Triad of Sepsis

"That which is looked upon by one generation as the apex of human knowledge
 is often considered an absurdity  by the next..."
--Paracelus (1493-1541)

Who is to say what the "real world" is or is not? Certainly not me. However, since I have been a resident of the physical human habitat for 50+ years, I feel that I have a right to comment on the concept of human reality, and to opine on the state of both my individual reality, and reality at large.

If you've read this blog previously, even if you are of the opinion that I may be, at worst, insane, or at my best, a half-cocked, conspiracy expert wanna-be with delusions of intellectual grandeur, you will have to admit that I am a serious student of the forces that work upon human consciousness as it relates to our world.

This brings me to my current topic. The Triad that I refer to is made up of Crowley
(sigh, yeah, I know, I know, I have one note), Jung, and HP Lovecraft, a union which later gave birth to other notables (whole other topic) such as Aldous Huxley, Terrence McKenna and Arthur C. Clarke. Not Philip K. Dick, or George Orwell, however. I believe they were burrowing into a different reality tunnel that was begotten of a different stream, altogether.

By seeding his texts with his own nightmares, Lovecraft creates an autobiographical homology between himself and his protagonists. The stories themselves start to dream, which means that the reader too lies right in the path of the infection. - Erik Davis, from Calling Cthulhu, HP Lovecraft's Magick Realism

Lovecraft died in 1937, at 46, of cancer.

I read my Uncle's Lovecraft paperbacks when I was in middle school, What I remember is that they were way over my head, boring to a pre-teen, and that the language was mostly unfathomable to me. Yet I continued to read them anyway. I knew Lovecraft's long, wordy descriptions were meant to show something unsettling and disturbing, but I couldn't, in my child's mind, figure out what it was that he was actually saying. Anyone who has read his work, may relate. Later, when I was a bit older, I saw the movie The Dunwich Horror with Sandra Dee, and was also confused by the queasy subtext (highly satanic, very sexually perverse) of that movie. More recently I saw some Lovecraft TV on You Tube; it was a little clearer. Contemporary screen writers have been able to translate his writing to video, and the real horror comes across in a huge way.

 I remember being 11 years old and sitting in the "wayback" of the family station wagon sedan, driving to a family vacation spot, and reading a constant rotation of Lovecraft books, Archie, Angel and the Ape, and Batman comics. I now realize that Archie contained references to the American bloodline family, the Cabot-Lodges. Archie's arch-enemy was Reggie - Reginald Cabot Lodge, a consummate snob and stereotypical entitled rich kid, who lived in a mansion. Archie on the other hand, was an All-American Everykid, full of can-do  goofball positivity and High School joie de vivre. Now that I think about it, blonde Betty and brunette Veronica, who other than their hair color, looked like identical clones, may have been the dual poles of the Masonic lodge, i.e. Solomon's temple - the dark and the light. Wow, it seems as if Archie comics were full of references to secret societies and elite cabals and such, But, that's not what this article started out to explore, so I must digress away from this digression back to my main thesis.

Lovecraft's writing per se wasn't that great, but as horror goes, his ideas and stories were phenomenal. Erik Davis points out that Lovecraft used "science to provide frameworks for horror."  I will be using a lot from Erik Davis, mainly because he is an excellent researcher and writer and also because I am lazy and do not want to study "Lovecraft, the man," myself. This is a blog, not an academic research paper. I already have the theory that I want to expand on. Mr. Davis' work provides me with an excellent springboard from which to do so and I credit him for that.
 What I remember about reading Lovecraft as a kid, is that, while I was tremendously bored and confused, I was at the same time cognoscent of an underlying existentialist dread, that I could not quite, fully realize as a somewhat normal pre-adolescent kid.

Erik Davis, wrote Calling Cthulhu, HP Lovecraft's  Magick Realism, a piece in an anthology entitled Book of Lies, ed. by Michael Moynihan. Do I wish to recommend this book in any way? Surely not, as although the writing is at times superb, I do not agree with the underlying philosophy of the anthology which supports and is inspired by the work of you-know-who, and is a tribute to said person of ill-repute. Same for Mr. Davis, a brilliant researcher and excellent writer, with whom, alas, I cannot agree with regarding his concept that dualism needs to be brought into balance through "magically navigating" the polarities (there's those pesky Masonic pillars again) of Order and Chaos, Structure and Disintegration, all because the universe is basically amoral, or something like that.

