Holding the slim volume in your hands, you're surprised by how flimsy it seems to be, its papery viscosity. Curling covers and splayed pages like some sort of Gutenbergian seaweed, there's something in the tactile sensation of this reprint that reminds the reader that it is insubstantial. This slick-covered and salacious slender novella could have easily not been written or worked into publication. It could easily have been made real, in a small, behind-the-counter manner of real-ness, and still been easily, confidently forgotten. What you're holding in your hand(s) is, at the very least, an improbability.
Michelle Olley, being characteristically classy, opens her essay with some Sun Ra lyrics. I've seen a lot of people online and in the fleshier immediacy who have cast long shadows in the light of Crowley's new Aeon's light hail Sun Ra as a musician-cum-magician (or is it contrariwise?) who tuned into the 93 Current.
I've only read Michelle's intro and talked to her for about an hour, but I feel confident in calling her "characteristically classy." Olley's credentials take up nearly a page and her information and experience-laden Introduction to The Sex Magicians is full of the easily-given and hard-won wisdom of anecdote and reflection. Dinners with Bob Guccione and ruminations on the merits of looking backwards and inflicting modern values are deftly handled as our author-at-hand performs an extremely important task:
Michelle Olley contextualizes and absolves The Sex Magicians. Olley is in a unique position of being a pioneer in sexual expression and one who has come out on top of the game. As far as I know, Olley hasn't declared any extraordinarily ugly sentiments about any groups, peccadillos or ways of being. Instead, she applies her myriad and extraordinary experiences to a multi-fold (multi-folderol?) interpretation, framed in empathy and understanding. Having Olley as our barker and initial interloper with the raw material of Wilson's first published novel is a very good thing, and very apropos, for our clarity-by-convolution century.
When I read her introduction for the first time, while I was drafting my afterword time and again, I mostly felt a massive rush of relief. I had tried to make an unobstrusive apologia for the novel while still trying to dive into the "real" magic of the book and I wasn't hitting my stride. My unvarnished enthusiasm for the book and my dubious demographic made me a poor choice to explain anything. I was moved to splutter, condemn, excuse and shrug. Michelle made everything crystal clear with an authority I could only ape at. Thank Horus for her work.
In our conversation on the Hilaritas Press Podcast, Michelle endeared herself to me, even more, after unknowingly swatting away my sweaty-palmed concerns over speaking on a topic I am wholly unqualified to write about, by professing her intuitive understanding that Wilson was a force of good. Whatever outdated prose and off-the-mark suppositions Wilson makes in his texts, he is always working for the betterment of existence. He's still working on it. Michelle also does a great job in the podcast and her introduction by drawing the listener/reader's eye to Lost Girls, a corollary text to the one you hold in your hand that delineates the boundary between reality and porn and the health of the intertwining ecosystems.
As such, I welcome you to Wilson's first novel and a few months of serious smut. Let's feel those vibes.
Original cover art illustration of The Great When (Nico Delort)
My relationship with Alan Moore and novels is odd. At first, I almost regretted that Alan was my favorite author, because I was never a "real" comics fan. My comics consumption entirely comprised of The Simpsons and Star Wars, Dark Horse titles bought on midweek nights from the local newstand. Nothing serious. Upon reading The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen Volume II, a comic book series composed of classic novels and some oddball references in the back, I was enamored with a new medium, made familiar and real by a Medium.
Such is the tone of The Great When, and I feel a lot like Dennis Knuckleyard until this day. You'd think the intervening years would matter, but I guess as the human conception of time is an illusion caused by our dimensional constraints, I'm still the cough cough cough slackjawed wishful secret agent I was when I was eighteen, and I wasn't even bombed.
Moore's only novel when I began reading him was the extraordinarily gnomic Voice of the Fire, with it's famously prophylactic first chapter and geographically hyperspecific references. It took me a couple times and a few years to get much out of it other than crying during the John Clare chapter. Jerusalem was Something Else. Echoing and expanding upon Voice, the gargantuan novel was a haunting chrous of self-turned-universe. Reading it was like being rendered. From the first time I heard him read the Michael chapter in the Northampton Library and strenously, and still imperfectly, transcribed it and reread it as a personal treasure. A jewel of the future. But I digress...
