The Invisible War

Connecting Some New Dots

Now that I’ve finished re-reading Lords of the Left-Hand Path: Forbidden Practices & Spiritual Heresies, I’ve got some obligatory “housekeeping” to do. I’ve been “edified” regarding some past statements and speculations made here at Dark Twins and there is a need to update some of my views. The good news is that this is probably going to be the last time I have to do this…but I’ll knock on wood, just in case.

This is humbling for me (there’s that word again), but I probably needed that, to be honest. One of the main reasons for that is the simple fact that I have, in fact, read this book before…so there are likely a few points where some of my readers may have been scratching their heads, wondering: “What gives?” And this is where I get the opportunity to practice some self-forgiveness…because there are some understandable reasons for the confusion.

I was a very different person upon my first reading of the book, and given its subject matter, any study at all of its contents should probably be done carefully. I only understood it as well as I did the second time around because of everything else I have learned through study, practice, and interaction with others on the Left Hand Path in the intervening years. Some of the factors influencing the way I received the book the first time are funnier than others. I think I’ll start with the funnier ones.

Stephen Flowers did his homework in writing the book, it’s clear. He’s also uncompromising in a fair few of the views he expresses therein regarding the rigor, self-discipline, and inner strength required to walk the LHP. In those tender years, when I was still so new to all of this, such comments hit differently than they do now after all the work I’ve put in. I remember one line in particular, however, that hit me square in the Shadow and left a long-lasting impression. It basically gave me a complex for a while:

Ouspensky appears to have been one of those personality types—common among geniuses and “occultnik nincompoops” alike (though the two types should not be confused)—who can muster no motivation to learn and study things that do not interest them intensely at that very moment.

p. 278

The passage was such a punch in the gut because I knew damn well that at the time I first read it, it applied to me. I was living at the time with a local neopagan Priestess, whom I would go on to marry, and our entire lives were built around the occult. The condo was filled with books and shrines, with an entire bedroom serving as her dedicated temple space. We both practically ate, drank, slept, and breathed occultism. We had met as fellow members of our Co-Masonic lodge, and she knew me for my reputation as a speaker for The Theosophical Society. We were a definite pair of “occultnik nincompoops,” and I was honest enough with myself to know it.

I just chuckled when I read that passage again this time around. Why? Because of what I know now that I didn’t know the first time: The tongue-in-cheek reason that the term “occultnik nincompoop” was enclosed in quotation marks. I forget now where I picked this tidbit up even though it was fairly recently, but apparently, that is a term Stephen Flowers once used to describe himself—more precisely, the version of himself dating from the time before he joined Temple of Set. Actually, I need to be more precise: The term he applied to himself was “occultizoid nincompoop.” Perhaps because my own father was so hard on me about schoolwork and Dr. Flowers was clearly such an accomplished academic, I had projected my own “daddy issues” all over this book and that statement in particular, all without realizing it was probably written with a self-effacing chuckle of Dr. Flowers’ own.

Anyway, on the more serious side, there are some other reasons that certain key facts from this book failed to fully penetrate my consciousness the first time around. For one, I wasn’t sober at the time I first read it—a fact which, all by itself, says a lot about how reliable my recollection of it all could possibly be. Secondly, there was the matter of the general emotional and interpersonal climate at the time.

The prospect of reading a book like that, given my relationship with “The Priestess,” was fraught with complication. The general tenor of the situation says a lot about how stubbornly taboo the Left Hand Path remains, even in the wider context of occultism—which is just wild given the number of taboos people need to break to be studying the occult at all. It continually astounds me how persistent the elements of shame and scandal can be. There are layers and layers of belief, ideology, and resulting taboo surrounding true and comprehensive initiation, and one of my faults is how easy it is for me to forget that due to how comfortable I am on this territory myself.

At any rate, it’s rather ironic that my partner herself was the very person who told me about the book and even outwardly encouraged me to read it, because all the same, I knew I had to be very careful how I handled and discussed the ideas presented within it. Our entire relationship was an unhealthy sort of power struggle. When we first got together, as I mentioned, I’d had my reputation for my work as a Theosophical speaker and teacher, and she herself had basically been a household name for years in the Chicago-area Pagan community. She had a reputation to uphold, too. As I look back, my presence in her life involved walking a very careful tightrope at all times, because my knowledge and experience were valuable to her and she was sure to put them both to good use in her designs for us to rise as an influential “Pagan Power Couple,” as she used to put it; so it was well for me to put time and energy into esoteric studies insofar as that might contribute to “the plan.” However, she was also fiercely jealous and would not tolerate the idea of being upstaged. Whatever contributions I made to the picture, they had to ultimately support her image of herself as the “main event.” One of her favorite terms for me was her “help-meet.” I was to remain secondary in prominence.