It all fits together

Although Lovecraft was a self-proclaimed "mechanistic materialist" (Davis, 139), and not the least bit interested in spirituality or mysticism, professing "cosmic indifferentism" (Davis, 142), Lovecraft can be linked to both ritual magic and to  Crowley because he was, admittedly, heavily influenced by Golden Dawn member, and writer Arthur Machen.
Davis states that Lovecraft built worlds, created worlds, and that there is a whole gaggle of followers who have since developed Chaos magic rites and rituals based on his Cthulhu mythos, trying to conjure up Cthulhu and other creepsters from the Lovecraft canon. As in Crowley's work with ritual and symbolism, and Jung's work with archetypes and inner dialogue, Lovecraft opened up a place in the human experience for supernatural creatures to come forth. Davis also shows, that Lovecraft brought together the occult, quantum physics, psychology and existentialism.The idea of alienation is central to existentialism, and is yet another avenue toward moral relativism and the idea that there is no objective truth, no objective right or wrong, it is all relative to individual choice based on subjective experience - no good or evil - just different comfort zones.

Lovecraft's universe and creatures are often referred to as "amoral," as if his creatures are base animals, predators, who are just exercising their elemental way up and down the food chain. His creatures murder, torment, mutilate, demand blood sacrifices and cannibalize human beings, so I keep wondering how his falls into the category of amorality. Their very existence is an evil so palpable, that, more often than not, people are driven to insanity by one encounter. How is this amoral from a human perspective? Of course, it is not. But we are never really dealing with the human perspective here, are we?

We humans have a system of morality based on the idea of objective right and wrong. If there is no difference between right and wrong, than why bother doing right? For instance, if nothing is considered right or wrong, than why bother not taking life, why bother not killing another person or animal? Why not rape, since nothing is intrinsically immoral. An immoral person will always have a limited vision of the future and the possibilities contained therein, because when there is no inner context of truth or justice, there is literally, nothing to look forward to. Hence, "Monsters of the Id."

Jung's Man & His Symbols was published posthumously in 1964, furnishing a thesis with which to consider embracing monsters and such as emanations of the unconscious, thus paving the way for actualizing Lovecraft's creatures, affording them a cozy playground in psychoanalysis, and later, "transpersonal psychology." (Why not call it transhuman psychology, I wonder).
Additionally the  classic sci-fi movie Forbidden Planet came out in 1956. The film made such an impact on the science fiction film genre, that in 2013 it was entered into the Library of Congress' National Film Registry and is deemed a film of cultural, historical and aesthetic importance. Forbidden Planet is based on a concept right out of psychoanalysis, namely, "Monsters of the Id."[Brief synopsis: The base camp set up on another planet by people from earth is attacked by an invisible monster. The "monster" turns out to be issuing from one of the lead scientists on the mission's Id, aided and enhanced by alien technology.] Although Jung broke with Freud over the rigid structure of the unconscious that Freud proposed, this is just a variation of good cop/bad cop. From my perch it still looks like we are climbing one big, happy psychological family tree. Monsters and demons are coming from us, so psychology says, from our own unconscious, from ourselves, which contains some shred of truth to it, in that demons, do lodge themselves in the central nervous system and consequently affect brain chemistry. That is why, once they are firmly established in the central nervous system, et. al., it is very difficult to remove them, because they control the nerve centers in the brain which can cause confusion, dissociation, hallucinations and so on. That's why it benefits us NOT TO LET THEM IN, through experimenting with occultism, new age techniques and rituals, television and movies that manipulate the senses, etc. You also let them in when you break Almighty God's Holy Commandments, which is why they were written down in the first place, as guidelines for being able to live a wholesome and pleasant life on earth without disincarnate yyeeeeccchhhh entering in to it.

Back to Lovecraft, as mentioned, his human characters are driven mad by contact with his "amoral" creatures from the other dimensions.  As human beings, we have a natural instinct, aversion and repulsion toward evil (sorry comfort zone proponents). Making it seem as if there is no objective experience of evil, and also by attributing aversion to it as "fight or flight" syndrome, reducing our fear to an animal reflex (science and psychology cemented together in the same wall of nonsense), attempts to override our natural, God-given instinct to reject it for the very reasons that we sense that it is toxic, harmful and dangerous to us as humans. This is why Lucifer is called "The Enemy," or "The Adversary," in Christianity. This being and his cartel is the adversary of humanity, filled with jealously and rage at our wonderful creation, seeking to steal from, kill and destroy us -- as documented in the Bible.

