On page XI of the Preface to 777, subtitled (originally in Latin) by Aleister Crowley “A Compilation of Symbols, Towards a Systematization of the Skeptical-Mystical Way Set Forth. A Hieroglyphic Foundation of the Most Holy Things of the Higher Knowledge.”, Crowley writes:

First, indicible means “unspeakable; unutterable; inexpressible”—so the same idea as another word often used by occultists: ineffable. The very essence of this idea is that it concerns something which the mind is incapable of describing, mainly for a lack of words, and this lack is not simply a lack of vocabulary. In other words, the idea is not that if you just had MORE words, or words put together in just the right (secret) way, you could say this unspeakable thing. It is that if you had all the words humans could invent and employ, and you filtered them through all the secret sonnets and ciphers, you would still be at a loss to accurately describe something indicible.

Now, in a way, anything we can talk about is indicible, in the sense of its transcendent or metaphysical essence being quite literally beyond words. We can use all the words in all the languages on the planet, for example, to attempt to describe the joy of a mother upon first viewing her newborn baby, and someday perhaps we shall even be able to explain that joy scientifically, and bottle it in pills, but that will only be about external attempts to simulate a whole and transcendent experience. Of course if we can simulate such a thing to the extent most people will not be able to tell the difference between the simulation and the “natural” reality—thus a man may finally get to know what it is like to deliver a baby, or to be done with it anyway—then perhaps the experience is not truly transcendent after all. Or, perhaps the simulation will itself be indicible but not in the same way as the simulated experience. And we must remember that to supply a generic simulation is still not the same thing as understanding that experience as it is processed by any individual. The quality of individuality is something like the dice in the game, and, though we know the range of feelings people should experience, that cannot guarantee us a comprehensive apprehension of the actual range. These are interesting considerations because they suggest that the methods of science may have a killing effect upon the spiritual aims of life, while those aims seek to escape nullification by being veiled in variation. Thus an essential and seemingly always hostile conflict underlies our game.

Aleister Crowley did not believe this conflict was an inherent or necessary problem and sought to reconcile the aims of religion with the methods of science. But as science continues its postmortem on the spiritual mythology of the human body, prying apart every “secret” and revealing its nuts and bolts and wires and chips, the indicible seems to be under attack, at least in so far as any conception of a special human mystery is concerned. Humans are now not much different than any other lab rat, arms and legs pinned back and guts on display, to be picked over by the whitecoats and their steely talons. That unfortunate condition, which Madame Blavatsky so feared as an unavoidable consequence of people turning their backs on God—in all forms—to accept instead the seemingly sterile material explanations of science, is merely one possible effect of scientific discovery. For science is quite capable of producing the most indicible images—in the case of the Hubble Space Telescope, literally so—that a human could imagine in the material realm. So, one way of thinking of the indicible is that it ranges from the “mundane” realization that we cannot ever truly understand the complete essence of anything in our universe, to the transcendence of the impressions of all sensory input and interior cultivations in the experience of some kind of burning-bush phenomenon. The dicible then is what we can say about the world, and the indicible is what is implied by what we cannot say about it.

When Crowley then says: “All this secrecy is very silly. An indicible Arcanum is an Arcanum that cannot be revealed”, he does not mean that the Arcanum cannot be revealed at all to anyone, but that one person can not reveal it to another in any direct, verbal, manner. On the other hand one may be able to imply it in a ritual or in some other indicible form of expression, as in poetry or art—or in the symbols of Tarot cards. Crowley was clearly satirizing the occult pretensions of the Golden Dawn, and that of Samuel Mathers in particular, when he writes later in the Preface: “…Unluckily, the leading spirit in these latter [secret] societies found that his prayer, ‘Give us this day our daily whisky, and just a wee drappie mair for luck!’ was sternly answered, ‘When you have given us this day our daily Knowledge-lecture.’ Under these circumstances Daath got mixed with Dewar, and Beelzebub with Buchanan.”

