The Great Beast Aleister Crowley
by Robert Anton Wilson
from Paul Krassners The Realist, issues 91-B, C, 92-A, B (1971-2)
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O The Fool
All ways are lawful to innocence. Pure folly is
the key to initiation. The
Book of Thoth
Crowley: Pronounced with a crow so it
rhymes with holy: Edward Alexander Crowley, b. 1875 d. 1947, known as Aleister Crowley, known also as Sir Aleister
Crowley, Saint Aleister Crowley (of the Gnostic
Catholic Church), Frater Perdurabo,
Frater Ou Mh, To Mega Therion, Count
McGregor, Count Vladimir Svareff, Chao Khan, Mahatma
Guru Sri Paramahansa Shivaji,
Baphomet, and Ipsissimus;
obviously, a case of the ontological fidgets - couldn't make up his mind who he
really was; chiefly known as The Beast 666 or The Great Beast; friends and
disciples celebrated his funeral with a Black Mass: or so the newspapers said.
Actually it was a Gnostic Catholic
Mass (even John Symonds, Crowley's most hostile biographer, admits that at most
it could be called a Grey Mass, not a Black Mass - observe the racist and
Christian-chauvinist implications in this terminology, but it was certainly not
an orthodox R.C. or Anglican mass, I mean, cripes, the priestess took off her
clothes in one part of it, buck naked, and they call that a Mass, gloriosky!
So the town council had a meeting -
this was the Ridge, in Hastings, England, 1947, not 1347 - and they passed an
ordinance that no such heathen rites would ever be tolerated in any funeral
services in their town, not never; I sort of picture them in the kitch Alpine-Balkan garb of Universal Studios' classic
monster epics, and I see Aleister himself, in his
coffin, wearing nothing less spectacular than the old black cape of Bela Lugosi: fangs showing beneath his sensual lips: but
his eyes closed in deep and divine Samadhi.
Because that's the sort of images
that come to mind when Aleister Crowley is mentioned:
this damnable man who identified himself with the Great Beast in St. John's
Revelations in an age when the supernatural is umbilically
connected with Universal Studios, Hearst Sunday Supplement
I-walked-with-a-zombie-in-my-maidenform-bra gushings and, God's socks, Today's Astrology
("Listen, Scoorpio: This month you must look
before you leap and remember that prudence is wiser than rashness: Don't
trust that Taurus female in you office" - I repeat: God's socks and
spats); this divine man who became the Logos when Logos was just a word to
pencil into Double-Crostics on rainy Sundays; this
damnable and divine paradox of a Crowley!
Listen, some critic (I forgot who)
wrote of Lugosi "acting with total sincerity and a kind of demented
cornball poetry" and the words, like the old crimson-lined black cape,
seem tailored equally well for the shoulders of Master Therion,
To Mega Therion, the Great Beast, Aleister
Crowley. This is the final degradation: this avatar of anarchy,
this epitome of rebellion, this incarnation of inconsistency, this man Crowley
whom his contemporaries called "The King of Depravity," The Wickedest
Man in the World," "A Cannibal at Large," "A Man We'd Like
to Hang," "A Human Beast"; and, with some anti-climax, "A
Pro-German and Revolutionary."
Now, to us, he is quaint.
Worse: he is Camp. Worse yet: he is corny.
We don't even believe his boast
that he performed human sacrifice 150 times a year, starting in 1912.
None of these cordial titles was invented by myself. All were used, in
I -- The Magician
The True Self is the meaning of the True Will:
know Thyself through Thy Way.
The Book of Thoth
For there is no clear way, even on the
most superficial level of the gross external data, to say what Edward Alexander
Crowley (who called himself Aleister: and other
names) really was trying to do with his life and communicate to his fellows.
Witness: here is an Englishman
(never forget that: an Englishman, and bloody English at times he could be) who
in the stodgiest year, of the dreariest decade of the age we call Victoria,
commits technical High Treason, joins the Carlists,
accepts a knighthood from Don Carlos himself, denounces as illegitimate all the
knighthoods granted by "the Hanoverian usurper" (he also called her a
"dumpy German hausfrau" - poor Vicky), yes, and then for years and
decades afterward continues, with owl-like obstinacy, with superlative stubbornness,
with ham heroism, with promethean pigheadedness, to sign himself "Sir Aleister" - a red flag in the face of John Bull.
