Lion of Light: Cloaked In Uncertainty

Scene from The Yellow Methuselah. Photo by Ira Cohen

Lion of Light: The Hidden Heritage – Foreword to Charles Kipp’s Astrology, Aleister & Aeon p. 195 - 213

Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law

“. . . Crowley remains a mystery inside a puzzle within a controversy cloaked in uncertainty.” After 28 years of research and experimentation into the Man, the Myth, and his Magick, Wilson provides this open-ended, bottomless, agnostic description of the subject he’s considered an expert on. His expertise on Herr 666 must explain why he nabbed this assignment. Kipp’s book uses Aleister as a focal point to write about Astrology, or so says the description on Amazon, I have not read the book myself. If anyone reading this has, what do you think of it? It seems a little surprising to find Wilson writing a Foreword to a book on Astrology given that he didn’t care for it. We find only the slightest of allusions to the subject in a quote from Crowley’s Gnostic Catholic Mass: “I believe in one Star in the company of Stars of whose fire we are created, and to which we shall return; and in one Father of Life, Mystery of Mystery, in his name CHAOS” appearing at the very beginning and again at the end to nicely frame the piece. You won’t find one word about the book this is a Foreword to.

I have only a superficial understanding of Astrology, maybe because I came up through the Wilson school of magick which didn’t direct much attention to that area. My father, the physicist, showed interest in it; unfortunately I didn’t get the opportunity to discuss it with him. I discovered it only after he left his mortal coil. He had a number of books on Astrology that I inherited including some basic texts on how to go about understanding and applying it. I took a crack at learning Astrology through these to no avail. However, I do think there’s something to it. I have friends I respect who are experts in the field. I also consider the astrological portent about timing certain events through drawing Tarot cards. Each of the Trumps, except The Fool, The Hanged Man, and The Aeon correspond to an astrological figure. Those three correspond to the elements Air, Water and Fire. The Universe card does double duty corresponding to Saturn and Earth (the element). Each of the small cards of the Minor Arcana represents one decan (10 degrees or 10 days of the zodiac belt.) The astrological aspects of the Tarot gets explained very well in Duquette’s Understanding Aleister Crowley’s Thoth Tarot.

Uncle Al did know astrology inside and out. It’s well known that he was a ghost writer for Evangeline Adams, a very popular New York based astrologer. He wrote two best-sellers for her: Astrology: Your Place in the Sun and Astrology: Your Place Among the Stars both of which came out under Adams’ moniker with no mention of Crowley. He finally received credit with the 2002 publication of The General Principals of Astrology, Liber 536 that included his material originally written for Adams. It also includes the birth charts, with ample explanation, for 193 famous people including luminaries such as Shakespeare, Dante, Mark Twain, Winston Churchill and Napoleon. In Confessions, Crowley claimed the ability to guess the rising sign at a person’s birth based on their appearance. Naturally, he kept track of his guesses and found he was right two out of three times. Anecdotal evidence in one of his biographies backs this up.

Wilson sets the stage, the mise en scene for Astrology, Aleister & Aeon in “The Hidden Heritage” by constructing a concise history of Hermetic secret societies and their place in the world starting with Freemasonry, moving to the Rosicrucians, and the Illuminati, then leading to the Golden Dawn, the O.T.O. and finally, Crowley. He sees Golden Dawn elements in the literature of Pound, Eliot and Joyce. I saw some in Proust who was related, through marriage, to Macgregor Mathers. It’s a brilliant and very informative history of these groups and how popular opinion reacted and responded to them.

RAW’s foreword has some excellent literary tricks/easter eggs; two that I know of. Wilson on Crowley:

“’Thank God I’m an atheist,’ he once wrote piously and that’s not anywhere near the peaks of paradox he employed to both reveal and conceal the meanings of his very hermetic books.”

The essay has other paradox or paradox-like tropes starting with the opening quote: “ I believe. . . (famously, he has said, “I don’t believe in anything”).The piece starts by ranking Crowley against a backdrop of the 20th Century’s worst thugs then turns around and compares him to brilliant people while throwing in Kennedy and Bill Clinton for comic relief. He first section, Something Wicked This Way Comes named from a Ray Bradbury story, also an excellent film. That’s followed by the next section, Light in Extension.

