This is going to be one of those articles that will piss off fanboys, not be enough for critics and that’s where we like it, right? Honesty.

The title is now the title and there’s no going back. We do need to have a serious discussion about Aleister Crowley and I’m probably not telling most of you anything you didn’t already know.

Let me open this with a warning for the uninitiated, meaning those whom haven’t read his work. You should. If you’re really wanting to get a deeper understanding of some concepts, Crowley’s early work is pretty brilliant and yes, at that time, the guy was a physical and mental beast.

He was obsessively disciplined when it came to his yoga, his mathematics, correspondences, his mountaineering and his ceremonial work.

Crowley, earlier in life did embody the ethos expressed here. Do The Work. Go With What Works. Present Results. Those results could be so esoteric that, without any intuitive guide, mentorship or even the original text of The Golden Dawn’s high ceremonial magick, that most would walk away. We’re here to be honest. Tell me our attention spans haven’t suffered in many ways. So let’s be honest.

Was Aleister Crowley effective in his ceremonial work? Yes.

Was he disciplined? Yes.

Was he prolific? Absolutely.

Crowley also had major issues. Crowley was just entering his thirties when he attempted to become a Golden Dawn London Lodge initiate. Even they acknowledged he had all the right stuff but he was morally and ethically extremely questionable. I thought, at first, this might have had something to do with his drug use and later addiction to heroin for his respiratory issues but it turned out to be so much more and I’ll nutshell it by demonstrating something that started out as funny and then further examination revealed that it is anything but funny.

Let me hit you with the point before we go on, talking to the completely new here, when it comes to Crowley, approach his work with caution, okay? Going with Donald Michael Kraig’s Modern Magick, Israel Regardie’s The Golden Dawn or The New Magus by Donald Tyson is probably best and I’ll show you why. Hang with me a bit, we need to take it apart.

Okay, class, if you have a copy of The Book of Lies, please turn to Chapter 23 entitled Skidoo. This is a play on some American slang at the time. “23 Skidoo” meant literally “Get out” or it was the equivalent of telling someone politely but cryptically to fuck all the way off. Everyone have their texts open?

Excellent. Now go ahead and read it, I’m not reproducing it here. Past this, I’m going to assume you have your text open and are reading along. If you don’t have a copy, then just get your Hoopla, Kanopy or whatever library app you have and borrow a digital copy and follow along.

Now that we’re all together and we’ve read it, let me give you my initial interpretation of it. I laughed. I’m not kidding! This was comical to me. He takes American Slang, this British man, who was also well-traveled and well-read, and slipped it into a poem where he spends the entirety of it telling you to “Get OUT!!!”

I sat there, reading it over and over again, I couldn’t tell you why I was drawn to it but I was and I showed it to others, they were confused. Many of them just thought it was super-weird and that’s the fact of Crowley’s work. Without context, the practitioner who picked up his work to gain a deeper understanding of rite, ceremony or function, that will never happen. You’re gonna give up. This is a feature of Crowley’s work. It’s pretty encrypted and when you approach it with that mentality, you start undoing the layers of Crowley’s Onion with the fumes telling you to “23 skidoo, son...this ain’t your jam.”

I did approach it with that in mind. I even attempted to recite it in several different styles, including Professor Snape because when you have the opportunity to read something as Alan Rickman, dammit you take it. Understand me? Yeah. That’s when the layers began to kind of undo themselves.

I also had to keep in mind that Crowley was extractive. He left behind a host of bodies in his wake. Some dead, others wishing they were. What he couldn’t get out of himself, he got out of others and left them behind like a spiritual strip-miner. The Golden Dawn understood that and that is exactly why they initially barred him entry at the door. Until S.L. MacGregor Mathers intervened and began causing canyons within the organization. Let this sink in. Crowley’s presence was so upsetting to the entire organization that others decided they would rather leave and do their own thing than to be aligned with someone the likes of Crowley. That is unsettling to say the least. He also didn’t last long with them.

Final thing to keep in mind: this is The Book of Lies, not The Book of Truths. We are going to use that frame to understand that there are more layers and it gets more intense the deeper you go.

First impression: This is hysterical. It’s comical in nature. Let’s attempt to deliver it in speech.

Second impression: Wait, okay, hold on...surface level here it looks like he’s talking to an initiate. He’s telling them to continuously advance, stop becoming comfortable, keep going, keep advancing.

I could get behind that.

How could I not? I’ve literally done it. I’ve left my comfort zone plenty, I’ve gotten results, some of them have been excellent, some, not so much. I get it, I can’t sit around, actually get the information and sit around and do nothing with it. That doesn’t make sense. Let’s look at our next steps during a day of actual rest here.

Third Impression: This is where it gets interesting because it started rubbing me some kind of way. I couldn’t identify it or explain it but I kept going back to read it. That’s when I notice he basically reverses the spelling of out by telling you to have the T, then the UT, then the O and at last, get OUT. It really stood out to me because it seemed so blatantly odd. One could write it off as poetic license but we’re talking about Crowley, not Shakespeare or Yeats, though the latter was a contemporary.

The T isn’t a letter. This is where the book 777: And Other Qabalistic Writings by Aleister Crowley comes in handy because of the correspondence tables. As I logged it all in my notes when picking through this one poem/chapter, the T is in reference to Teth, the Lion-Serpent force/lust but Strength in the Tarot also. The UT refers to the phonetic representation of an Egyptian word for Divine Serpent Force and O referring to Ayin (The Eye or The Devil) which is the lens through which all of this is viewed.

