"My number is 11, as all their numbers who are of us. The Five Pointed Star, with a Circle in the Middle, & the circle is Red. My colour is black to the blind, but the blue & gold are seen of the seeing. Also I have a secret glory for them that love me."
Awaiss,
as dictated to Aleister Crowley,
The Book of the Law (1904)
"This book is my fiftieth-birthday present to myself. I feel as though I am crossing the spine of a roof — having ascended one slope.
I am programmed at fifty to perform childishly — to insult “The Star-Spangled Banner,” to scrawl pictures of a Nazi flag and an asshole and a lot of other things with a felt-tipped pen. To give an idea of the maturity of my illustrations for this book, here is my picture of an asshole:
I think I am trying to clear my head of all the junk in there — the assholes, the flags, the underpants. Yes — there is a picture in this book of underpants. I’m throwing out characters from my other books, too. I’m not going to put on any more puppet shows.
I think I am trying to make my head as empty as it was when I was born onto this damaged planet fifty years ago.
I suspect that this is something most white Americans, and nonwhite Americans who imitate white Americans, should do. The things other people have put into my head, at any rate, do not fit together nicely, are often useless and ugly, are out of proportion with one another, are out of proportion with life as it really is outside my head.
I have no culture, no humane harmony in my brains. I can’t live without a culture anymore.
So this book is a sidewalk strewn with junk, trash which I throw over my shoulders as I travel in time back to November eleventh, nineteen hundred and twenty-two.
I will come to a time in my backwards trip when November eleventh, accidentally my birthday, was a sacred day called Armistice Day. When I was a boy, and when Dwayne Hoover was a boy, all the people of all the nations which had fought in the First World War were silent during the eleventh minute of the eleventh hour of Armistice Day, which was the eleventh day of the eleventh month.
It was during that minute in nineteen hundred and eighteen, that millions upon millions of human beings stopped butchering one another. I have talked to old men who were on battlefields during that minute. They have told me in one way or another that the sudden silence was the Voice of God. So we still have among us some men who can remember when God spoke clearly to mankind.
Armistice Day has become Veterans' Day. Armistice Day was sacred.
Veterans' Day is not.
So I will throw Veterans' Day over my shoulder. Armistice Day I will keep. I don't want to throw away any sacred things.
What else is sacred? Oh, Romeo and Juliet, for instance.
And all music is."
- Kurt Vonnagut
" In a speech in 1878--like many other speeches he gave in the last third of his life--Frederick Douglass was at that point, 1878, already fed up with Lost Cause arguments about what the war had been about.
He was also already, early in the process, fed up with the ways in which Americans were beginning to reconcile this bloody, terrible conflict around the mutual valor of soldiers, and in his view forgetting what the whole terrible thing might have even been about.
And at the end of a magnificent speech he gave at a veterans reunion he said this: "The Civil War"--this is Frederick Douglass--"was not a fight between rapacious birds and ferocious beasts, a mere display of brute courage and endurance, it was a war between men of thought, as well as of action, and in dead earnest for something beyond the battlefield."
11
From Thelemapedia
Categories: Numbers
The number 11 means, in the Tree of Life, the Sphere of Daath. In the Hebraic Language Daath means "knowledge" or "Abyss", being the Sephira located in the limit between the Superior Triad (Kether, Chokmah and Binah) and the Sephiroth located at the more manifested world. Daath is where takes place phenomenon usually known as the "Black Night of the Soul", when the adept stands at the mental state represented by the daemon Choronzon. Transpass this state of the mind is essential to reach the consecration of the Great Work. To reach Daath is necessary, first, to take contact with the Holy Guardian Angel, who conducts the adept and helps him to reach the Abyss safely.
This number also have the symbolism of the union of the Microcosmos and the Macrocosmos, as the sum of the 5 and the 6, being the 5 related to the Pentagram and the 6 related to the Hexagram. So, 11 joins the meanings of both the correlations and means the All.
Associations with the Number 11
References
Crowley, Aleister; Magick in Theory and Practice, ©1991 Castle Books. ISBN 1-55521-766-4
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