Horus-Maat Lodge Mandala – Hoor-Paar-Kraat – Studies – Familiarization with HML materials

Familiarization with HML materials is both a simple and a complex matter. The HML has had many members and, in my view, each member is a talisman to the HML, therefore, it could be said HML materials spread worldwide like an untamed fire. 

We should, therefore, narrow our search to the more obvious links. But before we get to published materials, we must yet observe the essential materials in the invisible college, that is, the body of knowledge and gnosis that the HML can offer according to its inner principles.

Again, what follows is my view, for I would have to start by saying the HML is and must be a college for the Priesthood of Maat, and that describing the Priesthood of Maat describes the ideal image of the HML. On the other hand, this priesthood is not solely an emanation of Maat, for it sprouts from the Double Current. Why? Because Nema’s, Achad’s and Kenneth Grant’s interpretation of the Ma’atian current is approached from the thelemic perspective of Horus. If anything, we were to conclude that a current specifically of Maat is missing, instead of concluding that we are forsaking one aspect of the double current in favor of another. 

For instance, Nema’s “Maat Magick” is already a magick as much of Maat as it is of Horus. 

The Ma’atian current appears first inside the halls of Thelema, a major occult movement brought to life by Aleister Crowley (born Edward Alexander Crowley; 12 October 1875 – 1 December 1947) but as soon as it does, it grows to heights that make it more or less independent of its literary origins.

So, what is Maat Magick[2], its priesthood, and what wisdom does it offer?

Truths 

Well, Maat herself is the Ancient Egyptian Goddess of Truth. And to Maat, Truth and Justice, Order and Honesty, Measure and Balance, are all manifestations of the same Neter or principle. In Maat Magick, Truth is bright enough and dispenses glamour, it comes about when we cease projecting. At that moment, we are projecting only that which is continuous, or the continuity of conscious awareness, we are projecting Maat.

Truth creates reality, and therefore it must be subjective and never objective, in terms of phenomenology. Yet it comes wrapped in form, and the form we give it must benefit communication, for communication is the water of truth in our world. And still, nobody can initiate another into truth, truth must come about by self-initiation and cannot be with anyone otherwise.

How can we self-initiate? Truth is testified when it brings about change, and for this, all moments of life are equally valid. Truth and breath are, therefore, bound to one another. Just as we must continuously breathe to keep ourselves alive, we must be continuously aware, and the two activities work together. Breath is the fire of Maat.

When this is done, we can begin to understand the relation between truth and silence, for silence changes not and yet it embraces all change. Silence is the heart of Maat.

Truth, at this point, manifests as being both eternal and flexible, and it can improve all situations by its infusion.

In terms of tradition, Maat Magick accepts that one can find, discern, and receive eternal truths throughout the many traditions in time. Such truths are operated via what we call masks. This means that we are or shall be operating from a subtler level to a denser one by forging a dense mask to express, always, the subtler gaze. The subtler a message is the more independent it is from time and space, the denser the mask the more this message disguises itself as time and space to transmit that which is beyond itself. The message is eternal truth, the mask is change.

The Abyss (void/vacancy) is the ultimate defender of truth if it does reveal to us that the world and the self bear the quality of illusions. It maintains the mindfulness of truth. In this mindfulness of truth, everything is perfect and eternal, and there is nothing to change. This realization, however, manifests as a stream of light that co-creates all densities subject to change.

We believe that Maat, and therefore truth, lives in the center of the heart. In the mind, it is the ultimate abstraction. In the material plane, it is the ultimate reality. But in all planes, truth prevails.

As priests working for Maat, we can establish Her by establishing justice and balance in the Kingdom, which are believed to be the ideal conditions for truth, since harmony allows us to know and hear our truest selves.

We also call truth by two synonymous names, Tao, and Magickal Current.

Ideals

Persons are not to be worshipped, only qualities and ideals. The same applies to the gods, their personalities are not worthy of worship, but their principles are.

Our ideal is that of furthering the species’ evolution. Beyond that, the name Maat enumerates most ideals: Justice, Honesty, Balance, Harmony, and Equilibrium.

Our Great Work is the unity and evolution of Humanity, for which we live.

Virtues 

An object (such as a behavior) is observed, from which we extract certain abstract qualities, and define such qualities as virtues or weaknesses.

In this regard, maybe the greatest virtue a Ma’atian Priest defends is Magickal Humility, which Nema describes as “the accurate assessment of your strengths and weaknesses, virtues and vices, prides and shames, and general usefulness to the universe”.

In Maat Magick we cannot expect any salvation from external sources, not even from gods. The Priest alone is responsible for his or her soul and his or her salvation, and “we do not trade autonomy for advice, nor responsibility for redemption”.

Ultimately, Magickal Humility will show us the vision of our function in the cosmos and the correct perception of our successes and failures in fulfilling it.

