The Modern Thelemic Corpus

[Nalyd Khezr Bey]

It is probably not much of a stretch to say that Kenneth Grant was perhaps the first occultist/writer to really take Thelema and Crowley's system of Magick up a notch or two in that he didn't just repeat or reprint what Crowley had already said and/or done. He innovated and evolved the perception of what it could be and what it has and actually will become. There have been several good books written by others in the same time span but most of them had just repeated or attempted to explain simply by rewording or using other models. Israel Regardie comes to mind as one of the better of those authors. Don't get the wrong idea though. I have appreciated a lot of those authors as well but none of them dared do what Grant did.

With that said, I am curious about what other members here think about the more recent wave of authors who have published books that attempt to push Thelema in slightly new directions. Perhaps not in the same fashion as Grant did but they are new directions or, perhaps we could say, new perspectives. I stress "attempt" there for a reason. I'm also interested to know if the membership here actually bothers to read the broader spectrum of this new Thelemic corpus or adds books like these to their own libraries. If so, what insights have they brought to your own understanding and practice?

To give you an idea of the kinds of authors and books I'm talking about I will list a few I have read and enjoyed below. These are just examples of course. There are probably more along these lines out there that I haven't seen or read. If others here know of more please mention them. I also don't want this confused with Thelemic authors who have expanded off of Kenneth Grant's lead. There seem to have always been innovators coming from the Typhonian current. You may notice that the books I'm listing actually come from what might be thought of as a kind of Thelemite (or Crowleyite) orthodoxy. For that reason I think they are significant in that it seems to have taken some of these guys a very long time to start coming into their own and to dare to push it a little. It is refreshing to see these steps... at least to me.

• The Mystery of the Letters and the Tree of Life by Robert C. Stein
• The Magickal Essence of Aleister Crowley and Aletheia: Astrology in the New Aeon for Thelemites both by J. Edward Cornelius
• Visions & Voices: Aleister Crowley's Enochian Visions with Astrological and Qabalistic Commentary by James Eshelman
• Initiation in the Aeon of the Child and The Angel & the Abyss both by J. Daniel Gunther

[Edward Gauntlett]

Hello Nalyd,

Of the books you list I've read only the Stein Mystery of the Letters, which I thought spectacularly awful. I'm interested in what people have made of the other titles as I'm a bit wary of shelling out for books which might turn out to be merely pot-boilers.

As for Stein... He makes a big deal about close study, and dependence on accurate reading of the MS of Liber Legis - fair enough. But then his own book is full of mistakes: he gets the numbers of paths, Atus and various Libri wrong, misquotes Liber AL, and more or less states that he is the long awaited genius who has solved the II 76 riddle. Personally I found his 'solution' unconvincing. Crowley indicated that the solution would be simple and obvious once found but Stein has created a rather involved 3D "Quantum Tree" with a bundle of extra paths to sort it out.

He claims that “The Riddle [i.e. AL II 76] lists the Paths on the 3-d Quantum Tree (QT) Tree [sic] in order. This Tree has a greater complement of paths than the traditional 2-d TL.” He then groups the letters and numbers in II 76 as it suits him rather than in accordance with the relative size of spaces between them in the MS. I don’t find his analysis compelling; nor is it immediately clear that the paths are listed “in order”, especially as he starts with number 4; but obviously they are in an order. He begins reasonably enough by attributing the first four numbers in the riddle: 4, 6, 3, and 8 to the paths of Daleth, Vau, Gimel and Cheth. The letters A and B are then attributed to Aleph and Beth. The K, however, he attributes to Samech in Briah on the grounds that in Greek it could be Ksi, which sounds like X or S and so fits with Samech. Coming to 2 and 4 he finds the obvious paths for these already taken, so uses the “next available 2 = 2(0) = Yod” and similarly takes the 4 as 40 because the 4 looks like the symbol for Jupiter and so “Chance shape applies.” I disagree that this particular instance of the figure 4 in the MS bears a close resemblance to a ?. He then switches to astrological signs in his attributions of: A (to Aries = Heh), L (Leo = Teth) and G (Gemini = Zain). Reverting back to Hebrew, M is attributed to Mem; but things become a bit more stretched at O, when he attributes this to “Samech in Yetzirah” on the basis that if you write a Samech carelessly enough it looks like an O and “Chance shape applies here.” Similarly R is attributed to Peh because in Greek Rho is written as P, which looks like a P and so must equal Peh. And so on. It becomes even more involved when he brings in the Hebrew finals and incorporates the brackets Crowley put to indicate that 24 and 89 should be read as such and not as 2, 4, 8, and 9. (The brackets, it seems, all relate to Nun final in different phases of paths leading from Daath to Yesod and Tiphareth.)


