From: Fir Area: Thelema To: Christeos Pir 17 Nov 94 07:44:26 Subject: Re: ROUND UP THE USUAL SUSPECTS! UpdReq 93 Christeos, > It never ceases to amaze me how people can print any damn thing and > no one calls them on it. Witness the following, from the Chambers > Encyclopedia Guide to The Occult, by Andre Nataf. I'll be danged! Here I thought that was a good book. Have even shown it to a local bookstore manager so he could order it for the store. What do you think of the book outside of this obvious untruthful page? BTW, picked up that Faulkner translation of _The Egyptian Book of the Dead_ yesterday. Thanks for mentioning it. It's beautiful. 93 93/93, Fir 201434369420143436942014343694201434369420143436942014343694718 From: Fir Area: Thelema To: All 17 Nov 94 07:52:26 Subject: NEW BOOK FOUR AVAILABLE? UpdReq 93, The ad in The Link says it will be available Nov. 11. Has anyone seen it available yet? 93 93/93, Fir 201434369420143436942014343694201434369420143436942014343694718 From: Tim Maroney Area: Thelema To: Michelle Hass 17 Nov 94 09:53:44 Subject: Re: Fancy seeing YOU here! UpdReq Hi, Michelle! Well, the phrase I used was "ermanent semi-retirement." I come and go. This is one of my active periods, and it's much less active than I used to be. It's nice to see you as well. It's clear that you've done a great deal of work refining your views and understandings, and I find your exhortations to skepticism entirely admirable. Don't pin your hopes on anyone heeding them, though! To most people any religion -- inlcuding Thelema -- is a source of comfortable certainties.... Tim 201434369420143436942014343694201434369420143436942014343694718 From: Tim Maroney Area: Thelema To: Frater H.A.C.A. 17 Nov 94 10:04:22 Subject: Re: Thelemic Insanity UpdReq Hi, H.A.C.A.! YOu asked for why people are down on the Thelemic Golden Dawn. Part of it is the usual inter-traditional rivalry; Michael Sanborn wrote a reasonably good piece illustrating the issue for the OZ Institute newsletter last year. People in traditions are jealous of other traditions, =especially= traditions that seem to be working the same areas, and they lash out, they look for flaws, they cut down the competition. Thelema is no exception; in fact, we may have ot especially bad, in that we tend to accept outright expreessions of anger as more legitimate than in other traditions, which leads to escalation of rivalries. Speaking for myself, though, the reason I tend to look askance at the group is that David Cherubim has made an extremely bad impression on me. His writing style is that of a bargain-basement Crowley imitator, drained of the poetry and insight and with extra heaping scoops of pretension and pomposity. If he could grow beyond his desire to be the next Crowley and his addiction to styles of which he has no literary grasp, then I might take another look at his work, but for now it seems laughable (in a queasy sort of way). Tim 201434369420143436942014343694201434369420143436942014343694718 From: Tim Maroney Area: Thelema To: Michelle Hass 17 Nov 94 10:33:24 Subject: Re: 10 = 1 discussion UpdReq MH> I don't know which Thelemites you've been hanging out with, MH> but as for myself I do *not* see Liber AL as being exempt MH> from critical analysis. [...] There is, to my mind, MH> no such thing as an infallable document that can be held up MH> and say "Aiwaz said it, I believe it, that settles it." I believe that this is true for you, though I also believe this represents a refinement of your position. When you first decided to be a Thelemite some years ago, your entire pole of thinking seemed to realign into terms inspired by AL, with no particular doubts about the validity of concepts like "struggle against the minions of Osiris" and such like. I'm not saying this to embarass you. I went through the same thing during the early 1980's myself (ask Josh Norteon what a pewling OTO sycophant I was back in my CompuServe days). Both of us, you and me, came out the other side. The snake wrapped around and ate its own tail -- we came to apply Thelema's own skepticism and eclecticism towards it in itself, regarding it as one of many sources of inspiration rather than the Uniquely Correct Word of the New Aeon. Unfortunately, I don't think most people make that jump, especially when they get involved with a group situation where there are powerful social pressures holding the mind in that shape. In fact, in my case, the group actually created the problem; before then, I thought of myself as a student of Crowley's corpus, and the Book of the Law as one minor part of that corpus. The initiation I went through and the study program I was assigned, including memorization of the first chapter, led me into a way of thinking that was alien to my normal mode, and which stuck for as long as I felt it was necessary to try to advance within the group. I'm by no means proud of this, and I'm not saying it to criticize the group or to displace responsibility. I'm using it to illustrate the psychological process by which membership in a group can influence one's beliefs and keep them locked into a particular mold. Group participation brings with it a number of pressures both conscious and unconscious which guide the mind away from areas which are seen as having a potentially negative impact on one's social standing. There is no question in my mind from my fourteen years of experience with the O.T.O. that a literalist and "uniquist" view of Thelema is de rigeur within the group, at least within the degrees which most members occupy. (I used to think this was due to a top-down authoritarian influence, but now I realize it is really more of a bottom-up problem, although the bottom-up pressure results in large part from a general =imagination= that deviance from the normative beliefs will result in problems with the upper degrees.) I know this from reading the