The Great When takes place during what was perhaps the bleakest twentieth-century phase for London; in the shadow of the Second World War. Postwar London/Britain is a behemoth I've learned about in scriptures such as Moorcock's Mother London (cited in the Acknowledgements of the present novel) and John Higgs' luminary Live and Let Love. It's all paraffin stoves and washbasin baths, pilchard on toast and communal toilets. Miserable shit, ripe for the weedy growth of nostalgia. Moore has always excelled at building atmosphere, whether in the visual or verbal medium, and this is his greatest trick yet. One smells and feels unfamiliar senses, vividly. (The whole weighty atmosphere is enough to make the geo-political non-entity sistrum of British culture in the Sixties seem a breath of fresh air for a drowning person.) The characters, long and short, have some more heft that the usual combination of names and dialogue. From name to attribute, the reader doesn't have a moment to question who they're meeting at the moment. It just is.
Moore, as he is at his best, has no shame showing off his mastery of his work. No character is described the same way twice and we're all the better for it. I found myself having to look up adjectives for their meaning, references for their provenance, for the first time in many years. The task is not tedious or pretentious, at all- rather, it is like the joy of discovery hearing some unfamiliar term is in our youth. This novel is the work of a Magician at the top of his Age, chronicling a city that isn't even his, in the most poignant and exciting way possible. Now that he has laid in the certain stone of the mind his beloved Northampton, Moore has turned his eye towards the metropolis...Behold, the real London!
I almost got to see him there once, in person. It was a show, a performance, on the behalf of Lex Records of his hagiography of Steve Moore in some disused tunnels that were once part of the London Underground. Unearthing- I won my tickets on the merit of my cough cough cough "essay" about why Alan was the greatest author. I didn't make the leap, couldn't have because of the bitter reality of logistics. But in my mind, I've been to Shooters Hill and Charing Cross. Shoreditch and Cripplegate are in my backyard.
This is a non-spoiler review, if anyone would like for me to go further into depth into the book, let me know!
[One of my students saw me reading the book and asked what I was reading. I simply replied it was the first book in a series of novels. They replied: "Is the next book going to be called The Great How?"
We shall fall to next Tuesday (10/8), with a discussion of Michelle Olley's Preface. "The dildo would have put it in the back of the shop."- Olley on the cover art for The Sex Magicians.
My icon for as long as I've been on Blogger. Taken from John Coulthart's cover art to The Moon and Serpent Bumper Book of Magic.
The Moon and Serpent Grand Egyptian Theatre of Marvels' Bumper Book of Magic was announced when I was an adolescent, young enough to believe that it would change the world and open the 32nd Pathway to all of humankind. Now, as an arthritic soul twisting its way through a decidedly banal world, I can still feel that fantastical hope within me. In a month, we will see the release of this long awaited book, now with a shorter title. When Tom Jackson sent me the announcement, I was coming home from school and it felt surreal. It is happening, and no matter what it is, it will affect me. In many ways, the past sixteen years have felt like a fuse leading to this pure exposition of magic by my living hero. (And another dead hero, who was the living one's mentor.) My mentor who, despite understanding his deep antipathy towards fannish sentiment, I regard as an intellectual father. Whether it was intentional or not, Moore shaped who I am in a way that I don't think I could ever shake. In his own words: "It's not in magic's nature to let anybody go..."
