One of the ideas Frances Yates explores in Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition is the intersection between hermetism and heliocentrism.
I said a little while back that the hermetic universe was small and geocentric, which couldn’t be more wrong. Giordano Bruno in particular was really excited by heliocentrism. He felt it marked a spiritual shift and signaled the revival of the true ancient Egyptian religion which was oriented toward the Sun as the Second God or demiurge.
He also grasped the significance of heliocentrism for the size of the universe. If the Earth is in motion, but the background of stars does not appear to move, then that implies that the stars are much further away than people once thought. This was an enormous shock to people in the 16th and 17th centuries, as the revealed universe dwarfed the human perspective.
Bruno viewed himself as the prophet of this new spiritual dawn, which entailed the moral and religious reform of mankind.
In 1919 Charles Stansfeld Jones published an essay in Equinox III:1 called “Stepping out of the Old Aeon into the New” in which he said, “The Sun does not die, as the ancients thought; It is always shining, always radiating Light and Life. Stop for a moment and get a clear conception of this Sun, how He is shining in the early morning, shining at mid-day, shining in the evening, and shining in the night. Have you got this idea clearly in your minds? You have stepped out of the Old AEon into the New.”
But in his De Umbris Idearum of 1582, Bruno had already pointed out that the intellect does not cease to illuminate, and the visible sun does not cease to illuminate, just because we do not turn towards it. He intended this in a spiritual and not primarily physical sense.
The “New Aeon” was inaugurated in the 16th century, and its prophet was Bruno, not Crowley.
It strikes me that Plato’s philosophy derives at least in part from the recognition of how bad the consequences of civil and political unrest can be. He lived through the aftermath of the Peloponnesian War and saw first-hand what happens when tyranny and demagoguery gain the upper hand. This explains in part why he rejected the mysticism of Parmenides in favor of being able to give a clear account of shared reality. He saw for himself what happens when everyone has their own reality and words mean whatever people want them to mean. The picture wasn’t pretty.
Hermetism and Gnosticism, by contrast, were Pax Romana philosophies. They bear a superficial resemblance to Platonism, but really they are about individual, ineffable experiences of ultimate reality. As the Roman Empire falls apart, these individualistic, mystical philosophies are upstaged by Catholicism with its emphasis on the Christian Church, not the individual, as the basic unit. Hermetism and Gnosticism eventually experience a resurgence, but only under the protective umbrella of Medici mercantile wealth and a sympathetic Borgia Pope.
To put it another way, Plato did not seem to take peace for granted. Peace requires negotiation, and negotiation requires language which is able to give an account of shared reality. We don’t just stare in wide-eyed wonder at the truth; we have to be able to bring back an account. Most of Socrates’s interlocutors experience this responsibility as an imposition, as do many of the privileged today. But Plato grasped that to be freed of this burden did not lead to individual freedom any more than being freed of air resistance allowed a bird to soar. The opposite of rationality is not individual expression; it’s just violence.
I recently did a video called DIY Eucharistic Magick wherein I broke down how to create your own ritual eucharist with items you probably have at home. For those who want a reminder of that procedure without having to watch the whole video again, I present this little cheatsheet.
Step One: Preliminaries
Chastity: Keep firmly in mind before, during, and immediately after the ritual that its purpose is to bring about union between you and your Holy Guardian Angel.
Fasting: Fast for a few hours beforehand.
Aspiration: Bring a degree of seriousness or religiosity to what you are about to do.
Step Two: Construct your Altar
You will need:
An altar, preferably something waist-height while standing, but any table top with also do.
A candle.
Some incense.
Some water and salt for purification.
Elements for your eucharist—something to eat and something to drink are good.
Step Three: Prepare the Temple
Keeping in mind the three preliminaries mentioned above, purify and consecrate your temple space. This can be done in the following way:
Purification: Mixing some salt and some water, say, “Let the salt of earth admonish the water to bear the virtue of the great sea. Mother, be thou adored!” Then spring the water around you and on your altar and perhaps over you. Say, “For pure will, unassuaged of purpose, delivered from the lust of result is every way perfect.”
Consecration: Lighting the incense, say, “Let the fire and the air make sweet the world. Father, be thou adored.” Cense around you and over you and say, “I am uplifted in thine heart, and the kisses of the stars rain hard upon thy body.”
Step Four: Declare your Intent
Take an oath before the gods, stating what you are about to do. The following is one of several ways to do this:
“Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law. It is my will to consummate this eucharist. That I may fortify my gross and subtle bodies thereby. That I may accomplish the great work. Love is the law, love under will.”
