Lion of Light: Hazardous to Your Dogma

Forgot to mention Seabrook below, he's another of Crowley's mostly-unreliable mid-century biographers.

Lion of Light: Foreword to Scott Michaelsen's Portable Darkness (pg. 187-193) 

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

I’m really happy that the order of Oz’s and my  responses to Wilson’s pieces on Crowley landed me with the forward to Portable Darkness. Not because I have anything particularly profound to share, but simply because this piece is important to me; it was one of the first pieces I read on The Great Beast that seemed promising and inspired me to continue deciphering the shadow-language of occultism. In many ways, the Lion of Light has been a walk down memory lane, a collection of works I had sought out or found in my hands but that had never before been concentrated in the same place. I cannot properly express how impressed I am with this collection: as I have said before, and will most likely say again, I wish I had had this collection when I was a novitiate. 

That said, even as someone who has spent years immersed in this milieu, there are still some mysteries in Wilson’s forward. I have never been able to identify the Wheatley story that chronicles the death of MacAleister and the elder Crowley’s institutionalization. I will admit I still haven’t read most of Wheatley’s fiction aside from The Devil Rides Out. He was prolific and much of his work is out of print; Wheatley helped shape that peculiar British tradition of being a man who was fascinated by the occult but drew a hard moral line between study and practice. His heroes are usually those who have only righteously dabbled instead of committing themselves towards black magic and are only interested in countering the diabolic machinations of actual practitioners. Wheatley also shamelessly capitalized on the occult revival of the 60s by releasing the curated collection of occult fiction “The Dennis Wheatley Library of the Occult.” I have a copy of Crowley’s Moonchild released under that imprint, so that shows how truly dangerous and evil Wheatley thought Crowley’s writing was. That, or he wasn’t afraid to unleash the dark energies of the Great Beast upon an unsuspecting public. Robert Irwin’s exceptional Satan Wants Me, set during the aforementioned revival, contains a humorous portrait of Wheatley, something that one suspects is inspired by Irwin’s own life experience. The hapless protagonist has found out that his involvement with a magical lodge has resulted in all-too-real consequences and writes to Wheatley for advice; the old author replies with a stodgy missive that scolds him for drug use, provides a facile and overblown warning about dabbling with magic and then encourages the protagonist to buy his latest book. Irwin’s autobiographical Memoirs of a Dervish has a few real life instances of the “luminaries” of mid-Century occult scholarship acting rather unimpressively. 

Wheatley’s novel was adapted into a fantastically lurid Hammer Studios film, released as The Devil’s Bride in America, that stars Christopher Lee as the virtuous Duc de Richlieu and Charles Grey as the Crowley-inspired Mocata. I highly recommend it. 

What was more troubling to me for years is that I never ran across the story of MacAleister’s unfortunate fate anywhere else, and I would relish reading the repetition of such a stone-faced canard. I love Crowley’s various fictionalized versions, deeply. That isn’t to say that I disbelieve Wilson- there was a mild boom of paperback and zines during the 60s that specialized in crude, inaccurate accounts of magical practice and demoniacal cults. Bereft of much literary merit, few of these publications were preserved. Once, a bookseller who knew my tastes well invited me into his backroom where he revealed a box of such titles, gathered from an estate sale. Although very broadminded, I think the salacious titles and cover art made him wary of putting the books on his shelves. I flipped through the lot, but could find very little of any use. Perhaps I should have purchased the collection for further perusal, but I only selected a couple of the titles with the most risque covers which I promptly lost between loaning them out and various moves. I think Uncle Al appreciated most of his caricatures, or at the very least took them in his stride. It is through these fictionalizations that we can best appreciate the dark dynamic of Crowley that Wilson writes about before trying to disabuse the reader of it in his foreword. 

I have never, to my satisfaction, identified the six biographies that Wilson was writing about in particular. There were more than six biographical accounts of Crowley published by the time of this foreword, and with the widened lens provided by the Internet, I cannot confidently guess at which ones would have flown across Wilson’s radar during this time period. One can assume that at least some of the hostile biographies would have been The Great Beast by John Symonds and Francis X. King’s The Magical World of Aleister Crowley; perhaps a third would have been Daniel P. Mannix’s The Beast: The Scandalous Life of Aleister Crowley. I would imagine at least one of the “sympathetic” biographies would have been Regardie’s The Eye in the Triangle with the other perhaps being Gerald Suster’s biography or Charles Cammell’s (father of Performance co-director Donald Cammell) Aleister Crowley: The Man, The Mage, the Poet. These are some of the inconsequential questions that have bothered me throughout the years. Lord knows we have more than enough Crowley biographies today, but I would like to reconstruct where Wilson’s knowledge was partially derived from. 

