I have made no secret of the fact that I deep concerns about the current usage of the meme (or counter-meme as the creator would have it) known as Godwin’s Law, but have only touched on the specific reasons for this. While the meme’s original intention was to improve discussion by pointing out that it is ridiculous to reference the Holocaust every time someone is even slightly firm in their opinion or advocating a mildly authoritarian policy, the meme itself has become an equivalent form of intellectual sloth. It has taken on the character of a way to bully people who disagree with a prevailing opinion, and, more perniciously, a peer pressure mechanism that helps to ensure that we do not learn history’s lessons.

In 1990, Mike Godwin noticed that discussions on Usenet had developed a meme that he found troubling, that of comparing the opponent’s position to the Nazis, even if such was totally non sequitor.

“But the Nazi-comparison meme popped up elsewhere as well – in general discussions of law in misc.legal, for example, or in the EFF conference on the Well. Stone libertarians were ready to label any government regulation as incipient Nazism. And, invariably, the comparisons trivialized the horror of the Holocaust and the social pathology of the Nazis. It was a trivialization I found both illogical (Michael Dukakis as a Nazi? Please!) and offensive (the millions of concentration-camp victims did not die to give some net.blowhard a handy trope).”

So, he coined a new meme, which states:

“As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches 1.”[

It was a good, Voltarian sort of quip, which had a noble purpose. Fast forward twenty years, however, and the counter-meme has become yet another handy trope for what are probably the same class of “net.blowhards” that it was originally directed at. One cannot make any analogy between a current situation and the Nazi regime without having Godwin’s Law thrown at them. This may have to do with the general degradation of people’s knowledge of rhetoric, whereby the analogy has come to be seen as requiring a one to one match rather than an overall similarity.

I think it has broader implications, however. There are a number of politically naive assumptions behind the current usage of Godwin’s Law that I find not only invalid but deeply troubling. Chief among these is the notion that the Holocaust was a transient episode in human history. A horrible aberration that we have learned from and moved past. But genocide, torture, and nationalistic fanaticism were not invented by Hitler. Human civilizations have been murdering, enslaving, and generally immiserating other, less fortunate populations since the advent of the cerebral cortex, if not before. Being a demagogue is an easy way to power, especially in times of strife and economic upheaval, such as that which Germany was undergoing when the National Socialists rose to power.

It is Democracy, as a modern ideology, that is historically unique and as yet unproven in practice. The glib, upper middle class white douchebags who sit complacently behind computer keyboards typing out snark about how perfect the system is generally do not recognize this latter fact. Most of the population of the United States does not support the Bill of Rights, almost everyone has some group of people whom they feel are unworthy of civil liberties, and two out of three branches of government, the Executive and Legislative, are so beholden to pork barrel interests that the odds of any effective change happening that would benefit the people is, as of this writing, virtually nil.

And Democracy is profoundly counter-intuitive to the way human societies have traditionally run. Equality? Rights for everyone? For most of the history of civilization, human beings were the subjects of war lords and their heirs. Slavery was not only common but necessary to sustain the lifestyle of the ruling class. What liberated us, to an extent, was the machine that made available a huge amount of leisure time. But today, rather than being indentured to a feudal lord, we are indentured to banks and corporations. We still treat our Executive like a Sun King. The differences between the past and now are not so great as the promoters of “progress” would have you believe.

So I get a little frustrated when people fall into the patterned thinking that labels any instance of an analogy as invalid, regardless of context. If someone started burning books and calling for the extermination of a population, I would wager there are still those who would cry “Godwin’s Law” when the obvious historical parallel was invoked. I am not the only person who feels that this meme has turned back on itself. In 2005, after an incident involving Dick Durbin’s use of a Nazi comparison, Reason’s David Weigel said:

“The Nazi taboo was flawed before the Durbin affair, and it’s only deteriorated since. Recently, armchair general Victor Davis Hanson took to the Chicago Tribune to assert that the swarthy enemies of freedom grow bolder “each time a public official evokes Hitler to demonize the president.” The chorus demanding Durbin’s apology included Rick Santorum, who’d apologized just a month before for comparing Democrats’ filibuster arguments to Nazi war plans. The effort of keeping up the ban has become more convoluted than Charlie Chaplin’s last speech in The Great Dictator. We’ll be better off rolling back Godwin’s Law and admitting the all-purpose usefulness of Nazi analogies. It’s exactly what the Germans wouldn’t want.”

We also need to come to terms with the fact that things aren’t “okay.” For a good summary of just how fucked we are in terms of our economy and the stability of civilization in general, I would suggest checking out Michael Ruppert’s Collapse. It gives far greater detail on our state of affairs than I possibly can in this context.

We live in times that are ripe for the advent of pure fascism. Our economic situation parallels if not exceeds that which Germany was undergoing in the mid to late 1930s. Yet the denizens of the internet can only snark, and rest complacent in the assumption that things will go on as usual. This is America, after all, where no one is really oppressed. It’s a democracy where “those sorts of things can’t happen.” History demonstrates something different. When empires begin to crumble, as ours unequivocally is, they split into factions, and the faction that offers an outlet for the anger and a paradoxical kind of comforting stability will tend to dominate.

