A Booklist for Thelemites:
Books added by Thelema Lodge

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Section II
Helpful Additional Reading

Addenda
Books added by Thelema Lodge

Section III
Official Publications
(This is a link to the
official OTO HQ list of
approved documents.)

From the Thelema Lodge Calendar:"This month the Section Two reading group responds to the general recommendation of the Greek and Latin classics at the end of Crowley's 'comprehensive course of reading' toward 'a general familiarity with the mystical and magical tradition.' Read ahead in your favorite translations and select a few of these poems to share with the group; any scholars amongst us are welcome to contribute selected recitations in the original tongues.

Centered in the great city of Mytilene on the Aegean island of Lesbos, Sappho's career as one of the best-known early classical Greek singer- songwriters occurred early in the sixth century before the past aeon, contemporary with the emergence of personal religious voices in the pronouncements of Gautama Buddha and the Hebrew prophet Jeremiah.

Daughter of a prominent family, she wrote hundreds of songs which were remembered all over the ancient world, and which continued widely popular for centuries, up until the dark ages. She was also an informal religious teacher, who developed a system of dance-worship for an academy of women with whom she performed her material. Although herself married and a mother, and by Greek standards no more 'lesbian' than the other women of her island, the great theme of Sappho's lyrics was 'how to love girls.' (As the poet Ovid asked, 600 years later, 'quid docuit Sappho nisi amare puellas?' -- what does Sappho teach but how to love girls?)

• "Sappho: One Hundred Lyrics by Bliss Carman"
• Oxford University jpeg collection of Sappho lyrics in original Greek from the Oxyrynchus Papyrus project
• "The Poems of Sappho"
• "The Divine Sappho"
• Wiki Classical Dictionary
• The sound of Sappho?
• SAPPHO: The World of Lesbian Poetry
• Sappho from Smith's Dictionary of Greek and Roman Biography and Mythology (1867)
• John Ezard, June 24, 2005, "After 2,600 years, the world gains a fourth poem by Sappho"

• Catullus' work in Latin and over 25 other languages at Catullus Translations
• Catullus 16, a very controversial Homo-erotic poem.
• The Carmina, Latin sources of Catullus' works.
• Dual-language editions of most of Catullus' works at the "Versa Roma" site.

Valentine Whips and Chains

• Histoire de Juliette, ou les Prospérités du vice, in French, by the Societé de Sade Escriven
• La nouvelle Justine, ou les Malheurs de la vertu (at the same site, in French)
• Museum display of the Illustrations in Justine (warning, Not Safe for Work, but excellent quality woodcuts), hosted by the World Museum of Erotic Art.
• Justine, or Good Conduct Well Chastised, (English) hosted by Globusz Publishing (Note, they have a $29.95 "lifetime" membership fee, which is probably how they can post erotica as well as other novels.)
• Juliette, in Russian

• The complete text of Venus in Furs from Project Gutenberg
• Leopold von Sacher-Masoch (analysis)
• Leopold von Sacher-Masoch article from Human Sexuality: An Encyclopedia
• Le legs de Caïn, Un Testament — Basile Hymen — Le Paradis sur le Dniester (French)
• La Pantoufle de Sapho (French)

From the Thelema Lodge Calendar: "The Section Two Reading Group will be expanding this month upon Crowley's generalized recommendation of "Roman classics" with an evening devoted to the appreciation of two of the last great Latin poets of Imperial Rome, Juvenal and Martial.

Writing around the end of the first century of the past era, these two urban poets were probably friends, although Juvenal, who remained almost unknown during his lifetime, was a generation younger than the very popular and widely published Martial. Decimus Junius Juvenalis (?60-?130) published sixteen satires in five books between the years 110 and 130, expressing a righteous indignation at the degeneracy of Roman life and culture. The sixth satire (which alone comprises book two of his oeuvre, and at circa 700 lines is his longest single item) concerns sex and marriage, amounting to one of the most sustained invectives against womankind ever to shame the Occident. (Those who believe St. Paul wrote badly of women in his letters in the New Testament should read Juvenal's invective against not only women but the entire institution of Marriage.) 

Iuvenalis, anglicized as Juvenal,is known for coining the phrase "panem et circenses" ("bread and circuses") to describe the primary pursuits of the Roman populace. The rhetorical question "Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?", ("Who shall guard the guards themselves?") comes from his satire On Women, and arises in a discussion concerning the usefulness of having eunuchs guard your women.

Concerning his life almost nothing is known with any certainty. There is a somewhat ambiguous inscription which, if it does in fact refer to Juvenal's family, would place his hometown at Aquinum in Italy. Ronald Syme points out that there were many people with Juvenal's same last name in Spain, and many modern scholars believe that he was the son of a Spanish freedman. He described himself as middle-aged at the time of publication of his first satire, which was sometime in the 100s. The latest known date for his activity is 127. The biographical material in ancient biographies of Juvenal, of which thirteen survive, appears to be extrapolated from the satires themselves.

Some modern scholars, most notably Gilbert Highet, have also attempted to glean biographical material about Juvenal the man from his satires. They believe that for a time he was very poor and was dependent on the rich people in Rome, and that he was (for some time) exiled in Egypt and possibly in Britain. These ideas concerning the life of Juvenal have largely fallen into disfavor among scholars over the last fifty years. The only known contemporary reference to him is in a poem addressed to him by his friend, the poet Martial.

