Weird Studies/Crowley

24 Feb 2023 - 23 Jul 2025
Open in Logseq
    • On Aleister Crowley. Who is practically normie these days.
    • Magick as striving for wholeness, not purity (including the bad parts of self)
    • Crowley: Magick is for all, it sounds so funny to hear these democratic sentiments from someone like him.
    • "Every man and woman is a star" – interpreted in Aristotelean(?) sense, individuals are outside nature, autonomous...not actually sure what this means and it seems to slightly contradict other things here, about the continuity of the universe.
    • The discussion of science vs magick is kind of dumb, sorry. "Magick looks at every level of reality as equally real" – kind of Latourish, but it misunderstands science in the usual way. Drives me nuts.
    • I was impressed and surprised by the discussion of causality and synchronicity. JFM didn't believe in it because of mechanism issues, which really surprised me. I feel like they are on the verge of an insight, and I'm on the verge of the same one although coming via a different path – maybe that all semantic relations have this atemporal quality, where causality is not strightforward and mechanistic...not sure that's it, it's a fleeting image of a thought, at best.
    • Principle of Sufficient Reason etc. That stuff leaves me cold
    • Narrative theory of reality
    • Burroughs: Money is the worst thing you can ask for in magic. (56:45)
    • Minsky contra Crowley around 23:00 (???)
    • 39:00 irreduction
    • Any intentional act is a magical act
    • Science deals with quantity, magic deals with appearance and the qualitiative
    • Erik Davis: irreducible weirdness
    • fin