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

Lysistrata is typical of Aristophanes in being a social and political satire calling for peace, with ridicule of the disastrous military adventures which were nearly ruining his city. The idea is that a panhellenic feminist revolt and general sex strike by women could bring the forces on all sides to their knees in a few weeks, thus forcing a negotiated treaty with the opposing Spartans. The persuasive young Athenian matron Lysistrata (whose name means 'breaker of armies') gets her friends and some representative foreign women together to swear off all consensual erotic contact with the male combatants for the duration of hostilities. At the same time, a fearsome gang of older women move to occupy the principal temple, having barricaded themselves into the Acropolis -- and barred the doors, / The subversive whores. It all works out the women's way, with peace established and everyone in a hurry to rip the costumes off and claim their reward.

The works of Anthony Powell

From the Thelema Lodge Calendar: "'Sinister if Gifted Buffoon' 'The Essence of the All is the Godhead of the True.' Commemorating the greater feast last month of one of the outstanding English novelists of the twentieth century, the Section Two reading group will be discussing and reading from the works of Anthony Powell (1905-2000). Join Caitlin for an examination of the cycle of twelve comic novels which chronicle English intellectual culture from 1914 through 1971 e.v. under the general title A Dance to the Music of Time (published 1951-1975). Thelemites will take a particular interest in two of the novels, the sixth and twelfth, upon which our group will probably concentrate. The Kindly Ones (1962) compares the opening of the first world war in 1914 e.v. with that of the second in 1939, and presents the figure of 'Dr. Trelawney,' a new age guru, thaumaturge, and long-haired health-nut, who incorporates impressions of Aleister Crowley, mixed with traits reminiscent of Arthur Machen, Gurdjieff, and Rudolph Steiner. We meet Trelawney first as 'high priest, if not actually messiah' of a prophetic cult proclaiming a new law through their portentously oxymoronic ritual greeting formula, free-form calisthenics, and communal enthusiasm. Twenty-five years later we again get a detailed characterization of Trelawney, based even more directly upon reports of Crowley's retirement in a Bellevue residential hotel; rather dithering, asthmatic, and reliant upon drugs, but still inspired. In the cycle's final novel, Hearing Secret Harmonies, we see a revival of 'Trelawneyism' during the late '60s e.v. in a group of ceremonial magicians whose leader claims to be a reincarnation of the old master. The story is notable for its sustained presentation of group ritual dynamics and the attractions of ceremonial interaction.

Powell went to school with several of the great writers of his generation, including Eric Blair (George Orwell) and Cyril Connolly. Another of his school friends was Henry Yorke (known for his comic novels under the pseudonym Henry Green), who took over a family business manufacturing 'sanitary fittings' (flush toilets) which his older brother Gerald Yorke had avoided in favor of travel and esoteric studies. As an editor with the London publisher Duckworth in the late '20s e.v. Powell worked on the book Tiger-Woman by Betty May, a celebrated artists' model and grande dame of cafe society, whose 'writings' were recycled Sunday newspaper articles prepared with her paid cooperation by reporters to exploit her notoriety. When the book appeared in 1929, Crowley telephoned the Duckworth offices to invite its editor to lunch for a discussion of accusations made against the Abbey of Thelema (where Betty May's husband Raoul Loveday had died from drinking tainted water from a Cefalu stream). Taking the call, Powell found the 'near-cockney accent' of the magus unappealing, and knowing that his ancestors had been among the dissenting sects of the Quakers and Plymouth Brethren, 'wondered whether his cadences preserved the traditional 'snuffling' speech ascribed to the Roundheads.' The restaurant was called Simpson's, in The Strand, and Crowley said Powell might recognize him 'from the fact that I am not wearing a rose in my buttonhole.'

Recalling his mother's dread as well as his childhood perusal of The Equinox, Powell was uncertain about the meeting, wondering 'whether I should be met in the lobby by a thaumaturge in priestly robes, received with the ritual salutation: 'Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law'; if so, whether politeness required the correct response: 'Love is the Law, Love under Will.'' In fact the 'big weary-looking man' who 'rose from one of the seats and held out his hand' was 'quietly, almost shabbily, dressed in a dark brown suit and grey Homburg hat.' His figure seemed 'intensely sinister' due to the 'unusual formation of his bald and shaven skull.' They dined on mutton, and Crowley had a glass of milk. After fully stating his case against the 'inaccuracies and vulgarities of phrase' marring Tiger-Woman, Crowley expounded in general upon 'the hard life of a mage, its difficulties and disappointments, especially in relation to the unkindness and backbiting of fellow magicians.' They parted amicably, and Crowley took no further action against the Betty May book (though he unsuccessfully brought suit against a similar book by Nina Hamnett a couple years later).

Powell did not meet the Beast again tête-à-tête (although he attended the Hamnett trial, deciding that 'Crowley's combination of facetiousness and humility could hardly have made a worse impression'), but Duckworth was approached the following year with a book offer in Crowley's handwriting, claiming to be from 'the beautiful German girl for whose love the infamous Aleister Crowley committed suicide' (based upon a stunt Crowley pulled off in Portugal to impress scarlet woman Hanni Jaeger, which briefly fooled several European newspapers). Crowley was offering to write his own sensationalized confessional best-seller in the character of another girl 'ruined' by love for him, 'the story of our elopement' to be entitled My Hymen, for 'an advance of £500 and a 15% royalty.' It seems a pity that Duckworth passed up what might have been a fascinating contribution to the topic of Thelemic feminism, but instead it was determined to commission a book called War and Western Civilization from 'Boney' Fuller.

hough their 'acquaintance remained unrenewed' Crowley shared a London neighborhood with Powell's family briefly during the '30s, and was recalled as a pedestrian whose 'tall figure would from time to time stride past the Children's Hospital just opposite our flat. Hatless, heavily bespectacled, he was dressed in green plus-fours, as for golf. Some days, too, a large bald skull could be seen, highlighted over a table, through the window of a Great Ormond Street ground-floor room, where Crowley was playing chess with a friend.' Powell found it easy to be critical of the Beast's ritualistic presentation and various personal eccentricities, and he especially noticed the 'ring of the old-time music-hall comedian' keeping up a 'steady flow of ponderous gags delivered in the rasping intonation' of Crowley's voice. But in this same vein Powell rather enjoyed Crowley's comic verse, and remained interested in his personality in the roles of magus and religious leader. He saw clearly the possibilities behind 'Crowley's moments of thaumaturgical majesty of demeanour,' however much of the 'buffoon' there might have seemed to be in his style (Powell, Messengers of Day, 1978, pages 79-85 & 152)."

