Lion of Light: The Blind Men and the Elephant

Dr. Timothy Leary looking into the future. 

 

Lion of Light: “Do What Thou Wilt” p. 134 – 156

Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law.

Aleister Crowley’s flamboyant personality and life-style sometimes overshadows his philosophy and work especially when looked at superficially. He’s been called the “archetypal villain in 20th Century.” We used to joke about someone receiving vague, unfair, criticism – “what’s the matter, did he kick your dog?” Yet, that’s exactly what W. Somerset Maugham has the vile character Oliver Haddo, based on Crowley, do in his novel The Magician to kick off the conflict. (Joyce has “shaddo” in Finnegans Wake.) Perhaps that’s where the expression originated, or maybe Maugham found it humorous to begin his caricature that way. I remember seeing an effeminate villain clearly based on Crowley in the Basil Rathbone, Sherlock Holmes film, The House of Fear. It’s not difficult to find other examples. This seems ironic given that Aleister spent considerable time using various devices in the attempt to get outside his everyday persona and tunnel realities. Wilson presents two such instances at the beginning of this section and quotes “Saint Aleister” as saying: “How can one hope to understand the world if one persists in regarding it from the conning tower of one’s own personality?”

Lion of Light devotes little attention to Aleister Crowley’s outsize and outrageous reputation though sometimes pokes fun at his critics. In this short 22 page section, Wilson compares Magick and Thelema to a wide variety of thinkers, researchers, disciplines and paths. The most prominent of these, perhaps, being the good doctor Timothy Leary, another character with a larger than life reputation. Wilson also references, in no particular order: Thomas Pynchon, Carlos Castenada, J.G. Frazer, John Lilly, Cleve Backster and telepathic plant research, Bhagavan Shree Rajneesh, Gurdjieff, Lao-Tse, John Lilly, John Allegro, Andrei Pujarich, R. Gordon Wasson, Weston LeBarre, Sufism and two of their mystics, Fariduddin Attar and Hazrat Inayat Khan, Wilhelm Reich, Francois Rabelais, Oscar Wilde, Hippocrates, Mordecai the Foul and the Master Therion among others. 

Apart from Leary, some of these other names seem equally controversial. P.D. Ouspensky felt that Gurdjieff was “evil” and possibly insane; he forbade his students from visiting Gurdjieff and his Institute while preaching and practicing G’s system his entire life after coming to know it. Oscar Wilde got imprisoned in extreme harsh conditions for loving the wrong person and being indiscreet about it. Wilhelm Reich got imprisoned for research the American Medical Association didn’t approve of which lead to his mental instability and eventual death in prison. Many people seem certain that Carlos Castaneda was a fraud who made up Don Juan out of thin air. Wilson quite perceptively quotes Castaneda appearing to address this in part, a quote that also applies to Crowley and his masks: “Little by little you must create a fog around you until nothing can be taken for granted, until nothing is any longer for sure, or real . . .” I suspect Don Juan was based on a real person or a composite of real people which Castaneda greatly embellished. This suspicion in part comes from hearing an unreleased interview of Claudio Naranjo who was best friends with Castaneda when they both went to U.C.L.A. The morning before reading this section to write this post, I was moving firewood with an old friend I see seldomly who happened to mention Journey to Ixtlan, the book quoted here.

This section initiates the student with an examination of the word THELEMA and its correspondence with AGAPE. We get a sense for why it’s known as the “93 current.” I found the comparison with Khan’s version of Sufi philosophy regarding will, love and consciousness insightful and unique to Thelemic exegesis. Wilson extolls the benefits of a positive outlook with a quote from Khan’s Cosmic Language: “It is an optimistic attitude toward life which develops will; the pessimistic attitude reduces it, robs it of its great power. Therefore if there is anything which hinders our progress in life, it is our own selves.” This gets followed by an interesting bit that compares the lack of telepathic ability to the widespread Victorian belief that women were unable to have orgasms. Wilson calls this “trained impotence.” He makes the claim: “it has been easier and easier for magick students and others to unleash their own telepathic powers.” This holds true for me. RAW prefaces this riff with pertinent quotes from Magick in Theory and Practice the last of which states: “WoMan is ignorant of the nature of hir own being and powers.  . . . There is therefore no reason to assign theoretical limits to what she may be, or to what she may do.” (translation mine). We have been programmed with sets of limiting beliefs by our cultural. Though not mentioned here, a useful practice for getting past these limiting beliefs is “Beliefs Unlimited,” a metaprogram written by John Lilly that can be found online or in his book The Center of the Cyclone.

