Fear and Loathing in the Noisome Abyss

Job- The Petal Threatened to Engulf Their Continent

grannywolf007@gmail.com — Sun, 08 Nov 2009 04:24:48 GMT

Crowley describes the divine force that manifests itself through the human race as one that is seeking to know itself. Crowley tells us that “God” seeks self-knowledge through His creation by experiencing each human life, through a wide variety of essential natures and existential conditions, “just as one would seek to understand the idea of ‘poetry’ by studying all available poems.”

I thought about this while reading Jung’s “Answer to Job.” Although Jung starts off strong, the fact that he is incapable of regarding God as “Beyond Good and Evil” is somewhat trying. He thinks that God needs to live by his own rules, imposing the democratic value of mutuality on the concept of divine hierarchy, which is not a fit. What God did to Job could be likened to my walking through a spider web, or the ‘infinite wail’ from the continent of the ‘little ones’ Crowley writes about in Liber LXV. Jung asserts that, because he was the subject of this divine assault, Job was ‘morally superior’ to God (!!!) and “the tormented though guiltless Job had secretly been lifted up to a superior knowledge of God which God himself did not possess.” (p.15) Because God broke his own commandments, in other words, Job came to know God better than God knew himself.

Although Jung’s assumptions are grounded in unconsciously Christian herd morality, he does make a valid point. According to Crowley, this kind of divine self-discovery is in a very important sense the POINT of creation. For this reason I think it is only logical to, as Jung does, deny the idea of divine omniscience. The final Revelation is the attainment of divine omniscience. Until then, God is struggling, through creation, to achieve self-knowledge.

I had never really thought about these ideas as a denial of divine omniscience before. I suppose, being free of space and time God is omniscient, but his participation in creation necessarily limits the divine force by IHVH, set in opposition to the image (of an image) of the ALHIM in the line of Adam.

Kinda makes you think…

Al Khem- Lawrence and Tagore

grannywolf007@gmail.com — Thu, 29 Oct 2009 00:29:17 GMT

Warning: Poetry

Lawrence and Tagore

There’s rules to this game
You notice when they’re broken
But fools that you became
Forget all the unspoken
But fools that you remain
You don’t know how to hide
So in punishment and pain
Abide, you fools, abide
In doglike law of Devil’s claw
Hope keeps them alive
But ruthless doom my Lord forsaw
Is one they won’t survive
Just focus on right now
And please, my darlings, try
To wonder and ask “how?”
Let weakness wonder “why?”
Play to win or play to lose
The rules all are lies
And while they’re passing out the blues
I’ll run off with the prize
You can’t beat a guy who cheats
So please be satisfied
Injustice lead to your defeat
Abide, you fools, abide

Fair will get you nowhere
Nice guys finish last
Don’t cry ‘cuz no one cares
Just shut up and finish fast

The Truth About my Cock

grannywolf007@gmail.com — Fri, 23 Oct 2009 06:31:51 GMT

I have noticed that there seem to be a few misconceptions about my cock floating around the internet, and I’d like to take this opportunity to clear up any confusion. It’s very important to me that the general public has a full and accurate picture of my cock, so that they understand its place in our culture and civilization. My cock doesn’t know that I’m doing this. If it did, it would probably try to stop me. “It makes no difference what they think about me,” it would say, with that twinkle in its eye, “all that matters is what I think about them.” This is true, but I think its only fair to give people a chance to educate themselves and each other. Please help me spread the word about my cock, so that when the time comes, people don’t have to be surprised and afraid.

There’s no easy way to say this, so I’ll just say it. The meek will not inherit the earth. My cock will inherit the earth. The meek might briefly inherit the earth, but being meek, they will never withstand my cock. It will be a bloodless coup. All will be convinced of the basic necessity of my cock’s rule. Hitler was democratically elected, but with the burning of the Reichstag he was able to assume absolute control of the government by declaring emergency conditions. My cock is an emergency condition. Although its rise to power will be Hitler-like, my cock is not a Hitler. The terrible Tyrannosaurs Rex was not the king of the dinosaurs. My cock is the king of the dinosaurs. Dinosaurs, much like humans, abused the free will they were given. Instead of choosing to invent space colonies and explore the galaxy, they elected to be smashed by giant rocks from the sky. This kind of poor planning is the reason that we need to have my cock in charge. I’ve been thinking with my cock for years, and this has convinced me of its wisdom. We won’t need a crusty senate, boring U.N. meetings, or stupid campaign commercials when my cock is making the decisions. I think we can all agree that this would be a better kind of life.

But why should we give up our autonomy to my cock, you ask? I beg to differ. My cock already rules us. We just have to wake up and realize that basic fact. Once, man thought the sun revolved around the earth. Then man thought the earth revolved around the sun. Soon, man will come to know the truth: the wandering stars and spinning planets of our infinite universe revolve around my cock. My cock is my shepherd, I shall not want. As I walk through the valley of the shadow of impotence, I fear no flaccidity, for my cock is with me. If you but peer out on the horizon, you can see my cock fall like lightning from heaven, but that is mere poetry. All that can be said about my cock is a lie, because the truth is nothing but my cock itself, all other images being imperfect reflections of the divine essence. It is wrong to think of my cock as an object. My cock is a deed. It is the rhythmic expression of the Transcendent Cock in the graceful ebb and flow of poetry in motion through space and time. My cock is the forbidden dance. It could be said that my cock is a lethal weapon, but it is in truth as harmless as a taser or billy club. It’s true that my cock has the power to kill, but my cock can also raise the dead. Once a person has been slain and resurrected by my cock, they know better than to continue to resist it’s will. Although the experience leaves them whole and unblemished, they will forever stand in awe of the power of my cock.

The bottom line is this: if you want peace you must prepare for my cock. It’s not about whether you win or lose. It’s about my cock. With absolute power, comes my cock (Kissinger was right). My cock is the Michael Jordan of cock, which is almost like being the Elton John of cock. My cock is an iron cock in a latex glove. The state is my cock. My cock is dead, but its shadow will play on the walls of the cave to terrify assholes for generations to come. There is nothing to fear…

..but my cock…

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Propaganda: Cacogenesis

grannywolf007@gmail.com — Mon, 19 Oct 2009 17:46:03 GMT

Fear creates evil in response to a perceived threat. By “evil,” in this case, we mean a deformity, restriction, or misdirection of the individual Will. The frustration and self-loathing caused by this condition of Being, which inevitably leads to the pursuit of false desires and the repression of true desires, spills out of a person at those around them, so we identify fear as the first cause of all hostile acts and thoughts.

Just as a happy and fulfilled individual is pleasant and refreshing to be around, a repressed and self-loathing individual is tiring and irritating to be around. From the smallest acts of petty insult to criminal acts of violence, the ill will that arises between human beings comes from this frustration. I say, “ill will,” not “conflict,” because happy people will still come into conflict because of competing desires, they will still fight with each other over different values, and they will still seek to strike each other down at times. These conflicts can be taken in a sporting sense if one diminishes the sense of “threat.”

The faculty of identity determines “threat.” In the physical sense we are, understandably, accustomed to identify with our bodies. In the symbolic sense we also identify with numerous ideas, images, and representations, and react to attacks on those things in the same way we would to personal attacks on ourselves. When extended only toward certain ideas on a limited basis, we psychologically participate in all of the basic conflicts that the ideas we identify with are engaged in.

The mystical solution to this problem is to identify with No Thing (whether Atman or Allah) and therefore participate in No Conflict, a state often confused with Peace. This state allows an individual to objectively assess questions of value, and takes the personal sting out of the experience of suffering. The magical solution to this problem is to identify with Every Thing and participate equally in All Conflicts, a state that encourages a spirit of healthy camaraderie with one’s fellow man. This allows an individual to objectively assess questions of value, and takes the personal sting out of the experience of conflict.

Thoughts on Freedom

grannywolf007@gmail.com — Wed, 07 Oct 2009 06:22:50 GMT

“We are confronted with the incontrovertible fact: At no time in the history of human society did masses of people succeed in preserving, organizing, and developing the freedom and peace they had achieved by bloody battles. We mean genuine freedom of personal and social development, the freedom to face life WITHOUT fear, freedom FROM all forms of economic suppression, freedom FROM reactionary inhibitions of development; in short, the free self-administration of life.”

-Wilhelm Reich, caps mine, The Mass Psychology of Fascism p. 331

“If human freedom is established as freedom TO, if man can realize his self fully and uncompromisingly, the fundamental cause for his asocial drives will have disappeared and only a sick and abnormal individual will be dangerous. This freedom has never been realized in the history of mankind, yet it has been the ideal to which mankind has stuck even if it was often expressed in abstruse and irrational forms.”

-Erich Fromm, Escape from Freedom, p. 296

“Freedom, however, is not the last word. Freedom is only part of the story and half the truth. Freedom is but the negative aspect of the whole phenomenon whose positive aspect is responsibility. In fact, freedom is in danger of degenerating into mere arbitrariness unless it is lived in terms of responsibility. That is why I recommend that the Statue of Liberty on the East Coast be replaced by a Statue of Responsibility on the West Coast.”

-Victor Frankl, Man's Search for Meaning p. 155-156

“Each individual must be left free to follow his own path. America is peculiarly insane on these points. Her people are desperately anxious to make the Cingalese wear furs, and the Tibetans vote, and the whole world chew gum, utterly dense to the fact that most other nations, especially the French and British, regard 'American institutions' as the lowest savagery, and forgetful or ignorant of the circumstance that the original brand of American freedom -- which really was Freedom -- contained the precept to leave other people severely alone, and thus assured the possibility of expansion on his own lines to every man.”

-Aleister Crowley, Comment on AL I:31

The Astral Light and the Magical Link

grannywolf007@gmail.com — Tue, 06 Oct 2009 00:37:48 GMT

In his Doctrine and Ritual of Transcendental Magic, Eliphas Levi describes the phenomena of the astral light. This idea is crucial to any practical understanding of ceremonial magick. Its laws are the laws that govern our effort as magicians, because it is the force that we employ to create change in conformity with our Will. The astral light is, in a sense, the gravity of causality. Magical acts, words, and rituals set this force in motion, and when it comes into contact with the material plane by means of the Magical Link, it makes an impression that can only be filled by the Willed result. The astral light is the medium of cause and effect in the same sense that gravity is the medium of matter and energy.

I submit that the astral light is beyond Good and Evil…

…but Levi would not agree. Time and again we find that he attributes the manifestation of effect through the astral light to a moral cause. Observe:

“Thought formulated by speech and confirmed by acts constitutes a good work or a crime. Hence, whether in vice or virtue, there is no utterance for which we are not responsible; above all, there are no indifferent acts. Curses and blessings produce their consequence invariably, and every action, whatsoever its nature, whether inspired by love or hate, has effects analogous to its motive, its extent and its direction.”

- Eliphas Levi, Dogma and Ritual of Transcendental Magick Part I, Realization

Unlike Aleister Crowley’s conception of the phenomenon, which is a scientific description of a basic force of nature, Levi sees a force that acts according to moral considerations, and manifests those moral triumphs or failures on the physical plane. In his chapter on the Universal Medicine, he makes this very clear by saying, “the majority of our physical complaints come from our moral diseases.” Elsewhere, Levi equates the astral light with the serpent in the Garden of Eden, and in the following passage, Levi completes the connection between this medium of causality and the dogma of Original Sin.

“Men who are born into a world modified by an idea bear away with them the mark thereof, and it is thus that the word is made flesh. The mark of the disobedience of Adam, preserved in the Astral Light, could be effaced only by the stronger mark of the obedience of the Saviour, and thus the original sin and redemption of the world can be explained in a natural and magical sense. The Astral Light, or Soul of the World, was the instrument of Adam's omnipotence; it became afterwards that of his punishment, being corrupted and troubled by his sin, which intermingled an impure reflection with those primitive images which composed the Book of Universal Science for his still virgin imagination.”

-Levi, ibid.

Crowley’s take on the astral light is somewhat more technical. He describes it as a mirror in which we can behold our own impressions of our self and the universe. While maintaining that it is an objective phenomenon peopled by entities that are separate from ourselves, (without which the experience is degraded and solipsistic) at the same time Crowley explains the magician’s travels in that light as a way in which we might, “discover ourselves by means of a sequence of hieroglyphics.” The astral light does not judge us. If we have conflicted ideas about ourselves and harbor secret desires or neurotic fears, these things will confront us in the astral light. If we feel guilt and shame about the things we want and the things we’ve done, that guilt and shame will track us down as well. The obvious solution is to jettison guilt and shame altogether, confront ourselves honestly, and to hell with morality.

When I read Levi’s writing on this subject, I am reminded strongly of the New Age hippie conception of “karma,” which basically replaces the divine father figure with an impersonal “force” that fulfils more or less that same function. If you do “good,” you’ll get rewarded. If you do “evil,” you’ll get punished.

