Pregnant with her first child, and beginning a slide into an abyss of heroin use, [Anita] Pallenberg, then 26, had a preoccupation with black magic that led her to increasingly fantastical realms. ‘I had an interest in witchcraft,’ she recalled later, ‘in Buddhism, in the black magicians that my friend, Kenneth Anger, introduced me to. The world of the occult fascinated me.’
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Oxford undergraduates are more adventurous than Oxford dons. The Oxford Poetry Society, a typically worthy undergraduate club, decided to venture on a strange fields by listening to a lecture by Mr Aleister Crowley on Gilles de Rais, a fifteenth-century magician known to history as the companion-in-arms of Joan of Arc and to children as the celebrated Bluebeard. The dons, however, took alarm, and so Mr Crowley has had to stay behind in Kent, leaving, one imagines, his inquiring young disciples to the less exciting delights of a paper on Wordsworth, or, perhaps, even on the metrical basis of Alexander Pope’s verse.
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The invaluable 100th Monkey Press website has just added some fascinating chess articles by and about Aleister Crowley.
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Tobias Churton: Some people may come to Crowley through rock n roll. Led Zeppelin III (1971) had “Do what thou wilt” inscribed on its run-out groove, if memory serves, and I suppose this gave the music a kind of free-form, libertarian rationale. However “Do what thou wilt” does not mean “Do as thou wilt”, so people in search of mere kicks of self-indulgence might be disappointed when they discover Crowley was a stickler for discipline!
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Oz Fritz reviews Servants of the Star and Snake: Essays in Honour of Kenneth and Steffi Grant from the perspective of an admirer of the great Robert Anton Wilson. It makes interesting reading…
Servants of the Star and Snake is a beautifully conceived and executed book with a high aesthetic on par with it’s content and subject matter. Praise Thoth! Every article is worth the price of admission though the entrance may not be for everyone.
One theory about Jack’s real identity involved an infamous name in Britain. Aleister Crowley, the occultist, black magician and writer, was known in his time as The Wickedest Man In The World. “It is surprising that Aleister Crowley has not yet been proposed as a precocious Jack,” Richard wrote, “an oversight which, doubtless, some future theorist will correct.“
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Iconic American filmmaker Kenneth Anger has inspired generations of creative storytellers since the 1950s. He is a unique visionary who drifts from pure poetry within his magical filmmaking to sardonic gossip in his bestselling Hollywood Babylon books. In-between these extremes is a person who never tires of exploring his own creativity.
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In 1981, P-Orridge reversed course in the gently trippy Psychic TV, whose danceable songs echoed the occult writings of Aleister Crowley and Austin Osman Spare, and included a tribute to Brian Jones of the Rolling Stones called “Godstar.” P-Orridge imagined the band as the center of a global consciousness raising, and recruited fans to join Thee Temple ov Psychick Youth, a cross between a fan club and a cult, whose members donned paramilitary gear and submitted bodily fluids as part of their initiation.
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In 1936, Parsons along with his colleagues Edward Foreman and Frank Malina initially appear to experience a day of failed rocket launches. Before attempting one last launch, Parsons decides to cast a spell on the rocket, much to the understandable skepticism of Foreman and Malina. The rocket makes it about a 100 feet up before blowing up but in the explosion, Parsons claims to once again see a woman in red…
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Amazon Prime’s original series, Lore, has taken on its share of spooky historical legends. And now as Season 2 approaches, it’s digging even deeper into the strange myths surrounding real-life people. In particular, the upcoming episode of Lore based on the true story of Jack Parsons could get pretty weird, especially if you know about Parsons’ past.
Read MoreBehemoth have unleashed another visually stunning music video. In their classic black-and-white style, Behemoth have debuted a clip for “Bartzabel,” which is filled with blasphemy and nudity. It’s a departure from their more recent material; “Bartzabel” isn’t a track filled with blast beats and gargling gutturals, acting more as a mood piece fairly mellow in execution.
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The Hermit invites us to discover wisdom and the progress that comes with study; the card also indicates that the Hermit is a person of integrity, but that he is scared to trust in others and completely express what he is feeling – very much as Jimmy Page was, polite to the point of sometimes being a little boring. The painting of the Hermit on the inner sleeve was by a supposed friend of Jimmy Page’s called Barrington Coleby. There is no record whatsoever of any such person, and there were those who believed the real painter was none other than Jimmy Page himself.
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