Winter Solstice

To Winter (by William Blake)


`O Winter! bar thine adamantine doors:
The north is thine; there hast thou built thy dark
Deep-founded habitation. Shake not thy roofs,
Nor bend thy pillars with thine iron car.'

He hears me not, but o'er the yawning deep
Rides heavy; his storms are unchain'd, sheathèd
In ribbèd steel; I dare not lift mine eyes,
For he hath rear'd his sceptre o'er the world.

Lo! now the direful monster, whose skin clings
To his strong bones, strides o'er the groaning rocks:
He withers all in silence, and in his hand
Unclothes the earth, and freezes up frail life.

He takes his seat upon the cliffs,--the mariner
Cries in vain. Poor little wretch, that deal'st
With storms!--till heaven smiles, and the monster
Is driv'n yelling to his caves beneath mount Hecla.

 

Yes, I realize this is more than a week late. What can I say? It was a busy “holiday season”

This poem of Blake’s differs immediately from “To Autumn” in that there are no enjambments between stanzas. Each of the four stanzas exists as its own unit, cut off and isolated from the others by full stops. This is what we would naturally expect in a poem about winter, the season attributed to the north and to earth – which, in its lowest aspect signifies, among other things, the creation of distinct entities by the mind’s separation of the flux of existence (cf. the Thelemic concept of the Khabs and the Khu and how, according to Thelemic metaphysics, the Khu creates this separation, enabling experience but also creating the tendency of the mind to misperceive reality, including the True Will, thus necessitating the practice of Thelema).

Yet each stanza contains at least one enjambment, many of them quite deep: the form of the poem suggests that beneath that separation into distinct entities, there is an underlying unity, a degree of interdependency.

One has to be careful with ideas like these. They too easily descend into vague, unhelpful platitudes like. “We’re, like, really all ‘one,’ man.” As Erwin Hessle reminds us, “unity” is just as much an illusion as “separateness”: the insight of mystical experience is not that one has discovered the “truth,” but rather that one has discovered a different perspective, one that can be very useful indeed. [It should also go without saying – though it sadly does not, usually – that “interdependence” carries with it no moral implications. We might say that predators and prey in nature are “interdependent” upon one another, but that doesn’t preclude them from acting in accord with their natures and producing conflict]

As I argued in my essays on the LBRP and the Star Ruby, the element of earth, though represented in the Old Aeon as the element of darkness – and death, and the winter, and the material world conceived of as “evil” – is actually an element of light and joy in the New Aeon. In the New Aeon, we understand that “darkness” is an illusion created by the rotation of the earth, that the sun continues to shine on the other side of the world (and within ourselves, metaphorically, as our True Will), that the material world is not cut off from the spirit but that it is the spirit in a very real way. Thelema does not posit a spirituality cut off from materiality, any more than it posits a materiality cut off from spirituality. Thus the events of one’s life, one’s path through the physical, material world, is created by the True Will, is a bright path illuminated by light (though it can be perceived as cut-off from the world – lonely, and dark – when the fog of the mind grows thick).

Students are advised to study the Ace of Disks in the tarot, and Crowley’s commentary thereupon (particularly regarding the identity of Sol and Terra).

With these ideas in mind, we are in a better position to understand Blake’s “To Winter” from a Thelemic perspective, and its formal combination of separate stanzas containing deep enjambments. The very form of the poem performs the way that Winter (the earth, the physical world, the regular events of one’s life, the north) can appear barren, in which entities are disconnected, but in fact contains within it – for those who know how to look – the interconnection represented by the joy of Sun.

The first line of the poem is a syntactically-complete sentence, a command to Winter, but it ends in a colon, a mark of punctuation that throws forward the emphasis. That colon both arrests the motion of the stanza and propels it, in exactly the way that the element of earth can both signify the solidification of the individual into a “separate” ego at odds with the world and can also act – when seen rightly – as a gateway to an understanding of the physical world as a paradise in which the boundaries between self and other are understood as arbitrary distinctions drawn by the mind/Khu.