From the Thelema Lodge Calendar: "The Section Two reading group this month is discussing the early thirteenth-century German epic Parzival. This work is our primary source for the lives and deeds of two Gnostic saints, the grail-knight Parzival himself, and his father Kamuret, and is also the source for the opera Parzival by yet another Gnostic saint. We will be examining the emotional and spiritual development of the grail-knight, which is presented with a realism and complexity not previously found in the Arthurian tradition. We will contrast Parzival's devotion to his wife Condwiramurs with the very different approaches adopted in the erotic adventures of his companion Gawain, and also those of Parzival's own father. The Parzival of Wolfram von Eschenbach was probably finished about 1212, and adapted its grail story from the unfinished Perceval or Conte du Graal of Chrétien de Troyes (written in the early 1180s). Several good modern translations of both Wolfram's and Chrétien's poems are available, and participants are encouraged to have a look at the earlier work also, in order to better appreciate the new directions by which the German poet leads the story. 'The music of your lips will part me from my Honor.' "

From the Thelema Lodge Calendar: "Join Caitlin for a discussion centering upon of the lodge master's favorite piece of narrative fiction, Robinson Crusoe (1719), with selected readings from the continuing tradition of island castaway stories. This 'summer vacation' meeting of the Section Two reading group will gather to spend an hour or two sharing literary experiences of maroonings in paradise. Beginning with Defoe's masterpiece of personal realism (the best candidate for 'earliest English novel'), we will explore the heritage of Robinson Crusoe in stories of savagery and survival from Peter Pan to Lord of the Flies.

Beginning in his sixties, Defoe produced fictional narrative writings for the booksellers' trade, providing a foundation for the English novel with his accounts of the colorful lives of synthesized literary characters such as Moll Flanders and Captain Singleton, who appear to be offering autobiographical accounts in the books which bear their names. Other works, equally full of stories, but also presented as non-fiction, such as The History of the Pirates (and other pirate books, 1719-28), and A Journal of the Plague Year (1722), were imaginative reconstructions rather than reports based upon actual participation. Later Defoe produced several books, also full of story telling, which explored the more fanciful territories of 'non-fiction,' such as The Political History of the Devil (1726) and A System of Magic (1727). Of all his works it was the one-man utopia of Crusoe's island for which he is best remembered, and Defoe's wonderfully practical and detailed account of the castaway's construction of an entire personal culture for himself in isolation has captured many imaginations and been retold in many variations ever since.

The decadence of this 'island' literature can be seen in shelves of Victorian boys' adventure stories, culminating in the great theatrical hit of 1904 e.v., the tale of the eternal boy Peter Pan. Here the island has degenerated into a perpetual adventure machine, the ancestor of our modern 'theme park' amusement facilities (utopia -- or paradise -- contrived into a sort of Disneyland). The immediate and sustained success of James Barrie's play gave an almost mythological aura to the title figure which has even been interpreted as a religious phenomenon. In view of the date of its premier, one critic's conclusions seem of particular interest: observing the development of non-religious literature for children in the later Victorian years -- largely due to the influence of Carroll's Alice -- it is apparent that . . .

'Barrie . . . in Peter Pan . . . . was following in the steps of Charles Kingsley, George MacDonald, and Kenneth Grahame: working from a largely religious impulse, he was attempting to replace conventional religion with something of his own devising which would summon up religious feelings in his child and adult readers. And unlike them he made a complete success of it. Peter Pan is an alternative religion."

Peter Pan -- 'the universal phallus,' perhaps? -- is the half-human, half- immortal 'personal saviour' who performs miracles, can restore the dead, and carries away through the sky those children who will never grow up, to a happy hunting ground of perpetual and unchanging satisfaction. In the famous stage crisis at the death of his fairy guardian angel Tinkerbell, Pan elicits a formal profession of faith from the audience ('If you believe, clap your hands!'), and he battles throughout time and space with the satanic Captain Hook (who seems to be his own unacknowledged 'adult' self). At the close of the Christian aeon the impulse to move on into unexplored spiritual territory was so strong that even so silly and self-absorbed a writer as Barrie was willing to design his own universe of spiritual conflict as an entertainment for children.

William Golding's Lord of the Flies (1954; named by his editor, T. S. Eliot) is a sort of Catholic answer to the intensely Protestant story of Robinson Crusoe. On Golding's island grace and ingenuity are no match for the inherently degenerate human condition, so that we see not an ordered paradise but a chaos of destruction spurred on by malicious enthusiasm, competition, pride, and laziness. Based not directly on Defoe's book but upon a Victorian juvenile thriller in the 'Robinsonian' castaway tradition, Golding took over the same characters from a group of capable young imperial administrators who triumph over the tropics in R. M. Ballantyne's The Coral Island (1858), and showed how a group of British boys might just as likely make the most disgusting and morally hideous mess of their island paradise. Spend some time with one or more of these books, or pick your own island reading, and join us for our Section Two expedition."

From the Thelema Lodge Calendar: " 'This is serious, Holmes! We must find Crowley soon.'

'Have you never heard of the Cabbala, Watson?'

There is a large share of anachronism in this account, but we are to suppose that sometime around 1913 e.v. the celebrated fictitious consulting detective Sherlock Holmes is engaged by the radical and high-born Cambridge don Bertrand Russell to retrieve a lost mind, which turns out to belong to philosophy's maddest new star, Ludwig Wittgenstein. As they investigate, Holmes and Watson keep encountering John Maynard Keynes - legendary for his mastery of profit - who appears to be peddling drugs. Holmes nearly seduces Annie Besant, and goes on to interview Virginia Woolf and Lytton Strachey, but then they encounter an enigmatic female violinist, and much of the trouble gets traced back to good old Aleister Crowley. Russell and Crowley, it seems, were up at Trinity College during the same years at Cambridge, and are still playing tricks on each other. It adds up to rather a silly romp in the end, perhaps, but some of the philosophical snippets are perfectly valid, and the entire notion was a nice one.

