TheLOLma

[letterblade]

So remember how I said a bit back (#6.5.5) that I should write a big honkin' post on why I'm being drawn to Thelema? I'm tired, I'm bored, I've spent all day browsing related foo on the 'net and have Crowley on the brain, and next time I'm at the temple I'll be asking for both baptism and Minerval apps.

It's about time.

Mostly this post is for those of you (er, yes, phoenix_rinna, looking in your direction, but I'm sure there are others) who have been liek all



(A note in interpretation: it's phenomenally rude, and "against the rules," inasmuch as us crazy folk have rules, to interpret The Book of the Law (henceforth L.AL for convenience, which is in no way related to LOLs) for somebody else. This I take as a very deliberate attempt to prevent an interpretive priesthood from forming and distorting the texts, as happened with Christianity (hence some love-is-the-law hippie dude being turned into an excuse for, say, the Inquisition), and I respect it as such. I may go a little into my own interpretation here, but only inasmuch as is necessary to chart the impact some of this shit has had upon my psyche.)

So. Let me look back at myself and take stock of where I was about the time I first read L.AL. (Well, not precisely. The first time I read it, I was naked in bed with hoath_iaida in the afterglow, I don't quite remember when, and my reaction was, by and large, mmm, good porn. I mean, to pick semi-at-random, "Pale or purple, veiled or voluptuous, I who am all pleasure and purple, and drunkenness of the innermost sense, desire you. Put on the wings and arouse the coiled splendour within you : come unto me!" (1.61) Hhhhhot. But I digress.)

So about the time I start seriously reading it:
- thrown out on my ass by somebody I'd loved for being irresponsible
- and that was after a previous disastrous two-year relatioship in which I'd been tossed away by an abusive partner after becoming too depressed to be convenient
- and everything blamed on me
- and terrified that everybody I loved would wind up hating me because I hurt them without meaning to
- and, to go deeper, afflicted with a massive perfection complex but only with regards to myself
- and the tendency to hold myself to obscenely high standards while being forgiving to others
- and the hatred of myself
- and the disrespect of myself, the base assumption that I wasn't worthy of a job, survival, happiness, simply for the crime of...being me
- oh, the hatred

I wasn't even letting myself feel it at all, because I was pretty sure that if I did, I'd just up and kill myself. They'd find me somewhere with all my crimes carved into my skin, and Cyn would think...oh, I don't even know what. So I went into survival mode. Stripped myself down to blind optimism. My life will go on, no matter what (and you all were there to catch me from that first sudden fall of homelessness, give me warm comfy places to sleep). Shucked off layers of emotion.

Naked again, I suppose.

"Remember all ye that existence is as pure joy ; that all the sorrows are but as shadows ; they pass and are done ; but there is that which remains." (2.9)

And I was joyous, then, but for a few hours or days of Bad Times.

I got myself a copy as a present once I got into some funds left over from my childhood; that was after four days of having nothing to my name but the seventy-eight cents in my pocket, after the breakdown at Intercon that some of you may remember, after I was rather seriously close to calling the nearest escort service and asking if they took fat chicks because I was getting just that desperate.

And I read, and re-read, and re-read.

I can't, looking back at it, pinpoint anything. Not a moment, not a sentence (though the above encapsulates it), when I realized how my attitude towards myself was changing, what degree of comfort I was finding in that strange little red book.

(For it is comforting, intensely so, to me. Funny thing to say about a book so elusive, controversial, at times terrifying. But I take solace in it. I curl up in bed (whatever bed I'm in) and read bits before I go to sleep, at times, when I feel shakey.)

"Every man and every woman is a star." (1.3)

But somewhere, in all that survival mode, all that stripping away or denying of emotion, something clicked. Every man and every woman is a star. Even me.

I hadn't dared think that for years. Years. And I'm young. That's just sad.

Am I saying it's all gone, all that I listed above just blown away? Am I saying reading trippy shit some rich horny bastard wrote when he was hopped up in the desert a century ago cured my depression? Can't say that yet. But--I am free, I am strong, in ways I haven't been for years, or have never been before. There was something carrying me through that month of homelessness, the job-hunting, the loss of my last few ties with Cyn (and some other dear friends as well); something just keeping me going, keeping me rational, wading through one piece of shit after another; some pillar of congealed flame, and I found myself thinking, that, that must be Will.

