Satan in Crowley (Part Two) Lucifer Revealed

It’s amazing how few read Crowley but still maintain they are thelemites (cough : they only read Lon Milo DuQuette)... I have no magical or religious affiliation; I’m just a poor poet scribbling down notes and I read for fun (like a shy boi at home, imagining worlds as words as people as gods and those gods are the ones with fire)... 

but, in the second part, here we come to the meat of the argument, like that Francis Bacon painting, a figure with meat, but imagine that isn’t a pope in navy but Crowley in bisexual purple (looking like a pope) with the meat dressed as genderfluid archangels… 

but with more carcasses than the art, two at the front, two at the back, with upside down pentagrams holding it all in place, and Crowley screaming… the child in the egg screaming… to be when the abyss grips your throat and tells you to die.

I looked and saw a great abyss and a dark funnel of whirling waters or fixed airs, wherein were cities and monsters and trees and atoms and mountains and little flames (being souls) and all the material of an universe.

Here Crowley, in the same book as before, The Vision and the Voice, offers a different kind of abyss to the abyss-as-prison, where he describes movement in or over or under the static cell(s) of his mind; here is the work of Lucifer! at work in Satan! Satan may be the scream but it’s Lucifer that opens the mouth and shakes the body into the scream! Or Lucifer is the scream and the carcasses are Satan… ?

But we have to backtrack a bit and do a bit of Qabalistic foreplay. Thelemites will scream that Crowley repeatedly says, the devil does not exist (as DuQuette says somewhere). In fact, this is true, for example on page 193 of Magick in Theory and Practice, he writes in bold no less,

The Devil does not exist. It is a false name invented by the black brotherhood to imply a unity in their ignorant muddle of dispersions. A devil who had unity would be a God. [Here is the number of that footnote we quoted in Part One.]

Fuck me, that kills my argument… oh wait… that sephirah which is not a sephirah, which is the seat of chaos, like a prison, static but in motion, whose overlord has a true name behind “the Devil”, Choronzon. He says of the “Black Brotherhood” on the page before,

They make themselves the false crown of the Horror of the Abyss; they set the dispersion of Choronzon upon their brows… 

In contrast to,

[The White Brotherhood] are the goats, the lonely leaping mountain-masters… are ready to be torn asunder, to give up their own life to the Babe of the Abyss…

I’m going to ignore his rather ridiculous use of black and white, and just say, on the surface, he appears to outline a simple structure: kether vs daath, unity vs chaos,  babe vs horror, love vs hate, Satan vs Lucifer… but his unconscious complicates the two: he is advocating a kind of gnostic divide between truth and lies but blurring them together into a strange patchwork, where, in his mind, truth wins out. In bold, he says,

The testing of the spirits is the most important branch of the whole tree of Magick. Without it, one is lost in the jungle of delusion. Every spirit, up to God himself, is ready to deceive you if possible, to make out he is more important than he is; in short, to lay in wait for your soul in 333 ways.

For Crowley, Satan is a liar that holds truth (like his mother calling him The Great Beast), he is Satan (“I am Satan!”) Even kether (“up to God himself”) deceives; needs to be tested! (like his father needs to be tested; to test his love or his hate! definitely his hate! can he love me?) The demiurge! even the demiurge (The Great Beast; him/his father; gnosis vs genetics) exists (somehow) in kether; the shadow of the demiurge reaching up from the abyss into the godhead! according to Crowley…

(Side note: I’m not an occultist, I have no idea of the reality of this nor do have any investment in his mythology, I’m here for the surreality of it all!)

Clearly Crowley has some serious trust issues… and why wouldn’t he with that upbringing? that trauma! that madness! breaking his heart! it is in the devil himself, he sees this, when he says,

“The Devil” is, historically, the god of any people one personally dislikes.

He rejects the god of his parents, and any rejected god is a devil (remember his parents rejected him and he rejected them) (and on similar grounds, he rejected the Golden Dawn and they rejected him!) (seeing (or projecting) the Plymouth Brethren power structures all over them) (they, seeing a chaotic drug fuelled bad poet attempting to conjure everything at once) (W. B. Yeats kicking him down a flight of stairs sealed his fate) (REJECTION)... he is the devil (he rejects them)... they are the devil (they reject him)... 

Satan is divided, split in two, but still somehow held together… yes like the meat split down the front figures in the Bacon!... something is missing… Lucifer… to quote that line from Liber AL… maybe my favourite line…

For I am divided for love’s sake, for the chance of union.

On page 35 in the chapter of Magick in Theory and Practice on the name of the godhead, IAO, we find,

and then on page 38,

All true gods are attributed to this trinity.

Isis, Osiris, Horus… nonexistent Set hiding in the background… and of course Hathor is missing from this picture… Pan opens the book of Magick in Theory and Practice… Victor over Rose… as a bisexual, one without the other is half a party at best… but of course Lucifer is Venus… Hathor in hiding… may she be revealed… may he be revealed… may they be revealed… KUNDALINI… BAPHOMET… BORN THIS WAY… “This is the creation of the world, that the pain of division is as nothing, and the joy of dissolution all.”

[Thanks to my friend DP for his diligent reading of my Substack notes before they go out.]