One of the authors is departed for another realm, one I would wager is bathed in moonlight. Steve Moore introduced Alan Moore to magic and Robert Anton Wilson and was his partner on the evening of January 14th 1994, when the roof came off and the two found themselves confronted by the alien-divine intelligence of Glycon and found themselves in a room full of dead magi, outside of time. The night that Moore the Younger decided that there really was something to magic. It was only a couple months before that experience that he declared his intent to become a magician, after imbibing too much Carlsberg. Steve Moore released his masterpiece Somnium in 2012, after years of working on it as recorded in Alan's Unearthing. Not long after this book, the "herald of the Qoph path" as I thought at the time, Moore the Elder went ahead and died in 2014. We were treated to a posthumous publication of his intricately beautiful Telguuth stories the same year that Alan released his magisterial Jerusalem. To me, the apocalyptic nature of Jerusalem, in the truest sense of the word, indicates an association with the Shin path. With two paths opened, leading to and from Malkuth from the higher spheres, it is time for the third and most powerful...the Tau path. (It should also be noted that another posthumous publication of Moore's Selene, a nonfiction incredibly in depth study of the titular God, has been released and further opened the lunar-back-of-the-head path.)
To go ahead and give some credit to my earlier, obsessive self, I'm going to simply reprint a detailed prospectus of the book based on interviews given by the magical Moores about what is (in some cases was) expected to be in The Bumper Book.
The Moon and Serpent Bumper Book of Magic Prospectus
“Alan and I tend to see all this as an ongoing process, somehow. Somnium, the non-fiction Selene book, Unearthing, Alan’s forthcoming novel Jerusalem, The Bumper Book Of Magic… they all seem to be part of some sort of vague, barely-defined Moon And Serpent project to provide an alternative view to simple materialistic reality. We’re willing partners in the project, but control’s been delegated upwards. It all kicked off with that ritual in October 1976, but where it’s going from here… well, I guess the gods know!”- Steve Moore
The Contents
“ a beautiful eight-page Steve Parkhouse strip that opens is, a silent little eight pager from me and Steve Parkhouse”
“Adventures in Thinking”- The keynote essay that will provide “reliable advice as to how entry into the world of magic may be achieved. There is an article on the theory of magic, as we understand it, a practical theory of magic.
“Things To Do On a Rainy Day”- Illustrated by Rick Veitch; will describe “activities such as divination, etheric travel, and conjuring of spirits, deities, dead people, and infernal entities from the pit, all of whom are sure to become your best friends”; Veitch on Moore’s pieces in this setting “I'm happy to report [they] are hilariously brilliant.”; “It's divided up into a number of different areas where we tell them how to get into the magical state, or at least ways that people have done in the past, where we've been pointing out the potential dangers, as well as the potential benefits, of any of these particular methods that we're talking about. We're not advocating any of them, we're simply saying, "This is how people have done it in the past, this is what we think about the techniques, these are some potential dangers you might want to watch out for."; “Once the magical state has been attained, we are talking about things that can be done including mentally projecting into real or otherworldly mindscapes, contacting people at distance, scrying the future, divining, conjuring entities, invoking or evoking.”; “We talk about the important of art and magic, considered in union, and we propose a very artistic form of magic that will actually get some results that you can show other people.”; “We also talk about "old school" magic like how to conjure a god, how to conjure a demon, things that might go wrong with it.”
“Old Moores’ Lives of the Great Enchanters”- “history of magic from the last ice age to the present day” consisting of pictorial, one page, biographies of fifty great enchanters; “we just come up through all of the important magicians, fictional, real or otherwise, the ones that you can't decide about, whether they were real or whether they were a heavily romanticized version of a real person, or whether they were a complete fantasy. The thing is that they're all important in that they added to the ideas about magic.”; in the style of Ripley’s Believe It or Not
the Dancing Sorcerer from the Trois Freres cave in France- “the picture of the guy with antlers prancing around – it’s the first representation of a magician”
Persian Magi and Zarathustra- “after the Stone Age shamanic period, that is the first record of actual magic”
King Solomon
Circe
Medea- “Medea flies through the air and she works her magic using the cauldron, so that's obviously where a lot of the ideas about the contemporary witch come from, like the witches from Macbeth stirring their cauldron.”
Apollonius of Tyana
Simon Magus- “Simon the Gnostic, the head of Gnosticism, basically a rival religion to Christianity, and it's conflating him with Simon the Magician, who was traveling charlatan and magician, who was allegedly invested in a magical competition in front of the Emperor Nero against St. Peter”
Sosipatra- “very definetly a kind of magical figure in her own right”; “the sort of second-century Alexandrian period female magician we settled upon”; [“we had to rule out Hypatia, strictly for reasons of space, but also because she was a Hermetic philosopher rather than an actual magician…so we give passing reference to Hypatia”]
Merlin- “he never existed, but that’s not really important. He was the first Christian-approved magician.”