Step Five: Consecrate the Eucharist
Declare what the eucharist is, what you are about to do with it, and what the final outcome will be. You can use the IAO formula for this.
Declare what the eucharist is (I): In some sense declare the food to be the body of God and the drink to be the blood of God. In my example in the video, I treat the bread as the body and the water as the vitality or movement of God. Use your imagination here depending on what you choose as elements.
Declare what you will do with them (A): This ritual structure requires you to transform the elements in some way, usually breaking them or perhaps burning them. This can be looked at as a sacrifice or a transmutation. Declare that you will do this. Offering them to the Sun is a good analogy, as the Sun represents both unification and destruction.
Declare what the final outcome is (O): In the IAO formula, O is resurrection or eternal life. You can think of this as union with God/the Holy Guardian Angel. Declare that this is your ultimate purpose using words of your choice.
Step Six: The General Invocation
This is the invocation of the particular being or energy you hope to unite yourself with through the consumption of the eucharist. This could be a prayer of your creation to your Angel. It could be a prayer to Ra-Hoor-Khuit, such as I use in the video. It could be the “Unity uttermost showed!” portion of Liber AL. It could be the invocation of the Secret Lord from the Anthem of the Gnostic Mass. This is an invocation of your highest idea of divinity. Be creative.
Step Seven: Destruction of the Eucharist
“Sacrifice” the eucharist somehow. This is the enactment of the “A” portion you described above. You could break the food, combine the elements somehow, maybe burn a portion, mix it with blood, bodily fluids, or smoke. Use your imagination to transform/transmute the elements, thereby releasing their spiritual potentials.
Step Eight: Consumption of the Eucharist
Again with the Preliminaries mentioned above in mind, solemnly consume the elements of the eucharist. Observe a short moment of silence after.
Step Nine: Declare your Union with God
Using words and gestures of your choice, declare your union with the God invoked in Step Six. This is the enactment of the “O” portion you described above. You can cross your arms and say, “There is no part of me that is not of the gods” or “I am clothed with the body of flesh, I am one with the eternal or omnipotent god.” Or you can create something of your own.
And that’s all there is to it! I broke it out into more steps here than in the video, so hopefully it’s a little easier to understand.
If you use this method to create your own ritual, record and post it on Youtube or let me know! Good luck!
In my opinion what makes Thelema distinctive is not the occultism, not the ontology, not the ethics, not the individualism. It’s that he took the western occult tradition with its God as a creative artist and inflected it through a Nietzschean understanding of life.
Renaissance occultism is based upon a view of the cosmos where everything is ordered into spheres or levels with Earth as the focus. Natural magic is about drawing power or spiritus down from higher spheres into lower ones. “Cabalistic” magic is about ascending to superluminary spheres and mastering the angelic forces there—which tips over very easily into mysticism, as it does in Thelema. In short it’s based on a hierarchical, anthropocentric view of the universe as a kind of container focused on human affairs, and the container is overall not that large.
Angelic Hierarchies, Spheres, and the Hebrew Alphabet. From Robert Fludd, Utriusque cosmi, maioris scilicet et minoris, metaphysica, physica atque technica historia.
This view was largely replaced by the natural philosophy in the 17th and 18th centuries. According to this new view, the universe does not behave according to purposes but rather mechanisms. There are no “pulls” in the universe, only “pushes”. And the universe in which these abstract mathematical laws operate is vast enough to overwhelm the imagination and the human perspective all together. The picture of the universe generated by this natural philosophy ultimately left up in the air the place of humans in it. And with this disenchanted view of nature came a challenge to both religion and magic.
Rather than recoiling from this picture of nature into a kind of reenchanted fantasy about life, Crowley instead embraces it. The sheer enormity of the cosmos is one of the premises of Crowley’s view of reality, embodied in the goddess Nuit. The pure mathematical view of reality is not rejected either but embraced. Mathematics was part of occultism going back at least to Pico, but Crowley really makes it one of the main themes of his spirituality. So in other words rather than trying to hide from the implications of modernism, Crowley leans into them.
And he understands the fundamental spiritual problem in a very modernist way. The problem we face is not suffering, and it’s not ethics. These are pre-modern or early modern ways of looking at the problem. No, the main problem is meaning. It’s the senselessness of the world. Crowley was motivated by this experience of senselessness at least since he was a student at Cambridge, and he writes about it at least as late as Little Essays Toward Truth.
