Sex, Drugs & Magick: 2000: An Inner Space Odyssey
Now we've arrived at the last chapter where Wilson delivers his final bits of philosophy, social commentary and prophecy. Finished in the early years of the 1970s looking forward to the year 2000, we are almost as far removed from his future as he was from our past. What held up in the half-century that has transpired since?
Christianity is still a threat to our civilization and has inspired the extremist response in our society that elects madmen, fascists and not-even-hiding-that-they're-shills politicians in the name of reaction to the excesses of the Left. Changing trends in gender and sexuality have spurred much of this animosity that now seeks to remove any mention of homosexuality (and much more besides) from schools and society at large. The sexual crisis in Christianity has gone on long enough that now a powerful, illegitimate minority seeks to have the highest court in the land rescind rights concerning marriage, birth control and secularism from the American people. While I imagine that some Christians oppose abortion because it feels wrong, I also can also clearly tell that the motivation of the larger contingent is to control sex and limit sexual activity as much as possible. They will come for what we do behind closed doors if this is allowed to carry on. I anticipate, barring a political miracle, that in five years mandatory prayer will be back in most schools, there will be federal laws against abortion and birth control will be heavily regulated.
These same Christians who, in Mencken's words, fear above all that someone, somewhere is enjoying themselves, rant and rave against the use of medications for ADHD, depression and anxiety. To an extent, we can posit that this is backlash against over diagnosis but we can also reasonably suspect that it is born out of superstitious ignorance. I do not have the energy or knowledge to comment at length on this, but I will again say that our hard won cannabis reform teeters on the edge of a knife. Who knows how long these brief glimpses of sensible drug policy will last in the America that is to come? Strides in psychedelic therapy are still in the infancy of their legitimacy and we will see if they ever make it out of Europe and the West Coast to the rest of the world. If the pandemic has taught us anything, it is that large swaths of the populace could care less what medical professionals have to say and that the CDC, AMA and other organizations are as political as they have always been. We had a chance to show our resilience and unity as a species/nation and we failed. Hard. I fear that if the other side gets their way, we will be seeing a societal reset to 1959 and much of what we have and continue to take for granted will join abortion in the back alleys and black markets.
As far as religious revolutions go, there doesn't seem to be any novel upheavals occurring right now. Arguably, the Drug Revolution's religious undercurrents became what we can loosely deem New Age beliefs which are as popular as ever, yet as wishy-washy as ever on the other hand. While a decade ago I was confident we were seeing the final years of Orthodoxy's tyranny in Western society, it seems that was a false hope. The war of heavens continues to rage across the Earth; we are still lost, divided and increasingly annoyed with our neighbor's beliefs. (I should note that most so called religion has as much to do with spirituality as the Kardashians do with quantum physics. Religion, in the common sense, is preoccupied with societal mores and tradition than any sort of inward exploration and bringing ourselves forth in the world.)
With the repetitious, pained lamentation of "only love is vile," Wilson pushes the reader's nose close to the burning insanity at the core of our society. We are still very much in an age that Blake would lament and where Reverend Swift could still make his acerbic observation that "we have enough religion to hate each other, but not enough to love." The amount of Christians, gentle, all-accepting and world-healing Christians, I know to this age that do not blink at violence but blush and stammer at the sight of a woman's flesh is astounding. The problem persists. Are we able to share a world with people who believe what seems to this heretic to be arch-blasphemy? Will they even let us have our own share of the world, away from their perverse, intrusive belief system? They haven't so far. Is there a point to trying to appease this idiot demographic when they seem determined to drive us all into their contra-spiritual muck?
So, our discussion of Sex, Drugs & Magick: A Journey Beyond Limits, proper, concludes much the same as it proceeded, with me anxiety-griping about the difference between RAW's vision and ugly reality. This has always been one of my favorite of his works, along with Ishtar Rising, since I read them in my wayward youth. It's full of inaccurate predictions and outdated information, but it is one of the trustiest guides to drug use I can think of, certainly in spirit. I'm grateful Wilson wrote this and doubly grateful for the impact it has had on me: it would be in my essential reading for anyone interested in magic.