I disagree with RAW and the Golden Dawn on one point: the aphorism that “Fear is failure, and the forerunner of failure,” a phrase that pops up from time to time in RAW’s fiction. I have a problem with the absolute inevitability implied by the word “is”. I agree that giving in to fear may lead to failure but not that it’s always a forerunner. In bardo training we’re told that it’s ok to feel fear but not to react to the fear by panicking. Speaking of telepathy, sometimes a fear sensation can be a warning of danger that thus may be avoided. The words “DON’T PANIC” appear on the cover of The Hitchiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, which serves as a science fiction Book of the Dead – very early on in the story, all life on Earth, including Earth itself gets blown to smithereens except for Arthur Dent whose initials, A.D. = after death. RAW also provides a definition of the Great Work related to the integration of the psyche which seems accurate enough. However, the Great Work has multiple definitions which gets acknowledged by RAW when he provides a different definition for it at the end of this section.

Wilson clearly doesn’t like to pay rent, who can blame him? He sounds a little ambiguous in what people should do about that. It seems like he may be playing with and/or challenging the reade. He first says it’s simply a matter of “waking up” and “stop paying” which gets immediately followed by a Rajneesh directive that when becoming enlighted to “go on behaving in your society as it requires” which, of course, includes paying rent. Then he rejects this “passive posture” and cites Jesus, Crowley, some early Sufis and Adam Weishaupt as examples, which sounds a little dubious, to me. Finally, he rails against rent again ten pages later as medieval exploitation. This ties in with his riff on the inequality of wealth between the “master class and servile class,” – still very relevant. It seems a little absurd to give the instruction “wake up and stop paying” unless he intends to communicate something else. “Stop paying” could be a pun for stop fighting or stop war. The Hebrew letter Peh corresponds with the Tower Tarot card also called War connected with Mars where all the war gods hang out. The paragraph before the rent diatribe has Gurdjieff saying that all that’s necessary to stop the current war of the time, WWI, is for people to wake up and stop shooting each other. Fighting each other seems completely counter-productive to progress of any kind, whether on a personal, political, or a global scale. On the personal level, contention and fighting seems very detrimental to any kind of alchemical construction. The instruction may simply be “stop paying” with rent presented as the context for saying it.

This section briefly goes into the energetics of Sex Magick, and tantra. On page 144 he cites what different researchers and cultures have called this phallic energy/life-force. Gilles Deleuze calls it “sense.” RAW presents a sex magick technique in the Pynchon Gravity’s Rainbow quote.

Apart from Crowley, Timothy Leary gets the most airplay in these pages. In an earlier comment I said RAW called Leary Crowley’s heir, but I was wrong, I didn’t read the full context and assumed he meant Crowley. He quotes Leary writing about Hippocrates from his book Jail Notes, a pretty abstract book mostly from what I remember though this selection appears clear and on point of the subject of drugs, then calls Leary Hippocrates disciple and direct heir. However, you can find a You Tube clip of Leary saying something to the effect that he’s carrying on Crowley’s work. Rabelais, a medical doctor as well as a satirical writer mentioned earlier in this section as a Thelemic antecedent also consider Hippocrates a major influence. We can find a direct line of transmission connecting Hippocrates to Rabelais then to Crowley and finally to Leary. Wilson introduces the very important “game-concept of human behavior” given by Leary along with his Interpersonal Grid that identifies different personality types and the games people play. This section concludes with an early presentation of Leary’s Eight Circuit Model of Consciousness, so early that it only has seven circuits. This section appears very information rich.