This was a bit of a problem for one main reason: We each definitely had our respective strengths and weaknesses. She was a prodigious reader with a great mind for absorbing and retaining historical facts. As such, it was fairly easy for her to dazzle onlookers with monologues in which she could spew a flood of information about Pagan gods and goddesses—in whom she believed strongly. She took her role as a Priestess very seriously, so much so that she basically defined herself by it. She saw herself as a devoted servant of the gods. “Devout.”

I, on the other hand, wasn’t as spectacular at memorizing history. Instead, my strength had always been more “philosophical” in nature: I was very good at digesting and synthesizing ideas. I could work with them on-the-spot. Where she was a Priestess, I was always more a “magician,” with very different views surrounding the ontological status of the gods and goddesses—some of which views, I know all-too-well, she regarded as insolent and offensive (an expected response when I wasn’t fully convinced they were even real in any absolute sense, while she had devoted her life to them). The tradeoff here was that, as impressive as her knowledge base might have been, she was completely taken off-guard if a given conversation veered into territory where deep historical knowledge was no longer an asset and she might actually have to think on her feet. While she held a great library of static data, I could generally make a much more compelling argument for any given idea than she could, and I could do so on command. I could meet people at their level and work within their understanding of things to forge a fruitful dialogue with almost anyone, one which honored their subjective experience instead of relying on being able to vomit up facts.

It’s not that I really cared who made a bigger splash on the scene; that wasn’t the point. Rather, it was the fact that I often outshined her without particularly trying to, just by being myself…and if I stepped out of line, there tended to be consequences.

She felt deeply threatened by this. We simply disagreed on various philosophical principles which were dear to her heart and which formed important foundational parts of her entire identity. My ability to flippantly step outside of the ontological framework around which she had built her entire life was simply frightening to her…and it had occurred more than once that she was willing to attack me over it—verbally, socially, and on one occasion, physically.

The situation was not very conducive to a careful study of the Left Hand Path, given all that was at stake should my studies threaten once more to upset The Priestess’ apple cart.

So no, I didn’t…quite absorb it all the first time through. But alas, times have changed and my current situation is different. I’ve put in a lot of work since then, and received the message from the book much more clearly this time.

There’s a reason I’ve belabored the above that goes beyond rehashing personal drama. As the rest of this post unfolds, the relevance of the above will become more clear. It fits right into the main subject.

The Coming Peril

The main point I need to address by way of “mending fences” revolves around statements and speculations I made in the post Hermekate and Setamorphosis, which focuses upon the foundation and early years of Temple of Set.

In that post, I commented extensively upon the accounts and depictions in the book The Temple of Set Vol. II of the Temple’s activity in its first few years of existence, and I did so with an occasional tone of mockery.

As I discussed, when The Temple was first founded, Michael Aquino was especially preoccupied with a particular passage from The Book of Coming Forth By Night:

By its very design the Temple confronts two essential problems. The second problem is to identify, comprehend, and effect Setamorphosis. Solving this problem promises to be exciting, stimulating, and ultimately very rewarding. The first problem is to survive long enough to solve the second problem. And this task, unfortunately, may be tedious, depressing, and possibly dangerous.
Consider the following passage from The Book of Coming Forth By Night:

I seek my Elect and none other, for mankind now hastens toward an annihilation which none but the Elect may hope to avoid. And alone I cannot preserve my Elect, but I would teach them and strengthen their Will against the coming peril, that they and their blood may endure. To do this I must give further of my own Essence to my Elect, and, should they fail, the Majesty of Set shall fade and be ended.

The Temple of Set Vol. II
p. 153

In the early years of the Temple, this passage was taken both seriously and rather literally, with a great deal of the Temple’s energy being given over to the imperative suggested: That the Temple must, somehow, exist in order to spare The Elect from “the coming peril,” which at the time was largely interpreted as being related to a very real, literal kind of apocalyptic destruction—possibly related to social collapse and the environmental devastation wrought by man.

