Question about Thelema and Mr. Crowley (not the song)

[American Dream]

For whatever it worth, I just bumped up this article, too:

The OTO & The CIA

[OP ED]

He did sacrifice cats however, both as a child (according to his own admonition) and as an adult (I have a credible reference somewhere for that)...

he mentioned killing a cat in confessions, as a child, i'm not sure it was what you'd call sacrafice, but i'm not interested in arguing it either. personally i've eaten cats at korean resturaunts before, so i do not find it particularly shocking, rather sort of in line with his more obvious three or four personality disorders.

there was a student of his of sorts who mentions the killing of a cat at the Abbey when he was older. She also suggested he used his magickal powers to subdue the cat into a hypnotic trance. it is entirely possible, but he never mentioned this incident himself. she apparently tried to shoot him later as well. he never mentioned that either.

he also sacraficed several other animals, including goats and a cow, i think, while in India on climbing expeditions. No one seems to make a big fuss out of the fact that the people whose temple he used still do this on a regular basis.
....

the woman who gave the account of the cat sacrafice at the abbey, btw, is Betty May-Loveday, her husband, Freddie Charles, was one of Crow's more devoted students. He died shortly after the two of them moved into the abbey. According to the doctors it was from drinking local spring water, which he had been warned against [one of the few things Crow and May's accounts agree upon] for this reason. Sick then dead.

the sunday express ran the headline

NEW SINISTER REVELATIONS OF ALEISTER CROWLEY.
VARSITY LAD'S DEATH.
Enticed to "Abbey".
Dreadful Ordeal of a Young Wife.
Crowley's plans.

[lightningBugout]

No you are correct - the childhood cat slaying can scarcely be called a "sacrifice." Susan Roberts writes it as a lab experiment which is probably closer to the truth.

[cptmarginal]

the sunday express ran the headline

NEW SINISTER REVELATIONS OF ALEISTER CROWLEY.
VARSITY LAD'S DEATH.
Enticed to "Abbey".
Dreadful Ordeal of a Young Wife.
Crowley's plans.

Here's something:

Top Shelf is proud to present the all-new installment in the breathtaking series by Alan Moore and Kevin O'Neill! In The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen (Vol III): Century #1 ("1910"), our familiar cast of Victorian literary characters enters the brave new world of the 20th century!

CHAPTER ONE is set against a backdrop of London, 1910, twelve years after the failed Martian invasion and nine years since England put a man upon the moon. In the bowels of the British Museum, Carnacki the ghost-finder is plagued by visions of a shadowy occult order who are attempting to create something called a Moonchild, while on London's dockside the most notorious serial murderer of the previous century has returned to carry on his grisly trade. Working for Mycroft Holmes' British Intelligence alongside a rejuvenated Allan Quatermain, the reformed thief Anthony Raffles and the eternal warrior Orlando, Miss Murray is drawn into a brutal opera acted out upon the waterfront by players that include the furiously angry Pirate Jenny and the charismatic butcher known as Mac the Knife. This one is not to be missed!

This book is the first of three deluxe, 80-page, full-color, perfect-bound graphic novellas, written by Alan Moore and illustrated by Kevin O'Neill -- with lettering by Todd Klein, and colors by Ben Dimagmaliw. Each self-contained narrative takes place in three distinct eras, building to an apocalyptic conclusion occurring in our own twenty-first century. -- 6 5/8" x 10 1/8"

SHIPPING MAY 13TH, 2009!

There's an advance scan of the book out, just leaked today.

[OP ED]

of course of course. Alan Moore is the servant of my patron Nahushtan, so this is to be expected from him.

could also be a keyword hijacking to distract you from the realization that Moonchild cannot be considered Crowley's best work.

[its dry as fuck for starters, and tends towards the preachy, also Crowley not only doesn't understand women--a common enough malady--he cannot even fictionalize them very well]

[yathrib]

That was what Robert Anton Wilson claimed in Cosmic Trigger I think... That the sacrifice of "A male child of high intelligence and perfect innocence" referred to sperm. It sort of made sense, except that RAW was such a huge Crowley apologist that his objectivity is suspect in that area. I'm not sure why Crowley wanted to make jacking off sound like felony murder, but it sounds like him.