The s +c letter code I may have mentioned once or twice previously in my uncollected works gets a little nod here. Apart from Wilson, this code gets employed by Rabelais, Aleister Crowley, James Joyce, Robert Heinlein, Gilles Deleuze and Thomas Pynchon that I know of. Pynchon explicitly identifies this code as a code in his Introduction to Slow Learner. In “The Hidden Heritage,” I first noticed it on page 199 as part of the light bulb changing riddle: “That’s a Craft secret.” Then, in the footnote on p. 201 “Copernican system of astrology.” Next, at the top of p. 208: “. . . revealed the secret clearly;” and at the bottom: “’support and congratulations.’” In the penultimate paragraph Wilson repeats a phrase he used earlier about a mystery inside a puzzle . . . then adds a different ending: “ . . . and yet still strangely concealed . . .” Some of these may have been coincidences, who knows? But then we see the word CHAOS (caps in the original) ending the opening quote as well as the last word in the piece, which starts with a C and ends with a S. The first sentence in Ulysses begins with an S; the last word in that long” sentence begins with a C. We find Wilson doing the same with the first section header. He was known to sometimes model his writing after Joyce. If this seems far-fetched, precedent for this kind of letter encoding and more gets identified in Tindall’s Guide to Finnegans Wake and Campbell and Robinson’s Skeleton Key… with the letters HCE and ALP.

The mystery of the lost “word” of the Freemasons comes under discussion, with the suggestion, based on Egyptian mythology, that this “word” = entheogen drugs. Support for this view comes from chapter 72 in Confessions where Crowley claims that he knows this lost word, without revealing it. Wilson deduces that he means these kinds of drugs because Crowley majored in organic chemistry and he offered them to the audience at his Rites of Eleusis performance series. True to form, RAW then offers an alternate model – tantric sex as the lost word. An informative lecture covering Crowley on drugs is presented by Richard Kaczynski here:

The part about his drug experimentation begins around 15:30 and concludes around 57:00.

On p. 203, Wilson says: “Bernard Shaw’s Back to Methuselah owes much to syncretic Golden Dawn ideas he probably learned from Florence Farr . . .”

Florence Farr was an actress, active feminist and an adept in the Golden Dawn. In “The Hidden Heritage” RAW claims that she was also the mistress of Shaw, Yeats, and Crowley. I haven’t been able to verify her romance with Crowley. The all-wise internet only says there was much speculation about it and that Crowley was certainly enamored of Farr, basing the character of Sister Cybele in his novel Moonchild on her. Farr was said to be present at Crowley’s initiation into the Golden Dawn, but she was also one of his superiors in the Order who refused his 5°=6° Adeptus Minor initiation siding with Yeats against Mathers and Crowley in the famous schism that eventually broke up the original Golden Dawn.

Back to Methuselah is an epic play, it can run up to 6 – 7 hours, yet it did have performances on Broadway and other prominent theatrical venues. In 1982 at New York’s Joyce Theater, I saw the Living Theater’s production of The Yellow Methuselah based on Shaw’s play and Kandinsky’s The Yellow Sound and it blew my mind. The setting of it ranged from the Garden of Eden to several thousand years in the future. The Living Theater was known for breaking down the fourth wall and inviting audience participation. I remember cast members costumed like sprites running though the audience whispering to us, “in the future, all is poetry” like a mantra. Shortly before the intermission, this surrealistic offering convened a panel on stage consisting of characters of famous people, including Bernard Shaw, discussing a now, alas, forgotten philosophical question. After the panel gave their responses, it was decided to ask the audience in the front two rows. A mic was passed around and people gave their opinions. After the 15 minute intermission, they came back with an answer to this question which consisted of playing back an edited tape recording of the audience’s answers. I was impressed with the speed they had put it together, long before computer digital editing; done on the fly, the old-fashioned way, with tape and a razor blade.

The word “syncretic” quite accurately used to describe the Golden Dawn in the above quote also seems a profitable approach to personal voluntary evolution: use what works for you from any system, religion, mythology, work of literature, piece of music, etc. and discard or pass by what you don’t need. Model Agnosticism lends itself to a syncretic strategy for Initiation.