On a related note, I have never ran across the utterly charming bit of verse that Wilson profers as “the quickest introduction to the real Aleister Crowley”:

By all sorts of monkey tricks
They make my name mean 666; 

Well, I will deserve it if I can:
It is the number of a Man. 

I’ve had this down by heart--it isn’t hard--since first reading this piece so many years ago; I love it, but haven’t found it in Crowley’s writings. Perhaps it is derived from his diaries, which I haven’t read all of and will admit that I didn’t read particularly carefully when I did dip into them. I’m hoping one of our astute readers might be able to point me in the right direction. I’ve raised a lot of questions here, and would appreciate anybody’s ideas or attempts at answers. I do think that some valuable insight is gained herein as towards Wilson's attitude towards Crowley and all his foibles later in his writing career.

Finally, a word on “Portable” anthologies. The Viking Library was famous for its “Portable” titles and I typically disdained them. Perhaps I had prematurely, through some temporal fluke, taken Crowley’s own words to heart that I wouldn’t read until years later; in his autohagiography, Crowley writes that his understanding of literature was so expansive because he read all of the works of an author, not just a few titles, while discussing Coleridge. I disdained the Portable Library as something beneath me and fell into the trap of believing that it is better to read nothing rather than excerpts. This arrogance cost me a few years of understanding. It was Portable Darkness that introduced me to a lot of the more lucid parts of Crowley’s corpus; I first read excerpts from Magick Without Tears and Eight Lectures on Yoga in that compendium. It would also be in The Portable Joyce that I would first read any part of Finnegans Wake. So, I recommend reading something over reading nothing. Portable Darkness was not part of the Viking line of books, but it did capitalize upon the trends. Aside from the fact that Scott Michaelson didn’t seem to believe in any of the practical bits in Crowley’s writing, it is a very good anthology and our editor does display his good taste by including most of the poems, sans commentaries, of Wilson’s beloved The Book of Lies. This was also the book wherein I first read Liber AL and a few of the very best of the Holy Books of Thelema. If the collection had included Liber E and Liber O, I would say it is a near-perfect introduction. Even without those foundational texts, it is still a great introduction, replete with further reading recommendations, "marvellous commentaries" and compiled by someone who recognized Crowley’s philosophical and literary merit. 

Love is the law, love under will.

A.C.

Lion of Light: True Will

 

Israel Regardie at the time he met Aleister Crowley

Lion of Light: “Introduction to Israel Regardie’s Eye in the Triangle” p. 175 - 184

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

It’s difficult to say how many biographies have been written on Aleister Crowley. I did a Google search and came up with 19, yet I know of at least two more not on that list. Some of them appear quite negatively biased. The Eye in the Triangle still holds up as one of the best, in my opinion. Israel Regardie not only personally knew and worked for Crowley, he became an adept and teacher in the Golden Dawn System of Magic, a foundational basis of Thelema. He not only walked the walk, he talked the talk quite articulately. This is a point Robert Anton Wilson makes in his introduction to that tome. Similar attributes apply to Robert Anton Wilson: a very articulate writer (on any subject)  who practiced what he preached. That seems a big part of his appeal and maybe explains why Falcon Press reached out to solicit his wise words for their third edition of Regardie’s biographical effort.

RAW explains several key Thelemic concepts in this relatively short introduction beginning with that invaluable tool of Skepticism called a bullshit detector. This concept initially gained currency in an interview Ernest Hemingway gave for the Paris Review on what makes a great writer originally calling it a “shit detector.” It was probably Hemingway himself who refined the term to a bullshit detector. The bullshit detector idea found its way into punk rock in the opening line of “Garageland” by The Clash from their eponymous first album. Wilson stays within Hemingway’s context of qualities needed for a good writer – adamantly advocating its necessity saying that without a bullshit detector, “they will never communicate efficiently.” Incidentally, nine more qualities Hemingway considers necessary for good writers can be found here:

https://glasstypewriter.wordpress.com/2014/04/05/10-qualties-of-good-writers-according-to-ernest-hemingway/ which was compiled from Ernest Hemingway on Writing.