“Magnetic respiration produces about the soul a radiation of which it is the centre, and thus surrounds it with the reflection of its own works, creating for it a heaven or hell. There are no isolated acts, and it is impossible that there should be secret acts; whatsoever we will truly, that is, everything which we confirm by our acts, remains registered in the Astral Light, where our reflections are preserved.”

-Ibid

We can clearly see the de-anthropomorphized father figure present in Levi’s thought. One could choke on the stink of guilt and repression. Crowley’s depiction of the astral light is, by comparison, strictly technical. If he is correct, and “In that Light, symbols are not conventions but realities, yet (on the contrary) the beings whom we encounter are only symbols of the realities of our own nature. Our operations in that Light are really the adventures of our own personified thoughts,” then “heaven” is purely a creation of self-love, and “hell” is purely a creation of self-loathing. The light is a means of self-discovery that can be used to cause change in conformity with Will by the proper formulation of the Magical Link. There are no ethical considerations to formulating the Magical Link. The magician’s efforts are either an appropriate means of connecting his actions to the target, or they are not.

Recently, I’ve been having a series of discussions with a friend about the nature of classical tragedies, which seems relevant to the comparison I’m trying to make between Crowley and Levi’s descriptions of the astral light. We have more or less agreed on this fundamental difference between the Shakespearean, and the Greek forms; that the source of causal initiative in the former case is always a flaw in the protagonist’s character. In the latter case, the source of causal initiative is circumstantial. Shakespeare paints character larger than life. They usually have political or social power, but he shows them to be flawed, secretly weak in spite of their great power. This is popular literature because the idea that great men are flawed is always going to appeal to the common people. To see great men fall prey to their own flaws is very satisfying.

In Shakespeare’s plays, the characters know what they SHOULD do, but they don’t do it. In many cases, they do stupid things to make their problems worse. The characters in the Theban plays, conversely, are all quite sincerely doing what they think is right. They don’t wind up in the situations they do because they have some inner moral flaw. They go about their business, do their best, one thing leads to another, and they find themselves standing downhill from some shit. And shit rolls downhill. And that’s that.

The analogy was made to the Sopranos and the Wire. The Sopranos is a show in which everybody is basically bad at their job because they’re inwardly flawed. The mobsters, the psychiatrist, the cops, the informants… they piss off the wrong people, go to work for the wrong reasons, go on the take, or try a little too hard to be unsuspicious. On the Wire most of the characters are, like Sophocles’ protagonists, trying to do their job as well as they know how. Most of the time, whether the character is a junky, a dealer, a cop, a cover, a lawyer, or a teacher, they’re generally doing the best they can to do their job well, for good or for evil.

On the Wire, it is a series of connected events that creates the tragedy. Those tragedies are not judgments on the people that suffer from them, merely the logical consequence of the various institutional forces at work. The same can’t be said of the Sopranos, in which Tony’s pride, Christopher’s addictive personality, Carmella’s greed, or the confused loyalties of other characters generate tension, becoming the causal initiative for sequences of events that come back to dramatically assault their initiator. One is a romantic tragedy, in the truest sense of the word; the other is a realistic tragedy.

The moral of this story? It’s up for us to find the meaning in our lives. We choose it. We can choose to inhabit a world in which we expect to be rewarded for “good” behavior and punished for “bad,” but we may have to creatively re-interpret reality to sustain that world view. The other option is to inhabit an amoral world of raw cause and effect. We will not have to devote the same kind of energy to re-interpreting reality, but we will have to learn to find meaning in our own suffering, failures, and thwarted desires beyond the cruel judgment of a mystical father figure.

The basic concept of morality makes it impossible to make accurate judgments about cause and effect. To discover the cause of a series of effects is valuable knowledge, but to call that cause “evil” or “good” on account of its effects is just ridiculous. The same quality, in another individual under different circumstances, could produce a completely different sequence of events ending in a totally different result. For that very reason, there can be no praise or blame involved in attributing cause and effect if we are to make any rational sense of it.

Speaking of nonsense…

“In the eighteenth century the unfortunate poet Gilbert fell a victim to his audacity in braving the current of opinion and even of philosophical fanaticism which characterized his epoch. Guilty of philosophical treason, he died raving mad, possessed by the most incredible terrors, as if God Himself had punished him for defending His cause out of season. As a fact, he perished by reason of a law of Nature of which assuredly he knew nothing; he set himself against an electric current and was struck down as by lightning.

-Levi, Ibid

Oh well. I suppose he was trying to avoid being burned at the stake…

Antecedent of Thelema- Relativity and the Hermetic Doctrine

grannywolf007@gmail.com — Sun, 04 Oct 2009 02:59:21 GMT

“That which is above is like unto that which is below, and that which is below unto that which is above.” In other words, the form is proportional to the idea; the shadow is the measure of the body calculated in its relation to the luminous ray; the scabbard is as deep as the sword is long; the negation is in proportion to the contrary affirmation; production is equal to destruction in the movement which preserves life; and ***there is no point in infinite extension which may not be regarded as the centre of a circle having an expanding circumference receding indefinitely into space.*** Every individuality is therefore indefinitely perfectible, since the moral order is analogous to the physical, and since we cannot conceive any point as unable to dilate, increase and radiate in a philosophically unlimited circle. What can be affirmed of the soul in its totality may be affirmed of each faculty of the soul. The intelligence and will of man are instruments of incalculable power and capacity."

-Eliphas Levi, Doctrine and Ritual of Transcendental Magic, Cap. I

This idea of the point and its infinite extension, highlighted above, is very clearly a precedent for the cosmology of Thelema outlined in Liber AL, perfected in the Commentaries, and summarized by the basic premise that "Every Man and Woman is a star." People have noted that it bears a great deal of resemblance to Einstein's Theory of Relativity, which states that the universe cannot be measured but by choosing an objective point from which to calculate the motion of all other matter and energy, and that any such measurement of the universe would vary according to what objective point was selected. Our own perception is the point from which we measure the universe of meaning that our lives inhabit, and the truth of the revelation of that universe is totally dependent on our own ability to understand the nature of that point of objective reference: the individual Will. Although Crowley brought this idea into the spotlight, the fact that he lived at the same time as Einstein sometimes confuses the issue. Levi clearly equates this idea with the Hermetic doctrine of "as above, so below," insinuating that initiates have understood this simple universal fact, which did not become intelligible to science until recently, for very, very long time.

In the popular consciousness, the God of relativity is, more often than not, invoked to dismiss some imperative as unnecessary. "It's all relative," is usually just another way of saying, "I don't want to do anything about it." Funny that Levi should take the form of relativity that HE describes to indicate that, "The intelligence and will of man are instruments of incalculable power and capacity." If you have incalculable power and capacity, you don't back away from asserting your Will and your values, from combatting ideas and individuals that oppose them, or from working hard to create in your own image. Relativity, such as Levi and Crowley describe, is dependent upon Will, and Will is necessarily an imperative. This kind of relativity demands action. The popular conception of relativity is dependent upon the nihilistic idea of the impossibility of meaning. This kind of relativity demands nothing.

How or Why? Existential Psychology and Thelema

grannywolf007@gmail.com — Mon, 28 Sep 2009 05:33:20 GMT

In my critical studies of the sexual/political philosophy of Wilhelm Reich, I have constantly been seeking other writers and thinkers to balance him with. Part of this is so that I can gain deeper insight into Reich’s ideas by looking at people like Aleister Crowley, Umberto Eco and even Sammy Gravano in light of what they have to say about the same topics. Another part of that is so that I can enjoy the act of reading without wanting to tear my eyes out with insane rage (Reich helps me write, but I find him trying). I’m working on the second part. At any rate, I’ve recently rediscovered Victor Frankl, who played a huge role in my studies of ethics at University, but who I never really re-read since then. I have a lot to say about Frankl’s ideas as they pertain to Thelema, but this particular section, a quotation from Nietzsche that drives much of his philosophy, really grabbed my attention…

“There is much wisdom in the words of Nietzsche: “He who has a why to live for can bear almost any how.” I can see in these words a motto that hold true for psychotherapy. In the Nazi concentration camps, [which Frankl experienced firsthand] one could have witnessed that those who knew there was a task waiting for them to fulfill were most likely to survive.”

-Victor Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning, p.126

We know that Crowley saw Nietzsche as a prophet of Thelema, but we find that he saw fit to invert Nietzsche’s axiom in some of his most important poetry. We find that he reiterates the same statement in Magick Without Tears in his chapter on a Method of Training, taking it basically to mean, “stop with the questions, and do the work.”

“Who has the how is careless of the Why.”

Note: “The natural (though hardly altogether just) contempt of the practical expert for the arm-chair critic.”

-Aleister Crowley, Suraiya, The Bagh-I-Muattar

Frankl’s work is predominately focused on suffering, as, to an extent, is Crowley’s. Although the Book of the Law affirms that “existence is pure joy,” initiation necessarily brings crisis, conflict, and by extension (at least in the beginning) some amount of suffering. The project of the initiate is to use these experiences to gain wisdom, strength, and insight, and thus to come to regard every act of apparent war upon one’s Being as an act of joy, for it provides the opportunity to achieve Overcoming an Obstacle, which is, Nietzsche observes, the source of real happiness. In both cases these men see it as necessary to find meaning in suffering.

As we know, for the Black School of magick, suffering is the definition of existence. Frankl, at the height of his existential crisis at Auschwitz, decided that if all there was for him was to suffer, he might at least suffer well, and do justice to his suffering. This is, to my mind, the highest nobility possible with the ideology of the Black School. All the same, I can’t help but sense a relationship between the inversion of the Black and White schools of magick, and this inversion of “why” and “how” in Crowley’s re-phrasing of the Nietzsche quotation.

Liber AL tells us that “if power asks why, then is power weakness.” There is no question that Frankl had no power to change his circumstance. It wasn’t an issue of a “frame of mind.” He was in a position of weakness. From such a position, the question of “why” may be actually very important. But for someone who has an opportunity for strength to relinquish that and CHOOSE weakness, to choose to see life as suffering even when they are surrounded by obstacles that they would have the power to overcome if only they chose “how” over “why” for their frame of reference, must be sheer insanity. And yet this seems to be the source of our culture’s existential crisis. We have infinite “how”s with no sense of “why.”

I don’t feel I’ve totally developed my analysis of this idea, but its been on my mind for the last several weeks, which is much longer than is usually takes me to develop an analysis. As such, I’d love to get feedback on this. It’s not something I normally ask for, but I feel like I’m missing something very important here. Joy vs. sorrow seems to somehow equal how vs. why. But there’s a factor I have not seen.

See something I don’t? Fak. I hope somebody does.

The Invisible War- Totalitarianism VS Fascism

grannywolf007@gmail.com — Wed, 09 Sep 2009 16:09:30 GMT

In his “Ur-Fascism” essay found in “Five Moral Pieces,” Umberto Eco makes an observation about Italian fascism that, in light of my recent reading of Wilhelm Reich on the subject, I found to be quite stunning. As previously observed, (and more here) Reich posited mysticism as the determining factor of fascist psychology. In Italian Fascism, however, Eco describes a “fuzzy” totalitarianism with no solid ideological core. Of Mussolini, he says that Il Duce, had “no philosophy, all he had was rhetoric,” which lead to a system that was “not wholly totalitarian-not for its moderation as for the philosophical weakness of is ideology.” (p.72) This is an interesting distinction to make, as I have compared Reich’s ideas to the modern liberal secular humanist movement in their nihilistic approach to the questions of mysticism and religion. Is it possible to have fascism without totalitarianism? What are the essential characteristics of each that would allow us to make such a judgment?

The racialist and neo-Pagan elements of Nazism were the “mystical” factor that allowed the Germans to be, not just fascist, but totalitarian as well. The same could be said, according to Eco, for the materialist, atheist factors at work in Stalinist Communism, or the Christian Falangist character of Franco’s fascism in Spain. This lack of higher aspirations and ideals that Eco observes in Mussolini’s fascism distinguishes it significantly from these other contemporary examples. Reich notes that fascism is inherently hypocritical in the sense that it presents a false face to the public, but that isn’t the same thing as lacking an ideological core. The Nazi elites, for example, may have said one thing and done another, but they were very clear what they were trying to accomplish.

In his effort to define fascism as a phenomenon separate from (although often in league with) totalitarianism, Eco looks at numerous salient characteristics of what he calls “Ur-Fascism,” the ubiquitous qualities of fascism. This post examines these, point by point, asking the questions, “do we see these points in Thelema?” and, “do we see these points in the Thelemic Community?” To address the latter issue, I will try to illustrate some of the totalitarian aspects of modern western nihilism as they pertain to Eco’s treatment of the subject.

Here Eco addresses the fact that Italy was the first European country to manifest an operational fascist government, setting examples for fascist movements elsewhere.

“It is pointless to say that [Italian] Fascism contained in itself all the successive totalitarian movements, so to speak, ‘in a quintessential state.’ On the contrary, [Italian] Fascism contained no quintessence, and not even a single essence. It was a fuzzy form of totalitarianism. It was not a monolithic ideology, but rather a collage of diverse political and philosophical ideas, a tangle of contradictions.”

