The Encyclopedia Of Demons And Demonology

chthonic deities 41
Ordered again to declare his true nature, Choronzon
said his name was Dispersion and he could not be bested
in argument. He uttered a rapid string of blasphemies
that taxed Neuberg’s ability to record. While distracting
the magician with blasphemies, Choronzon threw sand
onto the magic circle. When the outline was sufficiently
blurred, he took the form of a naked man and leaped into
it, throwing Neuberg to the ground. The two fought furiously.
The demon tried to tear out Neuberg’s throat with
his froth-covered fangs. At last, Neuberg was able to force
Choronzon back into the triangle, and he repaired the
magic circle.
Man and demon argued. Choronzon threatened Neuberg
with all the tortures of HELL, and Neuberg denounced
the demon as a liar. After a long time at this, the demon
suddenly vanished, leaving Crowley alone in the circle.
Crowley traced the word Babalon in the sand, and the ritual
was over. He and Neuberg built a fire for purification
and ritually destroyed the circle and triangle.
Neuberg maintained that he had literally wrestled
with Choronzon, and not with Crowley possessed by
the demon. Some occultists have posited that Crowley
somehow exuded an ectoplasm that enabled the demon
to make a form tangible enough to fight with Neuberg.
Another explanation advanced is that the entire experience
was visionary. Whatever the truth, both Crowley
and Neuberg felt that Crowley had beaten the demon and
achieved the status of Master of the Temple and Secret
Chief. Crowley’s new vision of himself was as teacher and
prophet who was to indoctrinate the world with the philosophy
of The Book of the Law.
Associates of Crowley said the ritual permanently
damaged him and that he was possessed by Choronzon
for the rest of his life.
FURTHER READING:
King, Francis. Megatherion: The Magickal World of Aleister
Crowley. London: Creation Books, 2004.
Symonds, John, and Kenneth Grant eds. The Confessions of
Aleister Crowley, an Autobiography. London: Routledge &
Kegan Paul, 1979.
chthonic deities In classical mythology, the dreaded
deities of the underworld, who are so feared that they
usually are nameless and are called only by euphemisms.
They often appear in the form of SERPENTs, which are
associated with tombs and death. Chthonic deities originally
were ancestral spirits who represented the ghosts
of the dead. They were worshipped by propitiation and
sacrifice.
As rulers of the underworld, chthonic deities torment
souls of the death and reign over chaos, darkness, gloom,
and evil spirits (see DEMONs). As Christianity overtook
pagan beliefs, the chthonic deities became associated increasingly
with evil and the DEVIL.
The greatest and most feared chthonic god is Hades,
the Greek King of the Dead, who owns a cap that makes
the wearer invisible. Hades is uncompassionate but not
evil. He seldom leaves his gloomy realm of the underworld.
His name became synonymous with HELL. The Romans
also associated him with the minerals of the earth
and called him Pluto, the god of wealth.
Hades rules the underworld with his queen, Persephone.
According to myth, Persephone was a lovely
maiden of spring, the daughter of Demeter, goddess of
corn and the harvest. Hades desired her and one day rose
up out of a chasm in the earth in his chariot drawn by
black horses, kidnapped her, and took her to the underworld.
In her grief, Demeter caused all things on Earth to
wither and die. Other gods entreated her to relent, but she
refused in anger. Finally, Zeus intervened and ordered
Hades, his brother, to return Persephone to Earth. Hades
acquiesced but first made Persephone eat a pomegranate
seed, which bound her to him forever. As a compromise,
Persephone returned to Earth each spring, producing a
flowering of the planet, and went back to Hades each fall,
causing the death of winter.
Other chthonic entities are the three ERINYES (Furies),
called Tisiphone, Megaera, and Alecto, who relentlessly
pursued and punished the sinners of the Earth;
and Thanatos, god of death, and his brother, the god of
sleep. From the god of sleep, the “little death,” issued
dreams, which rose up from the underworld in two
forms: true dreams, which passed through a gate of horn,
and false dreams, which passed through a gate of ivory.
The Greeks and Romans placed a great deal of importance
on the meaning of dreams, especially information
of a prophetic or oracular nature.
The descriptions of the classical underworld are most
vivid in the writings of the Roman poet Virgil and the
Greek poet Homer. To Homer, the underworld is a shadowy
place where nothing is real. To Virgil, it is more
realistic, a place where sinners are tormented and the
good enjoy rewards and delights. Virgil gave descriptions
of the terrain of the underworld, and the means
by which souls entered. A path led to two rivers, the
first of which was Acheron, the river of woe, which then
emptied into Cocytus, the river of lamentation. There,
an old boatman named Charon ferried souls across the
waters, but only those whose passage was paid, by coins
placed upon the lips of the corpses by the living and
who were properly buried. Three other rivers separated
the underworld: Phlegethon, the river of fire; Styx, the
river of the unbreakable oath sworn to by the gods; and
Lethe, the river of oblivion or forgetfulness. (Souls returning
to Earth to be reborn were required to drink of
the waters of Lethe, so that they would not remember
their previous lives.)
The gate of Hades is guarded by a three-headed,
dragon-tailed dog, CERBERUS, whose chief job was to prevent
any souls from leaving once inside. Hades himself
lived in a huge palace somewhere in the gloom of the underworld,
surrounded by cold and wide wastes.