The concept has evolved into becoming a “critical piece of one’s (magical) work” in the 2016 book On Getting A Bullshit Meter by Erica M Cornelius. She writes: “In essence, getting a Bullshit Meter is an internal process of tracing back, testing, and making a decision regarding each of one’s beliefs. Which ones are supported by objective evidence and which ones are not?” I would add that it also becomes part of one’s intuitive skeptical faculty particularly when objective evidence may or may not exist or appear readily available to support an assertion. A bullshit meter or detector seems critical to reading Crowley or Wilson, particularly the latter’s fiction which includes deliberately inserted nonsense under the guise of Guerilla Ontology or Operation Mindfuck. One purpose of this literary trickery: to get the reader to think for themselves; to not unquestioningly swallow or believe everything given. Guerilla Ontology, or shaking up our automatic and mechanical way of being, works by stating facts obviously true, statements obviously false, and statements uncertain in their veracity. That’s where the attentive reader intuitively decides how it reads or not on their bullshit meter. Though the b.s. needle will move on the meter at times in Lion of Light, there doesn’t appear to be a strong reading in Wilson’s introduction here unless, perhaps, you consider the byline: “Robert Anton Wilson, Ph.D.” One can estimate whether the suffix stands for “Doctor of Philosophy,” or as my father, who occasionally used the same suffix, thought: “Piled Higher and Deeper,” or something else.  The question of the authenticity of Wilson’s Ph.D. gets covered in the forthcoming biography, Chapel Perilous, The Thought Crimes of Robert Anton Wilson by Gabriel Kennedy. It seems Wilson did not use that suffix later in his career. If you would like your own bullshit meter but don’t know where to get one, simply send me $66 and I’ll guarantee to get it out to you immediately.

In this piece, Wilson personally touches upon the foibles of the man Crowley, as opposed to saying what other critics think of him. This gets tempered with placing him among such giants as Einstein, Joyce, Pound, Frank Lloyd Wright and Picasso under the common theme of introducing Relativity into their various fields. I’m reminded of the equivocity (relativity) of language when Wilson refers to Crowley as “sometimes downright vicious.” I’ve heard the recent terrorist attacks by Hamas and subsequent ongoing retaliation by the Israeli military victimizing civilians in the vicinity of Hamas called vicious.

Getting outside of the ego/personality complex seems a basic requirement of Initiation. Sufis call this “waking up.” Please don’t confuse this with the recent popular, politically correct or incorrect expression, “woke”, which often appears its own kind of sleep. Wilson gives a simple Crowley exercise of keying a piece of jewelry to a different personality type. It’s presented as an example of how A.C. “learned to quantum-jump from one reality-tunnel to another” and “developed, out of traditional “magical” practices, his own techniques for making such jumps quick and efficient.” Improvising one’s own techniques, or modifying other people’s techniques to work in your situation becomes part and parcel of an initiatory skill set. These individualized techniques, aka “alarm clocks” joins the student’s bag of tricks for waking up. This looks very much related to the formula given in Chapter 23 from The Book of Lies: GET OUT.

One very gentle ego transcending exercise that could help save the world can be found in You Are Not the Target by Laura Huxley called (paraphrasing from memory) “Standing in Another’s Shoes.” The title pretty much says it all. You literally imagine yourself in someone else’s position. It has a side effect of increasing compassion.

The second complete paragraph on page 179 did register a little on my b.s. meter. Wilson has not only Crowley, but all mystics trying to abolish the ego which implies making it go away forever. Yes, as mentioned, Crowley had various techniques and strategies for transcending the ego. I don’t know, and don’t recall hearing that he hoped to disappear it forever. Wilson quite correctly adds, “The ego has a seemingly infinite phalanx of strategies for sneaking back each time it seems demolished.” The words “abolish” and “demolish” set off the meter. I’m not aware of Crowley or anyone writing about him describing stepping outside the ego in those absolute terms. I agree with Gurdjieff that the problem seems one of identification. It may appear impossible to demolish/abolish the ego; it seems relatively much easier to not identify with it completely all the time. The ego does have social and cultural uses. It’s been called a convenient fiction. I regard the ego as a representation or a mask able to expand or contract as desired. I compare it to the two conceptual poles of Thelemic ontology, Nuit – infinite expansion and Hadit – infinite contraction. 

  

Discovering one’s True Will, one’s purpose in life, is another crucial subject given here. This again shows either the accidental or invocational continuity of Lion of Light, a collection of essays strung together like a rosary, as the last section in the previous article, “Do What Thou Wilt” is called THE TRUE WILL. Wilson unequivocally writes: 

“To find the True Self and the True Will, beyond the historical accidents of social imprinting, is the goal of Crowley’s magick.” 

