Having established hir own burning source of Black Light, the new magician should begin to pour it forth into the various alchemical vessels of the Black Art which comprise hir own arcana. These contain, focus, and distill the radiant liquid darkness so that it may be combined, recombined, and transmuted into the potent elixirs of intoxicating acausal power. The twelve ‘vessels’ here presented are one arrangement of such tools from which the magician may drink a draught of inspiration:
The Vessel of Conjuration
Out of the coagulated Black Light, the magician can congeal the manifest forms of hir desires. Illuminated from within, these forms purified through Black Flame take shape according to the perfection of the conjurer’s design. The patterns which crystallize from the liquid light are determined by the particular arrangement of will, desire, and belief which acts as a seed, nourished by the heat and power of the conjurer. Drawing the dark radiance toward or into hirself acting as a medium to be imprinted with hir intent, the conjurer actualizes the imaginal as if from nothing – in seemingly acausal fashion, that which she wills and desires comes into being as if of its own accord. This vessel functions as a magical womb, in which the conjurer can grow and breed arcane entities endowed from birth with the instinctive imperatives of hir own desires. Yet, the shining darkness of this womb also shimmers with a mayavic attraction, enamoring those whose attention feeds the conjurer more power.
The Vessel of Volition
The will of the magician can be regarded as a vehicle for conveying hir intent through the furthest reaches of reality, empowered by the internal Black Flame, navigating the shining voids by invisible Black Light. The various desires and aims of the magician become the realms to which she voyages, exploring the obscure and uncharted territories of experience. Such a perspective on the will removes the essentialist bias toward an underlying ‘true’ will, replacing it instead with the realization of the will as another magical tool, although an indispensable one. The conscious choices of the magician hirself determine to where and what the will is directed; its maintenance and its power are distinct from that of the consciousness and the magician, and yet it is therefore able to be brought to bear directly upon reality. It is through the will that magician enacts hir decisions, and yet the magician can also act upon and modify the will.
The Vessel of Opposition
Entry into this vessel is the embrace of the dualities and polarities that characterize the manifest, each including the other and striving against their own limitations through it. The alchemy of antithesis proceeds personally and aeonically through the dialectic of contraries; participation in it furthers not only the dialectic of history but the dialectic of the magician’s own self-overcoming. The attitude of the warrior who engages in the combat with the same attitude of devoted non-attachment one would dedicate to a favorite game or pastime known to also improve one’s capacities, capabilities, and qualities, and ennoble the self, is appropriate to embracing the possibilities inherent in this arena of strife. Each warrior becomes a microcosm of the self-transgression of the entire aeon, and achieves the gnosis of aeonic warfare in so far as this process can be discerned within both profane and esoteric conflict.
The Vessel of Perception
Within the depths and pools of this vessel, the seer scryes into the arcane mysteries and aeonic omens. Having internalized the symbolic language of the esoteric, its glyphs and messages can be read by the Black Light, reflected in the scintillating dark radiance of its mirrored surface. This is the gnosis of the total microcosm apprehended by its own watcher as if from outside – the function of the arcana as ‘magical mirror.’ In this mirror, the watcher can even behold itself, thereby realizing the Gnosis of the Watchers Enfleshed.
The Vessel of Coherence
A system open to the endlessly reflexive complexity of other systems becomes an ever-flowing vessel of ceaselessly increasing and self-complicating information, a recursive pattern which embodies the self-referential nature of consciousness. In opening the self to this vessel, the self can become like it, overflowing with creative power and potentiality. This spontaneous hypostasis of the will to exist echoes the joy and pleasure of coming-into-being throughout reality. Those who can resonate with it and contribute to it are similarly enhanced in turn; thus it exemplifies the endless Vessel of grail-lore. Its secrets are those of abundance and plenty, but therein is also its seduction and risk.