He also takes the view that the squiggle Crowley said was Tzaddi in "Tzaddi is not the Star" isn't Tzaddi at all but "Glyph" (which he attributes to one of his new paths). The problem here is that Aiwass must have said something Crowley heard as "Tzaddi" but Stein's explanation is that the verse is warning against confusing Tzaddi with "Glyph" and uses this as justification for putting Heh and Tzaddi back where they were and switching Lust and Adjustment back to numbers VIII and XI respectively because the Marseilles Tarot numbering was deliberately wrong.

I'd be interested to read what others made of the book and if anyone found it convincing.

[Nalyd Khezr Bey]

Thanks for that analysis/review there Edward. To be honest, I hadn't really even looked that close at the bulk of the first half of Stein's book which is where most of your criticism seems pointed. I just kind of quickly read through it. I initially acquired Mystery of the Letters about a year ago because I had heard in a review by Paul Hughes-Barlow* (if I remember correctly) that Stein had talked extensively about the sigils of Liber 231 and since there is not much literature out there on that subject I was moved to check it out. As I mentioned above I was stressing "attempt" in pushing Thelema into new ground. I do feel Stein made a good attempt to a certain extent but in terms of it being useful, well, that is the real question I have about a lot of this kind of stuff; when it comes to actual magical work what real use is nit-picking the details of Crowley's works? (That's a big part of the reason why I don't participate in discussions on the LAShTAL forums) I did enjoy some of the exegesis on Liber 231 though but that was about it. Since you pointed these things out about it I will have to give that first part a more thorough reading. 

As for convincing, I can't say that I'm convinced by most of this kind of literature. I'm more interested in the spin others put on these ideas whether I find it convincing or not.

* I also recall Paul Hughes-Barlow saying something along the lines that he was surprised that such a book was actually coming from a member of the C-OTO which also caught my attention enough to see what it was about. Paul was also kind of caught up in that "glyph" thing as well.

[Edward Gauntlett]

I can't comment on the Liber 231 bit now as I sold my copy of Stein's book. I may be a bit hard on him as I understand he's quite committed and spent some time working Liber Nu, about which I think he gave a lecture, so there may be more coming from him in print.

Regarding Liber 231 there is a section in Scarlet Imprint's Howlings, but that derives heavily from Grant. Also Marcelo Motta published a record in his Equinox V ii. Motta is a bit ... eccentric shall we say? ... but did certainly push Thelema.

The reason it has taken so long to get developments going is probably Crowley closing the field down. Like some literary giants (Goethe for instance) those coming after can't match him and give up trying. Grant was an exception and took an enormous amount of flak, from Regardie for instance, for being unorthodox or, indeed, heretical. Hence my query about pot-boilers as I have a suspicion that authors can't get beyond, at best, paraphrasing Crowley. Gerald Suster had a go but concedes the point in his Truth about the Tarot and Legacy of the Beast where he more or less says straight out "I can't improve on what AC said on X, Y or Z, so here it is". And Duquette's book on Thelemic Magick just reprints AC. 