What then determines Tiphareth, the Human Will, to aspire to comprehend Neschamah, to submit itself to the divine Will of Chiah?
Nothing but the realisation, born sooner or later of agonising experience, that its whole relation through Ruach and Nephesch with Matter, i.e., with the Universe, is, and must be, only painful. The senselessness of the whole procedure sickens it. It begins to seek for some menstruum in which the Universe may become intelligible, useful and enjoyable. In Qabalistic language, it aspires to Neschamah.
Aleister Crowley, Little Essays toward Truth, “Man”
The way he understands a possible solution to senselessness is very modernist as well. The solution cannot be sought in reason. Reason operates according to the principle of sufficient reason, i.e., for any proposition F, there must be a ground G for it, or for any event B, there must be a sufficient explanation A. Putting the principle of sufficient reason at the center of human relating to the world is what generated the picture of a senseless, purely mechanical world in the first place. Therefore, reason—specifically the application of the principle of sufficient reason—must be limited, but to limit reason it must be transcended.
But—the transcendence of reason cannot interfere with the legitimate operation of reason within its own domain. Crowley is not looking to reenchant nature in some naive way. He accepts the findings of the scientific view of reality and even holds them to be axiomatic for his spirituality. Nor can the transcendence of reason be a mere animalistic “overcoming” of reason. One cannot simply will oneself to be irrational, for instance. Both of these avenues would represent a kind of fanaticism.
So Crowley has to manuever somehow between the Scylla of rationalism on the one hand and the Charybdis of dogmatism or fanaticism on the other.
This is a very modernist—specifically German Idealist—way of looking at things. When a person with a background in the philosophy of Kant, Fichte, Hegel, and Nietzsche hears Crowley talking about transcending “because,” they’re hearing a tune they could hum in their sleep.
And Crowley’s proposed solution to this problem is will. Will transcends reason. You cannot ask “why” of will. In and of itself it prevents the questioning but instead gives orders. It’s authoritative. This is how he avoids rationalism.
But will also represents the “true” self of the individual. It is not a mere replacement for Jehovah. It is not a projection of the law of the father. Nor is it exactly bodily or animal instinct. This is how Crowley avoids fanaticism.
Someone yesterday asked me about the meaning of Saturn and what Saturn represents.
Saturn is the Law of the Father. In any society you have certain institutions and practices which approximate to justice. They were created and codified over time by people’s experiences. But at some point these practices lose their experiential dimension and become habits. Instead of appearing as choices, they take on the appearance of facts. In the language of Hungarian Marxist Georg Lukacz, they become reified.
This is a necessary process. Due to the sheer complexity of experience, we have to simplify. We have to filter out information. If we were to treat every disagreement between any two parties each on its own terms, administering justice would become impractical. The perfect would become the enemy of the good. So instead we apply precedents.
Hierarchical systems are established to aim at some good. Instead of everyone aiming at a different good, we bring together the resources of many people to aim at a common good. In a liberal society (as opposed to a monarchy or dictatorship), the common good is abstract: freedom, the pursuit of happiness, etc. Private individuals are left to pursue concrete goods—e.g., the production of a particular experience or product—so long as that good does not contravene the more abstract goods defined by society at large (e.g., enslavement, child labor, etc.).
Hierarchies are functional to the extent that they reward the competent pursuit of the good that the hierarchy aims at and punish incompetence, greed, corruption. etc. So if you go above and beyond what is expected of you, if you personally sacrifice more in the pursuit of the collective good (whatever that may be), you should be rewarded with a promotion, a bonus, etc. Those that do not will remain in their position, will be fired, or will be otherwise punished.
That’s what I mean when I say the law of the father. The law of the father is not necessarily a law handed down by an older male figure. Rather it’s a universal structure of mind which is satisfied when, in the context of a hierarchy, a good deed is rewarded and a bad deed is punished.
The problem with hierarchies is that they become corrupted over time. So instead of being rewarded for good work, a person may be rewarded solely because they are the family member or friend of someone in charge. Likewise a person who comes up with a new, more efficient way of doing things is seen as a troublemaker or threat to those in charge and is punished instead of rewarded
Mythically this corruption is represented by an old man who is blind and who is easily swindled. Osiris is tricked by Set. Isaac is tricked by Jacob. King Hamlet is deceived by his brother Claudius. This is a concrete representation in an individual of what happens in a family, company, or nation over time. It becomes blind to the corruption growing within it. It becomes oblivious to the fact that it is no longer aiming at the good which was its original reason for existing. It exists just for the sake of existing, just for the sake of power. Instead of utilizing concrete practices for the purpose of reducing information and making more efficient decisions, it loses the principle of consciousness all together. This is represented by the loss of sight, the eye being identified with consciousness. The hierarchy no longer embodies freedom but instead becomes a blind mechanism.
