My contribution to this discussion:

Yes, the Golden Dawn was historically exclusive and elitist. The original group was so exclusive and elitist that their teachings were almost lost when the group broke apart. Who would have carried this spiritual knowledge to the next generation if Crowley and Regardie had not gone ahead and just published the Golden Dawn material for everyone to read? Had it not been for that, chances are that few people reading or posting on this website would ever have come into contact with this material.

Remember, even Dion Fortune was rejected from one of the post-G.D. groups for not having the right symbols in her aura. ("A perfectly unanswerable charge.") And Fortune had her own issues with mental illness. Would you have kept Dion Fortune out of your group too?

A lot has changed in the last century or so, and going crazy just ain't what it used to be. In fact, it's much more common, and it is foolish to pretend to understand all of the reasons for this societal shift. The very drugs demonized in these posts are the ones most frequently prescribed by doctors today.

Philip K. Dick said that sometimes going insane is the only sane response to an insane society. He was a visionary, too, but I doubt he would have been able to live up to these standards, either. Another potential G.D. reject!

Though Crowley was barely out of school when he joined the Golden Dawn, he immediately observed that "the members of the Order were as vulgar and commonplace as any other set of average people." Elitism be damned. We all start out as lead.

image via Gorg

"For, as Freud has shown, we remember (in the main) what we wish to remember, and forget what is painful. There is thus great danger of deception as to the "facts" of the case; but our memories indicate with uncanny accuracy what is our true will. And, as above made manifest, it is this true will which shows the nature of our proper motion." -The Confessions of Aleister Crowley

THIS IS THELEMA.

Click here to see.

It's cool.

Via KillStopGo.

"Man is so infinitely small,   

In all these stars, determinate.   

Maker and master of them all,   

Man is so infinitely great."

-Aleister Crowley

Literally, a resource, for once.

Esoteric occult PDFs by Crowley, Blavatsky, Frater Achad, Dion Fortune, and so on. Good stuff. Click here.

LAM On The Run

"UFO behaviour is more akin to magic than to physics as we know it... the modern UFOnauts and the demons of past days are probably identical." -Dr. Pierre Guerin

Barney Frank: Today's Vote "One Of The Truly Great Coincidences In History Of Numerology"

Finally Congress is accepting the importance of this ancient art. I guess it takes the Dow crashing 777 points in one day to make them sit up and pay attention.

One steep drop for Wall Street, one shuffling step forward for synchromysticism.

LOLCrowley

Like the atom bomb, someone was going to make one eventually.

Via Gleamings From The Dawn.

More Scenes From A Life With Crowley

The girl was thin to emaciation; her eyes sunken in her head and surrounded by black circles; her lips carmined with so vicious a lipstick that she looked as if she had been kissing the wet paint on a pillar-box. Her clothing consisted of an exceedingly figure-revealing djibbah of dingy green. She looked like a sickly and unclean nymph who had had altogether too much attention from Pan.

-from Dion Fortune's fictionalized description of a mistress of Aleister Crowley in The Winged Bull.

It is unclear whether Fortune's description is meant to evoke Leah Hirsig, the best-known of Crowley's Scarlet Women, or if it is a composite.

Scenes From A Life With Crowley

June 29 AM K

...12:30 PM My opinion is that one does not really get a shot at one's complexes until one has managed to eliminate the influences of convention.

1:25 PM 6 dr G + rum + wine at lunch.

2:40 PM (after lunch) Quite uncomfortable—but 666 wants his books from the P.O., so after telling him a few thoughts (re later) I went. Returned—raining like hell—Tea. Ideas connected with convention and complex. To get at people's "conventions" trouble I suggest two main lines:

1 for the simple—ask the question "What troubles you most in life."

2 for the more complex animal—Force him with a list of all the crimes? possible and ask him to mention the one that he thinks worst "wicked" or "disgusting" or some such term....

Dec 27
G 2:20 AM Msbtd—Union with Chaos—my whole idea seems to deplete my body absolutely so that I may lose my thoughts—But I am all wrong. I am starved, but I shall start to love tomorrow. There will be no more masturbation—Perhaps there will be insanity or death, but there'll be something, if I have to create it myself.

