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