Even given all this, it may seem like hyperbole to compare, say, the Third Wave Movement in Christianity to the Nazis. A moment of reflection, however, should show that this is just the sort of movement that we should be concerned about in an era where our social and economic infrastructure is demonstrably crumbling. They are populist, capable of mobilizing millions of people who are willing to kill and die for their cause, and give people and easy target for their frustration, not to mention a deus ex machina whereby everything they loath will be destroyed. When the proverbial shit really hits the fan, when there are shortages food shortages in Middle America, when gasoline costs so much that many critical services simply cannot be provided because they are prohibitively expensive, it is to movements such as the Third Wave that people will turn, not ideologies of love and tolerance.

What concerns me is not that there is a movement with the potential to capture the minds of the angry and lonely. It is the fact that the biggest venue of public discourse, the Internet, is infected with a meme that functions as a discussion stopper, less an admonition against hyperbole than a way to dismiss the warning signs that history has left for us. The road to destruction is paved with just these sorts of icons of ignorance.

In the United States, we have in our constitution and explicit separation between Church and State. (Unless you’re a strict constructionist, but few reading this blog are likely to have imbibed that particular batch of brown Kool-Aid.) An observer from another planet would likely find this odd. Because, despite the fact that formally we separate religion and politics, very few people seem to do this on a personal level. It is one of the ways in which the ideology of the people who actually wrote the United States Constitution is counterintuitive to the way the average person thinks and feels.

The Pagan community is no exception to this. Historically, at least if Ronald Hutton is to be trusted, most of the founders of our current strains of Paganism were Tories. Today, we are largely identified with either liberal or radical leftist viewpoints. There are even strains of Paganism that overtly incorporate ideology into their theology. Often this last group draws on the most spurious and discredited historical information available, reifying error into their very praxis.

For some reason, people have this notion that a particular political perspective naturally follows from a given religious one. This is because of the common misconception that politics has something to do with morality and that laws have the power to create the world we want to live in. How this notion persists after the age that people have some experience of the world beyond their childhood and adolescent cloister environment baffles me.

The second item is the least arcane and easily refuted. Laws, while they may induce certain behaviors by inflicting punishment for deviation do not, in themselves, constitute social progress of any kind. (I’m not sure how conservatives speak of the sorts of social improvements they aim for. “Progress” seems like a liberal term, which may or may not apply to more traditionalist agendas.) They may indicate the tail end of a phase of improvement, but that improvement has reached critical mass long before the executives signature graces the finished legislation. If this is not the case, then the law will either not be enforced, or there will be such a reaction against it that it cannot be enforced and will be repealed sooner rather than later. Real change in society is a slow, steady process that takes decades to fully manifest. This is, of course, apart from full blown revolution, which is more of a symptom of a long chain of problems and failures than the cure many revolutionaries imagine it to be.

The first idea, that politics has something to do with morality, is tougher to deal with. Most people like to think their public officials stand for something higher than mere personal gain. Privately, folks generally assume that their ideology is the one that every sane person would have if they just thought things through.

Actually, I think politics is mostly about the projection of ones insecurities into the public arena. There is absolutely no reason that any issue shouldn’t be amenable to rational discussion between opposing viewpoints. We of course do not see this. The average political speech contains almost no information and nothing resembling and argument. The political talk show is basically a kind of emotional pornography, the political blogosphere an echo chamber of noise where the talking points of the major parties get recycled over and over.

This is not the way people behave when they actually want to effect enduring change. This is a series of snarling temper tantrums. Many have noted this, and seem to find in it a source of dismay. I no longer do. What I see is the natural result of what happens when you have close to a half billion egomaniacs fighting over mental territory, the physical territory having been devoured over a century ago.

I suspect that the people who wrote the Constitution of the United States knew something about this. They had seen, first hand, what happens when you have two irrational impulses mingle together. You get the Inquisition. The First Amendment is not simply a law, it is a philosophical statement.

The Pagan community is very diverse, and not everyone comes to it from the same set of experiences. To but it bluntly, everyone has a different set of personality disorders working themselves out, and their political ideology is likely to be a part of that. (I have toyed with the idea of figuring out which personality disorders go with which ideologies, but it’s too much work.) So it is not surprising to find Democrats and Libertarians and Republicans and Anarchists under the large umbrella of Paganism.

This is not to say that Pagans do not have rational territorial interests. Voting for a candidate that believes in Third Wave Christianity or has connections to Joel’s Army (overlapping sects that view themselves as at war with anything not fitting their definition of “Christian”) because they promise to lower taxes is probably a bad idea. Kind of like picking up loose change in moving traffic. You’ll end up with a buck or two before the Mack truck vaporizes your brain pan.
But this does not translate into “Republican Pagans are traitors.” Only if they vote for the Mack truck would this be the case. Even then we’re probably dealing more with political naivete than active suicidal impulses.

It is not so much that we are above politics (as long as we’re mammals, we won’t be able to say that) but I think our religions should be. There is too much room for a set of mythical ideas to meet up with an unfortunate circumstance and become an ideology of hatred and violence. This happens often enough on an individual level.

Ultimately, I think religion should be about things that endure, factors which condition rather than those which arise from conditions. The conclusions we draw from these enduring principles are, however, our own.

I give unimaginable joys on earth: certainty, not faith, while in life, upon death; peace unutterable, rest, ecstasy; nor do I demand aught in sacrifice.
Liber Al Vel Legis 1:58

Our society presents us with many competing gestalts concerning Reality. No matter which partisan you have the (mis)fortune to encounter, you can be sure that every single one will tell you that they have Figured Things Out and what they are telling you is How Things Really Are. Some even use Obnoxious And Non Sequitur Capitalization to elucidate those Principles which you Really Aught To Accept so that you can be In Touch With Reality just like them.