Another sentence beginning at the bottom of p. 202 stood out for me. Included in the description of the Golden Dawn we find: “This was combined with a profound study of Christian Cabala, a derivative of the original Jewish Cabala, a science or art influencing occult society which provides a religious language and numerology to discuss and clarify various altered states of consciousness.” (I’ve corrected the typo that occurs in the text – “influential” should read “influencing.”) Many people don’t bother to tackle Cabala as learning it feels like a monumental and daunting task. I will share how a very lazy person, myself, Picked it up a little at a time.

1. Procure a copy of 777 and Other Qabalistic Writings of Aleister Crowley.

2. Write down all the correspondences for key 6, Tiphareth. Pay attention when you encounter one of these correspondences as you go about daily life. For instance, seeing a Buddha statue, a Calvary Cross, a rose, a lion (if you happen to live in Africa or are at the zoo) or a see a book with “lion” in the title (very rare, I know) or even hear a song about a lion like “The Lion Sleeps Tonight,” anything that strikes you as particularly beautiful, etc, etc. etc. I combined this with an exercise to invoke/make contact with a deity connected to Tiphareth. For that, I worked with “Liber Asarté vel Berylli” found in the Appendix of Magick, Book Four which I modified to comport with my situation. 

 

3. Procure a poster or a large photo of the Qabalistic Tree of Life. Put it somewhere where it’s comfortable to absent-mindedly gaze at, see and ponder. I used the cover illustration to Dion Fortune’s The Mystical Qabalah pictured below. Posters of this were still available when I looked for one for a student a few years ago. Eventually, you will want to read something that outlines and explains the Sephira (spheres) and the paths that connect them. Fortune’s book provides an excellent study and there are others. In the course of this you will pick up the Hebrew alphabet, each letter corresponds with a path on the Tree. The first time I saw a diagram of the Tree of Life was on the back of a Todd Rundgren concert t-shirt. It had “Healing” on the front which was the name of the tour and his new album at the time. I saw it 2 or 3 days following the Living Theater performance mentioned above. Working with Tarot cards is another painless way to absorb Cabala.

4. Read the fiction of Robert Anton Wilson beginning with Illuminatus! Read Cosmic Trigger I.

5. If any particular number recurs frequently and/or you experience a strong synchronicity with a number, look it up. Apply your intuition (which becomes stronger with use) to decipher what, if any, meaning it has for you. 

 

6. Learn to transpose words to numbers then look up the number in “Sepher Sephiroth” (back of 777.) There is a chart there to transpose English and Hebrew letters to numbers. All the English letters are there except: F which I usually connect with Vau (6) because they’re both the sixth letter of their respective alphabets. Traditional Hebrew corresponds F with Peh (80). You can do it however it makes sense to you. I also ascribe “W” to Vau. The letter V is also there with Vau though traditional Hebrew has a variation connecting it with Peh. The letter X is missing from the chart, I put it with Tzaddi (90).

Also useful – “The Meaning of the Primes from 11 to 97” list on page xxv. Look up 23, for instance, if you happen to break out in a rash of coincidences with that prime (also very rare, I know). It gives the meaning: “The glyph of life – nascent life.” Perhaps this can indicate spiritual life or, as Timothy Leary prefers, extra-terrestrial life?

Contrary to Crowley’s instructions, I’ve never memorized any of the Qabalistic tables. Some things naturally become memorized through frequent use. As indicated above, Wilson says much of modern literary culture owes its symbolism and themes to the Golden Dawn and cites Yeats’ poetry, Ezra Pound, Eliot and Joyce as examples. I would add Thomas Pynchon. Learning Cabala will aid one’s understanding and appreciation of this literature.

Love is the law, love under will.

Oz

Lion of Light: Hazardous to Your Dogma

Forgot to mention Seabrook below, he's another of Crowley's mostly-unreliable mid-century biographers.

Lion of Light: Foreword to Scott Michaelsen's Portable Darkness (pg. 187-193) 

 Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law. 

I’m really happy that the order of Oz’s and my  responses to Wilson’s pieces on Crowley landed me with the forward to Portable Darkness. Not because I have anything particularly profound to share, but simply because this piece is important to me; it was one of the first pieces I read on The Great Beast that seemed promising and inspired me to continue deciphering the shadow-language of occultism. In many ways, the Lion of Light has been a walk down memory lane, a collection of works I had sought out or found in my hands but that had never before been concentrated in the same place. I cannot properly express how impressed I am with this collection: as I have said before, and will most likely say again, I wish I had had this collection when I was a novitiate. 

