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I think that phrase is key to a certain side of his thinking, which I didn't notice on first reading. There's a strand which deconstructs everything - it takes the "nothing is true" motif and really runs with it. It's not nihlistic as such but plays with words and paradox, and gets "truths" to collapse in on each other.
That's why I added the caveat that I understand where he's coming from, and I guess it's why I would also draw a clear distinction between magic per se and Crowley's Magick. He really does seem to be attempting something quite unique, in this book and elsewhere, which I don't think he's really given much credit for. I sometimes feel that this side of his work is so difficult, contradictory and challenging that its largely overlooked by the people who would rather focus on the robes, buggery and blood letting aspect of the man. A primer like Duquette's "Magick of Thelema" gives you a great introduction to his rituals, but without placing them in the context of the relentless deconstruction that seems to be fundamental to his whole deal. Crowley's Magick strikes me as a very Modernist 'versioning' of the field of occultism. I think his work does not so much follow on from the Golden Dawn, so much as take the trappings of western magic and use that as a starting point for all manner of distinctly Modernist experiment. I think RAW is spot on with the Joyce comparison - as Crowley does with "occultism" what Joyce did with "the novel".
But I think we also need to bring criticism to bear on Crowley's Modernist experiment just as we would with Joyce or Eliot. His work is fascinating and contains an overwhelming depth. You could spend a lifetime exploring it. Yet is this magical deconstructivism, where truth collapses in upon itself endlessly, necessarily the most sophisticated or effective lens by which we can approach magic? Is 'Finnegan's Wake' the ultimate expression of storytelling and the most captivating narrative ever written? Or is it a product of time, place and experiment with its own merits and its own failings?
Should Crowley's observation that a Magician must not attribute "objective reality or philosophic validity" to spirits and so forth, be taken as a hard and fast law of best magical practice? It's often reeled out as if it should, almost like a last word on the matter. Yet, in my own practice, heavily informed by Voodoo and related traditions, I deal with everything at face value. My God and Spirits are objectively real and philosophically valid to me, and they wouldn't take kindly to being told otherwise. In Crowley's vision of magic, I would have lost the plot, become caught up in my own delusions, strayed from the path into low religiousity or something. But is he right? Should the Modernist perspective of an early 20th century, well-educated, upper class, white westerner who has had the leisure time to devote to an exploration of occultism - be taken more seriously than the working perspective of numerous cultures who have practiced effective magic for survival across thousands of years? Sometimes you get a sense that this is what is being implied, when people pull out the above quoted paragraph and hit you over the head with it.
I'm not sure if that is something that people really intend to do, so much as it is a symptom of these matters not really being looked at or picked apart in too much detail. There is a real unspoken sense sometimes that the perspective, goals and operating procedures of western magic from the Golden Dawn onwards through Crowley are "High Magic" and the surviving "shamanic" traditions that continue to thrive in various third world countries are on some level "primitive". As if the western forms are a more developed, highly cultivated, better refined way of doing things compared to the far less advanced, simplistic, even childlike forms you would find in non-western cultures.
I think it's something largely inherited from the dubious ideas that people had about non-western cultures in the late 19th/early 20th century, but its largely carried over into how modern occultists construct their sense of global magical practice. I think the fairly ubiquitous dumping of virtually all non-western approaches to magic - no matter how diverse or radically different they might be from one another - under the generic heading "shamanism", is an example of the unexamined dismissive tendencies you come across quite frequently. I can't recall the amount of times I've had people try to pigeon-hole what I do as "shamanism", and I've always found it a bit dodgy how the word can happily be applied to things as fundamentally dissimilar as Haitian Vodou and Jivaro journeying.
My perspective, speaking as a practitioner of both Voodoo and Golden Dawn/A,',A,', inspired western magic, is that the latter is technically the less-developed, more "primitive" form in a lot of ways. Since it is largely a modern reconstruction that's been cobbled together by a small group of London intellectuals based on manuscripts from the British Museum, insights gleaned from second hand sources such as medieval grimoires, the rituals of freemasonry, a theatrical bent, and the odd flash of blinding UPG. It takes its lead from older sources, but what we know as western magic is very much a modern reconstruction of something that was lost.
Whereas, if you look at something like Voodoo and traditions whose structure has a similar longevity, you're looking at something whose form has been refined, cultivated and passed on from generation to generation - without a break in the chain - for literally thousands of years. This is how something gets refined. This is how an advanced understanding of the mysteries of the universe is formed. This is how a sophisticated magic evolves.
I think the problem has something to do with the manner in which contemporary western occultism, as we practice it in all our different 21st century flavours, literally grew out of these earlier western expressions such as the Golden Dawn, Crowley, et al. More "earthy" movements such as Gardnerian and Alexandrian Wicca also owe a lot to the structures and methods of engagement that characterise western magic; and certainly chaos magic is a direct reactionary child of all these influences, yet nonetheless an unmistakable product of them, just as Crowley is a product of his Plymouth Brethren upbringing.
I think our frame of reference is imbedded in these forms, to one extent or another, often in a fairly insidious imperceptible way, and its this that needs to be understood in order to really get to grips with the work of Crowley. You have to situate him in his time and place. I think that if you try and take him on board as a "teacher about magic" in any generic sense you are going to go wrong. Just as you would if you looked to Joyce as your primary source for crafting a novel. Or else you risk statements like "students are most earnestly warned against attributing objective reality or philosophic validity to any of them" being taken as an objectively real "truth" of magic in itself, rather than a facet of one man's insight into his own experimentation in the field.
I think the best way to engage with Crowley is to try and comprehend his genius and be inspired by the workings of his mind in response to magical encounters and occult experiment; rather than to necessarily take any of it on board. I don't think it is either possible of productive to try and practice or emulate Crowley's Magick as if it were a closed system, and I don't really think that's what he intended in the first place. It even says as much in the preface to the book by Soror Virakam:
"Frater Perdurabo is the most honest of all the great religious teachers. Others have said: "Believe me!" He says:"Don't believe me!" He does not ask for followers; would despise and refuse them. He wants an independent and self-reliant body of students to follow out their own methods of research. If he can save them time and trouble by giving a few useful "tips," his work will have been done to his own satisfaction. Those who have wished men to believe in them were absurd. A persuasive tongue or pen, or an efficient sword, with rack and stake, produced this "belief," which is contrary to, and destructive of, all real religious experience. The whole life of Frater Perdurabo is now devoted to seeing that you obtain this living experience of Truth for, by, and in yourselves!"
This wasn't the long post I was planning to write dealing with the magical memory, but I guess it's a start on fathoming some of my preliminary responses to Crowley and the experiment of western magic in general. |
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