Snake that giveth Knowledge & Delight and bright glory. Liber AL II:22.
- Blue am I and gold in the light of my bride: but the red gleam is in my eyes; & my spangles are purple & green. Liber AL II:50.
- Purple beyond purple: it is the light higher than eyesight. Liber AL II:51.
- I am the secret Serpent coiled about to spring: in my coiling there is joy. If I lift up my head, I and my Nuit are one. If I droop down mine head, and shoot forth venom, then is rapture of the earth, and I and the earth are one. Liber AL II:26.
- This is the creation of the world, that the pain of division is as nothing, and the joy of dissolution all. Liber AL I:30.
- But to love me is better than all things; if under the night-stars in the desert thou presently burnest mine incense before me, invoking me with a pure heart, and the serpent flame therein, thou shalt come a little to lie in my bosom. For one kiss wilt thou then be willing to give all; but whoso gives one particle of dust shall lose all in that hour. Ye shall gather goods and store of women and spices; ye shall wear rich jewels; ye shall exceed the nations of the earth in splendour and pride; but always in the love of me, and so shall ye come to my joy. I charge you earnestly to come before me in a single robe, and covered with a rich head-dress. I love you! I yearn to you! Pale or purple, veiled or voluptuous, I who am all pleasure and purple, and drunkenness of the innermost sense, desire you. Put on the wings, and arouse the coiled splendour within you: come unto me! Liber AL I:61.
- To me! To me! (Liber XV, the Gnostic Mass adds this phrase).
- Sing the rapturous love-song unto me! Burn to me perfumes! Wear to me jewels! Drink to me, for I love you! I love you. Liber AL 1:63.
- I am the blue-lidded daughter of Sunset; I am the naked brilliance of the voluptuous night-sky. Liber AL 1:64.
- To me! To me! Liber AL I:65.
- I am above you and in you. My ecstasy is in yours. My joy is to see your joy. Liber AL I:13.
- Beauty and strength, leaping laughter and delicious languor, force and fire, are of us. Liber AL II:20.