Cakes of Light pt.1 - reagents

vel Communio Sanctorum

Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law.

Eucharistic magick is a staple of the Magician's regular practice. In De Cultu from Liber Aleph, Crowley instructs, "Neglect not the daily Miracle of the Mass, either by the Rite of the Gnostic Catholic Church, or that of the Phoenix." In the Sixth Article of the Creed of the Thelemites, we recite, "And, forasmuch as meat and drink are transmuted in us daily into spiritual substance, I believe in the Miracle of the Mass." In Liber ABA Crowley devotes some chapters to the Eucharist and the Bloody Sacrifice. Crowley wrote that 

    A Eucharist of some sort should most assuredly be consummated daily by every magician, and he should regard it as the main sustenance of his magical life. It is of more importance than any other magical ceremony, because it is a complete circle. The whole of the force expended is completely re-absorbed; yet the virtue is that vast gain represented by the abyss between Man and God. 

    The magician becomes filled with God, fed upon God, intoxicated with God. Little by little his body will become purified by the internal lustration of God; day by day his mortal frame, shedding its earthly elements, will become in very truth the Temple of the Holy Ghost. Day by day matter is replaced by Spirit, the human by the divine; ultimately the change will be complete; God manifest in flesh will be his name. 

    This is the most important of all magical secrets that ever were or are or can be. To a Magician thus renewed the attainment of the Knowledge and Conversation of the Holy Guardian Angel becomes an inevitable task; every force of his nature, unhindered, tends to that aim and goal of whose nature neither man nor god may speak, for that it is infinitely beyond speech or thought or ecstasy or silence. Samadhi and Nibbana are but its shadows cast upon the universe. 

All this is mentioned to illustrate the importance that Crowley placed upon this regular ritual. This ritual action is one of the more obvious borrows of Crowley from earlier traditions, taken and advanced in his way and with roots that go into pre-history. In antecedent traditions ritual sacrifices were similarly emphasized. Both the Pentateuch and the Gospels place bloody sacrifice and breaking bread in central roles for popular celebration. Just the same, The Book of the Law has somewhere between 7 and 11 verses devoted to this ritual. This stands out in The Book of the Law as being the most detailed and tangible exhortation. Coupled with Crowley's emphasis it is surprising that Eucharistic magick is not a more common practice in Thelemic culture than other ritual actions such as the Pentagram Ritual, Liber Resh, Raja Yoga, or whatever it is that OTO does. It is also surprising that the recipe is approached relatively casually despite it being the main course of OTO activity where, by contrast, all other minutiae of the Gnostic Mass is deliberated over endlessly.

In this essay I want to go into the recipe a little more aggressively with some inevitable interpretation of the verses in question. It is my goal to present a recipe that is more textual and tastier, albeit slightly more involved. I understand that the production of cakes can be quite simple, but I hope the reader will entertain this more detailed version if only because the simpler recipes deviate in pretty significant ways from the recipe in Liber AL, which I will explain.

I  want to enjoin my fellow Thelemites to be more observant of De Cultu and present how this might be done without the difficulty that a Gnostic Mass can be (when aiming for daily communication!) or the timing inconvenience of the Mass of the Phoenix. 

Cakes of Light have been colloquially called "death cookies," in jest, but a cake is not a cookie. Cookies are pretty easy to make – mix up flour, sugar, egg, butter and water, then bake. Notice though that nowhere in Liber AL are any of those ingredients mentioned! Liber AL Cap III V. 23 reads, 

For perfume mix meal & honey & thick leavings of red wine: then oil of Abramelin and olive oil, and afterward soften & smooth down with rich fresh blood.

We'll go into these one by one. A big difference between my recipe and others' is the attention paid to the reagents. Most importantly I emphasize the observation of Liber AL's verbiage with reference to historical recipes and implications. I also encourage the use of rawer ingredients, not out of some deference to orthorexic magicians but rather because the level of purification and filtration of modern foodstuffs has the negative effect of removing natural yeasts from them. Additionally, many store-bought products identify as something that they are not. A driving theory of this more elaborate recipe is that the yeast that causes the Cake to rise, a crucial symbolical action, comes from the components. 

