Since it’s topical, another youtube video by “Frater Oz” entitled “In defence of the O.T.O.” contains an instance of another beginner’s mistake many Thelemites make that deserves correction.

In the video, “Oz” says:

Thelemites are a diverse group. Some do the work, some do not. Some simply live their lives as they see fit. Some interpret The Book of the Law in widely different ways than others. But that’s their right, and that’s the right that is given to them by The Book of the Law itself and by the Master Therion, and I think it’s very important for us to realize this.

“Oz” is, of course, referring to “the Comment” to The Book of the Law, specifically to the line:

All questions of the Law are to be decided only by appeal to my writings, each for himself.

Firstly, a minor point which is of ultimately little importance and should not distract, but is nevertheless relevant when we’re talking about someone who’s posting videos of themselves trying to teach people about Thelema. “The Comment” is not part of The Book of the Law. The Book of the Law consists of three chapters and only of three chapters. “The Comment” was written more than 20 years after the purported “reception” of The Book of the Law and while it is usually published along with it, it is not a part of the Book. So the “right” in question is categorically not “given to them by The Book of the Law itself”.

But more important is the assertion that the ability to “interpret The Book of the Law in widely different ways” is a “Thelemic right” granted by “the Comment”. It isn’t. Obviously, in the wider scheme of things, nobody is going to go to jail for interpreting The Book of the Law in whatever cack-handed manner they please, so in that sense it is their “right” to do so, but that is not the sense in which this assertion is being made. Read the rest of this post »

A recent thread over on LAShTAL.com dealing with “promulgation” was recently locked and then deleted, and resulting in the closure of the accounts on that site of Joseph Thiebes and “Frater Oz“. While the goings-on over at, and the moderating decisions of the owner of, LAShTAL.com are not the concern of this blog, the ideas of “promulgation” that were raised in that thread – and the reaction to them which resulted in its closure – are, and this entry will deal with them.

Joseph Thiebes has posted a six-part youtube series of videos of a “Promulgation Lecture” he gave at the 2009 National OTO Conference. We’ll begin by examining that lecture, because the approach to “promulgation” embodied in it is directly relevant to the reaction that the aforementioned LAShTAL.com thread received, and directly relevant to the observations on that approach that we shall later make. Read the rest of this post »

The vice of kings recently discussed the attitude to “compassion” in The Book of the Law. Richard Dawkins’ latest book, The Greatest Show on Earth, The Evidence for Evolution – which should be required reading for everyone – contains a passage I can’t resist quoting which – inadvertently – sheds a significant amount of light on the apparently callous and objectionable view which The Book of the Law takes.

Nature is neither kind nor unkind. She is neither against suffering, nor for it. Nature is not interested in suffering one way or the other unless it affects the survival of DNA. It is easy to imagine a gene that, say, tranquilises gazelles when they are about to suffer a killing bite. Would such a gene be favoured by natural selection? Not unless the act of tranquilising a gazelle improved that gene’s chances of being propagated into future generations. It is hard to see why this should be so and we may therefore guess that gazelles suffer horrible pain and fear when they are pursued to the death – as most of them eventually are. The total amount of suffering per year in the natural world is beyond all decent contemplation. During the minute that it takes me to compose this sentence, thousands of animals are being eaten alive, others are running for their lives, whimpering with fear, others are being slowly devoured from within by rasping parasites, thousands of all kinds are dying of starvation, thirst and disease. It must be so. It there is ever a time of plenty, this very fact will automatically lead to an increase in population until the natural state of starvation and misery is restored…

Futility? What nonsense. Sentimental human nonsense. Natural selection is all futile. It is all about the survival of self-replicating instructions for self-replication. If a variant of DNA survives through an anaconda swallowing me whole, or a variant of RNA survives by making me sneeze, then that is all we need by way of explanation. Viruses and tigers are both built by coded instructions whose ultimate message is, like a computer virus, “Duplicate me”…Suffering is a by-product of evolution by natural selection, an inevitable consequence that may worry us in our more sympathetic moments but cannot be expected to worry a tiger – even if a tiger can be said to worry about anything at all – and certainly cannot be expected to worry its genes.

