Vernal Equinox, 2013

To Spring

by William Blake

O THOU with dewy locks, who lookest down
Through the clear windows of the morning, turn
Thine angel eyes upon our western isle,
Which in full choir hails thy approach, O Spring!

The hills tell one another, and the listening
Valleys hear; all our longing eyes are turn'd
Up to thy bright pavilions: issue forth
And let thy holy feet visit our clime!

Come o'er the eastern hills, and let our winds
Kiss thy perfumed garments; let us taste
Thy morn and evening breath; scatter thy pearls
Upon our lovesick land that mourns for thee.

O deck her forth with thy fair fingers; pour
Thy soft kisses on her bosom; and put
Thy golden crown upon her languish'd head,
Whose modest tresses are bound up for thee.

 

Unlike “To Autumn” and “To Winter,” this poem speaks of a community, describing England as “our western isle” and “our clime.” Twice, the speaker ends a deeply-enjambed line with “turn” (or “turn’d”), and each instance makes readers “turn” their eyes to the next line in unison with the “angel eyes” of Spring and with the “longing eyes” of the community.

The very form of the poem, then, urges the reader to participate in this community: emerging from the cold of winter, the very land “mourns” for the touch of Spring, and this poem powerfully invokes it to appear erotically and quicken nature itself (and the community) back into life.

The tradition of troping the return of life in the spring as sexual is quite old, going back well before the famous opening lines of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. But here, Blake takes that convention and figures the season not as a male force – whose rain penetrates the land, as in Chaucer – but as female, imploring it to approach and embrace the land as another female with “modest tresses.” It would appear as if the entire community has been subsumed into a lesbian relationship that encompasses the natural world.

Importantly, the emphasis here is not on fertility – as it would be if Spring were gendered as male, impregnating the earth – but on the return of love, a fulfilling relationship of engagement with reality.

We might, if we were to read this poem through the lens of Thelema, see the invocation of Spring as a powerful invocation of the Holy Guardian Angel – the True Self of each individual – who descends to rescue the maiden of Malkuth (Heh final of the Tetragrammaton) who is each of us.

As life returns to the world, let us each focus on invoking our own HGA – that is to say, living from the depth of our actual selves. Recall that “conversation” – in the sense of “Knowledge and Conversation of the Holy Guardian Angel” – originally meant a way of life (conversatio), particularly a monastic one. “Knowledge,” of course, could also designate sexual intercourse.

“Knowledge and Conversation of the Holy Guardian Angel,” then, is a fancy way of saying that an individual should intimately identify with his or her True Self, making it a “way of life” to live from that depth.

Happy Spring.

By Their Fruitcakes Ye Shall Know Them....

There’s an interesting question that’s been asked on the Fruitcake Factory (aka The Temple of Thelema Forums) by one “Frater Potater,” who has recently tenured his resignation from Eshelman’s branch of the A.'.A.'. after learning that the organization is populated by a bunch of lunatics who believe a lot of bizarre nonsense, including apparently that they can send “healing energy” around the world in a manner essentially indistinguishable from a Christian prayer hotline.

Anyway, he started another thread there that poses an interesting question:

How exactly should we recognize someone who is a real master or adept vs. someone who is a charlatan or even a mere layman?

Read the thread here. Naturally, the thread has devolved into absurdity, with posters unable to address simple points and engaging instead in ridiculous semantic games about what “belief” means. Later in the thread, “Potater” goes on to give his answer to his own question:

On a superficial level, I'd say they [i.e. a “real master” or an “adept”] should at least be happy and well balanced individuals. They would be perfectly responsible and accountable. Self empowered, with a good sense of what they want for themselves, and how to achieve it. Neither pitying anyone, nor expecting to take advantage of others. They would be emotionally stable, and act appropriately in every circumstance. I am not saying that they would never experience any unforeseen turmoil, or not act as a human being would be expected to act under pressure, but that they would be able to compose themselves better than the average person. Knowing just how to judge each situation, against their will, and act accordingly.

You'd expect a master would have to have found practical ways of accomplishing these things to definite results, otherwise how could they speak that what they are following is their will? They must definitely know what their will is, with an unshakable sense of certainty, otherwise how will they know how to direct their efforts, or instruct others?

I think that people can definitely do this, without the use of supernatural or superstitious dogma.

[…]

I can't tell where worrying about magical powers, and believer scripts, is encouraging people to become adepts and masters. In fact, I can see a whole lot of potential pitfalls.

In this post, I’ll be looking at the idea of distinguishing an “initiated” person from a “non-initiated” person, discussing whether it’s possible, whether it’s useful at all, and what conclusions follow from it.

Read on for more.

Necessity, Sufficiency, and Evaluating Claims

Many people are confused about the difference between necessary and sufficient conditions or causes, and the confusion leads to a tendency to make exceedingly awful mistakes in evaluating claims.

This post examines the difference between these concepts and explains how to use them in drawing careful conclusions about the universe.

Read on for more.

The Pit of Because and Sophistry

This post extends the last one by reading a ridiculous post recently made by Jim Eshelman over at the Fruitcake Factory (aka The Temple of Thelema Forums, www.heruraha.net; read the specific post here) The purpose will be to demonstrate the severe logical problems with his argument and to show how his post is an example of the dangers that the Book of the Law warns us against.

Read on for more.

Your "Own Logic"?

Do you have your “own” logic? If you’re explaining why you think something is true, and someone else challenges it, is it a sufficient response to say that you have your “own” logic when it comes to these things?

Of course not. Read on for a very thorough examination of this claim, along with an analysis of the kookiness that they just rolled out of the Fruitcake Factory.

Gems from the Forums: Crowley and His System

From time to time, some folks find themselves confused by my arguments because, as they point out, Crowley believed in all sorts of things that I don’t (things like magic spells, spirit beings, reincarnation, supernatural abilities, etc.). While these folks are, in my estimation, grossly exaggerating the extent to which Crowley probably “believed” in many of those supernatural things, I have no problem acknowledging that my opinions differ from Crowley’s in many areas.

One area in which Crowley and I agree, however, is on Thelema and what it is. That Crowley’s personal beliefs on issues other than Thelema may diverge from mine is not relevant. Yet religiously-motivated Thelemites still often puzzle over this divergence and wonder how what I present on my blog can be, as I say, “Crowley’s Thelema.”

A while back, someone on Lashtal.com asked me “whether or not Thelema, as presented by Crowley, necessitates the abscence of supernatural beliefs.”

My response was a good one, and it will comprise the first half of this post. I will follow it by citing another post in which I explain my position further.

Read on for more.

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.