That said, even as someone who has spent years immersed in this milieu, there are still some mysteries in Wilson’s forward. I have never been able to identify the Wheatley story that chronicles the death of MacAleister and the elder Crowley’s institutionalization. I will admit I still haven’t read most of Wheatley’s fiction aside from The Devil Rides Out. He was prolific and much of his work is out of print; Wheatley helped shape that peculiar British tradition of being a man who was fascinated by the occult but drew a hard moral line between study and practice. His heroes are usually those who have only righteously dabbled instead of committing themselves towards black magic and are only interested in countering the diabolic machinations of actual practitioners. Wheatley also shamelessly capitalized on the occult revival of the 60s by releasing the curated collection of occult fiction “The Dennis Wheatley Library of the Occult.” I have a copy of Crowley’s Moonchild released under that imprint, so that shows how truly dangerous and evil Wheatley thought Crowley’s writing was. That, or he wasn’t afraid to unleash the dark energies of the Great Beast upon an unsuspecting public. Robert Irwin’s exceptional Satan Wants Me, set during the aforementioned revival, contains a humorous portrait of Wheatley, something that one suspects is inspired by Irwin’s own life experience. The hapless protagonist has found out that his involvement with a magical lodge has resulted in all-too-real consequences and writes to Wheatley for advice; the old author replies with a stodgy missive that scolds him for drug use, provides a facile and overblown warning about dabbling with magic and then encourages the protagonist to buy his latest book. Irwin’s autobiographical Memoirs of a Dervish has a few real life instances of the “luminaries” of mid-Century occult scholarship acting rather unimpressively. 

Wheatley’s novel was adapted into a fantastically lurid Hammer Studios film, released as The Devil’s Bride in America, that stars Christopher Lee as the virtuous Duc de Richlieu and Charles Grey as the Crowley-inspired Mocata. I highly recommend it. 

What was more troubling to me for years is that I never ran across the story of MacAleister’s unfortunate fate anywhere else, and I would relish reading the repetition of such a stone-faced canard. I love Crowley’s various fictionalized versions, deeply. That isn’t to say that I disbelieve Wilson- there was a mild boom of paperback and zines during the 60s that specialized in crude, inaccurate accounts of magical practice and demoniacal cults. Bereft of much literary merit, few of these publications were preserved. Once, a bookseller who knew my tastes well invited me into his backroom where he revealed a box of such titles, gathered from an estate sale. Although very broadminded, I think the salacious titles and cover art made him wary of putting the books on his shelves. I flipped through the lot, but could find very little of any use. Perhaps I should have purchased the collection for further perusal, but I only selected a couple of the titles with the most risque covers which I promptly lost between loaning them out and various moves. I think Uncle Al appreciated most of his caricatures, or at the very least took them in his stride. It is through these fictionalizations that we can best appreciate the dark dynamic of Crowley that Wilson writes about before trying to disabuse the reader of it in his foreword. 

I have never, to my satisfaction, identified the six biographies that Wilson was writing about in particular. There were more than six biographical accounts of Crowley published by the time of this foreword, and with the widened lens provided by the Internet, I cannot confidently guess at which ones would have flown across Wilson’s radar during this time period. One can assume that at least some of the hostile biographies would have been The Great Beast by John Symonds and Francis X. King’s The Magical World of Aleister Crowley; perhaps a third would have been Daniel P. Mannix’s The Beast: The Scandalous Life of Aleister Crowley. I would imagine at least one of the “sympathetic” biographies would have been Regardie’s The Eye in the Triangle with the other perhaps being Gerald Suster’s biography or Charles Cammell’s (father of Performance co-director Donald Cammell) Aleister Crowley: The Man, The Mage, the Poet. These are some of the inconsequential questions that have bothered me throughout the years. Lord knows we have more than enough Crowley biographies today, but I would like to reconstruct where Wilson’s knowledge was partially derived from. 

On a related note, I have never ran across the utterly charming bit of verse that Wilson profers as “the quickest introduction to the real Aleister Crowley”:

By all sorts of monkey tricks
They make my name mean 666; 

Well, I will deserve it if I can:
It is the number of a Man. 

