The common warnings about the psychological harm that occultists can cause themselves as a result of their practices are well known. In The Complete Golden Dawn System of Magic, for instance, Israel Regardie wrote that:

In the practice of Magic or anything which releases unusual amounts of energy from the unconscious the infantile megalomaniacal substructure is re-activated, and all the illusions and delusions of self importance and elevation of babyhood re-emerge…A new source of energy is released, an energy which is seen as carrying with it not only new feelings but new knowledge and a greater capacity for self-confidence with the ability to impress and motivate one’s fellow man. This energy floods the unprepared ego with almost infinite promise. Unless the candidate is properly prepared for this phenomenon, or is guided and guarded by a competent experienced teacher, he is likely to take this seriously. Effective self-criticism seems to have vanished into thin air.

Of course, this talk about “a new source of energy” is tommyrot. The real dangers come from simply believing that the subjective feelings aroused during occult practice actually represent something real, since when this starts to happen the occultist gets further and further away from reality, and suffers as a result. Read the rest of this post »

The mind runs along well-trodden ruts, and it does this by design. As we explained in Let there be no difference made, the mind would quickly become overwhelmed if it was necessary to fully process all stimuli received by the senses which would, apart from other things, be an enormous survival disadvantage.

Suppose we are cavemen, and we have roamed t0 an unfamiliar area and found a nice cave to make a home in. An early and necessary task will be to locate a safe route to water. Being unfamiliar with the territory, it would behoove the mind to play close attention to its surroundings. There may be various dangers, including bogs and quicksand, slippery rocks, hornets’ nests, and protruding tree roots, which could be hazardous to miss. We would also want to pay close attention to landmarks and other signs which will enable us to both find our way back, and to find our way to the water again on future trips. We may want to keep an eye out for animal tracks, fruit trees and bushes, and other possible resources which may come in handy. There are, in short, many reasons to pay close attention to the unfamiliar so that it may become familiar.

However, once we are familiar with the route, there is much less reason to pay attention. Moreover, there could be a reason why we would positively want to pay less attention – namely, because it frees up attention for other tasks, such as keeping an eye out for lions, or planning a power struggle against the local caveman chief. Having excess processing power in the brain may generally be considered to be a good thing, so anything the brain can do to increase that power may be helpful.

Once we are familiar with a route, and we know that, for instance, there are no bogs or quicksand along it, then there is no benefit in continuing to look out for them. Once we’re familiar with all the sources of resources in the area, there is no benefit in continuing to look out for them, either. Once we are familiar with a route, a lot of stimuli received by the senses become greatly reduced in importance compared to when we were unfamiliar with it, and needed to scope it out. Read the rest of this post »

The student syllabus for Jim Eshelman’s A∴A∴ branch contains the following books:

• The Equinox (Crowley, 1909–1913)
• Raja Yoga (Vivekananda, 1896)
• The Shiva Samhita (trad., English translation Shri Chandra Vasu, 1884), or The Hathayoga Pradipika (Svatmarama)
• Konx Om Pax (Crowley, 1907)
• The Spiritual Guide (Molinos, first English edition 1688)
• 777 (Crowley, 1909)
• Dogme et Rituel de la Haute Magie (Levi, 1861) or Transcendental Magic: Its Doctrine and Ritual (Levi, trans. Waite, 1910)
• The Goetia (Crowley & Mathers, 1904)
• Tannhauser (in the Collected Works, Crowley, 1905–1907)
• The Sword of Song (in the Collected Works, Crowley, 1905–1907)
• Time (in the Collected Works, Crowley, 1905–1907)
• Eleusis (in the Collected Works, Crowley, 1905–1907)
• The Book of the Sacred Magic of Abra-Melin the Mage (von Worms, trans. Mathers, 1897)
• The Tao Teh Ching (Sacred Books of the East edition, 1892)
• The Writings of Kwang Tze (Sacred Books of the East edition, 1892)

For readers lacking excessive familiarity with Crowley’s works, this reading list is lifted verbatim from 1912′s The Equinox Volume I Number VIII, having appeared earlier that year in The Equinox Volume I Number VII minus the last two items. It’s aim was to avoid “the unnecessary strain thrown upon Neophytes by unprepared persons taking the Oath of a Probationer” by creating a three month “student” grade. The student had to pass an examination in these books prior to being admitted to the grade of Probationer, where he was “expected to show a thorough acquaintance with them, but not necessarily to understand them in any deeper sense.”

