The following is an introductory message to a mystical text called
The Book of The Law, it's an inspired book written by Aleister Crowley, 19th century poet, occultist, mountain climber and philosopher, founder of liberALlism.
I thought it might come in handy due to its strikingly revealing relation to the topic we are discussing. Follow this link if you'd like to read the full text.
http://lilytears.com/spirituality/th...flaw/intro.htm
IV
The New Aeon
The third chapter of the Book is difficult to understand, and may be very repugnant to many people born before the date of the book (April, 1904).
It tells us the characteristics of the Period on which we are now entered. Superficially, they appear appalling. We see some of them already with terrifying clarity. But fear not!
It explains that certain vast 'stars' (or aggregates of experience) may be described as Gods. One of these is in charge of the destinies of this planet for periods of 2,000 years.* In the history of the world, as far as we know accurately, are three such Gods: Isis, the mother, when the Universe was conceived as simple nourishment drawn directly from her; this period is marked by matriarchal government.
Next, beginning 500 B.C., Osiris, the father, when the universe was imagined as catastrophic, love, death, resurrection, as the method by which experience was built up; this corresponds to patriarchal systems.
Now, Horus, the child, in which we come to perceive events as a continual growth partaking in its elements of both these methods, and not to be overcome by circumstance. This present period involves the recognition of the individual as the unit of society.
We realize ourselves as explained in the first paragraphs of this essay. Every event, including death, is only one more accretion to our experience, freely willed by ourselves from the beginning and therefore also predestined.
This "God," Horus, has a technical title: Heru-Ra-Ha, a combination of twin gods, Ra-Hoor-Khuit and Hoor-Paar-Kraat. The meaning of this doctrine must be studied in 'Magick.' (He is symbolized as a Hawk-Headed God enthroned.)
He rules the present period of 2,000 years, beginning in 1904. Everywhere his government is taking root. Observe for yourselves the decay of the sense of sin, the growth of innocence and irresponsibility, the strange modifications of the reproductive instinct with a tendency to become bi-sexual or epicene, the childlike confidence in progress combined with nightmare fear of catastrophe, against which we are yet half unwilling to take precautions.
Consider the outcrop of dictatorships, only possible when moral growth is in its earliest stages, and the prevalence of infantile cults like Communism, Fascism, Pacifism, Health Crazes, Occultism in nearly all its forms, religions sentimentalised to the point of practical extinction.
Consider the popularity of the cinema, the wireless, the football pools and guessing competitions, all devices for soothing fractious infants, no seed of purpose in them.
Consider sport, the babyish enthusiasms and rages which it excites, whole nations disturbed by disputes between boys.
Consider war, the atrocities which occur daily and leave us unmoved and hardly worried.
We are children.
How this new Aeon of Horus will develop, how the Child will grow up, these are for us to determine, growing up ourselves in the way of the Law of Thelema under the enlightened guidance of the Master Therion.
V
The Next Step
Democracy dodders.
Ferocious Fascism, cackling Communism, equally frauds, cavort crazily all over the globe.
They are hemming us in.
They are abortive births of the Child, the New Aeon of Horus.
Liberty stirs once more in the womb of Time.
Evolution makes its changes by anti-Socialistic ways. The 'abnormal' man who foresees the trend of the times and adapts circumstance intelligently, is laughed at, persecuted, often destroyed by the herd; but he and his heirs, when the crisis comes, are survivors.
Above us to-day hangs a danger never yet paralleled in history. We suppress the individual in more and more ways. We think in terms of the herd. War no longer kills soldiers; it kills all indiscriminately. Every new measure of the most democratic and autocratic governments is Communistic in essence. It is always restriction. We are all treated as imbecile children. Dora, the Shops Act, the Motoring Laws, Sunday suffocation, the Censorship--they won't trust us to cross the roads at will.
Fascism is like Communism, and dishonest into the bargain. The dictators suppress all art, literature, theatre, music, news, that does not meet their requirements; yet the world only moves by the light of genius. The herd will be destroyed in mass.
The establishment of the Law of Thelema is the only way to preserve individual liberty and to assure the future of the race.
In the words of the famous paradox of the Comte de Fénix--The absolute rule of the state shall be a function of the absolute liberty of each individual will. All men and women are invited to co-operate with the Master Therion in this, the Great Work.