Meal is any grain that has been milled.  Oftentimes in English literature you will have reference to corn. The Golden Bough uses this term consistently, but bear in mind that corn (as depicted here) is a new world grain and Europeans say "corn" to refer to any whole grain. Take for instance the very relevant early British rhyme, John Barleycorn: There was three kings into the east,/ Three kings both great and high,/ And they hae/ sworn a solemn oath/ John Barleycorn should die./ There was three men come out o' the west their fortunes for to try,/ And these three men made a solemn vow, John Barleycorn must die,/ They ploughed, they sowed, they harrowed him in, throwed clods upon his head,/ Til these three men were satisfied John Barleycorn was dead. The story of the runaway gingerbread homunculus is also a curious example of creating living beings from grain. Crowley wrote "... not only do I hold the cult of John Barleycorn to be the only true religion, but have established his worship anew; in the last three years branches of my organisation have sprung up all over the world to celebrate the ancient rite."

A mill is a big grinding stone that crushes up grain mechanically, making simple and quick what would otherwise be a huge pain. It was a revolutionary industrial invention in the ancient world and whole cities sprung up around simple mills that were powered by streams, donkeys or Conan. It crushed the grain to a certain fineness, but not necessarily that of flour. Flour is a powder, meal is grainy. If you buy packaged meal you'll find it is very grainy. Some stores have finer grain grain; I purchase "stoneground wheat" from local stores, but Cream of Wheat or farina could be considered equivalents. Again, the reason I do this is because the verse says "meal," not flour, and I hope that a rawer reagent might still have residual yeast in it. In the New Commentaries to The Book of the Law Crowley writes that Meal is "ordinary wheaten flour," but again for purposes of having rawer yeastier reagents of greater historical approximation (even to Crowley's time) we're going to avoid bleached or “enhanced” pulverized powder. Yeast is often seen on foodstuffs as a simple white powder, the same white powder you see on grapes you buy. Unless they're chemically washing or bleaching the stuff, which I doubt, then that yeast is still there and still alive. I utilize wheat because of its flavor and historical accessibility to the Mediterranean region. Other grains used by ancient man were spelt and barley. I have mixed these grains before, but always keeping my meal mix at least 3/4 wheat. 

Honey is bee vomit, nature’s finest excrement. Honey is very good for you, not only as a treatment for allergies but also because of its antibacterial quality. In the good old days it was a go-to for covering wounds. It also lasts forever without refrigeration - perfectly preserved honey has been found in Egyptian tombs. Very raw honey can also have yeast that would have been carried into the admixture by bees, but you're going to have to go local to get honey that raw. Honey has to be a little filtered unless you like eating bug legs, but the honey you get at any grocery store is extremely processed. Further, it is usually pasteurized, which means boiled, which would also kill any yeasts and de-nature components whose properties we want to carry into our cakes. If nothing else be warned that most mass market honey is not honey at all but is actually honey-flavored Chinese sugar goo. I know those little plastic bears are cute, but do not trust their dead eyes. Check with your local hippies or utilize google to find a honey supplier near you. Shop around because some of those yippies think its worth its weight in gold!

Thick leavings of red wine is where it gets a lot more involved and where the most inappropriate shortcuts are most popular. "Leavings" is an archaic term found in The Book of the Law. Crowley commented that "the 'beeswing' of port should be good." Beeswing comes from "bee's wing" and is a residue that you might find in the bottom of a bottle of port, a red dessert wine. The issue is that beeswing is seldom thick - being crystallized - and increasingly rare in this mechanically filtered world we live in. I have purchased an embarrassing amount of bottles of wine in my life and only found residual goo or beeswing in a few. To compensate for the scarcity of this essential component there are two popular alternatives, both inventive and both wrong.

