Lion of Light: Impotence on this Backwards Planet

Detail from the Stele of Ankh-ef-en-Khonsu

Lion of Light: “The Lord of Force and Fire: A Review of The Law is For All” (pg 215-228)

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

Published in 1976, this is a “peak” Robert Anton Wilson piece of writing if you consider the Wilson of Cosmic Trigger to be the archetypical “Wilson” persona. It begins with a discussion of Saul Paul Sirag and Dr. Andrija Pujarich’s separate but similar experiences with Uri Geller and his alleged contact, SPECTRA. I don’t think the Sirag who wrote in to Tom’s Rawillumination a few years ago would have much time for the Sirag who experimented with Geller (but that is my perhaps-incorrect impression based on a memory of a comment from years ago) and from what Eric Wagner has relayed here and my own impressions, I’m not sure that the Wilson of the 21st century would have held the same unbridled admiration of Liber AL and Crowley that is related in this introduction. But it is delightful to run across another piece from Wilson so close to the time of Cosmic Trigger’s publication that it read almost identically to that storied volume. 

This piece was a review of the Regardie publication of Crowley commentaries on Liber AL vel Legis that he meant to have published during his lifetime. It was, as the title quote from the book would imply, written to explain the profundities of The Book of the Law. Whether Crowley’s book succeeded in this task is left up to the reader; Wilson gives a sample of these efforts at explication in this introduction with a good natured “[i]s that quite clear class?” as a follow up statement. Your mileage will vary. There are many interesting verses in The Book of the Law; many which Wilson found particularly interesting or illuminated have been repeated across the various pieces collected in The Lion of Light. In this piece, I found Wilson’s confidence in the importance of the Eighties interesting, in light of a fragment of verse in Chapter III: “I am the warrior Lord of the Forties: the Eighties cower before me, & are abased.” It has generally been agreed upon in discussions with others that the “warrior Lord of the Forties” portion is a good whack at prophecy by Crowley or Aiwass, but the importance of the Eighties remains somewhat mysterious. 

Did the Eighties live up to the abasement prophesied in Liber AL? From an American-centric worldview, it could be seen as a time of abasement as economic policies made economic inequality more egregious and certain. It was a time of rising materialism and, if we wish to look at this from an environmental perspective, was a time when the world decided that the findings of the seventies could be ignored in favor of the status quo and global economy. I haven’t read many “official” Thelemic commentaries post-Eighties on this and am curious if anyone knows the “orthodox” interpretation of that decade. (I know that Wilson plays up the individualistic morality of Thelema, but those in or under the auspices of the O.T.O. tend to be (un)surprisingly uniform, at times.)  I wonder what Wilson made of the prophecy, which he seems to very much anticipate coming true in 1976, by the turn of the century. Wilson was obviously displeased with the course of the world during the Eighties, having left the United States to seek refuge in Ireland for part of the decade. Another mystery. 

As a Thelemite, I do agree with Wilson’s enthusiastic endorsement of Thelemic, and more importantly, by association, my morality. I always knew I was a good person. I also agree with Wilson’s assessment that if the true principle of “do what thou wilt” were applied, there would be a great deal more care applied to intra- and interpersonal conduct. Furthermore, I agree with Wilson’s perhaps interminably-human assessment that the progress of human relations has been in decline in the modern era. While we have made vast improvements in terms of race relations and gender equality, there is still a lot to be desired and the ubiquity of the Internet has given us a whole new, occasionally amoral, plane upon which to demonstrate the possibilities of human depredations. But this brave, if sunny, vision, is predicated upon a morality that is well-understood and applied, and humans aren’t very good at that. Far too many would-be Thelemites have already misinterpreted "do what thou wilt" as "do what I want." It is nice to consider the possibilities, though. I do admire, if I occasionally have to mitigate, the somewhat dangerous honesty of Thelemic morality, best exemplified by Crowley’s own insistence on displaying his flaws. That honesty is very, very admirable to me. And I also admire that Thelema demands growth from its adherents and doesn’t allow much time for (blind) self-indulgence. (On the other hand, this moral view is simultaneously profoundly uncomfortable. Your mileage may vary.) 