[sandow]

I don't know if you can count the late Benjamin Rowe among the "modern orthodox thelemic writers", or if you see him as a Typhonian. Sure, like Grant, he was influenced greatly by Frater Achad and obviously preferred Set to Horus, but I don't remember him quoting Kenneth Grant (to my knowledge, just one time, and ironically, in his "enochian magick reference"). So I see his ideas more as a parallel development with roots in "classical" thelema, and having some affinities with the typhonian current, but nevertheless different. His take on the "family affairs" between Set and Horus was highly original.
More importantly, on practical matters, some of his ritual work is extremely fascinating ( see his "enochian temples" and "Comselha") and his "short course in skrying" is a gem...

You can find almost all of his writings at hermetic.com:
hermetic.com/browe/
and
hermetic.com/norton/

[Nalyd Khezr Bey]

Feb 7, 2015 9:27:34 GMT Edward Gauntlett said:

Regarding Liber 231 there is a section in Scarlet Imprint's Howlings, but that derives heavily from Grant. Also Marcelo Motta published a record in his Equinox V ii. Motta is a bit ... eccentric shall we say? ... but did certainly push Thelema.

I really enjoy the Scarlet Imprint releases and Howlings in particular for the Liber 231 section you mentioned. A lot of the content of the SI books could be said to push the boundaries of Thelema (Peter Grey's own The Red Goddess is a good example) but they are somehow different in tone than the kinds of books I mentioned above which is why I didn't mention them to begin with. What I like and/or admire about Grey's The Red Goddess is that it reads more as a devotional and inspired outpouring than as an intellectual exegesis and/or academic study. Of course the latter elements can be found to a lesser degree but the more personal mytho-poetic qualities seem to dominate. Coincidentally that is this same quality I like in Grant's writings and is what, for me, pushes this ground into other territories.

We could also mention Robert Fitzgerald's A Gathering of Masks along those lines as well. Not particularly Thelemic in the sense of the books I listed but he does push working with Liber 231 into new and interesting territory. I very much enjoyed Fitzgerald's book but probably more because my own approach has quite a few parallels with what he describes. However, his work is closer to perhaps also being derived from Grant's ideas. In fact, the whole interest in Liber 231 probably derives more from Grant than anyone else. It probably would have remained a minor or obscure liber in Crowley's "holy books" had Grant not put an operational focus on it. In Gems from the Equinox, for example, Regardie made a point to stick it in a miscellaneous libers section and says "I cannot in all honesty believe that they add much value to the body of instruction for which The Equinox is famous". I've not actually seen Motta's work with it so can't comment there.

Most of the books I listed in my first post only slightly push into other territories probably because the authors can't quite get out of the spaces of their own heads to receive and/or birth new works. Gunther and Cornelius obviously take their work very seriously and bring a lot to the table to think think about and work with but nothing in their works seems quite as inspired. For the most part they are interpretations and/or re-statements of the degree symbolism of Crowley's A?A? system. It's the inspiration that seems lacking in a lot the Thelemic authors of this ilk. Eshelman's Visions and Voices is a full commentary on and astrological interpretation of Crowley's The Vision and the Voice; interesting and enlightening in a lot of ways but it is not the same as perhaps Eshelman himself skrying those ethers and receiving his own communications and inspired texts and then commenting on the implications of those.

I didn't even feel that it was relevant to mention Lon Milo DuQuette by the way, but since you did... as nice and intelligent of a guy as he probably is and as relatively helpful as his books may be to some beginners trying to get a handle on some of Crowley's corpus, no one has watered the Magick of Thelema down to bare uselessness as DuQuette has done in my opinion. There was a time years ago that I would not have expressed this opinion of his books but when one really takes on working with this material on the levels that a lot of us here have done you find yourself confronted with having to be honest with yourself and others about it. I've grown to have almost a disdain for DuQuette's books and other authors like him.

[squareye]

Just to add to the list...

The works of Jake Stratton Kent. I have found his Encyclopedia Goetia enlightening and his thesis fascinating in turn.


