October 1991 Thelema Lodge Calendar/Newsletter  (October & November events)
Copyright (c) O.T.O. and the Individual Authors, 1991 e.v.
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                              AFTER  AGNOSTICISM


                             BY ALEISTER  CROWLEY

 [In 1906 e.v. this essay was appended as a footnote to Crowley's Liber
LXVII," The Sword of Song, Called by Christians The Book of the Beast."]


     Allow me to introduce myself as the original Irishman whose first
question on landing at New York was, "Is there a Government in this country?"
and on being told "Yes," instantly replied, "Then I'm agin it."  For after
some years of consistent Agnosticism, being at last asked to contribute to an
Agnostic organ, for the life of me I can think of nothing better than to
attach my hosts!  Insidious cuckoo!  Ungrateful Banyan!  My shame drives me to Semitic analogy, and I sadly reflect that if I had been Balaam, I should not
have needed an ass other than myself to tell me to do the precise contrary of
what was expected of me.
     For this is my position; while the postulates of Agnosticism are in one sense eternal, I believe that the conclusions of Agnosticism are daily to be
pushed back.  We know our ignorance; with that fact we are twitted by those
who do not know enough to understand even what we mean when we say so; but the
limits of knowledge, slowly receding, yet never so far as to permit us to
unveil the awful and impenetrable adytum of consciousness, or that of matter,
must one day be suddenly widened by the forging of a new weapon.
     Huxley and Tyndall have prophesied this before I was born; sometimes in
vague language, once or twice clearly enough; to me it is a source of the
utmost concern that their successors should not always see eye to eye with
them in this respect.
     Professor Ray Lankester, in crushing the unhappy theists of the recent
"Times" controversy, does not hesitate to say that Science "can never" throw any
light on certain mysteries.
     Even the theist is justified in retorting that Science, if this be so,
may as well be discarded; for these are problems which must ever intrude upon
the human mind--upon the mind of the scientist most of all.
     To dismiss them by an act of will is at once heroic and puerile: courage
is as necessary to progress as any quality that we possess; and as courage is
in either case required, the courage of ignorance (necessarily sterile, though
wanted badly enough while our garden was choked by theological weeds) is less
desirable than the courage which embarks on the always desperate philosophical
problem.
     Time and again, in the history of Science, a period has arrived when,
gorged with facts, she has sunk into a lethargy of reflection accompanied by
appalling nightmares in the shape of impossible theories.  Such a nightmare
now rides us; once again philosophy has said its last word, and arrived at a
deadlock.  Aristotle, in reducing to the fundamental contradiction-in-terms
which they involve the figments of the Pythagoreans, the Eleatics, the
Platonists, the Pyrrhonists; Kant, in his "reductio ad absurdum" of the
Thomists, the Scotists, the Wolffians,--all the warring brood, alike only in
the inability to reconcile the ultimate antinomies of a cosmogony only grosser
for its pinchbeck spirituality; have, I take it, found their modern parallel
in the ghastly laughter of Herbert Spencer, as fleshed upon the corpses of
Berkeley and the Idealists from Fichte and Hartmann to Lotze and Trendelenburg
he drives the reeking fangs of his imagination into the palpitating vitals of
his own grim masterpiece of reconcilement, self-deluded and yet self-conscious
of its own delusion.
     History affirms that such a deadlock is invariably the prelude to a new
enlightenment: by such steps we have advanced, by such we shall advance.  The
"horror of great darkness" which is scepticism must ever be broken by some
heroic master-soul, intolerant of the cosmic agony.
     We then await his dawn.
     May I go one step further, and lift up my voice and prophesy?  I would
indicate the direction in which this darkness must break.  Evolutionists will
remember that nature cannot rest.  Nor can society.  Still less the brain of
man.

"Audax omnia perpeti
Gens humana ruit per vetitum nefas."
                          [Horace, "Odes", I:3.]

"[recklessly enduring everything, human kind progresses through heinous crimes]"

