Magick

Post Reply New Topic

Pretty much what RAW was saying in the video--and not inconsistent with what I posted about him...

techstepgenr8tion, I read your post.

I can't view any videos I'm afraid.

Maybe, but the con-artistry assessment seems a bit crowbarred.

To use the term as broadly as you seem to be would suggest that every scientist (which I'm in no way implying Crowley was a scientist) whose findings have been superseded by more recent research was a con artist, because they too were trying to communicate something to the establishment that was still half-baked and the establishment bought it as being something more complete or accurate than what they had before.

My point being you have to be careful how you throw words around.

The other thing that's really important here:

If he were doing nothing other than giving people a means to grab ahold of the root of their own consciousness and rebuild themselves from the ground up - he was providing something incredibly important and useful. If the woo of it were real too then it would hold the prior significance and even more.

In either case I don't see a credible claim for his works being a fraudulant bill of goods.

Right, but does the prevalence of those symbols mean that the people using them are part of some coordinated movement? Or in touch with real spiritual powers with some ability to act in the world? Maybe there are OTO people who really believe in this stuff, or Crowleyites who long for spiritual connection with AIWASS or Satan or whatever, but that doesn't mean all those people making triangles with their hands or covering one eye are actually part of some organized faith or coordinated activity.

Techstep, I take it you are a tentative believer that these ritual activities result in contact with and/or inhabitation by mysterious entities with some kind of supernatural power? This in no way negates the fact that Crowley ran a cult that used theatrical elements to bring members under his sway. This is what I mean by being a con artist. Whether he himself had become possessed by or a gate for supernatural entities or not is immaterial to the issue of his methods--not his ritual workings, but his leadership and persuasion of followers.

For that matter, suppose that "it's all true" and Crowley summoned up real demons while performing the Abramelin rituals, what kind of information do these entities release? What deep secrets did he learn. You summon Choronzon and end up with Aiwass, who, with all that deep mystical knowledge, tells you sweet FA about the cosmos. If those entities were real, con artist would surely be a good description for them as well.

When considering such ideas, I always think of the twin examples of John Dee and Isaac Newton.

Both men were passionately involved with fringe religious ideas, but in addition to alchemy and neumerological bibliomancy, Newton sought out understanding of the deeper nature of things with his own intellect and senses and discovered gravity, calculus, Newtonian mechanics and a lot of other useful science that greatly expanded human understanding of the cosmos.

Dee, on the other hand, was a geometer and cartographer who made some contributions to navigation but focused his efforts on gaining information directly from spirits. If we could communicate with the angels who participated in the creation, he reasoned, how much faster could we learn the deeper mysteries of things than by the slow, efortful process of observation and analysis that Newton and his like were developing as the scientific method. And what are we left with from the life work of Dee and his wonderful spirits? The Enochian alphabet. Some cool occult objects in the British Museum. A lot of ritual Twaddle from which there has been no evident expansion of human knowledge of the cosmos, human nature, psychology or anything else of value, except ritual manuals and occult stage dressing.


Why?

If it's all true, these are pretty shady entities. "By their fruit ye shall know them." What harvest are these things yielding?

If (as seems overwhelmingly probable) there is no truth in it, and these entities are delusions emerging from human psychology, then better not potentiate them with undue respect.

Can you unpack that? I'd have to know what kind of worldview I'm addressing to answer that appropriately.

I might be able to at least give this some kind of launch point and it's to straighten out the definition of gods and goddesses.

As far as I understand them they're symbols based on characteristics of natural forces as received by subjective/inward impression. It's a bit like how when you dream you're subconscious mind will cypher certain more tangible things into symbols. They're logical buckets for cosmic activities and forces in that sense.

Are they particularly 'shady' or yielding bad fruit? It's much more accurate I think to say that they're representing colors in an artistic pallet where the end user is more responsible for what the art looks like, especially that these very vivid forces get pushed through a person's subconscious and take on the flavor of that particular person's personality.