Love is the law, love under will.

Oz

Lion of Light: Delusory and Possibly Dangerous

Mina Murray confronts Oliver Haddo on the astral plane ( from The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: Century: 1969 by Alan Moore and Kevin O'Neill) 

Lion of Light: "Do What Thou Wilt" pg. 112- 134

Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law. 

It would have been nice to have this essay about 15-20 years ago, when I was first working at (or, to be quite honest, obsessing over) practical magic. You can find much of what Wilson says in “Do What Thou Wilt” elsewhere, especially in his fiction and in the other essays selected by Mike and Oz for the book, but having it in such a clear, singular sequence would have made things a lot easier. Perhaps I am being cavalier, but I believe this is an example of Wilson at his least gnomic; he provides the reader with practical instructions in a full course of the theory and practice of magic. Reading it almost reminds me of the works of Lon Milo Duquette insofar as parts of “Do What Thou Wilt” are composed of a straightforward explication of magic, along with practical step-by-step instructions. I can feel the envious eyes of the younger me when I read the text and I almost want to apologize that he didn't have this in his initial fumblings. Of course, my apology does nothing to alter the course of matters and it would have deprived me of whatever wisdom may have arisen from my earlier folly…so all’s well that continues to be kinda middling. Here we are. 

For a person in 1974, Wilson was impressively well-read as far as Crowley was concerned; while I don’t think anyone who has read Crowley and Wilson pre-Lion of Light would have mistaken him for a dabbler, I am impressed by how much our author was able to get his hands on in a relatively short amount of time when it was not nearly as widely available as it has been during my lifetime. I always take the Internet for granted but then again, I imagine some of the publications Wilson owned would have been the same that sit on my bookshelves: I can see the clear influence of such 60s-70s Crowley classics as Francis King’s Crowley On Chirst and The Secret Rituals of the O.T.O. as well as Regardie’s (fantastic and gorgeous) Roll Away the Stone in “Fourfold Vision.” I would place some decent money that I know which edition of Liber Aleph Wilson owned at the time. Like any work, this is a time capsule and particularly one for a period in Wilson’s life and times that I have always loved. “The first flush of occultism” and all that in one of the groovier times in the magical milieu. 

“Fourfold Vision” has Wilson clearly laying out what made Crowley different from other “mystics” aside from more generalized observations about his humor, skeptical nature and practicality. Wilson delineates the genius of Crowley’s syncretism by quoting from The Gospel According to George Bernard Shaw and applying it to Korzybski’s Structural Differential. Wilson’s choice of passage is similar to one of my favorite passages where Crowley conveys a similar idea, but with less mystical bullshit. Compare the passage derived from Crowley On Christ (page 113 in Lion of Light) to this footnote from The Book of Thoth: 

“Thus, in low grades of initiation, dogmatic quarrels are inflamed by astral experience; as when Saint John distinguishes between the Whore BABALON and the Woman clothed with the Sun, between the Lamb that was slain and the Beast 666 whose deadly wound was healed, nor understands that Satan, the Old Serpent, in the Abyss, the Lake of Fire and Sulphur, is the Sun-Father, the vibration of Life, Lord of Infinite Space that flames with His Consuming Energy, and is also that throned Light whose Spirit is suffused throughout the City of Jewels.” 

While I personally crave and revel in mystical bullshit, I can see where Wilson’s passage and explanation is much more useful than mine as it eschews the apocalyptic, somewhat condescending and wholly-upsetting-to-Christians language. (I now realize upon rereading this that, if anything, Wilson's selection is much more condescending and as likely to upset Xtians. But it is clearer and less apocalyptic.) We are also treated once again to what must have been one of Wilson’s all-time favorite passages from Crowley, considering how much it reappears in his writings: the second passage of Liber O vel Manus et Sagittae. 

