Third Day of the Writing of the Book of the Law

"How to Pull a Good Horus-coup even when the Oldsire is Dead to the World"

"'tis no timbertar she'll have then in her armsbrace to doll the dallydandle, our fiery quean upon the night of the things of the night of the making to stand up the double tet of the oversear of the seize who cometh from the mighty deep and on the night of making Horuse to criumph over his enemy"

"Conk a dook he'll do. Svap."

--Finnegans Wake

Second Day of the Writing of the Book of the Law

"Ainsoph, this upright one, with that noughty besighed him zeroine. To see in his horrorscup he is mehrkurios than saltz of sulphur. Terror of the noonstruck by day, cryptogam of each nightly bridable. But, to speak broken heaventalk, is he? Who is he? Whose is he? Why is he? Howmuch is he? Which is he? When is he? Where is he? How is he? And what the decans is there about him anyway, the decemt man? Easy, calm your haste!"

"Creator he has created for his creatured ones a creation. White monothoid? Red theatrocrat? And all the pinkprophets cohalething? [...] he is ee and no counter he who will be ultimately respunchable for the hubbub caused in Edenborough."

--Finnegans Wake

First Day of the Writing of the Book of the Law

"In the name of Annah the Allmaziful, the Everliving, the Bringer of Plurabilities, haloed be her eve, her singtime sung, her rill be run, unhemmed as it is uneven!

Her untitled mamafesta memorializing the Mosthighest has gone by many names at disjointed times."

"How bootiful and truetowife of her, when strangely forebidden, to steal our historic presents from the past postpropheticals so as to will make us all lordy heirs and ladymaidesses of a pretty nice kettle of fruit. She is livving in our midst of debt and laffing through all plores for us (her birth is uncontrollable) [...] she'll loan a vesta and hire some peat and sarch the shores her cockles to heat and she'll do all a turfwoman can to piff the business on. Paff. To puff the blaziness on. Poffpoff."

--Finnegans Wake

That’s What He Said: Crowley on Skepticism

Announcing a new feature on this blog: “That’s What He Said” – an article (or, hopefully, a series of articles) looking at what Aleister Crowley said about a variety of issues.

Crowley is so little read and so poorly understood by many people calling themselves Thelemites that the purpose of this series is to bring together the disparate threads of his thoughts and elucidate his writings on matters on which he was consistent and emphatic across the decades of his career.

I’d like to turn today to the topic of skepticism (who would have guessed, eh?). While most Thelemites admit – sometimes begrudgingly – that Crowley advocated skepticism, a good deal of them seem to be under the impression that Crowley only expected “students” to begin from a skeptical position and to discard skepticism as they gained more experience and could “prove to themselves” that the supernatural was real.

Take, for example, this line from the Wikipedia entry on Thelema (retrieved March 19, 2012): “Crowley taught skeptical examination of all results obtained through meditation or magick, at least for the student.” In the final phrase of this quote, we see the author attempting to salvage belief in the supernatural from Crowley’s system: the implication is that Crowley must have thought that skepticism was just fine for the student (oh, those poor profane fools who have yet to acquire experience!), but for those who have done the work and “experienced” the supernatural (that is, gotten warm and fuzzies in the belly, encountered ooky-spooky coincidences, or had daydreams about being on an episode of Tales from the Crypt)…for those folks, they can rest assured in the fact that they’ve proven (“to them,” of course) that the supernatural is real. That must be what Crowley was saying. Right?

Wrong.

The above interpretation of Crowley is completely and totally off-base, rooted not in the words of the man himself but in the desires and fantasies of the person doing the interpreting, who reads into those words things that aren’t there.

Read on for a very full explanation.

That’s Me in the Corner….

The process of a religious believer losing his religion is known in atheist circles as “deconversion.” A few years ago, John Ash Bowie posted an interesting article on his livejournal announcing his deconversion from Thelema and offering critiques of his former “religion.”

You can read his blog entry here.

Bowie, for those who don’t know who he is, is a former OTO member and a “naturalist” Thelemite, whose website Eidolons of Ash has a number of interesting essays on Thelema from an atheist perspective. His more recent work concerns “religious naturalism,” and you can read his website on RN here.

