The Magus

THE MAGUS

The Magus: Intel or Intelligentsia?

From the Abyss of primordial imagination, Aleister Crowley (1875-1947) was born in Victorian England to a life of financial privilege and religious bigotry. He rebelled against his traditional upbringing, becoming a Masonic maverick. The iconoclast philosopher became a mountaineer, a bohemian, a writer of sensuous poetry and a practitioner of what he called Magick and detractors called "the black arts".

Crowley was an uninhibited explorer of global spiritual traditions combining ritual with spiritual ecstasy. His winding path was a walk on the wild side, intersecting ceremonial magic, classical syncretism, Sufism, Buddhism, Hinduism, and Kabbalah. He made a new age fusion religion of sex, drugs, poetry and music.

Was the magus also a spy, or Hitler’s Guru, his “wannabee,”programmer, or even doppelganger? Was he a British agent or did he collaborate with Nazis during WWII? Information is power, but so is disinformation. He definitely wrote propaganda, but like Parcival in the Grail Castle, we have to ask, “Who do these things serve?”

ARCANA

The occult is one of the keys to world events; reality is also defined by politics. It takes intelligence to be a magician, but a magician can also be an active agent of intelligence, figuratively and literally. The real question is, rather, how and why and who and what do these things serve? Restoring self and society is the essential wisdom of the Grail. But this quest can be coopted for narcissistic or pathological ends. The Secret Doctrine can introduce both positive and negative praeternatural forces.

Who is served by the Holy Grail of occult knowledge? What is the Grail, and who does it serve? The secret is in the power and the power is in The Secret. It is a meaningless metaphor without the experiential process of self-transformation to back it up. It is the panacea, a personal path of recovery for “what ails thee.” The Grail is a metaphor for connection to the mystical Source of everything, the ever-renewing Fountain of all manifestation.

All paths lead toward a personal journey of transformation and enlightenment, though not all journeys fulfill the total potential of creativity, compassion, engagement, and spirituality. On a classical “hero’s journey” like Parcival, when you find the Grail, and are called to its service, no knowledge remains hidden for long, for magick was the first transdisciplinarian occupation, drawing on all areas of knowledge. Before science divorced the occult arts it was called Natural Philosophy.

A Magus is a “worker of magic” which eludes rational definition. The Magus is both a symbol of enlightenment and deception (disinformation)-- just like the Tarot card, The Magician, is a card of duality: Wisdom and Folly."Now you see it; now you don't" is the forte of the illusionist, the juggler of realities, who is master of Orwellian double-think – holding the tension of the opposites. Myths present themselves as systems of antinomies, or opposites: heaven/hell, good/evil, life/death.

Traditionally, the Magus is one who can demonstrate hands-on magic: healing, transformative rituals, metaphor therapy, alchemical transmutations, charging of talismans, spirit comm, etc. Magick works on the principle that man is a microcosm.

A modern Magus is any person who completes the circuit between heaven and Earth, one who seeks to bring forth the divine 'gold' within her or himself. He or she is also a Mentor, an Initiator, reading the signs and revealing deeper purpose and meaning in “the godgame.”

But that is how the outer world sees it. Every Magus has a foot in both worlds. Their inner life is mercurial, a complex psychic layer-cake of inner planes of transcendent experience where quantum leaps of consciousness are possible and messages are exchanged with the Great Unknown.

Perception of what is real and what is not dims and vanishes in a whirlwind of synchronicities. Imagination is reality. Magicians understand the world we live in, or think we live in, is an illusion, a construct of our own perceptual apparatus and a malleable interpretation of our brains.

But the hyperdimensional gifts of the Spirit come at a price. The magician taps into, becomes one with, an essence that pop culture calls The Force. It's subatomic vibration of Light and Sound is the enlivening force, which feeds creation and allegedly responds to focused intention. Information controls and patterns energy.

For masters of the Hermetic Arts, all magick is wrought through this impressionable ether, a plenum of potential, using true properties of nature, it's laws, forces, and principles. The mage seeks to selectively establish an internal order out of this chaos, then externalize it, according to his vision. He is the soul guide who initiates the transformation process.

The Hermetica included works on magic, alchemy, astrology, healing, gnosis, theurgy, ritual and philosophy. Sympathetic magic contends that like substances sharing an essence can influence one another through resonance effects. Likewise the hypnotic and magnetic qualities of charismatic individuals can create rapport with others to influence them.

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Mind Phreak

This power card also represents the fine line dividing white magic from black magic, toxic or malignant black ops. Power can be used in either a self-serving manner, or one in service to the All. In order for The Magus to achieve his aims, there must be constant awareness and self-examination, pressing on and exploring one’s boundaries, breaking through into the boundless realms.

This is also the Trump of discernment. The Magus can discriminate between various realities and fantasies, between various points of view, without buying into any belief system, literally. The sorcerer orchestrates and works within others’ belief systems.

By molding worldviews, a magician creates the perception, manipulates and defines the perceived reality, creates the structure for self-organizing transformation. He believes no metanarratives but orchestrates them for others. He is an opportunistic paradigm shifter, shapeshifter, chameleon, trickster. If you assume a role does that make it real? If not, fake it till you make it. Better to be an inspired lunatic than uninspired, or so Crowley’s arc implies.

Cosmic Intelligencer
Aleister Crowley was among the first magicians of the modern era to find his own personal zero point in the Abyss of the transcendent imagination. Crowley played with the perceptions of the world. He pioneered the use of magick and psychedelics, much like Freud pioneered brainwashing, psychoanalysis and cocaine. Crowley and Freud were psychonauts developing “software technologies” for the brain. Like Carl Jung, he explored the Collective Unconscious. Magick is a practical system designed for experiment. His magickal weapon was the phallic Wand, his means the creative Word, both truth and falsehood.

Whether Crowley ended his life as a degenerate burn out or enlightened individual is a deep paradox. As a magician, Crowley failed to immerse himself in the divine light and only developed on a mundane level. He never completed his own Abramelin Operation, having abandoned hhis quest for the Holy Guardian Angel or higher self halfway through the long retreat.

He never did any OTO opertions except sex magick. He failed as a Gnostic to dissolve into the ascending light. His world consisted of theoretical self-dissolution, strategies to disjoint personality, identity and action. The result were toxic experiments on himself and narcissistic idolizing of himself alone. As such, he was somewhat of a harbinger of the Postmodern dilemma.

But who better than a cunning master of deception to enter the hall of mirrors of international ESPionage as Agent 666? He may have seen others of the intelligentsia, the manipulative High Priesthood in there, smiling back from the Abyss – Malthus, Galton, Aldous and Julian Huxley, Bulwer-Lytton, H.G. Wells, George Orwell, Helena Blavatsky and later even L. Ron Hubbard and Tim Leary.