For example, I went to see Michael Moore’s new film, Capitalism, A Love Story this weekend. It’s fairly typical of Moore’s work. A little more focused on substantive claims over the stunts that have marked past efforts, but not much. It’s still very effective, and I imagine that the majority of people leave either feeling like marching on Wall Street or writing their Congress-entity to “do something about this nut.” Full disclosure: I tend toward the former.

On the other hand, it helps to remind oneself, when viewing incendiary material, that all truth is partial. ”Dead Peasant” policies, for instance, should simply be illegal, and the United States should really join the rest of the world industrial democracies and provide health care for its citizens. There are a number of such salient points made in the film, but they are arranged in such a fashion that one is guided toward a very Manichean view in which radical direct action appears to be the only way to get things done.

The problem with such a view is that it strips complexity and chaos out of the consideration of events and puts them either the Good Box or the Evil Box. Now that we’ve done this, the Manichean-type viewpoint declares that we are Certain of the Truth and the we are On the Right Side (in the Good Box, or at least one of its couriers).

Which brings me to the lovely quote from the Book of the Law. The problem with a perspective that treats such a statement as referring to mundane occurrences and concerns is that neither “certainty” and “faith” are not in any sense mutually exclusive in terms of human psychology. Every public religion, cult, political ideology, or philosophy makes truth claims that depend on other, foundational propositions which are taken to be axiomatic. An “axiom” however, is just another word for “the point where we got lazy and stopped dissecting what we were looking at.” It has to be taken on faith, or the rest of the world view dissolves as well.

Ultimately, our limited egos can not be said to be certain of anything. This is the source of almost every philosophical paradox one cares to consider. At some point, the amount of data we have to work with and our ability to process reaches its capacity and we have to simply say “that’s good enough for right now.” Accepting this ambiguity is not nihilism as some would claim, but is actually considered an important aspect of emotional maturity.

If we attribute divine origin to Liber Al (and I do) we must also assume that said divinity wished us well. Otherwise, why communicate at all? If a being came down and said “You all suck, I hate you and you should die,” we’d probably ask for a second opinion. We can also assume indifference, in which case we’re thrown back on our own resources to determine what we think their message means.

“Certainty,” in the mundane sense, looks a lot like intellectual sloth. It tends to mean that a person is, in a sense, dead save for the execution of a program that keeps looping over and over again. Going on the assumption that any divinity worth dealing with wants what is best for us, we must conclude that such brain death, being suboptimal, is not what they have in mind when they tell us that we are to have “certainty” in this life.

The book must be talking about something else. Something, say, divine maybe. Transcendent even. The sorts of things you’d expect a Holy Book to talk about, rather than political perspectives or mundane philosophies of “individualism.” (Funny thing about individualists: they always seem to have a fairly standard view of what an “individual” should act like.)

Compound entities, such as political movements and philosophies, are rooted in the quicksand of events dependent on other events. We cannot be “certain” of anything about them. We can, however, develop something resembling a sense of being at home with ourselves, and being engaged in a productive and creative way with the world around us. This seems much more valuable to me than assimilating a canned view of the world and treating something like Liber AL as though it were the instruction manual for a toaster oven.

The panchreston is a rhetorical device often employed by demagogues, bigots, and conspiracy theorists. In fact, almost any monolithic conspiracy theory (for instance, the idea that the “Illuminati” or Jewish Bankers own everything and are planning our eventual enslavement) can be considered an example of this tactic, or “error of thought” if we wish to be generous. A favorite example of this, which turns up in two apparently opposed but oddly similar camps, is the phrase “Secular Humanism.”

The largely fictitious version of “Secular Humanism” described by reactionaries exemplifies all the problems with panchrestons in general. First, it bares little resemblance to actual secular humanism as understood by those who actually adhere to that philosophy. What the detractors of secular humanism have done is create a strawman based on their own reactions to the ideas of secularism and humanism. Secularism is “bad” because it involves rejecting the idea that religion must play a key part in our lives. Humanism is also suspect, either because the critic in question believes human beings to be fallen and thus incapable of running their own lives, or simply too generally stupid to be trusted with heavy machinery and ethical theory.

Second, the strawman version of “Secular Humanism” is said to be at the root of every problem we face in our world. Or at least most of them, including the popularity of Lady Gaga. If you’ve spent any time looking at conspiracy theory or for that matter Marxist philosophy, you’ve seen the kind of logical gymnastics that are required to justify the idea that One Thing and Only One Thing explains All Our Problems. The problem isn’t that these theories don’t hang together with any coherence. What you notice after being exposed to enough of them is that they all present perfectly coherent arguments that their favorite target is the Root of All Evil Including Lady Gaga. They often do this by a slight of hand that involves hitting you with so much data that you’ll impose the pattern they want you to simply to make sense of it all, but they do all make perfect sense within their given frame of reference.

There are two basic conclusions we can draw from this. One is that either there is One Correct Theory and all others are either wrong or Involved in the Conspiracy. The other is that the entire idea that the problems of human society can be reduced to even a handful of basic factors let alone One is foolish and simpleminded. Frankly, having tried out various iterations of the former, I lean strongly toward the latter.

Which brings me back to the panchrestion in question. I know of two groups which regularly employ the term “Secular Humanism” in a pejorative fashion. One is the Christian Right. Fighting “Secular Humanism” is part of their core ideology.

