I have maintained an interest in Cult Leaders, the same sort of interest that many people find in serial killers, the sort that leads them to “study” killers at their own leisure. In that way, I've studied cult leaders. Not in any comprehensive sort of way, and certainly not professionally; just as they've caught my eye in the various stacks and piles of things I'm curious about.
Many, most, maybe all writers begin the writing process with a question, and seek to answer it through the course of the writing. This is sort of the Scientific Method of Creativity, if you like. It is also possible to come to the writing process after the answer has been attained. A tell-all book, for instance.
I think, in my “studies” of cult leaders, I have noticed something that others, namely scholars, have missed. I think that the people who come to the cult phenomenon are interested for very different reasons than I am, because they're always looking at the subject from a different perspective than I am. It's difficult to describe. I hear my frustration with scholars when I listen to scholars discuss the Esoteric; specifically with regards to Dr. Justin Sledge and John Dee and Edward Kelley.
They aren't asking the question I would.
I've been trying to figure out a way to say that that is how I conceptualize my relationship with Rob for literally two weeks – and that is after having known it for years now.
And that is to say that today's obsessive thought is about how the questions we aren't asking about cult leaders are the questions I have been trying to apply to Robert and whatever this process is. There is writing involved, that's for sure.
I saw someone on Twitter talking about Aleister Crowley's Book of Lies last night, how they went to a reading and left not understanding what they'd heard. And a Thelemite that I've come into conflict with before (and whom, in my estimation, I trounced in fair debate – but I would think that, wouldn't I? – responded to her that it's not meant to be “understood” as such. To which I responded that's because Crowley's work, but especially the Book of Lies is intentional word soup; it's nonsense, gobbledeegook, hocus pocus, bullshit. If it's anything, it's satire. But it's not even that because Crowley wasn't actually that clever.
But don't tell Thelemites that.
See, if you look at Aleister Crowley as who he was – a rich playboy – and you understood the aristocracy of his time, it wouldn't come as a surprise to you that he was able to climb the ranks of Europe and Britain's Gentlemen's clubs. By the time he was born, they were passé. We think they're so neat now and that we would love to be a part of them. It had been 100 years since the revolutions of American and Europe. By the time Crowley was an adult, the world had moved on from secret societies of men giving each other handies in old, musty temples, to full-on pagan-revivalist orgies.
And open cults - not just of personality.
That is, I should say, the world of the Élite.
I don't understand why—
See, I start to say that a lot. I don't understand why X-group doesn't see that their beliefs or their founders are false. But how could a group identify as a group – how could an individual within that group identify as part of the group – if they also reject their foundations? It is a question the Latter Day Saints are grappling with right now.
For what it's worth, I know no mormons. What I know of Mormon life and what it is to be Mormon I know from observing exactly one Mormon on Twitter and the book, The Complete Heretic's Guide to Western Religion Book One: The Mormons (Here's a Center for Inquiry Blurb about him/it). And because of that ignorance, I have very little to say because I think next to nothing.
On the matter of Joseph Smith, however, I can't help but notice people like him, like ripples in the pools of history.
Dan Carlin's Hardcore History Episode Prophets of Doom is an almost word for word pretelling of the Joseph Smith story. Like the prequel movies to the Darth Vader story of Star Wars. The only difference is that where the “prophet” of Dan Carlin's story is horribly murdered at the end, his cult discredited and dissolved, Joseph Smith's church lives on.
Am I to be led to believe that Aleister Crowley didn't learn the lessons of his antecedents? Do we really mean to believe that Crowley didont learn the lessons of Jesus – whom he sought to replicate by revivifying the Gnostic Church in Crowley's own image (and which still survives to this day) – of the European prophets, of the Bavarian Illuminati, of Joseph Smith in America— Do we really believe that we can disentangle him from his contemporaries and the people that followed in his footsteps?
Scientology is all but a bet to Aleister Crowley that L Ron Hubbard didn't need Crowley and his bullshit – he could make his own made-up religion.
Theosophy and Spiritualism, the brainchildren of Madame P Blavatsky, a contemporary and collaborator of Crowley's, still live on today. Spiritualism even had it's own Schism, fracturing into the newer Spiritism.
