will you ride your white horse?

i've been reading some crowley lately, since i re-sparked my interest this week while trapped inside wikipedia.

i find that now, with a little maturity under my belt (along with the developing beer gut), i am much better equipped to comprehend the affable trickster. i've done by 10 years of living what i intended to do with 2 years of study. c'est la vie.

"book 4" is my current project, containing such gems as this from the introduction:

Before printing, the whole work was read by several persons of rather
less than average intelligence, and any point not quite clear even to
them has been elucidated.

In other words, Frater P. is telling you "if there's anything in this book that you can't grok, it's because you're a retard, you retard".

Later on, he has this to say regarding yoga meditation:

Fourthly, we get a very high class of break, which is a sort of 
aberration of the control itself. You think, "How well I am doing 
it!" or perhaps that it would be rather a good idea if you were on a 
desert island, or if you were in a sound-proof house, or if you were 
sitting by a waterfall. But these are only trifling variations from 
the vigilance itself.

This was a big one for me, since i've abandoned meditation several times for exactly this reason: i lacked the will to concentrate during barkingdogstorms. Crowley had the solution to that as well:

But this constant worry, this fear of killing anything by mischance 
is, on the whole, worse than a hand-to-hand conflict with a griesly 
bear. If the barking of a dog disturbs your meditation, it is 
simplest to shoot the dog, and think no more about it.

While i do not accept this as a viable solution to my problem, his points in both cases are clear, now. In the context of the first quotation, the Great Beast is referring to the distractions inherent to maintaining an asana, and saying, in essense: "suck it up, whiner". The second quote comes from a context describing dogmatic religious proscription and prescriptions as means to an end and not ends in themselves. This i also accept.

It came, therefore, with a bit of surprise this morning that while reading the following, i was disappointed:

We have, as much as possible, diminished the Yahwistic and Christian
influences that marked the old Aeon manifestation of the Order. 
Yahweh no longer has primacy as in the Hebraic Qabala, as we 
acknowledge the Caananite and broader context of which the Hebrew 
Qabala is product and a remnant. We exalt the Egyptian and Hellenic 
Pagan archetypes as applied to interpreting the Qabalistic Tree of 
Life, which figures so prominently in the Golden Dawn system. Our use
 of the Qabalah and the Hebrew alphabet is as a system of symbolic 
glyphs and magickal names particularly well suited to the learning 
process.

i had considered further investigating this group, but the above made me reconsider. and the reconsidering made me consider my own motives, both for the original consideration and the re-consideration.

was i uncomfortable because :
1 - the osogd guys are pagans and i think pagans are, on the whole, silly?
2 - i'm afraid of moving out of my primarily judaic symbol system and find the idea of a non-jewish kaballah somewhat repulsive?
3 - i wanted to use the system to at least learn hebrew, so that, at the end, if i find the hogd to be rubbish, i can say, "well, at least i learned hebrew and some neat biblical trivia"?
4 - i think pagans are silly?

none of these reasons is consistent with my view (as a chaos magician, evidently) that any religious symbol system is as good as the next, since it's just a means to an end.

so what's the problem? as an agnostic, i stand officially undecided on the whole YHWH issue. what is decided, though, is that if YHWH is real and exists as described in the OT, he sure as shit wouldn't be pleased with the goings-on at any branch of the hogd (or most branches of judaism, for whatever that's worth). but i reckon i don't believe in that kind of YHWH.

in thinking about the problem i suspect i have vanquished it. if not, i am inconsistent, though i have never claimed otherwise (or believed otherwise to be a preferable state).

boo!