Huh. So that's what that's like.

Whooooaaaaaaa.

It was as if something had been unlocked inside me. Not that new ideas were put into my head, but that old, buried ideas were brought forth, validated, set into ascendance. Holy fucking shit I'm a star. Me. L'il old me. ME. Somebody who I've more than once wanted to murder. Myself. I. STAR. Sure, yeah, everybody else is a star, I've always believed that, though perhaps not in those exact words; but me? I'd never dared. Not until now. I thought I knew myself and I thought I was horrible. ZOMG I'M A STAR.

I told that to hoath_iaida, and he laughed and said this would be about the time when Ole Beastie would yell over from his afterlife of choice and be liek all



So. Yeah. Reading up on Thelema has done very unexpected and very good things to my brain. Now, that doesn't necessarily compute into joining the OTO, true. The fact that I felt kinda like I was coming to a home when I went to Mass, yeah. (Not home, singular; I'm not sure I'll ever have one home. But the concept holds. I R polyhomorous.) That computes in. The sense of coming home in other ways, when I read mah book, that I went into above. That computes in.

But what it comes down to, I suppose, is: I take all of the above as indicators that I belong here. Somewhere on one (or more!) of the various related paths. Somewhere in one (or more!) of those brotherhoods. Yeah, I've got my concerns with some stuff, but they mostly have to do with reconciling the Norse magic which I'm strongly connected to (but also don't know as much about, due to the relative lack of non-bullshit sources; one advantage of hanging out in a "religion" founded by somebody who died less than a century ago and was stupid prolific is that it's easy to go straight to the horse's mouth, as it were; and I'm sure that at some point I'll be contact Odin directly, but no time soon, and that was a long parenthetical remark) with the western-ceremonial-egyptian-qabalah-astrology-bits-of-yoga-sex-sex-let's-not-forget-the-sex clusterfuck that is Thelema, and some concerns with certain things of Whether I'm Ready. Because the Norse magic, from what I can infer of the actualy system in between the lines of the variously unreliable material I've been reading, is radically different in some fundamental ways; it counterchanges a lot of things in the whole tetragrammaton-fire-water-air-earth-father-mother-son-daughter-etfuckincetera formula, and the numerology and universe model and alphabet origins and functions is modelled similarly, but very different, I think...

...and that's another post, and one that I won't know enough to write for a while. Hell, maybe that's a fuckin' book.

But what I was getting at is: no, I'm not running off in the direction of some whackjob pseudo-religion because their central holy book cured-I-bloody-well-hope my depression. I'm taking that fact, that change it precipitated, as a sign that I'm onto something. That I've found something that jives with me.

...........

Sortof a second half to the post now, a little more sober:

Something that I had noticed, during the last few days of fighting and spats before Cyn kicked me out, was the following vicious cycle:
- Cyn thinks I'm irresponsible and that she has to take care of me
- as a result, she treats me like a child
- I resent that immensely, can't or don't know how to express it properly, and act up
- thus I act like a child
- thus she thinks I'm irresponsible...

For me to even start growing up, for that change to start--and I think, I dare say, much knocking on wood, that now it has--somebody, somewhere, had to have faith in me. To even imagine a possibility of a Grown-up Tory. I certainly never did. I hated myself, remember? I felt--still feel, though to a lesser extent--about nineteen, and utterly lost. And Cyn--I'm not sure she ever had that faith, certainly didn't at that point. Nobody else close to me did either; or if they did, they didn't express it in a way that was able to pierce through the endless layers of doubt and self-hate (which, I might add, is virtually impossible, so please don't feel bad; I can think of maybe one or two people who've done it in my life).

Except hoath_iaida. To him, I was somebody very different than I had been to anyone else. A beautiful, brilliant woman--woman, not girl, mature, independent--with the potential to be a great magician, and a fantastic lay to boot. And I knew it, gut-level--and I know so few things about other people gut-level--that this was who I was to him; and I saw the positive impact I had on his life.