Roger Bacon
Dr. Faustus- “Here we've worked out the tangled web of Georgius Sabellicus Faust, the child molester and “Fountain of Necromancy” as he styled himself, Johannes Faust, who was the completely blameless doctor of divinity at Heidelberg University, who was known as the “Demigod of Heidelberg”, and we've worked out how these two got mixed up together by people who were just confused by all these Fausts and that even Georgius Sabellicus Faust, in the first reference to him, he refers to himself as "Faustus Secundus," and we were looking at this, and I said, "But that makes 'Faust Second,' and this is the first Faust that we've ever heard referred to" — he's refered to by Johannes Trithemius — so we thought, "Who was Faust the first, then?" And Steve looked up in his Latin dictionary, and the word "faustus" means "fortunate, lucky, prosperous, auspicious," so it would have been a great generic name for a sort of generic folkloric magician, like we might say, "Oh, he was a bit of a Merlin," and they were saying, "He's a bit of a Faust, he's a lucky man,"”
Paracelsus- “We also found out that Paracelsus invented modern medicine.”; “What we happened to notice was that Paracelsus had actually created something called the "Alphabet of the Magi" which in some places looked similar to Dr. Dee's Enochian squiggles and, more importantly, it was used for writing the names of angels, backwards apparently.”
John Dee [Edward Kelley]- “Also, for our money, probably the greatest magician of all time was John Dee. No one else comes close.”; “who was a flat-out necromancer”
Emanuel Swedenborg
William Blake
Aleister Crowley
Austin Osman Spare
Jack Parsons
“The Adventures of Alexander”- “There's a little comic strip by Kevin O'Neill, I think there's about eight one-page chapters in it, and it's done in the style of old British radio fun, or film-fun comedy comics of the 1940's and 50's, { “a Radio Fun kind of thing”} and this is the adventures of Alexander, and it's account of the life of Alexander of Abonuteichos, the charlatan who created Glycon, who is the deity I am personally attached to, and that's very funny and very scurrilous, but it's got an awful lot of important factual material in it as well.”
“helpful travel guides to mind-wrenching alien dimensions”- “We’re currently stumbling through a series of pieces on ‘magical landscapes’ that can be visited in trance or by ritual, each of which is being compressed into a single page.”;
“profiles of many quaint local inhabitants”- “There’s this bestiary of demons and gods and other things that you might be lucky or unfortunate enough to bump into.”
“The Soul”- a decadent pulp tale of the occult; illustrated by John Coulthart; set in the 1920s; Coulthart on the story “This evolved from a comic strip idea which would have originally been published in one of the ABC titles to a text-story-with-illustrations, which is how we now intend to do it. One part of this has already been completed for the forthcoming Moon & Serpent Bumper Book of Magic which Alan is writing with Steve Moore. In all there should be six parts, presented across the book. The idea is quite a simple one, taking the old idea of the “occult detective” but twisting it slightly by having a female character.”; “This is a fictional story, but it basically contains real magical information that we couldn't contain in any other way. One of the main things about magic is that a lot of magical experiences happen entirely within the mind of the magician.”; “So personal experiences that me or Steve might have had, it's not really proper to talk about them in the factual parts of the book where we've been very careful to give a logical account of magic that is actually very rational, where we're checking all of our facts,…that stuff we're working into the fiction which, we think, will give a lot of the flavor of what it is like to approach magic without actually saying, "We did this, I did that, this is how it happened," without making any claims that people might justly argue with. There's that running story.”
“a fold out Kabalistic board game”-“There will be a Qabalah board game where the winner is the first person to actually achieve enlightenment as long as they don't make a big thing out of it. We've got that kind of half-designed, but we're still having some trouble fitting it even onto a fold-out board. We think we've got the main, the way in which you play the game, pretty much sorted out.”
