Talk:Choronzon
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[edit] Greenhorn Wikiter, Fave Beastie, Recent Logorrhea
There was, as I saw it, a rare, welcome completeness to this page: contemporary occulture views balancing the traditional Thelemic notions. My heart double-backflipped to see the Choronzon project was also discussed. I, Psychaotic, am the (humbly apologetic) newbie... who, suffering my usual TMI/logorrhea syndrome - especially as regarding the subject of this page, added the most recent, utterly-overlong trivia storm last week. (7 October '05...or aroundabouts.)
I did read through the ever-increasing load of FAQs, rules, examples, etceterata. Perhaps some of the other Wikiters understand my vexation, as a newbie faced with lots and lots to share with a project with a level of freedom rare on today's internet- a freedom counterbalanced (in most cases, understandably so) by a lot--I mean, a WHOLE LOT--of rules, guidelines and suggestions, in form of both written and unwritten behaviour standards. When I joined weeks ago, writing a Choronzon page was one of many intentions; soon, I found I'd been beaten to it. Overall, the contents pleased me; I added not to correct, but to update them. (And spell Peter Carroll's name right...never have I seen him referred to as "Pete".) Upon returning a few days later, I feared I'd surely managed to make enough grievous errors in Wikipedian standards to assure the whole thing would end up shunted to the Wiki-deathbucket. At first, this seemed the case; but I then noticed some of my addendata remained, including the link to the Book of Earthquakes [1].
Re: the suggestion that I should make another page to cover the various archetypal entities Choronzon has come to represent in non-Thelemic occulture: a) Article did not seem to be limited solely to Enochian interpretation, so I just added to it in kind, b) are you suggesting a "disambiguation page" or link be created? (Reading about those tied my brain in knots...They're so...ambiguous!)
I've no problem with the deletion of my newbie-style overload. (I was merely going by the general detail level of some other articles I'd read here.)
Thanks/apologies --Psychaotic 07:31, 11 October 2005 (UTC)
[edit] Far too much original research
The primary source from which the term derives, i.e. Crowley, has a very different view from that which is given forth in this article. The author seems concerned to replace Crowley's 'destruction of the ego' doctrine with his own. The point is not whether one is correct and the other wrong, the point is that Crowley is quite plain in his statements, whereas the author has replaced them with his own original research. Hence, the removal of the material should stand.Cavalorn 13:51, 27 Apr 2005 (UTC)
The topic of the article is not limited to Crowley's work. 'Choronzon' has been an element of many writings and operations before and since, and this author believes that it's a mistake to assume that Crowley = 'doctrine,' while (due to Crowley's popular notoriety) other sources are seen as less legitimate.
That said, I'd agree that the article could be more encyclopedaic. If Cavalorn has thoughts, perhaps we can find a middle position. Auto movil 14:36, 27 Apr 2005 (UTC)
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- I'm not saying that Crowley is definitive. However, he is a primary source, even if every single magician since has had their own take on the subject. What we currently have is a single author stating that such-and-such is how it is - e.g. 'the ego is not truly destroyed' - which, since it's an entirely personal point of view, counts as original research rather than the encyclopedic documentation that should be our concern.
- I'd say the safest bet is to reduce the article's content to material that can be cited from sources and then cite those sources. There are various different takes on the subject - that exhibited by Pete Carroll, say, is quite different to Crowley's, and can be sourced to such texts as Liber Null and the 'Mass of Chaos'.Cavalorn 15:17, 27 Apr 2005 (UTC)
Well, the fact of it is that the 'ego' isn't destroyed. Consciousness just shifts to where the ego is one element of many. Would you like to rewrite the article, including that as a valid viewpoint? There's a lot of material to draw from in the paragraphs I put there earlier. Auto movil 15:42, 27 Apr 2005 (UTC)
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- Whether that is indeed 'the fact of it' could be debated further! If you want to get technical, the Ego is reduced to a white ash borne as it were in a sheet that hath four corners, and so on, and later regenerated as a sheath of the new-risen Star. At least, according to the original material, this is what happens. Whether this is, in any sense, actually the case is really not my concern; the whole thing is a bit too metaphysical for any one person to state anything definitively about it. I hold that we ought to keep to citable sources and mention variant views as appropriate. That way, we avoid saying what the weather is like in fairyland (or any other categorical statement about the invisible) but we can at least clearly document what is believed about the subject, by referring back to source texts. I'd be happy to rewrite the article and mention various takes on the topic, but I'll keep from describing variant viewpoints as valid, just as I'll keep from stating that the original viewpoint is valid. We're here to catalogue and document, not validate.Cavalorn 16:03, 27 Apr 2005 (UTC)
Yeah, but that's all metaphor from books. You can't 'destroy' the ego. What happens is that it becomes a part of one's personality that doesn't hog the spotlight all the time, and that can be nudged aside by the 'will.'