I’ve had this down by heart--it isn’t hard--since first reading this piece so many years ago; I love it, but haven’t found it in Crowley’s writings. Perhaps it is derived from his diaries, which I haven’t read all of and will admit that I didn’t read particularly carefully when I did dip into them. I’m hoping one of our astute readers might be able to point me in the right direction. I’ve raised a lot of questions here, and would appreciate anybody’s ideas or attempts at answers. I do think that some valuable insight is gained herein as towards Wilson's attitude towards Crowley and all his foibles later in his writing career.

Finally, a word on “Portable” anthologies. The Viking Library was famous for its “Portable” titles and I typically disdained them. Perhaps I had prematurely, through some temporal fluke, taken Crowley’s own words to heart that I wouldn’t read until years later; in his autohagiography, Crowley writes that his understanding of literature was so expansive because he read all of the works of an author, not just a few titles, while discussing Coleridge. I disdained the Portable Library as something beneath me and fell into the trap of believing that it is better to read nothing rather than excerpts. This arrogance cost me a few years of understanding. It was Portable Darkness that introduced me to a lot of the more lucid parts of Crowley’s corpus; I first read excerpts from Magick Without Tears and Eight Lectures on Yoga in that compendium. It would also be in The Portable Joyce that I would first read any part of Finnegans Wake. So, I recommend reading something over reading nothing. Portable Darkness was not part of the Viking line of books, but it did capitalize upon the trends. Aside from the fact that Scott Michaelson didn’t seem to believe in any of the practical bits in Crowley’s writing, it is a very good anthology and our editor does display his good taste by including most of the poems, sans commentaries, of Wilson’s beloved The Book of Lies. This was also the book wherein I first read Liber AL and a few of the very best of the Holy Books of Thelema. If the collection had included Liber E and Liber O, I would say it is a near-perfect introduction. Even without those foundational texts, it is still a great introduction, replete with further reading recommendations, "marvellous commentaries" and compiled by someone who recognized Crowley’s philosophical and literary merit. 

Love is the law, love under will.

A.C.

Lion of Light: True Will

 

Israel Regardie at the time he met Aleister Crowley

Lion of Light: “Introduction to Israel Regardie’s Eye in the Triangle” p. 175 - 184

Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law.

It’s difficult to say how many biographies have been written on Aleister Crowley. I did a Google search and came up with 19, yet I know of at least two more not on that list. Some of them appear quite negatively biased. The Eye in the Triangle still holds up as one of the best, in my opinion. Israel Regardie not only personally knew and worked for Crowley, he became an adept and teacher in the Golden Dawn System of Magic, a foundational basis of Thelema. He not only walked the walk, he talked the talk quite articulately. This is a point Robert Anton Wilson makes in his introduction to that tome. Similar attributes apply to Robert Anton Wilson: a very articulate writer (on any subject)  who practiced what he preached. That seems a big part of his appeal and maybe explains why Falcon Press reached out to solicit his wise words for their third edition of Regardie’s biographical effort.

RAW explains several key Thelemic concepts in this relatively short introduction beginning with that invaluable tool of Skepticism called a bullshit detector. This concept initially gained currency in an interview Ernest Hemingway gave for the Paris Review on what makes a great writer originally calling it a “shit detector.” It was probably Hemingway himself who refined the term to a bullshit detector. The bullshit detector idea found its way into punk rock in the opening line of “Garageland” by The Clash from their eponymous first album. Wilson stays within Hemingway’s context of qualities needed for a good writer – adamantly advocating its necessity saying that without a bullshit detector, “they will never communicate efficiently.” Incidentally, nine more qualities Hemingway considers necessary for good writers can be found here:

https://glasstypewriter.wordpress.com/2014/04/05/10-qualties-of-good-writers-according-to-ernest-hemingway/ which was compiled from Ernest Hemingway on Writing.