“pop up Theatre of Marvels that serves as both a Renaissance memory theatre and a handy portable shrine for today’s multitasking magician on the move”- designed by Melinda Gebbie (hopefully); “pop-up is one of the most magic things there is as any sort of six year-old would tell you.”
“a matching pair of lengthy thesis revealing the ultimate meaning of the Moon and Serpent”- “makes transparent the much obscured secret of magic, happiness, sex, creativity, and the known Universe”; “at the same time explaining why these lunar and ophidian symbols feature so prominently in the order’s peculiar name”
Now, with thecurrent press release, it seems we might have missed out on the Tarot deck, the pop-up Memory Theatre and the fold-out Kabbalistic board game. (Edit: on seeing a flip through there seems to be something the reader can choose to cut out and assemble.) These were all incredibly ambitious undertakings and it is more than understandable that they weren't realized. Arecent review from Library Journal assures us that the book is full of "an array of puzzles, mazes, and connect-the-dots activity pages strewn throughout." (The review also notes that the authors' passion for the subject shines through and makes a convincing arguement for the importance of mystical and magical thought throughout human history.)
Some materials, that may preview what will be in the Bumper Book, have been released over the years. Along with the aforementioned Somnium, Selene and Jerusalem, (one should also mention Alan's Illuminations and the works of John Higgs) we have:
The various Moon and Serpent Grand Egyptian Theatre of Marvels recordings including: The Moon and Serpent Grand Egyptian Theatre of Marvels, The Birth Caul, The Highbury Working, Snakes and Ladders and Angel Passage.
"The Moon and Serpent Grand Egyptian Theater of Marvels" by Alan and Steve and "Beyond Our Ken" by Alan in Joel Biroco's Kaos 14
Promethea: A now-disowned comic series by Alan Moore that lays out a lot of magical theory and concepts.
"Fossil Angels:" an essay by Moore written at the beginning of the century about the then-current state of magic. Eventually published in The Gnostic #1 and was originally intended to be illustrated by Kevin O'Neill.
"Magic, Running Through the Gutters Like Lightning" from Dodgem Logic #3 which is probably the most practical and explicit published piece on magic by Alan Moore.
"Life On Another World" from Dodgem Logic #6 where Moore outlines the possibilities of new modes of living, including acknowledgement of our imaginary habitats.
"Show Pieces" and The Show: Occult cinema by Alan Moore and Mitch Jenkins. I anticipate that Jean Cocteau, Kenneth Anger, Cameron and Harry Smith will be in Old Moores' Enchanters.
The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: I have always maintained that this is as intrisically, if not as explicitly, magical as Promethea. Especially everything from The Black Dossier onwards. Some of the references to the British comics of Alan Moore and Kevin O'Neill's (along with Steve Moore's) childhoods in showcased in Tempest and seems to be making a reappearance in the Bumper Book.
So, you have a month to review these works if you're so inclined. We also have the first Long London novel, The Great When, by Alan Moore coming out the first week of October. Magic is afoot.
Consider Alan Moore, the closest we're ever going to get to Merlin or Prospero, upon his mouldering isle. Consider where we are and open yourself to the possibility of "real" magic. Things can only get better.
The Moon and Serpent Bumper Book of Magic by Steve and Alan Moore, along with artistsKevin O’Neill, John Coulthart, Steve Parkhouse, Rick Veitch, Melinda Gebbie, and Ben Wickey, releases on October 15th.
Major Edit: If you've found any interest in this post, you really need to read John Coulthart's write-up on The Bumper Book. It is a much more interesting take than my own and Coulthart contextualizes a lot of the material I have here. He is a floating member of the Moon and Serpent, after all, and designed the most excellent symbol below.
And Tchi said, "I would prefer a small mountain temple,
"With order in the observances,
with a suitable performance of the ritual,"
And Tian said, with his hand on the strings of his lute
The low sounds continuing
after his hands left the strings,
And the sound went up like smoke, under the leaves,
And he looked after the sound:
"The old swimming hole,
"And the boys flopping off the planks,
"Or sitting in the underbrush playing mandolins."
