In 1948 Charles Stansfeld Jones, a disciple of Crowley, declared that the Aeon of Horus was abortive and that an Aeon of Maat had commenced. Jack Parsons, another follower of Crowley, produced what he described as an additional fourth chapter of Liber AL vel Legis, indicative of a feminine magical current of the goddess Babalon. During the 1970s, Margaret Ingalls (or “Nema”) entered into correspondence with Kenneth Grant, founder of the Typhonian Order. She put forth a similar idea – that the world has now moved not into an Aeon of Horus, but an Aeon of Maat, or Horus-Maat. The theme was developed by Grant in his Typhonian Trilogies, and the general idea is that two Aeons, Horus and Maat, run concurrently, inside and outside of time as terrestrial and magical Aeons.
Timing is vital in magick and the roots of magick and of civilisation are immersed in man’s realisation of the ‘space marks’, the need to mark out time. From the very beginning this was based on a detailed observation of nature. It is impossible to separate magick from astrology and it is only in relatively recent times that magick and astrology were separated from science and astronomy.
The earliest recorded principles of magick and astrology, usually attributed to the Chaldeans, were based on the monthly cycles of the Moon. Lunar and Stellar astrology go hand in hand, for as the Moon passes through the 12 signs of the Tropical Zodiac each month she also passes across the fields of the great constellations. This is reflected in the polymorphous Gods of ancient Egypt. While Thoth, the Recording Angel and the originator of language, learning and writing, was originally a Moon God, Horus marked out the seasons, the festivals, the reigns of the pharaohs as well as the census of the population, by making notches on a palm branch. It is said there were 28 divisions on the branch of time, comparable not only to the 28 days of the Moon’s cycle but also to the vertebrae of the spinal column. Horus has countless forms and aspects, but the form most relevant to this matter of the Aeons is that of Hormaku. Hormaku is Lord of the Two Horizons, and has a special relation with the Sphinx of Egypt – which itself is a marker of the great wheels or cycles or time known as the precession of the equinoxes.
We can place the Lion at the beginning of a great wheel of the equinoxes, signifying an Age or Aeon of about 12,000 years ago when the Sun rose at the spring equinox in the constellation of Leo. At the autumnal equinox the Sun then rose in the opposite sign of Aquarius. In the Age of Aquarius (the present age) the Sun rises in Aquarius at the spring equinox, and in Leo at the autumnal equinox. So on this cosmic clock of 26,000 years, we are now at 6pm – the precise midpoint, the ‘fall’ of the grand year.
To imagine that any individual person can do anything that will make any difference to these great wheels of time is a highly romantic notion. On the other hand, any person that becomes a Magister Templi (Master of the Temple in an occult system of Initiation) can create a magical Aeon. In Greek, the word Aeon not only signifies a great age or time but also has the meaning of a magical temple. The Master of the Temple is the Master of Time and of all of the vehicles of the Self. Such a person identifies themselves with the temple they have built, and thus the Aeon. (There is a link between the words ‘temple’ and ‘temporal’, and the magical grade of Magister Templi is associated with Saturn or Time.) This will be true at least for all those that inhabit that Aeon and that Temple. When man first began to build temples and shrines they were inseparable from their physical locations, the ‘spirit of the place’, and the cycles of time as measured by the Moon and stars in relation to the Earth.
What of the present times, the New Aeon? Firstly, since Horus is the Initiator and measurer of all cycles and Aeons of time, it cannot be said that any particular Age or Aeon is an ‘Aeon of Horus’. The meaning of the present age is defined by Aquarius rising at the spring equinox, and Leo at the fall or the autumnal equinox. Together, these form the image of the Woman and Beast referred to in Liber AL vel Legis and intuited by Nietzsche in the fourth and final section of his Zarathustra writings. It is the image of the Sphinx, called Hormaku by the ancient Egyptians. This Aeon or Age is referred to specifically as Hrumachis in Liber AL vel Legis. The magical image of the Aeon we have now fully entered is that of Hormaku, for that is the God that is imaged forth in the heavens, who will preside for more than 2000 years until the Sun enters the constellation of Capricorn at the spring equinox. And since we are at the exact midpoint (or ‘fall’) of the great precessional year, then we certainly have entered an Aeon of Maat, or Horus-Maat.