'Your acquaintance with magick is superficial, Mr. Holmes.' "

From the Thelema Lodge Calendar: "Beowulf, the sole surviving epic poem in Old English, is the subject of our Section Two discussion this month, meeting in the lodge library with Caitlin at 8:00 on Monday evening 18th September. The story concerns a Swedish warrior chieftain of the early sixth century, and the three monsters he defeats in single combat. Written in England in the early eighth century, the poem spoke to a culture of fairly recent immigrants who were replacing an earlier Celtic civilization, and who projected their cultural heritage back through their Scandinavian ancestors. England, settled from about the fifth century of the old aeon by frontiersmen of various Teutonic and Scandinavian extractions, had gradually established itself as one of the more pleasant and comparatively peaceful backwaters of the continental European culture. For several centuries -- despite the odd local catastrophe now and again -- continuity was the rule, and social definitions remained quite stable.

Even the great cultural invasion of the frenchified 'William the Bastard' in 1066 (the effects of which rapidly ended the Anglo-Saxon literary culture), was ethnically just another rather late wave of the same sort of settlement. In those intervening centuries the greatest change in the social fabric came with the establishment of a foreign spiritual philosophy, the Roman cult of Christ. In a society so slow to change, this imported innovation could not all at once drive out the entire heritage of pagan warrior life which had for many generations bound society together by supporting political and economic systems of feudal alliance, charter, guild, and oath.

While formally adopting the Christian ethos, and becoming for a millennium an overwhelmingly Christian nation (a condition outgrown finally with participation in the European Renaissance), England never altogether discarded the old pagan values of the Germanic tribes. Partly due to its status as a culture 'converted' by outside forces, the English identity was heavily weighted with respect for its warrior ancestors, who were 'heathens' living 'outside the faith' by their own strong, glorious, stoical -- and ultimately doomed -- volition. It was almost as if this maintenance of pre-Christian ideas and insights functioned as a covert stronghold for an underground heritage of magical and humanistic impulses, which were thus kept alive to be revived in new social and spiritual patterns now in the aeon of Thelema."

From the Thelema Lodge Calendar: "'Deeply Delving in an Interdicted Lore.' The pulp fiction of Clark Ashton Smith (1893-1961), much of which appeared in the magazine Weird Tales alongside that of his friend H. P. Lovecraft, will be the subject of our Section Two reading group this month, meeting with Caitlin in the lodge library on Monday evening 23rd October, beginning at 8:00. As a promising young northern California poet, Clark Ashton Smith of Auburn first established his literary reputation with the eerie and elaborate visionary quality of his verses. His 1912 volume entitled The Star-Treader and Others was especially celebrated, and he also published a series of short tales in the 'Oriental' mode of the Arabian Nights, and was a prolific translator of French 'Symbolist' poetry.

n 1922 e.v. Lovecraft wrote to Smith from Rhode Island with praise for the Star-Treader poems, initiating a correspondence with 'Klarkash-Ton' which continued for fifteen years. Lovecraft got the more highly cultured Californian to read 'The Call of Cthulhu' in the February 1928 issue of Weird Tales, and their letters soon became full of an invented mythology as they named and speculated upon hideous mutant divinities from remotest eons and alternate dimensions. Before long Smith's literary friends in San Francisco were shocked to see his name on horror magazine stories like 'The Abominations of Yondo' and 'The Weird of Avoosl Wuthoqquan.'

For a few years in the early 1930s Smith became a professional pulp writer, although editors at Weird Tales (along with Strange, Stirring, Astounding, Uncanny and the various other periodical purveyors of fantastic fiction) were prone to reject some of his best work as 'too poetic.' Between September 1929 and the end of 1933 Smith wrote about a hundred stories, with only a few more to come in the next couple years; by 1936 he had stopped writing fiction completely and devoted himself to painting and sculpture, becoming famous in Auburn for the grotesque figures he produced. In 1954 he married and moved to Pacific Grove on the Monterey peninsula to spend his final years in retirement. The stories for which he is celebrated may have been produced primarily to earn extra money at a time when Smith was caring for his aged parents, but his literary craftsmanship gives them a jeweled intensity of focus, and his sardonic humor maintains a complex balance of attitude, which transcend the genres of fantastic fiction that provided their original marketplace. Smith is at his best in suggesting the vast stretches of time and space across which the essential influences of the universe reach out to play upon our conscious identities, and how such alien contact across the abyss can engage the individual overwhelmingly, to the point of enveloping into oblivion the investigating consciousness. Smith's protagonists each happen upon some unforeseeable communication with forces too alien to be comprehended, only to discover their own deeper identity with those forces, to which they are drawn with 'an abhorrently conflicting impulse to return.' "

From the Thelema Lodge Calendar: "This month the Section Two reading group studies The Confessions of an English Opium-Eater (1821) by Thomas De Quincey (1785-1859), and will meet to read from and discuss this work together. Join Caitlin for a look at one of the earliest personal chronicles, first of recreational drug use, and later of desperate drug addiction. When Aleister Crowley determined to use the title Confessions for his autohagiography, he was not just following the path beaten by Augustine and Rousseau in their confessional volumes, but also -- perhaps especially -- that of De Quincey in these Opium Confessions.

From the Thelema Lodge Calendar:  "Now well into its seventh year, the Section Two Reading Group with Caitlin meets in the lodge library once a month for an evening of literary discussion and shared reading. Two late-Victorian tales of moral and psychological horror will be our double subject:  Stevenson's Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde along with Wilde's Dorian Gray. Our twin titles for this month -- a doubling of tales about doubling -- are not from any of the Crowley's own lists, but we will argue that they easily might have been, had they not seemed too obvious at the time to be mentioned. Both are by authors extraordinarily popular during Crowley's youth, and in whom he is known to have taken particular interest. Robert Louis Stevenson he admired as a stylist (see for example this month's 'Crowley Classics' selection), and in 1903 with Gerald Kelly he had dramatized and performed one the stories from Stevenson's New Arabian Nights. Oscar Wilde, whose artificially dramatic prose was less of an influence, had been so prominent and pathetic a celebrity as to attain nearly mythic status for Crowley's generation.

