I met Aleister Crowley last month at the Last Book Store.
He had a t shirt and shorts on. He had been a TF2 youtuber and Reddit Mod for the better part of two decades. But recently, after reading Liber AL vel Legis, it dawned on him, that he was in fact Aleister Crowley.
We were discussing the occult, and he revealed to me his secret key to the tarot delivered directly to him, and never-before-seen (in fact, the fundamentals of numerological tarot described in detail in Crowley’s Book of Thoth).
I asked him how he planned on revealing these secret and what he expected. He had no clear thoughts on execution, but many on his inevitable rise to Great Beasthood and role in future events.
Thou know'st 'tis common.
While this may sound like an insane person or a rare occurrence it is in fact extremely common.
If you’ve spent any amount of time online in occult communities, or specifically Aleister Crowley‘s own Thelemic system, you will find that there are innumerable people who truly believe that they are the reincarnation of Aleister Crowley.
Why is this?
It is in fact because Crowley established a memetic persona: He was the Great Beast and his personal life, his early childhood traumas, his sexuality, his various idiosyncrasies and character traits all became infectious.
They were communicated in mass through his work and the many books about him. The little images of him on album covers, and the pop songs that reference him, all of this led to a mass projection.
Just as many young people relate to a popular movie character, or an antihero in comic books, Aleister Crowley is in fact a character to these people. More like Patrick Bateman or Darth Vader than a real living person.
Not somebody that we read and learn from, but rather somebody that they relate to. They can only value his work by relating to him.
They have to become Him.
It’s a pride in a way, where if you read the Book of the Law you must feel as if you too could do it, and in some ways Crowley served this self mythologizing by upholding the individual, by upholding past lives and reincarnations. In fact, Crowley himself believed he was the reincarnation of Eliphas Levi, but he certainly didn’t have many competitors.
Competition
It’s a trope at this point to imagine the mental asylum filled with Christs and Napoleons.
But while everyone has suffered like Christ, and nearly everyone wishes to be King for a Day like Napoleon, it takes a specific type of (traumatized) edgy kid to ego identify with Crowley.
In Crowley’s work he describes how one Soul can reincarnate into many people':
What do I mean when I say that I think I was Eliphaz Lévi? No more than that I possess some of his most essential characteristics, and that some of the incidents in his life are remembered by me as my own. There doesn't seem any impossibility about these bundles of Sankhara being shared by two or more persons. We certainly do not know enough of what actually takes place to speak positively on any such point. Don't lose any sleep over it.
-Magick Without Tears, Chapter 37
Immortality
Is this the case? Did Crowley find a bunch of losers and give bits of his soul to them in a bid for a sort of pathetic version of immortality?
Probably not.
But he did establish a Meme that would outlive him, in his own lifetime and far beyond.
This vision, that of Memetic Immortality (as opposed to a Genetic Immortality, like that of Genghis Khan) was shared by L Ron Hubbard:
I have high hopes of smashing my name into history so violently that it will take a legendary form even if all the books are destroyed. The goal is the real goal as far as I am concerned. Things which stand too consistently in it’s way make me nervous. It’s a pretty big job. In a hundred years Roosevelt will have been forgotten – which gives some idea of the magnitude of my attempt.
-A letter from LRH to his first wife Skipper
Survival of the Fittest
I’ve come to read the many Crowleys as a sort of beautiful evolutionary mechanism for Memes: Eventually someone will be just like Crowley (fr fr), and they will proliferate the Meme far further than the many lackluster Crowleys.
In the Memetic realm Reincarnation is no longer Destiny, it’s a power struggle.
Final Thoughts
As mankind “evolves” away from base bodily functions (not my desire, but this is the modern Telos.) memetic immortality alongside technological and medical self preservation will become as vital to the work of life as having a family and children is to our ancestors.
Are “You” going to make it to the New Aeon?