Theologians worry about the problems of suffering and evil, to the extent that they have even invented a name, “theodicy” (literally, “justice of God”), for the enterprise of trying to reconcile it with the presumed benevolence of God. Evolutionary biologists see no problem, because evil and suffering don’t count for anything, one way or the other, in the calculus of gene survival…And, just as we should expect if the survival of the fittest, rather than design, underlies the world of nature, the world of nature seems to take no steps at all to reduce the sum total of suffering…

Darwin, you’ll remember, couldn’t persuade himself that a beneficent creator would conceive [the female ichneumon wasp's habit of stinging its victim to paralyse but not kill it, thereby keeping the meat fresh for its larva as it eats the live prey from within]. But with natural selection in the driving seat, all becomes clear, understandable, and sensible. Natural selection cares naught for any comfort. Why should it? For something to happen in nature, the only requirement is that the same happening in ancestral times assisted the survival of the genes promoting it. Gene survival is a sufficient explanation for the cruelty of wasps and the callous indifference of all nature: sufficient – and satisfying to the intellect if not to human compassion.

Yes, there is grandeur in this view of life, and even a kind of grandeur in nature’s serene indifference to the suffering that inexorably follows in the wake of its guiding principle, survival of the fittest…If animals aren’t suffering, somebody isn’t working hard enough at the business of gene survival.

Scientists are human, and they are as entitled as anyone to revile cruelty and abhor suffering. But good scientists like Darwin recognise that truths about the real world, however distasteful, have to be faced.

As the volume of the writings on this website and blog grows, many of them extensive and dealing with multiple topics, it occurs to me that it would be useful to have some kind of index to enable new readers to have a fighting chance of finding the information they are looking for. In addition – since this site does concern itself with Thelema, after all – it would also be useful to have any easy way to go from the individual verses in The Book of the Law to the writings where those verses are discussed, to aid in the study and interpretation of that book.

With that in mind, I have created the Liber AL Study Guide. For each of the three chapters of the Book, a page is provided which lists out all the verses, contains links to the various essays and blog entries where they are discussed, along with a brief description of the contexts of those discussions.

We have touched on the much-abused “a curse upon Because” and “reason is a lie” phrases from the second chapter of The Book of the Law in a number of places, including The fallacy of “experiential knowledge” and Sun enters Cadent of Aquarius, but we’ve never given them a thorough treatment in one place, so this entry will serve that purpose.

AL II, 27-33, reads:

27. There is great danger in me; for who doth not understand these runes shall make a great miss. He shall fall down into the pit called Because, and there he shall perish with the dogs of Reason.

28. Now a curse upon Because and his kin!

29. May Because be accursèd for ever!

30. If Will stops and cries Why, invoking Because, then Will stops & does nought.

31. If Power asks why, then is Power weakness.

32. Also reason is a lie; for there is a factor infinite & unknown; & all their words are skew-wise.

33. Enough of Because! Be he damned for a dog!

Crowley’s commentaries on these verses are quite extensive, and we’ll begin with a critical examination of those.

He begins his new comment to AL II, 27 with:

Humanity errs terribly when it gets “education”, in the sense of ability to read newspapers. Reason is rubbish; race-instinct is the true guide. Experience is the great Teacher; and each one of us possesses millions of years of experience, the very quintessence of it, stored automatically in our subconscious minds. The Intellectuals are worse than the bourgeoisie themselves; a la lanterne! Give us Men!

Here, right at the beginning, we see a statement whose sentiment will be echoed throughout these commentaries. “Race-instinct” here has no Nazi connotations, but merely refers to the fact that the physical constitution of human beings already contain within them much instinctual information which can be relied upon as a guide to action. We don’t have to think “I am hungry” in order to motivate ourselves to get up and find food to survive; our bodies tell us this naturally. Our minds, we now know, are not the “tabula rasa” of Locke fame, but are hard-wired to tend us towards certain types of interpretation, the natural ability to perceive faces within disconnected stimuli being an obvious example. Living creatures other than humans of all kinds manage to survive and thrive perfectly well without any form of reasoning ability (so far as we can tell) and they do so because evolution has, in a sense, provided them with survival vehicles which come pre-loaded with a vast amount of information (incidentally, Crowley locates this information in the “subconscious mind”, since the existence of genes was not known in his time, and this is the same sense in which Carl Jung used the term “collective unconscious”, as opposed to the ridiculous idea some occultists seem to have of some vast telepathic collective subconscious mind dynamically shared by all humans). In the cases of the so-called “higher animals” this “information” is usually not a long list of explicit stimulus-response pairs, since in order to cope with the vast amount of different circumstances in the real world such a list would be impossibly long. Rather, such animals have developed a dynamic decision-making capability which partially relies on instinct, but which largely relies on the ability to perceive and make decisions based on interpretation and what we might call “rules of thumb”. A small number of such rules of thumb can be used to cope with a far greater variety of circumstances, and so although the creature still makes decisions predominantly based in the information contained in its genes, that information is brought down to a manageable level because it is possessed of a dynamic decision-making capability which can respond based on its application of those rules of thumb, as opposed responding purely automatically and mechanically. “Race instinct” refers to the fact that such rules of thumb will be largely common within a species (since the genetic commonalities which define such rules of thumb also serve to define “species”) but, in some cases, largely different between species (or “races”). Thus, a lion’s rule of thumb will tell it to run towards the antelope, but the antelope’s rule of thumb will tell it to run away from the lion.