From the Thelema Lodge Calendar: "In honor of St Valentine the Section Two reading group has often selected obscene literature for our February meetings, and this month's foray into the fabliaux of medieval France promises to be one of the most shameless. Fabliaux were popular in the thirteenth century, and just like the beast fables of that age they are brief comic narratives, typically of a few hundred octosyllabic verse couplets, sometimes concluding with a mock moral. Best understood as 'animal stories' about men and women, they are nearly always obscenely erotic or scatological, and are told in a casual style of clever ribaldry. Their characters are ordinary townspeople; usually tradesmen's families and members of the lower orders of the secular clergy. Modern readers like to pretend that fabliaux are accurate vulgar anecdotes of middle-class medieval attitudes, but if they were the sit-coms of their era we ought no more (or less) to look for ethnic data in them than in the content of our own commercial broadcasting. There is every reason to consider fabliaux as productions in a literary genre, enjoyed by sophisticated and courtly audiences and often written by major authors well known for their more respectable works. Their plots frequently burlesque situations in the traditional courtly romances, and sometimes reconstruct perennial stories with analogues going back to classical times. In the following centuries this sort of stories developed more significantly in prose than in verse, with the style of Boccaccio's Decameron serving as a model for many fifteenth-century imitators, becoming ultimately one of the fountainheads of European literary prose. In English fabliaux are best known in the poetic retellings of six of them among the Canterbury Tales of Chaucer, written (again for a literate courtly audience) at the close of the fourteenth century. Join us for a look at this vital and sexy story-telling tradition from seven hundred years ago. Half a dozen fun modern translations of medieval fabliaux are available for study on-line at http://www.courses.fas.harvard.edu/~chaucer/special/litsubs/fabliaux/ , and also at http://www.librarius.com/cantales.htm "

From the Thelema Lodge Calendar: " 'The Devil's Brother-in-Law.'  The classic text of magical aspiration and demonic invocation in English literature, Christopher Marlowe's poetic drama of 1592 Doctor Faustus, will be our 'Section Two' topic this month. Join us with for a group reading of the play, which contains some of the most impressive dramatic poetry in our language. There will also be some brief discussion of the larger pattern of the Faustian situation in literature, with mention of some of the later characterizations of Faust in nineteenth century music and poetry, to which we may be returning in future months with the reading group for some additional digressions into demonality and damnation.

n the throws of the Lutheran reformation, Germany was discussing spiritual alternatives at this time as never before, and considerable attention was given to the extreme example of Faust. As might be expected, most judgments which have come down to us were not those of the townspeople fascinated by the peripatetic magus, but those of scholars, religious leaders, and civil authorities who despised this reckless and unscrupulous popularizer of their secrets, and the extravagant claims of such a fly-by-night prophet and showman. Faust was condemned from so many sides that it seems a wonder he survived as long as he did. Authorities as divergent as Johannes Tritheimus (the Benedictine scholar abbot) and Martin Luther (excommunicated priest who successfully denied the pope) dismissed Faust as a rogue and a bum, a sidewalk huckster, and a dangerous fake. After Faust's death (around 1539, aged perhaps 60) he remained a symbolic figure, and was rapidly mythologized. Within ten years a dramatic story was being told of how the devil himself had tracked Faust down and killed him horribly. A generation later when the first written account of Faust circulated (around 1580) the story was that there had been a formal contract between Faust and the devil, which had run twenty-four years and then come due, leaving Faust defenseless against Satan's direct assault. Shortly afterwards when the Faust story came to be printed, first in what is now called the Frankfurt Faustbuch, it attracted enormous attention, with sixteen German editions of the little book in two years, and numerous translations quickly following. An English paraphrase was published in London a few years later under the title The History of the Damnable Life of Doctor Faustus. (The earliest English copy to survive was printed in 1592, but it was probably a reprint of material circulating in lost editions a year or two earlier.

Christopher Marlowe in the early 1590s was London's greatest dramatic poet and most successful playwright, and also one of the leading sinister new wave black leather trend setters of his day. More daring than any other established Elizabethan author, Marlowe openly celebrated not only an amoral bisexual hedonism, but a complete rejection of the dominant spiritual paradigms of his day. Marlowe was not just a heretic, he was an outright atheist openly scorning the piety, the morals, and the whole theology of Christianity. His great play Tamberlaine, the outstanding dramatic success of its season, which he followed up with a successful sequel, depicts the ruthless Turkic conqueror (otherwise known as Timur) in scornful triumph over all the established forms of spiritual culture, gradually taking over the world. Doctor Faustus on the other hand is an overtly Christian story, but it is easy to see the attraction of the defiance depicted in Faust's tragedy for someone of Marlowe's dark sympathies. The play was apparently written during the final year of its author's life, and some scenes in the middle may not have been finished, since an inferior poet is known to have been hired a few years later to make dramatic additions to the text so that it could be performed."

From the Thelema Lodge Calendar: " 'Finding a Bad Way Home.' Even as a man ascending a steep mountain is lost to sight of his friends in the valley, so must the adept seem. They shall say: He is lost in the clouds. But he shall rejoice in the sunlight above them, and come to the eternal snows. Or as a scholar may learn some secret language of the ancients, his friends shall say: 'Look! he pretends to read this book. But it is unintelligible - it is nonsense.' Yet he delights in the Odyssey, while they read vain and vulgar things. - Liber Porta Lucis sub figura X, verses 15-16.

From the Thelema Lodge Calendar: "Gnostic saint, scientist, statesman, titan of literature, initiate of various orders of spiritual fraternity, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832) provides the subject for our Section Two reading group this month. We will be reading from and discussing Goethe's 'Märchen' (little story), an alchemical fairy tale or symbolic parable written in 1795. (This link is to the Goethe biography and many of his works, translated in several languages.) Goethe had begun studying hermetic and alchemical texts at the end of his 'teens in 1768, corresponding at length with several friends regarding his developing insights into esoteric knowledge. He was fascinated with the symbolic narratives of the Rosicrucians, and in particular Andréa's Chemical Wedding (probably first written in 1605, then revised and published in 1616). Using techniques of medieval allegorical narrative, combined with emblematic meditation and elements of folk-style generic story-telling, a tradition of imaginative analogues to individual spiritual transformation had developed during the European Renaissance. [Read a Plus Ultra magazine article about Andréa's work.] "Complex symbolic narratives such as the great thirteenth century Roman de la Rose achieved a dense significance of meaning on multiple interacting dimensions, in a manner which invited participation from the reader as their ideas were discussed and their icons manipulated in subsequent cultural structures. (See the Glasgow University Exhibition notes on the Roman, including terrific images of the mss.)