However his themes of a hidden or disguised tradition of Western shamanism/yoga/mystical path etc. within the grimoire tradition, its connection with specifically early Greek religion and supplication and veneration of the dead, where necromancy is necromancy and not just a by-word for 'black magic'etc. All this I have found resonant with Typhonian themes.

Having said that he probably wouldn't agree as he was a bit scathing about KG in one interview I came across some time ago.

Barry Hale's Legion 49 - enjoyed the cut-outs but the ideas in the book did not grab me. Quite like his videos though.

[Nalyd Khezr Bey]

Hey Jamie,

Including Barry Hale's Legion 49 here might be stretching the criteria a bit for what I'm talking about. I don't know that I would classify it as part of the Thelemic corpus I'm referring to or even at all. It's more of a grimoire all its own. Perhaps it fits as an extension of the Typhonian corpus. I did get quite the experience out of utilizing the contents of Legion 49 but that may be another discussion worth having. On another online forums I had started a discussion of this recent trend in modern grimoires and included it there because it just happens to be one that I have.

Some of Jake Stratton-Kent's works might fit into what I'm talking about but unfortunately I'm not really that familiar with those that may like his work with New Aeon English Qabala, like The Serpent Tongue: Liber 187 for example (I would like to hear some about that particular book because I was interested in getting a copy at one time). However, I am familiar with the first two volumes of his Encyclopedia Goetica series, The True Grimoire and Geosophia, but these works are also more stand alone and seem focused on the grimoire tradition. Of course they can be informative to and used in a Thelemic context but they are certainly not an expansion of Crowley's work. In fact I think Stratton-Kent has made a point of leaving Crowley out of his current general magical perspective as he hinted at in one of the volumes of Conjure Codex.

I hope that didn't sound like I was trying to knock the books you mentioned there because I personally really dig all of them. They're just different than what I had in mind for this discussion. What I called the "trend in modern grimoires" above seems closer to a general kindred extension of Grant's work and the Typhonian tradition. In some cases a direct extension.

Nema's Ma'at Magick (and related works that her system has spawned) may be seen in the light of what I meant above as it seems that it was initially more of a direct offspring or extension of Crowley's body of work and later informed by Grant's input. From what I've seen in other places Nema's work is often totally dismissed as nonsense by those who follow more directly the authors I mentioned in my first post or others like them. I have no clue what those authors themselves think of Nema's brand of Ma'atian Thelema so can't say anything to that. For all I know they may privately welcome her and any "unorthodox" Thelemites to their table.

I also have James Eshelman's 776 1/2 which is one of those books that really adds nothing but convenience to the material it presents. I very much appreciate what he has done with making most of the key elements of 777 more readily accessible. It is not a replacement of 777 but a good resource to have on hand as a supplement.

I guess what I'm partly interested in with this discussion is if those that consider themselves part of the Typhonian current of Thelema actually examine and utilize the works of these other Thelemic camps to further inform what you do or to broaden your own understanding or just to see what others are doing and/or how they are doing it. Do you find that what they present contradicts what you understand as Magick and/or Thelema? Personally I find a different tone to what the authors above present compared to what Grant wrote about or anything found in Starfire journals (just as examples) but I also find a great deal of it relatively in line with my own understandings. The tone, to me, seems more religious and contemplative and less about actual magical work and pushing boundaries. Those boundaries being the actual trappings of Thelema and Crowley's corpus that so many seem so attached to. It is in that last point that I part ways with them altogether.

[sandow]

Feb 17, 2015 17:50:16 GMT Nalyd Khezr Bey said:

I also have James Eshelman's 776 1/2 which is one of those books that really adds nothing but convenience to the material it presents. I very much appreciate what he has done with making most of the key elements of 777 more readily accessible. It is not a replacement of 777 but a good resource to have on hand as a supplement.