The concept has evolved into becoming a “critical piece of one’s (magical) work” in the 2016 book On Getting A Bullshit Meter by Erica M Cornelius. She writes: “In essence, getting a Bullshit Meter is an internal process of tracing back, testing, and making a decision regarding each of one’s beliefs. Which ones are supported by objective evidence and which ones are not?” I would add that it also becomes part of one’s intuitive skeptical faculty particularly when objective evidence may or may not exist or appear readily available to support an assertion. A bullshit meter or detector seems critical to reading Crowley or Wilson, particularly the latter’s fiction which includes deliberately inserted nonsense under the guise of Guerilla Ontology or Operation Mindfuck. One purpose of this literary trickery: to get the reader to think for themselves; to not unquestioningly swallow or believe everything given. Guerilla Ontology, or shaking up our automatic and mechanical way of being, works by stating facts obviously true, statements obviously false, and statements uncertain in their veracity. That’s where the attentive reader intuitively decides how it reads or not on their bullshit meter. Though the b.s. needle will move on the meter at times in Lion of Light, there doesn’t appear to be a strong reading in Wilson’s introduction here unless, perhaps, you consider the byline: “Robert Anton Wilson, Ph.D.” One can estimate whether the suffix stands for “Doctor of Philosophy,” or as my father, who occasionally used the same suffix, thought: “Piled Higher and Deeper,” or something else.  The question of the authenticity of Wilson’s Ph.D. gets covered in the forthcoming biography, Chapel Perilous, The Thought Crimes of Robert Anton Wilson by Gabriel Kennedy. It seems Wilson did not use that suffix later in his career. If you would like your own bullshit meter but don’t know where to get one, simply send me $66 and I’ll guarantee to get it out to you immediately.

In this piece, Wilson personally touches upon the foibles of the man Crowley, as opposed to saying what other critics think of him. This gets tempered with placing him among such giants as Einstein, Joyce, Pound, Frank Lloyd Wright and Picasso under the common theme of introducing Relativity into their various fields. I’m reminded of the equivocity (relativity) of language when Wilson refers to Crowley as “sometimes downright vicious.” I’ve heard the recent terrorist attacks by Hamas and subsequent ongoing retaliation by the Israeli military victimizing civilians in the vicinity of Hamas called vicious.

Getting outside of the ego/personality complex seems a basic requirement of Initiation. Sufis call this “waking up.” Please don’t confuse this with the recent popular, politically correct or incorrect expression, “woke”, which often appears its own kind of sleep. Wilson gives a simple Crowley exercise of keying a piece of jewelry to a different personality type. It’s presented as an example of how A.C. “learned to quantum-jump from one reality-tunnel to another” and “developed, out of traditional “magical” practices, his own techniques for making such jumps quick and efficient.” Improvising one’s own techniques, or modifying other people’s techniques to work in your situation becomes part and parcel of an initiatory skill set. These individualized techniques, aka “alarm clocks” joins the student’s bag of tricks for waking up. This looks very much related to the formula given in Chapter 23 from The Book of Lies: GET OUT.

One very gentle ego transcending exercise that could help save the world can be found in You Are Not the Target by Laura Huxley called (paraphrasing from memory) “Standing in Another’s Shoes.” The title pretty much says it all. You literally imagine yourself in someone else’s position. It has a side effect of increasing compassion.

The second complete paragraph on page 179 did register a little on my b.s. meter. Wilson has not only Crowley, but all mystics trying to abolish the ego which implies making it go away forever. Yes, as mentioned, Crowley had various techniques and strategies for transcending the ego. I don’t know, and don’t recall hearing that he hoped to disappear it forever. Wilson quite correctly adds, “The ego has a seemingly infinite phalanx of strategies for sneaking back each time it seems demolished.” The words “abolish” and “demolish” set off the meter. I’m not aware of Crowley or anyone writing about him describing stepping outside the ego in those absolute terms. I agree with Gurdjieff that the problem seems one of identification. It may appear impossible to demolish/abolish the ego; it seems relatively much easier to not identify with it completely all the time. The ego does have social and cultural uses. It’s been called a convenient fiction. I regard the ego as a representation or a mask able to expand or contract as desired. I compare it to the two conceptual poles of Thelemic ontology, Nuit – infinite expansion and Hadit – infinite contraction. 

  

Discovering one’s True Will, one’s purpose in life, is another crucial subject given here. This again shows either the accidental or invocational continuity of Lion of Light, a collection of essays strung together like a rosary, as the last section in the previous article, “Do What Thou Wilt” is called THE TRUE WILL. Wilson unequivocally writes: 

“To find the True Self and the True Will, beyond the historical accidents of social imprinting, is the goal of Crowley’s magick.” 