The other, oddly, is the MFC (Muscular Fascist Crowlianite) camp. I say oddly because one would think that people identifying as “Thelemites” would be sensitive to errors of thinking that put them in ideological agreement with the demonstrably insane.

Neither the Christian Right or the MFCs are The Problem by the way. They, or rather their ideologies, are the dingleberries hanging from the ass of one of the larger overall negative trends in human society: the quest to be better than everyone else. Bettering yourself is one thing. Comparing your progress to others… you’re likely to find yourself engaged in little psychological games. Depending on the amount of data you can recall to support these, they can get quite sophisticated. Someone with a junior high education and a vocabulary of two hundred words is actually better off in this regard, since he is only likely to think of himself as “the baddest motherfucker on the block.” This is easily remedied by having someone larger kick their ass once or twice. A person with an advanced degree who frames their personal search in terms of how much more awake they are than the rest of the herd can create a baroque edifice of terminology that few can even attempt to assail.

The ways we can fool ourselves into thinking we’re getting somewhere are legion. Avoiding them is not simple, and nothing in the above should be taken as saying that the present author has mastered his own ego and never gets in trouble this way. It is simply to point out one of the many kinds of trap that one can and will fall in on the way to wherever it is we’re supposed to be going with all this weird shit…

This post on the Egregores blog got me thinking about Thelema, and the claims made about it by what I have termed the Muscular Fascist Crowlianites ( henceforth referred to as MFCs). The relevant passage for our purposes is a quote from Jan Assman’s Moses the Egyptian: The Memory of Egypt and Western Monotheism:

The distinction I am concerned with in this book is the distinction between true and false religion that underlies more specific distinctions such as Jews and Gentiles, Christians and pagans, Muslims and unbelievers.
[...]
The Mosaic distinction was therefore a radically new distinction which considerably changed the world in which it was drawn. The space which was “severed or cloven” by this distinction was not simply the space of religion in general, but that of a very specific kind of religion. We may call this new type of religion “counter-religion” because it rejects and repudiates everything that went before and what is outside itself as “paganism”. It no longer functioned as a means of intercultural translation; on the contrary, it functioned as a means of intercultural estrangement. Whereas polytheism, or rather “cosmotheism,” rendered differed cultures mutually transparent and compatible, the new counter-religion blocked intercultural translatability. False gods cannot be translated.

There is a way of reading Liber AL, favored by the MFCs, which would place Thelema into the category of systems (they say “it’s not a religion, but an ideology” – because they are ideologues) which deploy the Mosaic Distinction. Specifically, passages such as “abrogate are all rituals, all ordeals… etc” and the maiming of past religious figures in Chapter three, basically mean that all religions but Thelema are false. The traditional, Crowlian attitude to deity is rather complex, and in fact prefigures that developed by Chaos Magic. So gods per se would not be seen as “false,” only the original ontology of the religions those gods are a part of. It’s equivalent to the attitude taken by nineteenth century anthropologists when considering native religions; obviously the native understanding of these beings is incorrect, so we will explain their function in terms of whatever school we belong to.

It’s a kind of epistemological chauvinism, with all the arrogance that entails. Only in this case, rather than being based at the very least on comparative explorations by multiple groups of people in something like a scientific method, the MFCs’ confident stance derives solely from having achieved “gnosis” using Crowley’s poetry and rituals. Gnosis, of course, is a state where rational processes cease. The experience itself is transcendent. But the things the mind fills up with during the return to normal consciousness are not the same thing as that experience. Liturgy will, as we have seen, effect the recognition and understanding of that event. The assumption that such an experience could, in itself, validate a particular map is therefore a confusion of the planes and a good way to ensure nothing more than reification at the level of ego.

If you’ve ever dealt with MFCs, you’ll know what I’m talking about when I say that they tend to employ a language that, like the Mosaic Distinction, divides them from the rest of humanity. Not only by explicit intent (they are, after all, better than everyone else) but also by being totally divorced from the common spiritual experience of the bulk of humanity since the dawn of time. This is, remember, a viewpoint that considers social values such as concern for ones fellow human beings anathema.

Compassion, like the Sun or Love or War, are real, concrete realities. Pagan deities arise from these fundamental, basic aspects of existence. The Mosaic Distinction is a conclusion drawn from what were likely hallucinations on the part of people suffering from starvation and heat exposure. Judeo-Christian and Islamic Monotheism are pure, abstract surrealism that have a tendency to minimize and divorce one from the manifest world.

Likewise, adopting as an absolute “users manual” for life a similar kind of epiphenomena of someone else’s experience such as the Book of the Law, without regard for how this would look in the real world, is a similar kind of divorce. This is one of the reasons why I find the MFC perspective to not only be intellectually untenable but also little more than a continuation of the same set of mistakes that Western Civilization has been making for the past two thousand years. It represents the same error taken up one level of abstraction, from claims about gods to claims about ontology.

It has become quite common since the beginning of the civil rights movement for dominant groups to claim that criticism on the part of those less privileged constitutes a form of “reverse” prejudice. The element that gets missed in this kind of semantic appropriation is the power dynamic, and the very real material disadvantages that the group against which the charge is being made faces. When the focus of the discussion moves from the sort of body a person inhabits to the ideas they hold in their head and the beliefs in their heart, it tends to get more confusing and less helpful.

The problem with religious bigotry is that it assumes a particular invariable character on the part of a person’s belief system and then further conflates this projected assessment with the person who holds that belief system. It is thus a true “double whammy” of sloppy cognition. To start with, any large religion is going to have multiple variations. Christianity, for instance, is really an umbrella term for dozens of diverse faiths with the figure of Jesus Christ at their center. Attributing anything more than a few generalities to this broad category simply ensures that you will not understand any of its constituents with any depth.