I believe the "human sacrifice" claims come from misquoting Crowley about ritual masturbation or something along those lines.

[cptmarginal]

of course of course. Alan Moore is the servant of my patron Nahushtan, so this is to be expected from him.

could also be a keyword hijacking to distract you from the realization that Moonchild cannot be considered Crowley's best work.

[its dry as fuck for starters, and tends towards the preachy, also Crowley not only doesn't understand women--a common enough malady--he cannot even fictionalize them very well]

I was just reading part of Moonchild the other day and thought the same thing.

Alan Moore's Moon and Serpent Bumper Book of Magic is going to blow minds:

We seem to be turning up something new with every new enchanter we look at. It's a very fun book to do. It will include a complete tarot deck that I shall be working on with Jose Villarrubia. The basic thinking behind the tarot deck is that, if it's not as good as the Aleister Crowley soft deck, then it's not really worth bothering with. That's the one to beat or to equal. There's not much point in doing one not as good as that. That's the level we're setting the bar at. We're hoping to have a fold-out kabbalah board game. The winner is basically the first one that reaches enlightenment, as long as they don't make a big thing of it. Also, Melinda [Gebbie, Moore's partner] will also be contributing a pop-up temple for today's modern magus on the move, a little portable shrine.

We want this thing to have a lot of really fun inserts, fun features. Something that would delight a child. We want to make this not only a perfectly lucid and accurate book about magic, but we really want to make it a book about magic that would not disappoint an 8-year-old child if they came across it. Back when I was a child and I first heard about magic, then I kind of knew instinctively what a book of magic would be. It would be unimaginably wonderful. It would have fantastic things in it. It would be much better than the children's comics annuals I got at Christmas, and they were pretty wonderful. That is very much what we've tried to achieve. We want this to be magic that will be accessible to intelligent, modern adults. And we also want it to be magic that 8-year-old children will recognize as magic, as being as beautiful and glorious and entertaining as they had always hoped that magic would turn out to would be.

Sounds pretty dark and Satanic

[OP ED]

That was what Robert Anton Wilson claimed in Cosmic Trigger I think... That the sacrifice of "A male child of high intelligence and perfect innocence" referred to sperm. It sort of made sense, except that RAW was such a huge Crowley apologist that his objectivity is suspect in that area. I'm not sure why Crowley wanted to make jacking off sound like felony murder, but it sounds like him.

I believe the "human sacrifice" claims come from misquoting Crowley about ritual masturbation or something along those lines.

something like that.

using symbolic violence as double entendrees for sex rituals wasn't invented by aleister crowley. grails and lances, etc.

Actually publishing the clinical details of anything past the 7th degree O.T.O. would've literally been illegal where and when Crowley lived. not to mention trying to find a publisher. The practices, esp latter degreed homosex tantra wouldn't be illegal to talk about nowadays. [course doing most of them, actually IS illegal when/where i am currently typing this from, so lets not get a big head about how advanced our laws have become, they just don't enforce those laws anymore]

there are actually other reasons for using overt violence as your symbolic language for sex, wrt the nature of the Thelemic current itself and what the particular process of initiation is intended to do. its really sort of freudianingly obvious so i don't feel digressing into it right now.

[Stephen Morgan]

Crowley existed with a style and in a milieu where calling him evil seems redundant.

Evil is what the left-hand path is all about. The breaking of taboos, the defamation of human dignity, the demolition of cultural mores.

On the heroin, he though he could stop but couldn't. The triumph of the Will thelema dreamt of was well beyond him. Bayer used to market heroin and cocaine.

His publicity hunting implies he wasn't part of any group that would be inclined to sacrifice children. He would've been rejected by any intelligence group or other band of child killers. In other words he was too low ranking to sacrifice children, he was just a potentially troublesome tool for more powerful forces.

[Crow]

Crowley was a bit of a performance artist as well as a magician. His work is very difficult to understand if you don't get the joke.