I mean, my position at the moment is that I feel I'm arguing that water is wet, while considering where one might find sources for such a claim. We're capable of locking horns here, but I would have to say that this 'alternate; viewpoint is borne out by what I'd call the reputable sources. I call the shade of Ben Rowe to order. Crowley never 'crossed the Abyss,' y'know. Auto movil 16:24, 27 Apr 2005 (UTC)
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- Well, the destruction of the ego is found in plenty of other approaches (e.g. Buddhist) but that's by the by. The point isn't to establish what 'really' goes on, it's to document how the term is used. The fact is that in the source material, AC refers to the destruction of the ego. For the purposes of a Wiki article, it's completely irrelevant whether he was right or wrong, whether he crossed the Abyss or not, or whether there even is an Abyss.Cavalorn 16:59, 27 Apr 2005 (UTC)
I suspect the Buddhists would concur that the ego spins on harmlessly after it's taken off the controls. In any case, it isn't irrelevant whether AC was right or wrong: That would be the case if 'Choronzon' were a fictional character of his, but it's in fact a very real phenomenon that exists outside of his texts. He even borrowed its name.
I'm comfortable with a he said/she said format, allowing for alternate views on the subject. I think the important insight in the article is that 'Choronzon' is actually the petty workings and bargainings of one's own conscious mind, made strange by experiencing it for the first time at a distance. Auto movil 18:46, 27 Apr 2005 (UTC)
- The moment we assert that any entity, be it Choronzon, Jesus or the Easter Bunny, is 'very real', we've asserted POV. As for important insights, Wikipedia isn't the place for them - they're original research.Cavalorn 19:05, 27 Apr 2005 (UTC)
If you're determined to 'be right' rather than find a middle ground, then go ahead and rewrite the article however you like. Auto movil 19:14, 27 Apr 2005 (UTC)
- It's not about being right, it's about NPOV. We simply can't proceed from a baseline assertion that a given entity is real or that a given person's insights define the subject. A he said/she said format is fine by me, too: all we need to do is to find sources other than AC that can be cited.Cavalorn 19:19, 27 Apr 2005 (UTC)
I'd recommend Ben Rowe's articles, but also, any topic involving AC tends to be hugely contentious (I stopped watchlisting most of the pages for that reason).
To address the Easter Bunny thing, Crowley's own (I think useful) definition of 'gods' was 'aggregates of experience'-- which he qualified elsewhere saying that it's immaterial whether they 'exist' in a formal sense, or not. Choronzon clearly isn't an entity like you and I, or the mailman or whomever, but it certainly exists as an anthropomorhized experience that people have. Does that make sense? Auto movil 19:26, 27 Apr 2005 (UTC)
- I see what you're getting at, but I do disagree. I'd query the consistent identity of the experience from person to person. Choronzon is far too characterised to be an anthropomorphised experience. Furthermore, other anthropomorphised experiences (for example, Cupid firing an arrow through your heart) aren't held to be 'very real'. Cavalorn 19:48, 27 Apr 2005 (UTC)
I'd have to say that it's consistent enough from person to person to make a single name useful. It tends to behave very similarly from person to person. I'm not sure if you're saying that Choronzon has a 'real' existence as its own being, or whether it's less real than I'm maintaining. The new article is good, although I might add a sentence or two at the end to reflect the sort of contemporary Magister Templi view of things. Auto movil 19:55, 27 Apr 2005 (UTC)
- What I'm saying is that I agree with Crowley that it is more convenient to act as if such entities have their own being, whether or not one believes in them. This is certainly the case from a documentary point of view. One can talk about Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny, Harry Potter or Yog-Sohoth without worrying about their relative reality. By all means add additional material - I think the source concept has been adequately covered. By the way, are you Ben Rowe? :) Cavalorn 20:02, 27 Apr 2005 (UTC)
No, Ben died a couple years ago. He worked totally alone except for Usenet, and I never met him. (I got my original grounding from an A.A. guy in the NY area.) Auto movil 20:07, 27 Apr 2005 (UTC)
By the way, thanks for your work on the article. It isn't how I might have wanted it before, but looking at it fresh, it does look really good. Auto movil 21:30, 27 Apr 2005 (UTC)
[edit] Isn't this POV?