From the Thelema Lodge Calendar: " 'Chymische Hochzeit R+C.'  The wild alchemical allegory which appeared as a German pamphlet in 1616, The Chemical Wedding of Christian Rosenkreutz will be our topic this month for reading and discussion with the Section Two reading group at Thelema Lodge.  Recently a newly arrived lodge member asked about the name of this enterprise, since we don't seem to be sticking very close to the actual list any more. The explanation is that we long ago just about exhausted Crowley's old list, and ever since we've been making it up as we go. We have also been exploring the more directly erotic bibliography in Liber Artemis Iota, and various other 'recommended literature' from the Master Therion, as well as taking suggestions from the recently published O.T.O. Curriculum.

his month, in keeping with our summer program for exploring the range of allegorical literature, we return in an indirect way to the 'official' Section Two list, with includes several presentations of the Rosicrucian pamphlets. As we saw last month with Goethe's 'Fairy Tale,' and as we hope to see when we press further on into a grand allegorical orgy next month with comparisons of various samples from the genre (bring your favorites!), allegory as a narrative mode can have its delights. Despite its nearly universal bad rap from twentieth century writers and critics (apart from George Orwell and C. S. Lewis), allegory bares some essential relations with many of the characteristic stances toward narrative with which we are most familiar. The integrity of icons, the fascination with self- consciousness, our sense of genre and the typical, the wide-ranging games of reference we so continually play in our stories, frequently betray their foundations in traditional allegorical figuration.

From the Thelema Lodge Calendar: 'symbol and Similitude." On Monday the Section Two reading group meets to share examples of literary allegory and discuss the nature and potential of this indirect style of communication. Join Caitlin  for 'An Orgy of Allegory' as we explore one of the primary methods of putting meaning into the telling of stories, and of taking it out again as they are told to us. 'Allegory' is a term of literary art which everyone seems to recognize, but many have difficulty in defining. It is a method for the presentation of conceptual information in narrative form by artificial analogy with the psychology of interpersonal relations. It is also a method of interpreting narrative texts so that they seem to present a covert conceptual structure within the interactions of their characters. Both types - we might call them active and passive allegory, depending upon whether they are practiced by writers or readers - seem to us old fashioned, if not obsolete, but both are in fact strongly active in the strategies we continue to depend upon for our own presentation and reception of significance in narratives.

o single text is assigned this month for the reading group, but all are invited to consider their own experiences of allegory in literature, and to review one or two of their favorite examples. Spiritual and psychological allegories will most likely be central to our discussion, beginning with the medieval traditions from Martianus Capella's Marriage of Mercury and Philology [Link to a manuscript facsimile] (fifth century C.E.) to the great thirteenth century French study of erotic psychology entitled The Romance of the Rose. [ link to a manuscript reproduction online] Selections from The Faerie Queene [link to complete e-text] of Edmund Spenser, the masterpiece of Renaissance allegory in English, will be offered, and we will also touch upon the classic allegory of Puritanism, Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress. [link to complete e-text] We will be asking how the sustained metaphor of allegory has influenced the presentation of personal character in literature, and how narrative personification has in turn altered our experience of the abstract concepts thus presented. We will also examine the area where allegory fades into fantasy, which may hold the key to much of the pleasure of this literary trope. Tensions between the metaphorical motivations of allegorical figures and their vestiges of psychological character can establish a fascinating ambiguity which deepens and extends our experience of personality in narrative, while at the same time realizing in immediate human terms the thematic content of their stories."

From the Thelema Lodge Calendar: "The 'Section Two' reading group at Thelema Lodge meets each month to share literary studies, to cultivate the sacredness of texts, and to expand the possibilities of language as a medium for the work of the will. Meetings consist of reading and discussing together from a selected work or author, or more generally upon an agreed topic. Some are suggested by the A.'. A.'. curriculum, or by one of Crowley's other reading lists, while others we have picked out ourselves along analogous lines, of for our own reasons. This month's gathering on Monday evening 20th August will be devoted to the writings and thought of Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834), the most interesting and intelligent of the English 'Romantic' poets.

An impoverished scholar, dependent upon prizes and scholarships for his Cambridge studies, Coleridge (like Crowley a century later) spent three years in college there and then went down without bothering to take his degree. As a young man his associations with radical politics, nonconformist religion, and with poets such as Wordsworth and Southey, promised great things. In fact he lacked discipline and wasted much of his literary career on journalism or on minor and uncompleted projects, dampening his efforts by opium addiction and habitual self-doubt, wasting his time on quarrels with most of his friends. Famous as a revolutionary democrat while still at university, Coleridge and his friends designed a utopian project to emigrate to Pennsylvania among the newly independent United States. There twelve couples would live on a communal farm without individual ownership, educating their children for a new age of enlightenment, free of the bad old moral baggage of prejudice and selfishness and guilt. Raising the money to set out proved beyond the cooperative ability of the leaders who had talked up this scheme, so that it never got off the ground, but the idea of an isolated commune where a mixed fraternity could live and work in harmony was always the foundation for Coleridge's social ideals and lifestyle.

He survived to become known as a literary genius on the basis of a dozen or so of his poems, and to retire into respectable Tory Anglicanism."