And since the Father over time represents this loss, the principle of the Father is often tinged with melancholy.
This is why all institutions over time need to be revivified by consciousness. The Son must breathe life back into the Father or challenge the usurper of the Father’s crown. Antigone must challenge Creon. Socrates must challenge Athens. Jesus must challenge Rome. Hamlet must challenge Claudius. Martin Luther King Jr must challenge Jim Crow.
One of the conspicuous features of the coronavirus pandemic is how little control we have over the situation.
We’re facing a novel virus, one which has never infected human beings before. We have no vaccine. We have no treatments.
The one non-pharmacological intervention we do have—social distancing—is leaving a lot of people feeling powerless. They can’t engage in the activities that bring them pleasure. They can leave their houses only sparingly. All we’re left to do now is wait, and that can feel disempowering.
But even in situations that feel disempowering, we are duty-bound to understand circumstances as best we can and to bring them under our control.
Learn to understand clearly how best to manipulate the energies which you control to obtain the results most favourable to it from its relations with the part of the Universe which you do not yet control. Extend the dominion of your consciousness, and its control of all forces alien to it, to the utmost. Do this by the ever stronger and more skilful application of your faculties to the finer, clearer, fuller, and more accurate perception, the better understanding, and the more wisely ordered government, of that external Universe.
—Aleister Crowley, “Duty”
If you’re not a virologist or a physician, chances are it may feel as though there is very little to exert your control over. But times like this, when so much control has been taken away, it makes sense to concentrate on those things over which we still do have some or even complete control. One of those things is our dwellings.
As I said in my recent video, in order to keep your body safe, you need to keep the virus out of your home. Another way of saying this is that you must expand your sense of self so that it also includes the place where you dwell.
This is not a dimension of doing one’s will that should be taken lightly in any case. Commenting on the Magus card in the Book of Thoth, Crowley says:
This card therefore represents the Wisdom, the Will, the Word, the Logos by whom the worlds were created. (See the Gospel according to St. John, chapter I.) It represents the Will. In brief, he is the Son, the manifestation in act of the idea of the Father. He is the male correlative of the High Priestess. Let there be no confusion here on account of the fundamental doctrine of the Sun and Moon as the Second Harmonics to the Lingam and the Yoni; for, as will be seen in the citation from The Paris Working, (see Appendix) the creative Mercury is of the nature of the Sun. But Mercury is the Path leading from Kether to Binah, the Understanding; and thus He is the messenger of the gods, represents precisely that Lingam, the Word of creation whose speech is silence.
Here we find Crowley binding together several concepts:
The will (the central theme of the spiritual system of Thelema).
The Son, which as part of the Holy Trinity represents the manifestation in act of the idea of the Father. Crowley here explicitly references John I where we read,
“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was with God in the beginning. Through him all things were made; without him nothing was made that has been made. In him was life, and that life was the light of all mankind. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.”
In other words the Son—and hence the will—is not to be thought of as just a particular person (say, Jesus of Nazareth) but something more akin to the invariant structure of the cosmos. It is that act of the Father (the principle of consciousness) whereby the universe becomes intelligible.
To say that the Son renders the universe intelligible to us is to say that it is by virtue of the Son that the universe is anything at all to a consciousness like ours. It is that which allows things to be what they are, to shine forth as phenomena in their own right. Thus the creative Mercury or Son is of the nature of the Sun (that by means of which the sensible is made sensible).
This relationship between manifestation or shining forth and speech or the Word is given in the Greek word, logos. Logos is related to légō, which means “I put in order, arrange, gather.” Logos or the Son is the speech that gathers, and by gathering things marshals them forth into visibility.
“But Mercury is the Path leading from Kether to Binah, the Understanding”. In other words, it is attributed to the path of ב or Bet.
Bet means house.
Tying this complex strand of ideas together we might say that the Magus or the magician is that individual whose characteristic mode of action is to call beings forth into the light so that they may be what they are and understood as they are. The magician accomplishes this by “speaking” a certain way, by gathering them and showing them. And this mode of speech—this evocation—is intimately tied up with houses, with a particular mode of dwelling on the face of the Earth.
