According to Hanegraaff, in Western society there are three dominant modes of thought: reason, faith and gnosis. Although, I think that this three-partite model has many flaws, one of them being to crude a model, it describes the situation I want to discuss very clearly. Reason is the mode of thought used by the ancient Greeks and modern science. It is related to rationality and in a certain sense also to practical thinking. Faith is the mode of thought used by religion, especially by Christianity with its stress on dogma. It is easy to see that both of these modes of thought are dominant in Western society.
The last mode of thought is somewhat neglected. Like the category of magic, gnosis is not religion and therefore battled by (organized) religion, nor is it science and has therefore come under attack from science. As this last mode of thought is neither reason nor faith, it is easy to link this mode with a kind of counter culture, an embattled form of thought. It is easy, but not true, to see in gnosis a perennial form of a Western counter culture.
In the song “Aeon”, we saw that it could refer to Crowley’s new age of Horus. This age of Horus replaced the old age of Osiris with its dominant religion: Christianity. In the writings of Crowley, we see that his thought is very anti-Christian. The reason for this is that he considers Christianity obsolete, in this new age it is replaced by the new religion of Thelema. This anti-Christianity makes Crowley not a Satanist, but merely another figure in the anti-Christianity debate of that time. Joscelyn Godwin, in his “Theosophical Enlightenment”, argues that nineteenth century Western esotericism owes much to Enlightenment criticism on Christianity. His major example is Madame Blavatsky co-founder of the Theosophical Society. She promoted the Hindu religion as more true than (Western) Christianity. In her Theosophical teachings she blended nineteenth-century science with Hindu elements. Blavatsky presented this teaching essentially as a third way in the science vs. religion debate of the late nineteenth century.
However, the song “Intellect” is not a critique on Western religion, but on the other mode of thought: reason. This critique on intellect, reason and rationality is not unique in the work of Coleman. Other examples include the title of his yet unpublished book: “The Irrational Domain” and the line “analysis, paralysis” from the song “Whiteout”. This line suggests that reason leads to nothing. In “Intellect” Coleman argues that reason leads to nothing: “reason then gives birth to lies”. Furthermore, the last part of the song is about liberation from reason, from rationality. According to Coleman the only way to reach a state of happiness is without reason.
If we combine this rejection of reason with Crowley’s anti-Christianity and Coleman’s love of Nature, we get by default an appreciation for the third mode of thought, gnosis. Like I argued before, is gnosis, in its guise as Gnosticism, the main theme of “Aeon”.
Tags: Blavatsky, gnosis, Killing Joke, reason, Theosophy