Marcus Valerius Martialis (c. 40-c. 104, this biography link includes his Epigrams) was born and died in Spain, but spent his entire professional life in Rome, publishing twelve books of epigrams and various other brief Latin poems in the final decades of the first century."

His Epigrams, published in Rome between AD 86 and 103, during the reigns of the emperors Domitian, Nerva and Trajan. In these short, witty poems he cheerfully satirises city life and the scandalous activities of his acquaintances, and romanticises his provincial upbringing. Considered the creator of the modern epigram, Martial wrote a total of 1,561, 1,235 of which are in elegiac couplets.

"I live in a little cell, with one window which doesn't even fit properly.
Boreas himself would not want to live here."
Book VIII, No. 14. 5-6.

"Tongilianus, you paid 200,000 sesterces for your house.
An accident, too common in this city, destroyed it.
You collected 1,000,000 sesterces.
Now I ask you, doesn’t it seem possible that you set fire to your own house, Tongilianus?"
Book III, No. 52

Though many of his epigrams indicate a cynical disbelief in the character of women, yet others prove that he could respect and almost reverence a refined and courteous lady. His own life in Rome afforded him no experience of domestic virtue; but his epigrams show that, even in the age which is known to modern readers chiefly from the Satires of Juvenal, virtue was recognized as the purest source of happiness. The tenderest element in Martial's nature seems, however, to have been his affection for children and for his dependents.

His sexual outlook is consistent with that of his place and time. For example,

"Rumor says, Chiona, that you are a virgin
and that nothing is purer than your fleshly delights.
Nevertheless, you do not bathe with the correct part covered:
if you have the decency, move your panties onto your face."
Book III, No. 87

Same-sex love is also a recurrent topic. Many of his epigrams are of a pederastic nature, which, coupled with his often misogynistic tone, has given more than one reader the impression that he looked with favor upon relations with boys. Though Romans often took a more materialistic approach to sex with males than did the Greeks, Martial, in Epigram XI.43, praises the ancient pederastic gods and heroes. Online Editions:

• Liber spectaculorum (in Latin)
• Epigrammata (in Latin) at Bibliotheca Augustana.
• Epigrammaton (in Latin) at The Latin Library.
• Selected Epigrams in translation at Theatre of Pompey
• Some of Martial's more risqué Epigrams translated by Joseph S Salemi
• Selected Epigrams translated by Elizabeth Duke
• Translations from Martial by Franklin P Adams
• Apophoreta (in Latin)
• Xenia (in Latin)
• Poems by Martial at Poemhunter.com
• Martial Quotations at The Quotations Page

Kama Sutra, translated by Sir Richard Burton
The Online Library Page has a biography of Burton as well as many of the works listed below in e-text.

From the Thelema Lodge Calendar: "This month in honor of Saint Valentine the Section Two Reading Group will meet for a discussion of the Kama Sutra and the translations of other related texts issued by the 'Kama Shastra Society' under the direction of Sir Richard Burton in the 1880s. Crowley lists the best-known examples of this genre in the bibliography appended to Liber Artemis Iota: the Ananga-Ranga, the Kama Shastra, the Kama Sutra, and the Scented Garden of the Sheikh Nefzawi. In the list he also includes his own pseudonymous Bagh-i-Muattar of Abdullah el Hajji (1910), slyly interpolating it amongst these classic titles. ('Kama Shastra' is the genre rather than a specific work, although Burton at first used it as an alternate title for the Ananga-Ranga.) Join Caitlin for an evening of investigation into the mysteries of these silly and wonderful books.

In a successful attempt to avoid censorship of his efforts to introduce English readers to the erotic literature and philosophy of India and the Middle East, Gnostic saint Sir Richard Burton pretended to organize the 'Kama Shastra Society.' (The words in Sanskrit might be translated as 'fuck-books,' or 'scriptures of the sexual god-head.')

In 1883 he began distributing The Kama Sutra of Vatsyayana, a sex manual written early in the common era, which was no longer widely known even in India. Burton had hired native 'pundits' to locate manuscript texts of this neglected ancient treatise, and to provide a basic literal translation. Burton then re-wrote (or at least polished) and annotated their version, supervised the printing, and sold copies by private subscription. The non-existent 'Society' provided an illusion of exclusive scholarly interest, and in order to shield his printers the books often bore the pretended imprint of such obscure places as Benares (holy city of northern India) and Cosmopoli (ancient capital of the island of Elba).

Twenty years later Aleister Crowley was himself to put similar schemes into practice, running 'The Society for the Propagation of Religious Truth' out of his home at Boleskine, and pretending to issue his erotic publications from 'Benares' and 'Cosmopoli.'

Although no similar texts were available of a comparable antiquity with the Sutra attributed to the unknown Vatsyayana, Burton next issued translations of two medieval 'pillow-books,' the Ananga-Ranga: The Stage of the Bodiless One, or, The Hindoo Art of Love (Ars Amoris Indica) in 1885, and The Perfumed Garden of the Shaykh Nefzaoui: A Manual of Arabian Erotology the following year. Finding that his Kama Shastra Society was respected, without any serious threat of censorious prosecution, Burton continued to use its imprint in the release of his greatest work, the annotated translation of The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night (sixteen volumes, 1885-1888).