In that sense rather than real vs. unreal, shady vs. not shady, I think it's perhaps better to say that they aren't the moral actors - we are. That said, if you have a good person who wants to be better, or a person who wants to do good in the world and wants to do more, they're a great pool of resource for that person and their dealing with that resource - especially in knowing what they are and knowing that most revelations they'll have in visions or experiences will tell them more about themselves and the human condition rather than some cosmic scientific fact - will aid them in their endeavors. It's the old "Man - know thyself" adage.

In that sense I might model it like this - you have your conscious waking mind, you have your subconscious which is a massive collection of data, sometimes with a personality very different than your own (usually significantly broader for it's processing capacity), and there's various kinds of, for lack of a better word 'light' or shades of it that can significantly brighten at times. That could be purely neurochemical, it could be neurochemical driven by something more magnetic at times, it's tough to say. Really this is a way of reaching into the world through one's own frame, in some ways using internal facsimiles of the five sense but by and large not using them in the usual sense.

I'd also add that a delusion is a misinterpretation, so when one looks at them as logical containers of force or form rather than moral actors they've cleaned most if not all of that mess up already.

Why would they be obsessed with them (using them *everywhere*) if there wasn't something significantly meaningful behind them? Links...

http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_3Cw04KGjkvM/T ... -shirt.jpg

http://illuminatisymbols.info/wp-conten ... yramid.jpg

https://cdn0.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/norP_b ... o_upscale()/cdn0.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/4165178/tumblr_n7fropoh3C1tp1cxoo3_500-e1411772369495.0.jpg

http://s21.photobucket.com/user/alieas/ ... 5.jpg.html

https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/73 ... d81a14.jpg

https://i0.wp.com/illuminatiwatcher.com ... nerva.jpeg

https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/73 ... 6ad99b.jpg

http://illuminatisymbols.info/wp-conten ... Bieber.jpg

https://i2.wp.com/illuminatiwatcher.com ... =550%2C323

https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/or ... 47cd32.jpg

https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/73 ... e7ab23.jpg

http://illuminatisymbols.info/wp-conten ... Watson.jpg

http://illuminatisymbols.info/wp-conten ... minati.jpg

http://evilindustry.com/images/michaeljackson.jpg

https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/or ... 0165f3.jpg

http://illuminatisymbols.info/wp-conten ... 031568.jpg

http://vigilantcitizen.com/wp-content/u ... erFace.jpg

http://media.tumblr.com/tumblr_lq3en45ckX1qcgioa.jpg

https://scstylecaster.files.wordpress.c ... 368&crop=1

http://static1.fjcdn.com/comments/Plus+ ... f9199a.jpg

http://www.illuminatirex.com/wp-content ... le-666.jpg

https://starpulse-img.rbl.ms/simage/htt ... pa/img.jpg

https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/56 ... 9b9663.jpg

Most of those are just the eye (or more if you look closely). Plus, if you keep looking, you'll find more symbols. There are tons of ones with pyramids. Especially at concerts and in music videos.

Last edited by smudge on 01 Jan 2017, 2:15 pm, edited 1 time in total.

Unfortunately I think I just deleted everything I said about Crowley and his experiences, which is a shame - there was a lot of good stuff.

One of the most important books in understanding Crowley and his experiences, especially his experience of climbing the 30 Enochian Aethyrs, is in a book called The Vision and the Voice.

My analysis of the 30 Aethyrs as he described them - they sounded very hypnagogic or psychedelic, particularly in the way moods and motifs would change in unison and landscapes were highly unstable. What fascinates me is that people can do such things without drugs, ie. through quartz crystal balls or black mirrors, as well as deep meditation. I think it's a very important skill for people to be able to tap into because it gives an untold wealth of information to a person about their own deeper nature.

Crowley's a fascinating case study because in some ways he shows how brilliant a person can be at researching things, working for what he wants, getting to see his inner landscape in such vivid detail, and rather than becoming tangibly better and having his life grown/expanded he largely stayed the same, and I think it's because he was looking to dominate his internal world as he was rather than letting himself be transformed by the incoming or revealed information.