But more: the same romantic
reactionary, the same very parfet bogus knight, hears
that the French authorities, scandalized by the heroic size of the genital on
Epstein's statue of Oscar Wilde, have covered it with a butterfly - and, bien bueno, you
guessed it, there he is, at twilight with hammer and chisel, sworn enemy of the
Philistines, removing the butterfly and restoring the statue to its pristine
purity - but why by all the pot-bellied gods in China, why did he turn that
gesture into a joke by walking, the same night, into London's stuffiest
restaurant, wearing the same butterfly over the crotch of his own trousers?
A Harlequin, then, we might
pronounce him, ultimately: the archetypal Batty Bard superimposed upon the
classic Eccentric Englishman? And with a touch of the Sardonic Sodomist - for didn't he smuggle homosexual jokes (hidden
in puns, codes, acrostics and notarikons) into his
various volumes of mystical poetry?
Didn't it even turn out that his
great literary "discovery" the Bagh-I-Muattar
[The Scented Garden] was not a discovery at all but an invention - all
of it, all, all! from the pious but pederastic
Persian original, through the ingenious but innocent English major who
translated it (and died heroically in the Boer War), up to the high Anglican
clergyman who wrote the Introduction saluting its sanctity but shivering at its
salacity - all, all from his own cunning and creative cranium?
Yes: and he even published one
volume, White Stains (Krafft-Ebing in verse) with a poker-faced prologue
pronouncing that "The Editor hopes the Mental Pathologists, for whose eyes
alone this treatise is destined, will spare no precaution to prevent it falling
into other hands" - and, hot damn, arranged that the author's name on the
title-page would be given as "George Archibald," a pious uncle whom
he detested.
Sophomore pranks? Yes, but in
1912, at the age of 37, he was still at the same game: that was the year he
managed to sell Hail Mary, a volume of versatile verses celebrating the
Virgin, to London's leading Catholic publishers, Burns and Oates: and he even
waited until it was favorably reviewed in the Catholic press ("a plenteous
and varied feast for the lovers of tuneful verse," enthused the Catholic
Times) before revealing that the real author was not a cloistered nun or an
uncommonly talented Bishop, but himself, Satan's Servant, the Great Beast, the
Demon Crowley.
But grok
in its fullness this fact: he really did it. You or I might conceive such
a jest, but he carried it out: writing the pious verses with just the proper
tone of sugary sanctimoniousness to actually sell to a Papist publisher and get
cordial reviews in the Romish press - as if
Baudelaire had forced himself to write a whole volume of Edgar Guest: And
just for the sake of a horse-laugh?
To understand this conundrum of a
II -- The High Priestess
Purity is to live only to the Highest: and the
Highest is All; be thou as Artemis to Pan.
The Book of Thoth
These jokes sometimes seem to have
an obscure point, and one is uneasily suspicious that there might be
Hamlet-like method in this madness. Even the alternate identities can be
considered more than games: They might be Zen counter-games. Here's the Beast's
own explanation of the time he became Count Vladimir Svareff,
from The Confessions of Aleister Crowley: An Autohagiography.
"I wanted to increase my knowledge
of mankind. I knew how people treated a young man from
And the Hail Mary caper has
its own sane-insane raison d'etre:
"I must not be thought exactly
insincere, though I had certainly no shadow of belief in any of the Christian
dogmas... I simply wanted to see the world through the eyes of a devout
Catholic, very much as I had done with the decadent poet of White Stains,
the Persian mystic of Bagh-i-Muattar, and so
on... I did not see why I should be confined to one life. How can one hope to
understand the world if one persists in regarding it from the conning tower of
ones own "personality?"
