Aeonics, time cycles, and 2012
(I posted this in 2_0_1_2.)
---
I've done a lot of snarking here (and man, I don't regret a single post) but I figured it was about time I contributed some real content. I wish to discuss the connection between the Aeon of Horus which - according to standard Thelemic doctrine - we entered in 1904, and the 2012 phenomenon.
1. In Which We Briefly Introduce Thelema
(People who know about Thelema already may want to skip this chapter.)
For those unfamiliar, Thelema is a religion founded by that esteemed and infamous turn-of-the-century occultist, Aleister Crowley. The story goes like this: in 1902 after quickly rising in the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn to the highest rank that S.L. MacGregor Mathers (the head at that time) was able to give, Crowley found himself somewhat disillusioned with the occult - he accepted its veracity but felt it was futile in the long run - and so went his own way. He married a certain Rose Edith Kelly and, in 1904, they went on a trip to Egypt. One night, despite not having practiced any magic for several years, he offered to show Rose "the Sylphs". He conducted the ritual, but she was not able to see them; however, she entered a light trance, and began telling Crowley "They are waiting for you." The voice, speaking through Rose, identified itself as the Egyptian god Horus.
Crowley was skeptical, and decided to test the entity. He took Rose to the Boulaq Museum the following morning and asked her to show him an image of Horus. She took him past several such images without making any indication, and he was feeling most skeptical when at last she pointed out the Stele of Revealing, which not only depicted Horus (as well as two other gods that would become very important to Thelema) but was also numbered 666 in the museum catalogue, a number with which Crowley had identified from an early age.
Thus impressed, he performed an invocation of Horus as per Rose's instructions, and was told that a new Aeon had dawned, of which he was to be the prophet, and that he should await further transmissions at a later date. And so, between 12PM and 1PM on April 8, 9, and 10, 1904, the three chapters of the Book of the Law were dictated to Crowley by an unseen being speaking to him over his left shoulder.
Many people find the Book of the Law abhorrent on first reading. Crowley himself found it somewhat distasteful, and did not come to accept it until some years later. The most problematic material, perhaps, is its central tenet, set out in the first chapter: "Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law." (A caveat is added within the same chapter: "Love is the law, love under will.") Furthermore, content in the second and especially the third chapters expresses a fairly unmistakable cry for blood and war, a purging by fire of all human civilization. All of this seems to call for anarchy and chaos of the most brutal kind; small wonder that people tend to react with disgust!
However, "Do what thou wilt" does not mean "do whatever you like." Other parts of the Book of the Law, as well as Crowley's later commentaries, make it clear that what is being referred to is the True Will, the will of the divine spark in man which is occluded beneath the ego. "Doing what thou wilt" is therefore, in fact, a surrender: the Thelemite must discipline his mind and body, discover what his higher will is, and then subordinate his lower will to his highest Self. Crowley believed that if everyone were to follow their True Will, uninhibited by social conditioning and ego complexes, there could be no conflict; as the celestial bodies move harmoniously through their appointed orbits, so too would each person find a role which harmonized with everyone else's.
There is a further component of Thelema which will be of particular interest to us: Aeonics. Recall that Crowley claimed to be the prophet of a new Aeon. We will be more precise: the reception of the Book of the Law ushered in the Aeon of Horus, preceded by the Aeon of Osiris, which was in turn preceded by the Aeon of Isis. In some formulations there were other Aeons before those, but they do not concern us; interested readers can turn to this essay. To give a quick overview: the Aeon of Isis was characterized by worship of the Divine Mother, fertility rites, agriculture; the Aeon of Osiris by worship of the Dying God/Divine Father, strict paternalistic religion, city-states and war; and the Aeon of Horus by worship of the Divine Child, the eternal principle within every human being, a synthesis and transcendence of the Isiac and Osirian currents.
2. 1904?? What about 2012?
We will make one important assumption: that Crowley's story of how the Book of the Law was written is essentially true. From this we can conclude that Crowley (and his wife) were tapping into some potent content of the collective unconscious. There are other indications that this is the case, even if we do not assume the veracity of Crowley's account: for example, the first four publications of the Book were followed within nine months by major wars (of which I can only recall three: the First World War, the Second Sino-Japanese War, and the Second World War). Moreover it seems to have prophesied several events, including the Second World War ("I am the warrior Lord of the Forties", AL III,46.). That each of these wars failed to bring an end to civilization, Crowley attributed to his failure to publish the book exactly as per the instructions given in its third chapter.