Given the trajectory upon which humanity finds itself to this very day, it wasn’t this notion in and of itself that I found so questionable as it was the sheer hubris of a group as small and “ad hoc” as Temple of Set in seriously believing they could appreciably influence such outcomes. Aquino was, at one point, giving serious thought to farfetched fantasies that, for example, the Temple might put its resources into developing sufficiently advanced space travel so as to physically whisk The Elect to another galaxy or something.

To be fair, I did pay lip service to the likelihood that this was simply a temporary early phase of the Temple’s work, and that they had since moved on to more realistic activities; but yes, given some of the “tension” I hold in relationship to the organization related to my erstwhile attempts to join, I did revel in the chance to take a few pot-shots when the opportunity presented itself. I’m sorry, but the way its members behaved in the old days (and, to some extent, still conduct themselves today) does make for kind of an easy target, and it’s all laid out right there in the book; the brand of arrogance that characterizes these early accounts is basically begging to be taken down a peg. There’s something to be said here about reaping as one sows and all that; besides, Aquino did write himself, somewhere in the same book, that people should be able to tolerate a bit of playful “lampooning” of their ideas and beliefs, so I did enjoy some “lampooning” of my own. If they’re really Set’s Elect, they can handle it, I’m sure. I was definitely punching up rather than down, let’s put it that way.

At any rate, this is something Dr. Flowers did address directly in Lords of the Left-Hand Path, and it just didn’t really sink in the first time I read it, probably for two reasons:

1. The intellectual hostility of the situation I described above, and

2. My general lack of familiarity at the time with The Temple itself; put simply, I wasn’t as interested in the particulars of its history the first time I read this book. I don’t think I had even put in my application yet. As such, a lot of the details regarding the organization’s history just weren’t all that relevant to me yet.

Flowers very clearly admits to the relatively “extreme” early direction of the Temple:

In the late 1970s, there was for a while even somewhat of a survivalist mentality among some members of the Temple as these words in The Book of Coming Forth By Night were taken more literally than they have been in more recent years. In his 1985 commentary on this passage in the text, Aquino wrote:

During the first several years of the Aeon, I was inclined to interpret the warning of this passage in terms of the general ecological crisis confronting the human race as a whole during the next century. While factors presaging that crisis remain, it is increasingly obvious that the Temple of Set is far too selective in scope and interests to be a significant factor in confronting it. It seems more probable that Set’s warning is meant to alert the Elect to the general fear which profane humans feel concerning Initiates of the Black Art, and in particular their tendency to search out scapegoats during times of stress, confusion, and crisis.

pp. 423-424

And to be fair, these latter words of Aquino are also reproduced in the very same book where the Setamorphosis letters and other documentation of the Temple’s early years are reprinted—but as I have confessed elsewhere in my writings, I feel deeply that my purpose and that of the Word of Hermekate are tied somehow to this same passage from The Book of Coming Forth By Night, and thus I can’t let it go.

Obviously I do see the truth in what Aquino stated—my own experiences with The Priestess are a living example of the “general fear which profane humans feel concerning Initiates of the Black Art, and in particular their tendency to search out scapegoats during times of stress, confusion, and crisis.” Even my own behavior has, at times, been an unfortunate example of the same (as has that of Aquino, of Anton LaVey, and many others on the Left Hand Path; while we may frequently be singled out and “scapegoated” because of our willingness to face the Mysteries of Darkness so boldly, we nonetheless tend toward a sort of defensiveness that can manifest in similar ways, as a result of that very reality—in other words, no one is perfect; Initiates of the Black Art are often attacked by the profane, and often times attack them and others pre-emptively).

However, I still think he missed the mark. I think there’s more to the picture, and it involves ideas with which Aquino was almost certain to be familiar—though with an understanding of his highly rational, regimented, and generally skeptical mindset, I can see why he would not have connected all of these dots in quite the same way I am.

My theories surrounding this were already developing when I first wrote Hermekate and Setamorphosis, though I did not express them openly. Further, I can connect the ideas I held to a section from the previous chapter in Lords of The Left Hand Path, which covered Anton LaVey and The Church of Satan. That section is the one describing LaVey’s concept of “The Invisible War:”

For LaVey, society with its conformist norms acts as a great obstacle against which the Satanic will resists and asserts its nonconformity. This resistance of the Satanic will is painful but also gainful, for without the resistance, the Satanist would be awash in undifferentiated possibilities. Resistance leads to strength. This is not a benign relationship, either: the conformist world is seen as a great adversary bent on the destruction of the alien, the Satanist—and so there is now underway a great Invisible War.

