[kj] Crowley/Coleman
Stephen Robinson
heiferboy at robinsonworld.freeserve.co.uk
Mon Jul 12 17:34:45 EDT 2004
Do it!
It's only short too, another good thing to recomend it as a regious text!
----- Original Message -----
From: MARK SAXTON
To: A list about all things Killing Joke (the band!)
Sent: Monday, July 12, 2004 11:16 AM
Subject: RE: [kj] Crowley/Coleman
I must read Book Of The Law, been meaning to for years,this is the prod.
Rob <rob at westwoodassociates.co.uk> wrote:
an awesome life.........
-----Original Message-----
From: gathering-bounces at misera.net
[mailto:gathering-bounces at misera.net]On Behalf Of nicholas fitzpatrick
Sent: 12 July 2004 10:30
To: gathering at misera.net
Subject: [kj] Crowley/Coleman
Article about Crowley from Saturday's Guardian. Fleeting reference to
Killing Joke near bottom.
Cheers
n
The Guardian
HEADLINE: Saturday Review: Arts: Beyond belief: From yoga to punk, notorious
occultist Aleister Crowley has had a profound influence on modern culture
BY: Tim Cummings
BODY:
'There is no law beyond do what thou wilt; every man and woman is a star;
the word of sin is restriction." For some, these three short epigrams
heralded the end of Christianity and the dawn of a new age. They certainly
provided successive generations of beat s, hipsters, hippies, punks and
ravers, whether they knew it or not, with a manifesto of sorts. The words
come from The Book of the Law , an obscure prose poem written 100 years ago
by Aleister Crowley, often described as the key to the notorious Magus's
vast pantheon of writings. A multi-layered template of a magickal system,
encompassing Qabalah, single-point meditation, sex rituals, excessive drug
use and a good deal more, The Book of the Law made Crowley one of the 20th
century's hidden prophets, a truly outrageous figure presiding over rock
culture's original spirit of misrule.
Crowley died in relative obscurity in an eccentric Hastings boarding house
in 1947. And yet, in the 21st century, his legacy has an afterlife, one that
few of his contemporaries would have imagined possible. Last year he was
voted number 73 in the BBC's league of the top 100 Britons. There is a
continual stream of biographies and editions of his work, from a centenary
edition of The Book of the Law to a reprint of Francis King's excellent
study Megatherion . "To Mega Therion", meaning "the great beast", was one of
Crowley's numerous magickal names. In The Book of the Law , he is identified
as 666. "It means merely sunlight," he told the judge in a libel case that
bankrupted him. "You may call me Little Sunshine."
He wrote The Book of the Law over three days in April 1904, between midday
and 1pm, in a room near the Cairo Museum. The 29-year-old Crowley had come
to Egypt to honeymoon with his wife Rose. Together they spent a night in the
King's Chamber of the Great Pyramid, where Crowley tried to impress her by
conducting a magickal ritual to illuminate the chamber with astral light.
Rose had no interest in the occult, but soon afterwards it was she who fell
into a trance, repeating "They are waiting for you", and instructing her
husband to take his dicta tion at the appointed day and hour.
However, Crowley always denied he was the author of the book, claiming that
it had been dictated by an entity called Aiwass, an emissary of the
hawk-headed Egyptian god Horus promising ecstatic union and violent conflict
in more or less equal measure. Aiwass would overthrow the "slave religion"
of Christianity and liberate humanity with one commandment instead of
Christianity's 10. "Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law" is
probably the phrase most associated with Crowley, and the key to much of his
work. For him it became a liberation theology in 11 single-syllable words,
with "Love is the law" as the addendum. "Love under will."
Though the likes of WB Yeats called him "indescribably mad" -they engaged in
magickal battle when both were members of the Golden Dawn in the 1890s -
Crowley's reputation as the world's wickedest man obscures much that is
fascinating about him. He was a master of ceremonial magick, yoga, Qabalah,
Tarot and numerous meditation traditions; a mountaineer, poet, and chess
player of distinction; mentor to the great Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa,
a friend of the American writer Frank Harris, and the source of Malcolm
Lowry's magickal symbolism in Under the Volcano
Yet the hysterical press accounts of sex, drugs and sacrifice at his Abbey
of Thelema, in Sicily in the early 1920s, remain the core of the myth of
Crowley as evil incarnate. It was an image, along with his famously hypnotic
stare, that led Bond author Ian Fleming to model Blofeld on Crowley. They
met when Fleming worked in British intelligence during the war. That a man
so publicly reviled could still penetrate the corridors of power is a prime
example of his unlikely reach. Crowley was Fleming's first choice for
interrogating Rudolf Hess when the occult-obsessed Nazi was captured in
Scotland after a bizarre astrological sting.