Unlike “To Autumn,” which consisted of the anticipation of Autumn, the performance of his song, and his departure, “To Winter” features a stanza of commands to the season – set off by quotation marks – followed by the speaker lamenting (as if in an aside) that Winter cannot hear him. The speaker perceives no meaningful connection here. He describes Winter in its most monstrous aspects and anticipates the season’s eventual overthrow and his retreat below “Mount Hecla,” an Icelandic volcano mentioned in Thompson’s famous poem The Seasons, which Blake clearly has in mind in these mini season poems.

In other words, the speaker exists in a state of isolation, cut off from the rewarding experience of the sun, perceiving Winter as nothing more than a monster (and the description of Winter echoes what will later become in Blake’s corpus “Urizen,” the tyrannical god modeled on Jehovah, the rational faculty when it has usurped control of the human).

Like the speaker of many of the Songs of Experience, the speaker of “To Winter” cannot see past his limited perspective, but the form in which the poem is written enables us to discern that the situation is more complicated than the speaker can realize. We do not have to wait until the overthrow of Winter but can exult and enjoy the materiality of this – and all seasons – with which our bodies and minds are inexorably bound.

As Winter comes upon us, let us reflect that the days are starting to grow longer, that the sun never really goes anywhere, that there is a constant, neverending source of light, love, liberty, and light that is always available to those capable of shifting the focus of the mind.

Believers Say the Darndest Things: Pray Until Something Happens!

Here’s a short and sweet one, just in time for the holidays.

Religious believers of all sorts have no problem interpreting the regular happenstance of life as acts of Divine Providence. And when coincidences happen – which they inevitably do – believers sometimes read them as interventions of some kind of spiritual agency. And when the coincidence involves their *desire* for something to happen and that desire being fulfilled, then they start attributing power to their desire-announcing rituals, like prayer.

As two of the rotating co-hosts on the excellent public access call-in show The Atheist Experience have recently discussed, the phenomenon of prayer (at least in the Christian tradition) can often be summed up in the maxim, “Pray until something happens”: watch it here

That’s right – the approach if the religious is that if you want something or if you have a problem, pray for your desire and/or a resolution of the problem. And if nothing happens, then keep praying, and this time have more faith. And be sure to interpret anything at all as a sign of divine intervention.

Tracie Harris has also given a fantastic demonstration of how this works through the rolling of dice: by focusing only on “hits,” religious believers can make it seem (in their own minds, at least) as if their prayers are having some kind of effect on reality. [See her presentation here, which is really excellent. She starts by showing how “transcendent” is indistinguishable from “non-existent,” and she goes on to show how believers can talk themselves into thinking that prayer “works” by focusing on hits. Somewhere in part two of her presentation, I think, she and Matt give an excellent example of prayer “working” (Paraphrasing: “Give me a 5!” “It’s a 2” “Ooh, I was thinking of a 2 first! Maybe the dice heard my thoughts and gave me that result!”]

What does this have to do with Thelema? Well, as I’ve said before, a great number of Thelemites seem to practice not Thelema but a Thelema-inspired religion based on a misreading of Crowley’s writings, disinformation presented to them by people who don’t have much more knowledge, crap gleaned from various “spiritual” sources, and their own fevered imaginations.

Allen Greenfield made an excellent point upon his resignation from the OTO a few years ago. He wrote that the OTO "tends to attract to its ranks spiritually disaffected people [...] Many of these people are sincere, but they came to OTO alienated from a particular superstition, not from superstitious values per se."

Now, Greenfield is writing specifically about the OTO there, but I think his comments apply very much to Thelema as a whole. Thelema has become a kind of alternative superstition, rather than an alternative *to* superstition. I attribute part of the problem to a lack of skepticism and critical thinking: people get fed up with traditional religions, realize that they're bullshit, but they don't fully grasp why they're bullshit. They still keep the same patterns of magical thinking alive. So when they discover Thelema, they bring their old magical thinking patterns to their "new" religion -- actually to the pseudo-Thelemic religion that they misinterpret from Crowley's texts

We can see the manifestation of the religious mindset and magical thinking in various believer scripts that appear in Thelemic discussions.