If this discovery or realization was the only thing one got out of Lion of Light or any book about Crowley or Thelema, it would have served its purpose. In this piece, Wilson gives an excellent and concise outline of what this means using nomenclature from Physics and backing it up with a Sufi quote which starts: 

“However unhappy a WoMan may be, the moment (s)he knows the purpose of hir life a switch is turned and the light is on …” 

That’s exactly how it worked for me. Not long after getting into Crowley I started considering what my True Will might be. At the time, I worked for a rock-n-roll bar band as a soundman/roadie getting paid very little, but having a lot of fun. I recall reading something about “communication” in the Calgary Sun newspaper astrology column by Sydney Omarr and thought my True Will may have something to do with that: helping to communicate music to the world. This realization did feel like a light turned on. I remember loading these huge P.A. mid-range bins by JBL (called “45 – 60s” after their dimensions) into this ratty biker bar in Calgary called “The Airliner” feeling as high as a kite because I had some sense of my direction in life despite the unglamorous nature of that current situation.

In communicating the advantage of finding their True Will over the years, I’ve often discovered that many people have no idea what it might look like; often they have difficulties in even attempting to formulate the slightest idea of it. As Wilson implies, it doesn’t have to be something noble, altruistic or paradigm shifting, like curing cancer, bringing about world peace, or making sure bar patrons can hear the guitar solo in a cover version of Ted Nugent’s “Cat Scratch Fever.” One also need not have a final definitive formulation of True Will to begin aligning in that direction. It gets refined along the way. You can start this search simply by considering what you like to do? What brings you joy? What makes you happy? Completely independent of Crowley, Joseph Campbell gives the instruction to “follow your bliss.” Be true to yourself appears another simple way to put it. You can ask, “why am I here?” Why have I landed into this incarnation? It’s said that the whole Universe will assist you when you align to yourTrue Will; serendipitous synchronicities will come into play.  But even knowing, or having some notion of what your True Will looks like doesn’t necessarily make it easy to follow. A million distractions will pop up along with various pressures to conform to someone else’s idea of how you should spend your time; not to mention all the effort, time and attention involved with responding to the economic slavery facing the working class.

This essay gives a glimpse at RAW’s prodigious reading habits. He describes consuming The Eye in the Triangle entirely in one night, a book of roughly 500 pages. That’s far beyond my capacity despite it being one of the best Beast bios. He also said he’s read it several times since then, a time span of about 12 years; it’s not like he didn’t have other things on his mind and other things to do, like raising and financially supporting a family while trying to make ends meet as a free-lance writer. 

Israel Regardie ranks as one of the most significant contributors to keeping Crowley’s legacy alive while expanding it on a much larger scale. He gives his reasons for writing The Eye in the Triangle in the “Foreward” to that book: “. . . the time has come now to raise my voice in the intertest of clarifying the record of Aleister Crowley. He was one of the greatest mystics of all time, although a very complicated and controversial person.” . . . “he has too long suffered from misrepresentation and vilification at the hands of uninformed biographers” . . . “John Symonds, his major biographer, evinces throughout his narrative a totally contemptuous attitude towards Crowley. This hostility altogether invalidates his attempt at biography.” . . . “His writing is cynical, showing no glimmer of insight, or even the slightest trace of sympathy.”

This effort is even more admirable considering the two had a contentious falling out some four or five years after parting ways. Regardie owns up that he mistakenly started this brief feud. He had sent Crowley one of his recent books along with a “warm note.” Crowley responded: “He both joked and reprimanded me, together with some anti-Semitic slur about the adoption of the name Francis and he faceitiously called me ‘Frank.’” Regardie acknowledges that he should have let it go. Instead, he wrote Crowley a nasty letter. Crowley didn’t directly reply; he anonymously wrote a letter detailing his former student’s character flaws as he perceived them and sent it to Regardie’s friends and correspondents. The student also publicly expressed disappointment in his former teacher. In his landmark textbook, The Tree of Life – A Study in Magic Regardie writes: “Dedicated with poignant memory of what might have been to MARSYAS.” This is the mythological character A.C identified with in his poem AHA, a dialogue between a teacher Marsyas and his student Olympas.

Looking over The Eye in the Triangle in preparation for this post has me wanting to reread it again. The book begins with the young Regardie on a train station in Paris waiting to meet Aleister Crowley for the first time. He gives a brief sketch of how he got there, this first meeting and what it was like to work for Crowley, including a few salient incidences. One of these outlined Crowley’s indirect, gentle way of criticizing his grooming habits. Regardie goes on to include the details of their falling out and publishes in full the short anonymous letter mentioned above.  The remainder of the first chapter uses a defense against critics calling Crowley schizophrenic and neurotic as a jumping off point to give a brief and incomplete summary of the work A.C. accomplished. Coincidentally, or not, Regardie concludes this chapter with Liber Oz printed verbatim, but without the title. A facsimile of Liber Oz concludes the “Do What Thou Wilt” piece in Lion of Light, coming right before Wilson’s “Introduction to Israel Regardie’s Eye in the Triangle.” (I am aware of the typo, missing the “The.” One can always borrow this definite article from the very end of Finnegans Wake.)