If this discovery or realization was the only thing one got out of Lion of Light or any book about Crowley or Thelema, it would have served its purpose. In this piece, Wilson gives an excellent and concise outline of what this means using nomenclature from Physics and backing it up with a Sufi quote which starts: 

“However unhappy a WoMan may be, the moment (s)he knows the purpose of hir life a switch is turned and the light is on …” 

That’s exactly how it worked for me. Not long after getting into Crowley I started considering what my True Will might be. At the time, I worked for a rock-n-roll bar band as a soundman/roadie getting paid very little, but having a lot of fun. I recall reading something about “communication” in the Calgary Sun newspaper astrology column by Sydney Omarr and thought my True Will may have something to do with that: helping to communicate music to the world. This realization did feel like a light turned on. I remember loading these huge P.A. mid-range bins by JBL (called “45 – 60s” after their dimensions) into this ratty biker bar in Calgary called “The Airliner” feeling as high as a kite because I had some sense of my direction in life despite the unglamorous nature of that current situation.

In communicating the advantage of finding their True Will over the years, I’ve often discovered that many people have no idea what it might look like; often they have difficulties in even attempting to formulate the slightest idea of it. As Wilson implies, it doesn’t have to be something noble, altruistic or paradigm shifting, like curing cancer, bringing about world peace, or making sure bar patrons can hear the guitar solo in a cover version of Ted Nugent’s “Cat Scratch Fever.” One also need not have a final definitive formulation of True Will to begin aligning in that direction. It gets refined along the way. You can start this search simply by considering what you like to do? What brings you joy? What makes you happy? Completely independent of Crowley, Joseph Campbell gives the instruction to “follow your bliss.” Be true to yourself appears another simple way to put it. You can ask, “why am I here?” Why have I landed into this incarnation? It’s said that the whole Universe will assist you when you align to yourTrue Will; serendipitous synchronicities will come into play.  But even knowing, or having some notion of what your True Will looks like doesn’t necessarily make it easy to follow. A million distractions will pop up along with various pressures to conform to someone else’s idea of how you should spend your time; not to mention all the effort, time and attention involved with responding to the economic slavery facing the working class.

This essay gives a glimpse at RAW’s prodigious reading habits. He describes consuming The Eye in the Triangle entirely in one night, a book of roughly 500 pages. That’s far beyond my capacity despite it being one of the best Beast bios. He also said he’s read it several times since then, a time span of about 12 years; it’s not like he didn’t have other things on his mind and other things to do, like raising and financially supporting a family while trying to make ends meet as a free-lance writer. 

Israel Regardie ranks as one of the most significant contributors to keeping Crowley’s legacy alive while expanding it on a much larger scale. He gives his reasons for writing The Eye in the Triangle in the “Foreward” to that book: “. . . the time has come now to raise my voice in the intertest of clarifying the record of Aleister Crowley. He was one of the greatest mystics of all time, although a very complicated and controversial person.” . . . “he has too long suffered from misrepresentation and vilification at the hands of uninformed biographers” . . . “John Symonds, his major biographer, evinces throughout his narrative a totally contemptuous attitude towards Crowley. This hostility altogether invalidates his attempt at biography.” . . . “His writing is cynical, showing no glimmer of insight, or even the slightest trace of sympathy.”

This effort is even more admirable considering the two had a contentious falling out some four or five years after parting ways. Regardie owns up that he mistakenly started this brief feud. He had sent Crowley one of his recent books along with a “warm note.” Crowley responded: “He both joked and reprimanded me, together with some anti-Semitic slur about the adoption of the name Francis and he faceitiously called me ‘Frank.’” Regardie acknowledges that he should have let it go. Instead, he wrote Crowley a nasty letter. Crowley didn’t directly reply; he anonymously wrote a letter detailing his former student’s character flaws as he perceived them and sent it to Regardie’s friends and correspondents. The student also publicly expressed disappointment in his former teacher. In his landmark textbook, The Tree of Life – A Study in Magic Regardie writes: “Dedicated with poignant memory of what might have been to MARSYAS.” This is the mythological character A.C identified with in his poem AHA, a dialogue between a teacher Marsyas and his student Olympas.