“In this book it is spoken of the Sephiroth and the Paths; of Spirits and Conjurations; of Gods, Spheres, Planes, and many other things which may or may not exist. It is immaterial whether these exist or not. By doing certain things certain results will follow; students are most earnestly warned against attributing objective reality or philosophic validity to any of them.” 

One must admit that Crowley does a pretty good job advertising the fun right there. Herein, Wilson also appends the third passage where Crowley says that the practices in Liber O will widen the horizon and improve control of the mind. I can humbly attest that my general experience with Liber O would bear out Crowley’s promise(s). After diligently ignoring the passage from Liber Aleph where Crowley exhorts the student to firstly gain a grasp of mathematics, a task much more difficult for me than for either of the two authors at hand, and their advertisement for the possible usefulness of drugs, Wilson gives a precise name to Crowley’s method: logic-empiricism-magic-yoga. In my afterword, I propose that this is another version of what Ramsey Dukes (Lionel Snell) would perceive as his Religion-Art-Magic-Science structure, but Wilson also gives an outline that clearly differentiates it from the theory in SSOTBME. Particularly interesting, and convincing, is Wilson’s examination of how different societies and philosophies have so far failed to combine all four together, with one or two always being neglected in favor of the others. 

Wilson’s discussion of the A.’.A.’. is accurate: for all the mystery around the A.’.A.’., Crowley is extraordinarily clear and plain-faced in his description of the grades and their tasks. I know I spent too much time worrying about if there was an “actual” A.’.A.’. or not and debating whether I should formally join instead of working the path on my lonesome. So, I’m going to go ahead and say it is immaterial: one can join the A.’.A.’. by simply following what has been laid out here and in Crowley’s own work. As far as what A.’.A.’. stands for, I generally believe that it is “Astron Argon” or “Aster Argos” ( the latter of which is simply "Argentum Astrum," but in Greek), or that we’ll never know on this side of the veil: I asked my wife what she suspects it might truly mean. Her guess was "Arrogant Assholes," my guess is "Amateur Assembly."

After this, we are brought back to Wilson’s appreciation of Crowley’s humor, something I covered in my last post here. I told you that we’d run into Wilson’s love of Crowley’s “bloody sacrifice” joke again, even if it is only a small mention at the moment. You’ve already read and will read again and again in Wilson his admiration for The Book of Lies and especially Chapter 69, a joke that even junior high students would find understandable. Crowley’s poem from Thien Tao, or The Synagogue of Satan makes an appearance in Masks of the Illuminati as “ a succinct and representative example of the controversial verse of Mr. Crowley.” (Thien Tao can be found in one of my favorite of Crowley’s books, Konx Om Pax.) And while discussing Ambrossii Magi Hortus Rosarium, an early poem-play, Wilson gives some examples of Crowley’s dirty acrostic-notariqons while leaving out the equally delightful  “Femina Rapota Inspirat Gaudium.” 

I was never very good at astral projection and found Crowley’s instruction in Part V of Liber O too damned simple- this is funny as Wilson’s almost identical instructions occurred to me as much easier to understand while being pretty much the same. Perhaps that indicates a change in what I consider simple or possible compared to my younger self. I always hated Crowley’s line “It may be added that this apparently complicated experiment is perfectly easy to perform” at the end of that section as I could never cross the threshold of ever feeling as if I weren’t willing most, if not all, of the experience. I’m sure the younger me wouldn’t have appreciated Wilson calling astral projection “simple and most entertaining,” but that’s the stubborn resentment of youth for you. The only times I have confidently sailed the astral sea have been in those sporadic moments when I was willing to eschew whatever expectations I had and forgone slavish pratice, conditions I'm sure neither man intended. (Add to this how desperately I longed to explore my surely over-romanticized conception of the astral plane, one can see why it was my desire to study “The Seer,” mentioned as further reading on the subject in Liber O, and the full text of The Temple of Solomon the King at leisure that caused me to chase down a copy of The Equinox Volume I well before on demand publishing made it a financially sound endeavor. This has made me consider that it might be time to revisit astral travel, at least to satisfy the heartfelt interest of the self that made so many decisions and set me out upon this quest. Maybe I'd be able to let go of lust for results more easily.)

