William Blake's Book of Thel

Poet, artist, and engraver William Blake (1757-1827) is often named as an antecedent of Thelema. As a proponent of willful “energy” and sexual liberation, in addition to being a truly unorthodox Christian who implicitly deemed himself a member of the “devil’s party” – in addition to being the author of deeply symbolic poems about the human condition that he claimed were “dictated” or inspired by spiritual beings – Blake makes an obvious choice as a literary figure who anticipated some of Crowley’s ideas. Based on an essay Crowley wrote about him, the modern EGC (a religion based around Thelema) added Blake to its list of “Gnostic Saints” in 1997 e.v. In addition, a Lodge of the OTO (an organization concerned with teaching and promulgating Thelema) adopted his name. So, at the very least, it’s fair to say that Blake is relevant to quite a number of Thelemites.

A reading of Blake’s poetry from a Thelemic perspective is enlightening and interesting, and it is the purpose of this blog post to briefly read one of his shorter poems from the early 1790s from this perspective. The post will connect the reading to the ideas expounded on this blog about skepticism and its necessity for an intelligent practice of Thelema.

Read on for more.

Finding Your Own Answer

George Carlin once amusingly commented on that old phrase – common in courtrooms and in classrooms, he points out – “your own words.”

“Tell us,” an authority figure will often say to you, “in your own words….”

Carlin’s joke continues as follows: “Do you really have your own words? Hey, I’m using the  same words everyone else is using! The next time someone asks you to say something in your own words, just say, ‘Nigflot blorny quando floon!’”

As much as it pains me to explain a joke, the humor in the above piece relies on the fact that the joke’s speaker – i.e. the character through which Carlin is ironically speaking – takes the phrase so literally that he misunderstands what it really means: no one has their “own words,” in the most literal sense. We might even appeal to the dialogism theory of literary critic Mikhail Bakhtin, who noted that much, if not all, discourse comes from recycled language: not only do we use a language that was made long before we were born, our basic speech and writing patterns reiterate phrases, verbal tendencies, and other structures that we have absorbed from sources other than ourselves. How many of us use phrases that were used by people around us when we were growing up? How much of our daily speech consists of repetitions of or variations on phrases we’ve heard elsewhere or in popular culture? On an even more trivial level, how many of us have watched a few episodes of The Sopranos and found ourselves, the next day, greeting a fellow fan with “Ohhhhhh!”

The point here is that there’s nothing new under the sun of language. And we all know this – partially, this is why Carlin’s super-literal reading of that phrase is so funny. We all know perfectly well that “in your own words” simply means “don’t quote someone else verbatim.” And even then, it frequently doesn’t even mean that: teachers in classrooms are usually happy for students to compose a reply to a question in advance, and judges in courtrooms are usually fine with witnesses preparing their statements ahead of time. Some degree of quotation – even if it’s self-quotation – is inevitable.

The bottom line is that you really don’t have your “own words” in a silly, overly-literal interpretation of the phrase: participation in discourse is part of a shifting amalgam of other discourse that originates somewhere beyond what you call “you.”

This observation about words might possibly be applied to interpretation as well: when it comes to studying a subject, do you have your “own interpretation,” your “own answer”? What is it about the answer you come up with that is your “own”?

The topic comes up a lot among occultists, some of whom are staunchly against anyone who explains a subject clearly and lucidly, on the grounds that a clear explanation robs a “seeker” of the chance to “find his own answer.” In Thelema, such sentiments surround the idiotic ideas that people have about “The Comment” to the Book of the Law. There actually are some people – believe it or not – who think we shouldn’t be talking about the Book on the grounds that such talk may “influence” someone’s interpretation of it and prevent that person from “finding his own meaning.”

The premise behind these ideas seems to be that if one is “influenced” in some way in one’s interpretation, then one will be unable to “find one’s own answer.”

I would like to question this idea of “your own answer.” As this post will demonstrate, occultists who fetishize their “own answer” are ironically misunderstanding that phrase in a way analogous to the manner in which the speaker of Carlin’s joke misunderstands “your own words.”

Read on for more

Profiles in Ignorance 2: Misinterpreting The Book of the Law

The Book of the Law has some significant things to say about reason, and its passages have over the years been completely and totally ripped out of context, misunderstood, and used as justification for constructing extremely gullible New Age worldviews.

This post examines a handful of verses of The Book of the Law, looking at examples of ways that they have been misinterpreted and providing correct interpretations that expose the falsity of the New Age twaddle that the Book is often used to prop up.

The Enemy of the Enemy of My Enemy

A few years ago, occult author Donald Tyson published an article online entitled "Atheism, the Real Enemy," and its argument should be very familiar to regular readers of this blog: that pagans – and, as Tyson makes clear, supernaturalist occultists of all stripes – have much more in common than Christians (and other religionists) than they do with atheists and skeptics.

Though several members of the pagan community who commented on this article – and the several people who wrote “responses” to this article – took issue with its argument, what’s striking is that Tyson perceives very clearly a point that I have been insisting for some time: that occultism and paganism are religious orientations, at home with (and ultimately make claims whose truth values are indistinguishable from the claims of) other religions like Christianity, and strongly opposed to rational investigation, skepticism, and methods of distinguishing truth from falsehood.

Though Tyson would probably not phrase his position quite like that, that is precisely the argument of his article.

Read on for a few thoughts on this article.

A Wild Ghost Chase

Following an exchange with occult author Donald Michael Kraig on his blog, I briefly corresponded with him via e-mail about some of the points I raised in my last post, particularly the point that his approach to evaluating magical claims was an example of confirmation bias and incapable of properly evaluating the claims. In his response, he continued to assert that his method was “true skepticism.”

This post will reproduce part of my answer to him – which gives a more thorough example of the way that confirmation bias works – and will follow this with an example of confirmation bias and a lack of critical thinking that I chanced across the other day: namely, a gullible Thelemite claiming in public that he has “objective proof” of the supernatural thanks to his brother’s handy “Ghost Radar” (a toy that can be bought for $0.99 on an i-Phone).

Read on for more.

Pseudo-Skeptics

I stumbled across an article written by Donald Michael Kraig on Llewellyn.com entitled "Cold Fusion, Pseudo-Skepticism, and Magick."

Kraig, for those who don’t know, is probably best known as the author of Modern Magick, which was the first book I read on ceremonial magick when I was a teenager. I recall the book being a good introduction to the subject, and I also recall a handful of incredibly silly and laughable claims made in the book, including the claim that the author saw “astral junk” in the form of a snake leap out of his floor one day while he was watching TV and the claim that the ritual of the rose cross caused the author to avoid getting pulled over by the police for speeding.

Read on for an anlysis of Kraig's approach to evaluating claims and an illustration of where his logic goes wrong, rendering his approach nothing more than a mechanism to assist with self-delusion.

Profiles in Ignorance: The Argument from Ignorance Revisited

As an amusing follow-up to last week’s post on the argument from ignorance, I’d like to post one example of the argument in action.

This example comes from an interview given in 2007 by Richard Dawkins, one of the world’s most prominent scientists and outspoken atheists, to Bill O’Reilly, one of the world’s most annoying blowhards. O'Reilly is, for those who are blissfully ignorant of his existence, the host of a talk "news" show -- and I use the term "news" sparingly -- that consists mostly of his opinion on things and interviews in which he dominates the conversation by talking louder and faster than anyone else.

The interview can be found here, and the remainder of this post will analyze O’Reilly’s appeal to ignorance as an argument for the existence of a god.