Stray Thoughts
- It should be mentioned that Ouspensky, delightfully, also wrote down the line "a man can go mad from an ashtray" while under the effects of nitrous.
- I am almost certain that Wilson's references to counterculture groups adopting tenants of Crowleyean sex magic "as early as 1962" is a reference to Oberon Zell-Ravenheart's Church of All Worlds. The Church of All Worlds, covered in Margot Adler's Drawing Down the Moon, was a religion inspired by Heinlein's Stranger in a Strange Land. While reading Stranger in a Strange Land at the embarrassingly late age of 26, I was blown away by just how much Heinlein included from Crowley; I often joke that it is so different from his other works, aside from being incredibly well written and compelling, that Parsons must have ghostwritten it in between Science Fiction Club meetings.
- As I said above, this is the last post for the book proper, but it isn't the end. I'll be posting at least one or two more posts covering the afterwords in the Hilaritas text. I am almost through Alan Moore's Illuminations and will be penning a review of that soon. I will, of course, offer it to Tom before posting it here.
- I would also like to note that I'm turning over my foreword to Wilson's The Walls Came Tumbling Down to Rasa this week to accompany the Hilaritas edition. I'm excited to appear with Wilson and the wonderful Bobby Campbell.
Great post. One of my college students talked about "the decline of religion" a few weeks ago. I suggested that religion seemed alive and well in the US today, but the next week a student in another also referred to "the decline of religion". I googled it, and it looks like church going has declined in recent years. Certainly we have religion affecting politics in a big way these days, but perhaps religion's role in society will change in the coming years.
ReplyDeleteMost of the criticism of Christianity in Wilson's text and in your own blog post strike me as true, but I think a little bit more nuanced view is possible. Wilson writes that "Christianity has remained, willy-nilly, the most authoritarian and bigoted of all world religions." I would argue that if you look at recent history in places such as Afghanistan, Saudi Arabia and Iran, and the recent attempted murder of Salman Rushdie, Islam seems just as bad, and maybe even a little worse.
ReplyDeleteI am also a little less pessimistic about recent political trends than you are. Things are so bad that it seems hard to be too pessimistic. Yet, when abortion went on the ballot in Kansas, the pro-freedom side won. Five states are voting this fall on legalizing marijuana; maybe that will give an indication of whether the pro-freedom side on drugs is failing.
I don't think all humanity evolves at the same rate, I suspect we find a small minority ahead of the pack. Therefore we find that power possessors have a ways to go in the Intelligence, Compassion, Conscience and Heart Departments. Thus we find the U.S. government, both the Elephants and the Donkeys, willingly giving $65 Billion and counting for a proxy war with Russia instead of finding a way to stop fighting. This, despite the greatly adverse effect this war has on the American and Global economy. Thus, I'm not surprised that the fascist, political side of Organized Religion still strongly influences the masses.
ReplyDeleteWilson provides an individual solution for the tyranny of Organized Religion on page 322 - 323: "Fortunately, this last and most negative result is conspicuously missing in a few religions, such as Zen Buddhism; and many of the heretics within our religions, such as Sufis within the Moslem tradition, the Cabalists within the Jewish tradition and figures like Boehme and Blake in the Christian world, also lack this characteristic. Such men, mercifully, did not establish new dogmas and even actively encouraged others to seek their own visions and find their own truths. Italics added by moi.