I was always more adept at the assumption of god-forms and fondly remember timeless moments spent expanding my ibis-headed form above the campus of my undergrad school, then the town, the surrounding countryside, the region, the continent and into the starry heavens and beyond. While I certainly didn’t put it in the extremely useful psychological context provided by Wilson, I believe that sustained use of the practice did help stabilize me and help with a feeling of oneness with all things. I do think it would be interesting to experiment with other god-forms, as a quick perusal of my diaries only indicates that I tried it using the traditional Thoth image, along with a couple experiments with Horus. I do wish Wilson had explained the process of the vibration of god names in his own words as I've always found Crowley's (and Duquette's) "break-downs" of the practice to be lacking.

The itty-bitty-shitty-me worries that what I’ve written above isn’t enough, or clear enough, or clever enough, or too simple or whathaveyou, but I’ve dithered overlong already and it’s two evenings past when I should have had this up. I didn't pretend to have a bird's head for nothing. Happy journeys, until we meet again! 

Love is the law, love under will. 

A.C. 

Lion of Light: A New System of Judgement

 Lion of Light: “Do What Thou Wilt” p. 89 - 112

Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law.

Does anyone wonder how Robert Anton Wilson defined his True Will? I don’t know that he ever said, in so many words, but perhaps one can risk an inference based on his works? It would seem part of it concerned introducing Aleister Crowley and Magick to the world. Surprise and delight swept over me upon hearing that yet another introduction to those enigmatic subjects by Wilson was discovered in the hallowed halls of Harvard University, incidentally, one of the locations in his screenplay, The Walls Came Tumbling Down. This time, the walls of occlusion and forgetfulness did come down through the work of intrepid sleuths and a network of communication – a lost manuscript was found, “Do What Thou Wilt.” Wilson also planned to write a “long book” on Crowley. Nothing suggests that such a document exists in this Universe. In my opinion, he did write this long book over time, he just didn’t put it together under a single cover. In Lion of Light, “The Great Beast” Realist article gets immediately followed with “Inspirational Thoughts from The Great Beast Himself.” “O Nuit . . . since thou art continuous!”    

We can speculate that when “Do What Thou Wilt” was written, Wilson felt some necessity of providing an accurate and accessible guide to Crowley and his system while having fun with readers and critics along the way. In the “Inspirational Thoughts Overture” RAW quotes from 8 different crucial Crowley books so we can surmise he’s absorbed the entire curriculum available at the time. Needless to say, the quotes he chose reflect what he decides as important to get across. They are interesting in that regard; I’ll let readers draw their own conclusions about them.

The First Movement after the Overture begins with “Crowley the Enigma.” Enigma: a person or thing that is mysterious, puzzling, and difficult to understand. This definition fits Crowley to a t. He literally created puzzles, was naturally mysterious through his lifelong interest in the Mysteries, and remains difficult to understand. To go on a slight tangent here, he might be a tad easier to understand if the O.T.O., which owns his copyrights, released the additional material they have. For instance, the third of Confessions that Grant and Symonds edited out; also, the letters that got taken out of Magick Without Tears. Though who knows, perhaps that material renders his representation even more mysterious and diabolical and that’s why they took it out and deign to leave it in the O.T.O. private archives. Or maybe it got lost.

Wilson uses a multi-perspective approach to outline what various people thought of Crowley both pro and con. In so doing, he presents what came to be known, even by Crowley himself, as the “Demon Crowley.” It seems that everyone has to face and go through the Demon Crowley at an early stage or give up. Wilson takes the reader through the Demon Crowley here. Even though milder, it still has the effect of confronting something potentially unknown and scary.