Having worked with, and seen extreme mental illness in life, I would say that the main problem of the so-called "diseased" mind is fragmentation. Why wouldn't people become confused and fragmented by the type of circular thinking paraded before us in various literary, psychological, philosophical and art forms being constantly promoted by the corrupted world-society we now find ourselves in?  Added to that, the "field" of psychology "advanced" psycho-therapeutic  treatments by developing experiential therapies, such as Gestalt and hypnotherapy, that posit that inducing trance, confusion, dissociative, and other "altered" states are actually helping people heal their minds.

There are certain immutable cosmic and universal laws, that are God's laws, I don't profess to understand them. I believe that God's law includes free will, which is a paradox to our limited minds, and why, I suppose, we call it "The Mystery." Certain universal laws are originally fashioned by The Creator. These events and conditions exist within the laws of physics; the laws that science observes, abstracts and with that data then theorizes.  It is when conscious beings attempt to manipulate universal law and use it as matrices of invisible force that affect the entire field of a species, planet or world that this manipulation becomes an attempt to by-pass God, to override The Creator. This is ultimately the definition of black magic. God is good and never the author of confusion.

"For God is not the author of confusion, but of peace, as in all the churches of the saints."

 1 Corinthians 14:33

They Went Down to the Crossroads

 Minding the Minefield, Mining the Mindfield

 I had, a while back, an interaction with an ex-satanist who is very popular in the alternative movement right now, and whose work I mostly admired, except in one case. I came across a past radio interview that he'd done, in which he had given a glowing bio of Crowley as a person who'd contributed invaluable research to the field of metaphysics and should be appreciated for his pioneering ways in this area. At the beginning of the broadcast he directed people to "separate the man from his work," saying that to be able to do so  is a hallmark of mature, rational people.

Now I have already written about how tiresome I find the debate about whether or not Crowley was a trickster/jokester, media-toying huckster... also tired of the yammering about his being a chess master (yawn), mountaineer (double yawn), all around creative genius etc., etc., yawn, yawn, yawn. I do not believe that spin. I think that it is part of the double-cross, reverse psychology of evil to declare that evil is not evil, just something out of the ordinary. I believe that Crowley was not an evil master, but that he served evil, and like all good minions, he was double-crossed and thrown to the wolves (possibly literally in this case), Evil always consumes its own. Yet the clever occultist, besotted by his own false sense of power, will almost always, delusionally believe that they will circumnavigate this factor of how evil operates. Crowley deliberately mined the human unconscious, and he mined it in all senses of the word: He set landmines by embedding occult sigils, symbols and logos in his "work," and he also mined it by digging down into it to uncover things that he could use to enhance his own power and to open the doors for his peeps to get their foot into this world.

I emailed the radio guest expressing my distaste for his advocating for the Great Beast, and received a curt and mildly hostile reply to the effect that "he told [me, the listener] to separate the man from his work at the beginning of the broadcast."
I did not reply back, however I will say now: Just because someone tells me I should  separate a person 's individual life, history, personality and impact on society from their research does not mean that I have to. I disagree; I do not think that it is a mark of maturity to separate those things and I don't have to believe that a person is separate from those other elements that make up a lifetime. Says who? I also think that it is part of the moral relativism (that this particular radio personality dissects on a regular basis) to say that a person is not what they do, say, or how they act, but rather the quality of their research is what we need to really look at. Huh?

There has been open speculation as to whether Crowley and Carl Jung ever met, I wrote about the parallels between the two, with links to other people's research in another blog post: The Talented Mr. Crowley.

They may have never met in the flesh, but they met and their work was irrevocably intertwined in the work of cultural anthropologist Angeles Arrien, who died on April 24th, 2014, almost a year after I initially began the draft of this blog post.