- ibid. p.73

I do not think that it is difficult to see this as a description of the liberal secular humanist ideology that tries, on humanitarian grounds, to incorporate every conceivable worldview by condemning politics, knowledge, and historical fact to the realm of personal opinion. Various fascist ideologies have tried to appeal to “all walks of life,” as it were, but they have done so to subvert popular support to their clandestine agenda. In the modern west, as in the ideology Eco describes, no such coherent agenda seems to exist. He goes on to indicate that Fascism was, “philosophically unsound, but on an emotional level it was anchored in certain archetypes.” (p. 76) This is consistent with what we observe in the modern west, as we will see.

The first and second points given by Eco are what he calls “adherence to traditionalism” and “rejection of modernism.” The fascist ideology must be centered on a number of unconnected texts or institutions (probably rooted, as Reich would keenly observe, in the model of the patriarchal family) that can be interpreted, but not improved upon. He notes that this tendency in fascist thought is often syncretic. Awareness of the differences between various traditions is sublimated to the fascist ideology. As Eco says, “If you browse through the New Age section of American bookshops, you will even find Saint Augustine, who as far as I know is not fascist. But putting Saint Augustine together with Stonehenge, now that is a symptom of Ur-Fascism.”

Thelema is syncretic, but not to the point at which it abandons logic. Although contradictions are resolved above the abyss, sane Thelemites do not use this as a way of trying to justify their stated adherence to obviously contradictory ideologies. But sane Thelemites can seem like a rare breed sometimes. In the Thelemic community, this phenomenon is widespread. We have an abundance of people who believe (because they are equally ignorant of all religious traditions) that all religious traditions are more or less the same, to be interpreted in the light of what they already know i.e. the nihilistic ideology provided for them by the liberal secular humanist cultural milieu. Under these conditions, as Eco points out, there can be no advancement or learning. All “new” facts are considered a restatement of what the subject already “knows” (or, more to the point, has been told).

Although these subjects are in love with technology, they reject “modernism” in the sense that the whole concept of a “new idea” is totally jettisoned. Crowley tells us that intelligence is the ability to make connections between ideas, but the idea must be explored in depth before that happens. If, upon being introduced to a new idea, the subject immediately refers it to something else that they’ve read about, we are dealing with an instance of this phenomenon. If the subject is really using their intelligence to make connections, they will deeply consider the idea, and be able to express any apparent isomorphism in terms more eloquent than just, “see that A? It’s just like B!”

The third point Eco raises is that “irrationalism also depends on the cult of action for action’s sake.” There’s no denying that Crowley was an irrationalist, and this point certainly holds up when we look at the Thelemic Holy Books. We’re not supposed to ask why, invoking because, or to stop and count our muscles like the wise man in the field. We’re supposed to do, reap, and rejoice. Thelema is not, however, anti-intellectual. There is a certain fundamental tension here that is, I think, part of what makes Thelema such an intense dynamic system, something it inherits from the Nietzschean notion of the Will. There is a subtle difference between a rash act and a spontaneous expression of Will, and knowing that difference requires knowledge deeper than what is appreciable by the intellect. The distinction between use and abuse of this idea is more difficult to define than in the case of point two, but “success is your proof.”

This irrational “obedience” to Will does not mean, however, that we scorn the intellect. We can see our holy principle of action proceeding from Will aped in the Thelemic community by people who have done no HGA work and therefore cannot be reasonably expected to have any clue what their Will is or how to do it, and yet insist that they have transcended the need for intellectual work. Obviously, unless someone is devoted to discovering their True Will (which is an intellectually demanding task requiring logic and critical thinking skills) they cannot make use of what Eco calls “cult of action.”

The fourth and fifth points address are the role of criticism and dissent, both unacceptable to Ur-Fascism. Although Crowley was intensely self-critical, both of his own character and the magical work he did, we can see this rejection of critical perspectives at work in the Thelemic community. I would argue that this attitude is totally antithetical to the scientific attitude necessary in Thelema as Crowley describes it, but it persists never the less.

The sixth and seventh points address the social class of those susceptible to Ur-Fascism, which gives us some clue as to the reasons that certain elements in the Thelemic community have come to resemble Ur-Fascist models. Eco tells us that this ubiquitous fascism springs from social frustration. The disenfranchised middle-class, the shrinking proletariat, and the outcast type seeking to belong to whatever group will have them are all prime candidates for fascism, and demographically speaking, also make up a large part of the Thelemic community. In the latter case, these are people who are drawn to a powerful ideology, not realizing that they must work to deserve its rewards or that it will not change to meet their needs. These “outcast and unfit” have “nothing to do” with real Thelema.

I think its interesting that Eco points out that these disenfranchised social groups are often xenophobic and obsessed with conspiracy theories. We see both these types frequently among Thelemites at times, when an interest in Aleister Crowley is seen as equivocal to an obsession with UFOs, MiBs, massive government cover-ups, and all other varieties of foolishness that anyone with a central nervous system can see are ridiculous at best. Word to the wise: a government that can’t hide a blowjob can’t hide much else either. You’re giving them too much credit. This, as we will see when we get to point eight, is also indicative of Ur-Fascism.

Tolerating this kind of crap in the community hurts the ceremonial magicians following in Crowley’s footsteps who are trying to produce skeptical, legitimate, self-critical results leading to practical Gnosis by associating them with idiots who babble about pyramids and space lizards. Of course, these people are, as Eco describes, intensely xenophobic, shunning anyone who doesn’t buy into their infantile RAW-inspired fantasy world and “blind” and “brainwashed.” I understand that, for some of these people, it’s “all in good fun,” but personally speaking it pisses me off. It pisses me off for the same reason that I get pissed off when I see a report about Zombies appearing next to real news on CBC. It’s not that I don’t like fantasy worlds, but they have to be kept separate from reality, and from Thelema. Are we, as Thelemites and Ceremonial Magicians, looking at a real phenomenon, more or less uncharted by science, that not only allows communication with higher intelligences of an order of Being that differs greatly from our own in terms of its relationship with space and time, but also gives us tools to manipulate causality on an fundamental level, or are we jerk-offs in stupid robes playing games in our heads? This is a vital distinction to make.

The eighth point indicates one of the most important aspects of the fascist mentality, and the mentality we see expressed by conspiracy-obsessed pseudo-Thelemites. “The disciples must feel humiliated by the enemy’s vaunted wealth and power. … But the disciples must nonetheless feel that they can defeat the enemy. Thanks to a continual shifting of the rhetorical register, the enemy is at once too strong and too weak. Fascist regimes are doomed to lose their wars, because they are constitutionally incapable of making an objective assessment of their enemy’s strength.” (p.82)

Thelema teaches us to respect our enemies. If a foe is strong enough to deserve the title, “enemy,” they deserve respect. If we do not respect our enemies, we admit our own weakness. Wherever this attitude of contempt and hostility exists in the Thelemic community, it is a sign of the kind of clandestine fascist psychology that we have observed throughout this post.

Nine: “For Ur-Fascism there is no struggle for life, but life for struggle. Pacifism is therefore collusion with the enemy; pacifism is bad, because life is permanent war.” (p.82-83) Surely Thelema is guilty of that! But Eco goes on to say that, “since the enemy can and must be defeated, there must be a last battle, after which the movement will rule the world. Such a final solution implies a subsequent era of peace, a Golden Age that contradicts the principle of permanent war.” Thelema, as Crowley knew it, did not propose any such resolution to the drama, violence, tension, and conflict of the human condition. If Thelema were to “conquer the world,” the struggles for dominance between those with the greatest libidinous authority would set the political stage for this war to manifest itself, hopefully in the brotherly good-spirit with which we are encouraged to view such conflicts by Liber AL. This idea of a sort of “friendly war” is a direct consequence of the fact that Thelema finds its totalizing factor in the individual Will rather than subjugation to the needs of a group.

“The price of existence is eternal warfare.
Speaking as an Irishman, I prefer to say: The price
of eternal warfare is existence.
And melancholy as existence is, the price is well
worth paying.”

-Aleister Crowley, Liber CCCXXXIII, psalm 80

Or, as a minor philosopher once said, “I paid my two bits to see the high divin’ act, and ahm-a gonna see the high divin’ act.”

Point ten is another characteristic that we can legitimately find in Thelema, elitism and scorn for the weak. There can be no argument about this, nor is there room for interpretation. Liber AL practically commands us to scorn the weak, and subdue those who we can bend to our Wills. This gives rise to point eleven, which brings us back to those emotional archetypes that Eco saw philosophically weak fascism to be rooted in.

One of the central archetypes of Ur-Fascism is the hero who sacrifices himself for the cause. As technology shifted the balance of power in the west, we have come to see that square-jawed fascist warrior slowly but surely be replaced by variations on the theme of Mickey Mouse. The hero triumphs against impossible odds, not through strength, but in spite of weakness. This is an excellent illustration the way in which the fascist attempt to democratize heroism by making it the property of every citizen carries with it the seed of its own destruction. Humanitarian values replace the sacrifice one one’s life with the sacrifice of the potential to give meaning to one’s life. The happy resolution, the warrior’s welcome in the afterlife, is replaced by the comic triumph of what should be ineptitude. The mouse is not fit to defeat the cat, but somehow he does, bringing a smile to our faces at the thought that we too might escape unscathed as long as we ask for no more from life than to be safe from danger. The realization of this diminished utopia of lowered expectations in the real world becomes easy enough when the average person has no goals higher than those we might reasonably expect to find in the aspirations of Homer Simpson.

Point twelve involves the transmission of the Will to power onto the sexual question. The Sexual Revolution thread of this LJ has treated this subject in great detail, and I will avoid reiterating its major points here. Point thirteen is also highly relevant to our modern society. “Ur-Fascism is based on ‘qualitative populism.’ In a democracy the citizens enjoy individual rights, but as a whole the citizens have political impact only from a quantitative point of view (the decisions of the majority are followed). For Ur-Fascists individuals have no rights, and the “people” is conceived of as a monolithic entity that expresses the “common will.” Since no quantity of human beings can possess a common will, the leader claims to be their interpreter. Having lost the power to delegate, the citizens do not act, they are only called upon, pars pro toto, to play their role as the people. The people is thus merely a theatrical premise.” (p.85)

The only difference between these conditions and our modern western society is that there is no leader that “interprets the common will.” Instead, we have a corporately owned and operated mass media that creates this idea of “common will” in its depiction of “the people.” This is not difficult to see, and leads nicely into point fourteen. Ur-Fascists use what Orwell termed “Newspeak.” In other words, they have turns of phrase, axioms, and clichés that they use in the place of descriptive commentary. Nowhere is this tendency more obvious than on CNN.

My conclusion?

Although Thelema is not a fascist ideology, it is, in a very non-traditional sense, a totalitarian one. If the individual’s True Will is the single determining factor that resolves all questions of imperative, whether ethical or otherwise, we most certainly have a totalitarian system. The fact that this quality is intrinsically connected to the self-realized autonomy of the individual gives Thelema a remarkably different character from other totalitarian ideologies, but a spade remains a spade. Thelema is not, however, compatible with any form of fascism. Literally, the word means “a bundle,” referring to a bundle of rods with a projecting axe-blade that was the symbol of a magistrate’s power in ancient Rome. In Thelema, we do not bundle ourselves together. Fascist ideology is nothing more than herd mentality with one sheep giving voice to the fears of the many that we can see equally expressed in Democratic and Communist societies. It is this move from a collectivist power-structure to an individually determined power-structure that make Thelema unique.

Propaganda: At your leisure

grannywolf007@gmail.com — Sat, 05 Sep 2009 05:25:33 GMT

There is a reason that the Enemy attacks our civilization by occupying our leisure time. Leisure time has been a crucial factor in human innovation. It has been observed that developments like agriculture, architecture, advanced techniques in food storage and preparation, and so on, have had a ripple effect throughout our technological development because they afforded human beings more time to dream, invent, imagine, and so on. You can’t fit THINKING into a fifteen-minute break. If you’re on the hunt, your attention needs to be focused on your immediate surroundings. That’s an important part of the human psyche, but so is thinking. Thinking takes time, specifically, leisure time during which there are no other significant demands on the attention and concentration than the progress of one’s own thoughts.

Although our society is comported to deliver the maximum amount of leisure time for those who are successful, the full force of herd mentality is focused on occupying that leisure time with banal distractions. Television, music, and film have produced some amazing pieces of art, but for the large part they repeat the same childishly didactic moral and emotional themes varied only by minor cosmetic changes in tone, character, and plot. The modern secular cultist’s identity is totally founded on the fiction, music, film, and art that they consume. This consumption devours a large portion of their leisure time, leaving them little time to THINK about the art they’ve consumed. Because of this, although most social activity revolves around the consumption of art, it amounts to nothing deeper than flag waving.

I do not think that this farce is sustainable unless it is deliberately guided. Until then, we have only images, images, images. All without control. This does not mean that the people will wake up, but that the fit might come forth to guide their dreams to a higher place.