There are several things to note about this list: Read the rest of this post »

More from Dawkins’ The Greatest Show on Earth:

As we trace the ancestry of modern Homo sapiens backwards, there must come a time when the difference from living people is sufficiently great to deserve a different specific name, say Homo ergaster. Yet, every step of the way, individuals were presumably sufficiently similar to their parents and their children to be placed in the same species. Now we go back further, tracing the ancestry of Homo ergaster, and there must come a time when we reach individuals who are sufficiently different from “mainstream” ergaster to deserve a different specific name, say Homo habilis. And now we come to the point of this argument. As we go back further still, at some point we must start to hit individuals sufficiently different from modern Homo sapiens to deserve a different genus name: say Australopithecus. The trouble is, “sufficiently different from modern Homo sapiens” is another matter entirely from “sufficiently different from the earliest Homo“, here designated Homo habilis. Think about the first specimen of Homo habilis to be born. Her parents were Australopithecus. She belonged to a different genus from her parents? That’s just dopey! Yes it certainly is. But it is not reality that’s at fault, it’s our human insistence on shoving everything into a named category. In reality, there was no such creature as the first specimen of Homo habilis. There was no first specimen of any species or any genus or any order or any class or any phylum. Every creature that has ever been born would have been classified – had there been a zoologist around to do the classifying – as belonging to exactly the same species as its parents and children. Yet, with the hindsight of modernity, and with the benefit – yes, in this one paradoxical sense benefit – of the fact that most of the links are missing, classification into distinct species, genera, families, orders, classes and phyla becomes possible. (The Greatest Show on Earth, Chapter Seven, pp. 195–196.)

He gets to the heart the confusion underlying this point earlier in the book, where he shows how Plato’s “theory of forms” – termed “essentialism” today – led to the theory of evolution being so counter-intuitive: Read the rest of this post »

I came across a page on Facebook the other day called Petition the OTO to publish Crowley’s out of print books and Thoth deck. It appears to be a platform for criticising the OTO for – as the name clearly suggests – not keeping Crowley’s books in print, heavily populated by professional complainer “Keith418″.

Other than buying new editions – coincidentally, issued by the OTO – it’s been years since I tried to buy any new Crowley books, so I figured I’d put this complaint to the test by taking a look at the largest online bookseller – amazon.com – and seeing how easy or difficult it was to acquire said books. Regular readers will be aware that I am not, never have been, and never will be, a member of the OTO, that I can hardly be accused of not being critical of them in the past, and that I therefore have no axe to grind, so this can be viewed as a relatively objective experiment.

I searched for the following books, which represent substantially all of Crowley’s important works, and certainly the only ones someone interested in buying cheap books would be likely to want to acquire:

• The Collected Works of Aleister Crowley
• Magick (including Book Four – Parts One and Two, Magick in Theory and Practice, and the Equinox of the Gods)
• Moonchild
• The Diary of a Drug Fiend
• Liber Aleph
• Little Essays Toward Truth
• The Confessions of Aleister Crowley
• The Law is for All
• Konx Om Pax
• The Equinox, Volume I
• The Equinox, Volume III, Number I
• Gems from the Equinox
• 777
• Magick Without Tears
• The Goetia
• The Book of Lies
• The Book of Thoth
• The General Principles of Astrology
• Heart of the Master
• The Revival of Magick
• Eight Lectures on Yoga
• The Holy Books of Thelema