Two further Persian anthologies of erotic lore, the Abode of Spring by Jâmi in 1887, and the Rose Garden of Sa'di the following year, with texts prepared by an associate under Burton's editorial supervision, were issued before the Kama Shastra Society faded away upon Burton's death in 1890. Unfortunately Burton left to his widow the publication of what certainly would have been his most important work in the 'kama shastra' genre, a much expanded revision of The Perfumed Garden which he finished annotating the same week in which he died, and for her own private emotional reasons the foolish woman decided to burn the entire manuscript! "

Jurgen: A Comedy of Justice, by James Branch Cabell (This link is to the entire document in e-text.)

From the Thelema Lodge Calendar: "The Lance and the Veil

From the Thelema Lodge Calendar: "The Thelema Lodge Section Two reading group will be spending an evening with Boccaccio's Decameron. Readers and listeners are welcome to attend, and we plan to share a few of our favorite stories from this 'century of tales.' 

Giovanni Boccaccio, the first great European literary prose fiction writer, was also in his own day a celebrated poet and humanist scholar, who lived from 1313 until 1375. He was an established author of several major works in verse and prose when at the age of thirty-five he survived the Black Plague in Florence, and shortly thereafter he began work on the Decameron. (The title in Latinized Greek indicates a 'ten days' record' of storytelling). Just as Dante had set the Divine Comedia in his own thirty-fifth year of 1300 and organized in one hundred cantos the whole moral and political culture of his generation, so Boccaccio in a hundred Italian stories organized another sort of great Comedy based upon purely secular explorations of human motivation.

From the Thelema Lodge Calendar: At Oz House Caitlin will lead a reading and discussion of a select group of baroque British writers known from their fondness for scientific and philosophical conceits as the 'metaphysical' poets. We will be concentrating upon five of them: John Donne, George Herbert, Henry Vaughan, Richard Crashaw, and Robert Herrick. The basic suggestion comes from the course of reading outlined in Liber Artemis Iota. Like Crowley's earlier A.'. A.'. bibliography, this 'study' list comprises mainly classical and European authors, along with generous selections from his own work. There is only a glance at the literary tradition in English, concluding the curriculum with an allusion to 'English and Americans too numerous to list, but notably the poets in Holy Orders: Swift, Sterne, Herrick, Donne, and Herbert.'

Reserving the first two figures for some other eighteenth-century evening, we will encounter in selected works of the other three some of the most intense, amazing, and difficult lyrics in any literature, with ideas and images that can still inspire shock and dismay even in lovers of Aleister Crowley's own poetic 'excreta.'

John Donne (1572-1631), Dean of St Paul's Cathedral in London and one of the greatest preachers of his day, set the 'metaphysical' style in his early erotic lyrics and later 'divine poems.' His strong lines, packed with meaning and avoiding ornament, meditate over the mysteries and the rituals of eros and ecclesia. The sacraments of sense, intelligence, and spirit combine powerfully in Donne, and in his seductions he seems to succeed all the better for a style that 'perplexes the minds of the fair sex with nice speculations of philosophy, when he should engage their hearts, and entertain them with the softness of love' (John Dryden , 1693). Like Sappho and Catullus, Donne is a poet of fulfillment, whether sexual or spiritual. Love for him is based in the physical grace and coupling of bodies, however far it may be extended into the realms of science and theology.

George Herbert (1593-1633) was an academic rhetorician, priest, and member of Parliament. All of his verse (many examples at link) is religious in nature, memorable for its plainness and precision, achieving intense effects of psychological intimacy as he explores the essential challenges of worship. Herbert was also a pioneer of 'concrete' poetry, and deals intensely and fully with the ritual of the mass in much of his verse.

Henry Vaughan (1622-1695) is not specifically mentioned by Crowley, but deserves a place at our gathering for his alchemical and Hermetic orientation, which he shared with his twin brother, our Gnostic saint Thomas Vaughan. A Welsh royalist during the Civil Wars, educated in the law but also practicing as a physician, Vaughan never took holy orders despite his fervent religious devotions.

Richard Crashaw (1612-1649; this link has most of his poems in e-text), a Catholic convert, died in exile at Rome, where he held a minor clerical post. Although unmentioned by Crowley, he is included as the foremost lyric poet of the bodily fluids. His extreme excesses of baroque sensibility, wallowing in the tears, the blood, the milk, the sweat, and who can tell for sure what other oozings, drippings, gushings, and spurts from the bodies of his favorite soggy saints, record a devotion to the physiology of enthusiasm which seems worthy of the Temple ov Psychick Youth.

Robert Herrick (1591-1674), a priest and an aristocratic chaplain, was a prolific poet of romantic emotions, rosebuds, kisses, and other less rigorously philosophical delights. Though Crowley appreciated him, Herrick can easily seem too light and innocent to fully qualify as a 'metaphysical' poet, but like the Latin poets he imitates he is capable of careful descriptions of erotic details which are of sufficient technical interest to justify his inclusion. 