For example, the bizarre attitude of “pray until something happens,” described at the top of this post, pops up from time to time in various places on Thelemic forums. A fairly funny manifestation of it appeared the other day on everyone’s favorite fruitcake factory, The Temple of Thelema Forums, where one confused young man posted the following, in a thread he titled “Simple Archangel Magick.” Ah, yes. Nothing like simple archangel magick. Don’t you just hate that complicated Archangel magick that puts a damper on your holidays? It turns out that what he means by “simple” is “identical to religious prayer”:

I read about this technique in Sonia Choquette's ASK YOUR GUIDES, The trad 4 Archangels as seen in LRBP with 3 others Remiel , Raguel and Sariel can be invoked any time any place to work magick to effect change upon your Malkuth by merely understanding their properties and repeating their name mentally or in a whisper rhythmically in a mantra e.g. Mik-a-el Mik-a-el in between each breath. You "download" your particular trouble to them and voila .....in time.

one example is cited concerning a Chicago public school and Raguel the Archangelic policemen who keeps the others in order was downloaded upon by a young stressed out school teacher whio couldn't cope with the rowdy scallywags in her class. It was making her life hell. All weekend she invoked Raguel and downloaded this particular concern to Him and on Monday morning the head master told her that the school has been targeted by the city to be first in an experiment in classroom restructuring and voila all of the troublemakers where taken out of her class

 

There’s a lot that’s hysterical here, from citing the work of a New Age crackpot, to anecdotal accounts of (not even) coincidence being described as prayer “working” (a class is full of troublemakers and the school does something about them…what are the odds, eh?), to capitalizing the H on a pronoun used to describe the angel in question.

It should go without saying that whenever anyone has a problem, of any sort, one of three things is going to happen in the near future:

1) The problem is going to get better.

2) The problem is going to get worse.

3) The problem is going to stay the same.

And believers have answers ready for each one!

1) If the problem gets better, then they’ll say, it worked! Magick works!

2) If the problem gets worse, then they’ll say, well, the magick made something happen but not in the way you expected! Maybe you have a karmic debt that needs to work itself out, and your magick unintentionally activated this debt. Or maybe you made a mistake in your prayer or invoked the wrong angel. You ought to revise the working and keep focus on your intention. Either way, magick works!

3) If the problem stays the same, then they’ll say, just keep looking for results! Remember, even getting a pleasant feeling inside is a result of sorts! Keep doing the prayer/magick, and it will eventually lead to payoff in the real world (see one and two, above: all problems eventually get better or worse).

And there we have it. Oh, and just for fun, check out this kid’s later contribution to the same thread:

yeah [this kind of prayer] works but it is clear that contacting such beings in travelling or skrying in the spirit vision is more effective and rewarding imo so yeah i guesse in a sense it is geared towards the new age layman but sophisticates such as us could use it in our arsenal too haha

                                

He’s clearly caught up in a little fantasy where he’s part of a band of “sophisticates” with an ‘arsenal” of magical powers who can “travel” and “skry” in the “spirit vision” but who can also appropriate techniques used by those poor, profane “new age laymen” to work awesome magic by “downloading” problems to goblins from another dimension (prayer for the tech generation! iAngel 5!)

Here’s a Christmas present for everyone reading this: grow up. There is no Santa Claus, and there are no magical powers.

Happy Holidays!

End as thou didst begin: The Star Ruby

Crowley’s Liber XXV, a ritual known as “The Star Ruby” and designed as a “new and more elaborate” ritual of the pentagram, concludes with the instruction to repeat the Qabalistic Cross and “end as thou didst begin.”

Opinions vary on the meaning of this phrase – whether it indicates that one should perform again the “exorcism” that begins the ritual or whether it is a redundant description of repeating the QC. Such details as these are rather irrelevant. But the importance of this phrase, “end as thou didst begin,” however, cuts to the very core of Thelemic philosophy and one of its central paradoxes: initiation fundamentally changes the individual, but it ultimately changes nothing at all.