The results may be surprising. Read the rest of this post »

In the same LAShTAL.com thread referred to in Majesty in nature, the idea of “ultimate reality” arose, exemplified in the following comment from Ian Rons where it is termed “absolute meaning” or “absolute knowledge”:

However, yes of course people do make statements which they presume to be meaningful; but I would say that, ultimately, they are kidding themselves if they believe those statements tell us anything concrete about the universe absolutely, even if it helps people to interact with the universe…but ultimately we realise (through a fairly simple and not-very-abstract train of thought) that we cannot reach the absolute this way, so therefore our statements can never have absolute meaning or represent absolute knowledge.

Although not in direct response to Ian’s points, I made a separate post specifically on this idea of “absolute reality” or “ultimate reality” which warrants reproducing here, and therefore follows.

It’s worth looking at these purported “other modes of apprehension” for a moment, because it ties in with this idea of “ultimate reality” that such “modes” are hypothesised to apprehend.

In a sense, we already know what “ultimate reality” is. If we ask “what is the ‘ultimate reality’ of a cat?” for instance, then we already basically know the answer: it’s little subatomic particles whizzing around. Even if we don’t have the much-vaunted “theory of everything” yet, we can make a reasonable guess that what it will reveal is pretty much more of the same. Even if we never find it, we can still make that reasonable guess.

Now, this is obviously not what people of a mystical inclination mean when they talk about “ultimate reality”, but the idea that there is an “ultimate reality” beyond this is definitely not an idea that should go unchallenged. Read the rest of this post »

Over on LAShTAL.com, I’ve been involved in a thread dealing mainly with the question of “knowledge”. During that discussion, presumably objecting to the idea that “knowledge” – which requires effort and honesty to obtain – is helpful in any way, a flaky new-age whelp calling himself “sonofthestar” (whose immortal take on the veracity of Crowley’s account of the “reception” of The Book of the Law was “The Cairo Working – happened pretty much the way AC describes it – in spite of any so called confusion or discrepancies…If people really think about it, long and hard – How else could it have happened?” is rivaled only by that of another contributor to that thread that “If the document were a fraud, it would seem to be much more convincing to offer up a virtually flawless handwritten text, penned all at one sitting, with clear evidence of its origin in his diaries, that was then distributed to several acquaintances in a well-edited typescript. But none of that is the case here. If he were deliberately perpetrating a fraud, he doesn’t seem to have gone about it very sensibly” which boils down to “the lack of proof proves it!”) dribbled the following vapid and contemptible utterance:

It is their absolute Thelemic right to believe what they believe!
Why would/should—we believe it—should/would be otherwise,
or become upset over it—if we are doing our will?

which resulted in me having to school him that the actual “Thelemic right” – i.e. the only “Thelemic right”, since “Thou hast no right but to do thy will” – requires one to know what one’s will is, and therefore flatly prohibits one from having the “right to believe what [one] believe[s]“.

Clearly stricken by his obvious total and fundamental misunderstanding, the aforementioned flathead responded with this:

You have written voluminously,
elaborating your comprehension of Thelema,
with an above average, and technically adequate erudition:
and still, something lacks.
But it is far from a little something!
It lacks for what I can only describe as Vigorous Beauty!
It is un-dynamic, and lacks the Lustrous Light of illumination.

You present a dull and soul-less picture of Thelema,
by having stripped away all colours from it’s Starry Spectrum,
so that you, might paint some monochromatic parody,
using only a single hue from your palette of limited perspective.

