04.17.06
How to read Aleister Crowley
Since I suggested reading Aleister Crowley I should offer some free advice in the ‘how to’ vein.
I assume you have read all about Frodo the hobbit, but since you are determined or fated to be a gollum….
Assuming you have obtained his complete works,
Rule #1: Don’t believe anything you read. His tactics of disinformation are atrocious. You will end up a two bit Faust for merely reading him, and get nothing in return…
Rule #2: Don’t use any of his methods. Even if you are dumb enough to try them, they are all out of date, last century’s rosicrucian junk…
There is a simple trick to it: Be a ‘null Faust’, and don’t do anything, simply note the facts of the case, moving on asap.
Darwiniana » Do the science, Dennett said,
April 17, 2006 at 11:52 pm
[...] Dennett wishes us to study religion as a naturalistic phenomenon. Nothing new here. There have been dozens of prior attempts to do just that. What better way than to try to replicate the great scientific experiments of that pioneer scientist Crowley, whose tantric explorations were a model of that Rosicrucian injunction: Dare, Will, Know, and Make It All Public. Maybe in Scientific American. [...]
Mr. Toad said,
April 18, 2006 at 12:32 am
Oh lord. Why dig up that freak, sir (or is it madam)? I think Crowley was pretty clearly a charlatan and deviant, however amusing or talented (he was not a bad linguist–read some of his translations of Baudelaire). There may be some occult knowledge (tho I suspect it is generally reducible to sex and/or drugs, or perhaps very disgusting violent things–some of the nazis were occultists we might recall); Crowley however did not really help with that: he was a major perv too–have you read Francis King’s bio? Rather appalling. That said, if you manage to get some gals interested .in tantra and they sign up here, count me in, hermano–real e-mail too. (I’ll paseo on the more, eh, goatish aspects thank you) .
I don’t think Dennett leads at all to occultism or Faust: along with the Darwinism he seems to be quite the moralist. Often it is religious writers as much as scientists and naturalists who lead to occult and mysticism: I suspect more people go into occult from like Huxley or even TS ELiot than from Mendel or Darwin.