Turning Things Around: The Inner Tarot Revolution Chapter 34
Will Under Love
Things are heating up in the Inner Tarot Revolution series; as this is week 34 of 39, my desire to finish the series and move into a new phase of work swells with each passing week. I was in a completely different state, both geographically and psychologically, when I began this series, but due to the nature of the working, it heavily occupies my mind. Going back to the first post in the series (for which I have removed the paywall), you can see the methodology, which I came up with quite spontaneously on the morning of February 8th, 2023 and have been steadily working through ever since. In summary, I shuffled one of my Thoth tarot decks (I have two sets), split the deck in two, called one stack my “Sun Stack,” and one stack my “Shadow Stack.” The basic concept was that the cards in the Sun Stack would represent aspects of my conscious self, the person I openly consider myself to be and the parts of me that I gladly present to others. The cards in the Shadow Stack would represent aspects of my shadow self, or the side of myself that I try to keep buried or hidden from both myself and others. Although it breaks from the traditional format described by Michael Aquino in the book The Temple of Set Vol. I, there is a sense in which I consider this to be a working of Greater Black Magic(k) (GBM), because the aim is self-transformation on a very deep spiritual and psychological level. However, by doing this working openly and transparently—by writing about it and documenting it here, as well as gradually incorporating wider transpersonal themes including the expression of my ideas connected with the Word of Hermekate—it is also GBM on a more “global,” transpersonal level. Somewhere in his writings (I believe it was in the book Overthrowing the Old Gods: Aleister Crowley and the Book of the Law, but may be mistaken) Don Webb describes the essential Task of the Magus and the utterance of their Word to be, in essence, just such an act of “collective GBM.”
A quick note of clarification regarding the linkage of such a working to something as “ephemeral,” random, and external as a tarot card shuffle (which is one of the major deviations from what someone like Michael Aquino would consider to be GBM—magic(k) which aims to work, as much as possible, directly with the raw material of the Self): This is not necessarily a superstitious matter of forcing the self to conform to the turn of the cards. Quite to the contrary, one of the subtler and more hidden aspects of the working was my simple curiosity to see how the cards happened to fall, and by and large, I’ve been impressed with the consistency of some of the patterns; in one sense, I have been “testing” the linkage between my Subjective Universe and the Objective Universe to see how one is effecting the other. At any rate, making oneself “fit” with the cards is not the point. As in pretty much any tarot reading, the idea is really to use the cards more as a backdrop or jumping-off-point to stimulate inner reflection. There have been times when I really didn’t feel my cards fit me, and I have noted that. I say this for the benefit of anyone else who might want to try doing this working themselves (I am pondering a book that will include a chapter with more specific instructions surrounding it, gleaned from my experiences in conducting this little “experiment”).
Despite this, I have often been rather impressed at how closely events in my life and in the external world seem to have been following the activity of this working. Does this mean my magic(k) is influencing the events? Well, that’s a time-worn question that applies to all magic(k); of course, it’s possible and even likely that the deeper nature of this working and its importance in my own psyche means that I am simply bound to interpret all outer events through this lens—and that is, in fact, one of the reasons I am itching to finish the working. It’s been over a year now, and I would very much like to “clear my inner slate” of its influence, which is growing heavier.
That being said, one of the interesting patterns I’ve noticed of late—ever since I included a link to a discussion between Jason Louv and Damien Echols on Louv’s Magick.me YouTube channel, back in the post Honor Among Thieves—has been that Louv seems to discuss things as he releases new videos that overlap with stuff I’ve just addressed in Inner Tarot Revolution. Back when I started this series, I would have still regarded it as downright spooky, but now I just roll with it.
I won’t go through an exhaustive list, but I will discuss the most recent instance, because it’s rather important.
In my last two posts, I have “played with fire” by mentioning Julius Evola and his ideas, in a light other than firm and outright condemnation—which is very much a no-no as far as left-leaning “occulture” is concerned. This has run in tandem with my increasing discussion about a magic(k)al war (addressed by Egil Asprem in The Magical Theory of Politics). To some readers, it might look like I am trying pretty hard not to take sides in that division, and that fact in and of itself might be very worrisome because the dividing line here seems to be pretty unequivocally related to one’s relative tolerance of fascism, or at least the ideologies that almost inevitably feed into it. I plan to spend much of this post addressing that. True to the above-mentioned pattern, on April 12th—3 days after my most recent post, which, along with the one before it, referenced Evola—Louv released the following video. In it, he very specifically mentions occultists who “flirt” with Evola’s ideas, firmly denounces them as dangerous, and states that doing so is reckless.
