Page 3 of 3 [ 36 posts ]  Go to page Previous  1, 2, 3

techstepgenr8tion
Veteran
Veteran

User avatar

Joined: 6 Feb 2005
Age: 44
Gender: Male
Posts: 24,135
Location: 28th Path of Tzaddi

23 Dec 2018, 12:05 pm

Also if you actually want to know some things about OTO look up James Wasserman. He's one of the more forward public members and authors in the OTO, along with Lon Milo Duquette, he's actually coming out more as a political conservative these days on Facebook but his grasp of what OTO is and what it stands for, and it's take on what Crowley was about, is solid.


_________________
“Love takes off the masks that we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within. I use the word "love" here not merely in the personal sense but as a state of being, or a state of grace - not in the infantile American sense of being made happy but in the tough and universal sense of quest and daring and growth.” - James Baldwin


Mikah
Veteran
Veteran

User avatar

Joined: 23 Oct 2015
Age: 36
Posts: 3,201
Location: England

25 Dec 2018, 9:54 pm

techstepgenr8tion wrote:
What you just said above is a lacuna.


Well thanks for filling it in. Hope everyone had a good Christmas day.


_________________
Behold! we are not bound for ever to the circles of the world, and beyond them is more than memory, Farewell!


Pepe
Veteran
Veteran

Joined: 11 Jun 2013
Gender: Non-binary
Posts: 26,635
Location: Australia

26 Dec 2018, 5:49 pm

techstepgenr8tion wrote:
Mikah wrote:
You can thank Vox for that. He's pieced together how JP understands the world in Jordanetics from his own words and while Peterson never says "Hail Satan" or anything like that, Vox notes parallels with the writings of Aleister Crowley and that scene. In the mind of dear sweet Owen that becomes "JP is a closet Satanist".

I've only just recently been introduced to Owen. He's quite a character isn't he?

What you just said above is a lacuna.

Crowley was Andy Kaufman half a century before Andy Kaufman. He took the Golden Dawn's initiatory system, something that was a mix of Judao-Christian mysteries and Egyptian, and essentially put punk/emo patches on it and dressed it in wolves clothing because he'd been bible-beaten to the extreme as a kid and was trying to make a spiritual system that people could use who'd been through that rather than going buck-wild on atheist materialism. A lot of people joke perhaps that the Whore of Babylon (Babalon in his sytem) was wank material when he was a teen - maybe. His system is indeed juicy in the exotic and edgy direction but - that's what worked for him and I personally know a lot of people who are in OTO, I spent a while there and got my Minerval with them. It's calmed down a lot since the 60's, it had to, but essentially it's the really geeky kids you went to high school with who had punk and industrial patches on their backpacks doing ECG Gnostic mass regularly, having workshops on things like tarot as it relates to the Kabbalistic/Qabalistic Tree of Life, sometimes doing evocation if someone wants to do that, and at other times they're doing charitable work in the community in the same sort of ways that the Masons like to do. Other than that, just like I'd say with AMORC Rosicrucians or other mystics, you'd hardly know that you aren't hanging out with Unitarians.

To put Crowley in perspective, considering my stretch of time as a canonical modern Christian and my understanding of the way the charge of 'satanism' work there are two kinds.

The fist type, 1), is a person actually and literally worships satan, whether they believe that just to be a symbol (Anton Lavey), whether they're really coming at it from the Promethian pespective of seeking individual freedom and growth through experience (ie. Gnostic Luciferian), or whatever else - they're wringing out what they think is missing from strictly white-light religion and trying to mine the best aspects of what's considered 'the adversary' in most religious systems. You do also have groups who try to push the envelope in the theistic satanism direction, like Order of Nine Angles, and they also - running up against the law - can't do much of anything aside from promise a lot and then have to make an excuse for why they have to use representations (for example they're supposed to sacrifice someone yearly or something like that? I really doubt it happns).

The second format of the charge of satanism is, 2), anyone who believes and purveys something other than 'Jesus died on the cross for your sins'. In this sense any Buddhist, Hindu, Islamic, or any other type of spiritual leader in the world would technically qualify as a satanist as well as anyone whose teaching a variant of Christianity that's not canonical.

