Yesterday I wrote a singularly unpopular post on Love—what is meant by Love in The Book of the Law. Almost nobody wants to hear that the ordinary love, the one limited to our fictional, personal self is selfish—fickle—and, as such, deceptively unlike what it represents itself to be. That splendid, familiar small-l love is one you give to get something—whether it be security, happiness, children, status, and whether or not you admit such to yourself. Most importantly, the love that everyone wants to hear about is borne entirely by the bourgeois self that is produced by late capitalism. No matter how much sentimentalism you pour into your conception of what we ordinarily recognize as love, it starts out as a consumerist construct.
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Granted, we practitioners of Magick do need the ego, the “I,” and its loves are part of that. For it is through the place of the “I,” suitably transformed, that humans alone can bridge the Above and Below. “I” is the caterpillar whose chrysalis is Death ( N ), and which thence flutters upward as an avatar of some God.
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When Jerry typed “I Do Not Exist” as the title of his last essay, which Christopher and I published in our Joy of Dissolution, he expressed no metaphor. He meant it literally, and not because his body was about to dissolve. I do not exist. You do not exist. Only Nothing exists. We know Her as Nuit.