Positive impact. When I expected myself to poison everything I touched.

I thought I'd known myself, and I thought I was a piece of shit. A decent writer, sure, but only fanfiction; sortof good at a lot of useless things, like music and being eccentric and clever; but ultimately useless; and a huge burden on those she's close to, and social poison. This woman who he knows--she sounds pretty awesome. I'd like to get to know her better.

To switch books, there's a bit in The Book of Thoth:

"Redemption is a bad word; it implies a debt. For every star possesses boundless wealth; the only proper way to deal with the ignorant is to bring them to the knowledge of their starry heritage. To do this, it is necessary to behave as must be done to get on good terms with animals and children: to treat them with absolute respect; even, in a certain sense, with worship." (p. 97)

To digress (sortof), I was talking with hoath_iaida, while driving him home from Salem, about various aspects of magic and the masochism involved--we were just laughing and geeking away as usual--and he said something along the lines of "spiritual initiation is the Hand of God coming upon you...fucking you up the ass, pulling out your intestines, tearing them to little bits, and leaving you to put yourself back together." And then, after a pause, "Do you still want to take your Minerval?" And the conversation wound on; it's more when you get to first or second degree that things start getting screwy, etcetera.

Later: I had pulled into his mom's driveway, and had just laid down across the emergency brake with my head in his lap. Wanted a bit of comfort. And I was thinking, and said, very slowly and hesitantly, that, concerning his earlier question: yes, I'm fairly sure, for a lot of reasons that haven't quite crystallized yet, and one that has. I don't know how strong I am. I don't know what I can survive. I don't know what I'm capable of.

He said that was a good reason, which surprised me at first. That it sounded like I was trying to know myself.

This life I've led, this peaceful (relatively) and complacent and pampered world I live in, has only used some tiny portion of my capacity. Only some tiny portion of me is active in it. Time to start finding the rest of my capacity, the rest of my ability. The rest of me. My current theme: know myself. And, maybe, eventually, love myself.

Well. That ended rather more seriously than it began.

Love is the law, love under will.

Comments

[cwoolard.livejournal.com]

"There was something carrying me through that month of homelessness, the job-hunting, the loss of my last few ties with Cyn (and some other dear friends as well); something just keeping me going, keeping me rational, wading through one piece of shit after another; some pillar of congealed flame, and I found myself thinking, that, that must be Will."

That was you, I think. The Crowley just let you see it. Which may be what all his talk of "True Will" and "The Great Work" boils down to.

"Yeah, I've got my concerns with some stuff, but they mostly have to do with reconciling the Norse magic which I'm strongly connected to..."
"Because the Norse magic, from what I can infer of the actual system...is radically different in some fundamental ways; it counterchanges a lot of things in the whole...formula, and the numerology and universe model and alphabet origins and functions..."

The system is just a way to focus your emotional energy in the desired direction. Any system you clearly understand, are emotionally invested in, and are comfortable working with, will work. Don't be afraid to mix-and-match if so inclined.

Some warnings, based on my limited experience of Crowley:
--"Do what thou wilt..." is as much observation as directive. Be aware that everyone else is working their True Will to a greater or lesser degree, either consciously or unconsciously.
--Be preared to call bullshit. Some things may work for you, some may not. Don't let anyone convince you it has to be all or nothing.
--There is the teaching, and then there's the people who teach it. Try to keep politics and personalities seperate from the program itself.
(I supose this last is true of any teaching...)

I'd say best of luck, but luck has nothing to do with it. :)

--C.

"I am only alive in what I love and desire to the point of terror."
"Chaos never died."
--Hakim Bey.

[cwoolard.livejournal.com]

P.S.,

The LOLCrowley is priceless!

[mattador.livejournal.com]

I think Crowley would approve of your cat macros.

[wired-lizard.livejournal.com]

That was you, I think. The Crowley just let you see it. Which may be what all his talk of "True Will" and "The Great Work" boils down to.