Sexual Revolution- Wilhelm Reich and the Crisis of the Left

grannywolf007@gmail.com — Fri, 04 Sep 2009 18:28:08 GMT

One of what I suspect will be several follow ups on this previous post.

Reich and Crowley both agreed on this: that the free expression of the sexual drive was the key to solving the basic problem of the human condition. Reich saw this as a class problem, assuming that a sexually free society would naturally realize his liberal secular humanist utopia of “work democracy.” Crowley saw this as a spiritual problem, believing that a sexually free society would produce individuals capable of wielding causal initiative to the extent that they could master their surroundings, including the inhabitants of those surroundings. These perspectives are intrinsically related. Both thinkers have identified a core source of tension in the human condition, but because of their different attitudes toward the notion of power and the notion of good, they had radically different expectations of it. Both thinkers thought that a sexually free society would be the best society, but where Reich believed it would end social tension and human conflict, Crowley saw it as the force that would set the stage for social tension and determine the nature of human conflict. These are summary characterizations of both perspectives, but not altogether off the mark in either case.

What is the key factor that caused two people to take the same information and draw from it such radically different conclusions?

Both of these men see, very clearly, the elephant that has been standing in the room of western thought for thousands of years. To Reich, the discovery could potentially prove the salvation of his failed Marxist Utopia. Reich expresses disappointment in the Communist movement’s failure to realize and develop Marxist ideals in practice, and early in the Mass Psychology of Fascism, Reich identifies what he sees as the source of the problem, i.e. the failure of modern Communism to incorporate Freudian discoveries about sexuality and the human psyche. Reich seems to be arguing that sexual repression is what is preventing the revolution.

I think that this is the reason that Reich’s ideas seem prescient of modern Liberal Secular Humanism. He was personally facing the same crisis that the modern left faces today. Idealistic liberalism never really got off the ground in western democracy, and failed leftist governments are easier to name than successful ones. There are a number of reasons for this, but the fact is that Marx promised a kind of Manifest Destiny for the left. The Revolution was supposed to be inevitable. And although there were uprisings, they were founded on essentially nihilistic values (i.e. negate as much suffering as possible through total government control) it doesn’t usually get far beyond breaking down the system that came before it. Reich’s critique of Marxism, ironically, is no different. Beyond pointing out the role of sexual repression in fascist psychology, he seeks to preserve the Marxist vision of a total egalitarian society, naturally emerging, without any unequal expression of authority. He changes the name to “Work Democracy,” and makes a few cosmetic adjustments, but the “Utopian” quality of the Marxist ideal remains intact.

Reich can only conceive of sexual freedom as a freedom FROM fear and guilt, leading to an end to human inequality and conflict (the cause, he sees to presume, of pain and suffering). As a utopian vision, this might seem somewhat subdued, but again, prescient of the humanitarian ideals presently in vogue in the secular media.

Crowley saw sexual freedom as a positive force. He identified free sexual expression as the freedom TO CREATE in one’s own image by causing change in conformity with Will. For Crowley, this creative capacity is the ultimate expression of the authority of the individual Will which, by channeling it outward through deliberate acts of power, the individual uses to master the environment and its inhabitants. This does not produce egalitarian societies, it doesn’t prevent human conflict, and it doesn’t resolve social tension, but it seems to me that this is a far more realistic appraisal the conditions that are likely to result from a sexually free society. When the sex-instinct is allowed free expression, a hierarchy of libidinous power emerges. Given that the sex instinct is the most fundamental human expression of “nature,” this hierarchy is far more “natural” than any conceivable form of democracy, fascist state or egalitarian society.

Reich just seems so… “glass is half empty,” you know what I mean?

Sexual Revolution- The Patriarchal Family and Original Sin

grannywolf007@gmail.com — Thu, 27 Aug 2009 18:45:01 GMT

Wilhelm Reich’s Mass Psychology of Fascism is an important book for Thelemites. Reich, like Crowley, saw that the combination of sexual repression and herd mentality was what enabled totalitarianism. Reich believed that the fundamental root of this sexual repression could be found in “mysticism,” which he identified as a necessarily reactionary phenomenon. For Crowley, reversing its attitude toward the sex instinct, and striking from it the doctrine of original sin could redeem mysticism. Reich’s conception of mysticism bears a great deal of resemblance to the modern Liberal Secular Humanist characterization of religion qua religion. It is seen as necessarily hostile to individuality, necessarily hypocritical, and necessarily unable to withstand the natural expression of the human sexual instinct. This last necessity, according to Reich, manifested itself in the Patriarchal family unit, which was the primary instrument of sexual repression. This totalitarian tool imprinted the characteristics of obedience and servility that were essential for fascism to triumph.

“The sum total of these moralistic attitudes, which cluster around one’s attitude toward sex and are commonly designated as “philistine,” culminate in notions of-we say notions of not acts of-honor and duty. … A touch of dishonesty is part of the very existence of private merchandizing. [i.e. advertising] When a peasant buys a horse, he runs it down in every possible way. If he sells the same horse a year later, it will have “become” [quotes mine] younger, better, and stronger. One’s sense of “duty” is molded by business interests and not by national character traits. One’s own commodity is always the best-the other person’s is always the worst. … Nevertheless the concepts of “honor” and “duty” play a very decisive role in the lower middle class. This cannot be explained solely on the basis of efforts to conceal one’s crude materialistic background. For despite all hypocrisy, the ecstasy derived from the notions of “honor” and “duty” is genuine. It is merely a question of its source.”

-Wilhelm Reich, The Mass Psychology of Fascism, p. 52

This distinction between the notions of honor and duty and acts of honor and duty is key to Reich’s argument, and instrumental in defusing his attack on mysticism in general. We need look no further than “by their fruits, ye shall judge them” in the Bible, or “success is thy proof” in Liber AL to see that, in scripture at least, religion encourages us to make judgments based on what people do rather than what they say. Although Reich insisted, “every form of mysticism is reactionary,” (ibid, p. 24) he does not go into detail. This argument falls apart under close scrutiny. Islam totally revolutionized the nomadic tribal culture of the Pagan Arabs, overturning its entrenched leadership and paving the way for a new social order. Christianity revolutionized Monotheism by giving anybody who chose to identify with Jesus Christ access to the One God (which, as Gnostics would later observe, paved the way for the idea that “there is no God but Man” which shines forth in Thelema). Buddhism revolutionized the yogic practices of greater India and south Asia by giving them transcendent purpose. Rather than trying to secure a favored position in the cycle of death and rebirth, Buddhists sought to escape it altogether. Sikhism revolutionized synergetic religion, by showing that different Gods could be understood as different phases of the divine, that One could be Many could be One, expressed succinctly by the Guru Nanak’s epiphany that “there is no difference between the Hindu and the Muslim.” Although all of these ideologies were co-opted by reactionary political, their distinct revolutionary character cannot be denied. Reich sort of shrugs this off and, like our modern liberal secular humanists, focuses on the debate he can win, namely, the one where his opponents are fearful and ignorant. (see Reich p. 128 below)

An element of hypocrisy is germane to all corrupt institutions. It must be remembered that the Romans made Christianity into a political tool. Islam became a form of nationalism. Buddhism’s atheistic character provided the gateway for communism in China and ethnic chauvinism in Sri Lanka by a selective transliteration of key texts. Sikhism became a political ideology when greater India was partitioned upon ethnic and religious lines, with an independent state for Hindus and Muslims and nothing at all for the Sikhs. With a mere casual glance at history, this devolution is not hard to follow. Chauvinism of all kinds is based on a combination of hypocrisy and the obedience imprinting caused by the traditional Patriarchal family.

“I am the boss. I am the father of your family. I am your God.”

-Paul Castellano to Sammy Gravano during his Mafia initiation, Underboss, Peter Maas, p. 141

“A lot later on, I got to learn that the whole thing was bullshit. I mean, we broke every rule in the book. Like, at one of the trials, the lawyer asked me, ‘How could you break the oath of omerta?’ I said, ‘there was a hundred rules, and we broke ninety-nine of them. This was the last one. It wasn’t that hard anymore.”

-Gravano, in retrospect, ibid

The Patriarchal family model is necessarily grounded in hypocrisy because the father is not a God, and does not truly have the power that he appears to have to the child. For children reared in this kind of environment, realizing the truth can come as somewhat of a shock, and they find themselves yearning for something to replace the comfortable illusion that has been dispelled. This is what makes the Patriarchal family model so valuable to totalitarianism, but not, as Reich and the Liberal Secular Humanists would have us believe, necessarily valuable to mysticism or religion.

“Not only Victorian; wherever the family has been strong, it has always been an engine of tyranny. Weak members or weak neighbors: it is the mob spirit crushing genius, or overwhelming opposition by brute arithmetic. Of course, one must be of good family to do anything much that is worth doing; but what is one to say when the question of the Great Work is posed?…
In every Magical, or similar system, it is invariably the first condition which the Aspirant must fulfill: he must once and for all and for ever put his family outside his magical circle.
Even the Gospels insist clearly and weightily on this.
Christ himself (i.e. whoever is meant by this name in this passage) callously disowns his mother and his brethren (Luke VIII, 19). And he repeatedly makes discipleship contingent on the total renunciation of all family ties. He would not even allow a man to attend his father's funeral!
Is the magical tradition less rigid?
Not on your life!”

-Aleister Crowley, Magick Without Tears, Cap. LII

The hypocrisy of the traditional family, which Reich sees as rooted in mysticism, has three main aspects. These are the divinity of the Patriarch, the non-sexuality of women, and the denial of sexual pleasure.

Focusing on the Church instead of the Bible, (i.e. the enemy he is equipped to defeat) Reich recalls a public debate in which he pointed out that, “If nature is so strict and wise, why did it produce a sexual apparatus that does not impel one to engage in coitus only as often as one wants to create children, but on average of two to three thousand times in a lifetime?” (ibid p. 128) To Reich, this elementary fact (along with a few others) exploded mysticism, because the men to whom he presented them were incapable of answering for their church’s policies toward sexuality in light of it. Crowley, of course, took the same data and used it to conclude, “The sexual act is a sacrament of Will. To profane it is the great offence. All true expression of it is lawful; all suppression or distortion is contrary to the Law of Liberty.” (comment on AL I:42) In other words, Crowley saw sexual pleasure as a confirmation of divinity rather than a refutation of it. Of the crowd’s reaction to his presentation, Reich says,

“The clerical representative’s embarrassed answers evoked peals of laughter. When I began to explain the role played within the network of authoritarian society by the church’s and reactionary science’s denial of the pleasure function, that the suppression of sexual gratification was intended to produce humility and general resignation in economic areas also, I had the entire audience on my side. The mystics had been beaten.”

-Reich, p. 128

Leave it to a secularist to try and repudiate thousands of years of culture, mystical experience, philosophical study, and history by exposing some foolish and ignorant old men for the hypocrites they were. Reich was, of course, merely lucky that Our Prophet was not among the mystics that he tried to “beat.”

As we can see from the above, Crowley has a critique of the family and its role in society that is very similar to Reich’s. They both see it as a fundamental obstacle to individual freedom, in that it imprints notions of obedience to authority. Both men recognized the traditional family relies on the oppression of women. Crowley went so far as to claim that “two-thirds of modern misery springs from Woman's sexual dissatisfaction,” (comment on AL II:52) and “laws against adultery are based upon the idea that woman is a chattel, … It is the frankest and most crass statement of a slave-situation,” (comment on AL I:42) thus solidifying the Thelemic position on this subject.

The totalitarianism of western Liberal Secular Humanism is covert. Its adherents do not realize that they are devoted to any specific ideology, although all the people who claim to have no specific ideology seem to believe the same things and repeat the same “truths,” (usually starting with, “there is no absolute truth” and “everybody has a right to an opinion about anything no matter how ignorant they are”). They say that they are free, but the fact is that this “freedom of choice” only really allows them to decide which products to consume. In the modern west, we have choices without meaning. Our society is arranged to ensure that our choices will not create change. People identify very strongly with the choices they do have. They “find themselves” in the music they listen to, the cloths they wear, the movies they watch, the job they have, the car they drive, the school they went to, or where they spend their free time. Earlier forms of totalitarianism didn’t try to convince its subjects that they were free. In theory, because modern weapons technology has rendered moot the advantage of numbers, this might come as a surprise. I think Reich provides the key as to why it has become necessary for this totalitarian ideology to make people believe they are free.

“More than the economic dependency of the wife and children on the husband and father is needed to preserve the institution of the authoritarian family. For the suppressed classes, this dependency of only endurable on the condition that the consciousness of being a sexual being is suspended as completely as possible in the women and the children. The wife must not function as a sexual being, but solely as a child bearer. Essentially, the idealization and deification of motherhood, which are so fragrantly at variance with the brutality with which the mothers of the toiling masses are actually treated, serve as means of preventing women from gaining sexual consciousness, or preventing the imposed sexual repression from breaking through, and of preventing sexual anxiety and sexual guilt feelings from losing their hold. Sexually awakened woman, confirmed and recognized as such, would mean the complete collapse of authoritarian ideology.”

