Behutet Magazine Issue 51: Modern Thelemic Magick and Culture by Frater Archer

Author:Frater Archer
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub, azw3, pdf
Publisher: Thelesis Lodge, O.T.O.
Published: 2013-01-01T06:00:00+00:00

Friedrich Nietzsche

The composer Richard Strauss wrote a tone poem, also titled Thus Spoke Zarathustra (Strauss, 1896), inspired by Nietzsche’s work. It opens with a famous musical passage representing the rising of consciousness from the ape beast and the human being to the splendor and glory of the overman. The music, which also represents a sun rising over the mountain where Zarathustra has exiled himself, is measured out like the rising on three steps towards a solar altar, the last step of which brings the listener to the transcendence of being human. This passage turned out to be one of the most recognizable pieces of music in Western culture, and not just because it was used by Elvis Presley to accompany his appearance on stage.

In the mid-to-late 1960s, Arthur C. Clarke and film director Stanley Kubrick created 2001: A Space Odyssey (Kubrick, 1968), a novel/movie combination that sparked a cultural phenomenon. The film’s powerful use of the opening bars of Strauss’ masterwork played over an image of the Sun, the Moon and Earth lining up in splendid and transcendent symmetry , a key to the film’ s threefold structure. The film begins its narrative with “The Dawn of Man,” the exact moment when a starving and weak tribe of primate apes take a leap forward in consciousness that enables them to survive and dominate over other life forms to become the human race. The film moves into the Space Age and man’ s arrival on the Moon, and then progresses towards the first deep space journey beyond Jupiter and mankind’s entry into the dark abyss amongst the stars. The film climaxes in a psychedelic and mystical journey that is unlike anything else that had ever been committed to Hollywood celluloid.

Clearly the story of 2001, like Nietzsche’s Zarathustra, progresses from the most primitive layers of consciousness to the higher realms where humans and the gods become as one and there is no distinction between technology and magic. The film itself is a ritual enacting a myth, and the mysticism-influenced pop culture of the late 1960s saw it as more relevant to their visions and their concerns than anything else in Hollywood or on television.

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