From the Thelema Lodge Calendar:  "Every week we invoke into our temple, along with all the other saints in the Gnostic mass, a group of unnamed medieval European warriors with whom few in attendance are very familiar. The 'Paladins' or peers of Carolus Magnus (Charles the Great, or Charlemagne) are placed in the saints list immediately following the great Arthurian heroes of British mythology, and these two parallel traditions of courtly romance form the pillars upon which the ethos of chivalry has been represented in literature, the arts, and popular culture ever since. This month the Thelema Lodge 'Section Two' reading group will be looking at the Renaissance Italian epic tradition of Charlemagne's court.

It was in early Italian romance-epics, written five hundred years ago, and dramatizing European military crises of an already remote 'dark age' seven centuries previous, that the Paladins became emblematic of many of the esoteric pursuits of the Western magical tradition.

The great compendium of stories about these 'secret' Gnostic saints is not included on any of Crowley's A.'. A.'. bibliographies (or even in the 'History of the West' reading list in The Sword of Song [Hermetic Library online edition]), but we are adding to our series the story of Orlando, as begun by Matteo Boiardo (1441-1494) in Orlando Innamorato (Wikipedia edition) Orlando innamorato di Matteo Maria Boiardo (in Italian) and continued by Ludovico Ariosto (1474-1533) in Orlando Furioso (Sunsite Medieval Electronic Library) [or Orlando Furioso for Dummies, a canto-by-canto study guide online]. Both are available in translation, and are enormously fun to read, but they are long complex narratives, and if you've only time for one don't miss Ariosto.

The Paladins traditionally number twelve knights, though between many different sources and various inventive traditions no list of them ever emerged as canonical. (The list here we take from Thomas Bulfinch.) Charlemagne himself is first among the peers, though the romance tradition seldom features him directly. Orlando (the Italian name for the knight known as Roland (Online edition, in French) in the old French sources) was Charlemagne's nephew and favorite, and the most renowned warrior of Christendom. Rinaldo of Montalban was his cousin and companion.

Others often listed among the Peers include Namo of Bavaria, King Salomon of Brittany, Archbishop Turpin, the English knight Astolpho, Ogier the Dane (Wikipedia edition), Florismart (Celtic Twilight Online Edition), and the enchanter Malagigi. Included with them also was Ganelon of Mayence (later called Gano), who betrayed them. In the French accounts (notably La Chanson de Roland (A Wikipedia edition, dated about 1100) they had been stern, strict, and silly fighters, but the Italians made them emblems of love and mysticism, as vital as the Round Table knights and even more adventures.

Section Two continues its summer session with a second month devoted to the Italian epics of Orlando. The European tales of the Charlemagne cycle, in some ways preeminent among chivalric adventure collections, include dreamlike and allegorical episodes, alongside passages of old-time epic bluster and intricate lyrical wit. The impossibly exalted standards of prowess and loyalty, together with a sense of the ridiculous and the humane, can keep the reader alert, canto after canto. And these poems are long, too.

It's instructive to recall that it was just this sort of reading - these very books, in fact - which drove on Quixote (Free Online Library edition) off his rocker and out into the real world. Join Caitlin for an hour or two in the great forest with the Paladin knights in a last-ditch effort to save western civilization from the heathen hoards of the east."

From the Thelema Lodge Calendar: " 'Fox, Lion, Mouse, Ass, Dog, Hare'

Crowley wound up his 'Section Two' reading list with some general suggestions for the study of mythology and folklore, and though he omitted specific mention of the ubiquitous minor genre of the 'beast fable,' our reading group will devote an evening this month to these traditional animal stories. Meet in the lodge library for a discussion with examples -- bring your favorites; there can hardly be any person in the world who hasn't encountered beast fables somehow or other -- of the magical interface between human tale-telling and bestial characterizations.

Aesopus, according to ancient accounts, was a Greek slave in Samos during the middle of the sixth century before the common era, and the probable date of his death was 564. Thus he was a contemporary of Sappho , but unlike her intricately patterned lyrics, which could be imitated or altered only with the greatest care and difficulty, his prose fables were continually recycled over many generations in the discourse of Greek orators in law courts and political councils throughout the Hellenic civilization.¹

Fables from other traditions, such as the medieval European fox-fables of Reynard, or the 'Brer Rabbit'  fables collected from African-Americans after the Civil War, or any of the hundreds of recorded traditions of indigenous fables from all lands and periods, including the many literary versions of Aesop, are also invited.

Note: Traditions of Aesop having been ugly, deformed, hunchbacked, or a dwarf seem to date from the middle ages, and involve a confusion about the nature of Greek slavery. They are inconsistent with the ancient reports of him successfully conducting legal business and assisting in diplomatic and commercial missions at high enough levels to insure that he must have been well versed in Greek civic protocol, as well as reasonably presentable. It was not rare in ancient Greece for skilled 'professionals' such as physicians, secretaries, and teachers from neighboring cities to be held in bondage as slaves, sometimes for economic reasons, but particularly as a result of military defeats after which large numbers of conquered citizenry were sometimes forced to forego their personal freedom.