One technique is to dump into a saucepan a bottle of red wine or port and boil it on very low heat for a long ass time. This will boil out the ethanol and reduce the liquid into a goop that is thick, of red wine, and left behind, which really sounds like what the verse calls for except that it denatures the product and kills the yeast. Another increasingly common course is to simply use Cream of Tartar. Cream of Tartar is a hundreds of years old product of alchemical distillation that you find in the works of Paracelsus, Basil Valentine and others. It is the purified powder that you get from lees, which means lies as in the sediment that lies at the bottom of a bottle. Because it's processed from something yeasty Cream of Tartar has an effect on dough that makes it lighter. If you mix it with baking soda: baking powder! But there are a few problems with Cream of Tartar. First, it's not "thick." Second, it's not "leavings" as I'm about to define that term. Third and perhaps most importantly, it's not even "of red wine!” ALL commercial Cream of Tartar is made from white grapes, not red, and the grapes that are used for making Cream of Tartar are not even used to make wine, they are cultivated specifically for the production of Cream of Tartar. I was shocked when I read this in an industry article and I wrote several manufacturers and they confirmed it. Despite the red grapes depicted on the little label, it just ain’t so.

I propose that "leavings" means leavening lees. In the practice of viticulture, the art of producing wine, one first jumps up and down in a big tub of grapes. Then, you let it sit there for a minute and the yeast will go crazy and the whole mixture will start to bubble. The first filtration takes place which removes what's called the "must." Must includes leaves, sticks, and grape skin. Subsequent filtrations remove any other residue and once it is done the wine is barreled or bottled and left to age. Fermentation, which is what we call when yeast eats sugars and excretes ethanol, has to be done before bottling as the container expands with the farts and the heat of the reactions taking place inside. In modern winemaking the filtration removes all residue before bottling, which is why lees are now so rare. If you find lees in a bottle the wine is called sur lie, on lees, and the lees are dead yeast. Dead yeast does not leaven, which means to lift up as in levee, levity or levitate. Yeast is what causes sugars to turn into alcohol and also what causes bread to rise (because of the trapped gas). We need those lees to leaven in order to be leavings. To acquire leavings you therefore need to get what is taken out of the last filtration (after the must has been filtered out). So unless you're cozy with a viticulturalist, here's what you do.

Watch this video! And/or follow these simple instructions. Get a thing of Welch's grape juice without any additives. Drink a cup of it for space for foam for burping. Then add two teaspoons of regular old yeast, though your local liquor store should have wine yeast available which will get your product to higher concentrations of ethanol. Very little yeast is necessary to ferment the wine, but adding more yeast can get you more leavings. Give it a shake and then let it be. Within an hour you'll see it frothing. Within two or three hours you'll need to start burping the container as it'll expand pretty rapidly. You want to keep it sealed to prevent alien microbes from floating in and contaminating the concoction, but you'll want to leave a little crack in it overnight and it'll aspirate on its own.

In a few weeks it'll be well fermented and there'll be a good amount of leavings on the bottom, meaning yeast that has exhausted the sugar, sunk to the bottom but is still mostly alive. Bottle the wine and leave a swish in the jug and slosh it around to absorb that yeast. You should be able to get about one ounce of thick liquid leavings. Alternatively just cut the jug open and spoon out the goop. And don't ditch the wine! If you don't or won't or can't drink it then your leavings are technically not "of wine."

Oil of Abramelin can be complex to make yourself. I purchase Abramelin Oil locally but it is available online. Crowley's from the commentary to Liber AL:

• 8 parts cinnamon essential oil 

• 4 parts myrrh essential oil 

• 2 parts galangal essential oil 

• 7 parts olive oil 

And mix! Be careful in procuring these component reagents as much of the cinnamon and galangal oil on the market are usually just cheaper substitutes. The final product could be quite expensive depending on the level of quality you desire. This will easily be the most expensive ingredient, but it is used very sparingly so an investment will last for some time. Remember that Magick is the Royal Art, so don't skimp or you're liable to be purchasing and producing trash. 