Israel Regardie, through his books and cassette tapes, became a primary teacher of magic for me when I first got into this racket. I highly recommend anything written by him including: The Complete Golden Dawn System of Magic, The Tree of Life, The Middle Pillar, Healing Energy Prayer and Relaxation, The Art of True Healing, A Garden of Pomegranates, The One Year Manual, and Foundations of Practical Magic. Some of the exercises appear in more than one of these titles, there are overlaps. Regardie also edited some very important Crowley titles that I also highly recommend including: Gems from the Equinox, The Law is for All, Magick Without Tears, The Vision & the Voice, and the aforementioned poem AHA.

The exercise most associated with Regardie is The Middle Pillar Ritual. He introduced this into the Golden Dawn though he found it somewhere, he didn’t originally formulate it. I find it very useful because you can do it anywhere you have a chance to relax. I used to do it on the plane. Also, in the moments waiting at the mixing board before the concert would start. One can find more elaborate versions, but here are the basic instructions:

The Middle Pillar

Visualize a sphere of scintillating white light about the size of a salad plate swirling and radiating just above the top of your head and touching your skull. From within the center of this sphere vibrate the holy name EHIEH (eh-hee-yeh) and imagine the sphere of light getting brighter and more radiant with each repetition. This can be done from 1 – 5 minutes or longer.

When you’re ready, imagine the white light descending through your head down into the throat area where it forms a sphere of lavender light. Vibrate YHVH ELOHIM (yeh-ho-veh el-ho-heem) for a similar period of time firmly establishing the visualization.

Then the energy descends through the upper chest until it gets to the heart center forming a sphere of golden light. Vibrate YHVH ELOAH VA DAATH (ya-ho-veh eh-lo-ah va-daath)

After that, the energy descends down through the solar plexus and stomach coming to rest at the base of genital area and forming a sphere of deep purple light. Vibrate SHADDAI EL CHAI (sha-di el hi)

The energy descends through both legs to form a rich black sphere of light at the base of the feet getting stronger and more radiant each time you vibrate ADONAI HA ARETZ (a-doh-ni ha a-retz). 

Circulating the energy:

Now, visualize the energy starting from your feet rising through the center of your body changing colors along the way until it reaches the scintillating white light above your head. Breath in, then on the outbreath imagine the white light descending down and outside the left side of your body until it reaches your feet. Then, on an inbreath, visualize it crossing under your feet to ascend the right side. Do this at least 3 – 5 times or more until you distinctly feel the energy flowing.

The next circulation has the energy flowing down the front of the body on the outbreath then crossing over to flow up the back of the body on the inbreath. Continue until it feels right to move on.

For the final circulation, visualize the energy descending down the middle pillar inside your body from the top of the head to the feet. Then, on an inbreath, imagine the energy ascending the middle pillar from the feet until it bursts through the skull on the outbreath like a fountain of white light pouring around you in an egg shape until it reaches the feet then ascends again through the middle pillar on the inbreath and fountains out again. Repeat as necessary. 

* * * * * *

Wilson concludes by giving the Beast credit for recognizing and symbolically admitting to his assholeness in Chapter 70 paragraph 6 of The Book of Lies though Wilson admits it could be interpreted in other ways too. He also teases that there’s a deeper alchemical joke there. Any guesses as to what that might be? 

This week’s musical selection comes from a group I’ve worked with called MaMuse, though not this selection. It’s a live recording from the California World Fest. Unfortunately, the audio gets  distorted in places but it feels like a much stronger invocation than the studio version. The audio sounds ok enough if not played too loud. They invite anyone to call in support for anyone they wish. 

Love is the law, love under will.

Oz

Lion of Light: This Knight of Thelema

 

Page from Promethea # 17: "Gold" (Artwork: Jose Villarrubia)

Lion of Light: "Do What Thou Wilt" pg. 156-171


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

Wilson’s crescendo leading to the gut punch of meaning in his last sentences of “Do What Thou Wilt'' consists of some appropriately fantastic writing; some of it will be incredibly familiar as Wilson discusses themes that would carry over into his later written, but earlier published, works. We have Wilson theorizing about the Holy Guardian Angel--the goal of all worthwhile magic, according to Crowley himself--and a brilliant little exegesis of Liber Al vel Legis as well as the overarching cosmology, worldview and philosophy of Thelema. Finally, we have Wilson’s exhortation of the necessity of consciousness expansion and even the expansion of human habitation into the stars as the Exponential Age was already becoming overwrought and the very biosphere began to tremble under the treads of seemingly unlimited growth.

