Three Dangerous Magi: Crowley, Gurdjieff, and Osho Book Review

Three Dangerous Magi: Osho, Gurdjieff, Crowley

7th blog

At first, I have to reject rationalism to be creative. It is put aside and integrated later.

I read a book called The Three Dangerous Magi: Osho, Gurdjieff, Crowley. I found it through a discussion about the occult, art, and politics. A man named Conner Habib was on the Unregistered podcast, hosted by Thaddeus Russell (Unregistered 237, published January 2 2023). The book was written by P.T. Mistlberger and published in 2010. The author, P.T. Mistlberger, was a follower of Osho and attended many of his talks in person in the 1980’s. Here’s the front cover and table of contents:

There were a lot of interesting topics covered in the book. It detailed the lives of three “dangerous“ mystical teachers from recent history. These three men had many followers and were prominent mystics in their time. Each hosted mystery schools for their secret teachings. After reading this book, I changed my view on Aleister Crowley, I was introduced to George Gurdjieff, and I clarified misunderstandings I previously had relating to Osho.

Let’s start with Crowley, because I feel conflicted about him. Of the three, he’s the most interesting to me. I want to figure him out. But there’s another part of me, a little voice in the back of my head, that warns me away from his work. The following paragraphs are my attempt to work out exactly why I find him contentious. I think the essence of my problem with him and his work is based on confusion of his intentions. I’ve tried reading his work but I lose interest because I find most of it confusing. The subject matter he writes about is often very interesting, but he seems to hide his true intentions. I get a bad feeling that some part of him is tricking me, like tricks a devil would try. Was he a good guy or not? Almost every source I’ve read about his life claims he was generally not a nice person. Crowley wrote a short piece titled The Book of Lies. It was originally published in 1912, and I listened to it while lifting weights at the gym. It felt like a heavy metal album but in the form of spoken word. I see the influence his work had on artists like Ozzie Osbourne in Black Sabbath.

Black Sabbath, 1970, was the first heavy metal album ever released. It’s one of my favorite music albums of all time.

The Book of Lies went to dark places. Crowley writes positively about vulgarity, sacrilege, death, destruction, rebellion and anarchy. He celebrates all things, both good and evil, with a sick joy. I think some things should remain taboo, but I get the impression he wouldn’t seem to think so. Overall, if you asked me what The Book of Lies was actually about, I wouldn’t be able to explain.

Before reading Three Dangerous Magi, my impression of Crowley was that he was a bad guy, a black magician, or possibly a practicing Satanist. I thought he set up a religion dedicated to evil or Satanism in some capacity. I thought Crowley was a Satanist as in “a worshiper of the Biblical Christian devil”. On its face, this was an incorrect assumption on my behalf. I’ve since learned there are distinctions to be made between Crowley's beliefs, the entity referred to as the biblical Satan, and the modern day Church of Satan. It’s more nuanced than a simple label as evil. The Church of Satan was started in San Francisco in 1966 by Anton LeVay. The official belief of that church is atheism. The term Satan is used to pay homage to the archetype of the “great adversary”. Here a similar theme emerges, as Crowley himself was paying homage to adversary and chaos decades before LeVay. Much the same way it would be incorrect to say the Church of Satan “believes in and worships a being named Satan”, it would also be incorrect to say Crowley “believed in and worshiped a being named Satan”. The throughline is that Crowley seemed to actively attach his name to references of the biblical entity Satan. Crowley encouraged references of him as “666” or “The Beast” (interpreted as the Antichrist in the biblical Book of Revelation), but this is not the same as being a Satanist.

Crowley, who as a youth rejected his Christian upbringing, had gone through a similar way of thinking. Eventually, Crowley would claim to be a prophet for a new religion called Thelema. Thelema is the Greek word for “will”, here meaning ability to control actions according to one’s inclinations. In other words, one’s “will” is that which is exerted when one makes a choice using their power of “will'', i.e. their willpower. Crowley either coined or popularized the phrase “Do what thou wilt”, which is just another way of saying “People should do whatever they want''. I’ve always thought there were similarities between Nike’s Just Do It marketing campaign and Thelema created by Aleister Crowley. Contrast this to Christian teachings, where rules in the Bible guide people to act in accordance to an external God and His Will.

In my opinion, there are potential hazards to following a religion based on “Do what thou wilt”. The essence of religion should guide the individual to hold themself to values beyond selfish desires. Thelema emphasizes pursuit of True Will. Crowley encouraged people to do whatever they wanted until they found their True Will. And then he recommended steadfast pursuit of exactly that. But if something works spiritually, shouldn’t it work on many levels all at the same time? If one’s only religious conviction is “Do whatever you want”, it seems to justify poor dietary choices or treating other people disrespectfully. “Doing whatever you want” can mean wasting time on low value entertainment. In order to find one’s True Will, I think it’s necessary to believe in something greater than one’s self. This seems to be the point of the spiritual journey.