In his introduction to Goetia: The Lesser Key of King Solomon, Crowley makes the argument: “The spirits of Goetia (demons) are portions of the human brain.” In this light, we might say the “Demon Crowley” exists as no more and no less as than what we, or others, think about Crowley. RAW begins these vilifications and praises of the Demon Crowley by identifying him with his most famous expression: “Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law” calling it a “formula to curl the brain.” Crowley called it “a scientific principle of ethics.” 

The next section, “Life and Explorations” provides a short account of Aleister’s life that seems pretty accurate in that it agrees for the most part with the extensive research of later biographers. The only real discrepancies I saw occurred on the last page where Wilson writes that Crowley “resigned himself to poverty and obscurity” in 1930 after a fake suicide before an exhibition of his paintings failed to bring him fame and fortune. He may have never risen above relative poverty and obscurity in his lifetime, but as Tobias Churton’s later biographies on the Berlin and England years covering the last chapters of his life show, it wasn’t from a lack of trying. His reported last words, “I am perplexed,” which probably comes from John Symonds’ biography, perhaps the only one available in 1974 that goes to the end of AC’s life, has been disputed. The assertion that Crowley remained in a happy and tranquil state of mind in his final years has been contradicted since, though it seems he didn’t let his self-doubt and depression publicly show.

It seems two major omissions were left out of this short account of Crowley’s life. First, the beginning of his Order, the A.’. A.’. which he formed with George Cecil Jones in 1907 around the time of his attainment of the Knowledge and Conversation of the Holy Guardian Angel. Jones was the person who helped with his “crucifixion” after he returned from China. The second omission concerns the establishment of the Abbey of Thelema in Sicily. Wilson writes about that period in his life, 1920 – 1923 without mentioning the Abbey. This account did make me aware of one thing I hadn’t realized before: toward the bottom of p. 97 where we find the young Beast seeking a spiritual teacher in 1897 – 1898 after experiencing a sense of “vital catastrophe.” A sense of vital catastrophe appears not uncommon in this line of work.

“A First Effort At Understanding” considers standard psychological evaluations of this great Enigma and concludes: “But conventional ideas remain a barrier,” and a resolve to “confront this pre-judgement directly.” Wilson begins this confrontation in the next section by looking at what goes into the experience of reality, or as he puts it, the anatomy of consciousness. To aid this effort, he introduces a diagram called Structural Differential from Korzybski’s Science and Sanity. This section ends by stating that Crowley’s life work consisted of creating a new system of judgement in a four-part methodology that combines logic, empiricism, magick and yoga followed by one of Wilson’s optimistic claims that this will be the normal mode of knowledge in the future. It’s an interesting and unique formulation of Crowley’s life work that perhaps finds support in the fact that Crowley changed the name of the Golden Dawn Tarot Trump Judgement to The Aeon in his Thoth Tarot. This card, this new system of judgement gets described as:

“Around the top of the card is the body of Nuith, the star-goddess who is the category of unlimited possibility; her mate is Hadit, the ubiquitous point of view, the only philosophically tenable conception of Reality. He is represented by a globe of fire, representing eternal energy; winged, to show his power of Going. As a result of the marriage of these two, the child Horus is born. He is, however, known under his special name, Heru-ra-ha. A double god; his extraverted form is Ra-hoor-khuit; and his passive or introverted form Hoor-pa-kraat. He is also solar in character, and is therefore shown coming forth in golden light.” (The Book of Thoth p. 115) 

Some predictions about this new Aeon get made further on in the description of this card. They sound prescient considering he wrote this in the 1940s: “The time for the birth of an Aeon seems to be indicated by great concentrations of political power with the accompanying improvements in the means of travel and communication, with a general advance in philosophy and science, with a general need of consolidation in religious thought” (ibid. p. 116). However wonderful and utopic this sounds, he doesn’t see it happening anytime soon. Comparing events that occurred following the last change like this 2000 years ago, he predicts “500 years of Dark Ages,” but does conclude on an optimistic note: “Fortunately, today we have brighter torches and more torch-bearers.”