Now, if the New Aeon began in 1904, what about 2012? One possibility that immediately occurs to us is that Crowley was simply 108 years early, or the Mayans 108 years late. But the latter seems unlikely because of the celestial alignment that occurs precisely on December 21st, 2012; and the former seems unlikely because of the Book of the Law's apparent success at prophecy. Could there be other options?
Before we answer this, we will have to examine the nature of 2012 as it has been described by many of its "prophets". Little is known of what the Mayans themselves expected to occur in 2012, but we do know that they were very much concerned with cycles of time, especially (according to John Major Jenkins) with the precessional cycle. This trend indeed seems to carry forward: the dawning of the Age of Aquarius is based on precession, and some Thelemites believe that each Aeon corresponds to an astrological age (there is indication that Crowley did not in fact believe this to the case: he said the Aeon of Horus could last 100 or 10,000 years; moreover, given the longevity of the age of agriculture (corresponding to the Aeon of Isis) the archaeological record also does not bear out this theory).
Other popular conceptions of the 2012 apocalypse have emphasized not merely a cyclic but a fractal nature of time. Terrence McKenna supposed that all of history was contained in each moment (and each day, and each 64-day period, etc.), in a fractal wave which touched a kind of zero point on Dec 21, 2012 (he chose this date based on the same cosmic alignment on which the Mayans seem to have based their Long Count, and only later discovered the Mayan connection). Another popular recension (read: drastic distortion and reconfiguration) of the Mayan calendar suggests a similar hypothesis: that history is divided into thirteen ages, each one of geometrically shorter duration than the last, and that all of history is replayed within each age.
None of the above 2012 theories have had any real success in predicting events. However, they all share a common focus on time - to be precise, on a conception of time in which events on Earth are influenced by (possibly fractal) cycles which relate to cyclic astronomical phenomena. And this fact shall be our first connection to the Thelemic Aeons.
3. Nema and the Ma'at Current
Based on certain visions obtained during his scrying of the Enochian Aethyrs in 1900 and 1909 (which comprises the text of The Vision and the Voice), as well as perhaps other sources of information, Crowley claimed that the Aeon of Horus would be followed by the Aeon of Ma'at. Ma'at was the Egyptian goddess of justice and universal order, and was in that respect connected both to time and to astrological cycles, which fascinated the ancient Egyptians no less than the Mayans. This is a tantalizing, but (despite Crowley's aforementioned comment) 108 years seems a very short time for the Aeon of Horus, especially considering that with only five years left to go, the Aeon hasn't even fully manifest yet. We must therefore abandon the obvious interpretation and search for a more subtle connection.
Charles Stansfeld Jones, a.k.a. Frater Achad, Crowley's "magical son", declared 1948 to be the end of the Aeon of Horus and the beginning of the Aeon of Ma'at. This being an even more preemptive end of the Aeon than 2012, few people took him seriously. But in 1976, an occultist known as Nema channeled a text from Ma'at. Naturally she was skeptical of Ma'at's presence, given that this was supposedly the Aeon of Horus. But eventually, she came to understand (I wish I could cite this - I'll edit the post later if I find the reference, it's online somewhere) that Ma'at is in fact anchored in a future time, and on a higher level is in fact transtemporal; the Aeon of Ma'at therefore does not begin or end at any particular point, but emerges and reemerges at certain times (in a cycle, no doubt, or a fractal - much as we would expect from the goddess of Justice, based on what we've covered above).
With these key pieces of information, we are now prepared to propose a theory: that 2012 is a major anchor point - perhaps even the major anchor point - for the Ma'at current.
4. Drawing Connections
Now let's see how all this works together. First, let us return to Terrence McKenna. As is well-known among 2012 nuts, Terrence and his brother Dennis made their contact with the Powers That Be in 1971 during a journey to La Chorrera, Colombia. They were there in hopes of finding and studying oo-koo-he, a plant preparation containing DMT; instead, their discovery of a field full of Psilocybe mushrooms pushed their journey along a different route. At Dennis' insistence, Terrence and his traveling companions participated in an experiment which Dennis claimed would integrate the psilocybin molecules into his DNA, concretize the soul in a living superfluid, and end civilization as we know it, ushering in a new and enlightened era.