And Kung smiled upon them all equally,
And Thseng-sie desired to know:
"Which had answered correctly?'
And Kung said, "They have all answered correctly'
That is to say, each in his nature."
– Ezra Pound, Canto XIII
Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law.
It seems appropriate to conclude the Lion of Light reading group at the Spring Equinox amidst the Thelemic High Holy Days – Holy because they mark the anniversary of the events leading up to and including the reception of The Book of the Law. It began March 16th, 1904 when Crowley invoked IAO to show his wife Rose some sylphs. She didn't see them, but went into an altered state and kept on saying: "They're waiting for you." And so began the adventure 120 years ago that would completely change Aleister's and many people's lives. Crowley wrote his account in "The Book of the Results" which is in The Equinox of the Gods.
One of the things I enjoy about the study of Crowley and Magick is that it never ends; the learning and education never stops. I've seen recent videos where Lon Milo Duquette has been painting a vivid picture around this pivotal episode. I'm very familiar with these circumstances yet still learned new details or perhaps refreshed my memory on things forgotten. For instance, I didn't realize Rose was 5 months pregnant with their first child, Lola. Or that Lola had been conceived in the King's Chamber of the Great Pyramid on a previous visit to Cairo.
Another revelation came from hearing the account of the discovery of what's now known as The Stele of Revealing. This is the hand-painted wood funerary tablet of the priest Ankh af na Khonsu from Egypt's 26th Dynasty that Rose famously directed Crowley to in Cairo's Boulak Museum. Crowley brought her there to test the legitimacy of his wife's vision. It blew his mind upon finding the exhibit number = 666. What I didn't know until a few days ago: that stele distinguishes itself with the unique feature of showing hieroglyphs on the reverse side. That's why that particular stele got preserved and placed in a museum. Those hieroglyphs expressed a spell from a group of artifacts we now call The Papyrus of Ani or The Egyptian Book of the Dead. When a royal personage died, their body got mummified, a process which included removing all the internal organs. This spell, found on the reverse side of the Stele of Revealing, got inscribed and placed in the chest area of the mummified body. It became the magical engine that drove the heart of the deceased person.
The Stele of Revealing shows Ankh af na Khonsu giving offerings to Horus in his Ra Hoor Khuit aspect.
The goddess Nuit arches over the top of the tablet with the winged globe representing Hadit right below her.
The hieroglyphs on the reverse side of The Stele of Revealing
The translation Crowley used became part of the Adorations found in The Book of the Law
also used in the Mass of the Phoenix ritual mentioned earlier.
"And in that heart of hearts was no more I, No more the heart; but sobbing through the sky, Came trembling the more awful beat, the blast Of a million trumpets blazoning the past, Heralding the to-be, and on their wings Whirred incommunicable things. And in their wake, tremendous and austere, A form of fear, Awe in the shape of the Most Holy One, A globe, an eye, a hawk, a lion, a lord, A bowl of brilliance, a winged globe, a sword – All these in one, and one beyond all these, Mute, ithyphallic, caryatides Like gods about his car, came crested on The one true God, the Sun! Instant, the city swirling to its brim With Life unthinkable, dissolved in Him. Instant, explosion shook the bounding night,
Smote it but once, and left but one thing, Light."
– Aleister Crowley, The City of God
Woke up, fell out of bed, dragged a comb across my head . . . then I remembered that I don't have any hair. . .
Most appropriately for a tome encouraging active participation, Lion of Light ends with two questions to the reader. The questions pertain to an alternate cover illustration submitted by Chris Mazur that had garnered serious consideration.
I love this cover submission; it reminded me of Horus as the Crowned and Conquering Child but there was some concern that the figure didn't resemble Crowley enough. However, if you've seen any photographs of little Alex at age 4, it appears the spitting image of the precocious tyke who would grow up to become either the Magus of the Aeon or the Wickedest Man in the World depending upon one's point of view; or both or neither or something in between.
