The Blackberry Walk

Recently, I've been listening to a biography of Aleister Crowley called Perdurabo: The Life of Aleister Crowley to and from work as an audiobook. And whilst Crowley is not exactly my cup of tea, listening to this audiobook you find him to be a fascinating man. There are two strains of thinking on the man. The first is that he was just a cad; born into a wealthy industrial family, the nephew of a Carlylian captain of industry, he began life as one of a new era of aristocrats. Not one of the nouveau riche, but the beginning of a new era of elites, living like a nineteenth-century member of the Hellfire Club. And this view of the man is wholly true. Crowley treated the people around him with contempt, throwing women aside, not earning many shillings to his name through his poetic output, having to instead live off inheritance. He put on airs, pretending to be a Scottish lord or an Irish bard: the name Aleister is a fiction, his own invention, a Celtification of his middle name Alexander. This is all the case, he was a bona fide cad. But there is a second strain of thinking, that Crowley the magician, the dark wizard, was not just another of his airs, but rather the real deal. Many may call me silly for thinking Crowley was a real magician. At the end of the day, his A∴A∴, the Golden Dawn break-away group he founded, and the OTO, its more public Masonic-styled cousin he hijacked, were on what he staked his reputation, and the spreading of rumour of the potency and the skill of the great magician Crowley would have been in his interest also. That said, the accounts of these rituals in the biography, in part taken from descriptions in his private journals, paint an earnest look at someone learning magic. Sometimes a spell works, sometimes not; sometimes it goes horribly wrong. Sometimes there are even public effects, effects that can be documented and traced. His first wife, after being possessed by an ancient Egyptian demon in Cairo prophesied, narrating what would become Crowley's book of the law, only to afterwards become an alcoholic; and the same occurred to another lady Crowley had relations with in later life: again, she was possessed, gave prophecies becoming his second seer, and later fell foul of the bottle. Something was clearly going on here. I, for one, believe in the spiritual realm; and if the spiritual realm can have beneficent spirits like angels who submit to the Lord of Spirits, God Almighty Himself, there too can be evil demons who do not submit to Yahweh. I was surprised listening how much Yahweh features in Crowley's work. One story in particular comes to mind. One of Crowley's students summons a demon far too powerful for him to handle, and when the student commands him by name - a demon commanded by name must obey - this demon simply chortles at him. Unnerved, the student missteps; baited by the demon, he for a moment leaves the magic circle protecting him. The demon attacks, grabbing him by the throat, and pinning him to the ground. Only when the student manages to grope for a dagger encrusted with the tetragrammaton (YHWH) and invokes the name Yahweh does the demon retreat. That Yahweh features so prominently is no accident. Crowley's ideas on magic didn't come into being ex nihilo, they came via a long tradition. The alchemists, studied in great detail by Jung, were part of this tradition, encoding their encounters with the spiritual world and of self-realisation through esoteric chemistry. And before the alchemists were the mediaeval mystics, who wrote treatises on magic, treatises which Crowley and his fellow magicians studied. Much of their work, the work of the alchemists, and the work of Crowley take great inspiration from Jewish Kabbalah, which was a mystical set of practices for deeper gnosis of God, thought to be first compiled by Iberian Sephards around the twelfth century or so, though much is undoubtedly older. Hence why Yahweh is so prominent in Crowley's system. These systems and beliefs spread far beyond just Kabbalah, however, and the fruit of this tree can be found in all eras. These symbols and ideas are frequently found in other fin de siècle thinkers like Jung and Evola. Found too are they in Freemasonry, and other enlightenment organisations such as... the Illuminati! Do forgive me for mentioning the Illuminati, I couldn't help myself. The example is... illuminating, however. Any mention of the Illuminati immediately conjures up any number of conspiratorial tropes, that these esoteric cabals have been working across history for societal change. And today when we sense conspiracies afoot, we point to this great tradition of conspiracies to make sense of it. It's almost reflexive. Not just now, but across Western history, that Kabbalist/Pagan/Hermeticist cabals were shifting the rudder on the community, the nation-state, and civilisation writ large. And I believe this to be true. With the grand old men of science Isaac Newton and Francis Bacon, can you really distil their scientific enquiry from their alchemical enquiry? Or are they rather two boughs of the same oak? In short, our society has been profoundly change, terra-morphed in fact, by hermeticism. I love the book Dominion by Tom Holland. After reading it some time ago now, I returned convinced that Western Civilisation was grounded in Christian foundations. And this I still hold to be true. But if Christian foundations were the only system of values our society was grounded in, we wouldn't- not to sound like a Marxist here, but we wouldn't have a capitalist system of governance. And neither for that matter would we have had the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, or even the institution of kingship. There are other influences at play here, whether cultural, like Classical and Germanic cultures, or spiritual, like the hermeticists. Indeed, I think hermeticism, for better or for worse, is the second tradition of Western civilisation after Christianity. Its influence though not heard is felt, living in the caves like so many alchemists did, or hidden in guildhalls like Freemasons. Like a magnet behind a sheet, we can see the effects of hermeticism attracting and repelling without seeing the magnet itself. Whilst there are no Crowleys I know of today, hermeticism has returned to the public fora. It was a whole decade ago when Dr Peterson reintroduced Jungian ideas into popular discourse, and all of a sudden you heard people talking about divine masculine and feminine forces, the balance of order and chaos, and God as a principle rather than as a person. These Jungian ideas can all be found on the Tree of Life. Then alongside that, Mr Rogan was busy promoting DMT and psychedelics to achieve a greater level of gnosis. This undercurrent of hermeticism continues to flow under our civilisation, The West is Faustian, as Spengler says, and Faust was an alchemist. In summoning a demon, you can discover arcane knowledge, but you risk your soul to its temptation. But we continue to want to know. We are a civilisation who flies close to the sun like Icarus just to hold up a thermometer. It is at once our greatness and our sin.