First, we must find ourselves. Much of magic consists of orienteering: from the simplest affirmations to the more elaborate rituals, it can be reduced to exercises in location. The only Maybe Logic course I was able to take, during the Academy’s brief reopening in 2012, was Lon Milo Duquette’s "Initiation" class. In that course Duquette breaks down the Lesser Ritual of the Pentagram as simply finding out where we are in the universe that we propose to move through and thereby gain some understanding. The magician, during the ritual, is centering the universe around their perspective, which is the only reasonable course of action as most of us are hopelessly shackled to our individual purview of the world, no matter how many times we experience ego death through drugs, meditation or compassion. The magician maps and purifies the four quarters and invokes the four basic elements to prepare themselves for existence. The mere act of existence is, of course, the biggest act of magic possible: something from nothing, experienced anew upon each awakening. (There is a very good reason that what we now call The Egyptian Book of the Dead was originally called The Book of Coming Forth By Day.) To aid in their lofty endeavor the magician utters/vibrates divine names and calls forth the four Archangels; schematically, if we are to, at least temporarily, accept this particular magical interpretation of existence, they are the four largest pillars that uphold creation. These “angels” are not personal forces but concepts as large as the four fundamental forces of nature, or they are simply abstractions of the four fundamental forces- either way, we’re cooking with oil at this point. Bookending the locational aspects of the ritual, the magician simply recites the end of the Lord’s Prayer in Hebrew. A simple, but for many mnemonically powerful, acknowledgement that one is smaller than One.

(The other “basic rituals” given in Liber O are all of a similar nature, excepting perhaps the Lesser Ritual of the Hexagram. The Greater Ritual of the Pentagram is a more detailed conjuring of the elements and cardinal directions with some further divine nomenclature thrown in for good measure. Therefore, we can now see clearly that the Pentagram represents the terrestrial and microcosmic aspects of the magicians universe. The Greater Ritual of the Hexagram is a poorly written, but magnificent when finally decoded and executed, alignment of the magician according to the classical model of planetary or extraterrestrial/macrocosmic forces. The Lesser Ritual of the Hexagram is not as explicitly concerned with orienteering as the other three but focuses on the equally important explicit alignment of the microcosmic and the macrocosmic. I would propose that execution of the Lesser Ritual of the Hexagram would give a further experiential understanding of the knowledge alluded to at the end of this section in the essay which, according to RAW, is known to LSD trippers, magicians, pagans and yogis. Crowley’s Thelemic “updates” on the Lesser Rituals of the Pentagram and the Hexagram, respectively known as the Star Ruby and the Star Sapphire, make the symbolism more obvious and emotionally powerful.)

But when we find ourselves in the midst of such a vast and, from the ego’s perspective, frankly uncooperative universe, we need a friend. Preferably one who isn’t as much of a deluded jackass as our regular self can be; thus, the Holy Guardian Angel. Unlike Raphael and Co., the HGA is an incredibly personal force that can helpfully be seen through a variety of lenses. These various interpretations only become cumbersome when we search for a definitive and singular explanation as Wilson helpfully spells out by quoting Konx Om Pax, The Book of the Law and Magick in Theory and Practice. Oz’s footnote draws the reader's attention to a mistake in Wilson’s writing but also points toward the ceremony that Crowley penned to invoke the Holy Guardian Angel for the previously mentioned Frank Bennet: Liber Samekh. As Oz notes, this isn’t derived from The Book of Abramelin the Mage, but rather from “A Fragment of Graeco-Egyptian Work upon Magic.” Samekh follows the elemental/quaternary schema already familiar to the practitioner from rituals such as the Lesser Ritual of the Pentagram and impregnates them with passionate, sometimes nigh-frenzied invocations and exhortations of command and obedience. Naturally, most of the spirits the aspirant desires to be subject unto themself are the discordant and disarrayed aspects of their own selves. Naturally, as this is serious work trying to not only orienteer ourselves but also to contact something that already knows more than we do, the magician also invokes “the fifth element:” spirit.

