climate change | The Secret Door

“This shall regenerate the world, the little world my sister, my heart & my tongue, unto whom I send this kiss.” (AL, I, 53)

“Thou seest yon petal of amaranth, blown by the wind from the low sweet brows of Hathor? (The Magister saw it and rejoiced in the beauty of it.) Listen! (From a certain world came an infinite wail.) That falling petal seemed to the little ones a wave to engulph their continent. So they will reproach thy servant, saying: Who hath set thee to save us? He will be sore distressed. All they understand not that thou and I are fashioning a boat of mother-of-pearl. We will sail down the river of Amrit even to the yew-groves of Yama, where we may rejoice exceedingly.” (Liber LXV, Cap. I, vv. 34-39)

“This also is compassion: an end to the sickness of earth. A rooting-out of the weeds: a watering of the flowers.” (Liber XC, v. 26)

Setting aside the question of advocacy,[1] and simply taking the Book literally, no one can deny the remarkable prescience of Aiwaz in the Book of the Law. Written in 1904, the Book of the Law relays a set of prophetic pronouncements that presage the tenor, spirit, and actual events of the 20^th and 21^st centuries with remarkable precision and vigour.

According to Aiwaz, the old order of Judaeo-Christian civilization is moribund because it has ignored the earth.[2] To quote Yeats, “the best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity.” Industrialization and democracy are destroying human civilization. As the ancient Greeks understood clearly, democracy is always followed by authoritarianism. Inferiority and maladjustment demand ever more and more concessions, while the old aristocratic civilizations are torn apart by increasingly extreme conflict, enabled by industrialization, culminating in World War I (1914-18). As a result, the world is being torn apart by escalating warfare and violence, culminating in the rise of Nazism, the ultimately proletarian ideology, which continues covertly to this day, waiting for the opportunity to rise again (e.g., the Alt Right), and World War II in the 1940s. Human history is escalating toward a turning point, a point of decision, when organized human civilization will collapse and be superseded by a global catastrophe the like of which has not been seen for tens of thousands of years. The transition will be so terrible that human beings will long for death. Climate change is extremely interesting in the context of the Age of Set, the god of desert heat. This is an existential human crisis as a result of which billions will die in a short time (James Lovelock, the creator of Gaia theory, predicts this).[3] The transition may be expedited by the use of weapons of mass destruction that kills whole populations (nuclear, biological), followed by an interval of savagery, including the practice of cannibalism (see Cormac McCarthy, The Road), torture, and human sacrifice (cf. the Buddhist sattantarakappa or “age of swords”). Aiwaz implies that these events are imminent, and may be presaged by the burning down of Boleskine House, which occurred in December 2015. Christian, Muslim, Indian, Buddhist, and Mongolian regions (i.e., Europe, the Middle East, India, China, Mongolia, southeast Asia, and Japan) will be most affected.

As a result of these events, a new world power will emerge, based on ecological principles, as a reaction against the chaos then reigning. This power will form a world government and inaugurate a new world order that will replace the chaos of the old order. It will be aristocratic, prosperous, and secret. Its leaders will establish a new epoch of human civilization. Membership in the new order will be voluntary and open to all, but only those who rise in the order will exercise authority. It will be political, militant, and elitist.

According to the Book of the Law, the transition to the new order began in the 1980s. According to the Wikipedia, the 1980s saw great socioeconomic changes and a worldwide move away from planned economies toward laissez-faire capitalism, as well as economic deconstruction in the developed world. The AIDs epidemic was recognized during the 1980s, resulting in more than 39 million deaths to date. Global warming became well-known to the scientific community during the 1980s. The fall of the USSR made right-wing economic policy more powerful. The IMF and World Bank formed the nucleus of globalization as developing countries suffered from multiple debt crises. Major civil discontent and violence erupted in the Middle East, associated with the rise of Islamic terrorism. Population growth also exploded during the 1980s. Based on the Book of the Law, we can see the 1980s as an embryonic adumbration of the future.

Notes

[1] It’s an open question whether the uncanny and inhuman-sounding voice of Aiwaz, as Crowley described it, devoid of any human quality, was describing what might be termed the shadow of the New Æon or advocating it. Crowley based The Law Is for All on the latter assumption, but this might be questioned. Can we really know the teleology of a preterhuman intelligence, or the influence of Crowley’s psyche on the message? However you slice it, however, it is clear we are entering an age of extreme turmoil.

[2] Cf.: “Now is the time to destroy those who destroy the earth” (Rev. 11:18).

[3] Jeff Goodell, “James Locklock, the Prophet,” RollingStone, November 1, 2007 (https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/james-lovelock-the-prophet-192646/). Phoenix, Beijing, Miami, and London will become partly or wholly uninhabitable. Lovelock also predicts a war between Russia and China, which he says is “inevitable” (the twin warriors about the pillars of the world?).[4] Epidemics are likely to kill millions. By 2100 the earth’s population will be culled from 11 billion (2100 projection) to as few as 500 million. Most of the survivors will live in Canada, Iceland, Scandinavia, and the Arctic Basin (bordered by Russia, Alaska, Canada, and Greenland) (about 100 million people live in that zone currently). North America and Europe will be fourteen degrees Farenheit (8° C.) hotter than they are now, with the real possibility of descent into a dark age run by war lords. The alternative includes desalination plants, synthetic food, nuclear energy, and geoengineering. “Some people will sit in their seats and do nothing, frozen in panic. Others will move. They’ll see what’s about to happen, and they’ll take action, and they’ll survive. They’re the carriers of the civilization ahead.” Perhaps these are the future Thelemites.

[4] The phrase “pillars of the world” is Biblical: “For the pillars of the earth are the Lord’s, and on them he has set the world” (1 Sam. 2:8); “he who removes mountains, and they know it not, when he overturns them in his anger; who shakes the earth out of its place, and its pillars tremble” (Job. 9:5f.). The pillars of the world support the earth, so Aiwaz’ implication appears to be that the earth will be fundamentally disrupted by a world war. The number of the verse, 71, is that of Saturn and nothingness.

Citations

I, 10, 15, 23, 53, 61
II, 21, 24, 73
III, 3, 7, 8, 11, 18, 24, 34, 39, 42, 46, 51-54, 71