     We have destroyed the meaning of "vetitum nefas" and are in no fear of an
imaginary cohort of ills and terrors.  Having perfected one weapon, reason,
and found it destructive to all falsehood, we have been (some of us) a little
apt to go out to fight with no other weapon.  "FitzJames's blade was sword and
shield" [Scott, "The Lady of the Lake"], and that served him against the
murderous bludgeon-sword of the ruffianly Highlander he happened to meet; but
he would have fared ill had he called a Western Sheriff a liar, or gone off
Boer-sticking on Spion Kop.
     Reason has done its utmost; theory has glutted us, and the motion of the
ship is a little trying; mixed metaphor--excellent in a short essay like
this--is no panacea for all mental infirmities; we must seek another guide.
All the facts science has so busily collected, varied as they seem to be, are
in reality all of the same kind.  If we are to have one salient fact, a fact
for a real advance, it must be a fact of a different "order."
     Have we such a fact to hand?  We have.
     First, what do we mean by a fact of a different order?  Let me take an
example; the most impossible being the best for our purpose.  The
Spiritualists, let us suppose, go mad and begin to talk sense.  (I can only
imagine that such would be the result.)  All their "facts" are proved.  We
prove a world of spirits, the existence of God, the immortality of the soul,
etc.  But, with all that, we are not really one step advanced into the heart
of the inquiry which lies at the heart of philosophy, What "is" anything?
     I see a cat.
     Dr Johnson says it is a cat.
     Berkeley says it is a group of sensations.
     Cankaracharya says it is an illusion, an incarnation, or God, according
to the hat he has got on, and is talking through.
     Spencer says it is a mode of the Unknowable.
     But none of them seriously doubt the fact that I exist; that a cat
exists; that one sees the other.  All--bar Johnson--hint--but oh! how dimly!--
at what I now know to be--"true?"--no, not necessarily true, but "nearer the
truth."  Huxley goes deeper in his demolition of Descartes.  With him, "I see a cat," proves "something called consciousness exists."  He denies the
assertion of duality; he has no datum to assert the denial of duality.  I
have.
     Consciousness, as we know, has one essential quality: the opposition of
subject and object.  Reason has attacked this and secured that complete and
barren victory of convincing without producing conviction.  [Hume, and Kant,
in the "Prolegomena," discuss this phenomenon unsatisfactorily.--A.C.]  It has
one quality apparently not essential, that of exceeding impermanence.  If we
examine what we call steady thought, we shall find that its rate of change is
in reality inconceivably swift.  To consider it, to watch it, is bewildering,
and to some people becomes intensely terrifying.  It is as if the solid earth
were suddenly swept away from under one, and there were some dread awakening
in outer space amid the rush of incessant meteors--lost in the void.
     All this is old knowledge; but who has taken steps to alter it?  The
answer is forbidding: truth compels me to say, the mystics of all lands.
     Their endeavour has been to slow the rate of change; their methods
perfect quietude of body and mind, produced in varied and too often vicious
ways.  Regularisation of the breathing is the best known formula.  Their
results are contemptible, we must admit; but only so because empirical.  An
unwarranted reverence has overlaid the watchfulness which science would have
enjoined, and the result is muck and misery, the wreck of a noble study.
     But what is the one fact on which all agree?  The one fact whose
knowledge has been since religion began the all-sufficient passport to their
doubtfully-desirable company?
     This: that "I see a cat" is not only an unwarrantable assumption but a
lie; that the duality of consciousness ceases suddenly, once the rate of
change has been sufficiently slowed down, so that, even for a few seconds, the
relation of subject and object remains impregnable.
     It is a circumstance of little interest to the present essayist that this
annihilation of duality is associated with intense and passionless peace and
delight; the fact has been a bribe to the unwary, a bait for the charlatan, a
hindrance to the philosopher; let us discard it.  [It is this rapture which
has ever been the bond between mystics of all shades; and the obstacle to any
accurate observation of the phenomenon, its true causes, and so on.  This must
always be a stumbling-block to more impressionable minds; but there is no
doubt as to the fact--it "is" a "fact"and its present isolation is to be utterly deplored.  May I entreat men of Science to conquer the prejudices
natural to them when the justly despised ideas of mysticism are mentioned, and
to attack the problem "ad initio" on the severely critical and austerely
arduous lines which have distinguished their labours in other fields?--A.C.]
     More, though the establishment of this new estate of consciousness seems
to open the door to a new world, a world where the axioms of Euclid may be
absurd, and the propositions of Keynes [author of a text-book on "Formal
Logic"] untenable, let us not fall into the error of the mystics, by supposing
that in this world is necessarily a final truth, or even a certain and
definite gain of knowledge.
     But that a field for research is opened up no sane man may doubt.  Nor
may one question that the very first fact is of a nature disruptive of
difficulty philosophical and reasonable; since the phenomenon does not invoke
the assent of the reasoning faculty.  The arguments which reason may bring to
bear against it are self-destructive; reason has given consciousness the lie,
but consciousness survives and smiles.  Reason is a part of consciousness and
can never be greater than its whole; this Spencer sees; but reason is not even
any part of this new consciousness (which I, and many others, have too rarely
achieved) and therefore can never touch it: this I see, and this will I hope
be patent to those ardent and spiritually-minded agnostics of whom Huxley and
Tyndall are for all history-time the prototypes.  Know or doubt! is the
alternative of highwayman Huxley; "Believe" is not to be admitted; this is
fundamental; in this agnosticism can never change; this must ever command our
moral as our intellectual assent.
     But I assert my strong conviction that ere long we shall have done enough
of what is after all the schoolmaster work of correcting the inky and ill-
spelt exercises of the theological dunces in that great class-room, the world;
and found a little peace--while they play--in the intimate solitude of the
laboratory and the passionless rapture of research--research into those very
mysteries which our dunces have solved by rule of thumb; determining the
nature of a bee by stamping on it, and shouting "bee"; while we patiently set
to work with microscopes, and say nothing till we know, nor more than need be
when we do.
     But I am myself found guilty of this role of schoolmaster: I will now
therefore shut the doors and retire again into the laboratory where my true
life lies.

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