The stance Louv takes in this video is clear, and just as polarized as the wider political climate in the United States (which, since we have a stubbornly two-party system despite the stentorian efforts of many to get third parties off the ground, is also probably the most sensible stance to take from a political standpoint): He says we are at a critical decision point between a “new Dark Age” of theocratic oppression on the one hand, or an idyllic enlightened age ruled by the principles of reason and science on the other hand.
I can’t say that I think he’s exactly “wrong” here; but I also think it’s possible (and even likely) that by taking that stance, he might be missing the same thing quite a few other people are missing: Any sort of potential “third option.” Again, he’s only following the same sharp political divide that the rest of the country (and indeed, most of the world) is caught up in, and given the size of his audience, it makes sense that he’d adhere so closely to social convention. If he fucks around too much with the “twilight” realm, as he describes the social fringes of occultism itself in this video, he might lose much of his social currency and thus much of his audience, and that will hurt his platform. He’s got a hard balancing act to pull off where he’s talking about very obscure, borderline woo-woo topics (it’s literally a channel about magic(k)), and this is not the only place where he seems to play it relatively safe by making a concerted effort to err on the side of popular opinion. If you watch several of his videos, you can see it’s a pattern: He gets visibly nervous when making any kind of statement that fully indulges the magic(k)al worldview, begins to stutter a bit, and basically wavers between openly admitting that magic(k) is real on the one hand and sort of hedging his bets toward a stance that it’s mostly inner mind games on the other hand. Again, I see why he does it. He wouldn’t be anywhere near as successful as he is if he didn’t, and its also a good way to keep people safe, because as I know all too well myself: In the realm of magic(k) shit gets weird fast, and it can be easier than many think to go off the deep end.
But I digress.
When it comes to the politics he’s addressing, it’s not just about retaining his audience or protecting his business, either: I know very well that it’s dangerous to give fascism any quarter at all, in the main because if you give fascists an inch, they will take a mile. They will infiltrate and subvert just about any movement—it’s a major part of how they operate. Did you ever think you’d see the day you had to be careful about your leftism because it might cater to fascists? No? Check this out: The “Feminist to Far-Right Pipeline” is a thing:
Everyone has to be cautious these days (though I would point out that this highlights something else: Since Nazis will hide just about anywhere they can and subvert any movement they can, I think this also makes the strongest case possible against the kind of cancel culture that takes any movement they’ve touched off the table of respectable public discourse…because doing so misses the point that no matter what, we need to be very vigilant that we retain a sense of nuance in order to fully protect freedom).
I mean, what the fuck are you gonna do now? Cancel feminism “because Nazis?” Get real, kids.
No, this tells us in the clearest terms possible that cancel culture is not the right approach. We need to be a lot smarter about this.
At this point, I need to be clear about another thing:
I have yet to read anything by Evola. So why do I talk about him at all? I’ll explain why, and why it is that I’ve secured a copy (without paying for it) of Ride The Tiger so I can see for myself what it holds (although I’ve also recently taken in the viewpoints of experienced occultists who advise that one not even waste the time, such as this post entitled No, Evola is not a good source to learn about Hermeticism. Or anything. Stop asking. at the blog The Digital Ambler). It’s story time again!
Back in 2020, a Facebook page started showing up in my News Feed, and I started following it because I dug its aesthetic. It was called Nuclear Dharma and it featured syncretic artwork of stuff like many-armed Buddhas with AK-47s, which I thought was a pretty cool aesthetic because it seemed to incorporate themes of revolutionary spirituality, which is definitely my thing, I don’t know if you’ve noticed.
After a while, I was poking around more closely at the page, and I saw that there was a group attached to it about Archaeofuturism, which was something I hadn’t heard of before. However, based on the artwork I was seeing, I caught a whiff of something—again, it was mostly aesthetic at first, but it spoke to something deeper—that, at that point, I really liked. The general theme here seemed to be a worldview that synthesized different elements of modernism with a more traditional, archaic take on things.