Okay, great, we looked it up in 777 but why would that matter in a poem about leaving your comfort zone?

It’s not. It’s a formula. This is how you encrypted information in Victorian/Old West times to keep from being persecuted for witchcraft in those days and yes, that was still very much a thing until the last of the Witchcraft laws were repealed in the 1950s. On the surface, it’s weird, strange, esoteric. Give it time and it gives advice. Some of it good but sit with it awhile and the magick begins to unfold.

The formula of OUT (UT + O) explains why experience is the teacher and this is one thing Crowley was fond of pushing.

“You Can’t Think Your Way Out.” You came in to the world through the rational mind and the senses. You cannot escape ego-limitations by using more logic or reading more books, it doesn’t work that way. There’s an entrance and an exit and they won’t be defined until they’re understood and for different reasons.

“Drive…” The T (Teth/Strength/Lust) and UT energy is pure, raw, felt and lived experience. This is the Kundalini, the vital force of life itself. You have to actively rouse and direct that energy through practice.

“Perspective…” The O (Ayin) is the lens that shows you the raw unfiltered reality of nature and cosmic illusion. It’s not safe, sanitized, or anything close. This is more radical, often a terrifying experience of seeing the divine hidden in everything, even the dark and chaotic.

Now, we’re getting somewhere. Let me explain further. Consider Chapter 23 in a different light. From here, if we consider the advancement advice to the Magus, then it looks something like “Do not merely sit in comfort. That is no way to advance! Pack it up and leave the structure behind! Keep moving in the dark until you dissolve into the All!”

This suddenly becomes an extractive model because in Donald Tyson’s book The New Magus, he clearly delineates between three types. Those types are as follows:

1. The Materialist: Through the meticulous mapping the material world, the materialist manipulates matter on mammoth levels, creating miracles and dismissing the unmanifest because they believe only in what they can quantify.

2. The Mystic: The mystic eschews the material, rejecting it entirely in an attempt to re-combine with the one source. A literal dissolution. Think of it like taking a drop of water and putting it into the ocean, you can’t tell the drop from the ocean. It’s now meaningless.

3. The Magus: The Magus denies neither the five-sense reality nor the unmanifest. The Magus seeks to bridge the gap between the two. In order to effectively build that bridge, the practices need to be sustainable.

Crowley, in this instance, has allowed you to uncover the formula, but then, dig just a little deeper, apply your sense of logic, reason and see the gap between Crowley’s theory and your actual practice.

Magick, especially high ceremonial magick such as the type The Hermetic Order of The Golden Dawn did leaves real physical receipts and I think the uncovering the layers behind the chapter 23 Skidoo, along with clearly observing Crowley’s actual life path where he vascillates wildly between Materialist and Mystic while never fully achieving Magus because he, treated the Inn or body as disposable.

Promotion of advancement is one thing, however, promotion of advancement in this manner is completely unhealthy.

Tyson gave us the sort of model based on many of his examples in his book, which I recommend you all read, but it was Dion Fortune, one of his contemporaries, often wrote about the absolute necessity of keeping one’s feet firmly planted on the earth while reaching into the heavens, warning that improper grounding leads to physical and mental degeneration. Crowley failed to heed those warnings notoriously. This is why I tell you all, approach Crowley’s work with caution, apply your bozo filter and don’t go in until your bozo filter is clean and ready for use. Get your MindCrafting on.

Crowley’s method, as detailed in this formula, will absolutely water the rosebushes, however, it seems to leave out that he will be using a firehose. The outcome is that the rosebushes will receive water, but they will be destroyed in the process. The only problem is that he used the material to spark the unmanifest, however, he never stopped to consider the health of the roots of the tree he was climbing, proving that, if you fail to take care of the Inn, you will find yourself standing in the cold with nowhere to live.

The title of The Book of Lies warns us from the gate that we’re entering a book of lies, half-truths, paradoxes, contradictions and riddles. Once solved and decrypted, the practitioner now has to stop for a second, copy the formula, contemplate what it is it does and decide whether or not it’s right for them. For us, the framing of Crowley’s 23 Skidoo as a means of constant self-improvement and discipline that takes us out of comfort in favor of mobility is a worthwhile framing. It allows us to view the cautionary tale of what happened.

Crowley isn’t prescribing self-improvement through ritual and psychological discipline, this is something inherently worse. It’s the violent ejection of oneself from the “inn” because the world is “cold.” That is an act of spiritual escapism. If the job of the Magus is to bridge the unmanifest and the manifest, running into the OUT is a failure of the mission. That’s a retreat, and not a tactical advance to the rear. It leaves the practitoner spiritually isolated and physically shattered. That’s not where any of us would like to be, now, is it?

The Magus operates in service to others and can ill-afford the luxury of a permanent “skidoo. Dissolution back into the “All” is an abandonment of the very classroom where you’re supposed to be helping others learn. From a service-oriented perspective, this requires the strength to inhabit the “Inn” without stagnating and using the comforts of the material world to anchor divine light for those who can’t yet perceive it.

Crowley may have written these formulas as instruction for personal attainment but here’s the thing, he used the material to manifest the mystical but in the end, the material had to be burned in order to get it. Anyone familiar with Crowley and his life will be able to understand how much material he burned, not just himself but others as well, just to reach his level of power and influence. It was what he needed to equate to the full measure of his contemporaries. His tragic, broken end transformed it all into a public warning.

The lie in this particular sense is that The Magus can achieve supreme wisdom by abandoning the world. Were that lie holding any truth whatsoever, the world would have greatly benefited from magickal practices being completely eradicated.

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