The capacity for rational thought, on the other hand, provides human beings with a second avenue for making such adaptive decisions. Through the process of reasoning we can develop new rules of thumb all by ourselves, and base actions on those. There quite obviously can be no genetic rule of thumb which tells us to refrain from, say, engaging in insider securities trading, but experience shows we are quite capable of developing such a rule of thumb ourselves through the reasoning process. Read the rest of this post »

The phrase “Compassion is the vice of kings” from AL II, 21 is another in a long line of passages from The Book of the Law which modern-day Thelemites regularly attempt to pervert to their own moral and ideological ends. In particular, comments such as “we are told to indulge our vices” from Gerald del Campo in his essay “Ethics in Love” twist – in this case by referencing an unrelated verse in the form of “these vices are my service” in AL II, 52 – the meaning of the phrase into its exact opposite.

(Incidentally, in that essay, the quote is presented as “an email exchange which occurred between an unknown interested party and Tau Apollonius from The Thelemic Gnostic Church of Alexandria.” “Tau Apollonius” is, of course, Gerald del Campo himself. What it is with these whacked-out occultists giving themselves fancy names and then using them to quote themselves while pretending they are quoting someone else? “Aum418″ AKA “IAO131″ AKA “Isaac Aurelian” AKA “Victus” is probably the most egregious of modern examples, doing exactly the same thing on the legion of free websites, blogs, amazon.com book reviews ["If you want to actually learn about Initiation in the New Aeon, read the essay 'New Aeon Initiation' (i.e. by "IAO131")"]  and discussion boards ["Why not read the 'Psychological Commetnary on Liber AL vel Legis' by IAO131 that talks about the psychology of Thelema?" and "IAO131 writes about psychology of thelema all the time."] he has set up to promote his own “work” to himself. Perhaps they think they are dutifully emulating Crowley.)

As ever, the source is the best place to begin looking for the actual meanings of terms, so let’s look at the wider context in which this phrase occurs. From AL II, 18-21:

18. These are dead, these fellows; they feel not. We are not for the poor and sad: the lords of the earth are our kinsfolk.

19. Is a God to live in a dog? No! but the highest are of us. They shall rejoice, our chosen: who sorroweth is not of us.

20. Beauty and strength, leaping laughter and delicious languor, force and fire, are of us.

21. We have nothing with the outcast and the unfit: let them die in their misery. For they feel not. Compassion is the vice of kings: stamp down the wretched & the weak: this is the law of the strong: this is our law and the joy of the world. Think not, o king, upon that lie: That Thou Must Die: verily thou shalt not die, but live. Now let it be understood: If the body of the King dissolve, he shall remain in pure ecstasy for ever.

Regardless of what may come later in the book, seeing this phrase in the context of others such as “We are not for the poor and sad”, “who sorroweth is not of us”, “We have nothing with the outcase and the unfit: let them die in their misery”, and “stamp down the wretched & the weak” should make it abundantly clear that this particular phrase – “Compassion is the vice of kings” – in this particular context, is not a code-word for “yay for compassion!” It is – obviously – an admonition against it. If the Book later says “these vices are my service” – which it does – then it could be that it’s talking about different vices, or it could be that such vices can sometimes be pressed into service, or it could be that the Book is completely contradicting itself, any of which could suggest that a broader study of the whole Book is necessary to get a full “Thelemic” view of “compassion” or “vices” in general, but it is beyond reasonable doubt that this phrase in this context is an admonition against compassion, and not a kind of nudge-nudge-wink-wink pæan in support of it. This, ladies and gentlemen, is fact. Read the rest of this post »

Over on Jim Eshelman’s Temple of Thelema forums, there’s a thread called True Will and physical obstacles. The original poster asked:

A man, who is black receives repeated racial discrimination and abuse which affects his life so badly that he feels suicidal. He makes every effort to live his True Will and the path that involves etc. but he finds that the racism means he can’t even get through most days with peace in his own home and his ambitions (which because he is a ware of his True Will ARE in accordance with his True Will) are thwarted at every attempt…How do you suggest they [the original poster provided two other similar examples - EH] have caused the obstacles that they would have to overcome, not only to discover their True Will but to also follow that True Will? And how could they have avoided those obstacles?

to which Eshelman made the following astonishing reply:

Roll it back… Why did that individual incarnate as a black man in a time and place where this is the case? Until that questioln is answsered, we can’t really know what his True Will is. Under the conditions you mentioned, his True Will must include the component of the struggles that he dropped himself right into the middle of.