It will probably come as no surprise that I object to the laissez-faire assessment that a true anthropological view of human morals will render all of them equally absurd and/or meritorious. I must insist that I see some belief systems as entirely unworkable with my idea of civilization, which, after all, is the one I am generally concerned with. The rise of Christian nationalism and authoritarian values in the West serve as an ever-present reminder that some reality-tunnels are much harder to deal with than others. I have no time for equivocation during these years. We must tend to our garden and it is best to mind our own business, yes, but there really isn’t any call for the absurdism of being above-it-all. One must care about the soil that hopefully nourishes one’s garden. It depressed me to read Wilson’s confidence in the following line: “He opposed Christianity in general and Christian sexual morality in particular; and Christianity, especially its sexual morality, is everywhere in contemptible decline.” While this statement still holds statistically true, we can see that the rabid old dog still has teeth. Fundamentalism is incompatible with Thelemic morality and the Thelemic vision of a free world. 

As a final word on the Wilson of 1976’s confidence in Crowley’s importance, his litany of examples of how Crowley might have changed society is admirable and thought-provoking. Crowley’s influence on the occult is difficult to over-emphasize, and we must wonder how much of New Age thought would exist without him. His influence on art seems to be an easily-overlooked, occult, if you will; this seems to be a certainty, when one looks closely into the weave of the tapestry of culture. In Stranger Than We Can Imagine, at the end of the chapter on Individualism, Higgs wryly points out that there were more Jedi in Britain than Thelemites on the last census in the United Kingdom and suggests that Crowley’s ambitions to change the world were in vain. I think that Wilson might have disagreed. 

Happy Holidays, everyone! I imagine this will be “Happy New Year” as well. Oz and I will be on hiatus until the new year when we’ll come back together to discuss the final pieces  in Lion of Light. Until then…

Love is the law, love under will. 

Lion of Light: Cloaked In Uncertainty

Scene from The Yellow Methuselah. Photo by Ira Cohen

Lion of Light: The Hidden Heritage – Foreword to Charles Kipp’s Astrology, Aleister & Aeon p. 195 - 213

Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law

“. . . Crowley remains a mystery inside a puzzle within a controversy cloaked in uncertainty.” After 28 years of research and experimentation into the Man, the Myth, and his Magick, Wilson provides this open-ended, bottomless, agnostic description of the subject he’s considered an expert on. His expertise on Herr 666 must explain why he nabbed this assignment. Kipp’s book uses Aleister as a focal point to write about Astrology, or so says the description on Amazon, I have not read the book myself. If anyone reading this has, what do you think of it? It seems a little surprising to find Wilson writing a Foreword to a book on Astrology given that he didn’t care for it. We find only the slightest of allusions to the subject in a quote from Crowley’s Gnostic Catholic Mass: “I believe in one Star in the company of Stars of whose fire we are created, and to which we shall return; and in one Father of Life, Mystery of Mystery, in his name CHAOS” appearing at the very beginning and again at the end to nicely frame the piece. You won’t find one word about the book this is a Foreword to.

I have only a superficial understanding of Astrology, maybe because I came up through the Wilson school of magick which didn’t direct much attention to that area. My father, the physicist, showed interest in it; unfortunately I didn’t get the opportunity to discuss it with him. I discovered it only after he left his mortal coil. He had a number of books on Astrology that I inherited including some basic texts on how to go about understanding and applying it. I took a crack at learning Astrology through these to no avail. However, I do think there’s something to it. I have friends I respect who are experts in the field. I also consider the astrological portent about timing certain events through drawing Tarot cards. Each of the Trumps, except The Fool, The Hanged Man, and The Aeon correspond to an astrological figure. Those three correspond to the elements Air, Water and Fire. The Universe card does double duty corresponding to Saturn and Earth (the element). Each of the small cards of the Minor Arcana represents one decan (10 degrees or 10 days of the zodiac belt.) The astrological aspects of the Tarot gets explained very well in Duquette’s Understanding Aleister Crowley’s Thoth Tarot.

Uncle Al did know astrology inside and out. It’s well known that he was a ghost writer for Evangeline Adams, a very popular New York based astrologer. He wrote two best-sellers for her: Astrology: Your Place in the Sun and Astrology: Your Place Among the Stars both of which came out under Adams’ moniker with no mention of Crowley. He finally received credit with the 2002 publication of The General Principals of Astrology, Liber 536 that included his material originally written for Adams. It also includes the birth charts, with ample explanation, for 193 famous people including luminaries such as Shakespeare, Dante, Mark Twain, Winston Churchill and Napoleon. In Confessions, Crowley claimed the ability to guess the rising sign at a person’s birth based on their appearance. Naturally, he kept track of his guesses and found he was right two out of three times. Anecdotal evidence in one of his biographies backs this up.