As we know, it is highly doubtful that any of these predictions manifested. However, the experiment did catapult Terrence and his brother into a kind of surreal paranormal world in which a number of peculiar phenomena occurred. Terrence went for over two weeks with no sleep, suffering no ill effects, and had a hair-raising UFO encounter; Dennis managed (apparently) to materialize a key out of thin air on Terrence's request, and appeared for much of the time to have been mentally cast out into cosmic space (Terrence himself said he felt rather "illuminated" during this period). It was during this period, too, that Terrence began to receive hints about Timewave Zero, his theory of fractal time.
Looking at the story of these two weeks (as detailed in True Hallucinations), we begin to see some interesting parallels emerge with the Horus/Ma'at double current. Dennis, mad prophet of a new age, was like Aleister Crowley and his conquering god Horus. Terrence, on the other hand, was subdued and skeptical, a confirmed feminist; was concerned with cycles of time, foretelling a future accretion point; and in these respects he can be likened to Nema and Ma'at's more feminine Aeon.
Astute readers will have already noticed the proximity of these dates to each other: Terrence and Dennis' experiment occurred in 1971, and Nema received Liber Pennae Praenumbra in 1976. Could this entire time period have been an anchor point for Ma'at's energies? If it was, we would expect to find other irruptions of the collective unconscious around the same time. And indeed we do: Robert Anton Wilson was contacted shortly after the McKennas' experiment (in '72? '73?) by beings from Sirius and/or a pooka. And even more tantalizingly, 1974 marked Philip K. Dick's first descent into the realm of visions.
The story goes that Dick was waiting for a delivery of analgesic, as he was recovering from the extraction of an impacted wisdom tooth. The medicine was finally delivered by a girl who, Dick noticed, was wearing a fish pendant. He found himself transfixed by the pendant, and asked her what it meant; she said it was a sign used by early Christians to identify each other while escaping Roman persecution. This revelation catalyzed what Dick called anamnesis, an "unforgetting". Visions began to come to him; at first they were mainly of geometric forms and laser beams, but they soon resolved into a more complex scenario. He believed that he was living two lives simultaneously: as Philip K. Dick in the 20th century, and as Thomas, an early Christian living in fear of the Romans. He believed that these two time periods were in some sense the same time, hence his famous line, "The Empire Never Ended" - he claimed that history was in fact the repeating of the first 150 years or so of the common era over and over, and that the apparent progression of time in a linear fashion was an illusion created by the Archons, who wanted to keep us trapped. I hardly need point out the strong connections between this and the other theories we have been discussing: Philip K. Dick, like Terrence McKenna, considered time to be essentially cyclic and holographic.
This connection allows us to proceed further, working within Philip Dick's model. If Dick corresponds to an early Christian, who corresponds to Christ? We should not expect a perfect analogy, but even so the answer to this is not clear; Crowley could fit the bill, but then he may also be more of a John the Baptist. Perhaps the best fit is embodied not in a person but in a current: that of Horus and/or the Beast (Crowley claimed he was an incarnation of a being which he called The Beast 666).
Once we divorce the persona of the Beast from the person of Crowley, things become more clear. In the Book of the Law, Hadit tells us: "To worship me take wine and strange drugs whereof I will tell my prophet... They shall not harm ye at all. It is a lie, this folly against self." If Crowley is the prophet referred to here, it is not clear what "strange drugs" he was told of. But consider: Timothy Leary considered himself to be the incarnation, after a fashion, of Crowley. This initially seems absurd, since their lives overlap by almost three decades; but it makes more sense if we suppose that Leary served as a channel for the same Beast entity that Crowley did. The strange drugs, then, are LSD, psilocybin, and all of Leary's other favourites. And as we know, they have been widely prohibited and demonized, even though "they shall not harm ye at all."
Here, then is our Christ connection: Christ corresponds to the current in the collective unconscious embodied in Crowley, Leary, LSD, Dennis McKenna and even Daniel Pinchbeck (we will return to him later), along with who knows how many others. The Aeon of Ma'at, anchored in 2012, could likewise correspond to the return of the conquering Christ and the coming of the Kingdom of Heaven (the early Christians expected Christ to return any day), which in fact occurs outside of time, transtemporally. And the Roman Empire is, of course, the United States.
But I am beginning to ramble, and I should have been asleep two and a half hours ago, so I'll begin to wrap this up. But first, I should cover some of the flaws in these theories.