Looking over The Eye in the Triangle in preparation for this post has me wanting to reread it again. The book begins with the young Regardie on a train station in Paris waiting to meet Aleister Crowley for the first time. He gives a brief sketch of how he got there, this first meeting and what it was like to work for Crowley, including a few salient incidences. One of these outlined Crowley’s indirect, gentle way of criticizing his grooming habits. Regardie goes on to include the details of their falling out and publishes in full the short anonymous letter mentioned above.  The remainder of the first chapter uses a defense against critics calling Crowley schizophrenic and neurotic as a jumping off point to give a brief and incomplete summary of the work A.C. accomplished. Coincidentally, or not, Regardie concludes this chapter with Liber Oz printed verbatim, but without the title. A facsimile of Liber Oz concludes the “Do What Thou Wilt” piece in Lion of Light, coming right before Wilson’s “Introduction to Israel Regardie’s Eye in the Triangle.” (I am aware of the typo, missing the “The.” One can always borrow this definite article from the very end of Finnegans Wake.)

Israel Regardie, through his books and cassette tapes, became a primary teacher of magic for me when I first got into this racket. I highly recommend anything written by him including: The Complete Golden Dawn System of Magic, The Tree of Life, The Middle Pillar, Healing Energy Prayer and Relaxation, The Art of True Healing, A Garden of Pomegranates, The One Year Manual, and Foundations of Practical Magic. Some of the exercises appear in more than one of these titles, there are overlaps. Regardie also edited some very important Crowley titles that I also highly recommend including: Gems from the Equinox, The Law is for All, Magick Without Tears, The Vision & the Voice, and the aforementioned poem AHA.

The exercise most associated with Regardie is The Middle Pillar Ritual. He introduced this into the Golden Dawn though he found it somewhere, he didn’t originally formulate it. I find it very useful because you can do it anywhere you have a chance to relax. I used to do it on the plane. Also, in the moments waiting at the mixing board before the concert would start. One can find more elaborate versions, but here are the basic instructions:

The Middle Pillar

Visualize a sphere of scintillating white light about the size of a salad plate swirling and radiating just above the top of your head and touching your skull. From within the center of this sphere vibrate the holy name EHIEH (eh-hee-yeh) and imagine the sphere of light getting brighter and more radiant with each repetition. This can be done from 1 – 5 minutes or longer.

When you’re ready, imagine the white light descending through your head down into the throat area where it forms a sphere of lavender light. Vibrate YHVH ELOHIM (yeh-ho-veh el-ho-heem) for a similar period of time firmly establishing the visualization.

Then the energy descends through the upper chest until it gets to the heart center forming a sphere of golden light. Vibrate YHVH ELOAH VA DAATH (ya-ho-veh eh-lo-ah va-daath)

After that, the energy descends down through the solar plexus and stomach coming to rest at the base of genital area and forming a sphere of deep purple light. Vibrate SHADDAI EL CHAI (sha-di el hi)

The energy descends through both legs to form a rich black sphere of light at the base of the feet getting stronger and more radiant each time you vibrate ADONAI HA ARETZ (a-doh-ni ha a-retz). 

Circulating the energy:

Now, visualize the energy starting from your feet rising through the center of your body changing colors along the way until it reaches the scintillating white light above your head. Breath in, then on the outbreath imagine the white light descending down and outside the left side of your body until it reaches your feet. Then, on an inbreath, visualize it crossing under your feet to ascend the right side. Do this at least 3 – 5 times or more until you distinctly feel the energy flowing.

The next circulation has the energy flowing down the front of the body on the outbreath then crossing over to flow up the back of the body on the inbreath. Continue until it feels right to move on.

For the final circulation, visualize the energy descending down the middle pillar inside your body from the top of the head to the feet. Then, on an inbreath, imagine the energy ascending the middle pillar from the feet until it bursts through the skull on the outbreath like a fountain of white light pouring around you in an egg shape until it reaches the feet then ascends again through the middle pillar on the inbreath and fountains out again. Repeat as necessary. 

* * * * * *

Wilson concludes by giving the Beast credit for recognizing and symbolically admitting to his assholeness in Chapter 70 paragraph 6 of The Book of Lies though Wilson admits it could be interpreted in other ways too. He also teases that there’s a deeper alchemical joke there. Any guesses as to what that might be? 

This week’s musical selection comes from a group I’ve worked with called MaMuse, though not this selection. It’s a live recording from the California World Fest. Unfortunately, the audio gets  distorted in places but it feels like a much stronger invocation than the studio version. The audio sounds ok enough if not played too loud. They invite anyone to call in support for anyone they wish. 

Love is the law, love under will.

Oz