Wilson sets the stage, the mise en scene for Astrology, Aleister & Aeon in “The Hidden Heritage” by constructing a concise history of Hermetic secret societies and their place in the world starting with Freemasonry, moving to the Rosicrucians, and the Illuminati, then leading to the Golden Dawn, the O.T.O. and finally, Crowley. He sees Golden Dawn elements in the literature of Pound, Eliot and Joyce. I saw some in Proust who was related, through marriage, to Macgregor Mathers. It’s a brilliant and very informative history of these groups and how popular opinion reacted and responded to them.

RAW’s foreword has some excellent literary tricks/easter eggs; two that I know of. Wilson on Crowley:

“’Thank God I’m an atheist,’ he once wrote piously and that’s not anywhere near the peaks of paradox he employed to both reveal and conceal the meanings of his very hermetic books.”

The essay has other paradox or paradox-like tropes starting with the opening quote: “ I believe. . . (famously, he has said, “I don’t believe in anything”).The piece starts by ranking Crowley against a backdrop of the 20th Century’s worst thugs then turns around and compares him to brilliant people while throwing in Kennedy and Bill Clinton for comic relief. He first section, Something Wicked This Way Comes named from a Ray Bradbury story, also an excellent film. That’s followed by the next section, Light in Extension.

The s +c letter code I may have mentioned once or twice previously in my uncollected works gets a little nod here. Apart from Wilson, this code gets employed by Rabelais, Aleister Crowley, James Joyce, Robert Heinlein, Gilles Deleuze and Thomas Pynchon that I know of. Pynchon explicitly identifies this code as a code in his Introduction to Slow Learner. In “The Hidden Heritage,” I first noticed it on page 199 as part of the light bulb changing riddle: “That’s a Craft secret.” Then, in the footnote on p. 201 “Copernican system of astrology.” Next, at the top of p. 208: “. . . revealed the secret clearly;” and at the bottom: “’support and congratulations.’” In the penultimate paragraph Wilson repeats a phrase he used earlier about a mystery inside a puzzle . . . then adds a different ending: “ . . . and yet still strangely concealed . . .” Some of these may have been coincidences, who knows? But then we see the word CHAOS (caps in the original) ending the opening quote as well as the last word in the piece, which starts with a C and ends with a S. The first sentence in Ulysses begins with an S; the last word in that long” sentence begins with a C. We find Wilson doing the same with the first section header. He was known to sometimes model his writing after Joyce. If this seems far-fetched, precedent for this kind of letter encoding and more gets identified in Tindall’s Guide to Finnegans Wake and Campbell and Robinson’s Skeleton Key… with the letters HCE and ALP.

The mystery of the lost “word” of the Freemasons comes under discussion, with the suggestion, based on Egyptian mythology, that this “word” = entheogen drugs. Support for this view comes from chapter 72 in Confessions where Crowley claims that he knows this lost word, without revealing it. Wilson deduces that he means these kinds of drugs because Crowley majored in organic chemistry and he offered them to the audience at his Rites of Eleusis performance series. True to form, RAW then offers an alternate model – tantric sex as the lost word. An informative lecture covering Crowley on drugs is presented by Richard Kaczynski here:

The part about his drug experimentation begins around 15:30 and concludes around 57:00.

On p. 203, Wilson says: “Bernard Shaw’s Back to Methuselah owes much to syncretic Golden Dawn ideas he probably learned from Florence Farr . . .”

Florence Farr was an actress, active feminist and an adept in the Golden Dawn. In “The Hidden Heritage” RAW claims that she was also the mistress of Shaw, Yeats, and Crowley. I haven’t been able to verify her romance with Crowley. The all-wise internet only says there was much speculation about it and that Crowley was certainly enamored of Farr, basing the character of Sister Cybele in his novel Moonchild on her. Farr was said to be present at Crowley’s initiation into the Golden Dawn, but she was also one of his superiors in the Order who refused his 5°=6° Adeptus Minor initiation siding with Yeats against Mathers and Crowley in the famous schism that eventually broke up the original Golden Dawn.

Back to Methuselah is an epic play, it can run up to 6 – 7 hours, yet it did have performances on Broadway and other prominent theatrical venues. In 1982 at New York’s Joyce Theater, I saw the Living Theater’s production of The Yellow Methuselah based on Shaw’s play and Kandinsky’s The Yellow Sound and it blew my mind. The setting of it ranged from the Garden of Eden to several thousand years in the future. The Living Theater was known for breaking down the fourth wall and inviting audience participation. I remember cast members costumed like sprites running though the audience whispering to us, “in the future, all is poetry” like a mantra. Shortly before the intermission, this surrealistic offering convened a panel on stage consisting of characters of famous people, including Bernard Shaw, discussing a now, alas, forgotten philosophical question. After the panel gave their responses, it was decided to ask the audience in the front two rows. A mic was passed around and people gave their opinions. After the 15 minute intermission, they came back with an answer to this question which consisted of playing back an edited tape recording of the audience’s answers. I was impressed with the speed they had put it together, long before computer digital editing; done on the fly, the old-fashioned way, with tape and a razor blade.