This recalls the old philosophical chestnut: I always had a hard time comprehending why the world and the human situation seemed so messed up most of the time. Then I found a new teacher, Hoor-pa-kraat, and I came to realize that my problem all along had been that I had always put Descarte before the Horus.

But what in the blue blazing jesus does Horus represent?  Led Zeppelin’s “The Song Remains the Same” gives a sense of Horus if you listen to the words.

Love is the law, love under will.

Oz

Lion of Light: Burn Up Thy Thought

Goats to NoWhere ("Four Red Monks Carrying a Goat Across the Snow to Nowhere"- Aleister Crowley) 

Lion of Light: "The Great Beast" (11-21, pg. 71-86)  

Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law.

“You’ll hear the joke explained again.” That was the first and foremost thought as I read through the latter chapters of “The Great Beast.” Wilson was beyond fond of Crowley’s sense of humor; he was delighted by it and reveled in it. Wilson discussing Crowley’s blinds and double-blind sense of humor is like reading a gourmand describing a perfectly-cooked meal; he waxes so lyrical that it reads like poetry. Oz was absolutely correct about two points in his last post: that Wilson absolutely fulfills McMurtry's injunction to Duquette, and that Wilson does an excellent job reminding the reader of the similarities between Crowley’s language games and Joyce’s. I always thought that Ulysses and Finnegans Wake weren’t struggles because I had been exposed to the twilit, avian cacophony of occultic writing and, of course, because of Wilson’s framework(s). (I am not trying to claim that I understood/understand either of these novels, but rather that I was not too overwhelmed by the twists and turns of Joyce’s language because of my exposure to similarly-difficult writers.) 

One of Wilson’s greatest gifts would have to be his ability to engender further curiosity concerning what  lies beyond the curtain and to provide a trail of crumbs up onto the stage. I was struck by how well Wilson was able to remake himself as a Thelemite in this and other writings that come from this time: better yet, he makes himself and his characters into a postmodern Thelemic corps who never rest. Our author is able to dazzle and intrigue, his stage-patter is airtight, and he makes Crowley out to be as possibly-miraculous as the Old Beast could have possibly-asked. 

So, I’ve commented a couple times on this, at length, but I’m going to address the question again concerning how Wilson could have overlooked Crowley’s negative qualities. This is an example of early Wilson-on-Crowley and we have to remember he was very much on Crowley at the time; he was a heavy user during the early-Seventies. His enthusiasm for Crowley, his poetry-philosophy and his experimental mysticism (Scientific Illuminism) were those of a new near-convert. We can forgive some youthful indiscretion and assume that Wilson perhaps hadn’t had time to meditate properly upon Crowley’s moral shortcomings. But, we also know that Wilson had read everything he could get his hands on about Perdurabo at the time; while this is a small amount of work compared to today’s glut, it wasn’t insubstantial and had a great deal more net-literary merit. Wilson was aware of Crowley’s failures as a human being: I have, after my years of talking to both old men in my head, reasoned out two factors that contribute to Wilson's moral blindspot. Firstly, Wilson wasn’t looking at Crowley through the lens of the twenty-first century; we are, and much of the reputation that has (re)grown about To Mega Therion in the first few decades of this century is heavily informed by our changing ethics. Wilson was very much a twentieth-century-style individualist; through this lens Crowley can easily be seen as a flawed, romantic hero to the right person. It is very easy when one is looking from a perspective (that I could define with a plethora of now-commonplace qualifiers) such as Wilson’s to see Crowley as an unfairly maligned man who strove against the banal, rotten, even ranker hypocrisies of old-fashioned society. The same moldering ideals that Wilson strove against during his lifetime. 