From the Thelema Lodge Calendar: " 'Cruel Crowley cruelly laughed.' Join Caitlin and the Section Two reading group for some reading and discussion of Masks of the Illuminati, by Robert Anton Wilson.

Needless to say, this is one of the titles we've added to Crowley's original bibliography, but it has been one of the most often recommended when we've asked for suggestion to update the A.'. reading list.

Masks was published in April of 1981 e.v. by Simon & Schuster's Pocket Books division in New York, and is not so easy to find these days on the used science fiction bookshelves. With James Joyce and Albert Einstein among its principal characters, it's one of those playful post-modernist page-turners which sold so well as paperbacks in the 1970s and '80s.

It's very much a novel for people who like to read Crowley books, and is even designed to look something like one of his works, with portentous Latinate subtitles, diagrams of magical implements, and numerous epigrams, quotations, and narrative shifts. Crowley himself appears towards the end as a powerful and rather sinister but still good-natured character, and there is some good conversational banter between the Master Therion, Joyce, and Lieber Al Einstein. These personages are of course not rendered as biographical characters; the book carries the usual novelistic coincidence disclaimer about 'any resemblance to persons living or dead.' They are hardly even characters at all, but only conversational voices, generated with certain stylized elements of their namesakes' writings in mind.

t all comes to quite a fine romp nevertheless, and the portrayal of our hero is a much more impressive and meaningful pastiche of Crowley and his writing style than we saw in EM>The Magician (Project Gutenberg Texts, 1908 edition) by Maugham , or in Jepson's No. 19, or M. R. James's Mr Karswell in 'Casting the Runes' (both 1910).

'Did you imagine that Truth was a dog that will come when you whistle?
Did not I.N.R.I. warn you what the alchemical transformation costs?
Were you not aware at the beginning that you would be required to face everything you fear?'

'But Einstein said quietly: Don't deny that you've been cruel.' "

A Fair Field of Folk-Tales

The 'Seven Days' of stories collected by Queen Marguerite in conscious imitation of Boccaccio are told in French literary prose. Many were likely contributed by her courtiers, though the queen herself seems to have taken charge of the project, providing not simply patronage but close editorial management. Most of her stories concern sexual encounters, particularly forceful attacks and violent seductions. Rape is a dominant subject (the perpetrators being frequently monks and other undisciplined clerics; we are in the age of Rabelais here!), but other tales are concerned with more consensual erotic negotiations along lines familiar from Boccaccio and the French fabliaux tradition.

The Pentameron is written in Neapolitan dialect prose (with some verses interspersed), comprising 'fairy tales' right out of the European domestic tradition; it is often credited as the first great literary collection of this material, to which the brothers Grimm returned more systematically later on. Basile's fifty tales are told in a vigorous and vulgar satiric style, which easily accommodates casual occurrences of the most stunning supernatural phenomena, as well as shameless paeans of erotic enthusiasm or tirades of startlingly scatological disdain.

We will be reading them in Sir Richard Burton's 1893 translation, made shortly after he finished the monumental 1001 Tales of the Arabian Nights (and the hundreds of leftover tales assigned to Supplemental Nights), with which it is very instructive to compare the Neapolitan stories."

From the Thelema Lodge Calendar: " The Elder Edda [Link to Wiki entry and some of the Edda in translation], a ninth-century collection of mythological and heroic poems from the great age of pagan Norse culture, will be the subject of our next Section Two meeting. The Eddas - there is also a 'younger' one, covering much the same material, written in Icelandic prose about 300 years later - are the principal repository for the pre-Christian religious culture of northern Europe.

These poems preserve centuries of oral tradition, including the tales of Odin, Thor, Freya, Loki, and the other 'sir gods, of the giants, dwarves, and monsters against whom they contend, of Yggdrasil the universal tree (great picture at link), Midgard (Miðgarðr) the world of men, and the kingdom of Hel beneath, and finally of the Fenris-Wolf (Hróðvitnir, Fenrisulfr) and Jörmungandr (World-Serpent, Earth-Serpent) who will destroy them all in the end-times of Ragnarok (Ragnarök).

hey are the product of a highly literate culture which extended from Norway and Denmark to Iceland and the northern parts of the British Isles, speaking the proto-Scandinavian language now known as Old West Norse or Icelandic. They sent their teen-agers out on 'viking' raids (the verb means 'going up into the bays' in their shallow boats to catch villages by surprise), but in medieval Iceland they organized Europe's first functional democracy, where representatives of each homestead - men and women together - met annually at the Althing (Alþing)' to review the laws and establish the policies of their country.

n the Eddic verses they first perfected the alliterative four-stress verse line which dominated Germanic poetry in the middle ages, and with which we are familiar in English from Beowulf, Piers Plowman, and the Gawain-poems. Norse poetry is concentrated and intense, narrating only the essential moments of each tale, and embodying a dark humor and a stern understated fatalism which one early critic describes as 'the outlook of thoughtful heathen of the later Viking age.' "