Crowley's work in the occult has some similarities to the work of philosopher Friedrich Neitzsche. Neitzsche wrote a book called The Antichrist, published in 1895. The Antichrist was a sincere attempt to question the limits of the Judeo-Christian western philosophical tradition. It’s a challenge of western man to find what he’s missing and how he can grow in the modern and postmodern age.
 Nihilism is a worldview of people with the belief that “nothing really matters.” No action a being does has inherent meaning in any ultimate sense. Existentialists are those with a worldview that believe the choices a being makes have inherent meaning because they influence the actions the being takes in the world. Nietsche could be labeled as an existentialist or nihilist when he wrote “God is dead” in Thus Spake Zarathustra. Arguably, Crowley advanced the philosophical implications of Neitzche. Nowadays, Jordan Peterson advises modern man to “act as if God is real.” As far as I am aware, I have not heard of anyone else approaching the topic of Nietzsche’s rebuke of Christianity and connecting the idea to Crowley’s approach to a practical way of transcendence through occult practices. It seems the magician Crowley’s attempt was to change the world by going above and beyond the understood limitations of man. Both Crowley and Nietzsche were making the case that in order for man to transcend to higher spiritual levels, humanity needs to transcend above species-limiting beliefs.

But why is this relevant? For me, I grew up during the Satanic Panic. I’m interested in the occult. I used to be scared of these topics. Don’t get me wrong, I still have a healthy fear of anything unknown and potentially dangerous, but I think of myself as an open minded, yet skeptical, person. At the heart of it, I’m really interested in what motivates people. What do they actually believe, and how does this alter their behavior? For me, close study of these topics is as important as unlocking the great secrets of the universe. I separate worship of evil versus the Jungian conception of shadow integration for optimal personal development. There is something inherently naive in the Christian teaching of always turning the other cheek. People who are too scared to exercise power never integrate their dark side. In my experience, some Christians understand shadow integration, but most I knew growing up and interacting with today would not see value in any suggestions of the practice of shadow integration.

Thelema is practiced today and has ties to Wicca and Neo-Paganism. I recently watched a series of documentaries on an interesting life story of a man named Damien Echols. Echols is a 48 year old man who is an author and self proclaimed practitioner of occult magic. He was put in prison after being mistakenly found guilty of homicide. He and 2 other young men made up the West Memphis 3, a group that was put in prison for the accused murders of three eight year old boys in the state of Arkansas in 1992. As a youth, Echols practiced Wicca. A diary containing drawings of pentagrams and upside-down crosses led Arkansas state prosecutors to argue to the jury that Echols was a Satan-worshiper. He was found guilty and sentenced to death. DNA evidence allowed Echols to be released after 18 years. Now he’s a free man who gives interesting talks on magick and the occult on his YouTube channel. This was an example of a modern day witch hunt due to the infamous “Satanic Panic”. Echols has made recent videos about Crowley and his influence on “magick”.

I am trying to figure out who believes they can perform magic and what they mean by this exactly. These three magi made claims as if they knew. I want to take them at their word and explore. I’m an open-minded and curious person. Is there actually a mystical experience, and if so, what exactly is happening? I’m trying to separate something useful versus weeding out the bullshit. One of my goals is to extract something useful out of the occult and mystical claims.

I’m reading a book called The Middle Pillar by Israel Regardie, who was a secretary for Crowley in the 1920s. Regardie argues the realness of the magical experience could likely be entirely psychological. It’s all in the practitioner’s mind. Regardie and others claim magic is just a word that refers to the “truths” we know psychologically, but have not been able to prove with science yet. An example is some people develop a telepathic-like link to other people so convincing it seems like they are reading each other’s minds. Due to nonverbal body language, it’s hard to conduct a rigorous scientific study which studies this phenomenon. Crowley claimed he could invoke powerful beings and higher powers. On at least one occasion, in 1904, in Cairo, he claimed to have invoked at least one higher power he named Aiwass, an entity he claimed was entirely separate from Crowley's own consciousness. To him, this wasn’t a voice inside his own head. This is exactly opposed to Regardie's point. Crowley claimed Aiwass was a distinct entity from himself. Regardie seems sincere, a truth-seeker, unlike the trickster Crowley. Crowley deceived people and helped spread lies about him to increase his image, such as calling himself 666 or the Great Beast. As of this writing, I remain conflicted about Crowley.

The second magi in Three Dangerous Magi was George Gurdijieff. I didn’t know much about him before this book. He lived 1866-1949 and operated mystery schools in Georgia and Turkey throughout much of his life. He believed hard work was the path to enlightenment, a process which came to be known as the “Fourth Way”. He taught there was a need for mastery over one’s own mind, body, and emotions. It’s like that one scene in Fight Club:

Gurdjieff’s goal was to get people to wake up through hard work. The assumption is that nearly all people spend their entire lives asleep, unaware of great possibilities. He believed enlightenment was achieved through hard work and paying close attention to the universe.