In addition to making an insulting point about the indicible, Crowley had very personal reasons for bashing Mathers and attempting to make light of his oaths of secrecy to Golden Dawn. A great deal of Crowley’s “revelatory” effort, especially in his early days, was devoted to publishing without permission (and in violation of his oath of secrecy) the intellectual property of the Golden Dawn, and of Samuel L. Mathers. If anyone objected, and Mathers did finally do so, suing Crowley for copyright infringement, Crowley could always point out that Mathers himself had at most originated a particular expression of something very much in the public, if little known, domain. For Mathers to complain otherwise would have led to the obvious conclusion that the material in question was mainly or entirely his very recent creation. And that had been the charge Mathers had made against Westcott which eventually brought down the house of cards of the original Golden Dawn.

Of course Crowley may have sincerely felt he wasn’t stealing much of anything, at least not from Mathers, since as he points out the secrets were all available at the British Museum and couldn’t reasonably be seen as the private legacy or property of any particular person or organization. The Golden Dawn might claim it had a special place in the eyes of the Secret Chiefs with respect to the maintenance and teaching of the Great Work(s), but anyone with the time and interest to research documents happily residing in the perfectly public domain could make that claim with equal justification.

For Crowley, who needed to see his own role in things as special and indeed literally Apocalyptic, there was a compulsion, even in the face of the silliness of secrecy, to yet affirm a requirement for the ancient pretense, and to claim that the Secret Chiefs did indeed communicate their arcana to an elect few. Crowley claimed he was one of those elect, and armed with Liber AL, a document he said demonstrated the legitimate nature of his claim compared to that of all those library-trained prophets, Crowley moved on to personalizing the rituals and teachings of the Ordo Templi Orientis. When it came time to reconstruct the secret rituals and instructions of this fringe- or pseudo-Masonic Order, the silly secrecy was not abandoned but maintained. Crowley noted in regard to this that Theodor Reuss, the head of the OTO when Crowley joined it, had explained to him: “...that there were a few men who took the matter [of Freemasonry] seriously and believed that the foolish formalism concealed really important magical secrets.” If the “important magical secrets” would involve something other than the financial benefits of selling onion peelings (see Book of Lies, Chapter 14) to chaffed chelas, Crowley needed to justify the foolish formalism with some kind of substantive payoff. Then, as now, the best way to make people feel it was worth it was to dangle visions of sexual sugarplums before them. That sweet treat in the OTO is the infamous Secret of the IXth Degree, which teaches that human sexual oozings, if used as a “mother” to make a very sour dough of spells, can be applied to supposedly do the most effective, and the most natural, magick. To make this offering seem something more than merely sensual, a je ne sais quoi integument was added, suggesting that sex was a means to something transcendently true and even better than playing sperm-smearing games with amulets. This additional aspect, a necessary marketing consideration, allowed the OTO to continually claim, even when its supposed secrets had been published in various forms and forums, that it didn’t matter their pearls were now public fodder, because the real secrets could not be gotten merely by reading the words that apparently revealed them. As we’ve seen, that fits well with the doctrine of indicability, but since OTO, and especially its bastard offspring (C)OTO, continue to sell lottery tickets to people in search of the great arcanum, one cannot help but recall again Crowley’s pointed and in retrospect rather poignant insight that the commercial marketing of occult products, especially ones in the public domain, as if they were otherwise unobtainable secrets, is bad faith at best and should be indictable fraud. Or to paraphrase a (C)OTO operative: “There are no secret rituals, there are only trade secrets which can only remain so as long as we continue to claim, regardless of the evidence to the contrary, that there are secret rituals.” Since the evidence to the contrary is substantial, supposedly (C)OTO has gone about trying to rewrite the rituals to re-secretize them. The extent to which this has been done is debatable, but it is doubtful most (C)OTO members knowingly wish to be purchasing the occult prose and poetry of (much) lesser lights than Aleister Crowley.

Finally, somewhere, perhaps in an onion field, the truth is to be found, but to pretend it can be purchased, along with one’s self esteem, at Ye Olde Secrets Shoppe, is perhaps the depth of absurdity and dishonesty with oneself.

J. Karlin 5/20/2004