Race & Thelema
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Av said "I think a good test of discernment, in students of magick, is their reaction to Crowley's racism."
Good point,Av. My take is as good as a pomegranate is, there are bits to be thrown out. It has taken me a number of years to get past that and arrive at a different perspective while remaining true to my own view on the matter. There is some common sense to be leveraged here.
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It is quite incorrect to assign normative aspects of innate racial inferiority or superiority to the mere existence of Racialism.
The fact that a dog is not a cat, does not mean that dogs and better than cats or vice versa, it only indicates than Dogs have a unique function in the cosmos from cats, and to apply the standards of cats to dogs, would be a violation of the law of Thelema. As aspects of the universe the cat is as necessary as the dog, and to treat them as if there were no difference between the types and classes of creatures, would be a disservice to all.
The fact is than the cosmos developed different and unique races, each biologically and traditionally suited to the climate of it's origin, and each with a unique purpose and spiritual destiny of it's own.
If we deny Race, we deny Thelema, for racialism is merely the application of Thelema to genealogical ethnic groups. If we can not admit that races differ and are unique aggregates of stars, then how can we accept that the individual is a unique star with it's own particular WILL. If we take racial equality and apply the same principle on the smaller unit, it implies that all men are equal and should be treated not on a person to person basis, rather a broad brush can paint over all humanity, as all individuals are identical.
As every individual is unique and has a unique WILL which must be recognised, so do to all races, states, companies, etc have a unique collective WILL.
The essay on the Jewish problem, only claims that the Jewish people need to find a place in the world for their unique racial talents, and Crowley suggests that they messiah they await might be just the Magus to help them divine than purpose. Thus he suggests that if they accept the LAW of Thelema, and reform Judaism accordingly, The Jewish race as a whole might a place in the New Aeon, without conflict with the other races of the world.
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I get your point, but at the same time there are some issues with your analogy. Dogs and cats are different species. There is no genetic continuum between a dog and a cat.
Homo Sapiens is a single species, with a genetic continuum between fuzzy racial/ethnic groups. There are also the factors of your individual genetics, your gender, your genetic family, the people you grow up with, the region you grew up in, the species of which you are a part, the primate order, the mammalian class of life from which that species evolved, the broad phylum of vertebrates, the animal kingdom, or all life forms in general.
We don't really need to create a false dichotomy and say that one either denies race entirely or embraces it as very important.
As far as your statements about Crowley and the Jews, whether the underlying point is yours or his, it's all pretty convoluted. And why can't Gentiles, especially ones who read Evola, ever talk about anyone other than the Jews?
I'm tempted to write an essay called "the Goy Problem" wherein I talk about the WASP "race" and the redemption thereof 
Jewishness, as an ethnic identity is hardly a discrete genetic group. I mean, I'm ethnically Jewish (on my mom's side), but my family is Sephardic, from Spain, and went through a couple thousand years of mixing with Europeans and Arabs, etc. My wife's Jewish too, but her family is Ashkenazy, and spend a couple thousand years mixing with Slavic people in Russian and Georgia. Any genetic similarities between the two of us are probably due to general shared human traits, and non-Semitic DNA that's surely present. Culturally, our biggest factor in shared heritage is being raised in the United States.
Just because race "exists" and is a factor in who we are, doesn't mean it's a very big or important factor.
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@Frater Aster Lux said
"I certainly don't reject the idea of reincarnation, it just seems pointless to think about besides hypothetically. "
The only worthwhile point would be to help in your understanding of your true will in this incarnation (and, on a related note, how that fits in with your overarching true will across multiple incarnations). It is part of the curriculum that Crowley taught, for this reason.
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why must you define Race genetically, and not fundamentally a spiritual matter, meaning that a Race is a group of people, who share a tradition. The tradition like an Internet protocol, includes many layers. The cultural, the religious, the historical, the agricultural, the ethical, the genetic, the physiological. etc.
What defines a Race is than a group of people share that tradition, what the Shinto call the ancestors, or Jung calls the racial unconscious archetypes, evola calls tradition, Plato called the world of forms, Hegel called it Geist, Hitler called it Das Blut. and many have called by many terms.