In other words, magic is the transformation of nature into a home. As God the Father speaks nature into intelligible existence by calling it forth into his own radiance, so do we make our lives meaningful when we order the circumstances we find ourselves in in such a way as to suit our own purposes.
Thus Magick is the Science and art of causing Change to occur in conformity with Will.
God the Father in manifestation is the Sun, Tiphareth. The Light or Speech given off by the Father—the Son—is Mercury, Hod. This Speech returns to the Father by means of the Holy Spirit, symbolized by the dove which is Venus or Netzach. It issues back into the House of the Sun, Tiphareth, whose meaning in English is beauty.
This is why the Knowledge and Conversation of the Holy Guardian Angel (i.e., the Holy Spirit) results in the beatific vision. This is a vision of the oneness, beauty, and effulgence of all things, which Crowley also equates with atmadarshana.
The three paths connecting Tiphareth, Hod, and Netzach—Ayin, Peh, and Nun—add up to 200, the enumeration of Resh, which means head. The card The Sun is attributed to the path of Resh on the Tree of Life.
But from a microcosmic point of view, we might say that we imitate the act of the Father when we dwell in our abodes in a way which is beautiful. It is not the purely instrumental act of dwelling which matters so much as the excessive and playful mode of dwelling—dwelling for its own sake, i.e., aesthetic enjoyment.
Thus Crowley also says of magick that it is the Art of Life Itself.
So if you’re looking to perform magick in the face of the coronavirus pandemic you might try two things:
Expand your sense of self to fill the place where you currently live. Get to know every little nook and cranny of the physical building you occupy. Purge it of everything alien. Rearrange it—speak order into it—so that it reflects as closely as possible the divine order, i.e., consecrate it to the accomplishment of your will.
Beautify it to the extent you can. Don’t just be stuck here. Make sure what you see when you open your eyes every day is what you want to see. Think of your home as the House of the Sun, i.e., Tiphareth. The House of God is the beautiful house. Make sure it remains that way.
Not sure if I ever offered an explanation of my intention in making this.
This was meant to visualize some insights I had while listening to Alan Chapman’s Magia Teachings and reading Peter Kingsley’s book on Carl Jung, Catafalque, last summer.
The outer circle represents forms of absence. The flow of time is the absence of presence or the now. The other is the absence of self or self-subsistence. Appearance is the absence of reality.
Opposed to absence is the second circle of presence. Eternity is opposed to time by standing outside of it. It is the eternal present or the eternal now. Self is opposed to other. It is that which subsists, that which possesses itself. Reality is opposed to mere appearance by being the opposite of illusion.
Philosophy and spirituality aim to overcome absence and to achieve presence. They aim at timeless truth, the One Self or One Itself, the reality that lies behind the mere flow of appearances.
But overcoming absence is merely the first stage of the process. The next level of insight requires one to find absence in presence: eternity in the here and now, self in other and other in self, reality in appearance. Once both presence and absence are found in one another, their duality is transcended.
The union of time and eternity is immortality.
The union of self and other is love.
The union of appearance and reality is incantation or magical speech.
Aleister Crowley grasps this non-duality of duality and non-duality through the idea of 0=2. But 0=2 is not the mystery itself but rather the gateway to the mystery. 0=2 is the portal through which Thelemic spirituality opens on to the subterranean current of mystery underlying human transcendence as such.
Now we encounter eternal creation as the characteristic activity of the immortal God.
We find the divine self as the the loving comportment of All with Itself.
And we find the magical universe as the self-speaking totality.
Beyond even that mystery there is the mixing bowl or kratēr in which All is manifest: the divine individual, the sōtēr or the Holy Graal.
In this video I sit down and have a long chat with Seattle occultist and author Aion 131.
Aion 131 is a founder of Horus-Maat Lodge, a long-time Nath Tantrika Initiate, and a Welsh Traditional Craft Elder. He is the author of numerous titles, including Global Ritualism, Your Guardian Angel and You, The Book of the Horned One, and Naga Magick. His latest book, Werewolf Magick, is coming out late September of this year. I am also lucky to call him a friend.
Aion 131 and I have a freewheeling conversation, touching on topics as diverse as Jungian Shadow work, the Holy Guardian Angel, the meaning of tantra, and his early years growing up in New York City. Aion 131’s website is https://dennysargentauthor.com/ which includes his blog, Feral Magick. He can be found on Facebook as aion.hermeticusnath and on Instagram as dennysargentauthor.
Good grief. Somehow I made it all the way through the latest in Thelemic Union, a refutation of a prior article attacking “postmodern” or completely relativistic interpretations of Thelema.
