Manifesto of New Isis Lodge

[parsifal]

Does anyone have the full text of the 1955 Manifesto of the New Isis Lodge? Or perhaps know where I can find it online?

[stephen]

Was hoping that someone else might find the time to respond to this. I do have a photocopy of the Manifesto myself, passed on to me by a fellow member of what was then the Typhonian O.T.O., but as I believe that it is still regarded as a formal Order document it is not down to me to make it publicly available.

It was discussed in passing in the Grant's Transplutonic Planet Isis probably exists thread back in February - see mine and Michael's posts; in fact Parsifal, you quoted those introductory paragraphs that are included in The Stellar Lode in your own post in May.

I am not aware that the full text is available online. The version on Koenig's website is the highly truncated form in which it was reproduced by Grosche in his periodical Papers for Adapted Occult Art of Living.

[parsifal]

Thanks, Stephen, as always. I guess the only way for one to read the full text, then, is to seek entry into the Order! 

[Michael Staley]

No need to go that far, parsifal. Since the Manifesto was sent out to people enquiring about New Isis Lodge, I don't think there's any reason to withhold it now. If you send me a private message with your email address, I'll send you a pdf.

Sometime in 2017 I hope to gather together as one volume the various essays, articles, introductions and forewords which Kenneth Grant produced over the years. It will include documents such as the Manifesto of New Isis Lodge.

[parsifal]

Thanks, Michael. Will do. 

[parsifal]

Michael Staley has graciously provided me with a copy of the 1955 manifesto. Thank you, Michael. I thought I might share with the forum some of my impressions of the document, for what they're worth, if only to organize my thoughts on the subject. The manifesto is largely administrative in nature, describing the degree structure and ground rules of the Lodge for aspirants seeking entry into its Outer Court (0° Probationer through III° Student). My interest in reading the manifesto in full was because I was intrigued by its opening preamble about the transplutonic planet Isis. So on first read, I will admit, I was somewhat disappointed to find much of the document to be organizational. Yet the organization of a magical lodge is itself charged with symbolism, so perhaps a document describing such a lodge, though it may seem purely administrative on the face of it, may carry a bit of that charge as well—may, in fact, contain a few choice puzzles and hidden meanings for us profane to decode.

The title itself of the manifesto is one such example: "Manifesto of New Isis Lodge." I love how Kenneth Grant uses "New Isis" as a phonetic play on "Nu-Isis." I guess this is a fairly obvious one, but hopefully you get the point.

Another one that caught my eye is also on the first page of the manifesto, where Grant states, "As may be seen from a study of the Table appearing at the end of this Manifesto, these 10 Degrees are divided into two sets of four and one set of three degrees, having the Ninth Degree as their crown and summit. The Tenth Degree is of an administrative nature and its esoteric and inner character is known only to the Governing Body of the ORDO TEMPLI ORIENTIS (O.T.O)."

There are some interesting disjunctions here. First, two sets of four and one set of three adds up to eleven, not ten. Further contributing to the reader's disorientation is a line above that in the text where Grant states explicitly that the Lodge "comprises a body of doctrine concentrated in 10 Principal Degrees (0°—IX°)." Further, in the text describing the table (of ten degrees that actually add up to eleven), he calls the Ninth Degree the "crown," which is clearly a reference to the tenth Sephirah, Kether, the "Crown." Maybe I'm missing something obvious here, but these two conflicting statements seem to be pointing the way to Nu-Isis, whose number is eleven, as Nuit (Nu-Isis) states in Liber AL, I:60: "My number is 11, as all their numbers who are of us." The Tenth Degree in the table text above is what Grant states it is: the X° Degree, which is of an "administrative" nature on the mundane level, but also of an "esoteric" and "inner" nature on the transplutonic level—and on this level, its number is eleven, the number of Nu-Isis.

It's worth quoting from Michael Staley's essay "Scintillations in Mauve," as I have done elsewhere in this forum, to drive home this idea of the "transplutonic Isis" being beyond ten, that is, beyond Kether:

On the formal launch of the Lodge in 1955, the Grants issued a Manifesto of New Isis Lodge in which they spoke of the discovery of a planet beyond Pluto, the transplutonic Isis, and what it might mean for the evolution of consciousness on this planet:

A new and compelling influence is enveloping the earth and as yet there are few individuals who are open to the influx of the subtle vibrations of this influence.