From the Thelema Lodge Calendar:  "The Section Two reading group will be enjoying the works of Terry Southern (1924-1995), comic novelist, screenwriter, counter-cultural journalist, and indomitable hipster of the 'fifties, 'sixties, and 'seventies. Leaving home in west Texas as soon as he was old enough, Southern's college career was interrupted by a tour of European duty in the Second World War, after which he completed his education on the GI Bill at Northwestern in Chicago and the Sorbonne in Paris. He then achieved limited celebrity in pre-swinging mid-'fifties London with a handful of brief, well crafted comic novels, including the legendary pornographic comedy Candy (unpublished until 1964). As a Hollywood screenwriter in the 1960s he wrote, or did substantial revision on the scripts for, Dr Strangelove (1964), The Loved One (1965, working with Christopher Isherwood), Barbarella (1968), Easy Rider (1969), The Magic Christian (1970), and End of the Road (1970). On Strangelove, for example, Southern was hired to re-work a script by director Kubrick and suspense novelist Peter George, consisting of a serious treatment of George's military thriller Red Alert. Peter Sellers had given Kubrick a copy of The Magic Christian and from that connection arose the notion of converting the tense depiction of a great doomsday bungle into the blackest of comedies. Before Southern came on the job, as the comic re-write man later liked to brag, 'it wasn't funny.' Following his string of successes in the 'sixties he was less fortunate with regard to the films in which he participated, and 'between 1970 and his death in 1995, Southern worked on over forty other [movie] projects, but only The Telephone (1987), directed by Rip Torn, was filmed (according to biographer Lee Hill). Especially recommended among Southern's books are Candy (his original novella was expanded by 'junky poet' Mason Hoffenburg, and the work circulated in typescript for years among friends before censorship let up enough for publication) and The Magic Christian (1959). Films of both stories can be seen on video. Southern's other books include Flash and Filigree (1957), Red Dirt Marijuana (stories, 1967), Blue Movie (1970), Texas Summer (1992), and the new collection of journalism entitled Now Dig This! (2001), as well as an illustrated memoir of touring with the Rolling Stones in the carefree cocaine days of the 1970s."

From the Thelema Lodge Calendar: 'Voluptuous, Obscene, and Complacent' On Monday evening  the Section Two reading group gathers with Caitlin to peer into one of the great creepy books of all time, Mathew G. Lewis's 1796 Gothic bestseller The Monk. Lewis (1775- 1818) was a bored young 'eurocrat' in the British embassy at The Hague when he decided to devote a few months of his spare time to the composition of a novel, somewhat in the style of his successful contemporary horror writer Ann Radcliffe. But Lewis had been reading the new emotionalized mode of German literature known as Sturm und Drang ('tempest and turmoil'), which starkly characterized the more extreme states of the psyche. Marked by its fascination with youthful extravagance, violence, and naked honesty of feeling, without the shallow optimism of the Enlightenment or the artificial sentimentality of polite literature, this new narrative attitude was nearly unknown to English storytelling. Lewis's Gothic thriller completely abandoned the shocking but ultimately rational girls' horror thrillers popular in England during the 1790s (immortalized by Jane Austin's parody of them twenty years later in Northanger Abbey). Instead he produced a raw, alienated extravaganza of unhinged excess which earned him the title (in a review by Charles Lamb) of 'master of the art of freezing the blood.' Combining occult elements with vicious, obscene, and insane character motivations which were worked out with an elaborate display of psychological verisimilitude, The Monk shocked and fascinated its first readers.

Lewis was celebrated in glowing terms by the Marquis De Sade in France, but condemned so strongly by Coleridge and other English reviewers that he agreed to tone down the sex and violence in later editions of his novel. Section Two readers, who may find that they are not altogether immune from Lewis's terrible surprises and scenes of carnage even after two hundred years, are advised to secure an edition based either upon the first edition or upon its author's (surviving) manuscript of the novel.

Online link to Liber 418, provided by the Sacred Texts site.

From the Thelema Lodge Calendar: "In a departure from our usual focus upon works of 'suggestive' fiction, the Section Two reading group at Thelema Lodge meets this month to supplement Leigh Ann's Vision and the Voice reading project with a literary study of Liber 418. We will gather in the lodge library with Caitlin (preceding the reading of ZOM, the antepenultimate aethyr). Crowley himself considered this book, of the many to have come from (or through) him, as second only to Liber AL in literary and prophetic importance. The text was generated as a ritual diary, recording the visionary content of scrying sessions held (except for the first two earlier visions) in the Sahara desert late in 1909 e.v. with Frater Omnia Vincam (Victor Neuburg) as scribe and assistant. Each of the visions was initiated by Crowley's recitation of the appropriate Enochian call (the nineteenth key, with the three-letter name of the aethyr slotted in) as he peered into a large yellow topaz gemstone which functioned 'not unlike the looking-glass in the case of Alice.' Although diagrammed spherically, the Enochian airs were not spatially conceived, with each consisting experientially of 'the state characteristic of, or peculiar to, its nature.' Having successfully invoked (and verified) this specific state, Crowley as scryer would 'receive the subtle impressions' which by long discipline he had trained his senses to distinguish, thus 'becoming cognizant of the phenomena of those worlds.' Then he would 'describe what I saw and repeat what I heard, and Frater O. V. would write down my words.' Afterwards the visions were tested for coherence and consistency, and then incorporated into the working record to facilitate analysis of the entire project. They were found to contain crucial prophesies of the new Thelemic aeon of Horus. 'They brought all systems of magical doctrine into harmonious relation. . . . The whole of the past Aeon appeared in perspective, and each element thereof surrendered its sovereignty to Horus, the Crowned and Conquering Child, the Lord of the Aeon announced in the Book of the Law' (Confessions, as quoted from the unabridged typescript in the introduction to Liber 418 in Equinox IV:2, published by the O.T.O. in 1998 e.v.)."

From the Thelema Lodge Calendar:  "Monday evening finds the Thelema Lodge 'Section Two' group riding the bandwagon to Middle Earth with selected readings from The Lord of the Rings and other writings of John Ronald Reuel Tolkien (1892-1973). Choose a passage or two that stands out in your memories from past readings of these 'fantasy' classics, and gather around the fire in Horus Temple to read them once more with us. Tolkien, an Oxford professor of Germanic philology, constructed in his fiction an idealized pagan world of the bronze age, still recognizably English in many details, with foreign powers appearing as various species of more or less monstrous races.

His tales of Middle Earth face readers squarely with one of the central challenges of Crowley's 'Section Two' curriculum for A.'. A.'. Probationers: the difference between ritual magick and the magic of folklore and fiction. Whereas ceremonial magick in ritual provides a pattern for the concentration of will which functions like a yoga of belief for the participants, the magic of fiction simply extends this function into an artificial 'fantasy' of power. Untrained, undisciplined magical amateurs often fail to observe this difference, allowing their work to depend upon drama and confusion as they misrepresent their conditions in order more freely to imagine their results.