-Reich, p. 105

So what went wrong?

I think it is safe to say that we live in a culture that his successfully disentangled the sexual instinct from the production of children, a move that Crowley calls “the first condition of the Brave New World,” (MWT Cap. LIII). Having achieved this, we see that totalitarianism now finds it necessary to use clandestine means to achieve its ends. It has become what Chantal Delsol called a “black market” ideology, with all of the danger and unreliability that implies. Liberal Secular Humanism, in spite of its cherished “tolerance,” shares the same basic quality as any totalitarian ideology, namely, that it sees its own worldview as the only acceptable one. The only difference is that “crazy,” in the adherents’ evaluation of other ideologies, has replaced “sinful”.

Totalitarianism cannot reveal itself as such. In a sexually liberated society of people who see themselves as valuable and deserving of freedom, that would cause mass outrage. So long as totalitarianism cloaks itself beneath the garb of individual choice, it can operate as it always has. As long as the choices it offers us remain meaningless, it will avoid serious interference. As long as it remains hypocritical, totalitarianism can continue to function.

The standard argument against hierarchical authority is based on a conflation of such authority with totalitarianism. A hierarchical authority that is grounded in reality, has positive goals, and uses peoples’ individual strength rather than encouraging their common fears, could be an awesome force to direct the human race. But so long as the traditional Patriarchal family model continues to dominate consciousness, “authority” will be seen as equivalent to “totalitarianism,” which always relies on some form of the doctrine of original sin.

The basic premise of totalitarianism is that “evil is more powerful than good, because we are fundamentally flawed.” This is what made it possible for the Roman and Protestant churches to rule over people’s personal lives and destroy their strength as individuals. This is what made it possible for German nationalism to exercise its xenophobic slavery/slaughter campaign, because in spite of the “fact” that the Germans were a “master race,” they believed that the slightest intrusion of a foreign substance would destroy their purity and thus their power (which is actually an admission of weakness when you think about it). This is also the basis of Secular society’s hostility to religion qua religion. If it can be demonstrated that people calling themselves religious have done bad things, this is seen (by committing one of the most basic logical fallacies, “this cat is black, therefore all cats are black”) as sufficient proof that religion itself is bad. At the heart of both ideologies is the belief that human beings are intrinsically weak and require redemption. What do Reich and Crowley have to say about this? I’ll let my subjects close this particular essay in turn.

“The extensive success of religious mysticism is to be ascribed to the fact that it is centrally rooted in the doctrine or original sin as a sexual act for the sake of pleasure. National Socialism retains this motif and makes full use of it with the help of another ideology, [Christianity] one in keeping with its own purpose.”

-Reich, p. 118

“The doctrine of the previous verses, which appears not merely to allow sexual liberty in the ordinary sense, but even to advocate it in a sense which is calculated to shock the most abandoned libertine, can do no less than startle and alarm the magician, and that only the more so as he is familiar with the theory and practice of his art. "What is this, in the name of Adonai?" I hear him exclaim: "is it not the immemorial and unchallenged tradition that the exorcist who would apply himself to the most elementary operations of our Art is bound to prepare himself by a course of chastity? Is it not notorious that virginity is by its own virtue one of the most powerful means, and one of the most essential conditions, of all Magical works? This is no question of technical formula such as may, with propriety, be modulated in the event of an Equinox of the Gods. It is one of those eternal truths of Nature which persist, no matter what the environment, in respect of place or period."
To these remarks I can but smile my most genial assent. The only objection that I can take to them is to point out that the connotation of the word 'chastity' may have been misunderstood from a scientific point of view, just as modern science has modified our conception of the relations of the earth and the sun without presuming to alter one jot or tittle of the observed facts of Nature. So we may assert that modern discoveries in physiology have rendered obsolete the Osirian conceptions of the sexual process which interpreted chastity as physical abstinence, small regard being paid to the mental and moral concomitants of the refusal to act, still less to the physical indications. ***The root of the error lies in the dogma of original sin,*** as a result of which pollution was actually excused as being in the nature of involuntary offence, just as if one were to assert that a sleep-walker who has fallen over a precipice were any less dead than Empedocles or Sappho.
The doctrine of Thelema resolves the whole question in conformity with the facts observed by science and the proprieties prescribed by Magick. It must be obvious to the most embryonic tyro in alchemy that if there be any material substance soever endowed with magical properties, one must class, primus inter pares, that vehicle of essential humanity which is the first matter of that Great Work wherein our race shares the divine prerogative of creating man in its own image, male and female.”

-Aleister Crolwey, comment on Liber AL I:52

Propaganda: The Simpsons and Herd Mentality

grannywolf007@gmail.com — Wed, 26 Aug 2009 07:51:33 GMT

The Simpsons was a creation of Matt Groening, who also wrote a comic strip called “Life in Hell,” staring Bongo, the one-eared cartoon rabbit. When Groening created the Simpsons, he touched off an unparalleled television phenomenon. The comic strip “Life in Hell” was a poignant satire of American anti-intellectualism. The television show “The Simpsons” could have, at times, been seen as the same. But the show effectively touched off the biggest mass-media validation of anti-intellectualism in human history, on a level that has been accepted in virtually every class of western culture. I can’t help but think of the scene (I so often think of) of Zarathustra’s followers worshipping the ass at the end of Thus Spake Zarathustra. “Question authority,” has become “D’oh,” and a culture that used to speak in allusions to great literature now uses quotes from cartoons to communicate. There is a strange isomorphism between this phenomenon and the corruption of the Bible by herd mentality.

Like “Life in Hell,” the Bible had a set of values that were practically inverted by its popular manifestation. In Thelema, we are “against the people,” because the people ALWAYS fuck up the truth. Every time the herd accepts a good idea, it essentially becomes the flag for herd values and herd mentality. The values never change, “love thy neighbor,” “we are all essentially equal,” “evil is too powerful to fight,” “we don’t investigate truth, we repeat what we’re told.” These values have existed from the beginning of time, but they have flown a million flags in a thousand nations. The truth isn’t meant for the people. That was the flaw in Protestant thought. A pseudo-Satanic hierarchy of pain, tyranny, and debauchery may have corrupted the Catholic Church, but at least they didn’t unleash the Bible on the common man. This rash act is equivalent to a street person providing a precocious child with a pint of vodka and a pack of matches. They are bound to do bad things with it. This is also why Dave Chapelle went to Africa, if you know what I’m saying.

Satire should require a license. You should have to prove that you are competent to comprehend satire to a registered official before you’re allowed to consume it. This might be my Canadian “big government” idea, but I think that society would be improved to the point that we could legalize several exciting and enjoyable drugs if we put this law into effect.

Top Ten Reasons that George W. Bush was not “a Hitler”

grannywolf007@gmail.com — Sat, 22 Aug 2009 17:21:51 GMT

Recently there was some ridiculousness in the states that had certain individuals comparing Barak Obama to Adolph Hitler. I’m not really a fan of Obama, but it’s not hard to tell that this is a stupid thing to say. In honor of the memory of George W. Bush, a delta male if ever there was one, I composed this list. Because when people said the same thing about George W. Bush it was just as stupid. Bush wasn’t a Hitler. He was an Eichmann.

10. George W. Bush would never give up his Texas beef and become a vegetarian.

9. Adolph Hitler would never claim that he was “coming to save” the people he killed. Originally he just wanted some slave labor to solve his economic crisis, which became politically inconvenient. The final solution, genocide and mass murder, wasn’t the plan in the beginning. Most people tend to gloss over that. Bush was sort of like the aliens in Mars Attacks, insisting always that he came in peace and friendship.

8. George W. Bush was from money. Hitler was from a lower-middle class background. This gave the two men radically different perspectives. Bush was not “the man with the plan” in his administration, possibly because he was simply accustomed to having things done for him.

7. Adolph Hitler was an excellent public speaker. He held crowds spellbound with the power of his voice. Hearing George W. Bush speak in public, even when he was being a complete asshole, always made me feel sorry for him. Unlike some others, I didn’t make fun of him much during his “reign,” because I felt like I was picking on the retarded kid.

6. George W. Bush was never in the army. Not really. Hitler showed up for his military service.

5. Adolph Hitler murdered people who lived in HIS country. Bush’s violence was all exported, although he saw to it that people would die from neglect in America.

3. George W. Bush took a recovering economy and stomped on it. Hitler took over when Germany was still under tremendous economic restriction following the impositions of the League of Nations after WWI, and, with a little slave labor, made something of it.

3. Adolph Hitler was seen as an enemy by seriously dangerous and intelligent Russian Communists. Bush was seen as an enemy by Rage Against the Machine.

2. George W. Bush’s favorite color was entirely dissimilar to Adolph Hitler’s favorite color.

1. Adolph Hitler designed an entire aesthetic, complete with architecture, style of dress, and moral code, for the Nazi party. The guy was well organized, with big plans. Look at Iraq and Afghanistan. George W. Bush was… not so much with the planning.

So why do I say that Bush was an Eichmann?

Hannah Arendt’s book, “Eichmann in Jerusalem,” on the trial of Adolph Eichmann, is essential for anyone seeking to understand the modern war criminal. Its subtitle, “The Banality of Evil,” is very telling. Bush might be the greatest “villain” of modern times, but he’s a pretty boring guy. He’s no Doctor Doom or Dracula or anything like that. You’re never going to find him playing the harpsichord in a tower during a thunderstorm. He might whistle Dixie at a barbeque, but that’s as far as it goes. As technology separates the criminal from the crime, putting distance between a killer and their victims, it becomes possible to separate the traditional criminal mentality from the criminal act. This is entirely in harmony with Eichmann’s character. Eichmann was a door-to-door vacuum cleaner salesman who got a government job that sort of metamorphosed into the middle management of a genocidal effort during the time of his employ. As a person he was disinterested in anti-Semitism and had no strong feelings about the Nazi philosophy. The fact that he continued to DO his job speaks to his stunning lack of individuality or personal will. As Arendt says:

“Closely connected with this failure [to prove that the defendant was guilty of ‘crimes against humanity’] was the conspicuous helplessness the judges experienced when confronted with the task they could least escape, the task of understanding the criminal whom they had come to judge. Clearly, it was not enough that they did not follow the prosecution in its obviously mistaken description of the accused as a “perverted sadist,” nor would it have been enough if they had gone one step further and proved the inconsistency in the case for the prosecution, in which Mr. Hausner wanted to try the most abnormal monster the world had ever seen and, at the same time, try in him, “many like him,” even the “whole Nazi movement and anti-Semitism at large.” They knew, of course, that it would have been very comforting indeed to believe that Eichmann was a monster, even though if he had been Israel’s case against him would have collapsed or, at the very least, lost all interest. The trouble with Eichmann was precisely that so many were like him, and that they many were neither perverted nor sadistic, that they were, and still are, terribly and terrifyingly normal. From the viewpoint of our legal institutions and of our moral standards of judgment, this normality was much more terrifying than all the atrocities put together, for it implied-as had been said at Nuremberg over and over again by their defendants and counsels- that this new type of criminal who is in fact hostis generis humani, commits his crimes under circumstances that make it well-nigh impossible for him to know or to feel that he is doing wrong.”

-Arendt, p. 276

Hate Virus:

grannywolf007@gmail.com — Wed, 19 Aug 2009 03:03:56 GMT

“The Germans killed the Jews, the Jews killed the Arabs, the Arabs killed the hostages, and that is the news.”

-Roger Waters

I sometimes despair for love.

Whether you look at the contrast between “too cool to feel” culture, and bullshit “emo” pretensions, the world-wide tyrannical hegemony of corporate exploitation, or the general tendency of people, when hurt or betrayed stop trusting in and caring about the people around them, it seems like we live in hard times for love. This Aeon began with a viral infection of racial hatred that, growing and propagating itself through expansion by inversion, continues to this day. An institution of racial hatred created by Adolph Hitler provided the political capital to support the creation of an institution of racial hatred created by David Ben-Gurion, which provided the political capital to support an institution of racial hatred created by Sayeed Qtub and those who used his ideas and the ideas of similar thinkers to form “groups” like Al Qaeda, Hamas, and the Taliban, which provided the political capital for the global expansion of American tyranny founded on racial hatred disguised as humanitarianism. The course of this infection is not complex, nuanced, or difficult to comprehend. It is as simple as water flowing downhill.

The same reaction that individuals have in their personal relationships happens in political relationships between groups, ideologies, and nations. When you trust someone, you risk being hurt. When you love someone, you risk being hurt. When you get hurt, you can, if you're weak, hurt someone else. Misery loves company. Whether we're talking about an institution or an individual, it's an easy choice to make.

Hate starts by giving up on love. By saying, “never again will I take this chance with someone.” Maybe you say, “never again will I trust someone this color/ this ideology/ this religion/ who I have these feelings for,” but this is the first step on a slippery slope. I don’t get it really, because I don’t have that problem. Sure, when I get lied to, betrayed, or have my heart broken, it hurts. But I’d rather take the chance again, and get hurt again, than live life with my heart closed. I was like that for a while, so I know how both ways feel, and you know what? The loneliness of one closed heart is worse than the pain of a thousand heatbreaks. The loneliness of a life without trust is worse than the pain of a thousand betrayals. And the prejudice that comes with tarring every member of one group with the same brush? That’s herd mentality at its lowest.