messages of OTO members here, from reading their newsletters, and from personal experience with a few bodies of the Order. It also appears to be true of the other organized Thelemic bodies. To achieve an arms-length view of Thelema, you have to go to Chaos Magic, TOPY, or a similar post-Thelemic group; there is no group which is largely concerned with Crowley's corpus which treats that corpus with the proper skepticism. Both you and I are solitaries and so we are less subject to such social pressures. Not surprisingly, we also appear to be the two people here most concerned with the idea of skepticism towards Crowley, though I'm sure the others will reluctantly chime in with some lip service and then go back to assuming without question that the Tree of Life (Otz Chiim) is the ultimate model of spiritual progression and that the world is in a New Aeon which was proclaimed by the word of Aiwass. I find it sad, but I don't know what I can do about it except write messages like this one, which I know will be ignored or demonized by those who need to hear them most. Tim Maroney 201434369420143436942014343694201434369420143436942014343694718 From: Tim Maroney Area: Thelema To: Michelle Hass 17 Nov 94 10:35:52 Subject: Re: Crowley on CDROM? UpdReq I proposed the Crowley CD-RTOM to Bill Heidrick about a year ago. He said there wasn't enough to put on one. I may soon buy a CD-ROM burner (they're down to $2,500) and a scanner and start putting in facsimiles of my Crowley library. I owuld then start running OCR on them if I can find a program which will deal with the embedded symbols -- something completely and grievously ignored in the current badly-proofed ASCII versions. Then we'll see what we shall see. Tim 201434369420143436942014343694201434369420143436942014343694718 From: Tim Maroney Area: Thelema To: Ned 17 Nov 94 10:39:58 Subject: Re: Synthesis UpdReq Micahel Aquino was kind enough to send me a rather long document from the Crystal Tablet, and I am pleased to report that his interest in philosophy is not the "smoke and mirrors" which you have represented it to be. In fact, I have not seen any other occult or pagan attempt to systematize philosophy that is as well-informed, seriously intended, or near success as this one. If the Temple were to make such documents more widely available, I think it could only help their reputation. (This is not to say the document is without flaws; there are certainly portions where hand-waving is evident, together with some apparent contradictions and assertions which greatly outstrip the evidence; but compared to the bilious spewings that stand in for philosophy in most of the occult and pagan worlds, it is excellent.) Tim Maroney 201434369420143436942014343694201434369420143436942014343694718 From: Tim Maroney Area: Thelema To: All 17 Nov 94 10:45:50 Subject: abysmal proofreading UpdReq I am sorry for the numerous typographical errors which deface my messages here. This system has virtually no useful text editing capabilities. I will look into other ways of interacting with it in order to solve the problem. Tim 201434369420143436942014343694201434369420143436942014343694718 From: Keith S Schurholz Area: Thelema To: Tony Iannotti 17 Nov 94 13:49:30 Subject: Re: C.F. Russell and Michael Bertiaux UpdReq TI> But.... What is it? ;-) 93! The material is a series of FRA material relating to their version of the Gnostic mass - If I have it all translated I'll bring it out in Dec. Evidently, it was passed, at some point, to the Duc De Palentine (sp.?) group - are you familiar with their "Order of the Pleroma"? - and formed the basis of their Gnostic mass. Note that this is a rumor, and not by any means confirmed. Re: your comments on the Thelemic G.D.- cheez why are these people so thin-skinned? I ask a couple of little questions- everyone freaks out. . . I have no idea why - Re: Bertiaux, have you picked up any new material of late -we got the motherlode of MSR lessons - now all four years - also Societe magazine. Re: Occult Digest- do you have any of these issues in the files? How 'bout Yorke's post-war article on Crowley and Ritual Magick in general? Best to you- 93:93/93 Keith S Schurholz 201434369420143436942014343694201434369420143436942014343694718 From: Frater H.A.C.A. Area: Thelema To: Michelle Hass 16 Nov 94 13:33:48 Subject: Thelemic Insanity UpdReq Greetings in Thelema: Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law. MH> Just chalk it up to stupidity. Pure mammailian stupidity. MH> As for myself, I have found that being a Solitary is more to my liking MH> than involvement in a formal magickal order. But MH> that doesn't mean that MH> my approach is any better than your approach necessarily, or for that MH> matter anyone elses. There should be as many MH> flavors of Thelema as there MH> are Thelemites. And if you like one flavor over another, that's yo' MH> biz-nis, not mine. Thank you!!!!! Love is the law, love under will. Peace, Frater H.A.C.A. 201434369420143436942014343694201434369420143436942014343694718 From: Michael Aquino Area: Thelema To: Tony Iannotti 17 Nov 94 05:39:52 Subject: Re: Crowley on CDROM? UpdReq TI> Have you seen the TI> Book of the Law in Windows help text format? Links from each verse to the TI> manuscript page and the commentaries. MS pages are just 300dpi, but cool, TI> nonetheless. Color scans of the actual MS next. All this and a CD to say how thou didst come hither and a GIF of this ink and paper for ever - for in it is the word secret & not only in the English - and thy comment upon this Book of the Law shall be encoded beautifully in ANSI upon terminals made in Japan; and to each man and woman that thou E-mails, were it but to flame them, it is the Law to give. Then they shall chance to abide in this bliss or no; it is no odds. Do this at 28,800 baud! 201434369420143436942014343694201434369420143436942014343694718