The Crowley recipe
Aleister Crowley
To make an Edward Alexander Crowley, combine —
- 4 units mystical perspicacity
- 3 units Cambridge liberal arts education
- 2 units hyper-religious parents
- 3 units sadistic mom
Blend in the spirit of delicious naughtiness that loves to shock angry mommy. Mix in a large Camusian dandyism and then bifurcate into rebellious dandyism and indulgence. Sift through Blavatskian freemasonic self-help and superb writing style.
The result: the most accomplished self-deifying magus in modernity. All kidding aside, his metaphysics (pro-survival dualism) is well-thought-out —
- Buddhist foundationalism: Ultimate reality is an unconditioned infinite suchness, as in Buddhism, only Crowley’s Unconditioned is fecund. This unconditioned ground he calls “Chaos, the All Father” and its nature is to overflow and push emergent beings into manifest existence. The universe is one aspect of this perpetual unfolding underbelly.
- Dualism runs deep: The Urgrund is a boiling cauldron, and its first emergent is dual—it bifurcates into subject (the inward infinitesimal that is both agent and particular point-of-view) and object (the circumference of the cosmos).
- Indulgence in biological compulsion: You have emerged as a hedonic unit. The pleasure of life is pleasure. Indulge this, the one intrinsic good arising from your embodiment.
- Narcissism: The will to power seeps into the social as the drive for admiration. The highest admiration, as Nietzsche said, and which is the end point and highest level of the selfishness built into organismic survival, is to be God. Yahveh is confessedly a narcissist, which supports my claim that he is a self-conscious egregore, since this trait arises from awareness of one’s dependence on others.
Tangent
Crowley’s pro-egoism influenced LRH. Note how that goal of life is not to be the best individual or to realize identity of subject and Brahaman, but survive and thrive on all Eight Dynamics simultaneously, including as a team, species, organism, and so on. The goal of life for a cell is its own health plus that of the organ plus that of the organism plus that of the wife and children plus that of the local social group plus that of humanity plus …. It’s a totally pro-survival religion that takes mereological aspects of “life” into account. What ties all these levels together is the continued existence of the basic negentropic physical dynamic and all its emergent wholes. It’s a relation of self-valorization on every level—from the atom on up to Gaia, the local universe, the Multiverse. But does this go on all the way to the Unconditioned? Then the latter is not really unconditioned.
Q: Does the survival impulse ever reach a logical (metaphysical) wall?