Crowley's Holy Qabalah, part I

Without Form and Void

And the Earth was without form and void, and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Powers of Nature said: ‘Let there be light! and there was light.—1st Degree Initiation, Ordo Templi Orientis (The quoted text was largely cribbed by AC from the KJV Bible of course)

There is no-one who thinks in the lucid way you do, my little paltry cards are lost unless you illumine them by your Art.—Frieda Harris, begging Aleister Crowley to write BOT.

THE NEXT issue is the Holy Qabalah. This is a very simple subject.—Aleister Crowley, affirming the light by making light of it in BOT.

If Qabalah were a very simple subject, Crowley would not have needed to spend a good portion of his lifetime, and BOT, trying to explain it, to elucidate it—even to himself. And yet, he is quite correct too, for the basics of Qabalah do seem pretty simple to the oxymoronic audience he is talking about, people possessed of an “ordinary intelligent mind”.

What exactly is an ordinary intelligent mind? It seems to be a phrase denoting someone who lacks the knowledge to be classified as an expert in a subject, and who lacks the intelligence to do much with that knowledge even if he possessed it, but who nevertheless possesses a passable level of intelligence required to understand some basic ideas.

For example, most people can understand a basic mathematical statement:
2+2=4

But not so many, indeed few people can really understand an apparently equally simple statement:
E=mc²

Both are math equations. Both have five seemingly simple symbols. But there’s a difference in complexity between comprehending the one and the other, and not just the fact that the latter depends upon multiplication of variables and a constant, instead of addition of integers.

One reason for the difference is that the former, ordinary intelligent, equation is not burdened by being referential or correspondent. In other words, it exists purely mathematically (thus dangerously abstract) and is not intended to enlighten us about the fundamental conditions and workings of cosmic reality. Of course, one must qualify that statement, pointing out that 2+2=4 certainly is capable of providing useful insights about cosmic reality to occultists; but their realities, while often cosmic, are seldom scientific.

On the other hand, E=mc², divorced from what it is alleged to signify, is just another, purely abstract, mathematical expression. It could, like 2+2=4 stand for all kinds of things. However, hitched to its traditional signified, E=mc² is iconically fundamental, something like a mix of savior and sword of Damocles.

Crowley, by blithely dismissing complexity as any obstacle to Qabalah, is trying to tug the understandably reluctant ordinary intelligent reader into contemplation of what Crowley knows is a subject so vigorously abstruse that he himself was forced to admit his own shortcomings in understanding it. Indeed, he often employed extraordinary praeternatural intelligence, or so he claimed, in helping him to understand the complexities and ambiguities of Qabalah.

Back in Crowley’s day, there was a debate in intellectual circles about what kinds of understanding could be achieved by the ordinary intelligent mind. Certainly, that mind could only claw at the profound complexities of modern physical science. And with respect to art, it could pronounce its pleasures (it knew what it liked), which were appropriately banal and pedestrian, but it could not be expected to understand the differences between these dumb amusements and whatever world a Picasso inhabited and illustrated. And philosophy? Well, that had never been intended for ordinary minds, not even ordinary intelligent ones, had it?

Yet, here was Crowley telling his readers, most of whom were at best ordinary intelligent—his Tarot artist Frieda Harris joked she was sub-normally intelligent—that Holy Qabalah was a very simple subject. Was he joking? Was he veiling (or merely lying)? Or was he veiling by telling a truth too plainly?

The first, simple, thing Crowley tells his ordinary intelligent audience is that there are ten numbers in the decimal system. And then to back up that tautological insight, he says the reason for this is not merely mathematical, because Qabalah is not just a system of mathematics, but that it is—uh-oh—philosophical.

Wait a second. Didn’t we just get through saying philosophy was never intended for ordinary minds? Yeah, I said that, didn’t I? But you probably think there is some difference between my saying it, and Crowley saying it.

OK. Check this out:

“[Ten of Swords-RUIN] shows reason run mad, ramshackle riot of soulless mechanism; it represents the logic of lunatics and (for the most part) of philosophers.”

And note that it is in this lunatic essay on the Ten of Swords that Crowley includes an important reminder: “10 is the key of the Naples Arrangement”.

OK, so maybe he is counting himself as one of those least-part sane philosophers, the kind that will endeavor to set ordinary intelligent minds straight about the amazing entanglements of Qabalistic philosophy. Sure, thats the ticket. And we even know where that ticket is taking us. Crowley just told us, didn’t he?

A place called Naples.

Next: The Naples Arrangement

(jk)