When I’ve attempted in the past to orient Thelema in, well, any direction, I’ve been accused of having an “Old Aeon” perspective on Thelema, which is really just code for “I don’t like your opinion but am too weak to refute it,” so I am in some respects sympathetic toward the complaints made by Brother Sol-Om-On in the original piece being refuted here.
That being said, the points the author, James Gordon, makes at the beginning of the article are good ones and should be well-taken by anyone who wishes to bring philosophy to bear on Thelema.
Crowley was deeply influenced by Nietzsche. In fact I would say more than any other philosopher, it is Nietzsche who looms over Thelema.
But among other things, Nietzsche is the grandfather of postmodernism. (Martin Heidegger is arguably its father.) It’s difficult taking Nietzsche seriously—and Crowley did—without simultaneously adopting some of the perspectives which would later fall under the label of “postmodernism”.
In fact if I were going to level a criticism at “contemporary Thelema,” I would say that many Thelemites do not take Nietzsche or postmodernism seriously enough. They tend to view Crowley from an overly and overtly modernist perspective.
For example they take the notion of the subject—specifically the autonomous subject—too seriously. They construct a religious perspective—what in postmodern parlance would be called a “metaphysics of presence”—around MY preferences, MY choices, MY sexuality, MY responsibility, etc. This relies on a notion of subjectivity that both Nietzsche and Crowley challenged.
Take for instance the concept of Will, arguably the most important concept in Thelema. Will is not identical with your power of choice. In fact Crowley seemed pretty clearly to have been a determinist, i.e., someone who does not believe in freedom of choice. (Yes, I am aware he uses the term “free will” sometimes. Don’t @ me.) Nietzsche held to a similar point of view, regarding freedom of choice to be a fiction invented by the mind to make it appear as though the end result of the battle of many “wills to power” in a person is somehow “mine” in a final, metaphysically-grounded sense.
The desire for “freedom of will” in the superlative, metaphysical sense, such as still holds sway, unfortunately, in the minds of the half-educated, the desire to bear the entire and ultimate responsibility for one’s actions oneself, and to absolve God, the world, ancestors, chance, and society therefrom, involves nothing less than to be precisely this causa sui, and, with more than Munchausen daring, to pull oneself up into existence by the hair, out of the slough of nothingness.
Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil
Crowley differs from Nietzsche insofar as he thinks that whatever unfolds within the sphere of the individual is the predestined result of a course chosen outside of time by one’s Holy Guardian Angel or True Self. His perspective here seems to be closer to the monism of Leibniz than Nietzsche’s.
This is the evident and final Solvent of the Knot Philosophical concerning Fate and Freewill, that it is thine own Self, omniscient and omnipotent, sublime in Eternity, that first didst order the Course of thine own Orbit, so that that which befalleth thee by Fate is indeed the necessary Effect of thine own Will. These two, then, that like Gladiators have made War in Philosophy through these many Centuries, art made One by the Love under Will which is the Law of Thelema.
Liber Aleph, “De harmonia voluntatis cum destinia,” as quoted in NC on AL I.57
This is not just a passing opinion or remark on Crowley’s part but has importance for the pinnacle and ultimate goal of his spiritual system, which is something like amor fati or love of fate. So the result is similar to Nietzsche’s, although the philosophical contrivances used to get there are somewhat different.
Be that as it may, the problem with a lot of interpretations of Thelema is not that they are overly “subjective” or “postmodern”. I think from Crowley’s perspective they would not go far enough in that direction. Until the ground under your feet has completely vanished, you’re not really in a position to transcend. Transcendence requires a certain motivation, a kind of urgency or emergency brought about by a deconstruction which the (over-)reliance on “I-me-mine” is in place to prevent.
Nothing but the realisation, born sooner or later of agonising experience, that its whole relation through Ruach and Nephesch with Matter, i.e., with the Universe, is, and must be, only painful. The senselessness of the whole procedure sickens it. It begins to seek for some menstruum in which the Universe may become intelligible, useful and enjoyable. In Qabalistic language, it aspires to Neschamah.
This is what we mean in saying that the Trance of Sorrow is the motive of the Great Work.
Little Essays Toward Truth, “Man”
This gets confusing because Crowley says “magick is the science and art of causing change to occur in conformity with will.” But listen to the talk I gave on this a couple years back. I step through this really carefully. This is not about the primacy or supremacy of willing in the sense of bringing about a state of affairs that you want. It’s about the destruction of that very perspective.