5. Counterpoints and Conclusion
Despite its voluminous length and wide-ranging content, the above is intended only as a preliminary sketch of what I hope may become a kind of Grand Unified Theory of eschatology. It is almost certainly incomplete: I have woven in all my favourite 20th century illuminoids, but no doubt many other important figures have fallen by the wayside - I would be interested to see how Gerald Gardner, Anton LaVey and the Beatles might fit into the whole mess. Moreover I have neglected much of the sociopolitical climate and technological development of the 20th century, which doubtlessly influenced the occult current of that time. Even my terminology is lacking: when I say "Horus", "Ma'at", "The Beast" and so on, I am referring to certain currents within the collective unconscious, and merely using whatever names are immediately on hand. At any rate, I encourage anyone to take this theory and run with it.
In addition to being incomplete, much of the above may in fact be wrong - partially or completely. I encourage holes to be poked in my arguments. One important counterpoint is raised by Daniel Pinchbeck's experience (detailed in 2012: The Return of Quetzalcoatl) in which he came to realize himself as an avatar of Quetzalcoatl, in connection with 2012. The problem arises from the fact that Quetzalcoatl corresponds strongly to Horus, just as his twin Xolotl corresponds to Horus' twin Set. One possible resolution of this conundrum could be that Quetzalcoatl, as the originator of the Mayan calendar according to Mayan myth, could in fact embody both Horus and Ma'at. This would then suggest that the Aeon of Horus has not yet fully manifest simply because it needs Ma'at's guiding energy, and thus we can expect it to be realized in its entirety after 2012, when Ma'at comes through heavily. (Many Ma'atian magicians would agree that this is Ma'at's role, except that it is generally believed that the necessary double current is already extant).
Insomuch as this is a synthesis of diverse paradigms, it may appear to be an oversimplification of many of them. However, I have taken great pains (actually it wasn't very painful, I really enjoyed it) to explore each as a self-contained entity before splicing in what I deemed useful. This is where I see the countercultural mythos heading in the past decade: toward increasing synthesis and recombination of what were previously diverse conspiracy theories and eschatologies. Others may eventually continue this work by taking even this essay as a single unit spliced into a greater whole.
Please don't repost this elsewhere, as I may want to make some minor changes over the next few weeks, since it has not been in any way proofread and is therefore probably a total mess. You may however link to it, preferably in my own journal.
~Skatche
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I've done a lot of snarking here (and man, I don't regret a single post) but I figured it was about time I contributed some real content. I wish to discuss the connection between the Aeon of Horus which - according to standard Thelemic doctrine - we entered in 1904, and the 2012 phenomenon.
1. In Which We Briefly Introduce Thelema
(People who know about Thelema already may want to skip this chapter.)
For those unfamiliar, Thelema is a religion founded by that esteemed and infamous turn-of-the-century occultist, Aleister Crowley. The story goes like this: in 1902 after quickly rising in the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn to the highest rank that S.L. MacGregor Mathers (the head at that time) was able to give, Crowley found himself somewhat disillusioned with the occult - he accepted its veracity but felt it was futile in the long run - and so went his own way. He married a certain Rose Edith Kelly and, in 1904, they went on a trip to Egypt. One night, despite not having practiced any magic for several years, he offered to show Rose "the Sylphs". He conducted the ritual, but she was not able to see them; however, she entered a light trance, and began telling Crowley "They are waiting for you." The voice, speaking through Rose, identified itself as the Egyptian god Horus.
Crowley was skeptical, and decided to test the entity. He took Rose to the Boulaq Museum the following morning and asked her to show him an image of Horus. She took him past several such images without making any indication, and he was feeling most skeptical when at last she pointed out the Stele of Revealing, which not only depicted Horus (as well as two other gods that would become very important to Thelema) but was also numbered 666 in the museum catalogue, a number with which Crowley had identified from an early age.
Thus impressed, he performed an invocation of Horus as per Rose's instructions, and was told that a new Aeon had dawned, of which he was to be the prophet, and that he should await further transmissions at a later date. And so, between 12PM and 1PM on April 8, 9, and 10, 1904, the three chapters of the Book of the Law were dictated to Crowley by an unseen being speaking to him over his left shoulder.
Many people find the Book of the Law abhorrent on first reading. Crowley himself found it somewhat distasteful, and did not come to accept it until some years later. The most problematic material, perhaps, is its central tenet, set out in the first chapter: "Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law." (A caveat is added within the same chapter: "Love is the law, love under will.") Furthermore, content in the second and especially the third chapters expresses a fairly unmistakable cry for blood and war, a purging by fire of all human civilization. All of this seems to call for anarchy and chaos of the most brutal kind; small wonder that people tend to react with disgust!