I have to stress that I actually don’t spend a whole lot of time in the deeper levels of online esoteric culture, and at that point I had never really heard of Traditionalism either, so was also very naive about its common connections with fascist ideology. All I knew at the time was that these people seemed to hold a vision of a world that took the best of what the modern world has to offer, including various technologies, but also thirsted for some of the splendor and spirituality of the classical world to play a more prominent role in society. COVID was happening, disinformation was proliferating rapidly throughout our modern information systems and tech-based social networks, it was fucking with our elections and bringing out the worst in a lot of people, the oceans were filling with garbage, the climate was warming up due to our modern capitalist disregard for deeper meaning and anything other than profit margins, and yes: There was something very attractive about the idea of slowing things down, maybe having a deeper and more intentional relationship with our technology, and, as an esotericist, I certainly wouldn’t mind a society that was more open to embracing a basically Pagan-ish worldview, either (so long as we could also keep the freedoms that rationalism and modernism have won us). But that’s just me, I guess.
I was also vehemently arguing against fascism online, and without knowing how closely-adjacent all of this stuff I was seeing was to the far right, it seemed to have a real appeal to some of my deeper values.
I joined the group, and noted that one of the very few questions for new members was: “What is your ideology?” Looking back, I definitely outed myself when I answered that particular question by providing a link to the post I had just published on my blog, Hermekate: Dialectics of Transformation in an Apocalyptic Age, which expressed some clear, anti-Trump and thus left-leaning opinions. Looking back, I also see in that post many of the roots of where I would come to see the Word of Hermekate as being headed.
They let me in, and I was approached by some mods who seemed really hesitant to say some things out loud. Their language in referring me to the main text around which the group was based—Archaeofuturism by Guilliame Faye—was extremely vague. As I scrolled through the posts in the group, I was absolutely loving some of the artwork I was seeing.
But then I started seeing the swastikas. And this is taking into account the context of the photos, of course. They were those swastikas.
This group was how I first learned about accelerationism. I had fallen right into the middle of a nest of new-age Nazis, and I had put myself squarely on their radar by flaunting my “ideology” to them in the form of my post.
I left the group very quickly, along with the friend I had brought along to show it to. I emailed some people I trusted about it, who confirmed to me that the people running the group were “intelligent Nazis.”
I wasn’t sure what to do. To be honest, when I first stumbled across the group, one of the reasons I was so into it was because what they were about actually seemed to hold a lot of resonance with the Word of Hermekate, which stresses, among other things, a particular approach to synthesizing East and West, but also carries overtones of synthesizing modernity with aspects of the classical world.
Shortly after that, I began slanting the Hermekate Facebook page toward openly opposing these kinds of fascist occultists, while simultaneously upholding the better aspects of classical philosophy, eagerly supporting groups and pages themed around figures like Hypatia. This was when—and how—I first began presenting Hermekate as a “weapon” against the fascist elements in the magic(k)al war alluded to by Egil Asprem in The Magical Theory of Politics. I was, at one point, very open and enthusiastic about it—after all, those people already knew who I was. If anyone wanted to come after me over it, I already had a target on my back. I might as well run with it, right?
It was in the wake of all of this that I first learned about Julius Evola, and his book Ride The Tiger, as well as Revolt Against the Modern World. I definitely didn’t agree with any Nazis, but a few of the more basic principles spoken of with regard to Evola seemed relevant and potentially applicable even to my own perspectives. Furthermore, I saw certain people I was sure I could trust who—very carefully, I’ll add—said there was something to his vision that made sense, even if one had to be very delicate in apprehending and applying it so as to avoid his fascist tendencies. I didn’t see these people as embodying fascism, and this initially confused me because of all of the warnings I had since heard about Evola’s work.
I couldn’t disagree with the people I knew who seemed at least partially receptive to some of Evola’s views, because even as a staunch leftist in most senses, I nonetheless found myself initially intrigued by certain elements of these groups I was seeing. Were people engaging in a bit of scaremongering around Evola? Honestly, given this disconnect, I felt more intrigued than anything else—because, as much as I generally agree with the left, I think a lot of them take certain things to extremes, and the tendency toward blind groupthink can thrive on the left as well. It doesn’t as a rule, but it can. As an occultist, I was used to privately holding more nuanced views than most of the people around me, so there didn’t seem to be any reason to stop now.
As the years have worn on, the political polarization has only increased, and it is largely for that reason that I’ve put such notions on the back burner—because I was also caught up in a lot of my own shit, including alcoholism, and if I was going to fuck around in this territory at all, I really needed my wits about me because Jason Louv is correct that the far right is playing for keeps. People get hurt and even killed over this cultural war, of which the magic(k)al war is merely one facet.