That being said, there are variants of certain religions (particularly Christianity and Islam) which contain demonstrably toxic and even sociopathic beliefs. Whatever the mainstream beliefs of Christianity in our own time, it is safe to say that these have been somewhat diluted by the Enlightenment and other movements of intellectual progress which made any literal interpretation of the Bible intellectually untenable. Why one form of Christianity was the sole religious and political power in Western Civilization, the result was unequivocally disastrous. When Voltaire enjoined his countrymen to “remember the cruelties” he was writing with less than a century between himself and what he referred to.

There may be some who feel that genocide (the Crusades) and torture (the Inquisition) are only an absolute evil from “a certain perspective,” but I would submit that such an attitude is part of the problem. The reactionary movements of the last sixty years have become expert at exploiting the idea of “tolerance” as a blanket acceptance of any pernicious notion that might enter the heads of any lunatic. What they have made some forget is that such a tolerant society not only can but must condemn intolerance if any such condition of tolerance is to have any chance of continuing.

An idea is not bad because of where it comes from. It is bad because it causes clear, obvious, and immediate harm to both the people who hold it and those against whom it is targeted. Homophobia may not be an integral part of Christianity, and even if it were, this would not be enough to condemn it. It is to be condemned because it leads to discrimination in the best case scenario and deadly violence in the worst. But it is also the case that the main justifications for homophobia are, during the period of human history in which I write, couched in Biblical terms and promoted by a vocal and politically influential minority within the Christian umbrella. Further, the homophobic message seems fairly non-denominational, as there are simply not enough Fundamentalists to carry elections in a state as large as California. The core issues of the religious right appear to have a much wider appeal.

“Bigotry” must be judged by not only category but also by intent. To criticize the religious right is precisely the same as criticizing the Ku Klux Klan. To criticize Christians in general for apparently holding beliefs (or at least not speaking out against them) which can be inflamed and directed by such groups is the equivalent of criticizing mid-twentieth century Southern culture for the analogous tendencies with regard to racism. If people are afraid to do this for fear of being labeled “bigots” they are missing the point of being against bigotry.

In the end, the phrase “social progress” must either mean something or not. If it is to mean anything, it will have to involve actively opposing bigoted ideologies and attitudes, even if they arise from something like religion. Otherwise, it will remain a late modern platitude, suitable only for the museums that will hold the relics of a dead civilization.

I confess to being way behind the curve on reading Ronald Hutton’s Triumph of the Moon. However, having dug into it at last, I am struck with a possibility that the text itself suggests. Triumph… can be read as the history of what happens when people jump on a band wagon, which has implications for how it is referenced in the Pagan community.

Hutton shows us the greater context from which the Modern Pagan movement emerged. Before scholars like James Frazier began popularizing the idea of a survival of ancient pagan religions, the Romantic movement laid a firm cultural and emotional foundation for such an idea to take root. In the nineteenth century, individuals working in the new disciplines of archeology and anthropology drew on the findings of geology and Darwin to suggest that human culture had evolved, in a stratified way, from primitive animism toward rational science. When Frazier wrote The Golden Bough he was, in fact, trying to discredit Christianity by establishing Christ as “just another” dying and risen god. When the Romantic movement was exposed to his ideas, however, they took it in a radically different direction. That trajectory, which utilized ideas by Frazier that had actually been discredited within his own field, established a literary tradition and a long standing obsession amongst amateur folklorists concerning pagan survivals.

Gerald Gardner did not simply decide to make up a new religion and call it old. There were two centuries of cultural groundwork laid underneath him before he began gathering together the people who would help him found the religion of Wicca. Academically, many aspects of Wicca’s pseudo-history were long abandoned. But they had found there way into the popular culture of the time, where they have yet to wash out completely. An important cluster of authors, scholars, and amateur investigators had created a seemingly consistent body of work, some of it referencing ideas in a circular fashion that gave the lay reader the impression of an established view.

It is quite easy to fall into the trap of assuming that because a number of very intelligent (or at least articulate) individuals in different fields say the same thing, it must be true. Which is why Triumph…’s reception contains a certain irony. Many voices lauding the book have, at the same time, neglected to mention that none of the events it chronicles occurred in a vacuum. Instead, Hutton’s excellent work has effectively been plundered for snark food, leaving the truly interesting and important material to drift to the bottom of the internet where it will never see the light of day.

Such, I suppose, is the fate of nuance and intelligent probing in an era when ideas get mugged rather than courted. Still, I would be nice to see some indication that Hutton’s book has a wider future than the slug fest of a chat room.

The topic of Thelemic ethics is something of a mine field. This becomes clear somewhere in the second chapter of the Book of the Law, where we are told to, among other things, “stamp down the wretched and the weak.” Thelema is said to be “the Law of the Strong,” and Crowley and those who follow his interpretations of the Holy Books closely would say that this emphatically and unequivocally means that that which benefits the “strong” is “good” and that which would tend to bolster the “weak” is bad.

There are numerous problems with this, beyond the more obvious carnage it would entail if taken to its logical conclusion. “Weak” and “strong” are ill defined, to start with. Generally speaking “strength” in this context is defined by the capacity of an individual to find their True Will and do it. Once the fledgling Thelemite finds this Golden Ticket, they are said to be infallible. They’re little God Kings now, capable of deciding what is “right” and “wrong” based on the advice of the little supercharged Jimminy Cricket known as the Holy Guardian Angel.