Just so: the procedure is even
scientific these days (Role-Playing, you know) and is a central part of
Psychodrama and Group Dynamics. "You have to go out of your mind before
you can come to your senses," as Tim Leary (or Fritz Perls)
once said. Sure: you can even become Jesus and Satan at the same time:
Ask Charles the Son of Man.
For Artemis, the goddess of nature, is eternally virgin: she only surrended
once, and then to Pan: and this is a clue to the Beast's purpose in his bloody
sacrifices.
III -- The Empress
This is the Harmony of the Universe,
that Love unites the Will to create with the Understanding of that
Creation.
The Book of Thoth
The infant Gargantua
was sent to a school run by the Plymouth Brethren, the narrowly Fundamentalist
sect to which his parents belonged. He commends the school in these
cordial words from his essay "A Boyhood in Hell":
"May the maiden that passes it
be barren and the pregnant woman that beholdeth it abort! May the birds of the air refuse to fly over
it! May it stand as a curse, as a fear, as a hate, among men. May
the wicked dwell therein! May the light of the sun be withheld therefrom and the light of the moon not lighten it!
May it become the home of the shells of the dead and may the demons of the pit
inhabit it! May it be accursed, accursed - accursed for ever and ever.'
One gathers that the boy Alick was not happy there. In fact, the climax of his
miseries came when somebody told the Headmasters that he had seen young
This incident is a favorite with
the Beast's unsympathetic critics; they harp on it gleefully, to convey that they
are not the sort of religious bigots who would torture a child in this
fashion; and they also use it to explain his subsequent antipathy to anything
bearing the names or coming under the auspices, of "Jesus" or
"Christ."
It was this school, they say, which
warped his mind and turned him to the service of the devil; a nice theory for
parlor analysts or term papers, but it has the defect of not being quite
true. The King of Depravity never did embrace Satan, as we shall see, and
he kept a very nice mind full of delicate distinctions and discriminations; of
this experience he himself says, "I did not hate Jesus and God; I hated
the Jesus and God of the people I hated."
But now we jump ahead, past
adolescence (skipping the time he seduced a housemaid on his mother's bed;
sorry, Freudians), past Cambridge (missing a nice 1890-style student riot) and
past mountain-climbing (by 1901, he and his favorite fellow-climber, Oscar Eckenstein, held most of the climbing records in the world
between them - all but one to be exact); we came now to the Hermetic Order of
the Golden Dawn; caveat lector; we enter the realm of Mystery, Vision - and
Hallucination; the reader is the only judge of what can be believed from here
on.
IV -- The Emperor
Find thyself in every Star. Achieve thou every
possibility.
The Book of Thoth
It seems that the Golden Dawn was
founded by Robert Wentworth Little, a high Freemason, based on papers he
rescued from a hidden drawn in
No: not so either: behind the
Golden Dawn was actually a second Order, the Rose of Ruby and Cross of Gold -
i.e. the original medieval Rosicrucians still in
business at the old stand; and behind them was the Third Order, the
Great White Brotherhood - i.e., the Nine Unknown Men of Hindu lore the true
rulers of earth, one can only say, if the last theory be true, that the Great
White Brotherhood are Great White Fuckups.
The true true
story of the Illuminati, Rosicrucians etc. - or
another damned lie - is given in Illuminatus:
or Laughing Buddha Jesus Phallus Inc., by Robert J. Shea and this writer,
to be published by Dell this year, unless the Nine Unknown Men suppress it.
Well anyway, whenever the Hermetic
Order of the Golden Dawn came from, there it was almost practicing in the open
in London in the 1890's, with such illustrious members as Florence Farr (the
actress), Arthur Machen (the horror-story writer: you
must have read his Great God Pan?), George Cecil Jones (a respectable
chemist by day and a clandestine alchemist by night) and William Butler Yeats
(a poet who thought his verse was superior to Crowley's, he is described in Autohagiography as "a disheveled demonologist
who could have given much more care to his appearance without being accused of
dandyism.").