The method of Magick: Love the mode in which Will operates. The method of Magick in this—and in all—Work is: “love under will.”
Djeridensis Comment on AL I.55-56
Magick is ultimately the art of illusion or of what is illusory. Philosophically and spiritually it is concerned with destruction or the destructive quality of speech.
It’s worth keeping in mind that the mystical “center” or “source” of Thelema is not a presence at all but an absence. It is indicated by Harpocrates/Hoor-paar-kraat.
The Author [of The Book of the Law] called himself Aiwass, and claimed to be “the minister of Hoor-Paar-Kraat”; that is, a messenger from the forces ruling this earth at present, as will be explained later on.
“Introduction” to Liber AL vel Legis
At the center and source of Thelema is something of a performative paradox. The Book of the Law, the foundation of all our work, is the speech of the god of silence. Speech or logos is presence par excellance. Yet Harpocrates, conspicuously, can never be made present.
Who worshipped Heru-pa-kraath have worshipped me; ill, for I am the worshipper.
AL II.8
In the Gnostic Mass, a similar idea is expressed in the line, “O secret of secrets that art hidden in the being of all that lives, not Thee do we adore, for that which adoreth is also Thou.”
Keep in mind that Harpocrates is the Silent or True Self. What these passages seem to indicate is that selfhood is not to be understood in terms of presence. You are not there as an object to yourself. (If you were, you would no longer be subject but object.) The presence of oneself is always deferred.
Another way of saying the same thing is that the characteristic mode of being of this True Self is not properly understood as “a being” or a mode of presence but rather as a kind of going or motion. But it is all-too-easy to conceptualize this going as just another form of being present. This leaves out an important facet of motion, which is that it is a form of change or of destruction. Harpocrates is closely aligned with Aleph and the A or Apophis moment of the IAO triad.
…therefore is the knowledge of me the knowledge of death.
AL II.6
Now think of this in the context of Crowley’s numerous pseudonyms, magical and otherwise: Perdurabo, Chioa Khan, TO MEGA THERION, Oliver Haddo, OU ME, etc. Even when he signs his name “Aleister Crowley,” that’s not his legal name. His legal name was always “Edward Alexander Crowley”. Crowley’s literary presence is a play of absence and representation. He’s presenting himself in such a way as to say, “You think you’ve got me, but you don’t.”
And this gets to the second point which comes out in these passages, which is that self-possession—hence true self-governance and autonomy—is impossible, eternally deferred. No sooner have we turned toward the “True Self” than it recedes, vanishes, reveals itself as an absence of speech, by silence. This flies directly in the face of the notion that we can somehow possess or express an “authentic” self through things like preferences or even responsibilities.
As I said in my recent talk on nihilism, Will in Thelema is best understood as a solution to the problem of nihilism. But in order for the will to serve this function, it cannot be a pure, animalistic overcoming of circumstance that simply runs counter to reason. That kind of brutishness is what Nietzsche would have identified as part of the symptomology of nihilism, not its overcoming.
Even if the loss of ground is not known directly and specifically, it’s still felt, and so people look for something to plug the gap. Investing a dictator or a cult leader with divine authority (“metaphysical presence”) is a reactive attempt to do this. But I would argue that the reliance on MY WILL or MY TRUE SELF is a similar manuever.
This is why every time you post something online—whether it’s an article, in a community, or even on your own Facebook wall—suggesting that there’s some reality of Thelema apart from what “what I will it to be,” people start kicking, biting, and scratching. Yet articles like this that present the typical hippy/boomer narrative of Thelema both get hundreds of likes/hearts and are declared to be subversive. How can something receive near-universal adulation but also somehow subvert conformity?
Some person with a Hindu handle (they always have Hindu handles for some reason despite being Caucasian) took issue with one of my previous articles because I presented evidence in support of an interpretation of the Mass against another. I was told that it’s unthelemic to say someone else’s argument is wrong, even if you present evidence in favor of that conclusion.
How precious.
As Ra-Hoor-Khuit said, ” I am Ra-Hoor-Khuit; and I am powerful to protect my servant. Except when someone expresses an opinion too strongly. Then I melt like a snowflake under a hairdryer. Success is thy proof: argue not; convert not; talk not overmuch! Otherwise someone’s feelings might get hurt, and why would you want to do something like that to somebody? That’s really sad. They don’t want to hurt you.”
Obviously the supremacy of the subjective viewpoint is an issue people feel deeply insecure about. Why else would they be so reactive about it?
