Initiation means the Journey Inwards: nothing is changed or can be changed; but all is trulier understood with every step. The Magus of the Gods, with His one Word that seems to overturn the chariot of Mankind in ruin, does not in fact destroy or even alter anything; He simply furnishes a new mode of applying existing Energy to established Forms.
Aleister Crowley, Mastery in Little Essays Towards Truth
The joy of life consists in the exercise of one’s energies, continual growth, constant change, the enjoyment of every new experience. To stop means simply to die. The eternal mistake of mankind is to set up an attainable ideal.
Aleister Crowley, The Confessions of Aleister Crowley, Chapter 65
Hermetic Library Fellow T Polyphilus reviews The Ghost in the Machine: The Urge to Self-Destruction: A Psychological and Evolutionary Study of Modern Man’s Predicament [Amazon, Bookshop, Abebooks, Publisher, Local Library] by Arthur Koestler.
Arthur Koestler’s The Ghost in the Machine is offered as a somewhat downbeat counterpart to his immediately previous book The Act of Creation, which I have not read. It is, however, startlingly similar to Gregory Bateson’s Mind and Nature: A Necessary Unity. Although Bateson is putatively the more scientifically highbrow of the two authors, Koestler covers almost all of the ground that Bateson does with respect to systems theory, morphogenesis, and evolution, but provides much additional reflection on psychology and politics. Also, Koestler’s style is more accessible. Where Bateson offers a generalization of Russell’s theory of logical types to discuss interrelationships among systems, Koestler uses the hoarier and more approachable nomenclature of hierarchy. Koestler is also considerate enough to provide a few paragraphs of review at the end of each chapter.
In this book, the author sets out to antagonize the mechanistic paradigm of science, and in particular its expression in psychology’s behaviorist school and its progeny. He offers in contrast his theory of “Open Hierarchical Systems” (O.H.S.), which he also codifies in an appendix. He also discusses the importance of what he calls paedomorphosis (163 ff), which commends itself particularly to the attention of those who recognize the Aeon of the Crowned and Conquering Child. There is even a convenient iconic encoding of the O.H.S. concepts: “the tree, the candle and the helmsman,… the two faces of Janus … and the mathematical symbol of the infinite” (220-1).
The final section of the book is certainly the most provocative. In some ways, it is rather dated, having been written in the throes of the Cold War. But the predicaments that Koestler tries to address — the age-old patterns of human societies regressing into repressive ignorance and tribal conflicts superseding human identity, along with the anxieties of today’s “air-conditioned nightmare” (327) and the approach of human populations and power to a vertical asymptote (the latterly-dubbed “singularity”) — have hardly been resolved. He suggests that these may be symptoms of defective neuroanatomy, and rather than allowing our species to be scrapped so that some other post-primate might develop a more coordinated brain and more enduring societies, he proposes that humans should develop and apply the psychopharmacopoeia needed to produce homo sapiens from homo maniacus (339).
In that conclusion, he ends up pitting himself against Aldous Huxley, but the conflict between their respective pharmacological futurisms is not nearly as clear-cut as Koestler seems to make it out to be. “The psycho-pharmacist cannot add to the faculties of the brain — but he can, at best eliminate obstructions and blockages which impede their proper use,” writes Koestler (335). I’m not sure that Huxley would disagree. Koestler dismisses “mystic insights” as being alien to the human psychic constitution, rather than the product of its proper exercise. I suppose Koestler would be disappointed to find that 21st-century psychiatry has indeed greatly developed psychopharmacology, but with an emphasis on individual pathologies still rooted in a mechanistic behaviorism in organicist drag.
In any case, I enjoyed this book at least as much on a second reading, even as it has become more dated. It made an excellent sequel to my re-read of the Bateson volume, and the next title in this eccentric curriculum will be a jump forward to Jeremy Narby’s The Cosmic Serpent: DNA and the Origins of Knowledge.
Weishaupt’s concept of virtue stems from his Rousseauian influences. Jean-Jacques Rousseau equated true virtue with the purity of mankind in its infancy before it was corrupted by civilization. This virtue was still apparent in the “savage” races still being encountered by explorers in the forests and jungles of North and South America. By comparison, the despotism of western culture, with its class structures and inherent inequality, was considered inferior and contemptible.
Terry Melanson, Perfectibilists: The 18th Century Bavarian Order of the Illuminati [Amazon, Bookshop, Publisher, Local Library]
A “Christian” of that order ought to be put under restraint, and not allowed to associate with mankind. He carries a moral malaria with him, which poisons the air. He suggests evil to minds which have not thought it. He is a dangerous hypnotist, while pretending to be a disciple of Christ.