This agent dependent ethics is the reason many say that Thelemic ethics are opposed to deontology, which is what over educated people call the idea that some acts are inherently right or wrong regardless of the consequences. The True Will of the individual is the only arbiter of what is right for them. Of course, this “anti-deontology” is, in fact, an individualized version of Divine Command Theory which is itself a deontological position. But we’ll let that slide for now.

Instead, I want to focus on the problems associated with having a subjectivist ethics based on a putative and vaguely defined spiritual experience. These do not arise from the relativism of such a proposition. Rather, they involve something much more subtle. That is, the consequences of a semantic environment imbued with self-centeredness supporting transpersonal experience. Quite simply, unless one starts with a rather loose and metaphorical relationship with that semantic environment, they are likely to sabotage their own efforts and fall victim to “Magusitis,” that near ubiquitous syndrome found in internet chat rooms the world over.

Lets look at the two big landmark experiences in Thelema, Knowledge and Conversation and The Abyss. The first involves a surrender of ego. This is acknowledged even by the more muscular fascist Thelemites. Only they would say “false self” or (in true crypto-political cultese) “false consciousness.” The implication being that, regardless of the fact that Knowledge and Conversation is a personal experience unique to everyone, everyone’s Holy Guardian Angel agrees with Crowley circa The Law is For All. (We will again pass by with only this small digression the fact that this is still well within the province of deontology. In this case, it is Crowley who is setting the standard.) So, before earning the great cosmic wedgie, one is lost in the throws of a “false self” who needs a good talking to from their HGA. Afterward, they can use large words incoherently and call on Goetic spirits in an unfocused manner with the best of them.

Of course, a real surrender of ego, one that would be acknowledged as such by the rest of the world’s inner traditions, actually involves saying that the intellect is not enough, and that reason is imperfect. It involves saying “I don’t know and I’m willing to learn,” rather than “I have had the experience I am supposed to have had and now have the attitudes that people who say they’ve had that experience tell me to.” The first is letting go of a previous way of thinking, the latter is simply changing out the contents of that way of thinking and reifying them around an ecstatic experience.

Now, it’s time to break out the Ken Wilber. Take a look at this pretty picture:

This shows us the basic reason why it is a problem if we reify a spiritual experience around a particular map if we want to achieve something truly transcendent. Each state (the horizontal axis) can be experienced at any developmental stage (vertical axis). So we can achieve KC of HGA at a Mythic stage and think we are talking to Jesus or Aiwass or a Secret Chief. At one of the higher stages we would relate to that experience quite differently.

A highly literal reading of Liber AL speaks to a limited number of neurological circuits. Basically, the territorial ones. Among other things, these involve protection and support for the ego. They are narcissistic in the clinical sense, concerned only with the base drives of the individual organism. Given the above, it is unlikely that such a literal mapping would lead to a trans-egoic experience, but ego inflation.

This is the trap. Because if you achieve KC of HGA and you only end up reifying what you came into the experience with, the next experience, the Abyss, is going to sting. Hard. With Knowledge and Conversation you surrender your lesser ego to inclusion with the greater ego and the divinity beyond. At the Abyss you surrender even that. What would be the logical result of arriving at the edge of that Nothing with a stack of books you don’t want to let go of, dressed in heavy occult finery.

You will fall, and get spat out again. As one of the unfortunate members of the Black Brotherhood. This is not a pleasant stage of existence. It is death worse than death.

All of which can be avoided by taking the actual opposite position to deontology: consequentialism. That is, that the rightness or wrongness of an action depends on its consequences. Door number one leads to heavy ego reification and the Black Brotherhood. Door number two leads to actual transcendence.

One need not abandon Thelema to do this. Only see that there are traps laid, and to avoid them with a little critical thinking and logical extrapolation.

Being in the Golden Dawn has its advantages. Apart from the numerous toys and sharp objects one gets to play with, and a drag show that could put the Vatican to shame, we also benefit from having a foundation myth that no one in their right mind would take seriously. (I’m fully aware of groups on the internet who do take it seriously. You may assume that I consider these people to not be in their right mind.) Wicca had, for a time, some scholarly backup for certain elements now considered questionable. Margaret Murray was in fact considered an expert by non-specialists during her lifetime. The Golden Dawn’s foundation story pretty much evaporated upon contact with the outside world. For those not familiar, the tale involves groups of German Adepts who conveniently provide charters and just as conveniently die when they are no longer needed.

In the Golden Dawn, one can choose to either accept that the founders of the Order deliberately created a false pedigree and move on, or find ways to equivocate around the issue. Ultimately the decision depends on how much time one wishes to waste or how much money can be milked from the credulous who, in this case, tend to be more incredibly credulous than most.

Likewise the system itself. It’s a mish mash of elements from half a dozen traditions, two or more of which were historically hostile to one another. The Golden Dawn system works because of its framework and because people have been working the Current in some variation or another for over a century. (Though the Golden Dawn itself was dead for around sixty years, elements of it were taken in part or whole into other systems, notably Crowley’s. It could be said to have survived in fragments.) Almost all of the current complaints about the New Age could be levied at the Golden Dawn with little need to adapt language.