Arrien, a internationally famous author, with a strong following among proponents of transpersonal (Jungian) psychology, wrote "The Tarot Handbook (TTH), Practical Applications of Ancient Visual Symbols."  This handbook focuses exclusively on the Thoth (Crowley) Tarot, and serves to whitewash the particularly demonic intent of this deck by reducing it to a study of Archetypal symbols and how they relate to self-help studies, human potential and personal growth. Arrien saw her work as bridging disciplines - the tarot is  presented as a psychology tool rather than occult practice.  In true new age form, Arrien's handbook reduces everything to an inner psychological process - the inner reflecting what is manifesting in the outer, based on the idea that the unconscious is driving all motivation and therefore perception, thereby creating reality. Except that, of cooouuurrrsse,  the most aware and enlightened, i.e. those that  work with this handbook all the time, can increase their inner awareness and thus decrease the deterministic aspect of a reading. All scary negative interpretations of cards, such as Crowley's designation for the 7 of Disks -"Failure" -  is changed in the Handbook to "fear of failure", 5 of Swords - Defeat - is changed to "fear of defeat",  Disappointment - "fear of disappointment", etc. All negatives are changed to a fear of the innate negative characteristics of a card, the implication being that by adjusting one's attitude one can alter one's fate, which is true in some sense, but does not really have a practical application in fortune telling and the like, because if people are interested in the hard work of changing they don't usually contact entities and consult psychics in the first place. Arrien's Handbook ignores the implicit evil in Crowley's work, rendering useless any critical analysis of his intricately woven subliminal traps by putting it all into the realm of self-help and introspection.
Did I mention entities? Because you can rest assured that the Crowley deck comes with its own crowd called up from the Astral that use the symbols as portals for entry into the human field. The individual tarot higher arcana are called Keys (for instance Key #2, The High Priestess), and they are literal keys in that they unlock a place in the mind for the symbols to be introduced. These particular cards were created in order to open up a space in the human body-mind complex for the lower astral and demonic realms to enter. That's my story and I am sticking to it. 

Co-opt the Symbols/Change the Meaning

TTH takes tarot out of the realm of fortunetelling and puts it into the pseudo-science of psychology, while totally ignoring the overtly occult aspect of the Thoth Tarot.This creates a diversion from the embedded content:
Crowley switched out cards 8 and 11, returning # 8 back to being Justice and assigning Key # 11, in the Strength spot, but calling it Lust. Crowley was an "11" numerologically, so he would want this type of perverse focus going into the occult aspect of his personal number. Coincidentally, Arrien died at age 74, which equals 11; her website states that she did not wish to have a memorial service, but rather that mourners should light a candle on the 24th of each month in the year that she died (2014) in her honor.
Crowley took out all of the kings and pages and changed the court cards to Prince and Princesses, so that the court stood as: Queens - mature women; Knights - mature men; and Princes and Princesses -  youths male or female. The psychology explanation for this is that it gives a more optimal approach to 'reading' male or female individuals populating one's life. If you consider that everything and everyone in your environment is mirroring your inner reality, then even if a Tarot card is referring to a person of the opposite sex in your reading, since that person is your consciousness being mirrored in your life circumstances, that still makes it, you, The Fool, who is seen in #0 as the person experiencing the "journey."

I wrote on the fool card back around 2003, when I was a complete (as opposed to a partial) IDIOT.I revisit this material in order to emphasize the pagan fertility cult, mystery school, sun worshiping base materialism implicit in the tarot, which many consider a spiritual path:

 Although the characters in the Tarot appear to change in each card, they are really all the same person—The Fool. The soul, taking the  sojourn called human life, changes form but remains at source, inviolable and without gender. The sun or manifestations of solar life - people, animals, plants, appear in every card. Without the life giving rays of the sun, without photosynthesis,  vegetative, biological life would not be, just as without the number zero, our system of mathematics would not exist. That is why the Tarot begins with card (also called “Key”) zero which faces left, or backwards, toward the last card, The World, which faces right at the end of the journey, thus closing the circle. The Fool's jacket is covered in green tendrils to show that s/he is the concentrated energy of the sun animated through the force of biology - the life force. The energy of the sun, worshiped as a god in almost every ancient culture, suffuses every aspect of  The Fool's tableau, from the bright white-light of the large solar disk, the mandala-like wheels which also appear on her jacket, and the bright yellow color.Although the Fool's path is life itself, the road does not end with death. Key #0 in the Thoth deck, designed with an egg-shaped ribbon looped around him - Shakespeare's "Mortal Coil"—spirals up into the next plane of existence. The journey of this life prepares us for the next one, as all successive travels will prepare us for the ones to come. 