However, "Do what thou wilt" does not mean "do whatever you like." Other parts of the Book of the Law, as well as Crowley's later commentaries, make it clear that what is being referred to is the True Will, the will of the divine spark in man which is occluded beneath the ego. "Doing what thou wilt" is therefore, in fact, a surrender: the Thelemite must discipline his mind and body, discover what his higher will is, and then subordinate his lower will to his highest Self. Crowley believed that if everyone were to follow their True Will, uninhibited by social conditioning and ego complexes, there could be no conflict; as the celestial bodies move harmoniously through their appointed orbits, so too would each person find a role which harmonized with everyone else's.
There is a further component of Thelema which will be of particular interest to us: Aeonics. Recall that Crowley claimed to be the prophet of a new Aeon. We will be more precise: the reception of the Book of the Law ushered in the Aeon of Horus, preceded by the Aeon of Osiris, which was in turn preceded by the Aeon of Isis. In some formulations there were other Aeons before those, but they do not concern us; interested readers can turn to this essay. To give a quick overview: the Aeon of Isis was characterized by worship of the Divine Mother, fertility rites, agriculture; the Aeon of Osiris by worship of the Dying God/Divine Father, strict paternalistic religion, city-states and war; and the Aeon of Horus by worship of the Divine Child, the eternal principle within every human being, a synthesis and transcendence of the Isiac and Osirian currents.
2. 1904?? What about 2012?
We will make one important assumption: that Crowley's story of how the Book of the Law was written is essentially true. From this we can conclude that Crowley (and his wife) were tapping into some potent content of the collective unconscious. There are other indications that this is the case, even if we do not assume the veracity of Crowley's account: for example, the first four publications of the Book were followed within nine months by major wars (of which I can only recall three: the First World War, the Second Sino-Japanese War, and the Second World War). Moreover it seems to have prophesied several events, including the Second World War ("I am the warrior Lord of the Forties", AL III,46.). That each of these wars failed to bring an end to civilization, Crowley attributed to his failure to publish the book exactly as per the instructions given in its third chapter.
Now, if the New Aeon began in 1904, what about 2012? One possibility that immediately occurs to us is that Crowley was simply 108 years early, or the Mayans 108 years late. But the latter seems unlikely because of the celestial alignment that occurs precisely on December 21st, 2012; and the former seems unlikely because of the Book of the Law's apparent success at prophecy. Could there be other options?
Before we answer this, we will have to examine the nature of 2012 as it has been described by many of its "prophets". Little is known of what the Mayans themselves expected to occur in 2012, but we do know that they were very much concerned with cycles of time, especially (according to John Major Jenkins) with the precessional cycle. This trend indeed seems to carry forward: the dawning of the Age of Aquarius is based on precession, and some Thelemites believe that each Aeon corresponds to an astrological age (there is indication that Crowley did not in fact believe this to the case: he said the Aeon of Horus could last 100 or 10,000 years; moreover, given the longevity of the age of agriculture (corresponding to the Aeon of Isis) the archaeological record also does not bear out this theory).
Other popular conceptions of the 2012 apocalypse have emphasized not merely a cyclic but a fractal nature of time. Terrence McKenna supposed that all of history was contained in each moment (and each day, and each 64-day period, etc.), in a fractal wave which touched a kind of zero point on Dec 21, 2012 (he chose this date based on the same cosmic alignment on which the Mayans seem to have based their Long Count, and only later discovered the Mayan connection). Another popular recension (read: drastic distortion and reconfiguration) of the Mayan calendar suggests a similar hypothesis: that history is divided into thirteen ages, each one of geometrically shorter duration than the last, and that all of history is replayed within each age.
None of the above 2012 theories have had any real success in predicting events. However, they all share a common focus on time - to be precise, on a conception of time in which events on Earth are influenced by (possibly fractal) cycles which relate to cyclic astronomical phenomena. And this fact shall be our first connection to the Thelemic Aeons.