We will explore the meaning of this enigmatic-sounding sentence in this post, which provides a full examination of The Star Ruby and the ways in which it complements and extends the LBRP, bringing the pentagram ritual further into alignment with Thelema.

Read on for more.

Dissenting Opinion?...What Dissenting Opinion?

There are some things that are just inevitable: death, taxes, the tides, the seasons, and…Los having his relevant and insightful posts rejected from religious blogs. Earlier this week, I got into a mini-exchange with occult author Donald Michael Kraig on this blog entry here. It forms an interesting extension of the discussion I had with him on his blog earlier this year (which you can read here).

It’s not terribly enlightening to go through my argument there in much more detail: my point is abundantly obvious, as is the rather pathetic way Kraig immediately directs the conversation away from the substance of my post and onto irrelevant, distractionary nonsense (in this case, equivocating on the meaning of a common word and then trying to turn the discussion into speculation about *me* and not engagement with my *arguments*).

Feel free to read through our exchange. My final post of the exchange – rejected by Kraig – will be published below.

But first I wanted to take this opportunity to point out a trend I’ve noticed among religious believers online: they seem to have an aversion to an open discussion of their claims and are quick to shut down discussion (or simply prohibit it outright).

Read on for more.

Go Mitt in Your Hat: Reflections on the Election

Discussing politics is largely a game, one played by people who have the luxury to devote time to it. Like most games, discussing politics can be fun but doesn’t really have any effect on the world. Hell, the actual electoral process itself has only a slight effect. At the end of the day, here in modern America at least, the “choice” offered to voters is usually between candidates who are, in the big picture, remarkably similar. No matter who wins, very little is likely to change in the fundamentals of the system. For me personally, the outcome one way or the other doesn’t really affect how I carry out my True Will, so politics isn’t exactly a pressing issue.

That being said, it can be fun to talk about politics, especially when these Republican clods select the most odious “suit” possible to represent them and have their candidate (along with their dumbass, harmful policies) rejected by the country.

There’s an old Simpsons joke featuring banners at the conventions of the two main American political parties. The Republican banners read, “We’re just plain evil!” and “We want what’s worst for everybody!” and the Democrat banners read, “We hate life and ourselves!” and “We can’t govern!”

For those who dip their heads down to play the (relatively meaningless) game of political discussions, that joke pretty much sums up the playing field. It’s amazing that a joke made twenty years ago is even more relevant today than it was then.

It's also more than a bit disconcerting (once again, relatively speaking from here within "the game") how many American conservatives -- and especially Republican politicians -- seem not only misinformed but positively allergic to facts. Comedian Bill Maher provided a chuckle-worthy take on the phenomenon of the Republican "bubble" here.

Anyway, before this Romney character rides off into the footnotes of history, I wanted to share these links that I found entertaining:

A well-written and insightful review of Mitt Romney's book, written by a fellow Simpsons fan, as witnessed by the great quote that heads the entry.

An amusing parody of Gangnam Style ("Mitt Romney Style") by the folks at College Humor.

Autumnal Equinox

To Autumn (by William Blake)

 

O Autumn, laden with fruit, and stainèd
With the blood of the grape, pass not, but sit
Beneath my shady roof; there thou may'st rest,
And tune thy jolly voice to my fresh pipe,
And all the daughters of the year shall dance!
Sing now the lusty song of fruits and flowers.

`The narrow bud opens her beauties to
The sun, and love runs in her thrilling veins;
Blossoms hang round the brows of Morning, and
Flourish down the bright cheek of modest Eve,
Till clust'ring Summer breaks forth into singing,
And feather'd clouds strew flowers round her head.

`The spirits of the air live on the smells
Of fruit; and Joy, with pinions light, roves round
The gardens, or sits singing in the trees.'
Thus sang the jolly Autumn as he sat;
Then rose, girded himself, and o'er the bleak
Hills fled from our sight; but left his golden load.

 

 

 

Yeah, I'm posting this a day late. What's it to ya?