From the Thelema Lodge Calendar: "Ovid, a leading Roman poet during the reign of Augustus Caesar, who died in exile partly because the emperor took offense at his subversively erotic verse, was never a favorite of Aleister Crowley. Unmentioned in Section Two of the A.'. A.'. reading list, or even in the Artemis Iota catalogue of erotic classics, Ovid is never quoted and rarely even mentioned in Crowley's writings. The fact that Crowley shows no sign of having studied his works seems slightly odd to us, but is most likely due to an accident of history. Ovid, the favorite classical poet of both Chaucer and Shakespeare, had ranked alongside Virgil in his influence upon the European middle ages and the Renaissance, but gradually yielded place to Horace in the eighteenth century, so that by the period of Crowley's education he had been out of style for over a century, and had nearly disappeared from scholarship, ignored by all but a few mythographers. After the pronounced rebirth of interest during the past century in Ovid's poetry, and because of the close scrutiny his works give to erotic enthusiasm and its operations, he has come to seem an obvious choice for our reading group, despite Crowley's having missed him. At any rate he is easily justified as an addition by the generalized recommendation of 'Greek and Latin Classics' at the end of the reading list. The 'Section Two' reading group meets for a review of Ovid's poetic sex manuals and erotic elegies, the Ars Amatoria and the Amores. Join Caitlin in the lodge library from for an introduction to the erotic culture of early imperial ROMA, whose secret name was spelled AMOR.

"Certainly as worthy to be invoked by us into the sanctuary of the gnosis -- along with Saint Catullus and Saint Vergilius -- as the later, meaner, and cruder Roman poet Saint Martialis, Ovid may be seen as one of the earliest victims of the Aeon of the Black God, for the false modesty and obfuscating shame established in those dishonest public manners which Augustus enforced against him did more to stifle and pervert the vital impulse of mankind than any teaching attributed to the messianic radical fringe (as represented in the later 'gospel' accounts). Ovid celebrated the divine force of Eros as a primal archon of the universal order, and took as his subject the private management of this power in the individual sexual lives of men and women, gods and goddesses. He might be considered not just the Oscar Wilde of his age (for his mastery of word-play, his liberating humor, and his suffering as a scapegoat), but also its D. H. Lawrence (for his realistic attention to sex, and his insistence upon its sanctity, and his courage in presenting it); both the cultivated showman and the passionate priest of Love."

(link to music for the Atalanta poem)

From the Thelema Lodge Calendar:  Saint Michael Maier will be our subject at this month's meeting of the Section Two group, offering readings and discussion of selected passages from Atalanta Fugiens and Themis Aurea (both 1618), and a few of his other alchemical and Rosicrucian essays. Join Caitlin for an introduction to Maier's literary, pictorial, musical, religious, and scientific work. (For a discussion of Maier and his work, return to his biography in the Section 1 document.)

From the Thelema Lodge Calendar:  "The Section Two reading group presents Cockaygne night at Thelema Lodge this month for reading and discussion of the Land of Cockaygne in fantasy and tall tales. Cockaigne is a tradition of late medieval folklore in northern Europe, probably related to celebrations of Carnival at the end of the winter. The Land of Cockaigne is the Cloud Cookoo- Land of ancient Greek comedy, the fool's paradise, the fortunate isle, and later the Big Rock-Candy Mountain in the American west. In literature it is described in a number of popular verses from the fourteenth century, with the Dutch accounts perhaps the most interesting, French and English versions also known, and related traditions described in a number of neighboring languages. Cockaygne is the ultimate daydream, a land not simply of plenty but of hyper- abundance. In particular it is a glutton's paradise, an endless dinner table of good solid food, washed down with a continuous stream of wine. This land is often located on an Atlantic island (like the Hesperides or the Fortunate Isles), but geographically the descriptions do not even rise to the level of fiction; they are merely a set of rhetorical tropes, never integrally constructed as the elements of an imagined world. The descriptions of Cockaygne vary considerably, and they tend to be rambling, vulgar, and silly. It is not a coherently imagined place but a reaction to deprivation and uncertainty in ordinary medieval life, and an invocation of ideal ease and pleasure. Running around this land are animals ready to eat; roast pig on the hoof is a favorite, with a knife stuck in its back, offering slices of pork free to all. Roast birds call out their offers to fly into the mouths of anyone hungry. The streams flow with milk, honey, wine, and oil, the houses are made of pastries and puddings, while the shingles on their roofs turn out to be biscuits. Some folklorists have concluded that the Cockaygne tradition, most likely maintained by popular oral performances in conjunction with Carnival, may have been partly based upon hallucinations of abundant food experienced by hungry victims of famine or practitioners of monastic fasting.

Cockaygne is an alternative to paradise, a heaven on earth, an anarchic utopia, a harmonized commonwealth of perpetual plenty, a working man's Abbey of Thelema. The abundant food and drink on offer here are not the fancy feasts of the nobility, but the ordinary fare (enjoyed in good times and dreamt of in bad) of tradesmen's families in the boom towns of early modern Europe. The tradition seems also to have been popular with monks, and the Middle English verse parody describing 'The Land of Cockaygne' is largely concerned with monastic frolics. Like most celebrations of cultural inversion, it may seem like innocent fun, but it conceals deeply subversive implications: the very knowledge of such a place implies a radical criticism of concepts like 'paradise,' 'heaven,' 'utopia,' 'the common good,' and 'free will.'

Cockaygne is also closely related to the morality of western religion, and specifically of Christianity, where the central rite consisted in devouring the 'body of god' and drinking his blood at the communion lunch service. The pig offering slices of pork from its roast flank is so near to the messiah who says 'this is my body' to the faithful diners that one may never be able to enter the church with quite the same straight face or simple faith again. As a forerunner of the Abbey of Thelema, the Land of Cockaygne also illustrates some of the challenges of complete freedom of the will. Its name was taken from a small sweet cake called in early French cocanha (with variants in many European languages, including our word 'cookie'), which might best be translated simply as a 'treat.' Later when the narcotic alkaloid of coca was extracted and named after this mythical land of pleasure, the term was a pun on the name of its New World plant source and of the fabulous land which seemed to anticipate its (initially) pleasant effects. There is no law in Cocaigne save, Do that which seems good to you."

