Tag Archives: Aleister Crowley
Page & Crowley
Original Photo: Dina Regine Over the weekend I was stoked to find out that a new biography of Led Zeppelin guitarist, Jimmy Page, had recently hit the book shelves. According to a review in The London Times the book is a no-holds-barred excavation of Page’s debauchery and excess with a particular emphasis on the musician’s [...]
Crowley Outloud
I’ve got a bit of a difficult film writing assignment hanging over my head this week so rather than posting another horror film post, here’s a selection of recordings from the 1920′s and 1930′s featuring Aleister Crowley reciting occult poetry in both English as well as the Enochian language that Queen Elizabeth I’s court wizard [...]
Osiris Rising
I spent the morning writing a review of the 1970, psychedelic classic Performance. For me this is one of the few films from America’s mid-century cultural revolution that still lives up to its shocking reputation. Most people associate Performance with its cinematographer and co-director Nicolas Roeg. Even if you are a die-hard fan of outre, [...]
RAW on Crowley
I came across a post on the Lashtal site this weekend — BBC 4 is playing a series about the Summer of Love and the first episode featured two mentions of Aleister Crowley. I found the documentary’s trailer online, but couldn’t manage to find the full episode. I’ll keep and eye open for it, but [...]
Mountain Song
I don’t post a lot about sports on this blog — Insomnia is a counterculture blog and sports are mostly intrinsically mainstream culture in America. That said, certain extreme outliers are so crazy that they create subcultures that are ever bit as weird as any artists’ enclave, musicians’ scene or drug tribe. The men and [...]
Moore’s Mages
Earlier this week I came across a cool post on the Confidentials site that featured comic book legend/sorcerer supreme Alan Moore talking about the history of Western esoteric traditions and giving a list of his top five mystics and magicians. Here’s a bit about the poet/artist/gnostic prophet William Blake… Blake summed up the artistic, anarchic [...]
From the Abyss
Charles Stanfeld Jones was two men in one: On one hand Jones was a London accountant born in 1886. On the other, he was a brilliant ceremonial magician whom Aleister Crowley recognized as his “magical child” when Jones shared his brilliant insights into Crowley’s own The Book of the Law. Jones went on to found [...]
Granted
I suppose it’s just a Halloween hangover, but lately I’ve been a bit obsessed with Kenneth Grant — the British occultist who mixed Aleister Crowley’s Thelemic philosophies with H.P. Lovecraft’s Cthulhu Mythos to create his own Typhonian Order. I’m buying presents, and trimming trees, and readying my world for a couple weeks of holiday travel [...]
Manly: Mystery Master
Manly P. Hall’s The Secret Teachings of All Ages: An Encyclopedic Outline of Masonic, Hermetic, Qabbalistic and Rosicrucian Symbolical Philosophy is a cornerstone book in any esoteric library worthy of the name, and Hall himself was a spiritual prodigy whose publishing and teachings helped to synthesize core ideas of Victorian spiritualism for Americans in the [...]
Death of a Magician
Today we remember the death of Aleister Crowley on December 1, 1947. There is a handful of documentary films about the man floating about the internet, but these sensationalized accounts don’t do justice to their subject. As far as I know, nobody talks Crowley like Robert Anton Wilson… Stay Awake! Please subscribe to my YouTube channel where [...]