3. Nema and the Ma'at Current
Based on certain visions obtained during his scrying of the Enochian Aethyrs in 1900 and 1909 (which comprises the text of The Vision and the Voice), as well as perhaps other sources of information, Crowley claimed that the Aeon of Horus would be followed by the Aeon of Ma'at. Ma'at was the Egyptian goddess of justice and universal order, and was in that respect connected both to time and to astrological cycles, which fascinated the ancient Egyptians no less than the Mayans. This is a tantalizing, but (despite Crowley's aforementioned comment) 108 years seems a very short time for the Aeon of Horus, especially considering that with only five years left to go, the Aeon hasn't even fully manifest yet. We must therefore abandon the obvious interpretation and search for a more subtle connection.
Charles Stansfeld Jones, a.k.a. Frater Achad, Crowley's "magical son", declared 1948 to be the end of the Aeon of Horus and the beginning of the Aeon of Ma'at. This being an even more preemptive end of the Aeon than 2012, few people took him seriously. But in 1976, an occultist known as Nema channeled a text from Ma'at. Naturally she was skeptical of Ma'at's presence, given that this was supposedly the Aeon of Horus. But eventually, she came to understand (I wish I could cite this - I'll edit the post later if I find the reference, it's online somewhere) that Ma'at is in fact anchored in a future time, and on a higher level is in fact transtemporal; the Aeon of Ma'at therefore does not begin or end at any particular point, but emerges and reemerges at certain times (in a cycle, no doubt, or a fractal - much as we would expect from the goddess of Justice, based on what we've covered above).
With these key pieces of information, we are now prepared to propose a theory: that 2012 is a major anchor point - perhaps even the major anchor point - for the Ma'at current.
4. Drawing Connections
Now let's see how all this works together. First, let us return to Terrence McKenna. As is well-known among 2012 nuts, Terrence and his brother Dennis made their contact with the Powers That Be in 1971 during a journey to La Chorrera, Colombia. They were there in hopes of finding and studying oo-koo-he, a plant preparation containing DMT; instead, their discovery of a field full of Psilocybe mushrooms pushed their journey along a different route. At Dennis' insistence, Terrence and his traveling companions participated in an experiment which Dennis claimed would integrate the psilocybin molecules into his DNA, concretize the soul in a living superfluid, and end civilization as we know it, ushering in a new and enlightened era.
As we know, it is highly doubtful that any of these predictions manifested. However, the experiment did catapult Terrence and his brother into a kind of surreal paranormal world in which a number of peculiar phenomena occurred. Terrence went for over two weeks with no sleep, suffering no ill effects, and had a hair-raising UFO encounter; Dennis managed (apparently) to materialize a key out of thin air on Terrence's request, and appeared for much of the time to have been mentally cast out into cosmic space (Terrence himself said he felt rather "illuminated" during this period). It was during this period, too, that Terrence began to receive hints about Timewave Zero, his theory of fractal time.
Looking at the story of these two weeks (as detailed in True Hallucinations), we begin to see some interesting parallels emerge with the Horus/Ma'at double current. Dennis, mad prophet of a new age, was like Aleister Crowley and his conquering god Horus. Terrence, on the other hand, was subdued and skeptical, a confirmed feminist; was concerned with cycles of time, foretelling a future accretion point; and in these respects he can be likened to Nema and Ma'at's more feminine Aeon.
Astute readers will have already noticed the proximity of these dates to each other: Terrence and Dennis' experiment occurred in 1971, and Nema received Liber Pennae Praenumbra in 1976. Could this entire time period have been an anchor point for Ma'at's energies? If it was, we would expect to find other irruptions of the collective unconscious around the same time. And indeed we do: Robert Anton Wilson was contacted shortly after the McKennas' experiment (in '72? '73?) by beings from Sirius and/or a pooka. And even more tantalizingly, 1974 marked Philip K. Dick's first descent into the realm of visions.
The story goes that Dick was waiting for a delivery of analgesic, as he was recovering from the extraction of an impacted wisdom tooth. The medicine was finally delivered by a girl who, Dick noticed, was wearing a fish pendant. He found himself transfixed by the pendant, and asked her what it meant; she said it was a sign used by early Christians to identify each other while escaping Roman persecution. This revelation catalyzed what Dick called anamnesis, an "unforgetting". Visions began to come to him; at first they were mainly of geometric forms and laser beams, but they soon resolved into a more complex scenario. He believed that he was living two lives simultaneously: as Philip K. Dick in the 20th century, and as Thomas, an early Christian living in fear of the Romans. He believed that these two time periods were in some sense the same time, hence his famous line, "The Empire Never Ended" - he claimed that history was in fact the repeating of the first 150 years or so of the common era over and over, and that the apparent progression of time in a linear fashion was an illusion created by the Archons, who wanted to keep us trapped. I hardly need point out the strong connections between this and the other theories we have been discussing: Philip K. Dick, like Terrence McKenna, considered time to be essentially cyclic and holographic.
