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 […]

In the previous entry – which should be read prior to this one – we saw how one of the most fundamental mistakes that the occultist makes is to believe himself to have discovered some truth, where in fact he has only discovered an amusing word game. Having dispensed with the word games, we will […]

John Crow has just posted an interesting new entry on his blog, to which I responded with the following comment to one of his points, reproduced here for reference. John Crow wrote: Empiricism? As Crowley points out, our senses are very limited and in many cases, we only know of phenomenon by the results or […]

It is common for the unthinking occultist (and unthinking dullards in general) to champion the place of “experience” over “reason”, or “theory”, in the acquisition of knowledge. As we have said before, this is not merely mistaken; it is an outright category error. Let us imagine that individual gets into a car accident, and by […]

In the old days, occultists with a high school education and a penchant for misunderstanding and misapplying science would wax lyrical about quantum mechanics. It offered – for those not willing or able to take the time to learn anything about it – an alluring prospect of “probability waves” which gave the occultist the delusion […]

A recent discussion over on heruraha.net about reincarnation saw Jim Eshelman make the following statement in response to the statement that “There are innumerable arguments against reincarnation”: Which I’m not going to rehash or enter into. My experience confirms to me, with certainty matching or exceeding that of any other certainty in the whole range […]

In our last entry, Sun enters Ascendant of Aries, we discussed Aleister Crowley’s definition of “magick”: the Science and Art of causing Change to occur in conformity with Will and commented on how the principle question relates not to the “causing Change” part as many suspect, but to the “conformity with Will” part. In other […]

On a lighter than usual note, this entry will consist of a review and discussion of John Crow‘s “The Missing Calls to the Great Work”, an interesting and thoughtful essay in an otherwise uniformly disappointingly lacklustre and low-quality second edition of the “Journal of Thelemic Studies” magazine. In the essay, Crow summarises some points relating […]

The vernal equinox marks the time at which the length of the day begins to exceed the length of the night once again (technically, it doesn’t; due to the refraction of light in the atmosphere and because the Sun appears to be a disk rather than a point, the length of the day exceeds the […]

The position of reason and the intellect has always been a tenuous one in the realms of religious and spiritual pursuits. On first appearances, the reason (excuse the pun) for this seems obvious; rational analysis has a tendency to destroy the fanciful and often self-important delusions that often accompany these pursuits. Faith-based religions, for instance, […]