The Invisible War was first mentioned by name in a 1986 issue of The Cloven Hoof, although it had really been an underlying theme from the beginning of the Church of Satan. In this first discussion of the subject, LaVey is somewhat vague in describing the parameters of the war, although he states that it is “highly sophisticated, breaking down normal mental and physiological functions until malaise, incompetence, or destruction befalls most individuals.”

The purpose of this war is the “containment and control” of individuals. Weapons used in this war (which is also called World War III) include weather control, viral and bacterial diseases, ultra- and subsonic technologies, television, chemicals in food and beverages, psychological smokescreens (diversions and misdirections from the true conflict), the extended weekend (time to consume and be further indoctrinated), and urban warfare (real violence induced mainly through drugs).

It is an “invisible war” because the enemies are not obvious, perhaps even to themselves. Whenever confronted with one of the offensive weapons used in the “war,” the fastest way to identify the enemies is to ask the question “Who gains?” This question usually renders some specific answers. But the true enemy lurks even deeper. The agents of the enemy—actual people undertaking actions to the benefit of the enemy’s agents—keep the secret even from themselves. “They can’t even be honest with themselves—so keeping certain secrets is easy. If it means losing money unless they keep their customers believing particular things, people will keep their mouths shut. If it means being hated and rejected for what the secret hides, then it’s easy.”

pp. 346-347

Now we’re getting somewhere. As my more consistent readers know, I’ve been writing a lot about a “spiritual war” lately, and it is probably easy to guess that after refreshing my memory about this passage of Lords of the Left-Hand Path, I think Anton LaVey and I have seen the same war—the war I’ve been referring to is one and the same with this one. However, owing to certain differences of philosophy, I am also sure that I see this war in a different light from LaVey.

I think a lot of people have seen this “war” coming, and that its true nature is more sophisticated than any one of us fully realizes.

To start with, while I don’t exactly disagree with LaVey’s perspective on the war, I think his is somewhat simplistic. It would appear from the above passage—and would also align very well with the rest of his ideas—that LaVey saw the war in black-and-white terms of the individual (and in particular what he would describe as “The Satanic individual”) vs. society. One of my main critiques of Satanism is how simplistic it is in this regard: Its notion of antinomianism is too diametrically “adversarial,” based on grasping toward whatever the perceived “opposite” of one’s understanding of social conformity tends to demand. It’s an orientation that I honestly feel reflects the likelihood that LaVey was largely stuck at an adolescent level of development for most of his life: It doesn’t amount to a whole lot more than emotionally-driven, blind “teenage rebellion.” Its main weakness is that if you’re basing your attitudes on directly opposing the dominant norms around you, you’re still basically being controlled by your environment rather than exercising anything like deeply authentic self-determination. LaVey was clearly conservative in many of his inclinations and this is a perfect example of that: This orientation is purely reactionary, and that only feels empowering. It’s not, though.

His view of “the invisible war” reflects this: The “enemy” is thus seen as some rather vague and inchoate shadow of society-at-large, and since this is juxtaposed against an equally vague notion of “the individual,” one is ultimately cut off from any comprehensive and lasting allegiances in the war: It’s essentially every man for himself. In such circumstances, “the enemy” is bound to win. This view is not an effective one if there is any hope of securing any kind of meaningful victory in said “war.”

That being said, some of his notions about “the enemy” are nonetheless fairly insightful; it can indeed be difficult to clearly define “the enemy” because, as was masterfully explained by Dr. Flowers in the passage above, “the true enemy lurks even deeper.” The enemy lives within us, in many of our own limiting attitudes (in LaVey’s case, this included the ones I called out above: His relatively undeveloped notion of Self built around something like simple “teenage rebellion”), in our dependence on disempowering economic and political paradigms and the doctrines we’ve had to internalize just to get by, etc. “The enemy” is insidious and attacks us on many fronts; however, we can still do better than LaVey in establishing a better definition of “the enemy.”