The original poster, understandably, asked for clarification:

So, you’re saying any problems people have, no matter how horrendous, they ‘dropped themselves into’?

You’re saying that racism is a collaboration between the black person (or other race) and that the black person (or other race) is actually permitting the racism. That idea would also suggest that people wanted to go into concentration camps – that they collaborated with the Nazis. And that paedophiles victims are collaborating with their abusers – how do you suggest a child ‘permits’ or ‘collaborates’ with that?

which received the following even more startling reply from Eshelman:

I am saying that, yes, we pick the essential elements of our lives in advance and enter into them as an act of choice…I am saying that, given the context of racism, choosing an incarnation that has you step into a suppressive situation as one of those guaranteed to be suppressed is a choice.

Now, let’s get an obvious objection out of the way first. Unlike some others, the present author doesn’t get “offended” or “outraged” at the mere suggestion that racism, for instance, is anything other than a self-evident outrage against the universe. While other people may have moral objections, we don’t. The principle objection here is that this is a stupid thing to say. An unbelievably, boneheadedly, stupid thing to say.

The primary culprit appears to be Eshelman’s colossal misunderstanding of will:

their True Wills cannot (by nature of how the universe is compose) conflict with yours. Not at all. Not in the slightest. Their wants can conflict. Their choices can conflict. But not True Will.

The Ethics of Thelema has already deftly dealt with this particular misunderstanding, so we need only point out here that this is the kind of stark, raving, drooling insanity you’re going to come out with if you doggedly stick to a self-evidently stupid idea and incorrectly insist that that’s how the universe must work without actually bothering to check.

Talking of which, here’s the real kicker from Eshelman, the one that makes it all worthwhile:

I’m not arguing for anything. I’m answering your question by explaining the nature of reality. I don’t care if you’re convinced. I’m instructing you in how the universe works

We refer the reader back to A belief in experience, Evidence of the supernatural?, Scientifically testing the supernatural and Go-go-Godel! for more. The gall of this clown in even mentioning the word “reality” is almost awe-inspiring. Almost.

So you see? We’re really not making this stuff up, kids. If you go about believing in reincarnation, secret chiefs, goblins and all the rest of it, this is going to happen to you one day. You don’t want to turn out like that idiot. Don’t do it. Just say no.

A few months ago, in the entry Religious naturalism and religious thinking, we criticized the much-vaunted but actually non-existent benefits of religion within the context of philosophy (which actually does not exist) which eschews the regular supernatural components of traditional religious beliefs. We saw that:

• once you take the supernatural out of religion, you are left with nothing at all – that there is and can be nothing in naturalism deserving of the term “religious”;
• religious naturalism – in particular, John Bowie’s interpretation of it – postulates a deep-seated human need for various myths and stories, religious practices, and ethical frameworks which religious naturalism does not yet possess, and without which religious naturalists are apparently able to live spiritually fulfilling lives perfectly well;
• that religious naturalism – and religion in general – attempts to hijack numerous perfectly natural and human qualities and label them “religious” to justify their claims; and that
• by searching for answers to the “big questions”, religion – and religious naturalism in particular, by allowing us to see what happens when we remove the supernatural elements – clearly encourages and propagates the kind of conceptually mistaken thinking which causes people to ask those questions in the first place, and thus propagates the misery thereby caused in order that it can (falsely) claim to provide a solution.