The word “syncretic” quite accurately used to describe the Golden Dawn in the above quote also seems a profitable approach to personal voluntary evolution: use what works for you from any system, religion, mythology, work of literature, piece of music, etc. and discard or pass by what you don’t need. Model Agnosticism lends itself to a syncretic strategy for Initiation.

Another sentence beginning at the bottom of p. 202 stood out for me. Included in the description of the Golden Dawn we find: “This was combined with a profound study of Christian Cabala, a derivative of the original Jewish Cabala, a science or art influencing occult society which provides a religious language and numerology to discuss and clarify various altered states of consciousness.” (I’ve corrected the typo that occurs in the text – “influential” should read “influencing.”) Many people don’t bother to tackle Cabala as learning it feels like a monumental and daunting task. I will share how a very lazy person, myself, Picked it up a little at a time.

1. Procure a copy of 777 and Other Qabalistic Writings of Aleister Crowley.

2. Write down all the correspondences for key 6, Tiphareth. Pay attention when you encounter one of these correspondences as you go about daily life. For instance, seeing a Buddha statue, a Calvary Cross, a rose, a lion (if you happen to live in Africa or are at the zoo) or a see a book with “lion” in the title (very rare, I know) or even hear a song about a lion like “The Lion Sleeps Tonight,” anything that strikes you as particularly beautiful, etc, etc. etc. I combined this with an exercise to invoke/make contact with a deity connected to Tiphareth. For that, I worked with “Liber Asarté vel Berylli” found in the Appendix of Magick, Book Four which I modified to comport with my situation. 

 

3. Procure a poster or a large photo of the Qabalistic Tree of Life. Put it somewhere where it’s comfortable to absent-mindedly gaze at, see and ponder. I used the cover illustration to Dion Fortune’s The Mystical Qabalah pictured below. Posters of this were still available when I looked for one for a student a few years ago. Eventually, you will want to read something that outlines and explains the Sephira (spheres) and the paths that connect them. Fortune’s book provides an excellent study and there are others. In the course of this you will pick up the Hebrew alphabet, each letter corresponds with a path on the Tree. The first time I saw a diagram of the Tree of Life was on the back of a Todd Rundgren concert t-shirt. It had “Healing” on the front which was the name of the tour and his new album at the time. I saw it 2 or 3 days following the Living Theater performance mentioned above. Working with Tarot cards is another painless way to absorb Cabala.

4. Read the fiction of Robert Anton Wilson beginning with Illuminatus! Read Cosmic Trigger I.

5. If any particular number recurs frequently and/or you experience a strong synchronicity with a number, look it up. Apply your intuition (which becomes stronger with use) to decipher what, if any, meaning it has for you. 

 

6. Learn to transpose words to numbers then look up the number in “Sepher Sephiroth” (back of 777.) There is a chart there to transpose English and Hebrew letters to numbers. All the English letters are there except: F which I usually connect with Vau (6) because they’re both the sixth letter of their respective alphabets. Traditional Hebrew corresponds F with Peh (80). You can do it however it makes sense to you. I also ascribe “W” to Vau. The letter V is also there with Vau though traditional Hebrew has a variation connecting it with Peh. The letter X is missing from the chart, I put it with Tzaddi (90).

Also useful – “The Meaning of the Primes from 11 to 97” list on page xxv. Look up 23, for instance, if you happen to break out in a rash of coincidences with that prime (also very rare, I know). It gives the meaning: “The glyph of life – nascent life.” Perhaps this can indicate spiritual life or, as Timothy Leary prefers, extra-terrestrial life?

Contrary to Crowley’s instructions, I’ve never memorized any of the Qabalistic tables. Some things naturally become memorized through frequent use. As indicated above, Wilson says much of modern literary culture owes its symbolism and themes to the Golden Dawn and cites Yeats’ poetry, Ezra Pound, Eliot and Joyce as examples. I would add Thomas Pynchon. Learning Cabala will aid one’s understanding and appreciation of this literature.

Love is the law, love under will.

Oz