RIP Peter Lamborn Wilson (Hakim Bey)
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It
has been brought to my attention that Peter Lamborn Wilson (Hakim Bey) has passed away. Some of you may know that PLW acknowledged me several times in
his two final books[1 & 2] which were released only a few months ago. PLW and I began
corresponding through an intermediary and friend of his beginning in 2014 after
he reached out to me while I was living in Berlin, Germany, since he did not
own a computer and did things the old fashioned way. Inspired by some of my
writings and translations of Bayānī texts, in 2019 PLW formally requested to
enter the Bayān and was simultaneously made an honorary member of the Fatimiya
Sufi Order.
I
first encountered PLW's writings in 1990 as an undergraduate freshman at the
University of New Mexico. Already having become a disciple to the writings of
Henry Corbin (d. 1978) when I first came across PLW's SCANDAL: Essays in
Islamic Heresy (1988), more than any other work this book sparked my genuine
interest in the IsmāꜤīlīs and especially the Alāmūtī concept of the
Imām-of-ones-being.
In 1995 I briefly met PLW at the annual gathering of the
Muhyiddin Ibn Arabi Society in Berkeley, California, where he gave a
presentation that would later form the first essay of his SHOWER OF STARS: The
Initiatic Dream in Sufism and Taoism (1996). That book resonated with me
because of a few of my own initiatic experiences in the Imaginal World of the
Dreaming. His notion of the Temporary Autonomous Zone (TAZ) and Ontological
Anarchy has also gone a long way in helping me formulate my own political
theory of Theophanocracy.
While there was a lot I agreed with PLW about, there were
also some features to his writing and overall work which I profoundly disagreed
with, esp. his advocacy on behalf of NAMBLA, although I am of the mind that
this latter feature may have possibly been a qalandarī and malāmatī form of
warding off people and preventing himself from becoming a guru and unnecessary
focus of adoration by bringing blame upon himself as an initiatic act:
adoration which has sometimes corrupted even the best and erected turbid veils
due to the cultivation of the base ego.
Nevertheless, for whatever of his faults, lapses,
omissions and commissions, in my 'Book' Peter Lamborn Wilson left a positive
legacy to this world and leaves this life as a 'believer' (mu'min) in
the Light of the Bayān, the Primal Point, His Letters of the Living and Ṣubḥ-i-Azal,
which he acknowledges in his two final books published this year.
Although
I am not a PLWilsonian, in a sense I feel his acknowledgement of myself, the
Bayān and the FSO was a sort of passing of the mantle. I would have liked to
see PLW live longer and write and publish some more, but the Lord of All-Being
and Mistress of All-Life opened a new chapter for him in the Book of Destiny in
the afterlife. Peter was 77 years old,
i.e. the abjad numerical value of Yā Allāh (يا
الله), and he was considered by me a Letter of the NUR.
The Light of the All-High be upon him in every moment,
before every moment and after every moment!
إنّا لله وإنّا إليه راجعون
==