And then there's the extensive, but occult qabalistic imagery that appeared on every cover submission thanks to publisher and graphic designer Richard Rasa who wrote the end note: "A Search for a Cover." Note that the "t" in Robert and the "t" in Aleister bear an uncanny resemblance to the torso and arms in the illustration. An important Thelemic formula = the word ON which acquires multiple ramifications in its wake. It landed briefly a few weeks ago in the comments here. ON occurs no less than four times in this cover: Lion, Anton, Wilson, on. This suggests Tetragrammation, the four-fold aspect of God: Yod He Vau He. In some respects, O + N represent the Yang and Yin of Qabalah. O = male energies and you can probably infer what N represents. When these are equally balanced in one body you get a hermaphroditic nature. Cue up Rebel Rebel by David Bowie.
Here's the clincher: when you add the initials of Robert Anton Wilson + Aleister Crowley you get: RAW + AC = 216 = 6 x 6 x 6. Looking up the Gematria we find: 216 = Lion; Courage; Profound.
"I'd love to turn-urururnn ... you-ououou .... on-ononononnn"
Another big attraction to Magick for me: it works when applied; sometimes much more than expected; sometimes shockingly so. Simply expressing an intention puts things in motion. Coming into contact with Crowley's material presents the first obstacle or barrier – wild stories and concern about the man himself. It's been said that he exaggerated any lurid stories about himself to amplify this bad reputation. It may have gotten out of hand; at times in his life he appeared to regret all the bad publicity coming his way. Getting hung up on Crowley's personality can effectively filter out anyone not ready for the material. This got demonstrated to me with an astral experience a few months after I began studying him. My attention had been moving around the apartment while my body was lying on the bed. It came back to rejoin the body but was barred by the horrifying image of the Demon Crowley's face blocking my closed bedroom door. The only way to get back involved going through the demonic face. As soon as I plunged into it, the face dissolved and I realized it as a false mask to test me. Remarkably, this demon face didn't seem a projection of my personal unconscious; it appeared to come from what Jung calls the Collective Unconscious. I didn't have a negative bias about Crowley nor had heard any of the crazy stories. My only information about him came from Cosmic Trigger and sounded positive.
When I began this journey of self-Initiation in the early 1980s I invariably had difficulties putting the words into concrete action. I had to get by with a little help from my friends along the way. If the intention is there, synchronicities, or as John Lilly put it, Coincidence Control, opens doors and presents opportunities. On the other hand, as Crowley notes inThe Confessions, as soon as you make the intention to make these efforts, all kinds of obstacles, challenges, distractions and barriers pop up in a variety of ways attempting to thwart your efforts. Believe it or not, that appears a good sign.
Aleister Crowley's elder brother, G.I. Gurdjieff, writes of two basic laws in the morphogenesis, manifestation and process of voluntary human evolution: the Law of Octaves and the Law of Three. The latter maintains that it requires 3 different types of energy or forces to manifest any phenomena. He labelled it as affirming, denying and reconciling forces. It aligns with the Christian trinity of the Father (affirming), the Son (denying) and the Holy Spirit (reconciling) and from the Hindu, Brahma the creator, Vishnu the preserver, Shiva the destroyer. More scientifically and practically speaking, the Law of Three can be compared to Ohm's Law of Electricity which describes the relationship between Voltage (V), Current (I), and Resistance (R). It shows that V = IR, that voltage (spirit) results from the multiplication of current and resistance. I call this practical, due to the fact that the brain and nervous system function through electricity. My guess: higher states of consciousness increases the voltage of certain parts of the brain. A psychedelic will electrically stimulate the brain; it can also be stimulated through non-chemical means. Timothy Leary originally called the Sixth Circuit the neuro-electric circuit. I connect C6 with Tiphareth and the Knowledge and Conversation of the Holy Guardian Angel. This seems a long-winded way of saying that the resistance of obstacles and challenges facing the seeker becomes necessary for pushing the current of spiritual growth.
