CHAPTER VI
On Ritual, Sacrament, & the Gnostic Life
De Ritu, Sacramento, et Vita Gnostica [On Rite, Sacrament, and the Gnostic Life]
Article 6.1 — Ritual as Psychic Technology\
AL:II.35-44
Let the rituals be rightly performed with joy & beauty!
There are rituals of the elements and feasts of the times.
A feast for the first night of the Prophet and his Bride!
A feast for the three days of the writing of the Book of the Law.
A feast for Tahuti and the child of the Prophet--secret, O Prophet!
A feast for the Supreme Ritual, and a feast for the Equinox of the Gods.
A feast for fire and a feast for water; a feast for life and a greater feast for death!
A feast every day in your hearts in the joy of my rapture!
A feast every night unto Nu, and the pleasure of uttermost delight!
Aye! feast! rejoice! there is no dread hereafter. There is the dissolution, and eternal ecstasy in the kisses of Nu.
The Church employs community-oriented rituals as a central instrument of its Gnostic life—to follow the Rites of Passage that come upon all lives—Birth, Death, and all the celebrations held in-between. However, these rites must be understood Church's own terms—not as the appeasement or propitiation [placating] of an external deity who demands ceremony and sacrifice in exchange for favor. The Church does not traffic in the commerce of such appeasement, but in the celebration of life.
Other practices in the Gnostic Church of L.V.X., include the delivery of a disciplined psychic technology: a structured and saturated integration with the Collective Unconscious through the language of symbols developed from the study of its canon. Its holy books create a liminal space [Latin: limen, threshold; a space between the ordinary and the extraordinary] by which the deeper strata of the psyche becomes accessible to conscious encounter through the contemporary mythos contained therein.
Our main ritual is the Rosicrucian Mass that is a eucharistic rite by which one communes with the four elements of being; Fire, Water, Air, and Earth, or Spirit, Emotion, Intellect and Body; respectively. It is intended to facilitate the re-charging of one’s spiritual battery after having spent time in the mundane world, that we come together in community to create Sacred Space.
Article 6.2 — The Sacramental Principle
"To us, every phenomenon is an Act of Love, every experience is necessary, is a Sacrament, is a means of Growth. Hence, '…existence is pure joy;…' (AL:II.9).—The Master Therion
The Church holds a sacramental principle that is both formal and broadly inclusive. In its formal dimension: the Church administers specific sacramental rites—ceremonies of threshold, of passage, of consecration, of community—that are the ritualized crystallizations of the Church's deepest theological commitments, enacted in symbolic form.
In its broader dimension: the Church teaches that any act performed with full consciousness, genuine intention, and complete presence may become a sacrament—a charged moment of encounter between the particular and the universal, between the personal and the trans-personal, between the finite and the infinite. The formal sacraments of the Church exist to train the Gnostic in a capacity for sacramental attention—so that eventually, the sacramental perception becomes not an exceptional mode reserved for ritual occasions, but the ordinary texture of an awake and luminous life.
But also, we show how every phenomenon truly an ‘Act of Love’—a Synchronicity through which the Universe affects the Soul of the individual. And in Synchronicity, the Soul reciprocates and makes an impression on the Universe. Beauty is ultimately determined; no matter the pleasure or suffering brought on by any interaction, and the Soul becomes nourished and fortified with the experience.
Article 6.3 — The Gnostic Path
Gnosis, as the Church understands and practices it, is emphatically not a single event: not a ceremony of entry after which one may consider the work complete, the threshold crossed, the membership secured. The practices of Gnosticism in the Church of L.V.X. is a continuous process—coextensive, in fact, with Individuation itself, and therefore with the full span of the Gnostic Path.
Those ceremonies in which the community publicly witnesses and honors the successes of an individual's journey—mark one of the ways our congregants fortify the Genius in each other. Such accolades are not the conferral of something new from outside, but something the congregant has earned of his or her own effort—his or her own DO-ing.
The Church's role is to ensure that the Gnostic does not walk this path alone—that they walk as a Star in a company of Stars—in a company of fellow travelers who know the terrain. We are those who have descended where the congregant may not have yet descended, and who have ascended where the congregant may not have yet ascended. And through our community, we are all interconnected as if comrades in spiritual warfare.
AL:III.59 “As brothers fight ye!”
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