One thing I’ve learned in my wide travels is that if you treat people with respect and dignity, they usually respond in kind. If they don’t, it’s their problem, and it’s on them. That stuff doesn’t weigh you down if you realize that you don’t have to carry it.

So when I do despair for love, I remember that something that lives and grows in a harsh climate becomes strong. In these hard times for love, the love that we have is even more powerful.

?

grannywolf007@gmail.com — Mon, 17 Aug 2009 16:12:33 GMT

“The climax of the formula is in one sense before even the formulation of the Yod. For the Yod is the most divine aspect of the Force --- the remaining letters are but a solidification of the same thing.”

-A.C. MTP, Cap. III

If you read “confusion” for “solidification,” I think that this whole fairy tale mess starts to make more sense. This is one of the places that I’m not with Crowley, not because I think that he’s wrong necessarily, but because I think that data, which was simply not available at the time he wrote this, obviates the necessity to redeem this particular formula. He elaborates on the basic method of Gnosticism, based on the relationship between ALHIM and IHVH,

“The Yod will represent a swift and violent creative energy; following this will be a calmer and more reflective but even more powerful flow of will, the irresistible force of a mighty river. This state of mind will be followed by an expansion of the consciousness; it will penetrate all space, and this will finally undergo a crystallization resplendent with interior light.”

-Ibid

that reflects the course of the human experience of creation throughout time. But if existence is a muddle, then isn’t this, to an extent, the “muddling” aspect? And don’t we have another word for that, which might provide further clues to the identity of the force in question?

I can’t help but wonder what kind of role this would have played in this system if there was more information available.

The Sin of Onan

grannywolf007@gmail.com — Sat, 15 Aug 2009 05:37:45 GMT

The sin of Onan was not, as the vulgar have interpreted it, in the act of masturbation. Onan did not actually masturbate, he pulled out. He had a responsibility to impregnate his brother’s wife, but knowing that the child would come before his own son in the line of inheritance, he elected to spill his seed on the ground instead of conceiving. Onan’s duties came from the code of his tribe, and by disobeying them he betrayed, not just his people, but also the IDEA or SPIRIT of his people.

But what’s the difference between this kind of loyalty and herd mentality?

This is one of the Biblical stories that I think about a lot. Crowley talks about the ideal code of behavior being something like the “loyalty to the old shop” one saw among the faculty of Oxford and Cambridge. It’s very important for Thelemites to think hard about that, and how such loyalty is distinguished from herd mentality, which we seek to avoid at all costs. Herd mentality is the imposition of the IDEA or SPIRIT of the herd on the individual. The characteristics of this SPIRIT or IDEA have been well documented, so there’s no need for me to reiterate them here. There is a tendency in our post-counterculture media to conflate all forms of institutional loyalty with herd mentality, but this is a dangerous trap set by the lord of Dispersion. It is important to realize that institutions build HISTORY. Without institutions to preserve an idea, give it a foundation to grow, and carry it forward in time, the same stupid shit happens over and over, without anybody learning anything from it or making changes because of it. In the digital age, there is a great deal of hostility to institutions qua institutions. One thing that I have learned in my studies of the Middle-East and South Asia is that the same scenarios play out over and over, duplicating themselves with cartoonish accuracy, and almost all reasonable analysts agree that this is the case because of the total absence of viable institutional structures. In these places the military is the only institution that lasts, and in almost all cases that institution serves foreign interests hostile to the growth and security of the states in question.

The same ideas can be applied to the corporate world. People know that the corporations they work for do not truly value them, and like Onan, they will undermine the institutional structure of the corporation they work for in their own personal interests. This is not a system that can sustain itself.

I apply these ideas, naturally, not only to my work as a magician and a Thelemite, but to my work as a cook as well. I always strive to put out the best meal possible, to leave the kitchen clean and correct, and to do what must be done, however greasy and shitty that task might be. I don’t do this for my bosses, because that would be servility. I don’t do it for the other guys on the line, because it’s a dog eat dog world. And I don’t do it for the customers, because fuck them. I do it for me. Because when * I * put out a plate, that’s * me * going out to the floor. I try to make sure that everything I do is awesome, because * I * did it. I respect myself too much to settle for less. I’m loyal to the kitchen and the craft of cooking as an institution, but that loyalty comes from my own individuality, and my own self-respect. And when THAT is the source of your loyalty, nobody else can fuck with it. I might be mad at a boss, or a coworker, or a customer, but my work will not suffer for it. This, I believe, is close to what Crowley was aiming for when he talked about “loyalty to the old shop,” Betraying that loyalty, like Onan, would be tantamount to betraying myself.

Internet Arguments! They can be about anything!

grannywolf007@gmail.com — Thu, 06 Aug 2009 02:57:47 GMT

Check out the exchange of ideas here. I know we've probably all had stupid internet arguments like this, but the one in question strikes me as a textbook case, as such, bears consideration. Watch how, as each subsequent reply is posted, the actual content of the discussion diminishes and diminishes, until it ceases to exist altogether.

Step One: Miss the point.

Step Two: Emotional appeal for clemency. It's just my opinion, not an attack! I'm not trying to attack you! This step should omit any reference to material presented in the post itself, or the reply to step one.

Step Three: Intellectual appeal for relativism and tolerance. There is no such thing as right and wrong, there is no such thing as correct or incorrect. It doesn't matter what you say, it doesn't matter what I say. It's all just an opinion, so what I say doesn't really have to have anything to do with your post, your replies to my replies, or any ideas at all. Stop attacking me!

Step Four: Sarcastic smiley. Usually ;) or :P, but in this case we have a variant I am personally unfamiliar with. There may be some attempt and glibness, or an irrelevant quote as well.

Step Five: Fear, hostility, willful ignorance. Usually manifested in outrage at the persecution being visited on the "victim."

Step Six: Crickets.

I expect this kind of stupidity when I bash the Matrix, Nirvana, Atheism, Liberalism, Secularism, and so on... but Max fucking Hardcore? Of all things, I have to argue about this? Internet, you blow my mind. Like seriously, if any of you out there actually jerk off to that crap, do the gene pool a favor and drink a bottle of drano. Or come to me for an exorcism. There is no third option.

Propaganda: Will and Consciousness

grannywolf007@gmail.com — Sun, 26 Jul 2009 06:05:10 GMT

One point that we cannot overlook is that Crowley considered the True Will to be fundamentally unconscious. The Great Work is less focused on becoming conscious of True Will than it is on removing complexes that impede or obstruct the motion of True Will. Part of that process involves becoming conscious of True Will to an extent, but only to the extent that enables us to recognize what elements of it are dis-eased. As Crowley frequently points out, one is only conscious of a natural function such as True Will (or the breathing, the digestion, the vision, the hearing, etc.) when it is in some way afflicted. Although True Will provides direction there is, as the adept said to the boy on the back of the swan called AUM, “no whence, no wither.” Its motion, although perfectly concentrated in its path, is aimless. It does not have a DESTINATION, but rather, a DIRECTION. To be “in every way perfect,” True Will must be “unassuaged of purpose, delivered from lust for result.”

This is also why the longing for death is so important to the Thelemite. Will is perpetual, but all things move toward their ends. The end of our individual incarnation is the death of our physical bodies. Even this, however, is not a destination as such. Birth, death, and rebirth are simply, as Crowley says, “incidents in the career of the adept,” as unremarkable and natural as the acts of going to bed at night and rising to face the day in the morning.

The ideal of a final destination of our lives is essentially a trap. In his Letter on Humanism, the philosopher Martin Heidegger makes the argument that the ideology of “Humanism” is essentially a straightjacket (devoutly longed for by the Fuk-U-amas of the world who seek an escape from freedom) because to declare oneself a “humanist” is to set theoretical limits on the human condition and prevent further development. If we know absolutely what “human” means, any development beyond those already understood limits would represent a challenge to this idea of “good.” No meaningful development, progress, or evolution is possible within the framework of this ideology, which sees anything “more than human” as necessarily “evil,” in that it would require a redefinition of “human,” and therefore represent a challenge to the humanist’s ideology. This is much like the idiot wannabe Thelemite who declares that it is his True Will to paint a particular picture, and upon completion hangs himself, leaving a note that says “my work is done, why wait?”

We might long for death… but death is forbidden…

The Invisible War: Pakistan and Bangladesh

grannywolf007@gmail.com — Fri, 24 Jul 2009 13:59:04 GMT

Pakistan is an interesting case study in Imperial strategic organization. When western corporate forces removed their immediate presence from South Asia and divided up the massive territory that was then called India, the largely Punjabi pro-West Muslim leaders who made up the group that would go on to be the main power in Pakistan was rewarded for their loyalty to the British through two World Wars. When they created Pakistan, the new state was divided into two regions, East and West.

This post attempts to examine the nature of the schism created by political Islam among different cultural and ethnic groups in Pakistan by comparison to the unity created among different cultural and ethnic groups by early Islam.

The ruling elite and the organizational command structure of the Pakistani military were overwhelmingly culturally and ethnically based on West Pakistan, being made up of a majority of Punjabis, but also some Sindhi and Pashtun elements as well. East Pakistan was what is known today as Bangladesh, and made up about sixty percent of the combined population. Bengali Muslims were darker-skinned, spoke a different language, and their practice of Islam had picked up a lot of formal and ritual elements from Hinduism. This was a fact that was used to justify the militarily directed mass-rape of Bengali women by soldiers from West Pakistan when formal invasion (causing three million Bengali casualties- which is half the toll of the holocaust in less than a year) became necessary to control the populace after the democratic victory of the Bengali Awami in general Pakistani elections in 1970. Aside from these basic cultural differences, East and West Pakistan were also separated by over a thousand miles of India-controlled territory. The remote-controlled Empire had created a child in its own image. It was made in miniature, but possessing the same characteristics as its imperial father.

Islam was a religion that united disparate ethnic groups, that had previously been fighting with the ruling empires and with each other, by dispelling the cultural norms that kept various nomadic tribes from working together. Pakistan was a state, on the surface created along Islamic lines, which could never form a national identity that would be capable of overwhelming ethnic allegiances. The creators of Pakistan tried to use Islam for the same purpose as the prophet, but utterly failed where he had succeeded.

Western imperialism had learned to operate by remote control, with some help from the remnants of the Moghul Empire, and they decided to apply what they had discovered to their allies in Pakistan. Bengal was an obvious choice for a mini-colony situated according to the Imperial model. The Bengali conquest was one of the first major victories for corporate Imperialism. It was taken by the chartered armies of the British East India Company at the battle of Plassey in 1759. When the British, enervated by two world wars, finally withdrew almost two hundred years later, it was left in the hands of their local allies.

But as I said, this new nation was created in the image of its Imperial father. Being a microcosm of western Imperialism, we can make some observations about the fate of our own civilization by looking at what took place in Pakistan.

“The majority view in the Punjab was that drunk and incompetent generals combined with Indian military intervention had lost them Pakistan. As I have argued, this was a simplistic chauvinist view that ignored the structural exploitation of East Bengal by a predominantly West Pakistan-based elite.”

-Tariq Ali, Pakistan: On the Flight Path to American Power, p. 105

The wealth from the Bengal province’s massive agricultural production was mostly redistributed in West Pakistan, and mostly used for creature comforts, consumer products, and fancy living.

“The resulting distribution was at the expense of the peasantry, but few cared. US economic advisors echoed Papanek’s [Harvard economist] view that ‘great inequalities were necessary in order to create industry and industrialists,’ and that the growth generated in this fashion would lead to ‘real improvement for the lower income groups.’ This was what later, in the era of globalization, became known as the trickle-down effect. It did not work then as it does not work now. The upper-income groups in the towns paid no taxes and illegally moved their money abroad. Little was invested in the productive non-agricultural sector. Even the official planning commission set up by the government bewailed the bad habits of the city elite in West Pakistan. Keith B. Griffin, an Oxford economist well versed in the economic problems confronting the country, produced a report showing that between 63 and 83 percent of saving transferred from agriculture were wasted in non-productive extravagances, i.e. the sumptuous style created by nouveaux riches. Griffin went on to point out that in West Pakistan ‘the potential surplus of these savings units was used to consume more, to buy more ornaments, jewellery and consumer durables and to bid up the prices of real estate and farm lands, helping their owners disinvest. Often such surplus was devoted to luxury house construction or to open up one more retail store in the already crowded streets and bazaars.’”

-Ali p.61

Like I said… in the image of its father…

So what is the result of this kind of economic strangulation of a distant land for the profit of those at home?