But Crowley of them all – he is the true prophet. He surely isn't what people said about him during his life and after his death. He most definitely can't be his behavior – his deeds, now, can he?
The argument I alluded to earlier, someone said something about something Crowley said about his church. And I pointed out that he turned his back on that statement late in his life. Like he turned his back on every person who ever supported him. Like he robbed and raped every woman he ever met. Like he took advantage of and impoverished every man who trusted him. Like – for me – look no further than Jack Parsons. Really.
Jack's life takes off like a rocket after he meets Crowley. Then he takes Crowley's teachings through their natural process, and Crowley denounces Parsons and the entire American branch of his religion. Parsons dies, penniless, in an explosion in his garage.
Granted, it was L. Ron Hubbard who stole his money and his lady – but who was Hubbard trying to be? Let's be real, here.
I want to say that I don't understand the religious.
But that's not true. I do understand religion. I understand religion very well. In fact, I understand religion better than you do.
Our modern definition of religion is all fucked up.
I am confident I can say this as an observation of fact because of two exchanges on Twitter of all places: One I was a part of, the other I participated in, but mostly observed.
Jordan Peterson is someone you should by now know I keep an eye and an ear on. He says interesting things, provocative things I've thought independently and so agree with pretty readily. But he also challenges his audience with his language in a way I haven't learned how to do, yet. I talk a lot of shit about college and the education system in general, but there are definite advantages to a university degree. There are also very definite advantages to being neurotypical.
He tweeted something about the difference in the words Religion and Ideology the other day; and I found it fascinating, observing people who had never confronted the differences in these words flailing to either make them the same thing or to minimize the importance or the truth in the definition of the other. There are a wide variety of complex psychological things going on, there – if I'm mimicking Dr. Peterson's Voice to the best of my ability so as to do him the justice here I believe he deserves.
But what is the difference in Religion and Ideology? Religion is something you must do, and Ideology is something someone else must do.
We live in an increasingly Ideological and an decreasingly Religious world. Alain de Botton and his School of Life talks frequently about this. About the early 20th century (read: Aleister Crowley's adult life) and the sort of cultural crisis which was had in big cities about what to do about the void left in Post-Modernist thought by the removal of the church as the center of cultural identity. Evidently they tried to make libraries and museums fill this role – and we know 100 years later they failed.
I've been following the Millennials are Spiritual but not Religious trend as it's been published since about 2015. You don't have to do a difficult google search (really, just conduit search that link's text) to follow the data for yourself. It's right there in front of our eyes if we would just pay attention.
The US government has consistently trended less popular and trustworthy with its constituency since 1965. This is Pew Research, you tell me if I'm reading it wrong.
Until it spiked with G.W.
And now it's as low as it's ever been.
I've come to my limit, and I'm running out of steam.
It all feels and seems so obvious to me. And it does, to the conspiratorially insane, to the undiagnosed and self-medicated schizophrenic.
I said, when I started grasping for straws before drowning in the overwhelming mire of it all, that I keep wanting to say that I don't understand why Groups believe their myths about their origins.
The problem is that I do. How often do I imagine what I would be like if I still believed my father was a superhero or even a person I wanted in my life? How many sleepless nights do I wish that I could close my eyes to the comfort of a God who loves me and a government which exemplars my interests?
It is easier to live as an idealist. It is easier to be an Ideologue.
The hard choice is taking the suffering of living upon yourself and heeding the call – even if you aren't up to the task.
And I'm not. I'm really not. This thing - this Hermitage - this thing that Rob and I have decided to do – I'm not up to it. I want to give up every day. It feels like I just can't, like I will never achieve this. But if there's one thing I've learned from cult leaders, it's that if you do the hard work and you complete the hoax, people will believe. No matter how obviously false it is. Even if you've been found guilty in a court of law as a fraud, they will find ways to believe that you are who you say you are.
Fake it til you make it. Fail it til you nail it.
After all, that's the best anyone can ever ask of us, right? Our best?
Thanks for sticking with me through this one. Through as many of these as you have. I'll see you around.
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