In his book, "the manhood of humanity" Count Korzybski refers to the quality of "Time-binding" by which he means humans are able to record and learn from our history. We bind time not only in history books, but in our artefacts, our customs, our religious rituals, and to some extent it our genes, when we actively arrange marriages and such.
What I mean by this is that a Race is a combination of a tradition or a closed bound time-space related to the history of a people, that is reflected in their rituals, conditioned behaviours, family traditions, art styles, and genetics is only one small part of that tradition, that Time that is bound to a specific space and the people who dwell in that space-time.
Each tradition not only binds the past in the form of history, but it binds the future in that it is not a static, buy a dynamic system, it progresses, the Race then is an Aggregate of experiences the same as any star and it has a WILL and orbit just as the stars of it's smaller units the individual.
As for the reason judaism is a problem, it is because judaism was a culture that developed under oppression, and devised a very clever culture to survive and keep their dignity in that situation. While in captivity, the Jews devised a morality that humility and suffering are signs of righteousness. "God chose us and so he cause us to suffer, it is to test our faith". This mentality comforts the slave and all who are weak or oppressed, who suffer. They then teach this mentality to the ruling class, and this makes the ruling class feel guilty. Because I am rich and happy, then God does not choose me, I am not tested, I may have power in this word, but I am lowly in spirit. This eventually weakens the host nation, Babylon and them Rome. The ruling class feels guilty and ideas like what we today call progressive or socialist arise. The higher are made lower to be equal with the inferior, everyone get's a participation trophy, and the strongest warriors are not admired they are called murderers and spit upon.
Basically, Judaism in sets up a power dynamic in which the feelings of power and self worth are attained by poisoning the well of the host nation. They have a parasitic relationship to nations that invite them in. But, the Jewish people are clever and strong, if they accepted the law of Thelema, rather than defining themselves by fear, guilt and resentment of the world, they could rise up, take a sword and learn to see themselves as self governed by Love under WILL, to achieve power and a place for themselves on their own merits. Not hide their merits behind guilty false modesty, like a modest woman hides behind a veil. Has not that black veil been ripped away?
So that the teachings of modesty and humility are at an end, that one is to be brazen and unashamed, not taking the slave route of power through looking small and winning the most pity.
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@Froclown said
"why must you define Race genetically"
Well, perhaps because that's the meaning of the word. (It does help communication if we use words accordiong to their actual meanings.) Just to grab the closest dictionary at hand (dictionary.com, not necessarily my favorite but convenient):
Primary definition is, "a group of persons related by common descent or heredity." [That's genetic, you'll notice.]
Next, it cites the following definitions as used in anthropology:
"a. any of the traditional divisions of humankind, the commonest being the Caucasian, Mongoloid, and Negro, characterized by supposedly distinctive and universal physical characteristics: no longer in technical use." [That's genetic, too.]
"b. an arbitrary classification of modern humans, sometimes, esp. formerly, based on any or a combination of various physical characteristics, as skin color, facial form, or eye shape, and now frequently based on such genetic markers as blood groups." [These are genetic-linked markers.]
"c. a human population partially isolated reproductively from other populations, whose members share a greater degree of physical and genetic similarity with one another than with other humans." [Genetic]Other definitions following are:
"a group of tribes or peoples forming an ethnic stock" [Genetic]
"any people united by common history, language, cultural traits, etc." [Not necessarily genetic, but usuallywould have strong genetic commonalities]
"the human race or family; humankind" [Genetic]And so forth.
"What defines a Race is than a group of people share that tradition, what the Shinto call the ancestors, or Jung calls the racial unconscious archetypes, evola calls tradition, Plato called the world of forms, Hegel called it Geist, Hitler called it Das Blut. and many have called by many terms."
You should use a different word that means this, such as, oh, culture.
"What I mean by this is that a Race is a combination of a tradition or a closed bound time-space related to the history of a people, that is reflected in their rituals, conditioned behaviours, family traditions, art styles, and genetics is only one small part of that tradition, that Time that is bound to a specific space and the people who dwell in that space-time. "
Yeah, culture is the word you're looking for: " the sum total of ways of living built up by a group of human beings and transmitted from one generation to another," etc.
