general_koffi

I can tell you one thing, it would be a lot easier to believe in transubstantiation if the host was a "sacred mushroom" instead of a water wafer.

gurugeorge

It's certainly a plausible idea that astrotheology and shamanism were influential in the coalescence of many myths. People have been taking drugs to see God since forever, it would be no surprise if we should find evidence for that sort of thing in biblical stuff. Whether it does show up in the evidence is another matter.

I read Allegro when I was an adolescent, and was intrigued but not convinced then. For goodness sakes, does everything have to boil down to his pet thesis? It seems a bit much. Like saying everything boils down to the forces of material production.

steve_bnk

Crowley as an academic reference? He was a charlatan who collaborated with
L R Hubbard as in Scientology and had a following who belioved he was a true magician.

Castenada's first book was acuused by some of being a total fabrication, however in the end in the story he realizes he was led on a drug induced halucinagenic journey by Don Juan.

I did a little net research months back on a drug legalization thread. Up through the early 1900s use of drugs was not that big an issue. Opiates were common as were canabis nsed in 'patent medicenes'. From the founding of the nation it progressed from drugs being an important sales commodity to being taxed to being outlawed.

You can read Doors Of Perception by Huxley on his mescaline experience availble free on line.

There is also John Lily's Center of The Cyclone in which he takes drugs in conjunction with the water isolation tanks people used back in the day, think the movie Altered States. He clearly describes his experiences in academic detail.

gurugeorge

I wouldn't quite call him a charlatan, exactly, more a bit of a farceur. I don't know anything about his "magick" (which he often explained in rather Jungian terms - he even wrote favourably about Jung's first book, The Psychology of the Unconscious), but from his writings, I am pretty certain he had genuine mystical experiences. He undertook serious yoga practice in India, under the guidance of a Brahmin instructor who was a friend of one of the British officials where he was staying. He also studied Theravada Buddhism (under an ex-colleague of his in Western occultism, Alan Bennett, who had gone on to become one of the first ordained Western Bhikkhus, I think the first Englishman so to be ordained, in Thailand). He also studied a few other things, to various levels, from other Eastern teachers, including some kind of Sufism.

(This, he did along with travelling all over the shop while his inheritance lasted, writing poetry and literature generally, mountain-climbing, and latterly painting in a rather striking naive/Fauvist sort of style.)

Fact check. He didn't collaborate with Hubbard in any way, far less on scientology, he never met Hubbard, he only heard about him via an American student of his, Jack Parsons, a rocket scientist, who was conned out of his muse (one Marjorie Cameron, herself later to become a minor West Coast artist) by Hubbard (which Crowley warned Parsons that Hubbard would do, simply going on what Parsons was writing about Hubbard). Hubbard started inventing scientology well after that escapade, and well after Parsons was killed in an explosives accident at his lab.

Incidentally, curious tidbit: the artist Augustus John, said of Crowley that he was "the most religious man I ever met".

It's true that he had a small following of people who thought he was a great man, but as to magician, and what that word actually meant to him or his students, you'd have to read his writings to find out

Eldarion Lathria

I've read it. He had an interesting hypothesis, then immediately advanced all sorts of dubious evidence for it and claimed too much for it. To sum up the book in one sentence, "Everything longer than it is wide is a penis, and therefore SACRED MUSHROOM!" I put it with Brinsley Le Poeur Trench's The Sky People in the library of nonsense.

Eldarion Lathria

steve_bnk

I stumbled on the link between Hubbard and Crowlly on another thread. I read Crowley's Diary of A Drug Fiend back in the 70s which by some is considered auto-biographical.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diary_of_a_Drug_Fiend

Timothy Leary parodied the title in Confessions Of A Hope Fiend..
Crowley was an occultist of the early part of the century with all that implies.

People like Leary and Lily pretty much took it to the extreme combining drugs and a a patchwork of eastern mysiticism.

You have to know the times. The occult was everywhere. I read several of
Evans-Wentz'a books on Tibetam Mysticism, although a true academic, he lived for many years in the region in the early 1900s.

There is of course Lost Horizons, the hope for a mystical elswhere where all is well.



Back in ealy 70s I stumbled on the diary of a Christain priest travelking in Tibet/India in the late 1800s when I was looking for unrelated material at the Trinity Collerge library in Hartford Ct. You have to know the times up through the 50s/60s. The fascination with the occult was everywhere. Arther Conan Doyle fell into disripute for his becoming a spritualist, a term from his day. I read his biography.

http://www.lhup.edu/~dsimanek/doyle.htm


Crowley was one of many selling and half believing aspects of the occult for profit. Castenada came along and sold the same yarn in a differemt culture.