I said earlier that I regard these things as an advantage, which may seem strange after all that. But truthfully, I think it is far better to have a system that one knows is a modern creation cobbled together from various public domain source texts with a quasi-masonic underpinning taken from (it must be said) documents lifted from a dead man’s apartment, than it is to think that one is practicing an ancient religion when one is not. Not because you’ve achieved the unachievable goal of historical honesty. But because when you know your sordid past you don’t have to worry about it.

I can get on with the Great Work, without being burdened with having to defend my lineage. If someone says “Mathers was a wanker” I can simply say “Yes, but he was a very smart wanker and actually managed to put something together that influenced modern occultism up to the present day.”

As you might have suspected, the foray into my background was a McGuffin. The point is that the various controversies over lineage and historical accuracy are distractions. Far better to get on with ones work, acknowledging the web of half truths and outright fabrications that make up every aspect of our lives, not just our magickal endeavors.

(This a longer, somewhat more political version of my guest post on Wild Hunt.)

Like most things in samsara, it all goes back to wheels…

On 17 January, 1961, a dirty Red hippy peacenik named Dwight D. Eisenhower got on his soapbox and made a treasonous little speech. He said that, “In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex.“ Congress and every U.S. President since then has sensibly ignored this advice, giving us the harmonious and sustainable society we enjoy today.

But before we get into that, lets get back to that wheel. There is a reason the Wheel became the synecdoche for good fortune. With it, civilization became possible. One could travel long distances, carry goods with relative ease, and conquer their neighbors with far less hassle. There was, of course, a downside: the wheel is a rather simple device to back engineer. This meant that other, less God fearing types (some of whom might even be socialists!) could also travel far greater distances than before, thus threatening the grain supply and the local gene pool. Hence, the arms race could be said to coincide with the development of long distance travel.

This brings us back to that Pinko and his unpatriotic tirade.

Taking my tongue out of my cheek at this point (people tend to misunderstand you when your speech patterns are thus encumbered) I don’t know if people who quote that little snippet really understand how deeply the very phenomenon Eisenhower was concerned about has taken root in American society, and really the socioeconomic realities of the entire planet. The entity which calls itself “the United States Government” has, for all intents and purposes, ceased to govern. Instead, it now brokers huge contracts that form a huge part of what is left of the U.S. and world economies. If the military were to be drastically reduced tomorrow, the current economic meltdown would turn into a fiscal disaster to rival Three Mile Island. This is why Obama will not be able to close the detention facility at Guantanamo Bay, or leave Iraq. The contracts, not only for weaponry but also for housing facilities, support services such as food and laundry, and other auxiliary services, constitute a controlling interest in the nation’s GDP. Not so much in terms of percentage as distribution. Those contracts are often the backbone of a local or state economy. Pull out that single joker, and a hundred other industries go with it. Enough disappear, and the GDP follows suit.

That GDP is important, because it also happens to be the basis of our monetary system. Modern money is created through debt. Either the government creates it by borrowing from the Federal Reserve, or banks create it when they make a loan. This debt is borrowed against the GDP. Its payment depends on the amount of production and labor that the government can levy taxes on. Currently, there is more debt circulating than could be paid off in a hundred years assuming the current GDP. So, the military industrial complex is here to stay, largely because its weakening would eviscerate anything resembling the current standard of living in most of the industrialized world. See this site for a large amount of information on the MIC.

Then there are those other wheels: the automobiles and other modern conveyances that transport us from one place to another. And the turbines in the power plants that supply energy to major cities. All of these rely on a fuel source. Currently, this fuel taken from the finite geological resources of our planet. Oil, natural gas, coal, and nuclear power, all depend on something which will eventually run out. Discovery of new oil peaked in the middle of the last century. Oil production followed a few years later. Coal, apart from the general ecological damage it produces when burned, is also becoming increasingly difficult to mine. Coal companies have taken to simply destroying mountains -whole ranges in the Appalachians, Smoky Mountains, and Ozarks- in order to get at smaller and smaller coal seams.

And those wheels keep moving, the trains and trucks taking that coal to the city, where the affluent enjoy a standard of living that would be the marvel of an ancient king. Even the relatively poor would rival a feudal lord in access to food, entertainment, and creature comforts. Which really isn’t saying much, other than that life in feudal societies was “nasty, brutish, and short.”

Those poor give us a glimpse of another set of wheels. These wheels belong to the buses that bring ever-increasing numbers of urban poor to an ever growing number of prisons. As much as the military industrial complex has a controlling interest, the prison industrial complex has in some ways surpassed it. This is because lobbyists for the prison industry (now largely private) have used the usual bribes and threats to pass legislation that (1)includes stiffer penalties for crimes and (2) encourages recidivism by placing the focus on punishment rather than reform. The United States incarcerates a much higher percentage of its population than any other industrialized democracy. It does this so that the CEOs of private corporations can show a profit each quarter.

It is safe to say that most people are unaware of these rather ugly factors in the background of their daily lives. I don’t think it’s fair to make a charge of apathy or callous disregard in most cases. When these are expressed, I suspect discomfort more than actual lack of compassion. It is difficult to just get by. The big picture is often too big to deal with for people who are simply struggling with the every day dramas and traumas of modern life.

Among these are the Modern Pagans, some of whom contemplate, on occasion, the performance of a prosperity spell. A fair percentage of the time, someone will bring up the question of whether such an action is appropriately spiritual. Usually the argument will be settled by saying that Pagans do not reject the material world, and so doing work for prosperity is not somehow offensive to our beliefs.

