by Barry Kavanagh
Ever been in a cult? Conducted magical rituals? Have you ever been called "insane" because of your beliefs? Well, maybe it's true! Let's examine the evidence. The three cases I'm going to bring in and put on my clinically comfortable leather sofa are (1) Leo, aka Raymond Armin, mysterious leader of the Emin sect, (2) Australian trance artist and occultist Rosaleen Norton, R.I.P., and (3) um... Aleister Crowley.
Leo's going first. I'll begin by saying that in his teachings, everything has significance. Yep, everything. Every shape, number and colour has a secret, hidden meaning. These are messages from the "Unseen world," you see. "I start to appreciate the weird magnitude of Leo's and the Emin's creation," wrote William Shaw, who joined the sect without telling them he was a journalist and went on to write Spying in Guru Land: Inside Britain's Cults.
"They have built this vast labyrinth which they can lose themselves in for ever. I realise, to my surprise, that after months in the Emin, I can talk for minutes about the hidden significances of any meaningless object. Even the cup on my desk now has a shape, a name, a colour which can all be woven into this wild jungle of Emin semiology. It's blue, which would denote nurturing, creating. The cup is round which indicates—obviously—'containment', which is an Emin concept relating again to nurturing, but the shape also forms a zero, or the letter 'O', both of which might produce other meanings. The word cup can be broken down to c-up. Upwards? What does 'c' stand for? Why is the handle yellow? What does the handle's shape signify? And so on, and on, and on." Emin believers, while going about daily life, are constantly aware of the "Unseen" meanings. Have you seen them? They're the people who stare at their coffee cups in diners, don't you know?
Compare this idea of everything having meaning to the scribblings of , eh... Aleister Crowley. In Magick Without Tears (in the introduction, in the letter labelled "F" and dated August 20, 1943—and if you can't find that you must be holding the book upside down), Crowley recommends his method for studying the Qabalah: "As I walked about, I made a point of attributing everything I saw to its appropriate idea. I would walk out of the door of my house and reflect that door is Daleth, and house Beth; now the word dob is Hebrew for bear, and has the number 6, which refers to the Sun. Then you come to the fence of your property and that is Cheth—number 8, Tarot Trump 7, which is the Chariot: so you begin to look about for your car. Then you come to the street and the first house you see is number 86, and that is Elohim, and it is built of red brick which reminds you of Mars and the Blasted Tower, and so on. As soon as this sort of work, which can be done in a quite lighthearted spirit, becomes habitual, you will find your mind running naturally in this direction, and will be surprised at your progress."