In 1898, the King of Depravity was
admitted to the Order: Crowley took the new name Frater
Perdurabo which means Brother
I-Will-Endure-To-The-End; he later changed it to Frater
OuMh or Brother Not Yet - and began acquiring great
proficiency in such arts as the invocation of angels and demons, making himself
invisible, journeying in the astral body and such-like Wonders of the Occult.
In one critical operation of magick the Wickedest Man in the World failed abjectly in
those early days; and this was the most important work of all. It consisted in
achieving the Knowledge and Conversation of one's Holy Guardian Angel - what,
precisely, that may mean will be discussed later.
The usual operation, as found in The
Book of Sacred Magick of Abra-Melin
the Mage, requires six months' hard work and is somewhat more grueling than
holding the Ibis position of Hatha Yoga for that
interlude, or working out pi to the thousandth place in you head without using
paper or pencil. The beast's critics like to proclaim that he couldn't
manage this because he was incapable of obeying Abra-Melin's
commandment of chastity for the necessary 180 days. We will later learn
how true that claim actually is.
Invisibility, by the way, isn't as
hard as Lamont Cranston's Tibetan teachers implied. After only a few
months practice, guided by the Beast's training manuals, I have achieved
limited success twice already; and my cats, Simon and Garfunkel,
do it constantly. There is no need to look for mysteries when the truth
is often right out in the light of day.
V -- The Hierophant
Be thou athlete with the eight limbs of Yoga;
for without these thou art not disciplined for any fight.
The Book of Thoth
Early in February, 1901, in
For instance, after three weeks of
daily practice, the Beast recorded in his diary that he had concentrated that
day for 59 minutes with exactly 25 "breaks" or wanderings from the
triangle: 25 breaks may not sound so great to those who haven't tried this; a
single hour, however, will convince them that 3600 breaks, or one per second is
close to average for a beginner.
Toward the end of April, the Beast
logged 23 minutes with 9 breaks; on May 6th, 32 minutes and 10 breaks. I
repeat: anyone who think Acid or Jesus or Scientology
has remade his or her life ought to attempt a few weeks of this; it is the
clearest and most humiliating revelation of the compulsive neurosis of the
"normal" ego.
On August 6 the Beast arrived in Ceylon,
still working on daily dharana oh yes, in
Honolulu he'd had an affair with a married woman, later celebrated in his
sonnet sequence Alice: An Adultery, published under the auspices of his
fictitious "Society for the Propagation of Religious Truth": his
critics always mention that, to prove that he wasn't sincere; one
sometimes gets the cynical notion that these critics are either eunuchs or
hypocrites.
Under the guidance of Sri Parananda and an old friend, Allan Bennett, now the
Buddhist monk Maitreya Ananda,
he plunged into the other "seven limbs" of yoga. I say that his
mountain-climbing involved less self-discipline. I will not argue; I
will give a hint only. Here are the first two steps in beginning to do pranayama:
1. Learn to breathe through
your two nostrils alternately. When this becomes easy, practice exhaling
through the right nozzle for no less than 15 seconds and then inhaling through
the left orifice for a like time. Practice until you can do this without strain
for 20 or 30 minutes.
2. Now begin retention of
breath between inhalation and exhalation. Increase the period of retention
until you can inhale for 10 seconds, retain for 30 second and exhale for 20
seconds. This proportion is important: if you inhale for as long as, or
longer than, the exhalation, you are screwing up. Practice until you can
do this - comfortably - for an hour.
Got it? Good; now you are
ready to start doing the real exercises of pranayama.
For instance, you can add the "third limb," asana, which
consists of sitting like a rock, no muscle moving anywhere; the Hindus
recommend starting with a contortion that seems
to have been devised by Sacher-Masoch himself, but
choose a position that seems comfortable at first, if you want - it will turn
into Hell soon enough.
