In so far as there is a God, He is Great, and greater than you, and me, and anything you or I can imagine or infer. Well I infer this, and without imagining. The meaning of the word God is this; that which defies the laws that hold together the mind of the speaker of that name.
Since God is that which is great beyond all recognition, so his Death is death of greatness-beyond-recognition. Nietzsche’s theocide was an decisive act within a declining play, a severing of a festering arm, let us say the right arm, mans dexterity - his power to set true aims and to distinguish right from wrong, and health from sickness.
A period of sinister initiatives followed. Aleister Crowley the ever-intoxicated graverobber gained access to the sarcophagus and adorned himself and the age to come with the ancient gold of pagan gods as well as Christian ones, and roughly projected an era of passionate self-interest; the Age of Horus or Aquarius. In the absence of an aim higher than man, man became the vessel of religious investment.
But there is a catch at the end of the story. It has been enough to cause men who finished the puzzle to laugh for weeks on end.
“Ipsissimus”
Ao you see, God is not dead. He is only obscured. He was hidden by the orders, so well that the notion of God-hood may gradually be unveiled in a lifelong process of rigorous meditative and sacrificial practices; gradually the student in exalted self-interest approaches the gate that stands between him and the notion of God, the unfathomable original light, the object that can only be conceived of by the cultivation and of ones natural highest love; and in the uninitiated, this love goes out to themselves; but the one who finally knocks on the gate to Ipsissimus loves only his love, and wishes nothing behind that door except the opportunity to serve, to give, to attain properly the bestowing virtue, the fountainhead. There is no greater pleasure than giving away ones essence; this is how life found a way to exist, and it is also the way spirit found a way to exist.
Crowley claimed to have attained the grade of Ipsissimus in 1921, during a ritual at his abbey at Cefalu, in Sicily. Being an Ipsissimus isn’t only connection to the self, but magical enlightenment in the form of being able to perceive and feel the magical/energy flows in the universe, accordingly the capability to feel these would also make the person able to control them.
Those who do not have a love for the truth, will come under the spell of the AntiChrist’s deception and many will succumb to the deception.
Of ten degrees of ascension according to the Hebrew or Egyptian tree of life, Ipsissimus is the very highest degree of occult attainment in the terms of the Aeon that Crowley imagined or foresaw as unfolding by the logic of that ladder.
The state on of the Greater Self as New Age understands it, is attributed to a stage that lies separated from Ipsissimus by two planes, and five worlds. A bridge between either of these worlds is an unthinkably great moral dilemma that the Adept will have to solve.
All the doors demand a sacrifice. Only the overflowing will want to continue.
In the Self, the windows to eternity are opened. The frozen light pierces through the fluctuating darkness, and the fact that change is actually constant is revealed and the mind is supplanted from changeable Earth into fixed Heaven. But here only the beginnings of war are at work; beyond comes the polishing of the sword, the tying of the laces, the fastening of the belt and all the pleasures of first advance. Spirit is a conquest, and beyond the state of the Self, the individual is fully engaged in it as such.
Ipsissimus is the final attainment of victory; the Cardinal mystery. Or so it is framed; and this is why I said what I said; it is here that man ends and god begins. There are no markers for this terrain. Crowley, claiming to have attained it, has not proven it - it would be hard to find terms of proof that satisfy both truth and belief.
The attempt to Self-valuing of Man As Such. Such notions were inspired on the first paths above the Self. This very passage is the sort of leather-stretching and steel-sharpening preparation of the conquest.
Ipsissimus will not speak in commands, but in astonishing revelatory keys, and only to the worthy; philosophers understand this to mean those who will not perish of the truth, but that occultist is likely to understand it more as he who has adorned his consciousness and daily ritual with all the contradicting aspects of man, which altogether is truth; this will amount to the same paradigm of experience only the philosopher treads it in a bears hide, and the occultist as a cloaked king. I came to read beauty is terror to stand on the door in the other end of the hallway that opened with know thyself and the warning that only applies to those before the Self; nothing in excess. Beyond that, the path of excess is the only path of being; being is excess. Think Aphrodite, born of the cascading molecules of the surf - life emerges violently, far too great for itself to ever know itself. That is why it split up in so many forms; and that is why these forms want to know each other. But they can’t; not except if they look right through the appearance and into the underlying principle; but this is why the scorpion evolved into the philosopher.
Crowley only operated two orders: the O.T.O. which he received from Germany, and the A.·. A.·. which he took from the Golden Dawn.
The so-called Law of Thelema (Will) which involves the acceptance of a new sacred scripture gathered on occult ways by Crowley and called the “Book of the Law” requires the acceptance of Crowley as the prophet. This would, by no means, be a substitute for the figure of Christ, for anyone who believes in God.
Crowley was a passionate neo-pagan without any shred of sympathy for the biblical God.