Alfred de Musset was born in the middle of old Paris, in a house on the Rues des Noyers near the Hôtel de Cluny. Both of his parents were descended from distinguished families, and his father had written several historical and travel works. Musset entered the Collège Henry IV and graduated with honors in 1827. After hesitating between many professions, Musset abandoned medicine because of his distaste of the dissecting room. Instead, he studied painting for six months in the Louvre.

Musset began his career as a poet and dramatist in 1828 with the publication of a ballad called 'A Dream'. His first collection of poems, CONTES D'ESPAGNE ET D'ITALIE (1829), won the approval of Victor Hugo, who accepted Musset in his Romantic literary circle Cénacle.

Musset's following works showed the influence of Lord Byron. In 1830, at the invitation of the director of the Théâtre de l'Odeon, Musset wrote LA NUIT VÉNETIENNE, the first of his plays to be produced. After the humiliating failure on the stage, Musset refused to allow his other plays than historical tragedies and comedies to be performed. This decision partly liberated him from the thoughts of "technique"-- he did not care whether the plays made an effect or no. At that time theatre, on the other hand, was for writers a good means to reach their audience. A theatre ticked was not so expensive than a book. Musset's relatively well-made books, which cost only 3.50 francs, still did not reach a public of petits-bourgeois, craftsmen, or workers, who earned little more than 4 francs per day.

In 1833 Musset met George Sand, with whom he started an intense relationship. His autobiographical work, LA CONFESSION D'UN ENFANT DU SIÈCLE (1835), a fictionalized account of the affair, reflects the mal du siècle, the disillusioned moral atmosphere in the period of strife between liberals and monarchists. "Everything that was no longer exists; everything that is to be does not yet exists," Musset once said. In 1834 Musset visited Venice with Sand; their journey was a turning point in Musset's life. They both became dangerously ill, but Sand fell in love with her physician, and Musset returned to France alone and in despair.

The stormy year inspired his plays ON NE BADINE PAS AVEC L'AMOUR and LORENZACCIO, which is sometimes considered his finest drama. Lorenzaccio, written in 1834 and produced in 1896, was based on the murder of the Florentine tyrant Alessandro de'Medici by his cousin Lorenzo, known as Lorenzaccio. Idealistic Lorenzo wins the confidence of Alessandro in order to assassinate the tyrant. In the process, he loses his believes that the rebellious faction led by the Strozzis is capable of declaring a republic. He proceeds with the original plan and Cosimo de'Medici is declared the new ruler of Florence. Defeated in his hopes for justice and freedom, Lorenzo is finally assassinated in turn.

Musset became engaged to Aimée d'Alton in 1837. The relationship faded within a year and was followed by brief affairs. Throughout his life, Musset also frequented prostitutes and used occasionally opium. His health began to fail and after 1840s Musset's literary production as a dramatist diminished. However, POÉSIES NOUVELLES (1836-52) included 'Les Nuits', the series of lyrics for which Musset is best-known.

Musset was named a Chevalier of the Legion of Honor in 1845. From the late 1840s his plays, which were recognized for their profound grasp of the psychology of love, started to enjoy success on the French stage. Musset's later works include the patriotic song 'Le Rhin Allemand', and the popular comedy IL FAUT QU'UNE PORTE SOIT OUVERTE OU FERMÉE (1845). In 1852 Musset was elected to the French Academy. In the same year he entered into a love affair with Louise Colet, the former mistress of Gustave Flaubert.

For the last two years of his life, Musset was confined to his apartment near the Comédie-Française. His heart ailment, an unusual vascular malfunction that became known to scientist as the Musset symptom, was aggravated by drinking. He died in Paris on May 2, 1857. Nowadays Musset's popularity is considered second only to Racine and Moliere. "My glass is not big, but I drink out of my own glass," he once stated self-consciously. His influence is probably best seen in the plays of Jean Anouilh. Many of the titles for his works were taken from proverbs popular at the time.

• The Confession of a Child of the Century (English)
• The Confession of a Child of the Century — Complete (English)
• The Confession of a Child of the Century — Volume 1 (English)
• The Confession of a Child of the Century — Volume 2 (English)
• The Confession of a Child of the Century — Volume 3 (English)
• Contes Français (French) (as Contributor)
• Images from De Musset's Child of a Century (English)
• International Short Stories: French (English) (as Contributor)
• Oeuvres Complètes de Alfred de Musset — Tome 6. (French)
• Oeuvres Complètes de Alfred de Musset — Tome 7. (French)

• Documents littéraire, by E. Zola (1881);
• Les amants de Venise by Ch. Maurras (1902);
• Life of Alfred de Musset by A. Barine (1906);
• Un grand amour romantique: George Sand et Alfred de Musset by A. Feugère (1927);
• Le romantisme de Musset by P. Gastinel (1933);
• La vie privée de Musset by A. Villiers (1939);
• Musset: L'homme et l'oeuvre by P. van Teighem (1945);
• Alfred: The Passionate Life of Alfred de Musset by C. Haldane (1961);
• Etude historique et critique du théâtre de Musset by M. Vantore (1962);
• Vues sur le théâtre de Musset by A. Lebois (1966);
• The Dramatic Art of Musset by H.S. Gochberg (1967);
• Vie de Musset ou l'amour de la mort by M. Toesca (1970),
• A Stage for Poets by C. Affron (1971);
• The Poetry of Alfred De Musset: Styles and Genres by Lloyd Bishop (1987);
• Musset Et Shakespeare: Etude Analystique De L'Influence De Shakespeare Sur Le Theatre D'Alfred De Musset by Rex A. Barrell (1988)
• Paradigm and Parody: Images of Creativity in French Romanticism--Vigny, Hugo, Balzac, Gautier, Musset by Henry F. Majewski (1989);
• L'Esprit. Stylistique du mot d'esprit dans le Theatre de Musset by Jean-Jacques Didier (1992);
• The Romantic Art of Confession: De Quincey, Musset, Sand, Lamb, Hogg, Fremy, Soulie, Janin by Susan M. Levin (1998