But I also have to believe that if some elements of this apparently right-wing accelerationist ideology were appealing to me before I realized there was fascism underneath it…I couldn’t be the only one who shared some of these sympathies.
As I know now, if Nazis can infiltrate movements like feminism, health and wellness, and even hippie psychedelia (see Swallowing the Psychedelic Red Pill at Double Blind), the approach to fighting the advances of fascism cannot rely on cancel culture. To cancel everything they get their hands on is not to resist them at all, but to give in to them and let them have the things they seek to take from us. What we need to do instead is make like the punks, and get them out of our spaces. However, since many occultists hold aspects of the traditional or classical world dear, this supports the case that merely sweeping Evola under the rug is insufficient. Traditionalism doesn’t need to be radicalized toward fascism any more than punk rock does.
In the esoteric community, what this means is that it’s not enough to just tell everyone, “Don’t read Evola, find something better to do.” Let’s face it: As occultists, a lot of us are only encouraged and made more curious when someone tells us that a certain body of work is forbidden in “polite society.” That just makes it all the more attractive to certain kinds of inquiring minds. When we draw these kinds of hard and fast lines around certain literature, a subculture (and, for most if its history, a counterculture) like ours is basically saying, “If you want to engage with that material at all, we’re going to treat you like a Nazi,” and by doing so, we may actually be actively pushing many people directly into the hands of the right, because the right will use such censorious approaches of the left to appeal to vulnerable people, and the right will welcome them where the left rejects them.
How many have the left soured in this way, thus transforming potential allies into opponents?
Rather, I think we need to do just the opposite: We need to engage in the hard work of understanding what appeal aside from the fascism that writers like Evola hold, because the reason his name just won’t go away is because there’s something attractive there. Sure, he might have been a poor excuse for an occultist who only dabbled for a few years—great. I don’t think his occult work is the only reason occultists read him. We need to look beyond his “mere” value as an occultist. There’s something more to this.
The modern world leaves a lot to be desired to someone with esoteric tastes. Many of us love classical texts, from alchemical manuscripts to grimoires. The modern world offers us a lot that is lovely and fun and beneficial—there are brighter sides to advanced communication technologies and other modern conveniences (when properly leveraged), to the advances in freedom that the modern world offers us, to the bounty offered by science. That being said, if we succeed in wiping ourselves out due to some of our modern excesses, the legacy of the modern world will carry on for millennia—for all the wrong reasons. Ancient Egypt left a legacy based on amazing monumental stoneworks, whereas we will leave behind a legacy of toxic plastic pollution that will persist for millions of years.
I’ve spoken about my dissatisfaction with atheism, but I want to be clear that I am not the kind of person who actively opposes it, nor am I the kind of person who thinks people need religion in order to live ethical and meaningful lives. Far from it. In fact, I remember back in the days when I worked for The Theosophical Society in America, an annual, multi-faith holiday celebration would be held at the Olcott Center, its National Headquarters; people of all different faiths would be invited to come and take their turn at the podium, offering a prayer representing their own faith or religious tradition. Every year, a local atheist named Ted would come and offer a secular prayer, and they’d let him do it—but certain leaders in the organization would sit in the audience rolling their eyes, and make fun of him behind his back. I never understood this. I get that Blavatsky took a very hard-line stance against atheism, but the Theosophical Society prided itself, via its very own Second Object, on encouraging “the comparative study of religion, philosophy, and science”—so let the atheist speak, and be mature about it. I fully recognize, as Louv expressed so passionately in his video, that all of the advances toward equality that we presently enjoy are a direct result of widely embracing rational discourse and scientific inquiry. I also don’t want to see theocrats step in and put a stop to that, by any means.
However, I also recognize that there’s another reason, aside from its vast stone architecture, that Egypt left such a strong impression on the world that we still continue many of its traditions, even if we’ve given them a new secular gloss:
Its spiritual and philosophical traditions.
The enshrining of the principle of ma’at is one of the major reasons Egypt endured for thousands of years. Likewise, our modern rejection of such a “backward” notion in favor of blind, materialistic excess may just be the reason we’re on the verge of destroying ourselves on multiple fronts. The Egyptian worldview, if nothing else, produced a fairly stable civilization.
