Sexual Revolution- Mystery, Nature, and the Good
“Nothing is of its nature evil, and nothing is of its nature good. Evil is only excess, good is simply balance. All things are subject to abuse, all things are susceptible to beneficial use. And balance does not consist in denial, or excess of indulgence. Balance can only be attained by exceeding. These are the powers in man’s nature so tremendous that they can only be balanced by an ultimate self-expression.”
- Jack Parsons, Freedom is a Two-Edged Sword, cap. IV The Sword and the Spirit
Although I don’t always agree with Parsons’ priorities in his writing, I find this passage fascinating. Thelema is part of the Gnostic tradition, and Gnosticism is characterized by the tendency to seek the Truth. It would seem that Crowley’s statement which defines “evil” as “error” proceeds from this fundamentally Gnostic set of values, in which Truth is defined as good. After all, the opposite of Truth is error, or falsehood, isn’t it?
Parsons defines nature, or essence, as fundamentally beyond good and evil. The upshot of the above statement is that these moral judgements only become possible when we can apprehend the existential conditions of the thing under consideration, because only in this context do the concepts of excess and balance, which are the criteria for judgement as Parsons has defined them, become conceivable. If we see that it is engaged in balanced self-expression (which we can assume includes self-creation in the image of the essence) we judge it to be good. This self-expression “exceeds” the previously established totality of the self by adding to it and creating from it.
Evil, on the other hand, is another form of excess. According to Parsons, the judgement “evil” becomes possible when we identify excess that obfuscates self-knowledge, and creates in the image of neurotic fear. This implies a disconnect between the expression of a thing and the nature of a thing. It seems to me then that it is logical to say that the nature of a thing is good, and only the deformity of that by inhibition in expression creates evil.
I really have a problem with the statement “nothing is of its nature good” occurring within a Gnostic paradigm, or, for that matter, a Thelemic paradigm. The imperative to “know thyself,” and seek Truth and balance, is derived from the idea that we should know and express ourselves as we really are. Ignorance or fear can distort this knowledge and expression, thus creating evil. Yet, although this conclusion is very much in harmony with Parsons’ general argument in “Freedom is a Two-Edged Sword,” we find him saying that “nothing is of its nature good.”
I’m sure that I’m not blowing anybody’s mind when I say that Jack Parsons was not always a perfectly logical guy. The fact that I have this minor disagreement with the choice of wording is not significant. The reason that I think the paragraph quoted above IS significant, is that I see this same hostility to the concept of morality qua morality, or “good” qua “good,” in the writings of many modern Thelemites. Crowley had no such aversion. He was happy to call the universe essentially Good, stating even at the commencement of Berashith that he saw no reason to argue with Pangloss’ statement that we live in “the best of all possible worlds.” The key word, of course, is “possible” worlds. The existence of the universe is not a perfect expression of its essence, but it IS perfecting itself, and that is what gives importance to the idea of evil as “error” and Good as Truth, and the expression of Truth. In “Fallible Man,” Paul Ricceour describes evil, as a concept, as arising from the potential for failure. If there is a potential for failure, there is a potential success, which means that there is a goal being sought.
Existence, in this cosmological reckoning of things, is a statement being made by God in the same way that our physical lives are a statement being made by our individual stars. With each manifestation of an individual star, that statement becomes clearer and more intelligible. If we know that we are involved in this process, and we are personally invested in the success of this process (i.e. we judge it to be Good) then this process runs more smoothly, and has a better chance of success.
Secular culture wants our values to be unconscious, not only because it is hostile to God and reality, but because the values it is trying to impose are fundamentally irrational. If we intellectually apprehended them, we would see that they make no sense and reject them. To be hostile to the notions of good and evil in themselves seems silly. Maybe these ideas have been used to control us, but that doesn’t mean that they weren’t true, just that they were used out of context. This is consistent with the methods of Tyranny, as Parsons discusses in cap III of his essay:
“The joyous, I hope, indulgence of a natural urge is defined as a crime. Young persons enjoying themselves, or trying to do so, are burdened with a sense of guilt and shame. They are classed with common criminals. With robbers and murderers.
Why?
The answer is shameful.