I didn’t find anything in the latter half of the article that was of interest.
But yes, I would definitely take care when using the word “postmodern” to denigrate some interpretation of Thelema. In my opinion a lot of Thelema is stuck in delusions that I would consider to be quite “modern” in orientation. But as usual, these terms are really blunt and have to be defined precisely to be useful.
I wanted to elaborate a little bit on something I mentioned quickly in my recent video, Love, Will, and the Angel.
In that video I suggested a more-or-less traditional means of interacting with the Holy Guardian Angel, namely, prayer.
When I was a child, I prayed frequently to God, usually asking for some favor or another but also just for the purposes of ordinary conversation. After many decades, I have returned to prayer of this sort but with an important difference.
I never ask anything for myself when I pray.
I don’t ask to win the lottery. I don’t ask for a job interview to go well. I don’t ask for someone’s illness to be cured. I don’t ask for Bernie to win Michigan. (This last one might be reverse psychology.)
All I ever really ask for is to be a better servant of the divine in this world.
I ask for assistance to have my ignorance lifted. I don’t want to be ignorant about my nature. I don’t want to be ignorant about how the world works. I pray for the light of divinity to work through me in an uninterrupted fashion, unoccluded by false notions about who I am or what I should be doing.
Or as I suggested in the video, if I find myself in a difficult situation, I ask for help seeing how it is that I got myself into that mess and how to find my way out.
I understand that this is not how many occultists think about the Holy Guardian Angel. They think of conversation with the Angel more along these lines. And that’s fine. I wish people acted that way all the time, honestly. At the same time, I think my view on the Angel is consistent with Thelema as a doctrine.
The Angel is not here to rapture you, as the art on the Judgment card of the Coleman-Waite deck would suggest. Insofar as the concepts of salvation or redemption make any sense in a Thelemic context, they seem to entail something more like a change in perspective rather than a miracle.
Crowley’s two favorite metaphors for this seem to be inversion and unveiling.
You can find evidence of inversion or reversal of perspective all over the place. This is largely what the transition from Man of Earth to Hermit is about. It is captured in the imagery of the Beast 666. It’s in the idea of the Lion-Serpent as that which “destroys the destroyer” (i.e., inverts the inversion). It’s ritualized in Liber V vel Reguli. Basically the idea here is that we have an upside-down view on things. We need to be set on our own two feet for the first time, oriented toward the real foundation of things. From an outside perspective this will appear “demonic,” but it is in fact an orientation toward the transcendent and most high.
And then unveiling is the idea of the Khu as a “magical garment” that occludes the divine light within.
Our minds and bodies are veils of the Light within.
New Comment on AL I.8
The idea of the Khu and the “solution of complexes” has always seemed somewhat obscure to me, but the way I’ve come to think of it is that the Khu is like the khandhas or “clinging aggregates” of Buddhism. The Khu is the manifest universe you appear in, or at least the part of it that you consider to be you. There is nothing inherently wrong with manifest existence. There is no “fallen” state to be “redeemed” in other words.
But problems arise when we look at manifest existence as something which we can control or own or call “my,” “me,” or “mine”. To understand the nature of manifest existence means understanding that it changes constantly according to conditions that are beyond our control. This gives rise to detachment and a more balanced, equanimous perspective on reality—and ultimately a happiness that lasts apart from external circumstances.
The Khu remains, but now it no longer occludes the divine light within. This light is not “me” in the ordinary sense but is rather Hadit or Harpocrates. Everything else that I previously called “me” is now seen and correctly understood as an instrument for the expression of that divine light.
But this is essentially what I pray for—to understand nature in precisely this way and thereby to become a more perfect instrument for this divine light.
This is a way in which Thelema is far more like Buddhism than Christianity in my opinion. Buddhism begins from the notion that the main problem is not so much the nature of things themselves but rather avijjā or ignorance. This means that the solution to life’s difficulties is to develop sammā-diṭṭhi or right view, not to be “saved” by the gods or anyone else. I see Thelema has approaching the problem in a similar fashion.
Of course it should be pointed out that neither in Thelema nor in Buddhism can anyone or anything else alleviate your ignorance. It is up to you to do that through your own applied effort. But this mode of prayer can be thought of as practice for surrender of the ego or illusory self to the universal life.
So in short I would say that it does work to pray to the Angel—if the purpose of your prayer is to dispel illusion and to become a more effective instrument of the divine. But I am not of the opinion that the Angel can perform miracles for you like curing disease or putting someone in the White House like Christians think.