All this has a point, of course;
when pranayama and asana mastered, you
can begin to do dharana without constant
humiliating failures. Congratulations: now you can add the other
"five limbs." Of course, the temptation (especially after your
foot is no longer merely asleep but has progressed to a state gruesomely
reminiscent of rigor mortis) is to decide that "There isn't anything in
yoga after all" or "I just can't do it" and maybe there's
something in Christian Science or the Process or probably another acid trip
would really get you over the hump.*
Footnote: *Oh yes, brethren and sistern, we have known people capable of much
rationalization. Back in 1901, even, the Beast discovered that some of
the "lesser yogis," as he called them, used hashish to fuel the last
gallop from dharana to dhyana;
and he later recommended this to his own disciples - but always with the
provision that the results so obtained should be regarded as an indication and
foreshadowing of what was sought, not as a substitute for true
attainment. The Beast achieved dhyana,
the non-ego trance, on October 2, 1901, less than 8 months after beginning
serious dharana in
VI -- The Lovers
...rest in Simplicity, and listen in the
Silence.
The Book of Thoth
This may be getting heavy, but it
has to be endured for a while before the band starts playing again.
Specifically, we should have some understanding of what we mean by dhyana and what the Beast has accomplished in those
8 months. The best analysis is probably that given by the Wickedest Man in the
World himself in his Confessions:
"The problem is how to stop
thinking; for the theory is that the mind is a mechanism for dealing symbolically
with impressions; its construction is such that one is tempted to take these
symbols for reality. "That is, we manufacture units such
as the inch, the chair, the self, etc., in order to organize our
sense-impressions into coherent wholes, but the mind which performs this kind
service is so built that it cannot then escape its own constructs. Having
imagined inches and chairs and selves, the mind then perceives them "out
there" in the physical world and finds it hard to credit that they exist
only in the mind's own sorting machinery. "Conscious
thought, therefore, is fundamentally false and prevents one from perceiving
reality. The numerous practices of yoga are simply dodges to help one acquire
the knack of slowing down the current of thought and ultimately stopping it
altogether."
The mind's self-hypnosis, of
course, arises anew as soon as one comes out of dhyana.
One never retains the ego-less and world-less essence of dhyana;
one retains an impression thereof polluted by the mind's pet theories and most
resonant images. The Beast calls this adulterated after-effect of dhyana "mixing the planes" and
regards it as the chief cause of the horrors perpetrated by religious nuts on
the rest of us throughout history:
"Mohammed's conviction that
his visions were of imperative importance to "salvation" made him a
fanatic... The spiritual energy derived from the high trances makes the seer a
formidable force; and unless he be aware that
interpretation is due only to the exaggeration of his own tendencies of
thought, he will seek to impose it on others, and so delude his disciples,
Pervert their minds and prevent their development... "In
my system the pupil is taught to analyze all ideas and abolish them by
philosophical skepticism before he is allowed to undertake the exercises that
lead to dhyana."
By 1904, the Beast had come to the
conclusion that all he had seen and performed, among the Magicians and among
the yogis, could be explained by combining the known psychology with the
emerging beginnings of psycho-chemistry. He had pushed mysticism as far as one
can, and retained his Victorian Rationalism.
Then came
the cataclysm of
VII -- The Chariot
The Issue of the Vulture, Two-in-One, conveyed;
this is the Chariot of Power.
The Book of Thoth
Ever since his initiation into the
Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn in 1898, the Beast has been practicing astral
voyaging almost daily. This is considerably easier than pranayama,
asana, dharana, and it's
good clean fun even from the beginning.
If you are an aspirant, or a dupe,
merely sit in a comfortable chair, in a room where you won't be interrupted,
close you eyes, and slowly envision your "astral body," whatever the
blazes that is, standing before you. Make every detail clear and precise; any
fuzziness can get you into trouble later.
Now transfer your consciousness to
this second body - I don't know why, but some people stick at this point - and
rise upward, through the ceiling, through the other rooms in the building,
through the stratosphere, until you have left the physical universe entirely -
to hell with it, Nixon and his astronauts are taking it over anyway - and find
yourself in the astral realm, where NASA isn't likely to follow with their
flags and other tribal totems.
Approach any astral figures you see
and question them closely, especially about any matters of which you wish
knowledge not ordinarily available to you.
Return to the earth-body, awake, and
record carefully that which has transpired. The diary of such astral journeys,
carefully transcribed, is the key to all progress in High Magick,
once the student learns to decipher his own visions.
