LAShTAL.COM is grateful to Tobias Churton, author of Aleister Crowley: The Biography, for his participation in an interview for the site.

Read on for details…

With 2 print runs of his book Voudon Gnosis selling out, and through his past leadership of the Ordo Templi Orientis Antiqua and La Couleuvre Noire, and current role with La Société Voudon Gnostique, David Beth has gained the reputation as the spearhead of the revival of Esoteric Voudon. Perhaps less known about him is the fact that he has also studied numerous occult systems throughout the world for the last 20 years. This includes extensive research and practice of Thelemic esoteric principles.

As a gift to the Thelemic community for their inspiration and their aid in research and ideas in the past, David has made available a revised version of his essay Aleister Crowley and the Dawn of Aiwass: A Gnostic Investigation. In it, he explores the transmissions of the "Aiwass Current" and how they can be used in a personal system of Gnostic sorcery. David considers this one of his finest non-Voudon related writings and invites conversation and feedback on it.

My article, Walk Like An Egyptian: Egypt as Authority in Aleister Crowley's Reception of The Book of the Law, has been accepted by The Pomegranate: International Journal of Pagan Studies and is currently in press and due out very soon. The reference is The Pomegranate 12.2 (2010) pp. 20-47. I will link to the journal issue as soon as it appears on the web and if you want to access the article you'll need either a subscription to the journal, to pay for access to the article, or academic library access or a friend with academic library access (which means it'll be free).

Regular visitors to this site will know that I'm fond of Simon Callow's performance as a (kind of) reincarnated Aleister Crowley in Chemical Wedding, also known as Crowley in the US.

The movie will be released on Blu-ray on 16 November from Starz/Anchor Bay.

Thanks to HB…


There is a rare cable TV screening of the 1926 MGM Rex Ingram silent film The Magician: Sunday at midnight on Turner Classic Movies (US cable). So set your Tivos or set top recorders. I'm not sure about scheduling and coverage outside the USA but it is worth checking.

This is a very difficult film to see otherwise…

... and he's looking for a script.

Fangoria magazine carries an interview with "Bronson" movie director Nicolas Winding Refn in which he covers some fascinating and familiar territory for visitors to this site.

“I’m a massive fan of filmmaker Kenneth Anger,” explains the Danish filmmaker, who’s currently finishing off his new horror/fantasy VALHALLA RISING...

“His work, like INAUGURATION OF THE PLEASURE DOME and INVOCATION OF MY DEMON BROTHER, informed the look and tone of BRONSON to some degree, and I was going through my Anger book collection to see if there was anything missing. I found ‘The Aleister Crowley Scrapbook’ by Colin Wilson [sic.], in which Anger speaks about the villa in Cefalu, Sicily where the infamous British occultist played a lot of his black magic sex games...

“It started me thinking about applying the same logic to a film on Crowley as I had on BRONSON. Bronson’s frustration was all about his inability to express himself through violent celebrity; prison finally transformed his aimless life into that of a sensitive artist. Similarly, Crowley finding himself through drugs, astrology, black magic and bisexuality could become another fascinating metaphor—to explore the concept of what it means to the British in terms of eccentric hedonism.”

LAShTAL.COM is proud to publish a lengthy article by Micah A Hanks regarding Ian Fleming and Aleister Crowley, 007 and 666: A True Tale of Spies and Sorcery

This fascinating essay - reproduced by kind permission of the author -covers similar ground to the research by Richard Spence as presented in Secret Agent 666.

Micah describes the article in Nick Redfern's "Strangest Secrets" blog as: "A while back, I had begun working on an article that dealt with some of the more extraordinary (and in some cases, even paranormal) aspects of James Bond creator Ian Fleming’s career with British Intelligence Services during World War II. As most who have read the novels or studied James Bond’s history otherwise may know, many of Fleming’s experiences in real life later inspired the adventures of the world’s most famous secret agent. The article, however, was never published; therefore, I felt it was perhaps a good time, along with the release of Quantum of Solace in theaters, to present for the first time my original tribute to the 007’s classy creator. As the name implies, 007 and 666: A True Tale of Spies and Sorcery, is indeed based on real events that lead to the capture of the infamous Nazi Rudolph Hess. With a cast of characters that includes Maxwell Knight (then Fleming’s superior officer in MI5), the notorious Aleister Crowley, and Fleming himself, it is by far one of the oddest tales ever to stem from the annals of history."