Because at one time, in the dark ages, in the conditions of squalor and misery, or filth, ignorance, superstition and oppression, the sex taboo was the prime instrument of power.”
-Jack Parsons
When Crowley describes the motion of the Aeon of Isis to the Aeon of Osiris, he describes the transition of control of the mystery of sex from the hands of the Priestesses to the hands of the Priests. The former describes a time before the connection between sex and childbirth was fully understood. The latter describes a time during which sex was seen as an expression of the power of a man’s ability to produce children that would be necessary to do the work and fight the battles which allowed one nation or people to triumph over another. In the Aeon of Horus, technology has changed our priorities.
“We are then particularly careful to deny that the object of love is the gross physiological object which happens to be Nature's excuse for it. Generation is a sacrament of the physical Rite, by which we create ourselves anew in our own image, weave in a new flesh-tapestry the Romance of our own Soul's History. But also Love is a sacrament of trans-substantiation whereby we initiate our own souls; it is the Wine of Intoxication as well as the Bread of Nourishment. "Nor is he for priest designed Who partakes only in one kind."
Aleister Crowley, comment on AL I:51
Whether by ignorance of biology, by the creation of fear through taboo, or simply as a consequence of the “veil of matter” (referring to the three Aeons respectively) it is obfuscation of this principle which has determined power in the sense of the control and manipulation of other human beings. Although sex has been, to an extent, demystified in our culture, that very demystification is what has given rise to the “veil of matter” to which I refer. This is the tendency to posit the object of love as the “gross” and “physiological.”
Although Crowley uses these terms above to refer to the idea that sex should be for procreation alone in the context of the quote, “nature’s excuse” includes the sexual appetite, which produces a kind of irritation which demands sexual satisfaction just as hunger produces a kind of irritation that one must eat to satisfy. When Crowley made the above statement, I suspect that he was referring to Catholic values that command us to see sex as an exclusively procreative act, which is motivated by the formula of sexual power in the Aeon os Osiris, as previously described. However, our culture today still sees “the gross physiological object that is nature’s excuse” for sex as the driving force behind sexual desire. Medical science, which first produced its explanations for human reproduction, later began to explain and demystify sexual desire itself. This lead to a tendency, in both cases, to see sex as a means to a physiological end.
The difference between the modern view and the Old Aeon view is that we tend to see the “object” of sex as the satisfaction of the “hunger” produced by our natural sexual appetites rather than as the creation of children. Both of these views fail to see the forest for the trees, and are subject to the same critique being offered by Crowley above. The spiritual essence, the medium of self-creation and self-renewal, becomes either a means of producing labourers and soldiers, or a means of scratching a physiological itch that every human being has in some way. The kind of sex that people tend to have in modern “progressive” society is characterized by a casual hostility to love, drunkenness, and lack of intimacy. Only a very warped person would call this “enlightened.”
The sexual act, in both the microcosmic and macrocosmic sense, is the power that requires an “ultimate self-expression,” which Parsons’ stated that it is necessary to have balance through excess in order to achieve. The role of sex in the modern mass media is wholly characterized by a depiction of the act as something which “scratches an itch.” Some tangents of media culture still cling to the procreative model, but this only serves to strengthen the argument that this demystification has lead to an obfuscation of the holy and divine.
The same force is at work here that makes people uncomfortable when they talk about the “Good.” Nietzsche’s critique of morals reveals that they have been used to manipulate and tyrannize human beings. In a sense, this demystifies morality, and causes us to see it as a tool rather than a fundamental principle. The fact of the matter is that it can be both. When applied to an authentically fundamental universal principle, it is a tool that can be used to command incredible power.
I think that its instructive to look at Parsons’ writings on this subject, because he was born later than Crowley, and died shortly after the birth of the military/ industrial corporate plutocracy, as well as the international American empire that followed World War II. Because of this, I think that his point of view reflects something closer to the modern approach to Crowley's material. Throughout the Sexual Revolution thread we’ve looked at the inverse pattern of taboo between sex and violence in the New Aeon. The fact that Parsons should have the views about sex that he did, and played the role that he played in the establishment of this new empire, is emblematic of this inversion.