And olive oil is a pretty easy get, but remember that the goal is to get rawer and yeastier products and olives, like grapes, can have a residual yeast on them. Don't get "extra virgin olive oil" just because it sounds sexier. Like mass market honey it's filtered to death and most products available are fakes as a big expose in 2014 showed. CBS did a special on how to identify the real stuff. Regular olive oil is great, it's distinctly cloudier.

Rich fresh blood is the last ingredient and there's some ambiguity with how it becomes present in the final product. What it is comes up in the next verse: The best blood is of the moon, monthly: then the fresh blood of a child, or dropping from the host of heaven: then of enemies; then of the priest or of the worshippers: last of some beast, no matter what. So there are options! 

Blood is the sixth component and clergy often call it "Ingredient X." Liber AL is ambiguous as to whether the final product contains fresh blood or blood that has been mixed with batter and reduced to ash. OTO's policy for cakes is that they either have "livestock blood obtained legally from a butcher shop or a farm" or "Ash from Cakes of Light made according to any reasonable interpretation of [Liber AL Cap III v 23] or [Liber AL Cap III v 25]," so OTO adopts both interpretations of the method of introduction. Obviously there are more sourcing options for X going directly into the batter, but not for OTO events unless they’re made ash first. OTO’s reasoning here, like usual, is legal, since the reduction of bloodied cakes to ash denatures the X to where courts do not regard it as being what it may be. But, it is ambiguous in Liber AL if the ash is gotten from burned bloodied cakes or from burned bloodied batter. So simply take a cake, get your blood on it, burn it on a coal or an electric burner, grind it with a mortar and pestle and add the ash to batter. Don't fret about the coal's Potassium Nitrate (saltpeter), which has the stigma of suppressing sexual appetite. That was bad information from the early 20th century and it's not added to corn flakes anymore, nor is it given to soldiers to make them less rapey. I utilize a coal to burn up a small cake that I've bloodied (and that I use for incense), then I grind it up and add that ash to a new batter that I prepare. Bringing ash from the last cake of one batch into the next batch establishes an alchemical continuity. Continuity of reagents is a traditional consideration, such as with using starter yeast from previous doughs and vintages, and also with the Holy Oil described in Exodus which contains a drop from a previous batch, transferring the essence into the new medium.

The burning of the host would be sacrilege to a Christian, the sort of black magick that they were warned of in De Defectibus, but it has its roots in the classical worship of the Daemon in the manner of Socrates where one would burn honey cakes as an offering to their Daemon on their birthday. This is the reason birthdays were outlawed as a pagan practice under the reign of Constantine, a capital crime that was prosecuted for a thousand years. This was likely in deference to 1 Corinthians 10:21 and the understanding of Christ as the liaison for man with god rather than his personal spirit. This tradition is carried in Thelema explicitly in the above referenced Mass of the Phoenix, Chapter 44 of The Book of Lies, where the magician burns one cake and bleeds on and consumes the other. The former is explained in Chapter 62 of the same book as the one that “illustrates the profit drawn from the scheme of incarnation” and the latter “illustrates the use of the lower life to feed the higher life.” The Mass of the Phoenix is therefore a good ritual to implement if you’re down to two cakes and you want to enjoy a sacrament and end up with a burnt host for your next batch. However, if cakes you consume have ash from a previous batch in them then you’d need to first be gifted ashes from another’s batch in order to begin your own continuity of reagents.

For further reading I strongly recommend Sister Kimbell's essay on beeswing, though obviously I very much disagree with her recommendations for substituting leavings her research is great. T Polyphilus' Discourse on the Miracle of the Mass is great for information and reflection, as is, of course, Crowley's chapters in Liber ABA, Of the Eucharist and of the Art of Alchemy and Of the Bloody Sacrifice: and Matters Cognate. 

Love is the law, love under will.