On the basic levels, I think. There's also a lot of much more involved stuff, a number of specific psychological and magical transformations involved, but...see it and name it, yeah. Naming things can be useful. And have some idea of what I can do with it--which is to say, rather a lot.

The system is just a way to focus your emotional energy in the desired direction. Any system you clearly understand, are emotionally invested in, and are comfortable working with, will work. Don't be afraid to mix-and-match if so inclined.

Ahh, but the trick is figuring how how to mix and match, how they overlap and can be combined...plus, I'm also a geek, and seeing two similar but different philosophical classification systems for reality fills me with an undeniable urge to play compare/contrast until my head explodes! Plus I'll need to be aware of what formulae work or don't work in each system, and what's associated with them in each system, if I'm going to do something involving them. If I'm using the tetragrammaton formula in a Norse context, and I don't know how it maps, it's just going to get messy. Etc.

Er, yeah. Did I mention I was a geek?

The warnings are all things I'm doing my best to bear in mind already; but thank you. :)

(And nifty quote.)

[wired-lizard.livejournal.com]

I had to. XD

[wired-lizard.livejournal.com]

Well, y'know, do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the LOLz.

Seriously (?) though, that's another thing I love about this corner of religious/magical practice: most of the people involved have a great sense of humor about it. (Magicians with no sense of humor scare the fuck out of me; hoath_iaida says they're not magicians.) When there's a whole bunch of people, including several of the officers who just did Mass, hanging out in the temple plotting the 23 Blasphemous Masses, including the Rocky Horror and Pirates of the Carribean versions...hell, yeah.

[mattador.livejournal.com]

Hell, yeah, indeed.

I've recently become very interested in Crowley and Thelema (and the original Thelema thought experiment) for scholarly reasons- I'm plotting out an alternate history of the Twentieth Century where the existence of a spirirt world was made clear just before WW I, and Crowley seemed to me to be one of the people who would gain almost instant global importance and recognition as a result.

[wired-lizard.livejournal.com]

Dude - yeah, he totally would. Especially if you're including the whole concept of the New Aeon in your canon: if the world has just undergone a divine paradigm change to boot, then the fellow who heralded it is going to be a very big cheese.

[mattador.livejournal.com]

Since the original Thelema was an anti-monastery, I'm assuming for narrative purposes that it is now an anti-kingdom: a massive fleet of boats, technically unified under a government whose purpose is not to rule but only to minimize outside interference and interface with foreign nations diplomatically.

[delerone.livejournal.com]

This is kind of inspiring, actually.

Would it be creepy to say that I'm looking forward to learning more about the woman you're becoming?

[delerone.livejournal.com]

Creepy because it's the kind of thing one would say to a friend, I suppose, and I'm aware how one-sided our interaction is: you talk, and I'm mostly lurking in the background. I know that blogs/journals can be like that, but it still makes me feel like a stalker.

Anyways, you make me want to go out and fight towards some kind of spiritual awakening. That's a good thing, right?

[nevacaruso.livejournal.com]

Much, much love to you, Tory, and also to Eric for helping you to see the fantastic person that you can be.

And I second (third?) that the LOLCrowleys are frickin' awesome.

[juliansinger.livejournal.com]

As a depressive person who can be (and often is) down on herself and self hating and stuff-- this was really really good to read. Thank you.

[wired-lizard.livejournal.com]

Thank you! Not at all what I intended, but...yay.

And not particularly, no. :)

[wired-lizard.livejournal.com]

Awww. If it helps, I don't see you as a stalker, but as a potential friend who I haven't had a chance to meet and interact with much. From what little I know of you, you seem like a spiffy person.

That's a very good thing, I think. :) It makes me want to point you somewhere, but, really, there are so many places, so many ways, to go out and do that.

For the record, that icon cracks my shit up, and always has.

[wired-lizard.livejournal.com]

<-- icon, repeatedly. Thank you so much.

Heeee. Kinda inspired by this (http://community.livejournal.com/lolgods/) indescribably special community.

[wired-lizard.livejournal.com]

You're very welcome. I'm glad you got something out of it. :)

(O HAI U IZ STAR.)