From the magickal diary of Leah Hirsig, mistress of Aleister Crowley.

We're Pretty Sure This Has Happened To Us A Few Times, As Well.

Mathers was deceived into passing over the secrets of the Golden Dawn to an American fraudulent medium and con artist known as Mrs. Horos, who also went under the names Mrs. Dutton, Mrs. Johnson, and Marie Louise of the Commune. Her magical motto was Swami Vive Ananda, so she was known among Golden Dawn members as Soror (Sister) S.V.A.

Mrs. Horus learned a smattering of Golden Dawn lore from members living in New York, and was able to use it to persuade the credulous Mathers that she possessed the Order rank of 8=3, Magister Templi, which was one grade higher than Mathers' own rank. The 7=3 rank of Mathers was the highest level that could be attained in the Second Order, so Mrs. Horos was claiming to belong to the Third Order of the Golden Dawn, the Argentum Astrum (Silver Star). At that time, the Third Order had no existence on the earthly plane (Crowley would later use the name for one of his own organizations). Indeed, Mrs. Horos claimed to be none other than Fraulein Anna Sprengel, the German adept who was the supposed establishing authority of the Golden Dawn in England, and the link with the mystical Secret Chiefs, spiritual beings who provided the Golden Dawn with its occult teachings and its legitimacy as a Rosicrucian order. Mathers felt obliged to pass over secret Second Order documents, which Mrs. Horos and her two associates promptly stole.

This woman, described by those who had met her as being about sixty years of age, extremely fat, with a gracious and attractive manner, was aided by her husband (whether legal or common law is not clear), who went under the name Theo Horos -- the "H." mentioned by Crowley -- and another man calling himself Dr. Rose Adams. Mrs. Horos and her husband were eventually arrested. As an explanation for her corpulent body, Mrs. Horos claimed that she had absorbed the spirit of Madame Blavatsky, the leader of the Theosophical Movement, at the death of Blavatsky. Such was Mathers' willingness to embrace the miraculous that he did not dispute this assertion. Hence Crowley's expression of disgust with the childlike credulity of his former teacher and leader.

From Donald Tyson's notes on the Goetia.

The EQUINOX online.

Someone's gone to the trouble of collecting them.

"An Abramelin Ramble"

Moina MacGregor Mathers's Abramelin illustration.

This article is taken from a lecture by Bill Heidrick, who clearly knows what he is talking about.

This lecture will teach you a tremendous amount about magic on both the specific and abstract levels, covering topics that are rarely explained with such lucidity, in a very short amount of time. It's the closest thing to "instant gratification" I've found in quite some time.

Famouser and famouser.

Old J.P. is everywhere lately, enjoying his own little revival. Here is his first and long-overdue comic book cover. Supposedly a Parsons character has a role in the upcoming Crowley movie as well.

Via Technoccult.

Love the ill of Crowley in the lower left corner.

Some Internetters have noted a resemblance between poor Suri Cruise and the late L. Ron Hubbard, who would not have been above freezing his sperm and stuff, and plus he may have wanted a Crowley-inspired "moonchild."

Asked about skeptics who believe his marriage to Holmes is a public relations stunt, Cruise said, "That's laughable to me. I don't know what to say."

Winfrey asked about a book that she said "implied" Suri was not Cruise's child.

"I've had a lot of books written about me. When someone compares your daughter to Rosemary's baby — it's one thing to come after me. Say stuff about me," he said. "But when it comes to my family, my children, that's when I went, `This is off the chart.'"

Sometimes things are just so weird that even if they're not true they're still, like, true.

News Flash

Crowley was not as talented a painter as Austin Osman Spare.

Aleister Crowley: "The Other Loch Ness Monster"

This BBC documentary details Crowley's abandoned Abramelin ritual on the shores of Loch Ness.

Featuring commentary by occult filmmaker Kenneth Anger and Colin Wilson, who posits the theory that the unfinished ritual may have spawned the Loch Ness monster itself.