Ideologically democratic, the west goes about offering democracy to the people that it has just invaded, and when they cast their vote for the leader they want, the empire immediately overturns the result. This is not an effective long-term strategy. It requires those in authority absolutely must embrace hypocrisy, and embrace it with passion. That’s the sort of thing that drives people to revolt. In order to justify their Imperial ambitions to the voting public, democratically elected leaders must affirm their commitment to democracy and claim to be working to advance the cause of that ideology. They can’t actually do this, because the democratically elected governments that would spring up in their conquered territories would be naturally hostile to western corporate interests.

Pakistan has dealt with this problem; in a far more direct way, for its political life from 1947 until the creation of Bangladesh. When the Bengali majority toppled the Muslim League government in provincial polls in 1954, General Ayub Khan was prompted by the Britain and the USA to assume military control of Pakistan.

Bengali conversion to Islam was a relatively recent phenomenon. Like in many predominately Hindu areas, one of the key motivating factors behind this was a desire to find religious expression while escaping the tyrannical caste system imposed by most forms of Hinduism. Because Bengali Islam was fairly new, a new social class had been created. Whether we’re looking at the beginning of Christianity or the Industrial revolution, such an event always creates unrest among those of the old order.

In a sense, this capacity to free people of their society’s previously established hierarchy was the reason that Islam was so successful to begin with. As I noted in my post on the Mongol creed, a successful revolutionary ideology must uproot the established class system in the society it seeks to dominate, and replace it with its own. Islam had achieved that in the Bengal province to the extent that it created a comfortable middle-class among the Bengalis, which were not beholden to the feudal Hindu system, but had not won the imperial favor enjoyed by Punjabi Muslims.

Pakistan’s Imperial masters, because it was beholden neither to aristocratic tradition or a predictable caste system, saw this group as dangerous. The Awami League ran on a campaign that (Ali, p. 62) amounted to “no taxation without representation.” Bengali agricultural profits had been redirected to West Pakistan to be enjoyed by a minority elite that was in the pocket of Britain and the USA. Popular democratic ideals prompted this elite to hold elections, but their own needs and the needs of those who created the state of Pakistan prompted them to overturn the results. The masses in East Pakistan saw through this rather thin façade, and a revolt began which finally drove the West Pakistani military to kill the goose that laid the golden eggs.

Bangladesh was formed because of the massive popular uprising, and because, as the west had planned, they were surrounded by a foreign power that was hostile toward their pseudo-Imperial masters in West Pakistan. This part of the matter is pretty straightforward. What is striking is the contrast to early Islam. In the beginning, Islam overcame ethnic and cultural differences to unite a people into a nation of believers. Pakistan, however, was a state that contained multiple nations. There were, to name a few, Punjabis, Sindh, Bengalis, Pashtun and others, not to mention Sikhs and Hindus belonging to those ethnic groups as well. The idea behind Pakistan was to create an Islamic state, but Mohammed al-Jinnah was a secularly minded individual. He failed to understand the necessity of defining the new state as such, hoping to keep Pakistan to some extent a secular nation. Tariq Ali lauds him for this, but I see this as the mistake that allowed a great deal of the nonsense that followed to take place.

Maulana Maududi and his Deobandi fundamentalists could never have exercised the influence that they did in a Pakistan that had a clearly defined political notion of Islam, in much the same way that the secular quality of the USA allowed Christian fundamentalists to slip under the radar and swarm the White House. In the secular west, religious beliefs are seen as a personal thing, and we consider it poor taste to question them too deeply. In post-Jinnah Pakistan, Maududi’s followers succeeded in muddying the definition of Islam to the point that they could have their political enemies declared kaffirs and heretics when it became expedient for weak leaders to curry favor with the likes of the Islamic Party. Additionally, toads like Ayub Khan and Muhammed Zia-ul-haq could never have seized control of a truly religious state. They were common mercenaries.

Pakistan declares itself to be an Islamic nation, but it has no definite legal idea of what that means. Just sit back and use your imagination for a second. That set-up gives an opportunistic plutocracy a great deal of wiggle room to advance its agenda. Which means it was not an accident.

Early Islam united people of different backgrounds in a common jihad because it gave them a weapon against imperialism. Pakistan’s leaders were on the side of the invading empire after the Syed Ahmed Khan did his tour of Europe, and convinced European leaders to give the minority Muslims authority to act as the Bantustan “keepers” of the Hindu majority, and later of non-Punjabi Muslim ethnic groups, as well as Punjabi Sikhs and Hindus.

The point?

Being on the side of the foreign tyrant, the rule of the West Pakistan elite accentuated, rather than overcoming, the ethnic and cultural differences of the people of Pakistan.

the little depth

grannywolf007@gmail.com — Wed, 22 Jul 2009 17:08:10 GMT

Today is one month in TO.

Last night I took the subway for the first time. I was hoping to make it longer, but things happen as they happen. Naturally, since it WAS my first time, (in THIS city, anyway) the train broke down shortly after I climbed aboard. As we all sat, waiting to hear what was what, I found myself staring at a book advertisement that made me repeatedly cringe. Each time I faced forward I got a feeling like I had just walked through a spider web.

It said: “*author’s name* brings story alive!”

And it was like… Christ… if I have to be stuck staring at an insipid poster, can’t they at least check the fucking grammar?

Hell ain’t deep enough…

Faith in the Gods

grannywolf007@gmail.com — Sun, 19 Jul 2009 02:01:03 GMT

Objective, independently motivated, self-aware ideas?

“The fact is that certain ideas exist almost everywhere and at all times and they can even spontaneously create themselves quite apart from migration and tradition. They are not made by the individual, but they rather happen-they force themselves upon the individual’s consciousness. This is not platonic philosophy but empirical psychology.”

-C.G. Jung, Psychology and Religion, p. 4

Jung observes that complexes which spring from this forceful presence are better understood as separate from the individual that experiences them. Attempting to incorporate them into the self intellectually posits a division within the self. The first step in resolving these complexes is to distinguish them from the core essence by recognizing that they originate from outside sources.

In magick and yoga, understanding and ceremonially articulating this separation allows the adept to recognize their core essence, their True Will, by distinguishing it from all other apparent motives and agendas. This arduous process determines a definite “center of the universe” which makes an intelligible conception of the “all” possible. From there, the adept’s idea of the universe is expanded to include all objects and phenomena with reference to this absolute point of origin. When we try to confront these complexes without True Will as a frame of reference, we mistakenly try to include external influences in our conception of ourselves, and become subject to spontaneous unconscious actions and emotions that spring from our struggle with these Self Aware Ideas that are forcing their agenda on our consciousness.

As Aleister Crowley observes, we will restore our faith in the Gods by getting to know them. Instead of trying to block them out with mindless repetitive tasks, or drugging ourselves senseless, or drowning them out with media noise, we have to learn to realize their independent existence, and confront them on that level.

How can the people of this culture ever hope to know themselves when they believe that everything in their head comes from them?

The Flesh of the Mongols

grannywolf007@gmail.com — Thu, 09 Jul 2009 06:21:35 GMT

“The Mongol concept of a universal empire differed from that of the Chinese. The latter regarded the adoption of Chinese culture by the defeated nations as an essential part of the concept, whereas only economic interests were important to the nomads.”

-Paul Ratchnevsky, Genghis Khan, His Life and Legacy

The Mongols were important enough to be included along with the Christians, Muslims, Jews, Hindus, and Buddhists in the rather striking passage in Liber AL III:53, but they seem to be the odd ones out. The creeds and the empires of the other peoples mentioned span centuries. The dominance of the Mongol empire, though it was geographically the largest contiguous empire in human history, lasted less than two hundred years. The creed of Genghis Khan, and the vital essence the first nomadic warriors used to realize this massive achievement, did not endure.

I believe that there is an analogy that can be drawn between the more or less irreligious character of the Mongol empire and our own modern imperialism which can help us understand out own culture’s relationship to religious nationalism, particularly as it occurs in Islam. There is a demonstrable isomorphism between the rise of Muhammed and the rise of Genghis Khan. Both men united previously conflicting nomadic tribes under a single ideology. Both men were struggling against larger empires, the Romans and Persians, and the Chin dynasty respectively, both empires expanded along established trade routes with the help of the merchant class, and there are other distinct characteristics that both Islam and the Mongol creed have in common. The religious character of Islamic imperialism, however, creates some interesting differences that are relevant to our understanding of modern Liberal Secular Humanism’s imperial efforts.

First, let’s attack the most obvious point. Islam did not die with Muhammed. The Mongol empire, however, did not long outlive Genghis Khan. Why might that be?

“This creature Man, who in his own selfish affairs is a coward to the backbone, will fight for an idea like a hero.”

-George Bernard Shaw, Man and Superman

We can see how this plays into what preserved Islam, but what about the Mongols? During Genghis Khan’s life, it was clear what the Mongolian warriors were fighting for. They were truly brothers in arms. The officers and soldiers ate the same food. The leaders of the army, including the Khan himself, dressed, conducted themselves, and were treated the same as the lowest soldiers. Honorifics, ceremonial pageantry, and other such pompous airs were shunned. Although the Mongols were merciless in destroying those who resisted them, enemy warriors who had been observed to follow orders and stay loyal to their commanders were often offered positions in the Golden Horde. Those who betrayed their commanders, even to Mongolian advantage, were tortured and killed. Although new recruits usually had to, at first, hand over a family member to stay with the Mongol leaders as insurance against treason, once they had proven their loyalty they were extraordinarily well treated. One of Genghis Khan’s best advisors and generals was actually an assassin from another tribe that had tried to kill the Mongol leader, who was so impressed by his attacker’s marksmanship (in spite of his continued ability to draw breath) that he took the man into his service immediately.

What sort of mentality are we seeing here? What makes it different from Islam? In his comments on AL III:52 & 53, Crowley makes the following points:

Of Islam:

“Mohammed's point of view is wrong too; but he needs no such sharp correction as 'Jesus.' It is his face -- his outward semblance -- that is to be covered with His wings. The tenets of Islam, correctly interpreted, are not far from our Way of Life and Light and Love and Liberty. This applies especially to the secret tenets. The external creed is mere nonsense suited to the intelligence of the peoples among whom it was promulgated; but even so, Islam is Magnificent in practice.”

Of the Mongols, Jews, Hindus, and Buddhists:

“Why assault their flesh rather than their eyes, as in the other cases? Because the metaphysics, or point of view, is correct.”

Many Thelemites have written extensively on subjects relating to Judaism, Hinduism, and Buddhism. I don’t think I’ve ever noticed anyone so much as touch the Mongols. Why is that? What is it about the Mongol point of view which may get under a Thelemite’s skin?

“Life on the steppe made a warrior of every youngster and Genghis believed that a man’s fulfillment was to be found on the field of battle. On one occasion he asked Bo’orchu and other comrades what they thought was man’s highest bliss. They answered that it lay in falconry, when one rode out in the spring on a sturdy gelding, the hunting falcon on the wrist and loosed it against the prey. Genghis answered: ‘You are mistaken. Man’s greatest good fortune is to chase and defeat his enemy, seize his possessions, leave his married women weeping and wailing, ride his gelding, use the bodies of his women as a nightshirt and support, gazing upon and kissing their rosy breasts, sucking their lips which are as sweet as the berries of their breasts.”

-Ratchnevsky, p. 153

Clearly, in the Khan’s eyes, sex and violence, mutually inclusive, were the whole point of life. This is well worth thinking about. Thelemites often criticize the “Old Aeon” as anti-sexual, or sexually inhibited. It’s a small wonder that those same people who cling to this view avoid looking closely at the most sexually aggressive group included among the world’s major religious ideologies by Aiwass.

We can frankly admit that, even in the tolerant Mongolian empire, there were certain customs of the nomadic people imposed on those that they conquered. It was required, as per the tribal custom, that people take in travelers and offer them food and shelter. For the same reason, urinating indoors was punishable by death (if you insist that people take strangers into their home, it is only fair to also insist that they are more or less housebroken). Islamic customs of hospitality and restrictions on cleanliness are not dissimilar. Charity is a pillar of Islam, and Muslims are required to donate a certain amount of their income to the poor. The Mongol empire also had a tax, levied on the spoils of war, which went to providing poor and starving people with food. This is remarkable, in that every other comparable charitable enterprise in the twelfth century had some implicit religious character. The Mongols, however, had the equivalent of modern secular social programs going to economically support tribes that had been loyal to the Khan but fallen on hard times. All of this, however, depended on maintaining the warrior lifestyle that Genghis Khan lived, but never codified in any text or series of abstract rules or guidelines.

This kind of charity is not the only thing the Mongols had in common with the modern west. As the quote at the outset of this post indicates, economic interests drove Mongolian imperialism. Cities or people were almost always offered a chance to surrender and be spared. Although the Mongols have a reputation for merciless violence, they tended to give their victims an opportunity to continue about their lives more or less undisturbed as long as they got their end. This tactic, and the promise to kill every man woman and child that crossed their path if the offer was refused, (what do we call them? “Civilian hostages,” is the term I believe…) had the effect of turning the people against their leaders, if those leaders did not seem willing to acquiesce to Mongolian rule. Merchants and tradesman, often Muslims who viewed the Mongolian empire as a breath of fresh air distinct from other imperial rulers in that they did not interfere with their religious practices, would go ahead of the Golden horde spreading tales of its ferocity, its invincibility, and the futility of resisting conquest. Today, the western mass media accomplishes similar tasks in parts of the world in which western business has a vested interest. Religious “freedom,” that is, the de-politicizing of religion, is just good for business.

