Do What Thour Wilt: Life of Aleister Crowley

Upper class Shaming of the upper class and their virtues by embracing the history of the western occult traditon Saw and great Hypocricy of the whole of the Christianized West

"Antagonism towards the religious powers that be was the essence of Crowley's vision of his life and his mission"

Prophet of the New Aeon: "embodiment of a guiltless, liberated humanity that had at least chosen to become the gods it has merely worshipped in the past:.

Didn;t validate satanism because it relied on the ever present and powerful aspect of a christian church and god.

"Crowley desired nothing less than the creation of a full fledged successor religion, complete with a guiding Logos that would endure for Millenia,"

Irresistible fantasy for the counter culture

Was a master modernist-fierce impatience with restrictions on form and thought

"the history of religion is the most interesting part of the history of the human spirit"

Isaac Bashevis Singer in regard to the occult tradition: "We are living in an era of Amnesia. We have forgotten those vital truths that man once knew and by whose strength he lived". Crowley recognized this, "The era of amnesia had induced not merely forgetfulness but also outright contempt for traditions he revered and equated with the highest forms of mysticism"

identified as the beast: "it was a passionately ecstatic sense of identity"

Mysticism: Involved all undesirable connotations

Crowley: Magick is essentially the most sublime, and actually the most discredited of all the available terms. I swore to rehabilitate Magick, to identify it with my won career, and to compel mankind to respect, love, and trust that which they scorned, hated, and feared. I have kept my world"

the key: is to develop the powers of will and imagination

Magical Mirrors: "The universe reflects the self and the self reflects the universe, an infinite chain of myriad changes that the magus alone can encompass. "

"High magic is an attempt to gain so consummate an understanding of mastery of oneself and the environment as to transcend all human limitations and become superhuman or divine "

"Magic, at its highest levels of theory and practice, a most articulate challenge to the ways of the dominant religions. And why not? Its lineages are as rich and as varied as theirs"

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