The skeptical reader, if there are
any skeptics left in this gullible generation, might point out that this
process begins as an exercise of imagination and that there is no reason to
think it ever crosses the line to reality. Quite so: but that objection does
not diminish the value of the visions obtained.
The Beast has been at some pains to
write a little book called "777" which is a copious catalog, in
convenient table form, of the 32 major "astral planes" and their
typical scenery, events and inhabitants. Using one's own Magical Diary and the
tables in "777" together with a few standard reference works on
comparative religion, one can quickly discover where one has been, who has been
there before and what major religions were founded on the basis of some earlier
visitor's account of what he had seen there.
One need not hold any occult
hypothesis about these visions; you can even say that you have been exploring
Carl Jung's "Collective Unconscious" - or, more fashionably, that you
have been deciphering the ethological record of the DNA code (Tim Leary's
favorite theory about LSD voyages, which fits these astral trips just as
neatly). The important discipline is to avoid "mixing the planes" and
confusing your explanation with the actual vision itself; or, as the Beast says
in Liber O:
"In this book it is spoken of
the Sephioth, 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 they
exist or not. By doing certain things certain results follow; students are most
earnestly warned against attributing objective reality or philosophical
validity to any of them...
"The Student, if he attains
any success in the following practices, will find himself confronted by things
(ideas or beings) too glorious or too dreadful to be described. It is essential
that he remain the master of all that he beholds, hears, or conceives;
otherwise he will be the slave of the illusion and the prey of madness
"The Magician may go a long
time being fooled and flattered by the Astrals that he has himself modified or
manufactured... He will become increasingly interested in himself,
imagine himself to be attaining one initiation after another. His Ego will
expand unchecked, till he seems to himself to have heaven at his feet..."
The teachers of Zen have the proper
tactics against this danger of grandiosity:
Having watched the decline into
dogmatism and self-aggrandizement of various heroes of the New
Wave of dope and occultism, some of us are maybe ready to see that the
Beast's incessant profane mockery against himself and his Gods was a necessary
defense against this occupational hazard of the visionary life.
But then came the Mystification of
Cairo - and beyond it, the Mindfuck in
VIII Adjustment
Balance against each thought its exact opposite.
For the Marriage of these is the Annihilation of Illusion.
The Book of Thoth
In March, 1904, the Beast and his first
wife, Rose, were in
It soon developed that some god or
other was trying to communicate;
Like: "What are his moral
qualities?" "Force and fire."
"What opposes him?" "Deep blue" - until one god emerged
that fit the box just as sure as Clark
The Beast then took Rose to the
Sorry about that, fellow
rationalists.
And, of course, alas and goddam it, 666 - the Number of the Beast in St. John's
Revelations - was Crowley's own magick number and had
been for years.
Those who want to invoke the word
"coincidence" to cover the rags of their ignorance are welcome to do
so. Some of us have a new word lately, synchronicity, coined by no less
than psychologist Carl Jung and physicist Wolfgang Pauli - and I've read their
books and must admit I came out as confused as I went in; as far as this brain
can comprehend, coincidence is meaning-less correspondence, and
synchronicity is meaning-ful correspondence,
and if that makes you feel superior to the custard-headed clods who still say coincidence,
you're welcome to it.
And there's more: when the Beast
acknowledged Ra-Hoor-Khuit on the other side of the
astral phone hook-up, he was turned over to an underling, one Aiwass, an angel, who told him among other things that the
true Word of Power isn't abra-ca-dabra but abra-ha-dabra and the letter adds up to 418, which
was the number of Crowley's home on Loch Ness in Scotland; and Aiwass's own name adds up to 98, which is also the number
of love and will, the two chief words in his total communication,
which is known as The Book of the Law - But enough; the proofs,
mathematical and cabalistic and coincidental (if you must) run on for
pages.
In summary, the Beast had been
playing a Game against himself for six years, since 1898, invoking the
miraculous and the proving after the fact that it was "only" his
mind.