He did give the world the British Empire, by his other efforts, so I'd say that his Enochian is no more embarassing than Newton's alchemy.

In talking about Crowley's Vision and the Voice though that's a retold experience of his encounter with the 30 aethyrs, which is exactly that system - Enochian. Reading Nick Farrell, Benjamin Rowe, and Peregrin Wildoak on it (despite the name Peregrin's a pretty stoic analyst of mystic process in the Golden Dawn System), and listening to some of Pat Zalewski's interviews with Martin Thibault - it's a valid system of ingress. The four elements are a behaviorism of matter and the subjective experience works more with behavior than analysis of substance, hence the clusters on the tablets relating to fire, air, water, earth, and 'aethyr' being considered either the balancing point of them or their supernal/undifferentiated source.

I'd have to add that the late 20th and early 21st century have been a great time for the clarification of these concepts as more people are able to dive into these systems, experience the visions or sensations, and explain to other advanced and beginning practitioners what they consider to be the deliverables of these systems or the best angles of engagement.

Last edited by techstepgenr8tion on 01 Jan 2017, 2:20 pm, edited 1 time in total.

Smudge,

You might find this helpful - it's a masonicinfo.com debunk of Leo Zagami.
http://www.masonicinfo.com/zagami.htm

Lots of people believe the world is going to end some time around now because of their interpretation the Genesis 6 claim that 'I will only abide with man for 120 years' and they took this to mean 120 jubilee years - ie. 50 *120 = 6,000. They've also carved off the 70th Week of Daniel, the other sixty-nine weeks lasting between the Hebrew captivity in Babylon in 6th and late 5th century BCE to roughly 0 CE, the last seven years is going to land whenever God decides it to.

These people need organized Satanism having control over the world to edify their religious eschatological beliefs. Clowns like Zagami fill a market gap - ie. attempting to make a living by showing people what they want to see.

The one thing that conspiracy theorists do get right - power draws psychopaths and they tend to exhibit very destructive and nihilistic behavior behind closed doors (ie. there might be a lot to so many of the high-profile pedophilia scandals and accusations) and it makes things even more confusing because people tend to take such behavior, which is clearly satanic to the human condition in the sense of inimical/destructive, and mistake it for capital-S Satanism.

Whether Satanic or whatever you want to call it, it just makes me very curious as to why they're so invested in whatever their religion is. It must be a religion or cult of some sort. I didn't even mention the Devil handsigns that a bunch of politicians use too, as well as big rap stars.

I remember watching Ted Gunderson YouTube videos where he spoke about Satanic rituals. Does anyone have any opinions on that?

Will now look at those links you have provided me techstep, thanks.

5.50 minutes in, Lady Gaga's hand gesture after Jonathan Ross goes, "Oh, Good Lord".

They're not. It's a publicity game.

On one hand people like Jay-Z and Beyonce have attended and gained some vague affiliation with OTO and rather than just find it interesting or chew on it they wove it into videos and Jay somehow thinks its a sign that he's discovered the Illuminati and hey - they're alright and it's cool stuff!...well, OTO's far from being a 'secret' society and it's got nothing to do with anything one would attribute to the postulated 'Illuminati' - he's just a celebrity doing what celebrities do. Movie and music stars will dabble with occultism, some like Jimmy Page actually got very serious about it. These days though it's mostly clap-trap, the most watered-down and commercialized versions of Kabbalah, love spell and sex magic books by Ke$ha, etc.. You can think of this as the pop new age of the 1970's and 80's gone Hermetic.

Occultism, or at least the pop vision of it, is taboo and sexy, sex sells, so exploit-exploit-exploit.

No, Dee most certainly did not give the world the British Empire. He was one of many who advocated for expansion into the new world, but that project was hardly the whole of the Empire which was built over centuries by many.