Crowley, mostly falls into category 2), ie. not canonical Christianity, his system - really being a hijack and slight refitting of the Golden Dawn system, is heretical and synchretic in the old Greek and Roman sense, hence bad because he's dealing with other deities. Also yes, to some extent he's working with the sorts of radical self-exploration forces that one might get with Luciferianism to some degree in that he was as prone to explore both the light and the dark, test himself with the dark, and one of the things he said in his writings was a prayer, something along the lines of 'save me from both good and from evil'. In the Kabbalistic/Qabalistic sense, unlike modern Christianity, the Tree of Life doesn't consider the universe a holy war of good against evil. The tree has a right pillar (mercy) and a left pillar (severity), and most of the destructive or deemed satanic aspects like destruction, aggression, lust, sexuality in its more ambitious senses, would fall in Geburah on the left side of the tree, otherwise possibly the Qliphoth (shells) or dark side of Venus for the sexuality and the Qliphoth then gets taken as the inverse tree. The goal of a Kabbalist/Qabalist is to walk 'the middle path' which means not to be a pushover (ie. going so far to the right as to be brittle) and not becoming a violent putz (going to the opposite extreme on the left) but to walk the middle path - the path of mildness, which to them and many Christian mystics is the path which leads back up to the godhead.

I get that people who need to believe that there is a hidden army of satanists getting the world primed for the Tribulation or the Strong Delusion of 2 Thessalonians they have to believe that Freemasons, Rosicrucians, Martinists, OTO, Golden Dawn, and anyone else whose doing something both deep and different from they are (and in some cases not averse to symbols like Baphomet) are that hidden army or are a piece of it. If they really want to grasp at straws they'll see that enemy in anyone whose not a strict 20th century style 'Jesus died on the cross for my sins' Christian. They believe the tribulation is nigh and they believe that it's satans powers bringing it about.

If they actually did a digging into the history of the bible, *if they actually read the bible cover to cover and didn't have someone else constantly telling them how to interpret it*, they'd see the conceptual evolution of Ha Satan from simply being anything that was unhelpful to Yahweh or the Elohim's plan to then being the celestial curmudgeon and quality inspector (Job and other places) to then somehow getting thrown into Revelation as related to the characters in the vision.


What all of that means - Jordan Peterson is talking about the evolution of ideas across various cultures and what he, Jung, Mercia Iliade, etc. interpret them to mean. Unfortunately for 20th century style Christians - the bible is a braided knot of various kinds of pagan philosophy. Jordan's just addressing it for what it is and if he's talking about the virtues of Marduk and the confessions of Babylonian kings as to whether they were good Marduk's that year, or the virtues of the story of Isis, Osiris, and Horus, he's tracking these things - and Christianity - as the history of human moral development all the while, in my best estimation, being something like a pantheist/panentheist mystic himself. To me that's not a problem at all - it's a good thing because it shows he 'gets it', that he understands what these things are and, like anyone whose done their homework, he has no impression that the bible dropped from the sky like the monolith in 2001 Space Odyssey as the 'right' version of history that every account of the contrary is the devil/satan making false facts to the contrary.


Holy crap!
I don't have enough time in the space/time continuum to read this post...
I'll just assume it is very technical, thorough and intellijjent... :mrgreen:



techstepgenr8tion
Veteran
Veteran

User avatar

Joined: 6 Feb 2005
Age: 44
Gender: Male
Posts: 24,135
Location: 28th Path of Tzaddi

26 Dec 2018, 8:03 pm

Pepe wrote:
Holy crap!
I don't have enough time in the space/time continuum to read this post...
I'll just assume it is very technical, thorough and intellijjent... :mrgreen:

That's a shame - I was really writing that for you.

Jokes aside, the gist is: claiming someone is 'statanic' because they talk about Jung, Illiade, etc. because Crowley was into that sort of thing too grabs the wrong end of historical cause and effect.


_________________
“Love takes off the masks that we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within. I use the word "love" here not merely in the personal sense but as a state of being, or a state of grace - not in the infantile American sense of being made happy but in the tough and universal sense of quest and daring and growth.” - James Baldwin