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Highly recommend W. Sommerset Maughm's "The Magician" for a treatment of Crowley's personality and influence. The occult is full of tedious charlatans, and yet
by motohagiography 3y ago
Highly recommend W. Sommerset Maughm's "The Magician" for a treatment of Crowley's personality and influence. The occult is full of tedious charlatans, and yet they reappear in history in influential forms like Machiavelli, Rasputin, Crowley, Mesmer, Bernays, Marcuse, and other literal mesmerists, with lesser lights as 20th century cult leaders, and I think Klaus Schwab and his transhumanist hokum is the current equivalent to these prior figures. His cohort has been clever enough to outlaw the mockery they so richly deserve.
Oddly, the marjority of Issac Newton's writing was esoterica, and his contributions to physics and maths were almost incidental to his huge body of work on occult topics. What fascinates me about the occult personally is that it's a fundamentally inferior ontology - where it's what you believe when you don't have belief. Its ideas manifest in cults, but also in theory, where Marxism and its consequent gobbledygook(s) are predicated on similar occult and gnostic premises. Before we had ideology, we had superstition, and the priesthood of superstition was these magical thinkers, imo.
- dkarl 3y ago> What fascinates me about the occult personally is that it's a fundamentally inferior ontology - where it's what you believe when you don't have belief These characters are fascinating when they're safely in the past and they can be seen purely as drawing out an unacknowledged need in the zeitgeist. In the present, it's terrifying and infuriating to see people choosing their reality out of sheer self-indulgence.
- hnfong 3y agoI don't understand the quoted sentence from GP, what does that really mean? Also, you seem to think you don't choose your reality because it's "objective". Why do you believe that? From a relativistic point of view, wouldn't those occultists also think that their reality is the "real" one, and that you are choosing your reality out of sheer self-indulgence (or ignorance, or whatever)?
- nprateem 3y ago> it's what you believe when you don't have belief I know it's trendy to dismiss energy, chakras, astral projection out of hand, but there's some weird shit that feels every bit as real as any other experience if you know how to tap into them. Someone entering trance states (like Crowley's wife apparently) and interacting with those levels of consciousness isn't engaged in belief, they're having experiences that are real to them.
- burnished 3y agoProbably because they make completely wild claims that fall flat at the first hint of scrutiny. Then compounding that, I think a lot of people haven't had a 'religious' experience like that but have probably felt pressured to claim otherwise at some point. The result being that such talk appears completely ridiculous and clearly fictional. Which is all kind of a shame because it seems that these kinds of experiences are intrinsically human experiences, albeit completely internal, and discussion of it probably doesn't deserve to have 'belief in the supernatural' as a prerequisite.
- nprateem 3y agoYeah exactly, the potential for charlatans is huge. But the reports of a certain type of experience are common enough across time and space to be taken seriously. I was reading a story the other day that Kesha (singer of Timber etc) had a major experience and her therapists recognised it as a spiritual awakening. I was pleased to see she wasn't just given anti-psychotics. So I think there's more open-mindedness and awareness in some circles, which is the first step in dispassionately investigating anything. https://www.theguardian.com/music/2023/may/06/kesha-gag-order-interview https://www.theguardian.com/music/2023/may/06/kesha-gag-orde...
- praptak 3y agoMarxism is materialist, how is it predicated on occult or gnostic premises?
- Biologist123 3y agoI wondered at that too.