So, while I agree that there is a lot at stake and the situation is tense, I do not believe our only two options lay in catering to one extreme—the emphatically secular and materialistic—over the other, the religious and theocratic. I believe there is room for a synthesis that infuses our bleak modern world with enduring values we’re presently ignoring because of our insistence on such extreme rationalism, and that this is likely what many people who end up embracing imbalanced religiosity are truly craving—because the modern world hasn’t found a more widely-accepted way of making room for the deeper spiritual urges that drive many human beings.
I believe Jason Louv is pulling many of his punches when it comes to openly acknowledging this—it’s so very clear in his subtler body language and oratory tics—largely out of fear of what might happen if he lends the religious aspects of life and magic(k) too much credibility. It may be true that the modern, secular, liberal worldview is responsible for the lion’s share of our social progress, and that the same worldview is also the reason individuals are allowed to follow their own faithful outlooks if they choose, but the fact that materialism has been institutionalized as a worldview is still one of the reasons that, left or right, our world tends to be ruled by the almighty dollar. We have yet to succeed in placing anything of deeper value above money in importance on a collective level. It doesn’t need to be God—but we need to be open to something deeper.
I believe there is room for a different way of life that avoids the extremes of either dogmatic religiosity or bleak, postmodern capitalism driven by exclusive rationalism—and I believe that if not now, then some day, collectivizing such an alternative will be a viable and balanced option. However, it will never happen if we don’t remain open to it, starting now.
Thus, I am happy to once more begin expressing out loud that I submit Hermekate as “the anti-Evola,” as an anti-fascist answer to the modern ennui Evola does rightly address. His particular treatment, rooted in fascist ideology, may be wrong, but the reason his ideology continues to capture the hearts of esotericists is because no one is widely dignifying the more valid aspects of his spiritual critique of modernism. People are scared shitless of experimenting enough to find that middle way. People might even be completely stumped as to how to formulate one, because human nature seems inherently imbalanced in such a way that if we give religion any quarter, people tend to drag it down to a fundamentalist level…but that is silly because if anything, the existence of modern esotericists is proof that some people can handle it.
I don’t think we succeed by summarily shutting out everything that a Traditionalist perspective offers us. Extreme approaches are not serving us. We need to grapple with this in order to solve these divisions because the deeper spiritual thirst of humanity is being ignored. People are being pushed to the right because the left isn’t offering people a satisfying space to quench that thirst.
Maybe we really do need to “ride the tiger,” but without the fascist trappings. Maybe the way to inoculating our communities from fascists is to stop shutting that prerogative out entirely. Maybe it behooves us to get deeper and more sophisticated about how we approach this, instead of less sophisticated. And maybe that begins with understanding where things are going wrong.
Maybe it involves approaching the subject with love instead of fear.
Let’s do cards.
Top/Sun Card
The Sun Card for this chapter is Two of Cups, and it follows from last week’s Sun Card of Two of Wands in quite the complementary way. As I explored in Chapter 33, the Two of Wands represents “ideal Will,” and it could thus be said that this card represents “ideal Love.” That pattern does seem to embody “Love Under Will,” doesn’t it? However, as I quipped in Basic Elements of Hermekate: Part 3, I have often connected the Word of Hermekate with the contrasting principle of “Will Under Love.”
It’s interesting how the divinatory meaning of the Two of Cups is overwhelmingly interpreted as portending romantic love—depicting, as it does, a man and a woman facing one another and smiling, holding out their cups as if to prepare to embrace one another. I’ve even had the card seemingly signify something similar; I remember pulling it just before departing for a Tool concert I was attending alone, wondering how on earth it might come true, and then being seated next to a gal with whom I wound up spending the next few weeks in bed.
However, if you strictly apply the Qabalistic formula for understanding the card—which, as a Two, places the card in the Sephirah of Chokmah, very high up on the Tree of Life and immediately following the Ace, which is completely unmanifest—you get a completely different picture. As “ideal Love,” what we’re talking about here is a highly abstract principle, a much more universal kind of love. It is much more likely pointing to something like ἀγάπη (agape) than ἔρως (eros). For more about different kinds of love, see the article 8 Greek Words For Love That Will Make Your Heart Soar at Dictionary.com.
From a purely Thelemic standpoint, I am sure, the notion of inverting the traditional statement of “Love is the Law, Love Under Will” to “Will is the Law, Will Under Love” probably seems silly, a bit pedestrian, and somewhat superficial. After all, while the Two of Wands and Two of Cups are basically equal in their placement in the second Sephirah of Chokmah, in terms of the traditional Qabalistic order of the emanation of the four elements, fire comes first and is thus “higher” and more “spiritual” than water. As such, it would break with that tradition to place Will under Love.