Now he had to begin considering
that he had made himself the center of an "astral" field effect,
having the qualities of an intelligence greater than his, and signifying same
by multi-lingual and numerological correspondences coming not from
"inside" but from "outside": Rose's mind, the
"independent" decisions of the curators of the Boulak
Museum and, then, a certain Samuel bar Aiwass.
For, in 1918,
He was himself no mean cabalist and
had tried all sorts of Hebrew synonyms for "beast" but none of them
added to anything like 666; yet the answer came in the mail - Tau, Resh, Yod,
Vau, Nun, equal 666 - and it was signed Samuel bar Aiwas.
Aiwas is
the Hebrew equivalent of Aiwass, and also adds to 93,
the number of his Holy Guardian Angel.
But meanwhile came
the Chinese Mindfuck.
IX -- The Hermit
Wander alone; bearing the Light and thy
Staff.
The Book of Thoth
One day in
The beast, naturlich,
was aware that the Buddha had spotted that disturbing fact a long time ago, but
suddenly the full import of it hit home to him on an emotional level.
Chew on it: he could not absolutely
prove that there was an external world to Aleister
Crowley, but merely that there appeared to be a tendency for sense-impressions
to organize themselves to suggest such a world, Lord help us; and he could not
absolutely demonstrate that there was an "Aleister
Crowley" doing this organizing but only that there seems to be a tendency
to aggregate internal impressions in such a way as to suggest such an entity.
(Get the Librium, mother). All intelligent people have noticed that at one time
or another - and quickly brushed it aside, to carry on in the only way that
seems pragmatically justified, assuming the reality of the World and the Self.
The Beast, after the workings of
his Magick, the experience of his dhyana
(in which Self, indeed, had vanished for a time)
and his encounter with the ever-lovin' Aiwass, was not satisfied to rest in assuming
anything.
There was no absolute proof that he
had ever achieved dhyana, for instance, but
only a tendency to organize some impressions into a category called
"memory and to assume that they corresponded to "real" events in
a time called the "past." Nor could reason alone prove that he had
seen a "miracle" in "Cairo," or performed "Magick" in "London," or suffered in a
"school" run by "Plymouth Brethren," or had a
"biological" "relationship" "with"
"beings" know as "Father" and "Mother."
"About now," he scribbled
in his diary on November 19, "I may count my Speculative Criticism of the
Reason as not only proved and understood, but realized. The misery of this is
simply sickening - I can write no more."
He started on a walking journey
across
And it wasn't six or ten hours in
his case; it lasted four solid months, while
Manson, hell; you could turn into Nixon
that way.
X Fortune
The axle moveth not;
attain thou that.
The Book of Thoth
The Beast described this
120-Days-of-Bedlam in a poem called Aha!:
The sense of all I hear is drowned;
Tap, tap, tap and nothing matters!
Senseless hallucinations roll
Across the curtain of
the soul.
Each ripple on the river seems
The madness of a maniac's dreams!
So in the self no memory-chain
Or casual wisp to bind the straws!
The Self disrupted! Blind, insane,
Both of existence and of laws,
The Ego and the Universe
Fall to one black chaotic curse...
As I trod the trackless way
Through sunless gorges of
I became a little child!
"The are
waiting for you," Rose, in a trance, had said, a year earlier. "It's
about the Child."
When
Israel Regardie,
a biographer sympathetic to Crowley, but dubious about the existence of the
A.A. (the Third Order, or Great White Brotherhood, behind the Rose of Ruby and
Cross of Gold) comments thoughtfully, "I do not wholly understand
this."
Herman Hess, who described the
Third Order very clearly in Journey to the East, gives the formula for
initiation in Steppenwolf:
PRICE OF ADMISSION:
YOUR MIND
XI Lust
Mitigate Energy with Love; but let Love devour all
things.
