I have always had a problem coping with the last paragraph of Liber OZ, to be honest I have not been quite sure as what to do with that paragraph. Let me start by citing the five paragraphs making up the thelemiteethics:
“the law of
the strong:
this is our law
and the joy
of the world.” AL. II. 2“Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law.” –AL. I. 40
“thou hast no right but to do thy will. Do that, and no other shall say nay.” –AL. I. 42-3
“Every man and every woman is a star.” –AL. I. 3
There is no god but man.
- 1. Man has the right to live by his own law–
- to live in the way that he wills to do:
to work as he will:
to play as he will:
to rest as he will:
to die when and how he will.- 2. Man has the right to eat what he will:
- to drink what he will:
to dwell where he will:
to move as he will on the face of the earth.- 3. Man has the right to think what he will:
- to speak what he will:
to write what he will:
to draw, paint, carve, etch, mould, build as he will:
to dress as he will.- 4. Man has the right to love as he will:–
- “take your fill and will of love as ye will,
when, where, and with whom ye will.” –AL. I. 51- 5. Man has the right to kill those who would thwart these rights.
- “the slaves shall serve.” –AL. II. 58
“Love is the law, love under will.” –AL. I. 57
Let me make it clear: Man has the right to kill those who would thwart these rights. This is a very fundamentalist perspective on morality: Either you are with me or you are against me – put short that is the Old Testament way with the opponent. This, however, seems to be exactly how Israel Regardie understands Crowley, as he criticizes some of the young, idealistic kids of the sixties. Crowley would not, he says somewhere, be part of a movement whose motto was Make love, not war. No, he says, Crowley would rather say: Make love and war. Would he now?
It is true that Heracleitus says that war is the Father of all, but this is not a cosmologic, but rather an ontological conception of reality, which probably is also what Regardie points at, but it is a bad reading of Crowley, as the latter, and with great emphasis, puts forth that disease is a dis-ease of the whole of man’s system. A being at war with itself is not creative or remotely capable of willing anything, nor is it balanced, it is in a state of destruction of the True Will.
Now compare
Man has the right to kill those who would thwart these rights.
With
Men of “criminal nature” ar simply at issue with their true Wills. The murderer has the Will-to-live; and his will to murder is a false will at variance with his true Will, since he risks death at the hands of Society by obeying his criminal impulse.
In other words if we react against self-preservation we react against will-to-life and thus against the True Will. Now to kill those who would thwart the Law of Liberty is to put one at risk of being persecuted and sentenced to death or life in prison. So what does it mean this right?
Something else baffles me. The comment to the fifth paragraph is: The slaves shall serve. Now we cannot kill them, that would be an act of self-destruction, but can we enslave our opposers? Would that not be an act of equally dire consequences as we would then prevent a number of persons from doing their wills? Hence we would ourselves be guilty of thwarting the liberal rights of thelema.
A third possibility, which does lack all active reaction against persecutors and has a very Christian flare to it, is to lean back and let the so called slaves serve under their own delusions. That would not help very much preserving oneself from one’s persecutors. All readings are unsatisfied.
What does it all mean? One could try to cut the knot simply by saying to hell with Because. But honestly, that would not get us very much further, would it? One could start by asking oneself, what is actually said. There is a right put forth that one cannot conform to action. What then? The mere putting forth of the right is an epideictic act pointing towards the sublime gap showing itself in the above readings. The right is not an ideal, so that we could dream of an utopian thelemic community of free love and killing orgies, but neither is it real. The gap showing itself also puts forth the exact place in which it is possible for us to enjoy this right.
Let me exemplify. When the Slavonian contemporary philosopher Slavoj Zizek argues that a can of shit (the Merde d’artista) can only disgust and provoke us it is because that it shows that the sublimework of art is still very much alive in our consciousness. In the same way Crowley shows us by means of this right that there exists a right and wrong, the art of just living, but in the same time he pulls the carpet from under the feet of contemporary law. Contemporary law has removed man from just living, thus advocating a law of excrements, whereas the Law of Liberty is the answer to the provocation.
