602. The army (VII)
Yesterday, I came across a passage in Aleister Crowley that explained a ceremony he developed to end the Christian era; it involved a frog, various incantations, and, finally, the crucifixion of said frog. It struck me at once that this ceremony resembled images of Pepe the Frog crucified as “Yaldabaoth”—the demiurge, or, in gnostic terms, the mad creator god Christians worship. The particular image is a riff on the Japanese cartoon Neon Genesis Evangelion—itself replete with gnostic themes, or so I understand. There are, in addition, many straightforward images that show Pepe crucified; and each replicates Crowley’s ceremony in symbolic form.
That night, as related previously, I sat down for my customary Grimm fairytale before bed. The tale immediately mentioned a young boy who was given a pair of frog legs in an enchanted forest by a wood spirit; in Crowley’s ceremony, the last step after the frog was crucified was to eat its legs. Once again, as has happened previously, a notable bit of Crowley synchronicity—the two events happened mere hours apart. Sometimes I wonder if I am the perfect Crowleyite, even if I do not intentionally follow him: after all, my first gf called me “beast”; my Twitter page has stars on the banner and my avatar (a monad) could be taken as a star—“Every man and woman a star”; I have shaved my head; I write “666”-long articles, Crowley’s number; I always identified with the Peregrine Falcon from a young age, Horus (Crowley’s Aeon of Horus); and I seem to have a lot of synchronicity around him—of course, no willing buggery or drugs or Whore of Babalon (as of yet).
Just before my synchronicity, I noticed the deeper problem with Crowley’s thought. One Crowley disciple finally “got” what Crowley was on about: your guardian angel is just your unconscious mind, simply stop any repression in this regard—especially with regards to sex—and you will be fine. This was all Crowley meant by “Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law.” The problem with this approach—related to Freud, whom Crowley read—remains that it puts everything on a base plane: food, sex, and drugs. There is a higher plane with which you can identify, just to watch all these feelings and thoughts come and go, without acting out every desire you happen to have. This is not the same as repression or the Christian condemnation Crowley despised, it just means to watch your thoughts and feelings like sheep in a field.
The advantage to such an approach is that it is much less destructive and base than Crowley’s “indulged will”. By all means, you can say, “I really fancy jumping up on that table and taking a shit,” but there is no need, per Crowley, to do it—you can shatter the ego well enough by the thought’s expression, or just watch it and let it disappear; if you express it then it will simply be outrageous and funny, rather than actively destructive.
Crowley seems to have no sense that the awakened state is meant to be an interpenetration of opposites, for him it is all excess—all about release of repressed content; and he was as humourless and serious in his absolute indulgence as his strict Christian parents were in their abstention. This is why Crowley always feels a bit phoney and “tries”. He speaks from the cesspit, not the heart—not the pure experience that comes before lust and physical indulgence.
In the night, I fell into a trance-like sleep and heard a metallic voice speak to me—tangible pyramids appeared before me; and it was then I realised that Sadegh Hedayat’s The Blind Owl (1936), in which a man kills his lover and travels to a cemetery-city of strange pyramids, recounts a journey to John Dee’s City of Pyramids where the Elemental Tablets or Watch Towers of the Universe form 156 small figures represented as pyramids. A gift from Crowley, perhaps.