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Froclown, the OP is clearly talking about "race" in the genetic sense. So, if you're talking about "race" as a "culture", then I'd have to say it's a different topic.
"Jung calls the racial unconscious archetypes, evola calls tradition, Plato called the world of forms, Hegel called it Geist, Hitler called it Das Blut. "
And, I've never read about the "racial unconscious archetypes" in Jung. Nonetheless, the Jung's archetypes are nothing like Hitler's concept of Das Blut. Jung's archetypes, even if flavored by each culture, are universally human, in the same way that the Tree of Life provides a universal system for classifying consciousness, even if different tables have a cultural flavor.
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"Basically, Judaism in sets up a power dynamic in which the feelings of power and self worth are attained by poisoning the well of the host nation."
I really can't leave this one alone.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Well_poisoning
"the term "well-poisoning" remains a loaded one that continues to crop up even today among anti-Semites around the world."
I'll try to transcend the offensive sentiment underlying this, and actually follow it a little deeper. The Jews were used as a scapegoat for the bubonic plague, and accused of poisoning the wells of the city, in order to justify a pogrom to murder Jews.
Now, as we really know, the bubonic plague was spread by rats and fleas. So,in this case, the Jewish problem is really a flea and rat-infested Caucasian problem.
Metaphorically, then, I would say that the problem is not so much Judaism setting up a power dynamic in which the feelings of power and self worth are attained by poisoning the well of the host nation. Rather, the host nation is diseased and is looking for a scapegoat. The host nation being you.
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not at all.
Actually I used the term Well poisoning, to refer to the bible verse "Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live"
here the word used mean sorcerer or one who poisons the well, or a source, which can mean poisons the divine source, ie corrupts the divine influence, a renegade rabbai or some one who misuses the name of YHVH, commits the sin of Onan etc. But I digress.I chose the term to mean that the Jewish power dynamic is to teach life denying slave morality to the nation which has allowed them to stay, and generally not assimilate fully.
See "On genealogy of Morals" By Saint Nietzsche.
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Well, if you were unfamiliar with the accusation of well-poisoning against the Jews, then you clearly know very little about Jewish history, and are hard to take seriously.
@Nietzsche said
"These accursed anti-Semite deformities shall not sully my ideal!"
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"However, that’s what took place: out of the trunk of that tree of vengeance and hatred, Jewish hatred—the deepest and most sublime hatred, that is, a hatred which creates ideals and transforms values, something whose like has never existed on earth—from that grew something just as incomparable, a new love, the deepest and most sublime of all the forms of love: —from what other trunk could it have grown? . . . However, one should not assume that this love arose essentially as the denial of that thirst for vengeance, as the opposite of Jewish hatred! No. The reverse is the truth! This love grew out of that hatred, as its crown, as the victorious crown unfolding itself wider and wider in the purest brightness and sunshine, which, so to speak, was seeking for the kingdom of light and height, the goal of that hate, aiming for victory, trophies, seduction, with the same urgency with which the roots of that hatred were sinking down ever deeper and more greedily into everything that was evil and possessed depth. This Jesus of Nazareth, the living evangelist of love, the “Saviour” bringing holiness and victory to the poor, to the sick, to the sinners—was he not that very seduction in its most terrible and most irresistible form, the seduction and detour to exactly those Judaic values and innovations in ideals? Didn’t Israel attain, precisely with the detour of this “Saviour,” of this apparent enemy to and dissolver of Israel, the final goal of its sublime thirst for vengeance? Isn’t it part of the secret black art of a truly great politics of vengeance, a farsighted, underground, slowly expropriating, and premeditated revenge, that Israel itself had to disown and nail to the cross, like some mortal enemy, the tool essential to its revenge before all the world, so that “all the world,” that is, all Israel’s enemies, could then swallow this particular bait without a second thought? On the other hand, could anyone, using the full subtlety of his mind, even imagine in general a more dangerous bait? Something to match the enticing, intoxicating, narcotizing, corrupting power of that symbol of the “holy cross,” that ghastly paradox of a “god on the cross,” that mystery of an unimaginable and ultimate final cruelty and self-crucifixion of god for the salvation of mankind? . . . At least it is certain that sub hoc signo Israel, with its vengeance and revaluation of the worth of all other previous values, has triumphed again and again over all other ideals, over all nobler ideals." (Nietzsche, on genealogy of morals)
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@Nietsche said
""However, that’s what took place: out of the trunk of that tree of vengeance and hatred, Jewish hatred—the deepest and most sublime hatred, that is, a hatred which creates ideals and transforms values, something whose like has never existed on earth"
Here, Nietsche demonstrates a preposterous lack of knowledge about Judaism, their Scriptures, and the various competing and conflicting voices found in their holy books. Instead of speaking from knowledge, he speaks from a twisted historical perspective that conflates genetics with culture, and views the culture through the eyes of the cognitively distorted agony of his own psychological battle for liberation. Indeed, rarely are so many examples of cognitive distortion apparent at once.
