Aleister Crowley – The Eye in the Triangle

The Eye in the Triangle: An Interpretation of Aleister Crowley, is a book by Israel Regardie. The book description sounds like this:

“Aleister Crowley, the greatest Magus of the twentieth century, redefined the very basis of the Western Esoteric Tradition. His incalculably vast influence reaches through all modern occultism. Whether acknowledged or not, he is the father of the modern arts of ceremonial magick, Western Tantra, Tarot and Wicca. His devotees ascribe even greater significance to his life, regarding him as the prophet of the modern age.” 

I believe this is completely true, but I don´t see it in a positive way. In my blog post Witch Power, Occult Awakening and Dangerous Illusions, I have written about the wrong turn in occultism, which happened with the rise of evolutionism. Here occultism was sought integrated with science. Such an “integration” ends unavoidable in reductionism. In Crowley´s case the reductionism is psychologism.

In 1898 Crowley joined the esoteric Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, where he was trained in ceremonial magic. In Cairo, Egypt, where Crowley claimed to have been contacted by a supernatural entity named Aiwass, who provided him with The Book of the Law, a sacred text that served as the basis for Thelema. Announcing the start of the Æon of Horus, The Book declared this:

DO WHAT THOU WILT SHALL BE THE WHOLE OF THE LAW

A fall into complete subjectivism. Aiwass seems very inspired by the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche. After his channeling experience Crowley founded the religion of Thelema, identifying himself as the prophet entrusted with guiding humanity into the Æon of Horus in the early 20th century. His followers should "Do what thou wilt" and seek to align themselves with their True Will through the practice of magick (this is clearly an inspiration for the New Age concept of create-your-own-reality).

Crowley gained widespread notoriety during his lifetime, being a recreational drug experimenter, bisexual and an individualist social critic. He was denounced in the popular press as "the wickedest man in the world" and a Satanist. But Crowley has remained a highly influential figure over Western esotericism, the counterculture, postmodernism and New Age (see my article Constructivism: The Postmodern Intellectualism Behind New Age and the Self-help Industry).

Political he was without doubt a fascist, since he directly demonstrated this. Crowley described democracy as an "imbecile and nauseating cult of weakness", and commented that The Book of the Law proclaimed that "there is the master and there is the slave; the noble and the serf; the 'lone wolf' and the herd". In this attitude he was especially influenced by the work of Nietzsche (Aiwass?) and by Social Darwinism. Although he had contempt for most of the British aristocracy, he regarded himself as an aristocrat and styled himself as Laird Boleskine, once describing his ideology as "aristocratic communism". Pasi described Crowley's affinity to the extreme ideologies of Nazism and Marxism–Leninism, which aimed to violently overturn society: "What Crowley liked about Nazism and communism, or at least what made him curious about them, was the anti-Christian position and the revolutionary and socially subversive implications of these two movements. In their subversive powers, he saw the possibility of an annihilation of old religious traditions, and the creation of a void that Thelema, subsequently, would be able to fill. All this forms a background understanding of that my concept of The Matrix Conspiracy Fascism, is to be found on both the political left and right.

In the best Orwellian NewSpeak style he taught his students to use thought distortions in order to get on in the world, as for example contradictions. In his book The Vision and the Voice he writes something which sound like Yin and Yang wisdom, but which is a clever distortion:

…all the symbols are interchangeable for each containeth itself its own opposite. And this is the great Mystery of the Supernals that are beyond the Abyss. For below the Abyss contradiction is division. But above the Abyss contradiction is Unity. And there could be nothing true except by virtue of contradiction that is contained in itself.

He mixes the opposites instead of discriminating between them, as Yin and Yang philosophy teaches, and instead of clarity he therefore ends in obscurantism. In my Ebook The Tragic New Age Confusion of Eastern Enlightenment and Western Idealism, I describe how such a mistake happens by using Timothy Conway´s three-fold model of Nondual reality.

Where philosophers would point to logical problems such as self-refutation and contradiction, Crowley´s supporters see this as a sign of “crazy wisdom” (about crazy wisdom, see my articles Why I Don´t Teach Tibetan Dream Yoga, and Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh (Osho). Osho was inspired by Crowley, and used precisely the same rhetorical techniques of deliberately using contradictions in order to manipulate his students.

Crowley´s paranormal experiences and the contradictions can in my view not be due to any kind of enlightenment, but to a spiritual crisis of some sort, altering between ego-inflation and the dark night of the soul (see my article Spiritual Crises as the Cause of Paranormal Phenomena).

Finally, about the concept of The Eye in the Triangle. Usually this is used as a Christian symbol, were it represents the eye of God watching over humanity (the concept of divine providence). In Crowley´s case it refers to the Eye of Horus, but has been reduced to psychology mixed with the concept of the third eye. It is also a symbol used in many conspiracy theories, as for example the Illuminati conspiracy, one of the sub-conspiracies in my concept of The Matrix Conspiracy. Here it represents the rise of scientism (reductionism).

Another sub-conspiracy is the 666 conspiracy, which in my context has to do with a turning spirituality upside down, so that we have a worship of ego and obscurantism, instead of self-forgetfulness and clarity. Ironically enough, Crowley refers to himself as the Great Beast, and used 666 as his magick number. His sex magick was essentially about awakening the kundalini and rising it to the third eye. The demonical aspects of this has been shown in my article The Conspiracy of the Third Eye.