Aleister Crowley -

[panic in paradise]

Aleister Crowley - The Beast - The Most Wicked Man Alive(or dead) - The Merry Prankster?

what was he in your opinion?
insane? a con? The Beast? an Angel? a genius who jazzed religion, that is still many generations a head of his time?


i think you get the idea.

i tend to feel he was a genius who jazzed religion, that is still many generations a head of his time...personally, i cant look to him for spiritual teachings, as what he did himself was not that, he did not go to a single source for info. he seemed to of gone out, and started asking some big questions, and knocked down some big doors, and did so with big "success". of course studying his work would be like being given cliff-notes to almost every faith, spiritual belief, or religious practice etc. to not exorcise your own Will, and to not seek Thou own Truth, seems contradictory to his own principals, though.


~ Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law - Love is the law, love under will ~

love is the moral truth of conduct for which our thoughts are to be guided - if done so our most common senses will then be dictated by the same
- my take on that, for now...all of his poetry i feel is amazing, also.



please do discuss, and please do understand that this takes a serious sense of humor

 

[Psychodelirium]

Crowley was definitely way ahead of his time. The whole "let's approach mystical experiences scientifically" shtick is all over the place now, but at the time it was pretty revolutionary, imo. There's even an essay, I think it is "the initiated interpretation of magick" or something like that, where he explicitly says that goetic demons are literally parts of the human brain, that the whole point of ritual magic is the control of the mind, and so on. So I think Crowley was one of the first people to look at all this stuff rationally and say, "yes it works, but it's not what it appears to be."

 

[B9]

Crowley often seems to credited with authorship of "do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law" but I have a sneaking feeling he just rewrote part of an earlier work by an unnamed author ? Thoughts ? Comments, recipes for fish dishes ?

 

[Psychodelirium]

Crowley often seems to credited with authorship of "do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law" but I have a sneaking feeling he just rewrote part of an earlier work by an unnamed author ? Thoughts ? Comments, recipes for fish dishes ?

It's from Rabelais' Gargantua and Pantagruel:

All their life was spent not in laws, statutes, or rules, but according to their own free will and pleasure. They rose out of their beds when they thought good; they did eat, drink, labour, sleep, when they had a mind to it and were disposed for it. None did awake them, none did offer to constrain them to eat, drink, nor to do any other thing; for so had Gargantua established it. In all their rule and strictest tie of their order there was but this one clause to be observed,

Do What Thou Wilt;

because men that are free, well-born, well-bred, and conversant in honest companies, have naturally an instinct and spur that prompteth them unto virtuous actions, and withdraws them from vice, which is called honour. Those same men, when by base subjection and constraint they are brought under and kept down, turn aside from that noble disposition by which they formerly were inclined to virtue, to shake off and break that bond of servitude wherein they are so tyrannously enslaved; for it is agreeable with the nature of man to long after things forbidden and to desire what is denied us.

 

[panic in paradise]

^ Carl Jung had the same philosophy as Crowley about "Magick", he actually was supportive of Tarot and Divination practice for those very same reasons.

 

[axl blaze]

I'm a big fan, of course on not quite everything he preached. at the very least, he was a genius; and at the very most he was a bit deranged

still, very interesting philosophically and magickly

 

[Pindar]

"Great Men have Great Faults", we forget that he was a user and supporter of recreational drug usage: he used opium, cocaine, hashish, cannabis, alcohol, ether, mescaline (from a species of peyote; its said that he introduced Huxley of "Brave New World" to this), morphine, and heroin.

"To worship me take wine and strange drugs whereof I will tell my prophet, & be drunk thereof! They shall not harm ye at all. It is a lie, this folly against self. The exposure of innocence is a lie. Be strong, o man! lust, enjoy all things of sense and rapture: fear not that any God shall deny thee for this." - The Book of the Law