Of course, readers of my blog will be aware that I don’t treat Thelema as a “religion” in the sense of being a collection of undemonstrable doctrines about the universe. But many Thelemites *do*, as apparently Bowie did. [See "Skeptical of the True Will?" for an instance of a Thelemite trying to reduce Thelema to a position of faith, along with my refutation]

What’s so striking about Bowie’s account of his deconversion  is how similar it is to other stories of atheists, who ironically deconverted from their former faiths because of their very attempt to confirm the truth of their beliefs. Bowie writes:

So what happened? In about a two-year time span I went from being a zealot to an apostate. This essay is not going to retell that tale, however, since my primary interest is in offering a critique rather than a biography. I will say that it primarily involved a project that required examining many of Crowley's core documents with an analytical eye. Although I initially went into that project fully expecting the examination to support my Thelemic faith, it was eventually to dissolve it. I fought it tooth and nail until the very end, performing all kinds of theoretical contortions to justify holding on to Thelema, but it just wasn't enough. I came out of that tunnel a non-believer. (emphasis added)

This account strongly resembles many other deconversion stories floating around on the internet, and it brings to mind for me particularly the story told by Matt Dillahunty, host of the public access show (and internet show) The Atheist Experience. Dillahunty has frequently spoken on the show of his time as a fundamentalist Christian, which he was from the age of five until sometime after thirty. Like Bowie, he reports that he engaged in a process of examining his faith – in his case, as a preparation for attending seminary, as he felt he had a calling; his study was to enable him to justify Christianity to himself *and* to enable him to better win souls for Christ. And just like Bowie, Dillahunty found that his study had destroyed his faith and convinced him that Christianity, along with all other religions, was not justified and that no one had good reason to believe it.

The point of both of these stories is one made by Bowie in the comments section of his post: "Free inquiry and curious investigation are generally not compatible with stable religious belief."

[Amusingly, the person he is conversing with responds by observing “I don't want to live in world where there's no magick,” demonstrasting (once again) a point I have frequently made on this blog: religious types think that preserving the feeling of magic is more important than figuring out what’s actually going on.]

In his post, Bowie offers a  rational critique of the “religion” of Thelema, and in my post here, I intend to critique Bowie’s critique and demonstrate that he is in fact objecting not to Thelema, but to a religion, one loosely based on Crowley’s writings and on a murky interpretation of Thelema. The point that I intend to make by this is simple: that the supernaturalist religion that some people mistakenly insist on calling “Thelema” cannot withstand rational scrutiny and that – unless the Thelemic community gets serious about defining and talking about Thelema – the nonsense that some people call "Thelema" will drive intelligent seekers, who absolutely will think along the lines that Bowie does, away from Thelema.

Read on for more. 

Believers Say the Darndest Things 5: "You Aren't Doin' it Right!"

I’m currently involved in a relatively interesting thread on Lashtal.com about a “True Act of Magick” (read it here). On this thread, I’ve been arguing that the only “true act of magick” is bringing one’s activities in line with one’s true will. That is to say, “Magick” in the widest sense of “the Science and Art of causing Change to occur in Conformity with Will” can be said to “work,” merely because all actions consist of “causing change.” Under this definition, the tricky part is not causing the change (which is usually incredibly easy) but knowing which changes to make in the first place.

As a corollary to the above, “magick” in the narrow sense (that is, ceremonies designed to cause coincidences to happen by some unspecified means) doesn’t work at all – or, at least, nobody in his right mind has any good reason to think that it does – and thus a “true act of magick” cannot consist of doing a ritual to attract money and then rejoicing once one finds a friend has decided to pay back a loan sooner than expected. In a case like this, absolutely nothing indicates that the ritual caused the so-called “result” and nobody – not even the practitioner – has any reason to suppose that his ritual did cause it.

This argument should be familiar to readers of this blog, but you can find some more information in the posts "Hey, It Works for Me!"and "A Wild Ghost Chase", among others.

Read on for a description of a religionist believer script that popped up in the thread.

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.