Establishing an operational definition of 'reality' for the body of the article is, in my opinion, POV. rmbh 18:08, Nov 21, 2004 (UTC)
- The following is duplicated from my talk page: rmbh 00:33, Nov 22, 2004 (UTC)
The article says that the character, Choronzon, is real 'in a sense.' It's difficult to explain well without a lot of lengthy exposition, but it's also inadequate to say that this character is wholly unreal. It's not quite like Santa Claus or the Easter Bunny.
It has a similar sort of reality to concepts such as the 'personality,' the 'superego,' etc. It's a reflection of internal events and processes. But also, because of the techiques people use in doing these workings, it's experienced as a thing outside of, and apart from, the self. It appears through trained visualization as a separate physical entity with its own will and agenda.
The line dividing 'real' and 'unreal' gets rather tenuous in that kind of circumstance, and it's not fair to say either that 'Choronzon' is an unreal thing whose importance you can dismiss as if it were a character in a dream, or that it's an actual being. It's really somewhere between the two.
Is that what you were asking? Auto movil 21:26, 21 Nov 2004 (UTC)
I think the accepted meanings of the terms 'fiction' and 'non-fiction' are sufficiently concrete to be compared with 'unreal' and 'real', respectively. Concepts are not real, in any material way. So, non-fiction that orients on concepts, and that also fails to disclose its immaterial/creative basis, is POV. For example, gravitation is what pulls the apple from the tree to the ground. Gravitation is also a model, which is based through observation of the phenomena, and so has both material bases, and a potential for material falsibility. 'Personality' and 'superego' refer to psychological models, and like all scientific models, they are an attempt to describe reality. But they are not reality. For example,'gravitation' may refer to the physical phenomenon, which is real, or an abstraction of the phenomenon, like F= Gm1m2/r^2, which stops being real past the phenomena of science, or ASCII or unicode. A character in a book is never real. A historic figure is. So when Auto says "it's not fair to say either that 'Choronzon' is an unreal thing whose importance you can dismiss as if it were a character in a dream" I disagree: a character in a real dream is substantially more real than Choronzon, who is a fictional entity functioning as a component of a (somewhat obscure) model of reality. This obscure model should be presented as such, I think. rmbh 00:33, Nov 22, 2004 (UTC)
You're beginning with a sensible definition of 'real' that denotes things like bricks, then granting special cases to abstract concepts you're familiar with. I can't follow your argument.
'Choronzon' is not a real thing like a doorknob is real. It's a descriptive abstraction.
What makes it a difficult case is that there's a technique of visualization -- what you might call a "not-real dream" without having done it (it's quite more vivid than REM) -- in which a thing might appear to you that seems to be a specific hostile, separate entity. Strangely enough, many, many people experience the same thing spontaneously. So a sensible thing to do is to put a name to it, and for at least 1500 years, people have. One of those names is Samael, while another more recent one is Choronzon.
Psychological terms simply don't do it justice. However, it's a psychological manifestation. As an abstract construct of a psychological reality, it's quite 'real.' The consequences are real, because one is battling with oneself in a way that can cause real trauma.