“Genghis was tolerant. As a statesman he knew the danger to internal peace represented by wars of religion, and as a conqueror he recognized that the proclamation of religious freedom was a powerful weapon in his struggle against peoples of other religions. Genghis thus ordered that all religions should be respected and that none should be given precedence over the others…”

-Ratchnevsky, p.197

At what cost?

Although the Mongols had no spiritual crisis comparable to what we see in our society, Genghis Khan did. Later in life he was greatly conflicted about himself and his achievements. He asked questions which would have been absurd for a prophet like Muhammed to ask himself. How could a former slave become the Emperor of the world? This identity crisis lead Genghis Khan to meet with Christian, Islamic, Buddhist, and Taoist religious leaders. It was finally a Taoist sage by the name of Changchun that gave him some answers that seemed to help ease his mind, although he did not, by any means, convert to Taoism. A flirtation with spirituality, very similar to what we see in our culture, was all that was took place. For Muhammed, questions like “Why me? How can this be?” were answered before the battle for conquest had even begun. And those, of course, are the very questions that plague our privileged western society. We have every advantage, and we use it to live lives of empty entertainment and shallow consumerism. Weighted against that, these people who live in the most affluent, technologically advanced civilization in the world are bombarded by images of human misery and suffering on a daily basis, and they simply do not know how to place the opportunities and benefits of their own lives into any kind of meaningful context with respect to those images.

Victory can be as difficult to understand and process as defeat. But, and here is the interesting question, why were the Mongols victorious? Ratchnevsky dismisses the notion that it was a question of superior cavalry, military strategy, or mere ferocity. Instead, he attributes Mongolian success during the life of Genghis Khan to military meritocracy.

“The Mongol army was organized on principles which differed from those of enemy armies. Appointment to command was based solely on ability and results, not on birth or position in the tribal hierarchy. One of Genghis’ bilik states: ‘He who is able to command ten men in battle will be able to command a thousand or ten thousand in battle formation, and he deserves such a command.’ Officers who were not able to meet the demands of their appointment were removed and their commands entrusted to subordinates. The possibility of unrestricted promotion – every soldier carried a marshal’s baton in his knapsack – gave rise to lively competition among the warriors. The military commanders owed their position to Genghis Khan [not, let us make the distinction, to their friends and relatives -007] and he could rely on their unconditional loyalty and military efficacy.”

-Ratchevsky, p. 171

Success is your proof, then! This is a key aspect of the Mongol character. This is the only legitimate form of heirarchy.

One thing that Islam and Genghis Khan had in common was that they served to dis-integrate the tribal class structure that had characterized the lives of their people. This is, in a very real sense, the key to any major social change. Although class does not disappear, it is re-ordered. This is always accompanied by a violent shake-up of a society, but in the case of nomadic peoples being dominated by foreign empires, it was absolutely necessary to their own survival and success, not to mention the transition to imperial status themselves.

In Genghis Khan’s case, the whole thing was carried on the character and integrity of a particular individual, which influenced the phylogenetic development of an entire people. Although it did not become codified into a coherent system, as Islam did, this also meant that it could not be misused or corrupted by other interests, which Islam, along with many other religions, has been.

Those are, to my mind, the most salient characteristics in question. Pardon me if this post seems fragmented. Any one of these topics would be worthy of a more in-depth treatment, but I present them in review here to legitimize my claim that there is, indeed, a particular isomorphism between the nomadic-come-imperial characters of the Mongolians and Islam, and another distinct isomorphism between the secularism of modernity and the religious tolerance of the shamanistic Mongols.

Jung for Occultists: The Personal and Relative vs. The Abstract and Absolute

grannywolf007@gmail.com — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 23:42:58 GMT

When discussing the difference between his own methods of dream interpretation, and how they differ from Sigmund Freud’s, Carl Jung makes the following distinction that, I think, raises a number of very important questions. How do we relate to our complexes? Do we gain power over them by identifying them and “naming” them, so to speak? Or do we assert our Will over theirs by understanding our particular relation to them?

“Freud is seeking the complexes, I am not. That is just the difference. I am looking for what the unconscious is doing with the complexes, because that interests me very much more than the fact that people have complexes. We all have complexes. It is a highly banal and uninteresting fact. Even the incest complex, which you can find everywhere if you look for it, is highly banal and uninteresting. It is only interesting to know what people do with their complexes; that is the practical question that matters.”

-C.G. Jung, Analytical Psychology in Theory and Practice, p. 93-94

As soon as I read these words, I thought of the following quotation:

“How restore faith in the Gods? There is only one way; we must get to know them personally. And that, of course, is one of the principal tasks of the Magician.”

-Aleister Crowley, Magick Without Tears, Cap. LXXVI

Although I do not believe that we can dismiss Freud’s work on dream symbolism as “impractical” so quickly, it is impossible to deny the validity of Jung’s point. We may all possess various complexes brought about by the universal nature of human development, but how we relate to them as individuals really determines how they impact our lives, and whether or not they pose a threat or obstacle to doing our True Wills. I would argue that having a working knowledge of the abstract nature of a complex (we could make the analogy to finding a spirit’s attribution in Liber 777 in order to determine the means to control it) is crucial to scientifically documenting the process of resolving it, but it seems reasonable to assert that although this is necessary for a magician or yogi, it is not for a mere psychiatric patient (conflate these at your own risk).

What must be understood is that the mere existence of the Gods indicates a division of the Will. This is a point that cannot be avoided. This is why Crowley tells us, time and again, that the only way to really accomplish the Great Work, on the personal scale or in light of human development as a whole, is to “make contact with higher intelligences.” The force that these intelligences exert upon us divides the Will, because they act on the psychological complexes inherent in the human mind giving them ‘a Will of their own,’ which they use to manifest their separate agendas through spontaneous unconscious actions. This is most obvious in a schizophrenic personality type, but I think that the phenomena is far more universal than Jung suggests here:

“Because complexes have a certain will-power, a sort of ego, we find that in a schizophrenic condition they emancipate themselves from conscious control to such an extent that they become visible and audible. They appear as visions, they speak in voices which are like the voices of definite people. This personification of complexes is not in itself necessarily a pathological condition. In dreams, for instance, our complexes often appear as in a personified form. And one can train oneself to the extent that they become visible and audible in a waking condition. It is part of a certain yoga to split up consciousness into its components, each of which appears as a specific personality.”

-Jung, ibid. p. 81

The attainment of Pratyahara is the technical name for this. When a person attains to this state, it becomes very clear that certain thoughts, visual impressions, and imagined conversations which one previously supposed to be having with oneself actually have their source in various psychological complexes/ Gods and spirits which are imposing their agenda on the individual’s consciousness. To reduce this to “splitting up the personality” is typical of Jung, and comfort to all those academic pseudo-magicians who prefer to believe that “it’s all in your head.” Nevertheless, the point holds. One can banish or subdue an intruding intelligence, but that intelligence was able to intrude on the consciousness because it found fertile ground to take root there. If an exorcism takes place, it must also be accompanied by a “salting of the earth,” so to speak, or in other words, bringing the hidden (occult) psychological complexes that served to nourish that intruding intelligence to light. This doesn’t necessarily mean that the complex goes away, but when one becomes conscious of these things it is no longer such an easy task for outside influences to turn them against a person.

But in what sense are these complexes resolved? Are they just simplified out of existence? Is there a final showdown? It seems foolish to assert that they simply disappear. Crowley makes no such suggestion. In fact, as many of us are aware, trying to ‘kill’ a complex or make it disappear triggers its defensive mechanisms. It WILL fight to preserve its independent Will and existence. Is this really what we’re trying to do? Or are we just trying to disentangle our complexes from the mandate handed to the intellect and ego by the True Will, and use that force to put them to work for us?

“If I have ten and sixpence in the world and but a half-guinea cigar, I have no money left to buy a box of matches. To "snap out of it" and recover my normal serenity requires only a minute effort, and the whole of my magical energy is earmarked for the Great Work. I have none left to make that effort. Of course, if the worry is enough to interfere with that Work, I must detail a corporal's file to abate the nuisance.
…
The new Master is "cast out" into the sphere appropriate to the nature of his own particular Great Work. And it is proper for him to act in true accordance with the nature of the man as he was when he passed through that Sphere (or Grade) on his upward journey. Thus, if he be cast out into 3° = 8°, it is no part of his work to aim at the virtues of a 4° = 7°; all that has been done long before. It is no business of his to be bothering his head about anything at all but his Work; so he must react to events as they occur in the way natural to him without trying to "improve himself." (This, of course, applies not only to worry, but to all his funny little ways.)”

-Aleister Crowley, Magick Without Tears, Cap. XXXIII “How Can a Yogi be Worried?”

I think what Crowley is trying to say here is that, just because a complex has been overcome by the True Will, (as, to attain to the Grade he describes, all complexes must have been overcome) it does not mean that it “goes away,” or ceases to cause anxiety. One can do one’s True Will while being tormented by all manner of disturbances, so long as they do not interfere with actually doing the work. If a magician’s Great Work requires him to go to Paris at once, he can go there in sublime satisfaction, in timorous anxiety, in hopeful expectation, or in resigned annoyance. He can go to Paris healthy and robust, drunk and disorderly, bejeweled and in silk, or sick with cholera and wrapped in a bed sheet. It doesn’t matter. The salient factor is his going to Paris. So long as this is accomplished, the Secret Chiefs really don’t care how the magician feels about it, or how he manages to do it.

(The only exception to this is when the task involves the Act of Truth, where attitude is paramount, which is a totally separate matter for discussion.)

So if Crowley insists that we personally get to know the Gods, these (as Jung calls them) despotic and inescapable forces at work in our lives, does this coincide with Jung’s method of observing a person’s relation to their complexes, and giving that priority over analysis of the complex itself?

In a sense, I think Jung is presenting a false dichotomy of value. He describes the analysis of the complex qua complex as “uninteresting.” I’m not precisely sure what he gains by that, other than to score a rather unbecoming political point off of Freud. This reminds me of, to keep to our analogy, people in the occult community who don’t want to memorize tables or study abstract philosophical concepts, because they consider these to be “boring,” and who would rather focus on developing their “personal mythologies.” While there’s no doubt that this is an important task to one who would “know thyself,” making this information intelligible demands that it be brought into conformity with a coherent set of ideas, principles, and formulae. There must be an alphabet and a grammar if there is to be a language.

Crowley tells us definitely that we must get to know the Gods personally, but that doesn’t mean that we simply dismiss the notion that all Gods of a Mercurial nature, for example, are of an analogous type. We look at the things Mercurial Gods have in common in their abstract sense, and we balance that data against our personal experience with the divinity in question. The armchair magician who reads books and never does magick has no personal experience with the Gods, and as such commands only academic authority (poor creature!), while the campsite magician may have had some intense personal encounters with the divine, but lacks the language and intellectual understanding to rationally articulate or understand their experiences in an intelligible way, and as such is likely to be lead down all manner of fanatical garden paths. In neither case does the would-be magician really KNOW the things they study or encounter, as the case may be.

It is tempting to assert a dichotomy between the work of Freud and Jung. Both men had students that devoted themselves entirely to making that distinction. To me, this is like asserting a dichotomy between history and literature. Not only is it absurd, as both categories of study deal with different questions and assumptions entirely, but it is also damaging to the interpretation of history as literature (which is crucial to understanding history) AND to the interpretation of literature as history (which is crucial to understanding literature). Psychology is a relatively new field, and suffers a great deal from the desire to create “schools” of one kind of thought or the other. I think that is we look at the evolution of its companion, Philosophy, we can see the way in which this kind of thinking scuttles the boat before it reaches the harbor, denying what is on the basis of what should be.

I hope I have made clear the way in which I see Freud holding the tail, Jung the ear, of this particular elephant…

Quote of the Day: What is good for philosophers? For Gnostics?

grannywolf007@gmail.com — Tue, 30 Jun 2009 03:31:56 GMT

*in response to the question, 'How big is this sphere, which is the four-dimensional self?'*

"This is really a philosophical question, and to answer it requires a great deal of theory of cognition. The world is our picture. Only childish people imagine that the world is what we think it is. The image of the world is a projection of the world of the self, as the latter is an introjection of the world. But only the special mind of the philosopher will step beyond the ordinary picture of the world in which there are static and isolated things. If you stepped beyond that picture you would cause an earthquake in the ordinary mind, the whole cosmos would be shaken, the most sacred convictions and hopes would be upset, and I do not see why one would wish to disquiet things. It is not good for patients, or for doctors. It is perhaps good for philosophers."

-C.G. Jung, Analytical Psychology in Theory and Practice

A beautiful illustration of why the therepy/ self-help model is totally incompatible with Gnosticism, magick, real yoga, or Thelema.