From the Thelema Lodge Calendar: "The Section Two reading group embarks in April upon a two-month study of the literature of utopia. Our meeting at Oz House on Monday evening 19th April at 8:00 will open a discussion of traditional utopian fictions from the Renaissance, beginning with Sir Thomas More's original Utopia of 1516. We will glance at some related elements in the writings of François Rabelais : the Thelemites at the end of Gargantua (1534) and the utopian colony in Pantagruel (1532). Then we will visit the magical Civitas Solis (the City of the Sun), written in 1602 by Tommaso Campanella, before venturing into the ideal commonwealths of two other Gnostic saints, Christianopolis (1619) by Johann Valantin Andreae, and The New Atlantis which Francis Bacon, Lord Verulam, left unfinished in 1626. These invented city-states embody the ideals of their own age; the dream of a just society in fully developed form, where the rights and responsibilities of every citizen are clearly defined, personally fulfilling, and fairly distributed. At the same time they are experiments in imaginary ethnography, or synthetic travelers' tales, whose alternate customs and perspectives offer a scale against which readers are invited to measure their own actual, unfinished, imperfectly defined communities. Perhaps the essential element in these invented foreign cultures is the realistic detail of their presentation, and its implicit comparison with our own, a function which excludes from the definition such completely fantastical societies as Martians or Hobbits. Following the Renaissance there have been several other utopian 'booms' in literature, particularly during the final decades of the nineteenth century and again after the second world war. These will be our subject in May, when we will examine the brief optimism for a bright clean efficient future and then the backlash into technological nightmare which turned ou-topia (nowhere) from eu-topia (the good place) into the totalitarian mechanized dystopia."

Frater Superior is Watching You

he dystopian tradition seems to begin in the very midst of its earliest examples, with stories that open in the idealist vein of the traditional utopia, but then become more involved with the threats of this concept than with its promises. One of the first is Bulwer Lytton's The Coming Race (1871), where a fantastic species of superior beings living in the hollow earth seems at first to appeal quite strongly to the visiting storyteller, who even falls in love with one of them. As he gets to know them better, however, the cold rationalism and the advanced scientific mentality of the atomic- powered 'Vril-ya' become more and more threatening, until the danger assumes evolutionary proportions and we are left wondering whether they might beat out mankind in a Darwinian competition for world domination. Crowley appropriated some of the ideas from this work in his own strange contribution to the utopian genre, The Lost Continent, or, Atlantis (Liber LI). Likewise in the writings of H. G. Wells, who was the first widely influential author in establishing the dystopian tradition, we often see the glittering dream of future progress in all its clean, automated appeal, only to find the storyteller becoming disillusioned and paranoid as the tale advances. The Time Machine (1895), When the Sleeper Wakes (1899), and A Modern Utopia (1905) are only the best examples among more than a dozen related works by Wells.

story by E. M. Forster entitled 'The Machine Stops' (1909) captures the spirit of rebellion against a future world-state which provides complete care in isolated cells for all mankind, leading to a technological apocalypse more urgent and prophetic than even the most pervasive tales of 'scientism' by Wells. Forster's novella ranks with the greatest of the early classics of the science fiction genre, which is perhaps the archetypal literary mode of the twentieth century, and it may also be the first unambiguously 'dystopic' literary vision of mankind's destiny. The earliest great classic of totalitarian dystopia is the Russian novel We, by Yevgeny Zamiatin, written in about 1920 under extreme Stalinist repression and published only abroad. Readers will recognize in We many plot elements of George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949), which is in some ways an English re-telling of Zamiatin's story. Perhaps the best known scientific dystopia is Aldous Huxley's Brave New World (1932), where the forces of technology and conditioning contend against irrepressible primitive vitalism in a rigidly hierarchical future. We will be comparing Huxley's stance in this work with his revisions of the concept of utopia in the later novels Ape and Essence (1949) and Island (1962). From the 1950s onwards, the dystopian concept appears so frequently in science fiction that no list could comprehend the tradition. Dystopia expresses our unwillingness to be trapped within our own achievements, and our essential dissatisfaction with the limitations of our dreams of order and control. In the eternal rebellion of chaos against creation we may find a uniquely Gnostic literary form, to which our reading group hopes to enunciate a variety of Thelemic perspectives."

John Silence - Physician Extraordinary, by Algernon Henry Blackwood 

From the Thelema Lodge Calendar: "Among the 'poets in Holy Orders' to whose works the student is directed in the section on 'materials for study' appended to Liber Artemis Iota, the first place is given to Jonathan Swift (1667-1745). Poet, priest, and satirist, Swift was Anglo-Irish, and for political reasons went unpreferred in his ecclesiastical career, despite being recognized as one of the most interesting and persuasive writers of his day. His great work is the four volumes of fictional travelogue, Gulliver's Travels into Several Remote Nations of the World, published in London in 1726. With our Utopian geography well established, the Section Two reading group will spend an evening in the worlds of Gulliver. Swift takes us through a series of startling shifts in narrative perspective, exploring the relations between self and society with a exuberance - and an astonishing facility of 'magical realist' detail - that breaks down all barriers between travel and utopia."

A Personal Narrative of a Pilgrimage to Al- Madinah and Meccah, by Sir Richard Burton

e had not been the first, though perhaps the best prepared, of the very few British traveler to return from geographical investigation of the holiest sites of Islam. At one point early on, Burton had to dispose hurriedly of a sextant he carried, due to suspicion it was arousing among his fellow pilgrims. This necessary caution prevented him from accomplishing one of the goals of his trip, a determination of the exact longitude of Medina, which was to remained unsettled among cartographers for another fifty years.