Ella Wheeler Wilcox, The Heart of the New Thought [Amazon, Bookshop, Local Library]
There is a law governing all things. There is a connecting link between earth, air and sea, between flowers, beasts and birds, between mankind and all animals, and inanimate things, a mysterious joining of mind to matter. It is an intangible something, perhaps an electrical current, but certain it is that the line is there and unbroken, and between every human creature whom God has made, there is the same unbroken chain, which can be followed up link by link, step by step, until we find ourselves on the boundaries of the next world and perhaps beyond; who can tell? The chain may be unbroken even then.
Lydia Leavitt, Bohemian Society [Amazon, Amazon (Dodo Press), Bookshop (Dodo Press, Gutenberg, Local Library]
there are no eternal truths, no divine virtues, no heavenly ethics decreed by any God upon mankind. Morals are not carved into stones as commandments by a God; they are a product of societal agreements among people. Mankind makes its own rules, laws, and morals.
Tom Taylor, Aphorisms to the Individual: Notes for my Sons [Amazon]
The ‘company of heaven’ is Mankind, and its ‘unveiling’ is the assertion of the independent godhead of every man and every woman!
—Aleister Crowley, New Comment on the Book of the Law, Liber AL vel Legis, I.2
Vril, the Power of the Coming Race by Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1986 second printing from Spiritual Fiction Publication / Gerber Communications, is part of the collection at the Reading Room.
“VRIL, mankind’s occult power of the future, and the kind of life and society created by its use in the interior of the earth, is the vivid picture presented in this book. Written 100 years ago by Lord Bulwer-Lytton, famous English Rosicrucian, statesman and author (see: Zanoni, a Rosicrucian Tale another Steiner-book), VRIL, his last book, stands as stern warning and reliable witness to his profound concern for the future welfare of mankind.
VRIL made today’s science-fiction books possible and interesting, but VRIL itself was a serious and prophetic testament that man today must pay heed to, if he is to survive, and become MAN.” — back cover
We know that on some summit, far away
Within the Soul, a beacon-light uplifted
Makes on the mountains round eternal day;
By its bright beams the clouds beneath are rifted,
And for awhile is glorified the grey
Life-sea, whereon so long mankind hath drifted;
That single will oft new strength create,
And then the Spirit conquers time and fate.
To all at times these golden glimpses come;
The clouds roll back; the deep, supernal blue
Is arch’d above those mountains like a dome;
The revelation of the great and true
Comes with those glimpses from the Soul’s far home,
And the Soul knows her lineage and her due;
But most have striven to reach the source in vain
Whence come those beams, or bid their flash remain.
Yet for life’s fever and the mind’s disease
The only refuge for the world is there;
Before they reach it none can taste of ease,
There all are sphered beyond the range of care;
Wrecks toss’d in scorn upon the scourging seas,
Our sails are set to find a haven fair,
But, from those mountains shrinking, still we strive,
And drift for ever where the winds my drive.
We dream of islands lapp’d in amber light,
Of pleasant groves and wilding woodland bowers,
Where morn unclouded follows starry night,
And starry night on evening’s pensive hours;
We see no beauty in the frowning height—
That awful altitude the mind o’erpowers;
Yet the Soul’s home is in its purer air;
Soul-glory, majesty, and might are there.
But there are many, could they see their way,
Who would the summit by their toil attain,
Who not in vain would pour their lives away,
Achieving conquests for their brethren’s gain;
But whom doubt weakens, who in tears delay,
And contemplate life’s spectacle of pain;
Who to do something yearn, yet pause and ask
Some high encitement to so hard a task.
And therefore have we written, O man, for thee
The book that follows, here its plan proclaim—
Help for thy Soul—help that the soul may see
In evil days her best, her noblest aim,
And ever faithful to that end may be,
Though faith should fail, though truth her hope disclaim.
And, ‘mid the general lapse from light, may find
No impulse left for the exalted mind!
What inspiration from the heaven came down
To fill the brain? What angel bade us write?
Oh, in the green fields, in the crowded town,
And in the sunshine or the starry night,
Those thoughts descended which in Soul are sown,
And ripen’d in us, as the flowers in light—
Their strength supports us, from the ample store
We scatter; may they number more and more!
Oh, may this book, by our own heart created,
Be life in all to whom its dream is told—
To draw the world up God’s steep path be fated,
Till all the splendid prospect shall behold,
And on those heights all Souls be reinstated,
From which perchance they lapsed in days of old;
Or those attain whose altitude till then,
Though dimly dream’d, was never known by men!
— A E Waite, “Proem” from Azoth, or the Star in the East
The Hermetic Library arts and letters pool is a project to publish poetry, prose and art that is inspired by or manifests the Western Esoteric Tradition. If you would like to submit your work for consideration as part of the Arts and Letters pool, contact the librarian.