He had many followers throughout his life who recognized him as a great teacher, enough so that he is remembered today.

Gurdjieff taught a concept that the universe was resonant, through laws relating to the significance of the numbers 3 and 7. He believed music and dance could get one’s mind out of the way and instead feel the energies of the universe. Dancing requires a letting go, a giving into the forms of the music, the subtle energies of the flowing sounds. It requires some level of choosing to move the body, but a significant part of good dancing is letting go and allowing movement to happen naturally. This is present in Daoist and Zen teachings as well, the art of letting go and observing oneself until realizing the self doesn’t exist and it goes away. It’s a jolting and subtle realization that the person doing the thinking is in fact the same as the universe, a return to Source or God energy. In the Japanese spiritual tradition, the term satori means a sudden waking up, a divine insight into the real nature of reality. In the Western spiritual tradition, the divine spark is the transfer of divinity from God to each human, as demonstrated in this Michelangelo painting. The Western version of satori is realization of the divine spark:

I found Gurdjieff very reasonable. I didn’t find anything in his teachings objectionable, like with Crowley. He seemed like a serious and down to earth kind of man.

And finally, let’s discuss Osho. I knew a bit about him before reading Three Dangerous Magi. I’d first heard of Osho from a 2018 Netflix docu-series called Wild Wild Country. I recommend it if you’ve haven’t seen it (98% on Rotten Tomatoes). It covers the crazy story about Osho and his followers taking over a town in the Oregon desert in the 1980’s. That series did not emphasize Osho himself, yet the whole reason the story happened was because of him. He’s painted as a bad figure in the series, but I made it a point to be open minded about what Mistlberger had to say about him in this book.

Osho

I learned that Osho was a voracious reader and kind of a lazy guru. Osho lived from 1931-1990. He’s talked a lot his whole life and claimed he was enlightened at age 21. The author said that Osho had remarkable control over his own body and his “subtle energy”. Osho regularly sat completely still for many hours at a time while he spoke publicly. Osho encouraged practice of yoga and brought Indian Eastern mysticism to a western audience.

What’s the connecting theme to all of this? I have fun thinking about the implications of what I’ve read. I like connecting the dots to other things I’ve read, or even connecting interesting ideas of topics within the book. That’s what I enjoy about reading about secret mystery schools or the occult, I like learning about ideas. I like seeing how different people define what a good life is, and then what the spiritual path means for different people. To me, the spiritual path is one for maximum physical, social, emotional, and mental health, and if all those aspects of life are lined up, that human will experience spiritual health as well.

So after reading, then having the ideas, I need to write the ideas down and this is what this blog is. I have to make it public as a way to track my progress over time. Publishing these words gives them a finality, a need for editing.

Thinking and writing about them is a way to process through them. I’ve been thinking: “what about all the forgotten knowledge? What did we used to know and have since forgotten?” Collectively, imagine how much has been lost to memory. Before writing, everything was only accessible through verbal, and before language it was passed nonverbally. More information seems to be generated now. So somehow more information from people’s minds are being put down onto the page. Imagine if we had been able to do this for all of history. How much has been forgotten over time? What did the ancients feel like and think about? Imagine all the gatherings, the interactions, the personalities. The lack of information probably caused the imagination to run wild. Nowadays we have too much information about the world we have this construction of. There is not much to ponder if we can quickly google the answer.

So this is my way of processing through what I learned from books I’ve read. I read them to gain knowledge, to occupy my mind. But it’s not purely for entertainment. I’m trying to learn from everything. I want to know how the world works. I want to know what people mean by the spiritual path, by what they mean when they say they know the mystical way. I want to know details so I can construct the stories myself. I want to make my own mind up about the subject matter.

And I don’t want the information to be consumed and then forgotten about. Inevitably I will eventually forget exact details of what I’ve read, but the intended goal is to preserve my emotions and thoughts about the book. It's about setting my life up in a way where anyone can connect with me, the person writing this out and connecting these ideas together. It could be myself reading this later, or any other person. My intent is to write something interesting that contains my experience and transfer it to another person in another reality, in another world, space, and time.

To conclude this post, I watched a third film from Tarkovsky, a film named Solaris (1972). I didn’t like it and don’t have much to say about it. It is in color, which is different from his previous two films. Solaris was a science fiction movie about a scientist going to a space station where strange things begin to happen. It has some psychological elements, but overall I found the film too slow. I watched the first half and thought it would be a 2/5 on my scale, but by the end of it I had changed it to a 1/5. I may not be as big a fan of Tarkovsky as I had hoped, stemming from listening to Dr. Iain McGilchrist talks about how much he adores this director. I liked the first film, Ivan’s Childhood but just haven’t liked anything since then.

-Michael

May 20, 2023