It was also Crowley who gave Churchill his famous victory sign, a magickal
gesture to counteract the Nazi's use of the swastika. Indeed, his hand
appears in many unexpected places - there is even a story that he aligned
Stamford Bridge and gave Chelsea its team colours - but his hidden influence
was not restricted to the British war effort or the Premiere League. In the
1940s, one of his closest followers was a young Californian adept, Jack
Parsons, one of the founding fathers of the American space programme. His
work at the fledgling Jet Propulsion Laboratories lay the groundwork for the
Apollo moon missions.
Rocket fuel, space exploration and Crowley's brand of ceremonial sex magick
was a powerful mix. Working with Parsons was none other than L Ron Hubbard,
who later founded the cult of Scientology, which now attracts so many
Hollywood stars. Hubbard would also abscond with Parsons' money a nd wife,
but not before Parsons had written a fourth "chapter" of The Book of the Law
and unleashed the powerful sex magick of the Babalon Working with his
Scarlet Woman, Beat artist Marjorie Cameron. Cameron would go on to star in
films by Kenneth Anger and Curtis Harrington, and was the inspiration behind
the classic Eagles song, Hotel California . As for Parsons, he blew himself
up in his lab in 1952 and there is a crater named after him on the dark side
of the moon.
A hundred years on, Crowley remains one of those figures often dismissed in
public, but whose work is collected and studied in private. His immediate
following may have been small, but his influence on modern culture is as
pervasive as that of Freud or Jung. As an occultist, he can justly claim to
have made a lasting change on the world, refashioning the occult with his
famous dictum to combine the aim of religion with the method of science.
There were followers such as Gerald Yorke, the epitome of the English
gentleman, who worked as his secretary for many years, and who later became
the Dalai Lama's emissary, almost single-handedly bringing Tibetan Buddhism
to the west. Crowley himself played a pioneering role in the western study
of eastern religions. His writings on yoga are still regarded as the most
lucid ever produced. His writings on drugs, too, are prescient; decades
later, psychedelic gurus such as Timothy Leary would find themselves
literally following in Crowley's footsteps.
"Worship me with wines and strange drugs whereof I shall tell my prophet,
and be drunk thereof! They shall not harm ye at all!" proclaimed The Book of
the Law . Six years after it was written, Crowley introduced psychedelics to
Europe, with a sacrament of mescaline in his 1910 staging of the Rites of
Eleus in London. It was a kind of prototype of the rock band Hawkwind's epic
S pace Ritual of the early 1970s. Both comprised music, dancers, poetry,
hallucinogens, and, in Hawkwind's case, projections and strobes they turned
on themselves as well as the audience.
As Gary Lachman makes explicit in his book on the occult and the 1960s, Turn
Off Your Mind , Crowley's most visible presence is in rock music and the
post-Beat counterculture; on films such as Don Cammell's Performance , and
Kenneth Anger's Lucifer Rising ; on the Satanic Majesties-era Stones, with
Jagger donating a dissonant synthesiser soundtrack to Anger's cinematic
enactment of one of Crowley's rituals, Inauguration of My Demon Brother
Crowley is there on the cover of Sergeant Pepper , and in the music and
myths of Led Zeppelin, whose Jimmy Page is one of the most famous
rock'n'roll adherents. And then there is David Bowie, "closer to the Golden
Dawn, cloaked in Crowley's uniform of imagery". Bowie lived almost entirely
on a ritual l evel for several years in the mid-1970s and, like Crowley, his
drug use had a magickal as much as a hedonistic base. It is a period he now
professes not to remember, preferring to dine out on the fruits of that work
instead.
But while the hippy era is most closely identified with the explosion of the
occult, it was punk that was the manifestation of Do What Thou Wilt. The
energy of punk at its purest was about disruption, chaos and transformation
- with whatever magickal accoutrements came to hand. Bands from Throbbing
Gristle and Killing Joke to the Only Ones, Eddie and the Hot Rods and Coil
absorbed, by osmosis or design, the essence of Crowley's Thelema.
Rock'n'roll has always been the devil's music, with a powerful,
uncontrollable element of invocation, and Crowley is one of its
grandfathers. Rock's initial spirit of upset, outrage and teenage rampage
was the very spirit Crowley believed was unleashed with The Book o f the Law
In the age of the crowned and conquering child, it doesn't matter whether
you believe in Crowley's magick or not. Like Tarot or astrology, it's not a
question of belief; it's whether and where the pattern fits. "Certain
actions," said Crowley, "produce certain results." Sentiments worth bearing
in mind for those curious about the life, work and legacy of this
extraordinary, flawed, complex and often shocking figure.
The Book of the Law is published by Samuel Weiser (Airlift Book Co, 020-8804
0400) Megatherion is published by Creation Books (Turnaround, 020-8829
3000).
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