But honestly, for a group of people who slavishly say that same phrase—”Love is the Law, Love Under Will”—to close virtually any and all Thelemic communications—maybe there’s room to poke fun at how seriously such a practice seems to take itself. It’s kind of culty, no? And if we’re supposed to “Do What Thou Wilt,” and my Will is to switch it up, that’s what I should do, isn’t it?
Are there any deeper mysteries to be discovered by doing so?
I dunno. Honestly, it just seems to me that, yes, even if on a very superficial level, sometimes Love is more important than Will. Sometimes we don’t subject our Will sufficiently to the principle of Love. I honestly feel this way much of the time: That the emphasis on putting Will first often results in shaping some pretty stodgy, anal-retentive magicians who might be a little too focused on controlling things that maybe they can’t really control.
And frankly, when it comes to the philosophy of Julius Evola (which, again, I still haven’t even read myself, except for the opening pages of my bootleg copy of Ride The Tiger), this might be a good starting point for recognizing the areas (even if they are few and far between) where he just may have been onto something in critiquing the modern world: It seems to me, from the scattered quotes and secondhand commentaries of his work that I’ve taken in, that he would definitely put the principle of Will above the principle of Love. Maybe rooting out the fascist elements of his ideology and synthesizing something more workable from whatever is left would rely heavily upon putting Love first in importance: Coming from a place of love, rather than the place of fear that not only seems to embody his work, but also our reactions to it.
Of course, you have to keep in mind that I say this as someone who was assigned Mein Kampf to read in 8th grade—not to promote it, but precisely to discuss, in my social studies class, where it went wrong. Why? Because, much like it seems Evola and all other fascists do, the relative success of Mein Kampf’s ideology started from the valid points it did make, from the concerns that truly did resonate with the public to which it was presented. Fascists are always sneaking nasty pills into tasty biscuits that way.
Nonetheless, I see the prevalence of fear as the tensions escalate between left and right as a bad thing. To return to Louv’s fairly polarized examination of where we’re headed, I noticed that while he was very busy speaking out against theocracy, he took blatant pains to specifically avoid directly dealing with the subject of Palestine—he literally said so out loud. I notice many well-known figures are doing the same, simply avoiding the subject altogether…and I strongly suspect it’s not simply because it’s heated and controversial, but that it’s controversial in such a way that people are afraid to be outspoken about it because they’re that terrified of fomenting antisemitism, or at the very least, of being accused of it:
Withholding criticism of a religious ethnostate that, by all objective measures, is engaging in genocidal behavior, all because that nation stands for a people who still face widespread hatred. Because Nazis are indeed invested in conflating Zionism with Judaism as a whole and seizing upon this opportunity to advance their hateful agenda, people who would otherwise vocally oppose genocide refuse to voice a view critical of Israel. Because, I suspect, they also know exactly where their hearts truly lay, they also shy away from voicing support for Israel, either. Instead they remain silent. They are that scared of inadvertently adding steam to fascist, antisemitic efforts.
My friends, when the Nazis have us that tongue-tied, they’re already controlling the narrative. It means they’re already winning.
And in Jason Louv’s case, again—I get it, this channel is his bread and butter, so he won’t take the more controversial and nuanced view. Nonetheless, there you have it: Even in his own case, as a leading figure in our community, it’s fear winning over love.
In The Book of Thoth, Crowley describes the kind of love represented by the Two of Cups, and it largely supports the perspective I began expressing above:
This card might really be named the Lord of Love Under Will for that is its full and true meaning. It shows the harmony of the male and female: interpreted in the largest sense. It is perfect and placid harmony, radiating an intensity of joy and ecstasy.
p. 196
As Crowley taught, Love that radiates from as high a level as this is a kind of love that undergirds and permeates the entire universe. It may show the harmony of male and female, but not merely those two facets of reality: The deeper meaning of this is that it’s a love that shows the farther-reaching (sometimes less obvious) harmony between all opposite principles. Love in its “full and true meaning” is a love so lofty and deeply universal that perhaps even agape is too sentimental to capture it. This would be a love that runs so deep that, to be frank, it would not favor particular individuals, or particular groups of people, or particular ideologies, or particular nations; it’s a love that runs so deep, it sometimes disguises itself as conflict. It is a love for all things, including both predators and prey. It makes me think of a line from The Book of the Law that I have quoted before:
Invoke me under my stars! Love is the law, love under will. Nor let the fools mistake love; for there are love and love. There is the dove, and there is the serpent. Choose ye well! He, my prophet, hath chosen, knowing the law of the fortress, and the great mystery of the House of God.