Given the situation, economic, ecological, and social, I think this is quite the wrong place to start thinking from. It assumes the ubiquitous “all things being equal” clause, and all things are demonstrably not equal. What does “prosperity” mean when we, as a civilization, are engaged in what can only be seen as a sustained effort to destroy ourselves and our habitat? That is the question I think needs to be asked.

While there are no easy answers to this, and any attempt to formulate a plan on my part would be partial and based on my own ideological pre-dispositions, I think it is possible to suggest a direction, a tendency that, like a celebration of the material world, is fully compatible with Paganism, and indeed gives it a bit more depth. We already have a piece of it in the concept of interconnection. But interconnection alone tends to focus, in practice, on very intimate, individual relationships. This is because broader, more inclusive concepts of interconnection are generally too abstract to be personally meaningful. You don’t feel the connection between yourself and the migrant worker who picked the strawberries on your pancakes this morning, or the large and increasingly militarized police force and your quiet Sunday morning. Your intellect may be aware of these things, but the guts don’t buy it.

Slovak theorist Slavoj Zizek is fond of saying that, in order to solve the ecological problems of the day, we need to become less connected with nature. Our embeddedness in the Web of Life, says Zizek, actually distorts our perspective. We may know intellectually that the carbon dioxide coming from our cars and our power plants is slowly making the planet less and less habitable for our kind of life-form. But, again, the gut level of experience doesn’t really lead us to believe it deep down. He suggests taking our relationship with nature to an almost gnostic level of abstraction in order to restore ecological balance.

While I find this more than a little extreme, and suspect the “Madman of Theory” is being more than slightly facetious in order to make a point, I do think he might be on to something. It’s the forest/tree problem. In order to get to some sort of resting point in terms of a view of prosperity that honors both intimate interconnection and abstract whole, a look at a key doctrine from another Tradition may be in order.

In the Mahayana Tradition of Buddhism one encounters two important concepts. The first is lovingkindness. (I’m not sure why they always scrunch the two words together like that. It probably has to do with trying to distinguish it from Western assumptions about those two words as separate concepts.) This is a form of basic, relational interconnection. It concerns the way in which one relates to those they regularly encounter. The specific meditation practice for this is called Metta Bhavana. In it, one cultivates lovingkindness for progressively broader groups of people, and also increasingly difficult individuals. Eventually one gets to “all sentient beings,” but this is still a rather personal kind of connection. It stops at wishing people well.

The more abstract form of connection, and the one that I think would do us the most good in terms of thinking about prosperity, is Boddhichitta. This has a number of fairly poor translations, one being “Wisdom Attitude.” What it refers to is the desire to achieve enlightenment for the benefit of all beings. There are also progressive stages to this, each one involving more commitment and discipline.

Now, Modern Pagans can be a little averse to some conceptions of “Enlightenment.” Especially if their only experience with Buddhism is Theravada, where the specific goal is to abandon materiality altogether. Obviously this does not fit with anything Pagans believe. However, in the Mahayana traditions, particularly Vajrayana and the highest esoteric schools such as Dzogchen, the material world is seen as arising equally from Emptiness, and in fact being identical with it. These schools of non-duality express what amounts to a quite well developed concept of immanence.

The difference is that the goal is much “bigger.” Translating into Pagan terms, we can see ourselves as part of a sentient Cosmos, or Goddess. Nut, the Goddess of the Night Sky, would be a good image here in terms of vastness. We are all “stars,” as it were, in the body of this all encompassing, and all pervasive, Deity.

But our first experience is of separation. We are individual units with our own concerns for survival. Then we begin to notice and care for larger and larger groups of people. Eventually, we may be able to see beyond our own sufferings to that of others, and realize that it is the holding on to the smaller, pettier concerns that creates this suffering. We want to help others “wake up” to this wonderful, all encompassing Joy that is the Cosmos we all came from and share space in.

In this sense, the “wealth” is really already there. There may be artificial constraints to getting it, but the actual raw material we need to work in the world is all around us. We have an innate intelligence that can guide us to the best way of using our talents to acquire what we need in order to do this Great Work. “What we need to do the work” may not look like conventional ideas of wealth. But, in the end, we are part of the Cosmos, and there is no question of poverty in such a vast context. It is only a question of how we use that wealth.

We can squander our innate inheritance, as so many in past and current generations have done and continue to do. In that case, the world becomes more poisoned, more oppressive, less livable for our kind of bodies. Or, we can learn to use what we have been given to help ourselves and others. One cannot truly help one without helping the other, since ultimately we are all interacting facets of a larger diamond. We all shimmer or shatter together. This is Boddhichitta.

As we wind this journey down, we can think of another wheel. This one is a wheel that traditionally dwelt inside a home, not traveling but remaining in one place. On it, weavers spun wool and fibers into thread. If their attention was not on the work, they would wreck the perfectly good raw material. Though this may be purely subjective, a coat made from wool spun in anger, or haste, probably didn’t last quite as long as a labor of love.

The poison and the pain of our lives are first born in our minds. Through no fault of our own we get caught up in trivial games that only serve to distract and irritate us, diverting us from the core fact of our separate existence: it hurts. But this division only makes reunion more joyous, and we have all we need to accomplish it. We have only to recognize it, which can be, we must admit, incredibly difficult.

But the consequences of not doing so are too grave. We can no longer fritter away our lives on small drama and the acquisition of toys to distract us. It is time to realize that, even if we are idle, in a broader sense we are always working, always weaving. And the results of our work show how much attention we’ve given it.

Like most things in samsara, it all comes back to wheels…