Even if he had singly handedly carved out the empire for the British throne, this is a paltry achievement compared to the torrents of knowledge Newton released in the Principia and other works. There is just no contest between the two, and gaining that kind of knowledge was Dee's primary motivation in seeking contact with Angels and Demons.

His efforts to reveal the deeper truths of the universe, informed by deep reading in the Hermetic tradition and the latest ideas in Neo-Platonism from the continent, were abject failures.



Whatever. Still waiting to see one of these masters of deep mysteries reveal a single deep thing about the cosmos that isn't self-referential wankery.

If they said "this is a made up system that can nevertheless serve as window into states of consciousness" and then showed all the useful insight into the workings of consciousness, the unconscious or whatever, I would be impressed. But they don't. They say this is a system that uses symbolic stuff that isn't always literally true to reveal deeper things that can't then be shared and the beings we contact are real and external to our minds..."

And having seen not a shred of evidence to support that, I tend to think they are full of it.

That some believe their own hype doesn't make it less false.

Where did all their working and practical magick get Crowley or his followers? Drug addiction? Penury. Disease. Madness. Maybe it's just me, but I would expect something a little more positive from unlocking ultimate power and the secrets of the ages.

In the most generous view possible, the forces he unleashed were directly responsible for the World Wars, Concentration Camps, nuclear chemical and biological weapons, the cold war and ascendancy of the surveillance state, as well as the success of Scientology and Nasa (JPL in particular!)... If you accepted that his working really did contribute something to all that, what in it would make you say, "hey that's something I want to be part of! All that stuff is so great!"

Yes, I am not taking it seriously, because my BS meter is pegged at the high end of the scale whenever I come near this stuff, but if, despite all evidence to the contrary, it turned out to be true, would it be something you would want to invite in? I don't get that.

Newton lucked out in that alchemy housed richer material for technological advancement. Dee was using the wrong set tools for that particular kind of result, and had Dee been sent a book by a late 20th or early 21st century Golden Dawn diaspora author he'd realize it was a dead end and jumped over to alchemy himself. It might have chagrined groups like the Golden Dawn not to have an Enochian system to work with but they'd still have plenty of kabbalah, alchemy, and various other visual-mnemonic devices to keep them busy. All of this doesn't make Dee a worse or lazier person, he just picked a less scientifically fortunate venture.

Another bit that I think Newton had over Dee - he was doing most of his work almost 100 years later and would have had an easier starting point to plan his efforts from.

If you do consider this a powerful modern morality tale though I'd hate to hear the slating you'd give to the 19th century scientists who subscribed to ether theory of light when comparing them to Einstein.


Here's something to chew on. Western culture is committing suicide. It's splitting to pieces as each generation has a greater debt of chronologically adult babies. A lot of the people who are deeply dissatisfied with how their lives are working out or aren't working out are getting obsessed with interesectional politics, playing victim games, and as of lately trying to leverage the world around them for power through legislation and intimidation with hefty fines. It's a psychosis that would have been laughed in a culture that had more cohesion and stabilizing structures but that's not where we're at and the people crafting the legislation have almost as muddied a grip on reality themselves.

It's all getting washed along by post-modern philosophy of a variety that suggests that there's no such thing as 'truth' - there's one group's truth vs. another group's truth, all discussions or tries at triangulating one central truth are just cynical attempts of one group to wrest power from the next, and that logic is just another tool used by the patriarchy to take things away from people who aren't as equipped to use that particular tool against them. If that gets too much farther we'll be crushing our economic engine, treating our best producers and thinkers almost like kulaks, and we'll be going the way of Rome. The snowflakes seem to have enough self-loathing that I think they're almost wishing a stronger, more ancient, more old-testament type of person would take their freedom away from them and dictate truth - I remember Jonathan Haidt saying something about the femininity of the mob and I think he was on onto something with that.

