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.)