Rant Number 578 20 March 2014
In Surat al-Mujadila the Qur’an speaks of Hizbullah, God’s Party. In verse 19 it also mentions HizbushShaytan, Satan’s Party. Clear words indeed.
Satan’s influence deeply concerns the Holy Father, too. In a Lenten homily in St Peter’s Square this supposedly liberal Pontiff told the faithful: beware! Remember your baptismal vows, he said. Such as ‘renouncing Satan and all his works’. As Jesus spurned the fiend’s temptations in the desert, so must the believer. And dialogue with Satan, as Eve tried in the Garden of Eden, is lethal ‘because he is so cunning’, Pope Francis explained. ‘At times of temptation, there can be no argument with Satan…rather, fight him with the Word of God.’ Excellent advice.
Satan’s party never lacked followers. Englishman Aleister Crowley was one of them. Crowley rejoiced in titles like ‘the wickedest man in the world’ (a sobriquet coined by his unhappy mother) and ‘the Beast 666’ – an allusion to Revelation 13. Accordingly ‘the Beast’ founded OTO, the Order of the Oriental Temple, a worldwide cabal devoted to ‘sexual magic’. Crowley’s idea of magic was a risible hocus-pocus but unbridled eroticism certainly was the aim. The American branch of OTO celebrated night ceremonies that included a naked priestess popping out of a coffin to engage in unorthodox, i.e. obscene and sacrilegious, rites.
Crowley summed up his demonic creed thus: ‘Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law’. In plain English: do whatever you fancy. A tantrum-throwing child’s idea of self-expression. Or at best a sort of poor man’s Nietzscheism. A deliberate perversion, I think, of St Augustine’s dictum about love leading to good deeds. Altruistic, neighbour-orientated Christian love is as remote from sexual licence as the sky is from the earth.
It seems the Beast wanted to give birth to Satan’s child, the Antichrist. An unpleasant notion later inspiring Roman Polanski’s movie, ‘Rosemary’s Baby’. To encourage it, he composed a novel, ‘Moonchild’. A tedious and badly-written affair - clearly, His Satanic Majesty’s powers do not extend to the literary sphere. A distinction is drawn between white and black magic and the child to be is described as a wonderful, redeeming figure. The tempter, I suppose, never gives up…
To procreate such an unfortunate creature an even more unlucky female was necessary. A series of women, in fact. Each one Crowley, obsessed by the Book of Revelation, termed ‘the Scarlet Woman’. But he also gave the poor things unbiblical names, like the Ape of Thoth, Sister Cybele and Alostrael. Stuff that brings out a sinister fact about Crowley’s putative sexual liberation. It was fun chiefly for the man. Women were largely used, abused and discarded. Significantly, a gross sketch by Crowley (painting being another art at which Satan must be ungifted) shows a course, lewd demon devouring a tiny, hapless female. Yak!
The Beast dabbled in politics. Marco Pasi’s study on Crowley, subtitled ‘the Temptations of Politics’ discusses that. (Went to the book launch last night.)They were unremarkable, piffling episodes. Crowley never managed to get anywhere near politicians of influence. He knew minor figures on the margins of National Socialism and Bolshevism. Even the closet gay, Labour MP Tom Driberg. (Homosexuality actually never appealed to the out and out lady’s man Crowley.) He hoped Mussolini would crush the Pope – Christianity being the Beast’s greatest bête noire – but when the Duce smartly signed a deal with the Vatican Crowley was disgusted. If he ever dreamt of becoming Hitler’s magical mentor…methinks the Fuhrer was not quite as stupid as that.
Still, Crowley fancied himself as a secret agent. As a Cambridge student, he was in the right milieu to make useful contacts among Britain’s elite. He offered himself to the Foreign Office – that’s a Satanic organisation all right – and during WWII again he, a true English patriot, suggested to the intelligence services that his occult powers would be useful to them. He was not taken seriously. Was he alive today, would he fare better, I wonder? Satanism still thrives in certain quarters.
Where does that leave Satan’s party? It is a losing outfit, as the Qur’an observes. Above all, it is a losing, ruinous cause for those who adhere to it. That is invariably the lot of hapless individuals who are lured into joining covens and satanic cults. They believe the Fiend will grant them exceptional powers, money, sex, immortality…In fact, they end up becoming powerless, exploited and sucked dry by clever manipulators. And the chief Satanists too are unwitting victims of their own delusions. Crowley himself turned into a drug addict, obese, bloated and often penniless. It figures.
There is however a sense in which Crowley’s legacy lives on. You must look for its reality not amongst conventicles of Neo-Nazi loonies but within the powerful democracies of the West. In the sexual sphere, the permissive gospel preached by Crowley has triumphed. The laws and mores of America and Britain, assiduously propagated by the media, are as Crowley-like as can be. Sure, the hedonistic masses, the youth do not give a damn about magical rites but it comes down to the Beast’s self-gratifying, childish slogan: do whatever you fancy, that rules OK.
And God’s Party? There is Hizbullah in Lebanon. It takes its name from the Qur’an verse I quoted. Alas, whatever its merits right now that party is fiercely opposed and fought against by many fellow Muslims in the Middle East, equally entitled to claim membership in the divine ranks. Party politics is a tricky affair. God alone knows who truly belongs to his party, methinks.
Revd Frank Julian Gelli
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