'Real' appears in quotes in the article, with the qualifier, 'in a sense.' If there's something ambiguous about that, I can't see it. Auto movil 02:41, 22 Nov 2004 (UTC)
You're focusing on the word that initially set me off, 'real', which is arguably appropriate. Perhaps I shoud chill-ax. But this is about NPOV, and I think the whole article lacks the 'N'. I think comparing your explanation of Choronzon (which is closer to the context of dimethyltryptamine-mode hallucination [alian abduction, near death experiences], with the actual article, illustrates that the article reads closer to a Dungeons and Dragons card than a bonified model. And your "not-real dream" dig is just that - I was differentiating between dreams as a phenomena ('real' dreaming, which could be broadened to include daydreaming and hallucinations induced by an oxygen-deprived pineal gland) with dreams as a concept (daring to dream, the psychology of dreams). I agree that I'm pro-material, but I'm also pro-abstraction, or I wouldn't be into Wickipedia. There's Wickipedia policy to suggest that NPOV means that pseudoscience should be demarked thusly, and this reads like it was written by a Choronzon 'enthusiast'. Anyways, I should be working on a stub right now instead of arguing about why I think this article's hackish. I can't support its deletion, and I'm not competent to fix it...rmbh 03:51, Nov 22, 2004 (UTC)
Well, you're arguing against a whole component of human experience by comparing it to drug trips and D&D. Included in the argument would have to be Hinduism, Buddhism, and Christianity, et al. It's quite a wide swath, and I think also ultimately a POV issue.
I understand your argument. We're essentially talking about a black-magic sort of demon, and there are a lot of superstitious wackos out there who believe weird things. The D&D and 'alien abduction' cognates aren't hard to reach for.
I'm coming from a rationalist background, though. It's possible to approach consciousness not through a biochemical or sociobiological model, but through an empirical one. While 'dimethyltryptamine-mode' can be seen as explanatory via some standpoints, in another sense it's merely a causal factor -- a descriptor. If one focuses on effects, it's necessary to have a very different set of categories and tools.
Hence religion, etc. But the 'Choronzon' character comes from a different tradition. There's a dovetailing of science and the so-called mystical in the Western hermetic tradition, comprising the alchemists and others. You end up with guys like Isaac Newton (who spent maybe 10% of his time on physics and mathematics, and the other 90% on alchemy and theophilic topics), and guys like Jack Parsons of the Jet Propulsion Lab (who should have a Wiki article if he doesn't already). It's a very longstanding, very real route of human inquiry.
I'm sorry you think the article is hackish. But 'pseudoscience' implies that there should properly be lab experiments, peer review, et al., when the very nature of a subjective experience is that it can be described and analyzed (as in psychology), but not neutrally observed.
Apples, oranges. But it's possible to be good at both, and to do both intelligently. And that, in a roundabout way, is how one gets to hypothetical entities like 'Choronzon.' It's a tool for a different job than you do, but one with uses of its own. Auto movil 05:42, 22 Nov 2004 (UTC)
[edit] References
This article desperately needs references. Also, there appears to be a lot of original research that will have to be removed if citations cannot be provided. -999 13:15, 30 May 2006 (UTC)
The article states that: "Peter Carroll's 'Mass of Chaos' includes such a reference to Choronzon". This is in fact untrue. The Mass of Chaos is described in Carroll's Psychonaut, but there is no mention of Choronzon in the description of the mass. Psychonaut does however contain a separate chapter devoted to Choronzon. Source: Peter J. Carroll, "Liber Null and Psychonaut", pp130-2, first combined single-volume edition 1987, pub. Samuel Weiser, Inc. ISBN 0-87728-639-6.
[edit] Reference added
The Peter Carroll mistake has just been fixed; I noticed that a while back and meant to fix it for some time.
As for the rest, a lot of this is not going to be found in published sources due to its nature. I will be able to cite some of the material I wrote to Joel Biroco's publication KAOS, but I need to get the issue number for the one he did on Choronzon. A lot of this comes from Choronzon.org and its vault of articles. Original research goes on every day in occultism, and I hold it cannot be held to the same standards as science, being that occultism and magick have a subjectivist bent and so eveeryone who uses any kind of magick is going to be getting different results, ideas, and inspirations from it. I humbly suggest that particular Wikipedic canon be somewhat loosened for such topics, or else you'd not be able to include anything new. These days, people frequently write their thoughts for the world, especially about obscure topics like occulture, into website articles, without bothering to publish in magazines and books. Has not anyone ever considered this? Psychaotic 17:55, 30 September 2006 (UTC)