"1.All-or-nothing thinking (splitting) – Thinking of things in absolute terms, like "always", "every", "never", and "there is no alternative". Few aspects of human behavior are so absolute. (See false dilemma.) All-or-nothing-thinking can contribute to depression. (See depression). Also called dichotomous thinking.
**2.Overgeneralization – **Taking isolated cases and using them to make wide generalizations. (See hasty generalization.)
3.Mental filter – Focusing almost exclusively on certain, usually negative or upsetting, aspects of an event while ignoring other positive aspects. For example, focusing on a tiny imperfection in a piece of otherwise useful clothing. (See misleading vividness.)
4.Disqualifying the positive – Continually reemphasizing or "shooting down" positive experiences for arbitrary, ad hoc reasons. (See special pleading.)
5.Jumping to conclusions – Drawing conclusions (usually negative) from little (if any) evidence. Two specific subtypes are also identified:
Mind reading – Assuming special knowledge of the intentions or thoughts of others.
Fortune telling – Exaggerating how things will turn out before they happen. (See slippery slope.)
6.Magnification and minimization – Distorting aspects of a memory or situation through magnifying or minimizing them such that they no longer correspond to objective reality. This is common enough in the normal population to popularize idioms such as "make a mountain out of a molehill." In depressed clients, often the positive characteristics of other people are exaggerated and negative characteristics are understated. There is one subtype of magnification:
Catastrophizing – Focusing on the worst possible outcome, however unlikely, or thinking that a situation is unbearable or impossible when it is really just uncomfortable.
7.Emotional reasoning – Making decisions and arguments based on intuitions or personal feeling rather than an objective rationale and evidence. (See appeal to consequences.)
8.Should statements – Patterns of thought which imply the way things "should" or "ought to be" rather than the actual situation the patient is faced with, or having rigid rules which the patient believes will "always apply" no matter what the circumstances are. Albert Ellis termed this "Musturbation". (See wishful thinking.)
9.Labeling and mislabeling – Explaining behaviors or events, merely by naming them; related to overgeneralization. Rather than describing the specific behavior, a patient assigns a label to someone of him- or herself that implies absolute and unalterable terms. Mislabeling involves describing an event with language that is highly colored and emotionally loaded.
**10.Personalization – **Attribution of personal responsibility (or causal role) for events over which the patient has no control. This pattern is also applied to others in the attribution of blame."The first section above from Nietsche commits all but #5, Jumping to Conclusions; and #8, Should Statements.
@Nietsche said
"—from that grew something just as incomparable, a new love, the deepest and most sublime of all the forms of love: —from what other trunk could it have grown? . . . However, one should not assume that this love arose essentially as the denial of that thirst for vengeance, as the opposite of Jewish hatred! No. The reverse is the truth! This love grew out of that hatred, as its crown, as the victorious crown unfolding itself wider and wider in the purest brightness and sunshine, which, so to speak, was seeking for the kingdom of light and height, the goal of that hate, aiming for victory, trophies, seduction, with the same urgency with which the roots of that hatred were sinking down ever deeper and more greedily into everything that was evil and possessed depth. This Jesus of Nazareth, the living evangelist of love, the “Saviour” bringing holiness and victory to the poor, to the sick, to the sinners—was he not that very seduction in its most terrible and most irresistible form, the seduction and detour to exactly those Judaic values and innovations in ideals? "
Again, the entire construction here commits all errors of logic and subjective emotional thinking except for #8, Should Statements.