Secondly, while others might contend my afterword’s assertion that Wilson “loved” Crowley, I don’t think it is debatable, at least in any meaningful sense, that Wilson loved Crowley’s sense of humor and wit. (Unless Wilson was just lying, lying all the time, when he put pen to paper.) You’ll hear the joke explained again. Wilson found no end of amusement in Crowley’s career of shocking the bourgeois-of-the-soul and his painstaking sense of humor. At times, it seems like Wilson is trying to trace multiple brick jokes Crowley laid the foundation for in his youth that only paid off in the Frater Oh Mh’s dotage, as if he’s afraid yet another observer would miss the punchline. I think all readers can agree that humor is a huge part of Wilson’s ethos and personal makeup…I imagine it is a large part of what attracts us to Bob. So, for Wilson to find someone who he believed to be truly profound while also being damned funny…perhaps we should call it a transmigratory trauma-bond. 

I’m sure Wilson knew Crowley could be downright unpleasant and mean-spirited; I suspect he believed Crowley did more good in his work and philosophy for those who need it than the pain he caused for others in that span of timespace. At the beginning of “The Hanged Man” Wilson writes: “The Beast lived on for 41 more years, and did work many wonders and quite a few blunders in the world of men and women.”  (Really, I should point everyone questioning Wilson’s affection toward Sri Paramahansa Shivaji towards “The Hanged Man” which provides a succinct, if somewhat rudimentary, characteristically wry commentary on Crowley-the-man. I’d also recommend rereading “Death” and then exploring Crowley’s Liber V vel Reguli carefully. Did Crowley ever truly forfeit his sense of honor? Did he forfeit it meaningfully in the eyes of Robert Anton Wilson?) I’m sure Wilson knew Crowley was nuts; I suspect he believed Crowley was pretty good at being nuts. And he did it with panache and a sharp, surrealistic sense of humor to boot. For Wilson, I believe that counted towards a lot. In an article I penned years ago, where I counter-ranted against Alex Jones and his ilk and proposed that thinkers such as Wilson and Bill Hicks were a better model of how to deal with conspiratorial thinking, a churlish commenter posted something along the lines of: “So Wilson and Hicks were better because they smoked weed and told a joke when they were talking about conspiracies?” I replied: “Yes. (Although Hicks didn’t really care for marijuana.)” I am perhaps exhibiting my hubris by thinking that Wilson’s reply to queries about Crowley’s moral dubiousness might be expressed in a similar manner. We can debate whether Count Svareff was a good person or if he really was a great beast, but I think we might be missing the (or, at least, Wilson’s) point entirely. 

I would ask the reader to carefully consider what they think of the concept of the Holy Guardian Angel. Wilson, like every other biographer-commentator-student ever, liked to pick his favorites of Crowley’s assertions and comments: he was fond of the idea that Crowley used that terminology since it was the most ridiculous option for describing such a profound-yet-ridiculous concept. You’ll have to forgive Wilson’s heavy-handed and loaded commentary on blood sacrifice and the greater moral inequities of extra-Crowley-terrestrials…the charges laid at the feet of other humans, while often overlooking the shocking inequities of the Great Beast, are enough to give one the vapors. 

“There’s nothing more romantic than a young magician writing about the Qabalah.”- George Cecil Jones, Masks of the Illuminati 

In Wilson’s rosy fingers, these snippets of the fretful fingerings of magic’s first blush, we can find some truths to the enigma of  Aleister Crowley. (And do remember to pronounce it as crow-ly as in hoe-ly.) There's a little bit of the pearlescent splendour on the hands of our Ipsissimus. If you aren’t overwhelmed by the lilting crassness and the blithe humor, that is. Wilson is driving at something he never quite spells out, sure, every reader who can see between the lines understands it’s a sex joke, but it pans out, truly. Consider another bit of early-Thelemic Wilson's adice and try to wade your way through the brilliant insanity of Louis T. Culling. After all these revelations, all I can attest to is: And in the end, a magician has to give every last drop. You will hear this joke again.

Love is the law, love under will.

A.C.

(Posted the wrong song yesterday. "Oh Sweet Nuthin" was just what was playing when I finished the post.)