The core of it seems to be that people can't stand a minute alone with themselves and they're constantly looking outward to be entertained, to be served, or for the causes of their problems - it's a complete disconnect from reality, particularly internal messages from subconscious levels that are less malleable to convenience, and as a result we've got a bumper crop of self-loathing and reality-loathing special snowflakes. Mental illness is slowly becoming the new norm and setting the popular rules on how to think.

We might have been able to survive some degree of this sort of churlishness when we didn't have the means to blow ourselves up several times over but we're in that world now and we'll only survive if we can cultivate a heck of a lot more integrity than we'd had in the past. For as much as technology does a great job at leveraging the human capacity to get things done it does little or nothing spectacular at making people less crazy. The paths people have for self-development through formalized Neoplatonist and Hermetic initiatic systems do focus on that, most observably in the foundations of Freemasonry, and those means for people to face themselves, gain firmer foundations in themselves, and be better integrated members of society is much more important than any of the so-called 'magick' that's getting bemoaned and it's much more important than any of these questions about what gods, goddesses, angels, demons, etc.. are. You can't just have this going on in private meetings with a therapist where sanity might be shared between two people if you're lucky; you need it on the broader public scale.

Really first and foremost I'd like to see us get some kind of cohesive culture together again rather than take a huge leap backward all because science and technology alone weren't enough to brace a culture.


Most of history occurred before Freud and Jung were around - including this. Meditation would be BS by this logic because it came about before meditators could be put in MRI's and have the effects on their brains tested. They didn't know that it was reshaping their brains, as far as I know were by and large using new-agey parlance to explain the process, and wouldn't have often thought of it in terms of neuroscience because because a modern neurologist hadn't handed that off to them yet.


Is that what you'd expect to be surrounded by today if you walked into an OTO EGC Gnostic Mass?

I'll admit that what you'll find there by and large are a lot of people who had difficulties in their lives up-front. Typically people who don't have enough difficulties up front in their lives will do almost anything to conform as perfectly as they can to the presiding cultural norms rather than touch anything remotely taboo.

OTO these days has cracked down completely on drug use from the grand lodge level. You might have a little bit of wine with your wafer, or water if you have problems with alcohol - that's it. What I've noticed about the people I just mentioned earlier who do attend; they're making their lives better by taking what would have often been unbearably difficult or complex life situations in one way or another and making up the difference by building internal resource with what they can glean from ideas in the MMM and EGC systems. They're strategically making peace with their lives even without the $300-400k brick facade, an Audi or Lexus in the driveway, or bragging rights as to what ivy league school their kids are graduating from.


I don't think he unleashed a thing and while there might be true believer or two out there I don't think most people in the OTO, AA, and especially the broader magic community at large take him particularly serious on this point. When he wrote his notes on Book of the Law he suggested the possibility that as he'd been following his Buddhist practices that he'd developed a bit of antipathy for them somewhere deep down and that Nuit, Hadit, and Ra Hoor Kuit found him based on things he was repressing.

Far more likely story of Book of the Law than any sort of new aeon - people can know things without knowing how they know them based on how our minds aggregate data. When there's a significant difference between what you know subconsciously vs. what you know or what you think you know consciously you're in a prime zone for eruptions and visions. Knowing that the isht was going to hit the fan in Europe back in 1904 may or may not have been a genius level prediction but it was a bit down the tracks and it probably wouldn't have been something he'd have had directly on his mind.


This is where we're talking past each other and may be for a long time.

One of the most absurd things Crowley ever said was something to the effect that God once washed the world away with water (ie. Great Flood), the baptism of the world with fire was his contact with Aiwass in Cairo Egypt, 1904. I mentioned above very few people believe that and most of those who do are usually in some splinter Thelemic group or another. That worldview isn't central to magical practice, it's only central to people who would take Crowley that seriously or make the mistake of interpreting him as somehow infallible. It'd be the same kind of person we have these days in the midwest who can't bring any objectivity to the table when reading the bible. Thankfully OTO, at least the lodge I've been attending, has relatively few if any of those sorts of people.