@Nietsche said
"Didn’t Israel attain, precisely with the detour of this “Saviour,” of this apparent enemy to and dissolver of Israel, the final goal of its sublime thirst for vengeance? Isn’t it part of the secret black art of a truly great politics of vengeance, a farsighted, underground, slowly expropriating, and premeditated revenge, that Israel itself had to disown and nail to the cross, like some mortal enemy, the tool essential to its revenge before all the world, so that “all the world,” that is, all Israel’s enemies, could then swallow this particular bait without a second thought? "
#5, Jumping to Conclusions: subtype Mindreading; and #10, Personalization, are key in this passage though all are still present except #8, Should Statements.
@Nietsche said
"On the other hand, could anyone, using the full subtlety of his mind, even imagine in general a more dangerous bait? Something to match the enticing, intoxicating, narcotizing, corrupting power of that symbol of the “holy cross,” that ghastly paradox of a “god on the cross,” that mystery of an unimaginable and ultimate final cruelty and self-crucifixion of god for the salvation of mankind? . . . At least it is certain that sub hoc signo Israel, with its vengeance and revaluation of the worth of all other previous values, has triumphed again and again over all other ideals, over all nobler ideals." (Nietzsche, on genealogy of morals)"
I just think it's a shame he was never able to express himself without resorting to such obviously distorted and imbalanced revisions of history. This isn't history. This is a projected story that came from a disturbed and distorted psyche - disconnected from a holistic historical perspective and fallen captive to the "splitting" that is found in narcissistic and borderline personality disorders.
It's simply poor and muddled thinking.
It makes me pity him, tortured soul that he was.
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Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law.
I say the most important point one could raise in Crowley's defense on this matter would be that he was in his mid-20's at the turn of the 20th century; during this time, these sort of sentiments were far from uncommon. Certainly, many of his contemporaries would not support such a disposition and many may have gone as far as to shun such convictions. However, of the aforementioned, few and far between are those responsible for a body of work equal to Crowley's in terms of scholastic depth, artistic prowess, and cultural impact.
Love is the law, love under will.
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It is quite clearly expressed by Crowley that Races are different, they have different traditions from very different histories. That races can express noble qualities or the opposite, depending in large measure, upon how they are treated by the peoples around them. That Thelema is interested in cultivating and gathering those individuals of all races which express noble qualities is also clear. It is shown that the flavor in which the highest qualities of a man are expressed vary from Race to Race, so also the lowest qualities.
Crowley of course concerning himself with quality over quantity would rather like to have seen a 2/3 the population of the world destroyed in some great war, or famine, so long as it left the most noble 1/3 or less as potential adepts. Likewise the many inferior folk he insists of whatever race are mere cattle, concerned with base, things. The put health, wealth and vanity at the top of their priorities, while the noble place, Science, art and spiritual matters as their priority. Thus the base need to be ruled over by the noble. "Kings shall be kings, the slaves shall serve".
However, Crowley also was no fan of the big business model or the metropolitan lifestyle that lured the family farmers and craftsmen into a life of low plane, intemperance, gambling, and in the low minded they always would sink lower rather than resolve problems on a higher plane, eventually leading to theft, arson and murder. The higher sort of man, of course could engage in these vices carefully without destroying his spiritual constitution, if he took care to direct them towards the higher ideals of his TRUE WILL.
It any event, the global merging of races and cultures in the big cities and their global economic schemes, the industrial revolution, were problematic to Crowley. The Craftsman continues in the tradition of his race and his WILL to work and create is noble, he puts himself into his production, it reflects himself and his people. But the factory worker is merely the slave of a machine, his creativity stifled, his product an expression of mechanical efficacy rather than the LOVE of a skilled artisan.
So ideally, you would keep everyone race and culture together in small groups, you would retain the artistry and differences in the races. each would take pride in his art and craft, as on expression of and positive contribution to his people. Thus the most noble of every race, the adepts of Thelema would be the upper class of every race, each expressing it's own flavor of thelema, the perennial truth expressed in the symbols of the race. The adept of the same race and culture as the people he governed. Leading each my example of virtue, helping to ensure each traditional craftsman, farmer, artist, etc. is facilitated by the governing system to produce the greatest possible contribution to the whole.