The obvious observation that the response “you have written voluminously, elaborating your comprehension of Thelema, with an above average, and technically adequate erudition: and still, something lacks” translates to “No fair! No fair! You smarter than neanderthal man! Me want be right! Leave me ‘lone!” is not very interesting. What is interesting is this idea that what we may call a “materialistic” view of the universe – i.e. one in which gods, spirits, “præternatural beings”, demons, and the like neither exist nor take an interest in human affairs even if they did – is somehow “dull and soul-less”. Read the rest of this post »

In a recent email exchange, a correspondent asked me “whats your opinion on astrology?”, to which I replied, “superstitious nonsense”. A further question of “so, what do you think of astral projection or such? Is it all your mind playing tricks on you?” elicited a response which seems to have hit home. So, for all the folks out there who could use a gentle reminder, and for those sane souls swimming in a sea of insanity who just need a little encouragement to employ their own common sense, here’s the response in question.

It’s entirely in the mind, yes. People don’t reincarnate, the chance layout of the tarot cards is unrelated to the passage of future events, there are no real “demons” to evoke or real “Angels” to invoke, and you can’t bewitch your neighbour’s ox by sending vibrations across the astral plane. None of this supernatural stuff is true. None of it.

It’s not “your mind playing tricks on you”, either – if you actually pay attention to what you’re doing, none of this stuff even appears to be real. When you actually believe in this stuff, that’s when your mind plays “tricks” on you, because you’re drawing invalid conclusions based on what you merely think you are seeing, not on what you actually are seeing. It’s no accident that when this stuff is subjected to controlled testing it is found to be entirely imaginary, because what the controlled testing achieves is precisely that: taking the mind’s “tricks” out of the equation, and forcing conclusions to be drawn on the evidence that is actually there, as opposed to the evidence that is merely believed to be there by someone who is already predisposed to believe in it.

Some people want to give credence to this supernatural stuff because they think their “subjective experience” informs them that it’s real, and since everything is “subjective experience”, they might as well believe that it’s real. However, this logic is only ever applied partially, and it’s only ever applied to those things that one already wants to believe in. If “everything is subjective experience”, then it’s that exact same “subjective experience” which informs you that if you jump off a cliff you’re going to hit the bottom and come to a sticky end, no matter how strongly you believe something else will happen. This is always a good test – if you’re not prepared to conduct your “mundane” daily life on the basis of the same beliefs with which you interpret your “occult experiences”, then that’s an indicator that you should be highly, highly suspicious of those beliefs, because it indicates that you don’t actually subscribe to those beliefs in any practical sense at all. Occult, new-age and religious literature in general is jam-packed with trite-sounding philosophical platitudes designed precisely to conceal this simple fact from you.

I have today uploaded to the “Writings” section of this web site a PDF version of my new essay, The Holy Guardian Angel.

The objective of the essay is to engage in a comprehensive and thorough review of the occasions where Aleister Crowley wrote about the Holy Guardian Angel in his published works of prose in an attempt to derive a definitive account of what he actually meant when he used that term. Regardless of whether or not one agrees with the conclusions drawn, the essay is valuable for the comprehensive view it gives of what Aleister Crowley actually said on the subject, and will be particularly useful for those lacking an intimate familiarity with his works, and who must therefore rely on the few regularly repeated soundbites which are so often floated about in discussions on the subject, usually woefully out of context.

Since the attainment of the Knowledge and Conversation of the Holy Guardian Angel forms the core of Crowley’s system of magical attainment and personal development, and represents the revelation of the “True Will”, the essay is also valuable as a delineation of the central concepts behind that system.

Since it is a 15,000 word essay it would be too long and unwieldy to read as a blog entry, and so is a “straight to PDF” work. A printed version will be made available in the near future.

I came across an article on wiccantogether.com today which is called “Why do we exist – A Thelemic Philosophy” and appears to be a thinly veiled retelling of The Khabs is in the Khu. To give the author a little credit, he/she did correctly identify it as “a re-hashing of an article [he/she] found online.” The author says – correctly, I suppose – that “it is told strictly from my interpretation with no copyright violations”, but even so, an attribution would have been nice. Even the bibliography has been lifted wholesale from my essay without alteration, despite the fact that most of the works listed are not referenced in the “re-hashed” version.