It all comes back to Al

[haptalaon]

Every few months tumblr will try and cancel the Beast, which is...

I don't think it's good that young people are growing and trying to flourish in an atmosphere where they are constantly on the alert for moral cooties, I think it's very scarring. It's not exactly that I think it doesn't matter: it's good to be socially aware and try to build forward, and to know our own history. But one can be forthright about problems under one guise, and still use it in others - especially for the dead.

In the case of Aleister Crowley, I find it especially irking because so much - so much of modern magic - is his, & it leads to an uncomfy situation where someone will very earnestly be cancelling Crowley with their right hand while using his art with their left. The dead aren't owed respect or reverence, nor is something better for being traditional or old. But beyond a point, you have to know where you came from, & there's no value in tabooing it wholesale either.

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I'm having a very difficult month. I'm trying to stave off the terrors by getting the spirits section of my website together, which like all website work is kinda thankless, but future me loves having it. It's too hot and too horrible to do much else but shelter behind the stone.

As part of that, I've put up a new layout of Liber Astarte - Crowley's lil book on how to do divine reverence, which I come back to constantly. & like a lot of Crowley, it's a book where I've had ideas and then come back and discovered he had them first. (In this case, it was using love songs for divinities.) & of course, its the origin point for so many altar-building practices you'll already know and which are commonplace across the Pagan movement. I'm also making an ebook version to download, so it's easier for me to have to hand.

Thank you to venerable Sacred Texts for keeping this all available.

Comments

My Atlantis

[goatgodschild]

I think that one of the biggest hurdles around Crowley is that, for all his MANY faults, he was a genuinely talented writer and occultist. The unfortunate fact is that often, the two do not always overlap.

Then and now, we are often faced with this problem as occultists. Piles of books are published in the public sector that are easy to read yet provide no useful information -- while in the private sector, results are foremost, but recording them legibly, less so. To borrow from medicine, it feels as though you have no choice between extremely technical medical journals, who expect you to have full medical training and experience in the field to read them...or one of those terrible "have you considered eating less of what you don't eat anyway?" pamphlets you get when a doctor is concerned about your weight. (How can I stop eating butter if I don't eat butter? But I digress).

There's also the issue of PR. Most experimental or research-forward occultists, then as now, tended towards presenting (in both the queer sense and the public speaking sense) simply but dully. Emphasizing that they hold steady jobs, are upstanding members of the community, are connected to families they love. This is all fine and good in the practical sense, but this is not what PR is made from.

Crowley, on the other hand? He may not have had Steiner's big-eyed, delicate good looks, but what he lacked there he made up everywhere else. Summon something called the Bornless One in the Great Pyramid at Giza? Why not. Be flagrantly bisexual? Absolutely. Do piles of drugs, equally for fun, for health reasons (heroin was originally prescribed to him for his asthma, as it was the medical standard pre-inhaler) and for religious purposes? Definitely. His penchant for public bridge-burning, to go big or go home, only increases his reputation down the line. To quote a pop song, "History will hate us, but they'll never forget our names!"

Then there's the relatability factor. A lot of people getting into the occult, especially those who are queer, don't have a good relationship with their families. Having drug use and interest in the wrong kind of partner lead to your parents declaring you part of the Devil's retinue -- that's still a common enough tale.