Any fans of Crowley's works here?

I have read "Book 4", "Portable Darkness - An Aleister Crowley Reader", and some of "Confessions". Aleister Crowley has always fascinated me for some reason. Anyone else into "The Great Beast" and his books,etc?

 

I use Crowley's tarot.

 

I also have Crowley's tarot.I really enjoyed Martin Booth's biography of Crowley "A Magick Life".I think it might have been easier to get away with that kind of crazy behaviour back in Crowley's time,which was perhaps more accepting of eccentrics in a certain kind of way.

 

Awesome! The THOTH deck! Majorly creepy and cool!:2thumbsup:

 

Crowley was awesome in his strange way! Very uninhibited and in the Victorian/Edwardian Era....that was mindblowing!

 

Yes.I think what I was trying to say is that it was easier to be secretive in that era...Very useful if you are the head of an occult magickal society! Today you would probably be bugged by Prism et al...

 

It's hard not to respect the guy if you are into magick and study more than one paradigm. He is sort of the rockstar of the occult world. I have the book of lies and he is a decent enough author but his writing style is not my favorite, if you can read his stuff and comprehend it then you have done your homework for sure. He rubbed elbows with a lot of other well known magicians, Dion Fortune, Mathers, Gardner...what a time to be a magician! Can you imagine what a conversation between Fortune and Crowley must have sounded like?

 

According to what I have read she was kind of a stick in the mud compared to Uncle Al! Mathers was basically insane! (He would play chess with spirits and called himself the reincarnation of King James!)

 

Nah she was more dynamic than that. I'm a bigger fan of AC but DF moved real power and rocked her endocrine system fighting Nazi occultists in the astral realm and recruited the best army to help her that she could put together. DF I think is misunderstood. Maybe Mathers was off his rocker but so many people have that opinion of Crowley also. Some people reduce AC to an old kook who died from an std but he was so much more and so was Dion.

 

A very one sided put down Id have thought given most of his remarks about most of his contemporaries.
AC was a genius no doubt, but perhaps a flawed genius.

 

Fighting Nazi occultists in the astral realm....damn that sounds cool!:afro:

 

It's historical knowledge that there were white witch covens doing this kind of thing during the 2nd world war.

 

That may be true I dunno but he did consult with her to a small extent on the Thoth Tarot as I understand it. She was a bit of a feminist and an accomplished magician and didn't take any shit. I don't think she would have allow him to put her down to her face but who knows for sure? It wouldn't be the same Crowley if he wasn't controversial.

 

I think I read that somewhere.

 

Just wanted to add that I was reading a book review for DF today and it mentioned that she had an aversion to some of the work Crowley performed. So maybe I am romanticizing this meeting of magicians too much. If the info is accurate it's kind of disappointing and I like my mental image better lol. Oh well.

 

Uncle Al was interested in SEX MAGICK and she most probably wasn't interested in sex period. I can imagine they hit it off about as well as oil and water!

 

She had heavy Christian overtones in her magick and AC wanted move past that kind of thinking. I think they may have agreed to disagree but yea not exactly kindred spirits it seems. It's funny you mention the sex magick, I was watching this ongoing documentary series the other night called "how sex changed the world" the last episode had a good portion of it dedicated to Crowley. They called him the first hippie and said that he more or less started the sexual revolution and was having orgies and free love gatherings way before the free love movement. I thought it was interesting.

 

I would agree that his thinking on free love puts him far ahead of his time.