Reich had his orgone machine to catch cosmic energy, Pyramid Power being a later version of the idea.
http://www.wilhelmreichmuseum.org/
http://inventors.about.com/od/qrstar...s/a/orgone.htm

I could go on. I spent a number of years back in the 70s along many others wandering rhrough eastern mysticm, yoga, and all the rest.

The point being drugs and mystical revelation, or so it seems to the user, is nothing new and likley goes all the way back to the beginnings of us humans. It gets repackaged every few decades..

And of course Scientology is a modern incarnation with Hubard and Crowley sharing common roots.

gurugeorge

Again, fact check: he absolutely rejected with abhorrence the idea of doing anything occult or mystical for profit. In his early years he had an inheritance, in his later years he survived off his disciples. His books made very little profit. He loathed the type of "occultism" that makes big bucks (e.g. Lewis Spence's AMORC Rosicrucianism, that kind of thing.)

He had a puckish sense of humour, and a certain blindness to the damage he was doing in his own life and to the lives of some of his disciples, but it's quite obvious from his writings (and from what others said about him) that he was deeply serious about his mysticism and his magick (not a "half-believer", a full believer).

Oh sure, I agree with that. I think early Christianity itself may have been one of those periodic repackagings. (I do however think there's something valid in mysticism - my position is pretty much the same as Sam Harris' on this - the practices and exercises, minus the relevant religious dogmatisms attached, are worthwhile and illuminating to undertake. But of course, this was Crowley's position too!)

Again, this is just wrong. Wherever you got that information from, it's factually wrong, and the facts have been well-known for a long time. There was no connection between Hubbard and Crowley, the only connection was between Hubbard and Crowley's student, Jack Parsons. Hubbard was a con artist who tried all sorts of things (in the course of which he conned Jack Parsons) and eventually settled on a hodgepodge of psychology with a s-f flavour (he'd been minorly famous as a s-f writer, and this is the little boost of fame he capitalised on). His main inspiration for the idea of "engrams" for example was the brain experiments (can't remember the experimenter's name, it might have been Sperry) where the scientist probed parts of peoples' brains and the subjects reported Proustian bursts of memory.

Crowley's ideas, on the other hand, come from his own travels in the East, his own experiences and experiments, and his connection to a European tradition of Hermetic occultism that dates (in more or less the form he knew it) back to at least the 17th century, and has roots dating back to the Renaissance, and probably even beyond (e.g. to Catharism and remnants of paganism and original forms of Hermeticism and the like).

Crowley was legendary in his time, as a demonic public figure. He was one of the early victims of the "tabloid" press in the UK, and at times he egged his bad press on, so there's just a ton of misinformation about him around, yet the facts can be easily ascertained, especially since the internet arrived - there have been a few serious biographies of him (some hostile), which mostly agree on the facts; and we also have his own "autohagiography", with which the biographies mostly agree.

OK, don't want to drag this any further off-topic. There's a wiki article that gives a decent sketch of his life and work, and further references, here.

Only reason I've banged on about it is because I think the old guy doesn't actually deserve a lot of the bad press he had and has, a lot of it is unfair and ill-informed.

steve_bnk

Dianetics and Scientolgy was created by Hubbard who was a relatively unsssuceful writer.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L._Ron_Hubbard
http://www.religio.de/atack/occ1.html

".. Isaac Asimov, a professor of biochemistry, criticized Dianetics' unscientific aspects, and veteran author and literature PhD Jack Williamson described Dianetics as "a lunatic revision of Freudian psychology", likening it to a scam..'

'...Scientology seems to be a hybrid of science-fiction and magic. Hubbard's reflection on philosophy seem to derive largely from Will Durant's Story of Philosophy 13) and the works of Aleister Crowley. Aleister Crowley is surely the most famous black magician of the twentieth-century. It is impossible to arrive at an understanding of Scientology without taking into account its creator's extensive involvement with magic...'

'....John Whiteside Parsons, usually known as Jack, first met Hubbard at a party in August 1945. When his terminal leave from the US Navy began, on Dec 6th, 1945, Hubbard went straight to Parsons' house in Pasadena, and took up residence in a trailer in the yard. Parsons was a young chemist who had helped set up Jet Propulsion Laboratories and was one of the innovators of solid fuel for rockets. Parsons was besotted with Crowley's Sex Magick, and had recently become head of the Agape Lodge of the Church of Thelema in Los Angeles. The Agape Lodge was an aspect of the Ordo Templi Orientis, the small international group headed by Aleister Crowley. ..'

I believe the discussion is within the bounds of OP.

Scientology was a fabrication and bastardization of a patchwork of thougt as was Crowley's organizations.