Recently, continuing discussion over on “Swimming the Sacred River” demonstrated a marked reluctance on the part of Bowie in particular to address these issues, indeed having to defensively hide behind a long list of excuses in order to avoid doing so. The kind of basic questions being asked of religious naturalism boil down to: what is it? Why is it useful? Why should the sought after stories, practices and ethics be considered necessary if even religious naturalists appear perfectly able to get by without them? One would think that the creator of a blog dedicated to religious naturalism would be able to answer such fundamental questions with a snap of his fingers, but not only have answers not been forthcoming, but it appears that Bowie is incapable of providing them. Read the rest of this post »

I recently received the following questions via private correspondence:

I want to ask you some detailed questions about the Trumps & the hebrew letters if you don’t mind? Do the hebrew letters play any part in Tarot readings? Ok for example the Chariot is assigned Cheth/Fence well we know that a fence can keep people/things out but it can also keep a person trapped or imprisoned. So what then is the real meaning to Cheth what are we protecting & keeping out or in? I want to know how to use the hebrew letters when applied to a reading. I wish you could teach me more on this subject. Can i ask you if you have received any Tarot papers from the O.T.O or any other Mystery School giving the true hidden meanings to the cards? You seem like you know a lot about the cards…if you or someone is looking to teach the Thoth Tarot please let me know I would love to learn the “True Meanings” to the cards.

My response was as follows.

You appear to have picked up some rather strange ideas about the Tarot. The Tarot originated in 15th century Europe as a game. The Tarot was, originally, a deck of playing cards. The occult associations of Tarot began, as far as anyone can tell, in 1781 when Antoine Court de Gebelin published a speculative and spurious essay asserting that the Tarot was descended from Ancient Egypt and represented the mysteries of Isis and Thoth. It isn’t. It started off as a deck of playing cards and then, from the late 18th century, occultists started overlaying symbolic meanings onto it.

The point of this is that there are no “true hidden meanings”. In particular, the Tarot is not (or originally was not) a pictorial representation of the Qabalah. Some occultist at some point once noticed that there were 22 Tarot trumps, and 22 Hebrew letters, and so he assigned one of latter to each of the former, but the trumps categorically do not originate with the Hebrew letters. The same thing goes for the astrological, numerological and other symbolic attributions – they are, as the name implies, attributed to the trumps, they are not some kind of hidden meaning underlying the trumps. The Tarot is not an embodiment of ancient secret wisdom – it is a deck of playing cards to which some occultists have attributed symbols several centuries after it was invented.

The upshot of this is that the only “objective meaning” for any particular symbol attached to any particular card resides in the intent of the creator of that attribution. Read the rest of this post »

The U.S. OTO Frequently Asked Questions page contains the following:

What if it’s your True Will to do [some bad thing]?

This is the philosophical puzzle at the core of Thelema, and like most puzzles, it resists easy solution. One school of thought considers “Do what thou wilt” to be a descriptive rather than a normative law, similar to the distinction between the speed-of-light limit imposed by the physical nature of the Universe and a posted highway speed limit. Given that your having carried out a given act indicates that you both intended it to occur and successfully made this intention manifest, it is evident that you have conformed to the laws governing such actions; q.e.d. The other school argues that the Law should be seen as a goal to be achieved, and that it is very possible to act against your (true) Will. In this view, it is posited that were all to do their own Wills and nothing else, there would be no strife.

Another post on Kjetil Fjell’s blog called Adequate tension with the surroundings attributes the OTO’s failure to develop into a religious movement of anything other than miniscule size to a lack of strictness:

Where even the term thelemite itself has become so vague that when someone talks about how much he hates the tenets of the Law of Thelema, people will reply gladly that they are so happy that this person has found his Will as a Thelemite and are doing it as opposed to all those who merely mimic Crowley’s. Where obvious borderline psychopaths, people with poor social skills, people who are attending the great parties and because they like the people are accepted as equal to stable and committed members who are knowledgeable and have achieved success with it’s teachings. The list is nearly endless, but in general it can be summed up with that we have an extremely permissive culture, one that is so permissive that it even tends to drive away people who otherwise are supportive of the tenets of the Law.

As it stands, this is a sensible enough observation. Fjell calls it “counterintuitive” but it really shouldn’t be – exclusivity is a major reason why people join groups in the first place, and exclusivity is incompatible with extreme permissiveness. To grow a group, people have to want to belong to it, and in order to want to belong to it there needs to be some more-or-less exclusive criteria or standard which defines the group as a group and makes it attractive. As Fjell says, “strictness promotes an increase of numbers…people join something because it gives something different than they can get elsewhere.”

However, when considering actual Thelema – as opposed to Fjell’s space-alien brand of Thelema – we’d suggest that the aforementioned quote from the OTO’s FAQ reveals the real problem with a lack of what we might term “strictness”. Although Fjell-Thelema may be concerned with “getting into contact with praeterhuman intelligences”, actual Thelema is concerned with discovering and performing the will, or “true” will. Yet, as the OTO’s FAQ page shows, the official position of the largest organisation of Thelemites declares the will – the one central concept of Thelema – to be a “philosophical puzzle”. Read the rest of this post »