I bag on LaVey a bit, but despite his stunted level of personal development, it’s not like he was completely without some valuable insights into himself. One of those that I came to better appreciate after this reading of Lords of the Left-Hand Path involved his theories surrounding sadomasochism, which go a long way toward furthering the understanding of the ways in which “the enemy” dwells within us: In a certain sense, one of our main obstacles on the Left Hand Path can be how some of us are masochistically attached to the realities of our personal slavery: This can be one of the main things that maintains a person’s religious devotion and unwillingness to dare transcending it, for example. This can be reflected in our relationship to power itself: Some people spend all their time railing against power structures while doing nothing at all to reinforce their own empowerment because deep down inside, they’ve grown to resent the very concept of power itself—and are thus complicit in leaving power on the table that has always been theirs to claim. This sort of dynamic is one of the major fronts of The Invisible War.

Anyhow, LaVey’s attitudes about Aleister Crowley likely prevented him from understanding many of the forces involved in The Invisible War. As Flowers reports, “Although LaVey viewed Crowley as a deluded, drug-addicted adventurer, he admired ‘the world’s wickedest man’ for having lived a full life.” LaVey’s no-nonsense, pragmatic attitude had its definite benefits, but as a result, it seems he was all-too-happy to dismiss Crowley’s ideas about The Aeons—much to his detriment, because they provide a fairly valuable lens for understanding the nature of The Invisible War. For starters, such a model makes it clearer than LaVey’s own model that there are almost certainly more than the two main sides of “individual” and “society” in this war: There is more than one enemy. There are instead many warring factions, and one way of delineating those factions would be to understand the Aeons and how they fit together. While it’s questionable how literally the model should be taken (I think many dedicated Thelemites also miss the mark by taking the model too literally, and also by adhering too strongly to the more “linear” view of the Aeons that sees them as successive ages), a basic understanding of each Aeon on its own merit and in comparison with the others can help one get a better grasp of humanity’s current situation.

Most particularly, it helps to understand the implications of The Aeon of Horus—especially since Horus was a neter of war. In other words, Crowley predicted The Invisible War long before LaVey was even born.

The Invisible War itself is but one frame of reference—more a “consequence” than a “cause” of the current tumultuous stage of development through which humankind is now passing—but to make a long story short, I think on a broader level, The Invisible War is itself “the coming peril” that Set warned us about in The Book of Coming Forth By Night.

Since Set is conceptualized in Michael Aquino’s view as the neter of isolate intelligence, as being akin to the very Platonic “First Principle” of the separate, individual self, and the giver to humanity of its Gift of The Black Flame, our self-illuminating intelligence—it stands to reason that the “peril” is not necessarily a physical one at all, but a mental one.

I think of the dulling and stupefying effect of our very own information technologies as manifestations of this peril: We remember less and less because we have ceded our powers of memory to Google—for we can run a simple search for whatever information we might need. In so doing, we’ve given over an important aspect of our intelligence and sapience to “the enemies” in The Invisible War. Likewise, the more time we spend on social media, the more our own thoughts and attitudes are shaped by the echo chambers we’re living in and the algorithms that shape them. Unless an intentional resistance is put up—unless we recognize the more negative aspects of our relationship with information technology as the detrimental phenomena that they are—we stand to witness the very snuffing out of The Black Flame itself.

That’s “the coming peril,” and it’s here already.

The Invisible War and its related phenomena that define the current, postmodern form of the human condition have been foreseen by many; in my recent post On Second Thought, I discussed the ideas of Karl Marx and Friedrich Nietzsche alike—and I think that both of them saw The Invisible War and its potential outcomes, each in their own way. I think that in his theory of the Übermensch, Nietzsche may have been perceiving the same thing Michael Aquino called “Setamorphosis,” and that Nema called “N’Aton;” likewise, I think Karl Marx was seeing something very much akin to Crowley’s model of The Aeons in his model of history, and that his own vision of a communist utopia was a reflection of how the potential “telos” of that history appeared to him. I think that Marx, Crowley, Nietzsche, Nema, LaVey, Aquino, and many others have all been examining essentially the same phenomenon (or, more accurately, noumenon)—each of them perceiving their own uniquely comprehensible facet of the same—and expressing it in dramatically diverse ways.

I believe The Invisible War is what we must succeed in passing through in order to learn where history has been leading us all this time.

In the post The Rising Tide, I described the Word of Hermekate as a “weapon” in this self-same war, and now I have outlined just what that means: Hermekate, properly understood, has the potential to “nuke” the battlefield and to turn the tide in our favor. The key will be in meticulously developing a rich and well-informed synthesis of all of the ideas above.

Such will be the main focus of my Task in the times to come.