I:57
We can take two separate, yet co-existing truths from this passage:
The true scope of love is deep and vast, deep enough that it defies all human efforts at classification and categorization. It covers everyone and everything, and suggests that at higher, more universal levels, love operates in ways so mysterious that outer appearances of conflict and even such things as bloodshed are part of the deeper ways in which this love is expressed.
Nonetheless, we are pressed: Choose ye well! We must choose between the dove and the serpent—between the symbol of peace and love, and the symbol of vital, but predatory force.
I understand why people choose what they choose, and why Louv advocates what he did in his video: Given the choice between the two alternatives he presents, I would choose the same side he chose.
However, once more: I smell a great deal of fear (even though mixed with love) behind the simplistic view that we really have to choose one or the other. I think Louv offers us a false dichotomy. Serpents and doves both exist in this world.
There are also winged serpents, as we learn from the example of Quetzalcoatl.
That being said, I have to believe that “the love of the dove” is powerful enough to produce a path for humanity that gives way neither to empty materialism, nor to belligerent, power-mad, fundamentalist religion—and that those who are willing to spare the intellectual effort to lean into such inquiry need not restrict themselves to such a narrow dichotomy.
I trust that love can see such a process through without letting hatred win. The Word of Hermekate is founded on this ideal, regardless of what the cowardly might believe.
Gerd Ziegler affirms such a universal view of love in his chapter about the Two of Cups in Tarot: Mirror of the Soul: Handbook for the Aleister Crowley Tarot:
The water is still and the sky clear and blue. Deep joy (yellow) flows into the emotions (water) and the energy of renewal (green) permeates them (compare Two of Swords). Thoughts are free and clear (blue sky). Seen through the eyes of love, the world appears transformed.
p. 119
Shadow Card
This chapter felt a bit awkward and took some deeper reflection because of the similarity between both the Sun and Shadow cards. However, there is plenty of distance between the two on the Tree of Life, as well as in interpretive meaning, such that there is still a deeper underlying sense made by the contrast between the Sun and Shadow card positions.
I can certainly claim the Nine of Cups for my Shadow, because “happy” is not necessarily the word that would most often describe me. I tend to have a lot on my mind from day to day. And honestly, one of the deeper reasons for this stems precisely from the sheer amount of distress at many of the forms taken in daily life by modernity. I know I am starting to sound like a broken record here, but once more, I’ve got to repeat it: While I have yet to read and fully appreciate Evola’s viewpoints, I also have to admit that, a few pages into his introduction to Ride The Tiger, his prose is hitting pain points that have only gotten much worse in today’s world than they were back when he first wrote the book.
Of course, it may be true that these same points are better expressed elsewhere—political and esoteric perspectives included—in less explicitly-fascist quarters; if so, I have yet to read those books. It’s quite possible that I will read this book and finally agree with Evola’s harsher critics that yes, it’s pretty much trash, through and through. I won’t know until I finish it.
What I do know is this: From what I’ve seen, while plenty of leaders in the modern esoteric community are definitely not shy about their own critiques of modernity and they manage to make them without reference to people such as Evola: I also really don’t see them living up to the full spiritual implications of their stated principles. Whether, as appears to be the case with Jason Louv, popular authors and public figures of the esoteric world are simply withholding some of their more radical views and keeping them relatively private so as to render their message more palatable for popular consumption, or whether their allegiances truly defer more to modernity than to a reverence for classical philosophies and practices, comparably few of them seem to be actively opposing the status quo to quite the extent you might expect from someone who has dedicated their lives so much to their spiritual ideals. I don’t mean to sound like a curmudgeon, but at the end of the day, most people seem to be able to clearly see the problems with modernity, while simultaneously preferring relatively lackluster efforts to actually change any of it at a deeper level.
Are we complacent? Lulled into slumber by the ease and comfort with which modernity seduces us? Too comfortable to work hard for a closer match between our stated ideals and the life we’re willing to accept?