The Book of Thoth
One act remained in the drama of
initiation: the achievement of the Knowledge and Conversation of the Holy
Guardian Angel. This most difficult of all magical operations had been
started anew even before
Sometime after his return to
England, the Beast arranged to have George Cecil Jones "crucify" him
(I am not totally sure what this means, but suspension on a cross, even via
ropes, gets quite painful in a very short while) and, while hanging on the
cross, he swore an oath as follows: "I,Purdurabo,
a member of the Body of Christ, do hereby solemnly obligate myself... and will
entirely devote my life so as to raise myself to the knowledge of my higher and
Divine Genius that I shall be He."
I n Chapter 9, "The Redemption
of Frank Bennett," in The Magick of Aleister Crowley, John Symonds tells how with a few
words Crowley brought a species of Samadhi or Satori
to Frank Bennett, a magician who had been striving unsuccessfully for that
achievement over many decades.
The words wore, in effect, that the
Real Self or Holy Guardian Angel is nothing else but the integration that
occurs when the conscious and subconscious are no longer segregated by
repression and inhibition. It is only fair to warn seekers after either-or
answers that in Magick Without Tears Crowley
flatly denies this and asserts that the Angel is a separate "Being... of
angelic order... more than a man..."
After the Crucifixion, the King of
Depravity went on plowing his way through the required 180 days (the essence of
the Abra-Melin operation is "Invoke Often")
and adding other various techniques.
On October 9, 1906 The Beast
recorded in his Magical Diary:
"Tested new ritual and behold
it was very good... I did get rid of everything but the Holy Exalted
One, and must have held Him for a minute or two. I did. I am sure I
did."
On October 10, he added: "I am
still drunk with Samadhi all day." And a few days later, "Once
again I nearly got there - all went brilliance - but not quite." By
the end of the month, there was no longer any doubt. Eight years after
commencing the practice of Magick, Aleister Crowley had achieved the Knowledge and
Conversation of the Holy Guardian Angel.
XII -- The Hanged Man
And, being come to the shore, plant thou the
Vine and rejoice without shame. - The Book of Thoth
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. In 1912, he became the English head of the Ordo
Templi Orientis, a secret
Masonic group tracing direct decent from Knights Templar. In 1915, he
achieved a vision of the total explanation of the universe, but afterwards was
only able to record, "Nothing, with twinkles - but WHAT twinkles."
In 1919, he founded the Abbey of Theleme in
Somewhere along the line, he became
the Master of the A.A. or Great White Brotherhood (assuming it ever existed
outside his own head, which some biographers doubt) and began teaching other
Magicians all over the world.
He married, and divorced, and married,
and divorced.
He wrote The Book of Thoth,
in which, within the framework of a guide to divination by Tarot cards, he
synthesized virtually all the important mystical teachings of East and West; we have used it for our chapter-heads.
He landed on
He wrote The Book of Lies, a
collection of mind-benders that would flabbergast a Zen Master, including the pregnant
question, "Which is Frater Perdurabo
and which is the Imp Crowley?" He got hooked on heroin; kicked it;
got hooked again; kicked again; got hooked again...
He died, and his friends buried him
with a Gnostic Catholic Mass which the newspapers called Black.
But he is best remembered for
writing in 1928 in Magick in Theory and
Practice that the most potent invocation involves human sacrifice, that the
ideal victim is "a male child of perfect innocence and high
intelligence," and that he had performed this rite an average of 150 times
per year since 1912.
XIII Death
... all Acts of Love
contain Pure Joy. Die daily.
The Book of Thoth
Even his bitterest critics (except
Rev. Montague Sumners, who was capable of believing
anything) admit that it's unlikely that a man whose every move was watched by
newspapers and police could polish off 150 victims a year without getting
caught; but they are, most of them, not above adding that this ghastly jest
indicates the perversity of his mind, and, after all (summoning those great and
reliable witnesses, Rumor and Slander) there was some talk about Sicilian
infants disappearing mysteriously when he was running his Abbey of Thelema there...
We have got to come to a definitive
conclusion about this matter or we will never grasp the meaning of his life,
the value of his Magick, the cause of his
vilification, or the true meaning of the Knowledge and Conversation of the Holy
Guardian Angel.
XIV Art
... make manifest the
Virtue of that