justdrew wrote:is there a good biography on Lavenda? I'm not finding a birth date even. He was a member of AOCC, must have been rather young at the time. Isn't he likely an insider? or does he have some sort of whistleblower angle to his presentations? I'm going to go ahead and see that presentation Wombat, looks interesting...
no bio as such we're aware of; check this:
http://rigint.blogspot.com/2006/07/simon-says.html
from the comments (also, Levenda showed up for a Q&A @ one of the comments sections.
Can't recall when or which blog post (ask Jeff - he may remember):
& this:
http://www.nypress.com/article-7663-the-doom-that-came-to-chelsea.html
From Jeff's "Weird Tales" link:
Levenda added more detail in this interview a few years ago with the editor of Dagobert’s Revenge:
My involvement was on the translation side. I've been around occult groups in New York since the late Sixties. I was a friend of Herman Slater of the old Warlock Shop in Brooklyn Heights before it moved to Manhattan and became Magickal Childe.
I was around during the famous Witch Wars of the Seventies, when it seemed that everyone was casting spells on everyone else. I was there when Gardnerians and Welsh Trads and Alexandrians and Sicilian Trads sat down around a table in the back of Herman's shop to settle the War and make peace once and for all. Herman had once interviewed neo-Nazis in New York in the 1960s and we had a lot of interests in common. I never joined any of the groups, that wasn't my intention or inclination, but I was a familiar face around the campfire, so to speak.
My fascination has always been on the degree to which religion and occultism influence mainstream politics; Unholy Alliance began as an academic study of this before it turned into a Nazi history.
As for the Necronomicon, it was part of a stash of stolen books. The story is told, I think, in other places and I have been asked this before -- also on the Internet -- so to summarize: in the 1970s a couple of Eastern Orthodox monks pulled off the biggest rare book heist in the history of the United States. It was a continuing crime, the books being taken from libraries and private collections all over the country (and, it was said, Canada and Mexico). They were finally busted, and did federal time, but most of the books were never recovered. The Necronomicon was part of this swag as were a lot of occult books. It was in Greek, handwritten, but the problem was that much of the Greek was unintelligible.
My modest contribution to this was recognizing that some of the Greek was an attempt to phoneticize Babylonian and Sumerian words. I am not one of the people arguing that this Necronomicon is THE Necronomicon, or that Lovecraft was even aware that it existed. I think Lovecraft heard the name through one of his friends in the Golden Dawn, and used it creatively.
If the Simon Necronomicon is a hoax, I think it would have been better done and more closely followed the Cthulhu Mythos. I kind of like the fact that William Burroughs was into it, and wrote Simon and L. K. Barnes a letter praising it as an important spiritual breakthrough.
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America's voting software run on... Micrsoft frikkin Access?