Now, Liber Samekh, is not, for all its repetition, an easy work to memorize and execute. I have only managed to commit it to memory for a brief six-month period and practice it regularly during that time. I will be quite honest, at no point was I bathed in glory nor did I hear an authoritative voice telling me exactly what to do in order to gain health, wealth and length of days. My Angel won’t even tell me one of the winning lottery numbers or how to fix horse races. But during this time I felt more aligned with my “self” and privy to the obfuscated possibilities of life. Like an alchemical process, the Knowledge and Conversation of the Holy Guardian Angel seems to be steady and incremental; it is not something that one possesses after executing a single ritual, no matter how beautifully written or enthusiastically performed. There are many paths to this Knowledge and Conversation, I would like to share one that I was also using at the time and still use to this day.

As Wilson has his favorite psychologist in Wilhelm Reich, I have one in Roberto Assagioli. By way of one of my best teachers/therapists, Will Parfitt, I was introduced to Assagioli and his system of psychosynthesis. Central to psychosynthesis is the practice of self-identification and disidentification. The exercise can be found in almost all of Parfitt’s works on Qabalah and Psychosynthesis. Essentially, self-identification and disidentification consists of understanding the mutability of your physical, emotional and intellectual composites and finally the unchanging centrality that we all dub “I.” This exercise ends in the understanding and affirmation that I “am a centre of pure self consciousness. I am a centre of will…” and the unmitigated experience of that ever present, though necessarily obscured, state of being. I have also had great success while playing the Alien Game administered to Benny "Eggs" Benedict by Cagliostro the Great in The Universe Next Door:

““Suppose I were an extraterrestrial,” the man said gently. “Suppose I were several million years ahead of this planet. What one question would you ask me?”

“Why is there so much violence and hatred among us?” Benny asked at once.

“It’s always that way on primitive planets,” the main said. “The early stages of evolution are never pretty.”

“Do planets grow up?” Benny asked.

“Some of them,” the man said simply.

“How?”

“Through suffering enough, they learn wisdom.”

Benny turned and looked at his odd companion. He is an actor, he thought. “Through suffering,” he repeated. “There’s no other way?”

“Not in the primitive stages,” the man said. “Primitives are too self-centered to ask the important questions, until suffering forces them to ask.”

Benny felt the grief pass through him again, then leave. He grinned. “You play this game very well.”

“Anybody can do it,” the man said. “It’s a gimmick, to get outside your usual mind-set. You can do it, too. Just try for a minute- you be the advanced intelligence and I’ll be the primitive Terran. Okay?”

“Sure,” Benny said, enjoying this.

“Why me?” The stranger’s tone was intense. “Why have I been singled out for so much injustice and pain?”

“There is no known answer to that,” Benny said at once. “Some say it’s just chance- hazard- statistics. Some say there is a Plan, and that you were chosen to learn an important lesson. Nobody knows, really. The important thing is to ask the next question.”

“And what is the next question?”

Benny felt as if this was easy. “The next question is: What do I do about it? How ever many minutes or hours or years or decades I have left, what do I do to make sense out of it all?"

“Hey, that’s good," the stranger said. “You play Higher Intelligence very well.”

“It’s just a gimmick,” Benny said, feeling as if a great weight had been taken off him.

They laughed.

“Where did you ever learn that?” Benny asked.

“From a book on Cabala,” the man said. “It’s a way of contacting the Holy Guardian Angel. But people don’t relate to the metaphor these days, so I changed it to an extraterrestrial from an advanced civilization.”

“Who are you? I keep feeling I’ve seen your face…”

The man laughed. “I’m a stage magician,” he said. “Cagliostro the Great.”

“Are you sure you’re not a real magician?” Benny asked.”

I don’t think I’ve ever reproduced that scene in full before; I’m glad I did as it is remarkably beautiful. But that’s what I call “the Alien Game.” I highly reccomend trying it sometime. You might be suprised what’s already inside you, waiting to speak. I don’t know what book that might have come from originally, or if there ever has been such a book, but I’m terribly grateful to Wilson for sharing it with us. (For that matter, I’m not sure where Wilson gets the idea that Maimonedes was trained in Sufi sex-yoga rites, but I’m going to just let that possible-canard stand.)

After discussing the Holy Guardian Angel, Wilson moves on to give a brief, incredibly cogent interpretation of Liber Al vel Legis. I should note that I accept The Book of the Law as a received text, but some of the “accurate” prophecy therein is par for the course as far as such works are concerned. If it were Crowley who intentionally authored Liber Al, (again, I don’t believe it entirely was) he wouldn’t have been foolish to place money on the idea that war and strife would rule the 20th Century. The shadows of Empire grew long across the world as technology, marvelous and amoral, proliferated across the Earth. It doesn’t take a divine intelligence to see that homo bellicosus would turn our wonders into horrors soon enough. That’s why The Revelation of St. John can be used to convince the convincible that the signs of the End Times are upon us, at any time; War, Famine, Pestilence, Death…the four are always riding, throughout history. But please study Wilson’s writings about the visions presented in The Book of the Law. Wilson was truly an amazing exegete of Crowley’s.