The Vessel of Dispersion
This is the broken vessel, the shards of a closed system already and always subject to breakdown, waste, disorganization, loss, and decay. As patterns of redundancy devour its possibility and potential, it drags into itself all it can to renew its failing continuity. It is a hungry vessel the effect of which is to degrade patterns and scatter their essence. Its powers are those of extremism and excess but also of insufficiency and lack. Even in its imbalance it is imbalanced, and tends toward its own undoing – yet therein is its use to the magician who knows how to control it. In dispersing the Black Light it spreads dark radiance further, but loosens its focus, further particularizing it but also diluting it with obstructions, embodying cosmic entropy and all that can be analogized to it.
The Vessel of Vitality
To drink of this vessel is to restore oneself with the Elixir of Life. Its manifold powers reify and refine the vital force in a variety of forms and channels: the vril, the od, orgone, chi, and many more. It seeps into the physical and the organic, enabling the growth, development, and subsistence of living forms, which are themselves also its vessels. Mastery of it thereby also affords measures of control over these forces, both within the self and in others. The Vessel itself is nested, all its formulations within itself, and each with a multitude also within. As Life itself, its endless cells also embody Life Itself, recursively, forever and without end.
The Vessel of Senescence
The cup of death contains the bitter venoms of corrosion and corruption not merely caustic to the vital forms of life, but invasive to the alignment of consciousness and sentience within these patterns. Drinking of it offers release, and the dangerous solace of Lethe. Those who can transmute its poison into universal medicine thus achieve the triumphal death, and become masters of that ultimate toxin which is homeopathic medicine for the soul and spirit. This is the power of total transformation, survival beyond life, the nourishment of strange aeons and the intrusion of unguessed possibilities. Its rewards transgress eternal life, offering the undeath and unlife which embrace and yet consume and transform it: the gnosis of the empty tomb.
The Vessel of Mind
That alchemical medium produced with the union of the bone staff and skull-cup of carnality, within this vessel are sealed all the secrets of cognition, vivified and transmuted by the single infinitesimal drop of Black Light radiating with consciousness. Enkindling the Black Flame within this vessel illuminates the Mind and transforms it from a passive fluid into an active principle of concentration and transmission of arcane power. Reflected in its waters are the macrocosmic forms and patterns of reality; when illuminated from within by the dark radiance, these forms may cast their own shadows onto the manifest. Abstractions made real, the ideal made actual: such is the magical power of the Vessel of Mind.
The Vessel of Obsession
The breeding womb of the ids, filled with the noisome and strange creatures which flourish in depths of briny, atavistic fluid. The alchemical monsters which boil forth out of the variously contorted chambers of this complex and sinous vessel embody the bizarre shapes and forgotten forms of primal atavisms and novel mutations alike. Their contortions may allure, fascinate, repel, and horrify, but they stir the waters of mind, sense, and sympathy; their diets are for each idiosyncratic – unique conflations of appetite the hungers and thirsts of which draw them to unexpected channels of reality. Their ecosystem can, with care, be inter-related to the broader realm of the ids, a vast network of such vessels all interconnected beneath the surface of reality and flowing with radiant darkness. The peculiar adaptations of these ids might offer unguessed powers to the sorcerer who successfully taps them, breeding them into the less primal lineages of mental beast, or learning to emulate their qualities.
The Vessel of Substance
The First Matter and Base Matter of the operation, the Great Work is based upon and dependent upon this indescribable and ubiquitous reality, numberless vessels of which provide the substrate for all formations and formulations of the rest. Of itself it has no value, worth, or interest, but when utilized as the means for the alchemical transmutation, it becomes indispensable. By its nature it distinguishes the worthy from the unworthy, since only for the worthy is it worthy itself. Thus, to integrate a gnosis of it is also to know the use of this most obscure and arcane vessel.
The Vessels of Structure
It is in their arcane arrangement that the significance of these Vessels is understood, whose role is to separate the qualities of the Matter. Indispensable to the operations of distinction and discrimination, their patterns and possibilities are infinitely more diverse and various than the already infinite set of Vessels of Substance: they are the base elements, phases, and possibilities of the Great Work. Their processes reveal the fundamental laws by which the Matter can be organized and transformed.
Arcanus Ordo Nigri Solis (AONS) 