I'm struck, on reading this over, by the way this poem positions Autumn's "lusty" song as central, only to absent him in the last line.

The structure of the poem is anticipation of Autumn and his song (stanza 1), the song of Autumn (stanzas 2 and 3), and the departure of Autumn (stanza 3). [None of Blake's other season poems have this structure] The song of Autumn -- the centerpiece -- can't be contained by the form of the poem: the song spills over the constraints of form (organically, we might say) from one stanza to the next, though it breaks neatly on the period of a syntatical sentence.

That is to say, a reader may think that the song is over when it continues abruptly in the next stanza.

Autumn departs in the final line, leaving his surplus: the harvest, the beautiful sights, sounds, and smells of autumn, and his poetry.

Autumn is an ever-present absence, the tokens of something fleeting, something evermore about to be, and its omnipresence spills out into our experience in ways that no human form can fully capture, not even the "fresh pipe" of a skilled poet (though no doubt such a "pipe" will have no end of activity in celebrating the "lusty" song Autumn leaves in his wake). Unlike the other season poems, there are no other humans: the speaker makes no mention of "we" or "our" as he does in the first two season poems. There are only the "daughters of the year." All is fading now, including the speaker, who will be left alone with Winter in "To Winter." But what remains is a "golden load."

It's difficult to read this poem and not think of James Joyce reading it, giggling at the phrase "golden load": his HCE in Finnegans Wake also departs and leaves in his wake a "golden load" for the rest of us. And quite aside from any scatalogical jokes we may want to make, this "load" is also the cosmic egg, the nourishing breakfast left for us, all the horses, by the fall of a cosmic humpty dumpty, "iggs for the brekkers come to mourn-him, sunny side up with care."

There is almost certainly a Fall from the Garden of Eden reference in here as well. We start with the blood of grapes (foreshadowing the necessity of communion), Autumn references "modest Eve" (summoning the thought of both evening and the character from Genesis), and then he departs (the fall from the Garden?).

If what he has left behind is a "golden load," it might well be that Blake is -- like Joyce -- referencing the felix culpa, the "fortunate fall," the Christian view that the fall was a good thing, for it necessitated the greater good of redemption. Or, to paraphrase St. Paul, sin boldly, for it will elicit even greater mercy from God. Or, to put it into Thelemic terms, our "fall" into individual consciousness necessitates the greater good (and the greater enjoyment and fulfillment) of our union with Nuit through our union with the Khabs, the True Self, the True Inclinations.

There’s a lot that could be said here about the radical political implications of Blake’s subversion of poetic form (this was written at the beginning of his career as a poet, long before he *really* began exploding poetic form, as he would in the 1790s and especially the 1800s: the child is the father of the man, as always). There’s also a lot to say about the sexuality of this poem in its eighteenth-century context. And there’s also, aside from the Garden of Eden stuff, an echo of Milton’s Lycidas in the third stanza.

A lot going on, as always with Blake.

Happy Fall.

(Get it? Happy Fall?)

 

The Problem with Platitudes II: It's All Subjective!

Some people are excessively enamored of the fact that reality can only be experienced subjectively. It leads them to draw all kinds of goofy conclusions, among them one of the most laughable canards awaiting a serious student of Thelema: “Since everything is subjective, nobody has any ultimately correct answers.”

In practice, people who spout this stupid saying often acknowledge that people can indeed have correct answers about reality (“Look out! There’s a brick wall over there!”). But they often dismiss these answers as the products of “consensus reality” or a “shared reality” that we can speak broadly about but that comes apart at the seams when we discuss the particulars of a single individual’s experience. Thus, while consensus reality may not accept the existence of psychic powers, magic, spirits, ghosts, and the like, since reality is ultimately subjective, an individual’s subjective experience – such as, for example, seeing a ghost – can vary from that of the consensus. Thus, the consensus has no monopoly on the correct answer of whether there’s a ghost or not.

This approach is, however, simply a device for maintaining delusion, and it is the purpose of this post to explore the flaws of this platitude and exactly how it hinders individual progress.

Read on for more