The Ezra Pound quote that opens this post was inspired by Confucius. For all I know, it may be the words of Confucius translated by Pound. It shows that this information exists and has existed for a long time outside of Crowley; he channelled or created a particular assemblage of it known as Thelema or Magick and attempted to make self-empowerment and mutual respect more widely known. For me, studying different things: Joyce, Gurdjieff, Deleuze, The Beatles and Stones, etc. etc. helps with understanding Magick and Magick helps to understand and deeply appreciate these various other disciplines.
* * * * * *
I was in the happiest place in the world when I first read some of Crowley's Eight Lectures on Yoga. It was humid, odd and unattractive. But Crowley was writing about how to be, how to deal, if you will, with humidity and oddness.
Welcome to the plateau of humidity and oddness. The two of us write this together. Since each of us is several, there is already quite a crowd. Here we have made use of everything that came within range, what was closest as well as what was farthest away. We have assigned clever pseudonyms to prevent recognition. Why have we kept our own names? Out of habit, purely out of habit. To make ourselves unrecognizable in turn. To render imperceptible, not ourselves, but what makes us act, feel and think. Also because it's nice to talk like everybody else, to say the sun rises, when everybody knows it's only a manner of speaking. To reach, not the point where one no longer says I, but the point where it is of no longer of any importance whether one says I. We are no longer ourselves. Each will know his own. We have been aided, inspired, multiplied. (Slightly paraphrased from Rhizome by Deleuze & Guattari.)
A quality Deleuze and Crowley share in common = re-contextualizing standard philosophical principles and beliefs to suit their own purposes. Some people wish to know how an advocacy of Horus gets reconciled with an advocacy for Peace being that Horus commonly gets thought of as a God of War. To start, Crowley emphasizes the dual aspect of Horus – Ra Hoor Khuit (the male, war-like aspect) and Hoor pa Kraat (the female, silent aspect). Things change when becoming more balanced. Crowley also introduced the concept: "the Red Triangle reversed" which describes Horus as a triangle on the Tree of Life with its base formed by the path Teth (= Horus) connecting Geburah (Severity) with Chesed (Mercy) and the paths of Yod and Lamed going down from there to form the apex of the triangle in Tiphareth. Crowley said he saw Horus as an aspect of Tiphareth that included Geburah and Chesed. He said that the Red Triangle reversed came from Rose, that it was new to him. The triangle in Goetic magic ritual is where the spirit or demon manifests. Red = anger or war. Reversing the red triangle reverses the manifestation of war-like spirits. To repeat: Horus = an aspect of Tiphareth that balanced Severity with Mercy.
Crowley heard about Thelema from Rose. John Lennon heard about it from Yoko. Love is the law, love under will helped inspire the song All You Need is Love which Lennon wrote for the first satellite transmission around the world. Later, Lennon wrote:
Imagine there's no countries,
It isn't hard to do
Nothing to kill or die for
And no religion too
Imagine all the people living life in peace
– Imagine
I believe John Lennon's activism help contribute to the eventual ending of the Viet Nam war. The change eventually occurred in conformity with his Will. It was Lennon's request to have Crowley appear on the cover of the Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band album. Pepper = Fire. Somewhere RAW quotes Barbara Marx Hubbard:
"The future exists first in IMAGINATION, then in WILL, then in REALITY."
Love is the law, love under will.
An editor's note: The lion's share of this post was offered by Oz, you can even make a game out of finding my own, very short contribution. I have been especially lucky that, through the magic of Wilson and Crowley, I have been able to work with people such as Oz Frtiz, Tom Jackson, Eric Wagner, Bobby Campbell, Richard Rasa and Mike Gathers. I'm even more lucky that I'm able to call many of them my friends. I hope you all listen closely to Oz, who is a true magician; ever bit a brilliant, compassionate and far-out as a magician should be. I'm also terribly lucky to have had such great readers as Spookah and LVX15 along with us during this time. Thank you to everyone that's kept up with the reading group. As is my usually modus operandi, I began this reading group during the school year and various tasks have split my attention to the point where I feel bad about my own lack of commenting. I'm going to at least add some thoughts on the past few posts, if anyone is still curious. Otherwise, we will be back soon with some musing on the forthcoming tome from the Marvellous Moore's and a summer reading group. Love is the law, love under will.- A.C.