Written in the months following his safe return to Egypt and then to India, Burton's account appeared as A Personal Narrative of a Pilgrimage to Al- Madinah and Meccah (London: 1855; memorial edition 1893; reprinted 1964). Join Caitlin and the 'Section Two' reading group for a group discussion with selected readings from this classic account of the spiritual culture of the Near East. Burton's numerous observations, digressions, and footnotes on all aspects of the peoples and cultures he encountered provide a fascinating record of what was implied by occult Freemasons from northern Europe who designated their exclusive Templar order as 'Oriental.'

Crowley, who was in his mid-teens when Burton died, may well have modeled some of the notable features of his own character upon those of this outrageous and celebrated Victorian, whose checkered career as an explorer, linguist, writer, and collector of erotic folklore, achieved considerable celebrity. From the skill of playing double blindfold chess to the habit of adopting Oriental names and disguises, from his interest in exotic spiritual and sexual customs to his propensity for overland travel in unexplored regions of the world, Crowley sometimes seems to be adopting - or exceeding - specific features of Burton's public persona."

From the Thelema Lodge Calendar: "Read a little in any of Yeats's works, then join us and participate in a discussion of his importance as a poet, dramatist, politician, folklorist, and ceremonial magician. Our talk will be illustrated with a few brief readings from Yeats's memoirs, documenting some of his Golden Dawn contacts and studies.

G. H. Frater Perdurabo survived to assume the burden of the Prophet of the Aeon of Horus, and in the following decade completely reorganized the traditions of the Golden Dawn upon Thelemic lines in his early A.'. A.'.. On the other hand, G. H. Frater D.E.D.I. went on to become the most famous and most widely studied participant in the early activities of the Golden Dawn, but then noted in his autobiographical volume The Trembling of the Veil (1922) 'I am not now a member of a Cabbalistic society.' After their ceremonial confrontation over the heritage of Mathers' original organization, Crowley's treatment of Yeats is defined by a professional rivalry, pursued with a good deal of literary teasing. Yeats, however, seems to have genuinely feared and hated Crowley for years afterwards. Much later he seemed enraged and embarrassed to hear in 1914 that his father had become Crowley's friend in New York among the circle of the literary patron John Quinn. John Butler Yeats, a renowned painter, considered his son's old nemesis to be quite good company, and wrote to 'My dear Willie' of his fascination with this 'formidable stranger.' "

Note: There is a long letter Yeats to his son available at the end of this article.

From the Thelema Lodge Calendar: "'The Monster Must be Destroyed' --  Looking ahead to the dark festivals of mid-Autumn, the Section Two reading group will devote another evening to the work of Bram Stoker. Crowley included Dracula (1897) on the 'suggestive literature' reading list for the A.'. A.'., and several years ago our group enjoyed an especially stimulating discussion of this work. Now we return for a look at some of Stoker's lesser known writings. A prolific author who published eleven novels and dozens of stories, as well as several volumes of theatrical memoirs and a good deal of dramatic criticism, Stoker (1848-1912) spent ten years as a civil servant in Dublin before becoming personal secretary to one of his age's most celebrated stage actors, Sir Henry Irving, in 1878. He had earlier published a few stories and novellas in various magazines, and in the early 1890s his first three novels of Irish village life appeared, of which The Snake's Pass (1890) is the best known. His early work had included some traditional ghost stories and tales of horror for the Christmas annuals with which Victorian publishers flooded the winter-time fiction market, but nothing in this mode shows much preparation for Dracula, the fantastic masterpiece for which he became famous. This work, which has never been out of print in the twentieth century, created one of the great mythological figures of our culture, and exhibits a strikingly effective narrative technique in its epistolary form, which Stoker adapted from the earlier novels of Wilkie Collins.

From the Thelema Lodge Calendar: "The writings of Charles Baudelaire (1821-1867) will be the subject for this month's meeting of the Section Two reading group, with Caitlin inviting readers and listeners to join us for a discussion of the first great lyric poet of the dark side of the urban experience. 

"Modern poetry as our outgoing vulgar century has conceived of it seems to have two primary foundation stones, each of which is a great collection of lyric verse from the middle of the preceding century. Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman and the Flowers of Evil by Charles Baudelaire each embodied years of poetic craftsmanship, expanding and developing over a number of editions through the 1860s. These books redefined poetry, and of the two it was probably the torments explored in the French collection - the psychological, physical, artistic, erotic, and spiritual degradation of a cultured Parisian - which have had the greater influence. Certainly they did for Crowley, who was more influenced by Baudelaire than by any other poet, and translated much of his work into English (including the complete Little Poems in Prose, the hashish essays, and about a dozen of the Flowers themselves).

