Here’s a summary of activity for the week ending January 15th, 2017.
A bunch of new subject matter in Forms and Fellows announced this week to check out, most of which I was working on for a while that went into production with the new site but a few completely new. There’s definitely a trade-off with the new site: there’s less craft and artistry to making pages, but that also means pages can be made a bit faster.
Two completely new Aleister Crowley books from the collected works are online: Oracles: The Biography of an Art and Alice: An Adultery. I also added Aleister Crowley’s essay Berashith: An Essay on Ontology. Most of the material contained in these resources was written in the curious period between Aleister Crowley’s first initiation into Golden Dawn, but before the Thelemic period that began with the 1905 reception of Liber AL. Lots of interesting things to check out there, including, to mention only one, Venus, a poem written in a temple of Crowley’s oft-forgotten Enochian-inspired pre-A∴A∴ order Lamp of the Invisible Light.
Here’s a summary of posts on the blog from last week
- “Somewhere along the way from one side to the other, Crowley says, the magician must also confront and temporarily become the ‘Demon of the Abyss’, whose nature is Dispersion. Crowley named this demon Choronzon, a name for Satan from the works of Dr. John Dee; but the characteristics he assigns to the demon owe more to the ‘Dweller on the Threshold’ from Bulwer-Lytton’s Zanoni novels. It is unclear how this confrontation relates to the destruction of the magician’s human self.”—Benjamin Rowe, The Illusion of the Abyss
- Esoteric Disorientation Manual
- Lunar Pisces Temple Expansion by Sun Duel
- “Thine ass shall be taken away violently, and will not be returned to you”—God quoted by Giordano Bruno
- Quest for the White Witch by Tanith Lee
- If thinking doesn’t end with action, it’s useless. Taking action is why we think.—John Braddock, A Spy’s Guide to Thinking
- “For know that I am proud and revengeful and lascivious, and I prate even as thou. For even as I walked among the Sons of God, I heard it said that P. . . . could both will and know, and might learn at length to dare, but that to keep silence he should never learn. O thou that art so ready to speak, so slow to watch, thou art delivered over unto my power for this. And now one word was necessary unto me, and I could not speak it. I behold the beauty of the earth in her desolation, and greater far is mine, who sought to be my naked self. Knowest thou that in my soul is utmost fear? And such is my force and my cunning, that a hundred times have I been ready to leap, and for fear have missed. And a thousand times am I baulked by them of the City of the Pyramids, that set snares for my feet. More knowledge have I than the Most High, but my will is broken, and my fierceness is marred by fear, and I must speak, speak, speak, millions of mad voices in my brain. With a heart of furious fancies, Whereof I am Commander, With a burning spear And a horse of Air To the wilderness I wander.”—Choronzon speaking in ZAX, the 10th Aethyr
- Thee Temple ov Psychick Youth
- The Cross of Christ by The Message
- “I will go to the Café du Dôme and break my fast humbly with Coffee and Sandwich. May it strengthen me in my search for the Quintessence, the Stone of the Wise, the Summum Bonum, True Wisdom and Perfect Happiness!”—Aleister Crowley, John St John
- O coffee! By the mighty Name of Power do I invoke thee, consecrating thee to the Service of the Magic of Light. Let the pulsations of my heart be strong and regular and slow! Let my brain be wakeful and active in its supreme task of self-control! That my desired end may be effected through Thy strength, Adonai, unto Whom be the Glory for ever! Amen without lie, and Amen, and Amen of Amen.—Aleister Crowley, John St John
- Guns & Liberty in GTA4 — Key 23
- Millions of Mad Voices — Ministry of Information
- Byzantium by Exomène
- Discordianism
- The true and noble life of man during the precious conscious interlude is the life of philosophic speculation.—Ralph M Lewis, The Conscious Interlude
- Dictionary of Angels: Including the Fallen Angels by Gustav Davidson — Bkwyrm
- Chaos Magick
- We are here to fix the gods’ mistakes — and in doing so — become gods ourselves.—Sean Bonner and Allen Morgenstern, The New Oklahoma
- 2012: The Return of Quetzalcoatl by Daniel Pinchbeck — Key 23
- I Had Mythology by Doleful Lions
- Key 23
- The strain and tension of world issues disturb our judgment. We cannot if we would turn away from the events and movements that affect the destiny of nations to dwell calmly and securely upon our own inner, private actions.—Cyrus Guernsey Pringle, The Record of a Quaker Conscience
- Greater Feast of Robert Anton Wilson
- Corridors by Somnolent
- Originally published as (or excerpted from) [insert original author, title, publisher, and year]—Lon Milo DuQuette, The Sons of Osiris: A Side Degree
- Greater Feast of David Bowie
- Weird Sun Twitter
- seelenreise by (m)
- Calendar
- Cyclonopedia Studies
- Strange Tides by Khan Kurra
Some top pages at the library
- William Blake and the Imagination in W B Yeats, Ideas of Good and Evil
- Sacramental Theory and Practice — T Polyphilus
- The Book of Babalon — John Whiteside “Jack” Parsons
- Cakes of Light by Aisha Qadisha — Ecclesia Gnostica Catholica
- Liber CDXV – Opus Lutetianum or The Paris Working — Libri — Aleister Crowley
Some top posts on social media
- Thine ass shall be taken away violently, and will not be returned to you
God in G Bruno, The Cabala of Pegasus - Oracles: The Biography of an Art. Unpublished fragments of the work of Aleister Crowley. 1905.
- Alice: An Adultery by Aleister Crowley. 1903. “The book is a statement of plain truth.”
- Greater Feast of Robert Anton Wilson, died January 11, 2007 at Capitola, California
- Oracles: The Biography of an Art. Unpublished fragments of the work of Aleister Crowley. 1905.
Some top posts on the BBS
- “RIP William Peter Blatty, who wrote the great horror novel of our time. So long, Old Bill.”
- Aleister Crowley is a professional wrestler
- “Ladies and gentlemen this is your captain speaking. Welcome aboard the most metal flight of your lives. Let’s do some sky crimes.”
- “Explorers find disease-cursed City of the Monkey God and nearly lose their faces to flesh-eating parasite”
- “[Damien Omen] is facing jail on Friday the 13th after … punching two cyclists”
Be sure to check out the actual Hermetic Library, and all the ways you can participate at the library and support the work.