In this way each race will be guided by the highest expression of the race, and thus degradation of members to engage in the lowest expression of the race minimised, and as each member of a race performs at it's highest expression the race as a whole performs at it's highest expression, and thus on the global level, all the races interact at the most noble and refined level. Just as organ in the body works to perfect itself, which is also the perfect health and function of each cell of the type that builds than organ, and when each organ is perfected, the body as a whole is perfected and healthy.
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"So ideally, you would keep everyone race and culture together in small groups"
I figured as much.
Your argument is pretty much: Why can't we have the most reactionary, rigid, segregated society possible, with only one modification - it'll be entirely just!
It's a nice thought experiment, but when it only serves to further the agenda of people who were simultaneously spouting it, and actively working towards genocide, you can see that it is just the most qlippotic elements of the Osirian age, masqueraded as higher thought.
I seriously wonder what your point-of-view would be if you put down the books and do 6 months of daily LBRP and Middle Pillar Ritual. For fairness sake, I'd participate in the same experiment, to see how my POV shifts without immersing myself in constant political theory/philosophy/utopianism/etc. Are you game?
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Froclown stated-"So ideally, you would keep everyone race and culture together in small groups, you would retain the artistry and differences in the races. each would take pride in his art and craft, as on expression of and positive contribution to his people."
In my opinion, that would be the recipe for the death of art and the turn to revolt. The true artist would follow something that could not be confined and see that expression manifest in love or war. You are forgeting the Will of the individual. Not everyone needs to discover it through a system. What you describe is like prison, but worse.
I do enjoy your thoughts and appreciate the time and detail you put into it. Thanks
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The purpose of art is to express the cultural tradition of the race and thereby to express as a prophesy the direction in which each race is headed.
It used to be that if you go to France you could expct to see people drinking wine, eating cheese, wearing barrets and other French things. Now, France is not different than anywhere else in the world, everything is all mixed up and there is nothing gained by travel. You can eat the same cheese at home as in Paris, and neither is the cheese and wine of some one whose family tradition and culture is represented in the product, it's all made in a factory by mechanical specifications with no variation of personal craftsmanship at all.
The replacement of traditional cultures with mass produced systems of global production, is what ruins art. It also destroys all sense of personal identity as some one who lives by and expresses the values of your Family, Race, community, city, and nation, with the bland common base traits of merely a human, equal to and like all other humans. It makes you nothing, a common part that is superfluous and replaceable by any other human part in the machine. Thus you have no WILL of your own, you are not a unique product of a long line of genes, and cultural traits, you are just a common replaceable mass produces space filler.
your WILL is a product of your history and the structure of the society and environment into which you are genetically affixed. Like your heart is affixed to it's WILL in your body. The heart is not something that can be replaced by the liver or the kidney, it serves a specific function, and it can't do just any old thing it might want, by virtue of being a heart and by the system that evolved into which it came to be a heart, it has one and only one function, which it must learn and do.
Like wise your TRUE WILL is that ONE and only ONE function which you MUST learn and do, that is a product of what you are and how you came to be in the system of the world.
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That "one thing" that you mention, isn't one thing.
Teaching mankind the next step in this Aeon, may be a single, well stated idea with the force of the universe behind it, but is not one thing. A heart is useless in an emesis basin.
Art is deeper than terrior, as wine is. Ask the dude who turns the bottle a quarter turn, ad infinitum.
Eating cheese in Paris is much different than eating cheese in Akron. One may be preferred by another.
I don't mean to throw these out like this, but it's just how I see it. You may be completely right.
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Thee are no Higher forces.
The material forces of environment and heredity determine WILL, there is no SPIRITUAL anything.
A leopard can not change it's spots, it has to discover what it is, and learn to be satisfied being a leopard and learn to stop dreaming about being a fish or a bird, that is what initiation is all about, giving up the fantasy that you can be anything you want to be and learning to be what you actually are.
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There's Briah, but all I see in your posts are Yetzirah and Assiah. I've also heard tell of Atziluth, but haven't glimpsed it yet.