From the Thelema Lodge Calendar: "Guided by the closing comments of Crowley's A.'. A.'. curriculum, and generalizing from the references there to various folk literatures, our 'section two' group will venture this month to borrow an item from 'section one' : the ultimate Victorian folklore compendium, by Sir James George Frazer (1854-1941). It might almost seem as if Frazer accomplished the project of the fictional scholar Edward Casaubon in George Eliot's Middlemarch (1871-2), whose great work was called The Key to All Mythologies. But Frazer's study, which expanded over several editions (1890, 1900, and 1906- 1915) into a great twelve-volume collection of scholarship (with a supplemental thirteenth volume appearing in 1936), is nothing like the dry monograph upon which Casaubon was engaged. Frazer's vast romantic framework holds together a series of compelling and insightful studies, surprisingly objective in their analyses of cultural, moral, and religious issues. The Golden Bough was from its initial publication a best-selling and widely influential work, perhaps the greatest scholarly survey of ritual magic before Crowley's own writings. Frazer drew upon a huge data base combining history and ethnography, developed over the course of a prolonged fellowship at Trinity College, Cambridge, beginning in 1879. When Crowley matriculated to the same college in 1895, Frazer's stipend there was just being renewed for a fourth five-year term, although the scholar himself was frequently away traveling in Greece.

Continuing into a second month of discussion: 

Crowley's own praise for Frazer is seldom unqualified, though he credits the influence of The Golden Bough upon his understanding of the precession of religious aeons in his early drama The God-Eater and also in his great commentary upon the gospel story, Liber 888. Frazer is given pride of place among Crowley's forbearers in having two quotations from the Bough prefaced to Magick in Theory and Practice. In outlining the A.'. A.'. curriculum with J. F. C. Fuller, Crowley wrote that they could 'agree with' such pioneers away from the Christian era as 'Voltaire . . . Huxley . . . Frazer . . . and Nietzsche as far as they went' Confessions, chapter 60).

Considering that Frazer devoted several decades of a scholarly career to collecting descriptions of magical and ritual lore, readers who approach his work from the A.'. A.'. bibliography will be amused to note the scorn he often seems to express for the entire magical world-view. Frazer's definition is frankly negative: 'In short, magic is a spurious system of natural law as well as a fallacious guide to conduct; it is a false science as well as an abortive art.' Its practice by primitive magicians is based upon 'misapplications of the association of ideas' and 'mistaken notions of cause and effect' (from the 'Sympathetic Magic' chapter). Considered universal among early human cultures and surviving in contemporary savages, magic appeared to Frazer as the primitive stage of civilization, which with increasingly sophisticated cultivation would yield first to religion and then at last to an accurate scientific comprehension of the world. But just as Crowley was also to insist, Frazer recognizes a similarity between magic and science in that both involve the active working of man's will upon 'a certain established order of nature . . . which he can manipulate for his own ends.' Magic and Science differ in their levels of accuracy, understanding, and success, but are alike opposed to the religious attitude, where man 'ceases to rely on his own intelligence and his own unaided efforts, and throws himself humbly on the mercy of certain great invisible beings behind the veil of nature.' For Frazer the dawning Scientific Age seemed to promise unbounded enlightenment, and 'even in regions where chance and confusion appear still to reign, a fuller knowledge would everywhere reduce the seeming chaos to cosmos' (from Frazer's concluding chapter). If magic was scorned by Frazer as false science, Crowley expressed the same truth by responding that 'science was successful Magick' (Confessions, chapter 58)."

From the Thelema Lodge Calendar: "Meeting on Monday evening 21st February in the lodge library at 8:00, the 'Section Two' reading group will look this month at the classic pulp novel Darker Than You Think, Jack Williamson's occult adventure tale which develops the idea of witchcraft as a genetic 'taint' in the human evolutionary heritage. Join Caitlin for a discussion with selected readings from this apocalyptic fantasy, depicting the rise of a witch messiah who will renew the prehistoric supremacy of his ancient race of ruthless shape-shifting predators which has menaced mankind by night down through the ages. Originally appearing as a story in the magazine Unknown in 1940 (from which eight years later it was expanded into a novel), Darker Than You Think was a favorite of Jack Parsons, who sought out Williamson and befriended him upon its first publication. Today a celebrated and prolific author of science fiction and fantasy novels (and a retired university literature professor), who is still publishing major new works after an almost incredible career of over 70 years, Jack Williamson was twenty years old when he saw his first story illustrated on the cover of Amazing in 1928, and still at it in 1999 when his latest book The Silicon Dagger appeared.

Parsons, who increasingly saw himself in the role of Antichrist (which he later adopted as a magical name) would have been immediately fascinated by Darker Than You Think when he saw it among the several magazines of speculative fiction which he perused each month and shared with his friends. In a small American university town a reporter becomes attracted to a mysterious girl with 'flame-red hair' and strange eyes who admits 'I'm a witch' on their first date. Slowly it emerges that she is part of an ancient underground cult which is becoming 'organized, preparing for the time to test their power, awaiting the appearance of an expected leader -- the Child of Night -- to lead their Saturnalian rebellion.' In a series of dreamy nocturnal runs with the witch-girl, in which she sometimes takes the form of a large wolf or else rides on his back naked as a woman while he shifts to animal form, they kill off the team of desperate scientists who have excavated some ancient relics which could expose the witch-people. Gradually our hero overcomes his fears and learns the ways of magic, until in spite of his own doubts he emerges as that 'tall, lean, commanding figure, standing amid shattered rocks, terrible and black in a long hooded robe' -- the Child of Night himself."

Lysistrata, by Aristophanes