Also, although we admit that existence is illusion, we cannot admit that there is virtue in suffering (or rather, there is no virtue in prolonged pain), and we work to make all illusions harmonious.

Beyond what I have mentioned, faith and hope are useful virtues at the beginning of our training as Priests.

But an important virtue of the Adept, no longer in the beginning stages, is the ability to help the other while bypassing the verbal censors of the unbalanced Ego. Empathy and sensitivity are considered important astral virtues of the Adept.

Divine Love 

We cannot speak of Divine Love without first speaking of love. Love without will is sentimentality, will without love is tyranny. In this sense, love requires the balance of will, that is, self-control.

Many ideas in the tradition of romanticism tell us that love must be necessarily spontaneous and uncontrollable. Not only do we think it often asks for some amount of self-control for it to be nurturing, as we observe that just as belief can be cultivated and brought about, one can will oneself to love.

This does not mean that we cannot deliver ourselves to love, but we must remain able to make balanced decisions and see clearly. As attention is the hand of will, love can also lose its clench if attention is withdrawn.

We have spoken of love. Now, Divine Love is considered by the Ma’atian Priest to be the unity of all things in their illusory nature.

In the ultimate level of priesthood, the Ma’atian Priest becomes fully his or her self-awareness, that is, he or she has no will of his or her own, but lives as the self that is dissolved in Divine Love. In terms of function, all denser levels of the Ma’atian Priest, at this point, self-operate in harmony.

Another kind of love is that of the Priest, the so-called profound love that describes the magical link between the Priest and the rest of the species. It enhances the influence of the Priest upon others. It is intimately connected to Divine Love and is the experience of participating in the universal pattern of consciousness so that the other is also us in the unity of intelligence. As Nema used to say: “The Priesthood is a condition of a soul on fire with love.[3]”

The champion of this kind of love is described in the Horus Maat Lodge by the original Throne of Saturn or Binah, called the Throne of Love. The mission of the throneholder is to unite the past, present and future as one eternal mode of being (that is, to seek the universal qualities that portray the unity of our species from its dim origins to its translation beyond the physical plane) and to “transform a divided and competitive species into a cooperative, consciously unified one by achieving these qualities as individuals and then applying them Magickally[4]”.

This must necessarily pass by healing all internal fears, paranoia, misunderstandings and hatred.

Wisdom

Maybe our greatest icon for wisdom is the hive, where Maat lives in every detail, for “the Bees work out their Will in ordered harmony[5]”.

Wisdom lies in instinct, but it only becomes wisdom when thinking discovers it with clarity, patience, and self-knowledge. Likewise, it should be sought not only in the limited personality but in the full range of human experience and used to speed our species’ transformation.

The priest must not sit in his or her shrine dispensing his or her wisdom in words, for it has been said that truth can only be honored by actions. The priest must help others be ready for when illumination touches them, which includes, as Nema said: “feeding the hungry, sheltering the homeless, protecting the vulnerable from violence and doing the necessary to relieve worry and fear for immediate survival” and moving our collective self to “philosophies and practices to reverse pollution, bad management and greed[6]”.

To live in wisdom also requires innocence, which comes about when we learn to see, understand and cooperate with the nature of things and when we expand our sense of self to include the cosmos. We call it “sacred humanism.”

One of the functions of Ma’atian Wisdom is to understand and apply significance. This is no small thing, for through significance we can make a word move worlds, a godform[7] activate and strengthen an attribute, and a sigil manifest the fulfillment of desire.

The Sphere we attribute to wisdom is Uranus (Chokmah), and its other name is Creative Truth.

A function of the priesthood is to share wisdom with their younger sisters and brothers in ways proper to their partners in dialogue.

Compassion

Our initiatory journey as Ma’atians through the levels of reality has proof of success in our increase of compassion for those who haven’t seen its nature, so that we are helping others to come to their liberation, including the confused, the desperate, the ignorant and the comfortable. If ever in this process we end up destroying long-cherished beliefs, we must also be compassionate in this doing.

The other can recognize a Ma’atian Priest by how well understood this other feels. A person will feel the compassion and interest of the Ma’atian Priest without knowing the source.

The compassion of the Ma’atian Priest for the world of illusion is immeasurable, in pair with how much suffering can be avoided by liberation from individual belief in reality. Peace remains undisturbed, the Priest/ess knows well that all illusion resolves eventually into the nothing from which it came.

The mentioned compassion is known to be true when there is a level of gratitude in it and it comes from the desire to share good fortune with the universe from which the Priest/ess has been liberated.

In other words, compassion is the motivation of the Ma’atian and the reason for all continuity.

In the Horus Maat Lodge, we consider that our work might remain valid in aiding humanity in its course of evolution only if it keeps being guided by compassion, and one of our disciplines is to always turn rage into compassion.

To compassion, we assign the goddess Isis, a goddess also of patience and endurance.

