Tag: occultism

The Fool from the Sola Busca deck.

3,533 words

“Tarot” is a strange word because everyone and no one knows what it means. Ask anyone over 20 what “Tarot” means, and the likelihood is that they will recognize it in the simplest, most popular way; A deck of cards which can tell the future. Like so many modern myths, that is misleading on both counts. Although there are decks of Tarot cards, and they predated its study, Tarot is also the school of thought behind the meaning of the cards, rather than just the cards themselves and any simple meanings which might become attached to them. (more…)

7,303 words

“I don’t want to be a product of my environment; I want my environment to be a product of me.”
– Frank Costello, The Departed

“You don’t ask for power. You design the system that obeys.”
–David Thompson

Constant Readers will recall that recently, in “Yockey vs the Dorks: AI, Ethnic Souls, & the Tech Kabbalah,” I looked at contemporary analogues of Yockey’s anti-materialistic concepts of  science, race, and nation that continue to drive manly, skeptical conservatives into hysterics. (more…)

8,121 words

Phil Baker
City of the Beast: The London of Aleister Crowley
Foreword by Timothy D’Arch Smith
Strange Attractor Press, 2022

“No news, no tobacco, no friends, no printer, no hope, no bloody nothing.”
—Aleister Crowley, London, Spring 1943

“This desolating war!”
—Aleister Crowley, London, 1943, after a lunch of game pie, grapes, 1858 cognac and a Cabanas cigar.

Constant Readers will recall my review of David J. Goodwin’s Midnight Rambles: H. P. Lovecraft In Gotham (Fordham University Press, 2023). Imagine then, my delight when this work by Phil Baker[1] crossed my path, described thus by the publisher: (more…)

You can buy James J. O’Meara’s Mysticism After Modernism here.

1,646 words

James J. O’Meara has a book out, Mysticism After Modernism: Crowley, Evola, Neville, Watts, Colin Wilson, and Other Populist Gurus, published by Manticore Press. The book is about where mysticism intersects with culture and politics, rather than being some purely academic look at mysticism and the occult. It is also about thinkers who used magic to enact real-world change.

Much of the Right is dismissive or derisive of the occult, their criticisms ranging from conspiracy theories about evil Illuminati occultists to dismissing the New Age scene as being solely for Left-wing hippies. Regardless, there is a lot of crossover appeal and syncretic occultism. (more…)

Ne, není to Winston Churchill. Muž na obrázku nebyl ani zdaleka tak zlý…

2.057 slov

English original here

Část druhá

Aleister Crowley (1875–1947), který sám sebe rád nazýval „Velkou bestií 666“, dodnes zůstává relevantní postavou v subkultuře okultismu i současné populární kultuře. Zatímco ho někteří oslavují jako filozofa, mága a proroka, pro jiné je především zvráceným egomaniakem. Povětšinou je ale zájem o Crowleyho osobu motivován poněkud morbidním zájmem a jeho celkovou excentričností. (more…)

2.563 slov

English original here

Edred Thorsson
History of the Rune-Gild: The Reawakening of the Gild 1980-2018, North Augusta, S.C.: Arcana Europa, 2019.

Pozn. překladatele: Kniha má, snad trochu překvapivě, vztah i k České republice. Obsahuje totiž krom jiného také fotky české pohanky Šárky Sedlákové, která se setkala s Edredem Thorssonem/Stephenem Flowersem osobně, je členkou Runové gildy, a mimo jiné též stála za chaosmagickou edicí KIAton. (more…)

Aleister Crowley by Charles Krafft

648 words

Aleister Crowley was an English poet, novelist, painter, and mountaineer who is most famous as an occultist, ceremonial magician, and founder of the religion and philosophy of Thelema. Sadly, he was also an egomaniac, a pervert, and a drug addict. But at least he did not sacrifice babies to Satan or eat them for breakfast. Ironically, though, Crowley’s supposed Satanism and Black Magic are far less frightening to most people than his politics. For Aleister Crowley was also a man of the Right.

(more…)

Aleister Crowley

1,734 words

When I began reading Counter-Currents, I was quickly drawn to the commemorative pieces, not least because many of the deceased were completely new to me, and have since led me to new intellectual pastures. The late, great Jonathan Bowden was correct in describing CC as an online university. One commemorated figure, however, although very familiar to me, surprised me as figuring in the pantheon.

I have been interested in Aleister Crowley since I began studying the occult some 30 years ago. Somewhere in my mother’s attic in England are my copies of Magick in Theory and Practice and The Book of Thoth. The latter is of particular interest as, for all the chaos of his personal life, Aleister Crowley was possibly the greatest scholar of a discipline in which I have a particular interest: Tarot. (more…)

Aleister Crowley by Charles Krafft

646 words

Aleister Crowley was an English poet, novelist, painter, and mountaineer who is most famous as an occultist, ceremonial magician, and founder of the religion and philosophy of Thelema. Sadly, he was also an egomaniac, a pervert, and a drug addict. At least, though, he did not sacrifice babies to Satan or eat them for breakfast. Ironically, though, Crowley’s supposed Satanism and Black Magic are far less frightening to most people than his politics. For Aleister Crowley was also a man of the Right.

(more…)

Muriel Gantry

7,874 words

Editor’s Note: The following text by Muriel Gantry (1913–2000) is a bit more than half of the “Curriculum Vitae of Muriel Gantry: All You Ever Wanted to Know and a Great Deal You Probably Didn’t,” which she prepared in 1995 for Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke, who was writing a biography of her friend Savitri Devi. (more…)

Aleister Crowley by Charles Krafft

424 words

Aleister Crowley was an English poet, novelist, painter, and mountaineer who is most famous as an occultist, ceremonial magician, and founder of the religion and philosophy of Thelema. But ironically Crowley’s supposed Satanism and Black Magic are far less frightening to most people than his politics. For Aleister Crowley was also a man of the Right.

(more…)

2,462 words

James J. O’Meara
Mysticism After Modernism: Crowley, Evola, Neville, Watts, Colin Wilson & Other Populist Gurus
Melbourne, Australia: Manticore Press, 2020

“For me real and imagined, by the way, is just the same. Because the world is our imagination.” — Aleksandr Dugin [1] (more…)

2,254 words

Current 93 is a neofolk group fronted by David Tibet. Its name is derived from Aleister Crowley’s numerological manipulation of the words Thelema and agape, the “93 Current” of the present age.

If that’s not weird enough for you, it gets better! (more…)