Official Statement of the Ma-Ion Nexus of the Horus Maat Lodge (New York City)

93/696 – N’Aton.

We write as initiates of the Horus Maat Lodge and as members of the magical community in solidarity with the protests unfolding across the country in response to the racist police murder of George Floyd, and the recent murders of Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery, and countless others.

We know that these murders are a symptom of the deep sin of restriction that is white supremacy in our society, which we’ve seen play out in innumerable ways over 400 hundred years of American history. Most recently, we’ve seen the disproportionate impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on Black, Brown, and low-income communities across the country, and the utter failure of an appropriate response from elected officials, who only offer us militarized policing, aid for corporations and the wealthy, and the reopening of an unequal economy that never worked for us rather than any real relief. We know that recent incidents of police violence come alongside the policy violence that, even before the pandemic, was responsible for murdering 700 people every day in this country through poverty.

Some have condemned the protests as “riots” rather than what they really are, the eruption of a people that has been systematically held down, ignored, and murdered for far too long. Some have urged moderation. But the time for moderation and reform is over, if it ever existed. Dr. King once said that “The whole structure of American life must be changed.” We require political and moral revolution in this country to create a new and just world. As Thelemites, and especially as members of the Horus Maat Lodge, we know that the Aeon of Maat — of Truth and Justice — can only come when the Aeon of Horus — of Force and Fire — burns down the old order and its structures in the red hot flames of renewal. Only then can true Justice arrive and actual re-integration take place, and only then can a new world, built on the ashes of the old, begin to emerge.

The Powers That Be, the forces of restriction, will always uphold the old order in their fear and terror of the new. We know that “a dying mule always kicks the hardest.” In the letters that announced the Aeon of Maat in 1948, Frater Achad wrote of what he believed to be a “flaw” in the “original structure of physical matter,” a remnant of an originary Fall; he wrote that “the nucleus of certain atoms was unstable.” He thought that the “nuclei of the unstable atoms had to be destroyed in order to correct the original physical flaw,” something that had begun with the incoming of the Atomic Age. Kenneth Grant expanded on this by suggesting that the atomic bomb had actually opened a gateway for a massive influx of Nightside forces into human consciousness, which threatened to engulf us unless we could apply the proper keys.

Long before the bomb, the true originary flaw of our country was the sin of restriction that is white supremacy and systemic racism, which since the beginning has been the unstable nucleus of our nation’s history, the history of an American Nightmare. With Achad, we believe that to correct this flaw in the structure, the nuclei of the unstable atoms have to be destroyed. We should not be surprised that the locked-up power that is unleashed during this process can be destructive, and we can’t let our fear cause us to try and tamp down this energy. We must become conduits for it. Grant wrote that “those only are immune from contagion who can enter Nu’s ark as totally polarized beings”; he refers here to the traditional belief in the primordial human being as androgynous. However, “polarized” is often a word that is thrown about today as a phrase for our deeply divided society. We believe that the “polarized beings” who might help to eliminate the contagion of white supremacy and restriction are only those who know that now is not a time for moderation, but a time to take sides in a struggle to change the whole structure of American life.

The Horus Maat Lodge believes that the next evolutionary step in human consciousness is homo veritas, the future human being who is both individual and collective, attuned to the needs and well-being of both itself and all of humanity. But homo veritas itself must be “polarized” if it is ever to emerge against the forces of restriction and oppression that today strike at the heart of our society. We believe that the future collective human being cannot emerge from a supposedly “neutral” or generic humanity (which almost always means white, male, straight, and privileged), but from the rejected and the wounded of our society, from the poor and dispossessed who take to the streets every day to declare that we will no longer tolerate oppression. The rejected are the seed-gestalt of the new human being, and we will take the lead in forging our new world through the Force and Fire of our struggle for Justice.

93/696 – N’Aton.