Father of All Telesmi

Magical myth clearly distinguishes the Environment as the passive component and Azoth as its androgynous form. The World passive environment, when struck by an impulse of the creative will, gives rise to its androgynous hypostasis — the environment of realizations, traditionally called the Azoth by the alchemists and later the Astral. In other words, Telesmi is the activity that arises in the Passive Environment through the application of external will.

Hermes Trismegistus describes this plane of being thus:

“He is the father of the different designs of the whole world. (Pater omnis telesmi totius mundi est hic.)”

Among modern Magi, the notion of the “Astral” is foundational, and it is hard to find an occult text in which the word is not used in every paragraph.

At the same time, traditionally the Telesmi aspect was regarded as a purely “technical” concept, denoting the perceptible disturbances in the World Environment, and the conduit adapted to perceive these disturbances — the sensory body — required its own development alongside the other planes of manifestation of mind.

Nevertheless, one cannot deny that in human life, and on the Way of the Magus, this plane is no less and sometimes more active than the physical.

Let us try to understand how Tradition describes Azoth and its significance.

We have discussed many times that the primary thrust of the world process arises from the division of primordial unity into active and passive components. The essence of the process is the entry of the active component into the passive and the emergence of a new unity — the Pleroma.

This entry is articulated by the quaternary scheme, and it holds both in the macrocosmic sense and at the level of any phenomenon. Regardless of scale, any active manifestation reflecting in the Passive Environment, by the tetragrammatical law, produces a vortex within it.

The action by which the triune dynamic force is transformed into a stable system of relations and attractions is called realization.

Active will can manifest countless potential differences, and all of these are active and can supply energetic equivalents. The Environment can also reveal potential differences, but they are always passive; they cannot produce energetic equivalents. Thus, will can manifest many powers and agents, while the Environment reveals only voids — spaces for manifestations of the active mind. These voids always accompany the corresponding impulses of activity; they cannot arise by themselves. Following manifestations of activity, the Environment on the one hand sustains manifestations and enacts inertia. That is, any manifestation of will causes in the Environment the birth of a vortex whose active component is the volitional impulse and whose passive component is the inertia of the Environment itself.

Any feeling, any desire or volitional impulse, even any active thought, can always be regarded as the beginning of a vortex in the World Environment directed toward the realization of that desire. The primary sign of volitional energy is direction; will is always dynamic and directed. At the same time, any manifestation of will is the consequence of the attraction between a potency of the Monad seeking manifestation and a corresponding potency of the World Environment. Therefore, all worldly life is nothing other than an endless aggregation of volitional impulses: the result of the mutual attraction of potencies of Light and of the Environment eternally striving to manifest themselves. When any volitional impulse arises, its analogue is thereby made manifest in the World Environment and a vortex appears.

Technically, in the Telesmi aspect, this appears as the continuous generation by all beings of vortices, connecting desire with its object.

Having arisen as the result of a volitional manifestation, the vortex acquires a quasi-autonomous existence and moves through the World Environment according to the laws of attraction — toward whatever it has the greatest affinity for.

For example, if one person is attracted to another, in the Telesmi aspect this appears as the constant emission of vortices by the first moving toward the second, intended to alter the very structure of the second’s sphere of desires so that they will reciprocate the feeling. If the second finds the first repellent, they, in turn, emit repulsive vortices.

Moreover, owing to the complete passivity of the Environment, a vortex cannot disappear by itself; it can only be annihilated by another vortex equal in force and opposite rotation, and even then the imprint of that counterbalancing remains recorded in the fabric of the Environment.

It is clear that in this aspect the cosmos is a vast number of interacting, intersecting, merging, and mutually annihilating vortices. The totality of all vortices, or, in other words, the entire cosmos in the Telesmi aspect, constitutes the World Vortex, or Baphomet.

Perception of these vortices — “astral sight” — while it helps to grasp the multiplicity of interactions in the cosmos and sometimes to trace particular processes, has had limited value in the magical tradition precisely because of the extreme profusion of vortices, which complicates interpretation and can even lead to wholly false conclusions.

Furthermore, in the modern context, perception of the Telesmi aspect is often mistaken for perception of the Interworld, which leads to ineffective actions and erroneous conclusions.

At the same time, all “folk” magic reduces to manipulating vortices — their creation or their annihilation.