I’d be willing to cop to that, sure. Even though I am writing this, I’ll admit to sleepwalking. We must all stand in a position of similar conflict. To a great extent, that’s human nature.
Regardless, yes: I can say that Happiness is definitely more of a “Shadow” quality than a “Sun” quality for me, and modernity is mostly to blame.
People can’t afford housing. Every aspect of life is growing more expensive while incomes not only stagnate, but continue to decline. People are giving more and more of their lives over to the bullshit jobs so many of us hold in order to pay the bills, or (as is my current case), at least to looking for bullshit jobs. We’re running out of third spaces, and increasingly require private transportation such as cars to get to whatever is left of them. Hollywood sucks anymore, having long sold its own artistic soul to Wall St. Hardly anyone can afford comprehensive healthcare.
The world is bleak, and materialism is largely to blame, I don’t care how atheist anyone is. Like I said above: It doesn’t necessarily have to be God, but as a species, we desperately need to institutionalize something more important than the economy from which to derive meaning on a truly collective level. Yes, modern society typically frees us to choose to pursue more lofty, spiritual or philosophical goals on an individual basis, but fewer and fewer people have the fucking time, energy, or income to do so. I don’t care what modern lefties say, this all needs to change, and in order for such a change to be effective, it probably needs to come from a top-down level because the grass-roots efforts aren’t cutting it. We aren’t going far enough. We won’t sufficiently organize to make that kind of impact. Something’s gotta give.
Let’s look at how DuQuette describes this card in Understanding Aleister Crowley’s Thoth Tarot:
Is everybody happy? Yes!
See what happens when we return to the stability of the middle pillar? This is one of the best cards in the deck. Pisces, being the mutable sign of water, tends to stabilize the element. She is most welcome in Yesod, the sphere of the watery Moon. Yesod is also the Foundation, the sephirah that stabilizes the entire Tree of Life. This provides a most cozy and satisfying environment for loveable Jupiter to happily enjoy the good life as only Jupiter and his friends can.
Jupiter also has an affinity to water. Chesed, the sphere of Jupiter, Crowley affirms, “represents Water in its highest material manifestation.”
Everybody is, literally, happy!p. 237
Does that accurately describe you? I mean, I have my ups and downs, but by and large, it doesn’t really describe me! And I know that in many respects, happiness is an inner state of mind not so strictly dependent on external factors like great wealth and such, but nonetheless, I would wager that most people who are happy much of the time in the sense of not experiencing many of the hardships I described above…probably feel that way because they live very privileged lives.
As far as this card’s presence in the Shadow—not only mine, but largely, the collective Shadow as well (in terms of the dichotomy of the modern and the traditional worldviews)—the planetary aspect hits this note perfectly: Jupiter is the de facto planet of spiritual exaltation, while Pisces is one of the most spiritual of the zodiac signs—and these are precisely the energies that are increasingly repressed in a world that seems to absolutely favor money and material pursuits above all else.
This is the sickness Evola addresses, and I will say it yet again: Even if we don’t turn to him for any kind of solution, we also won’t defuse the radicalizing “bomb” of his corpus of work if we don’t better address the modern illness to which he appeals.
This, in essence, is another one of the problems the Word of Hermekate seeks to solve by exploring a healthier balance between modern and traditional ideals.
How brave are we?
How deeply are we committed to our esoteric ideals?
To the extent that we have seen them at work in our lives on a transformational level, do we believe the world at large can find its way toward a similar balance?
Can we lift the modern world up to such an extent that the Nine of Cups can find a fuller, more widespread expression and presence in our lives?
Is the answer really more of the same? More consumerism (paired with a better distribution of wealth), more materialism, more empty secularism? Again, I’m not saying we need to shove spirituality down the throats of anyone who doesn’t want it, either…
…but maybe we can pry the concept of “spirituality” from the maw of the religious fundamentalists so it can find a more balanced place in our society?
I am one of those strange people who believes the concept of “spirituality” is fully compatible with an atheist worldview; that one need not believe in God or even in a spirit world to be what I would call “spiritual.” You can benefit from meditation, from deeper introspection, and from values that honor the human spirit, all without adjusting your metaphysical views to allow for gods, ghosts, and demons.
Esoteric practitioners know this better than anyone.
Jason Louv knows it.
Will we find happiness on the road we’re presently taking?
I don’t think we will.
This is why I am Magus of Hermekate.
Louv was right about one thing, though: We need to solve the problem soon.