This connection allows us to proceed further, working within Philip Dick's model. If Dick corresponds to an early Christian, who corresponds to Christ? We should not expect a perfect analogy, but even so the answer to this is not clear; Crowley could fit the bill, but then he may also be more of a John the Baptist. Perhaps the best fit is embodied not in a person but in a current: that of Horus and/or the Beast (Crowley claimed he was an incarnation of a being which he called The Beast 666).
Once we divorce the persona of the Beast from the person of Crowley, things become more clear. In the Book of the Law, Hadit tells us: "To worship me take wine and strange drugs whereof I will tell my prophet... They shall not harm ye at all. It is a lie, this folly against self." If Crowley is the prophet referred to here, it is not clear what "strange drugs" he was told of. But consider: Timothy Leary considered himself to be the incarnation, after a fashion, of Crowley. This initially seems absurd, since their lives overlap by almost three decades; but it makes more sense if we suppose that Leary served as a channel for the same Beast entity that Crowley did. The strange drugs, then, are LSD, psilocybin, and all of Leary's other favourites. And as we know, they have been widely prohibited and demonized, even though "they shall not harm ye at all."
Here, then is our Christ connection: Christ corresponds to the current in the collective unconscious embodied in Crowley, Leary, LSD, Dennis McKenna and even Daniel Pinchbeck (we will return to him later), along with who knows how many others. The Aeon of Ma'at, anchored in 2012, could likewise correspond to the return of the conquering Christ and the coming of the Kingdom of Heaven (the early Christians expected Christ to return any day), which in fact occurs outside of time, transtemporally. And the Roman Empire is, of course, the United States.
But I am beginning to ramble, and I should have been asleep two and a half hours ago, so I'll begin to wrap this up. But first, I should cover some of the flaws in these theories.
5. Counterpoints and Conclusion
Despite its voluminous length and wide-ranging content, the above is intended only as a preliminary sketch of what I hope may become a kind of Grand Unified Theory of eschatology. It is almost certainly incomplete: I have woven in all my favourite 20th century illuminoids, but no doubt many other important figures have fallen by the wayside - I would be interested to see how Gerald Gardner, Anton LaVey and the Beatles might fit into the whole mess. Moreover I have neglected much of the sociopolitical climate and technological development of the 20th century, which doubtlessly influenced the occult current of that time. Even my terminology is lacking: when I say "Horus", "Ma'at", "The Beast" and so on, I am referring to certain currents within the collective unconscious, and merely using whatever names are immediately on hand. At any rate, I encourage anyone to take this theory and run with it.
In addition to being incomplete, much of the above may in fact be wrong - partially or completely. I encourage holes to be poked in my arguments. One important counterpoint is raised by Daniel Pinchbeck's experience (detailed in 2012: The Return of Quetzalcoatl) in which he came to realize himself as an avatar of Quetzalcoatl, in connection with 2012. The problem arises from the fact that Quetzalcoatl corresponds strongly to Horus, just as his twin Xolotl corresponds to Horus' twin Set. One possible resolution of this conundrum could be that Quetzalcoatl, as the originator of the Mayan calendar according to Mayan myth, could in fact embody both Horus and Ma'at. This would then suggest that the Aeon of Horus has not yet fully manifest simply because it needs Ma'at's guiding energy, and thus we can expect it to be realized in its entirety after 2012, when Ma'at comes through heavily. (Many Ma'atian magicians would agree that this is Ma'at's role, except that it is generally believed that the necessary double current is already extant).
Insomuch as this is a synthesis of diverse paradigms, it may appear to be an oversimplification of many of them. However, I have taken great pains (actually it wasn't very painful, I really enjoyed it) to explore each as a self-contained entity before splicing in what I deemed useful. This is where I see the countercultural mythos heading in the past decade: toward increasing synthesis and recombination of what were previously diverse conspiracy theories and eschatologies. Others may eventually continue this work by taking even this essay as a single unit spliced into a greater whole.
Please don't repost this elsewhere, as I may want to make some minor changes over the next few weeks, since it has not been in any way proofread and is therefore probably a total mess. You may however link to it, preferably in my own journal.
~Skatche