The Book of Walls: Passions
Passions are often equated with sexuality and its urges but that is only part of the picture. Passions are what drives us; but to a one those passions are encoded into the Illusion which binds us and instead of being expressions of ourselves they are moulds into which we are impressed.
Every Wakeful being has passions: Kether's passion is to rule, Golab's passion is to torture, Pazuzu's passion is insects etc. No Wakeful being is by necessity reduced to a single passion, but usually one passion emerges as the driving force of such a being. The enforcement of the Illusion might well have become the driving passion of the Demiurge; it may even have replaced the Demiurge' original passion(s), and the realization of that finally made him leave.
But the Illusion has us struggle with a set of basic passions which are so deeply rooted in our illusory existence that they govern our very lives. Freud identified a sexual urge and a destructive urge. The urges to breathe, feed and to stay alive are in us as well as the urge to excel, to see ourselves as being better than the others. Our passions all have become urges which drive us. Passions are powerful, a wealth of untapped energy, but our illusory configuration makes us playthings of these powers instead of putting them at our behest. Instead of using our human capacity for sexuality as a means of glorious communication and communion with each other we let it make us debase ourselves and others, use and abuse, search eternally for weak and fleeting pleasures which serve no purpose. Instead of using our human capacity for wild, unchecked destruction as a means of change and creation we only destroy for destruction's sake and neither learn anything from it nor do we create better things in place of what falls before us. We could be builders and destroyers of worlds but instead we let the mere shadow of the powers which are our birthright govern our every deed.
In Reality passions define one's being; or rather, one's being expresses itself through passions. Everything a Wakeful being does is somehow geared toward his or her passions. All efforts of Geburah both inside and outside of the Illusion are at least indirectly concerned with the imposition of judgement. Tiphareth's very being is suffused with coordination of events, things, and information; art is also among her passions. The various incarnations of Astaroth each express a single passion of his; the Antichrist as the opponent, the seducer as perverter, the beast as hate.
Each human soul, even in its captivity, has access to passions. Apart from the perverted passions which govern our lives as the aforementioned primal urges we may have other, subtler passions: the creation of art, collecting certain things, love for a certain area or person(s), something that makes our lives worthwhile. It is possible to glean some information about one's Real nature from the passions one develops in life, weak and shadowy as they may be if compared to the Real thing. Through the study of the magical art of Passions we may be able to help ourselves along on the path to Awakening. However, our primal urges remain strong, and almost all magicians on this path fail to see the significance of the 'weaker' passions. They lose themselves in sexual or destructive powergames and thus fall into another of the Demiurge's devious traps which only serves to enforce the Illusion.