Its rays proceed from a source as yet unexplored by those who are not at one with it in essence and in spirit, and it finds its present focus in the outer universe in the transplutonic planet Isis.

In the inner being of man, also, this influence has a centre which will slowly begin to stir in mankind as a whole as the influence strengthens and flowers. As it is at the beginning of its course in relation to man, however, many ages will pass before he may avail himself fully of the great powers and energies which this influence is silently and continually bestowing on all who know how to identify the inner core of their being with its deep and inscrutable heart.

It is surely obvious that the Grants were not talking about the discovery of a physical planet; such a discovery would have been more relevant to an astronomical journal. If we bear in mind that the first sephirah, Kether, is attributed to Pluto, then a transplutonic planet would be ‘One Beyond Ten’, the Great Outside.

So X could be said to actually be eleven, the "Great Outside." And here's something else that I found interesting. Later in the text, Grant describes an Inner Invisible Head of the Order, the Master Nodens, Nodens being the God of the Great Deep referenced by Grant in Chapter 10 of Aleister Crowley and the Hidden God, "Nu-Isis and the Radiance Beyond Space." Michael tells me that "Nodens" was a magical name of Grant's during the years when the Lodge was active. In Hidden God, Grant states that "the Heart of the Sigil of Nodens is identical with the Mark of the Beast," which he says is "the fusion of O and X which produces the lightning flash. Nodens is the God of the Great Deep or Abyss, microcosmically identified with subconsciousness" (p. 148-9). In the manifesto, couldn't his seemingly "administrative" description of the Lodge's structure also be read as describing this "fusion" that "produces the lightning flash"? That is, the explosive fusion of O and X is represented in the degree structure of 0° to X°, whose actual number is eleven, the number of the "Great Outside," of Nu-Isis. The structure of the Lodge itself represents the lightning-bolt influx of this transplutonic "radiance beyond space."

I'll have to stop there for the moment, as it's Friday night here and I've got beers to drink. I'll pick up with my observations soon.

A parting observation, however, about disjunction and disorientation. It seems that Grant liked to induce these states in his readers. He found them useful to spiritual advancement. Why, then, should his manifesto be any different? Even as I was trying to describe in words the inconsistencies I found in his text, and to decipher what they might be pointing to, my logical mind was straining a bit: Am I reading the text right? Are these disjunctions I'm describing actually present or am I just misreading it? Is there something I'm missing here that is obvious to others? As I tried to reconcile two statements in the manifesto that seemed irreconcilable to me, I began to feel that the thing I was trying to get at was present in the middle territory, in that disorienting space of irreconcilability and disjunction, that space in between conflicting statements. To again quote from the closing passages of Michael Staley's essay, where he in turn quotes Grant from the introduction to Outside the Circles of Time:

One final point is here relevant, and I state it without apology. It is not my purpose to try to prove anything; my aim is to construct a magical mirror capable of expressing some of the less elusive images seen as shadows of a future aeon. This I do by means of suggestion, evocation, and by those oblique and ‘inbetweenness concepts’ that Austin Spare defined as ‘Neither-Neither’. When this is understood, the reader’s mind becomes receptive to the influx of certain concepts that can, if received undistortedly, fertilize the unknown dimensions of his consciousness. In order to achieve this aim a new manner of communication has to be evolved; language itself has to be reborn, revivified, and given a new direction and a new momentum. The truly creative image is born of creative imagining, and this is — ultimately — an irrational process that transcends the grasp of human logic.

[N0T 2]

Oct 31, 2016 10:21:44 GMT Michael Staley said:

Sometime in 2017 I hope to gather together as one volume the various essays, articles, introductions and forewords which Kenneth Grant produced over the years. It will include documents such as the Manifesto of New Isis Lodge.

Michael, this promised volume sounds very attractive. Will it include ephemera such as the ads from Prediction magazine, where Kenneth advertised N.I.L. in the early days?

[Michael Staley]

I've only so far come across one of those ads in Prediction, which I think ran for several months until Prediction declined to accept them. I may well include it in the "collected works" volume; depends on the scope of the volume as it develops.