Earlier, while discussing Leary, the HGA and immortality, Wilson quotes Leary as saying that “Consciousness is energy received and decoded by a structure.” Since we are, in a sense, only privy to the matters of our own consciousness, this is certainly worth meditating upon. It also gives us a way to look forward. This is helped by a definition of magic, always one of the funniest and most frustrating pursuits of magic is defining it, given by Alan and Steve Moore in their upcoming Moon and Serpent Bumper Book of Magic: magic is “a purposeful engagement with the phenomena and possibilities of consciousness.” With this energy decoded and engaged with, what possibilities could wait for us in the future? As he closes his essay, Wilson concerns himself with the primitive stages of evolution and whether our planet will grow up. It would be in bad form for our author to despair over whether we can, but whether we will is another matter entirely. All we can do is try, keep asking the next question. Move forward, with the stars in our eyes.

Love is the law, love under will.


A. C.

Practice: After writing to Mr. Parfitt, he has graciously given his leave to republish his version of "the

Self-identification exercise." I would very much like to recommend the practice, which does not typically afford immediate, "fireworks;" but, with the proper applicaltion of Will, it does yield sparkling Results. 

THE SELF-IDENTIFICATION EXERCISE

The following exercise is a tool for moving towards and realising the consciousness of

the self. This exercise is of vital importance, and should be done with the greatest care.

Affirm to yourself the following: I have a body but I am not my body. My body may find

itself in different conditions of health or sickness, it may be rested or tired, but that has

nothing to do with my self, my real I. I value my body as my precious instrument of

experience and action in the world, but it is only an instrument. I treat it well, I seek to

keep it in good health, but it is not myself. I have a body but I am not my body. 

Close your eyes, recall what this affirmation says, then focus your attention on the

central concept: I have a body but I am not my body. Attempt to realise this as an

experienced fact in your consciousness.

Now affirm to yourself: I have feelings, but I am not my feelings. My feelings and

emotions are diversified, changing, sometimes contradictory. They may swing from love

to hatred, from calm to anger, from joy to sorrow, and yet my essence - my true nature -

does not change. I remain. Though a wave of anger may temporarily submerge me, I

know that in time it will pass; therefore I am not this anger. Since I can observe and

understand my feelings, and can gradually learn to direct, utilise, and integrate them

harmoniously, it is clear that they are not my self. I have feelings, but I am not my

feelings.

Close your eyes, recall what this affirmation says, then focus your attention on the

central concept: I have feelings, but I am not my feelings. Attempt to realise this as an

experienced fact in your consciousness.

Now affirm to yourself: I have thoughts but I am not my thoughts. My mind is a valuable

tool of discovery and expression, but it is not the essence of my being. Its contents are

constantly changing as it embraces new ideas, knowledge, and experience, and makes

new connections. Sometimes my thoughts seem to be independent of me and if I try to

control them they seem to refuse to obey me. Therefore my thoughts cannot be me, my

self. My mind is an organ of knowledge in regard to both the outer and inner worlds, but

it is not my self. I have a mind but I am not my mind.

Close your eyes, recall what this affirmation says, then focus your attention on the

central concept: I have thoughts but I am not my thoughts. Attempt to realise this as an

experienced fact in your consciousness.

Next comes the phase of identification. Affirm clearly and slowly to yourself: After this

disidentification of the self, the I, from my body, my feelings, and my mind, I recognise

and affirm that I am a centre of pure self consciousness. I am a centre of will, capable of

observing, directing and using all my psychological processes and my physical body.

Focus your attention on the central realisation:

I am a centre of pure self-consciousness and of will. 

Realise this as an experienced fact in your awareness.

When you have practised this exercise a few times, you can use it in a much shorter

form. The important point is to keep to the four main, central affirmations:

I have a body and sensations but I am not my body and sensations.

I have feelings and emotions, but I am not my feelings and emotions.

I have a mind and thoughts, but I am not my mind and thoughts.

I am I, a centre of pure self-consciousness and of will.

You may have to repeat the exercise a few times to start with to get its full flavour, but

then you will be able to do it daily from memory. The effort will be well worth it. All the

influences which try to capture your attention and demand identification will no longer

have the same hold over you.

(by Will Parfitt)