[yathrib]

I look forward to reading it, assuming that the real Alan Moore is writing it and not the preachy, pedantic bore who wrote Promethea,

[
Alan Moore's Moon and Serpent Bumper Book of Magic is going to blow minds:

We seem to be turning up something new with every new enchanter we look at. It's a very fun book to do. It will include a complete tarot deck that I shall be working on with Jose Villarrubia. The basic thinking behind the tarot deck is that, if it's not as good as the Aleister Crowley soft deck, then it's not really worth bothering with. That's the one to beat or to equal. There's not much point in doing one not as good as that. That's the level we're setting the bar at. We're hoping to have a fold-out kabbalah board game. The winner is basically the first one that reaches enlightenment, as long as they don't make a big thing of it. Also, Melinda [Gebbie, Moore's partner] will also be contributing a pop-up temple for today's modern magus on the move, a little portable shrine.

We want this thing to have a lot of really fun inserts, fun features. Something that would delight a child. We want to make this not only a perfectly lucid and accurate book about magic, but we really want to make it a book about magic that would not disappoint an 8-year-old child if they came across it. Back when I was a child and I first heard about magic, then I kind of knew instinctively what a book of magic would be. It would be unimaginably wonderful. It would have fantastic things in it. It would be much better than the children's comics annuals I got at Christmas, and they were pretty wonderful. That is very much what we've tried to achieve. We want this to be magic that will be accessible to intelligent, modern adults. And we also want it to be magic that 8-year-old children will recognize as magic, as being as beautiful and glorious and entertaining as they had always hoped that magic would turn out to would be.

Sounds pretty dark and Satanic

[Truth4Youth]

something like that.

using symbolic violence as double entendrees for sex rituals wasn't invented by aleister crowley. grails and lances, etc.

Actually publishing the clinical details of anything past the 7th degree O.T.O. would've literally been illegal where and when Crowley lived.

The irony of course being that you could write about child sacrifice BUT NOT sex rituals.

[OP ED]

something like that.

using symbolic violence as double entendrees for sex rituals wasn't invented by aleister crowley. grails and lances, etc.

Actually publishing the clinical details of anything past the 7th degree O.T.O. would've literally been illegal where and when Crowley lived.

The irony of course being that you could write about child sacrifice BUT NOT sex rituals.

no, the irony is that the books containing child sacrafice are still published, but de-coding them would probably still be worse for the Thelemites than having the moral majority think they eat babies. As i mentioned previously, actually performing the rituals is still illegal under "sodomy" laws and etc, in 29 states. although in twelve of those states i can fuck a horse and videotape it, if i want to.
One of the more obvious signs that the Caliphate has fallen to the abyss, IMO, is that they've abandoned even any pretense of maintaining the legal rights of their students, officially disbanding 11* as it was the one most easily associated with homosexuality, which is still the biggest sin in the post-american world.

Aleister Crowley will make your kids gay. Plus he was like a total heroin addict.
[i mean he was kind of good at it even, how many heroin addicts make it to seventy something to die of myocardial degeneration and bronchitis?]

...

this is the part where i ignore Morgan again and his uninformed prattling on about "the left-hand path" or whatever.
...

Love is the Law.

[jimbo21]

I always find it interesting on these Crowley threads, they revolve around what he was or was not, did or did not, etc. Rather than many other artists, who are reflected on by their body of work, not so much the artist. I wonder how many people who debate have actually read but more importantly understood any of his work.

Off topic side note, interesting I just came across this today:



On this DOORS 13 album back cover, is supposedly a bust of Crowley under Jim.

[Stephen Morgan]

Crowley was a bit of a performance artist as well as a magician. His work is very difficult to understand if you don't get the joke.

When he abandoned his fellow mountaineers under an avalanche then raced back to civilisation to clear out the expedition's bank accounts, was that performance art of humourism?

this is the part where i ignore Morgan again and his uninformed prattling on about "the left-hand path" or whatever.

I notice Crowleyites don't like anyone to have an independent knowledge of mysticism.

The right hand path is restraint, the left hand path is the breach.