Humanity as One Big Family and the Golden Age

We have seen through the Akasha a possible and desirable future in which humanity will develop by strengthening and aligning the individual connection to the rest of the species, in that our awareness of other people is sharpened and expanded to a second consciousness. This comes about by telepathy in balance with empathy, which will make us careful of the well-being of all and each.

The aim of Maat Magick is for the Magician/Priest to benefit from this state of future double-consciousness now so that we link to the aura of the collective species and the collective power in our works. With practice, we extend beyond humanity to the cosmos and the chaos around and within it, transcending all that confines us, including the present notion of ourselves.

Two things are important to understand what I am talking about. The same basic physical structure is common to all humanity, but we also share the collective unconscious which is a consciousness that is asleep and striving to awake. Its awakened state is called N’Aton, in our “tradition”. Half of N’Aton appears to us as an individual being that is the expression of all human beings, or all human beings expressing themselves simultaneously and as one. The other half is entirely cosmic.

Nema describes N’Aton as “the personality generated by the collective consciousness of humanity in its next stage of species development.” He/She/We is the self-aware consciousness of Humanity as a unified living being.

The likeness to the hive so dear to our notion of Maat and the bee that was mentioned before also come into play. Sexuality becomes gynandry, exhibiting no sexual characteristics of polarity, not abandoned but changed radically. Double consciousness will also affect global socioeconomics but not in individual sovereignty.

All of it might not be as complicated as it seems, theoretically. When all chakras are fully activated, we have achieved the peak of the natural realization of humanity.

When we reach double consciousness, the other intelligences and other worlds that await our maturity will reveal themselves or be revealed to our exploration. We call them “the comity of stars,” composed of all beings in the cosmos who have already achieved this evolved stage.

We named this state of humanity Homo Veritas, humanity with its collective consciousness active and functioning. The maturity of our species begins in the Homo Veritas and not before – the Homo Veritas is the next evolutionary step from the Homo sapiens, the only alternative being self-destruction.

Double Consciousness implies the obliteration of hatred, selfishness and ignorance and what Teilhard de Chardin called ‘the Omega Point’ or what has been called otherwise Maha Samadhi (the highest level of equanimity of the intellect).

Yet, this golden age is now, in the sense that all times are now, and now it manifests the home that we know we deserve.

On the other hand, that we first appeared under the banner of a form of Thelema is no coincidence, for the future cannot come into being without what we call Horus, an explosion of solar consciousness for the liberation of humanity from all obsolete structures. The obsolete structures include the structures of time. For instance, if we think of a collective consciousness of humanity, we might be thinking of all living human beings. However, consciousness is not subject to such limitations, and N’Aton includes the ancestral dead in the past, all the living, and our unborn descendants to come. All of them, no matter if they slept through life or not, live in N’Aton in an awakened state.

Our successful transformation into a double-conscious species shines forth yet another age which we call the Wordless Aeon, where physical speech or material communication, with a shared consciousness, becomes unnecessary. This is the silent state (hardly detectable to us presently) in which I have seen most species exist in the Universe.

Some considerations are left to be said concerning N’Aton, the collective consciousness of humanity: it is on the verge of waking and his/her/our gestation is occurring now; humanity can still abort it and choose the route of species suicide. If all of humanity does not awake (the waking state – awakening from the collective nightmare – is the innate godhood of each), none of us will survive.

Resuming, what we call the Priesthood forms a talismanic link with the rest of humanity that operates through the Racial Unconscious and the higher realms of pure spirit. This greater power and deeper vision render the Priest capable of influencing large numbers of people.

The mass of humanity can still, through the same channel, influence the Priest/ess and have him or her fall back into a narrower and more vile reality. The Priest can only avoid it by being constantly aware and responsible: the species depends on his or her personal perfection. More, if ever the Priest/ess considers him or herself a Savior, the whole Priestly work will be reversed, and what was a living talisman immediately loses the higher realms of consciousness, replacing them with aspects of the limited self.

The Priest/ess is a human among humans, and when universal enlightenment is complete, so will he or she be free like all others.

The general plan is simply to help Humanity to survive, evolve, and awaken while helping each other do the same.

[1] A throne is the mastery and practice of a given principle in the life of a Magickian-Priest.

[2]  Magick is about aligning oneself with natural forces to manifest an intention. Spelled with a ‘k’ after the usage of Aleister Crowley, who wished to differentiate his practice from stage magic.

[3] Nema; The Priesthood: Parameters and Responsibilities, published by Black Moon Publishing (2008).

[4] The Inner Council of the HML; The Horus Maat Lodge: The Grimoire of a PanAeonic Magickal Tribe, published by Black Moon Publishing (2019).

[5] Nema; Liber Pennae Praenumbra: The Book of the Pre-Shadowing of the Feather, published by Black Moon Publishing (2018).

[6] Nema; Maat Magick: A Guide to Self-Initiation, published by Red Wheel/Weiser (1995).

[7] The image or incarnation of a deity.