My suspicion holds that Heinlein got an assignment from Parsons or Smith to write a popular account of Crowley's teaching without mentioning him or his system directly and this became Stranger In A Strange Land though he does mention Crowley and The Book of the Law in passing. I once wrote a fairly lengthy blog post of all the Magick and Thelema I saw in that book then got advised, by my Intiution if you will, not to publish because it gave away too much. I recall there being much to do with the path of Peh as you might expect in a book about a man from Mars. His name Valentine (heart) Michael (archangel of fire) Smith (everyone, also a worker in metals, i.e. alchemy) alone says a lot. Pynchon connects V (as in Valentine) with Peh in BE ( Bleeding Edge) .
The Walls Came Tumbling Down is a favorite of mine though haven't read it in years. I look forward to your new Forward and reading the book again when the new edition comes out. Thank-you for leading this discussion.
I am excited about reading The Walls Came Tumbling Down, one of the few Wilson books I have not read, and the new foreword is going to be great (I got to read an early draft).
ReplyDeleteTo me, the main takeaway from this chapter was the almost intrinsic individualistic and/or anarchic implications of mysticism, a subject that has interested me more and more. On that regard, the libertarian bend of this book, much more pronounced in my view than in, say, Ishtar Rising from the same period, finally feels justified. One needs to be able to make their own experiences, in their own way, in order to then come to their own conclusions. See the paragraphs on the vision-quest of the shaman, or Leary’s Two Commandments. Znore also dedicates a whole part of his book Death Sweat of the Cluster to this connection.
ReplyDeleteOf course, another implication of this can be seclusion, first social as a way to pursue the quest, but then ontological, with a distrust of consensus reality or perhaps even any reality-tunnel. Chapel Perilous territory. The link between occultism, a reclusive lifestyle, and madness is explored in the indie flick The Alchemist Cookbook, by director Joel Potrykus (note the wink to anarchy in the title as well). This low budget film has much more to offer than might appear at first glance, I recommend it.
Apuleius, I feel curious, which other books would you consider “essential reading for anyone interested in magic”?
I remember finding funny in Prometheus Rising the idea proposed by RAW that he and Christopher Hyatt might be the same person. If Undoing Yourself might be seen as Hyatt’s PR, then maybe Secrets of Western Tantra would be his DS&M.
@Eric, we can only hope. I do have an optimistic belief in the possibility that this is perhaps the death thrash of the ugly old institution. Perhaps by the end of the 22nd century, we'll live up to the better parts of the Enlightenment.
ReplyDelete@Tom, I think that all three major Abrahamic religions have proven to be the belligerent parties at times throughout history. I have my issues with them, some that I need to overcome.
I do think we might be looking at a near future America where some states are simply better places to live than others. I wonder how that will play out in our century.
@Oz, I'm very relieved to also hear that you genuinely believe that there was something sublime/conspiratorial about the genesis of Stranger in a Strange Land.
I am afraid that while I am generally anti-war, I don't believe there is a peaceable solution to Putin. I don't quite share the post-War perspective of Neville Chamberlain, but appeasement doesn't work. Blessed be the peacemakers, but sometimes that piece is achieved through the death of the right person. I pray that we don't escalate the situation and that America doesn't fall in-and-of-itself.
@Spookah I remember those essays! Tom gifted me the book a few Christmases ago. I think that The Walls Came Tumbling Down does a great job meditating on the individual nature of the mystical path while also emphasizing the need to be connected to the greater mass of humanity. It reminds me of arguments I had with my best friend when we started our youthful foray into magic where he would point out that Crowley (and myself) were at our best when we felt a greater connection to humanity than when we were beholden to our sneering escapism. Also when my psychosynthesis therapist/teacher kept emphasizing that all magical acts must be *grounded* and *purposeful.*
I have only read RAW's intro to Secrets of Western Tantra. I didn't really like Undoing Yourself, but I should really read that book. I did the main meditation exercise from Undoing Yourself, but heavily preferred Francis King's "tantric" version of the Middle Pillar exercise, which I experimented with at the same time and continued with for nearly a year. Wish I kept it up. That's how I feel about most rituals.
I'll post my list of essential reading as a blog post.