That is the idea anyway, as put forth by the "intuitive arts". I believe that Crowley replaced Kings and Pages with Princes and Princesses for the following reason: Crowley was at heart, if not publicly, a Satanist and as such was into "Powers and Principalities" (Biblical) -as a ceremonial magician he worshiped the God of Forces. Lucifer is a "prince of the air"; the court card Prince of Swords, is literally a Prince of the Air, as the suite of swords in the tarot represents the element of air, or in psycho-babble, " the process of mentation." Crowley insisted the Lucifer of his deck had nothing to do with the Devil of Christianity (although all Satanists draw on Christianity for their own rites and rituals), instead seeing Lucifer as the Light Bringer - Bringing Illumination to all of mankind and liberating them from the forces of darkness and ignorance. This is the same philosophy underlying secret groups the likes of the Illuminati and where they derive their name and ethos. They consider themselves the holders of a superior light source, emanating from Lucifer. I've heard it said that all Illuminati are Luciferians, but not all satanists are Illuminati, or know that they are, in essence, Luciferians.

 Psychological Psychopomp or Satanist Psychopath?

Crowley changed the Devil card (Key 15) to 'Mirth'  and Arrien christened it  "The Principle of Mirth, Humour at what Bedevils us" ("The Tarot Handbook," California Institute of Integral Studies, 1987.)
Instead of the sinister looking Baphomet depicted in most subsequent cards succeeding the Marseilles deck, (the card featuring a man and woman chained to the devil), Thoth Tarot has a dopey cartoon looking goat - making the Devil a potentially benign concept and a mere internal process rather than a cosmic force of evil. When we drag things out into the light, the handbook states, they are not so scary and we see the humor in what appeared to initially be a dark situation, intimating that our ideas about good and evil are overblown and paranoid to begin with..

Crowley wrote of Key #15 in Liber 777:

The figure of Pan or Priapus

Golden Dawn description

This card should be studied in conjunction with No.l3. They are the two great controlling forces of the Universe, the centrifugal and the centripetal, destructive and reproductive, dynamic and static. The lower nature of man fears and hates the transmuting process; hence the chains binding the lesser
figures and the bestial forms of their lower limbs. Yet this very fear of change and disintegration is necessary to stabilise the life-force and preserve continuity. The colours are indigo, livid brown, golden brown and grey

from : http://supertarot.co.uk/777/devil.htm

 Arrien's TTH encourages the use of these cards for meditation. Affirmations (mind control) are provided to reinforce the "positive" aspect of the card.
The tarot is a solar pathway in the occult. It references the marriage of the sun and the moon, as befits its affiliation with the ancient fertility cults. 
 As others have pointed out, there are 78 cards in a tarot deck and the 78 signifies the marriage of the sun and moon. Card 7, the Charioteer, is aligned with Cancer and ruled by the moon. Card 8, was traditionally Strength and depicted a woman with a lion (Leo, a sun symbol) on a golden yellow card. This was before Crowley made it card 11 and renamed it Lust; Arrien's interpretation is that it is "Lustre" - an inner radiance that is enhanced by rubbing against the sharp edges of life.  7 + 8 = the marriage of the Sun and Moon as illustrated by the tarot cycle.

Crowley's cards reinforce the Kabbalistic overlay (An overlay is a perceptual field, not a real spiritual truth.) of our false reality. The sun serves as a  Sephiritic sphere, providing a lens and filter to allow in the the limitless light of the outer world, then refracts into the prism of colors which is called the seven rays of occultism. All occult doctrines are filtered through the lens of Kabbalistic tree of life Sephira, spheres which are the oppressive overlay that is often referred to as "the matrix." The first "The Matrix" movie was immediately recognized by occultists everywhere as an artistic powerhouse of occult lore.

In short, Crowley had to change the tarot and get princes ensconced firmly into it for the reasons previously state, i.e.,  that Lucifer, his main squeeze, is a "prince of the air" - see, the Thoth tarot is just another way to get Lucifer, the prince of darkness and his cartel of dark lords into pop metaphysics, most of which does not believe in a real devil, Satan or Lucifer, all seen as Archetypes rather than real supernatural beings, become part of our unacknowledged "shadow material;" which we need to embrace (Give it a big hug) in order to integrate it into our psyches and become whole. No, I don't believe this, I'm just explaining the spiel as it relates to this topic. It is all about the "transmuting power." I believe that Angeles Arrien unknowingly aided him in preparing humanity for the reign of the dark lords by believing that she was bridging cross-cultural symbolism with psychology. Come to think of it, the name Angeles means angels and Arrien contains the word Air or Aire (Old English spelling). So although it is her real name, it appears to be an anagram, of sorts, of "Angels in Aire" - if you can get one anagram from several different languages.