I think the updated tables aren't the best part of 776 1/2 (for correspondences, I would rather go to Stephen Skinner's book), but at the end of the book, there are very beautiful examples of magical ceremonies, and an interesting way to build them. BTW these ceremonies can be found online for free (and legally) in the various issues of Black Pearl, the old magazine of the temple of Thelema :
www.thelema.org/publications/bp.html

Personally, although Eshelman is undoubtedly a thelemite, I see him more as a part of a "Regardie's tradition", less interested in doctrine and more involved in the practicalities of the work.
I personally continue to appreciate this "Regardie's tradition" for the help given in practical matters.
 I continue to find the GD/AA training (Yes, I tend to conflate the two even if it's anathema, especially for the people on the  GD side) extremely useful and valuable, even if limited: it provides you the basics bricks for developing your skills. It seems to me (perhaps wrongly) that Typhonians, people like Grant or Bertiaux, go much farther, are infinitely more creative, but aren't very helpful in the field of daily practice or personal discipline.

[triveni93]

Please accept my apologies if this is inappropriate, but I can't resist giving a quick plug for Magickal Union of East and West: The Spiritual Path to New Aeon Tantra by Gregory Peters here. It undoubtedly pushes Thelema in different directions, and is heavily influenced by the Typhonian current.

[Nalyd Khezr Bey]

Charlotte, I totally agree with you about Magickal Union. After some months I finally bought a copy and received it not long ago and only then upon opening its cover did I realize that you are a co-conspirator in it. I have not properly read through it yet primarily because of some advice that Gregory shared with me privately when I told him I had finally purchased a copy. I hope he doesn't mind my sharing this but he said the following:

...it is meant to be worked, a practical, visceral experience. Reading it without doing will probably be a bore, but if you engage with the material (or better yet, if the material launches you into new creative and unique vistas of exploration) I think you will be surprised at just how readily you will find yourself looking right into the Mauve zone with "eyes wide open" so to speak!

So with that I have been hesitant to just jump in reading it until I'm ready to embark on a new journey. I have only scanned over its contents but I can tell from what I've seen that it's digging into new ground and is a very welcome addition to my library.
 

[triveni93]

Thank you for the kind words, Nalyd! Yes, I am Greg's "co-conspirator" (I like that verbiage, by the way!). ;-) I hope you enjoy the book. I agree with Greg that it is meant to be worked with, and not just read (although I'm biased and think Greg is a good writer, too).

[Gregory Peters]

Thank you Nalyd Khezr Bey and triveni93 for the very kind words. I do hope the book inspires further creative occultism and exploration of the Typhonian Gnosis. I am very interested in feedback from people that have worked with the material, particularly those that experiment independently. 

[sandow]

I should add that I also bought a copy of Magical Union, loved it, and although i didn't put in practice (yet), I certainly didn't find it a bore!

[Gregory Peters]

Hi Sandow, that is great to hear! Very interested in feedback as you explore the material.

[N0T 2]

In terms of post-Crowley Thelemic writings, I'd certainly include the wonderful books by Frater Shiva (of Solar Lodge). These include occultism and autobiographical documentation of past events which I believe Crowley would have been blown away by, had he lived to observe them. When the OTO in the USA had basically died on Germer's watch, Shiva -independently- led a group which dynamically created its own working methods using Crowley's works, both OTO and AA structural principles, and basically took over an entire town for several years.

The account is in Inside Solar Lodge: Behind the Veil, which I would regard as seminal Thelemic history. All of Shiva's books I would regard as having a Thelemic essence, influenced as they are by various other things as well.

From the younger generation, a relevant and sincere literary effort was Sam Webster's Tantric Thelema.

[The Double-wanded One]

Feb 10, 2015 0:11:17 GMT Nalyd Khezr Bey said:

I didn't even feel that it was relevant to mention Lon Milo DuQuette by the way, but since you did... as nice and intelligent of a guy as he probably is and as relatively helpful as his books may be to some beginners trying to get a handle on some of Crowley's corpus, no one has watered the Magick of Thelema down to bare uselessness as DuQuette has done in my opinion. There was a time years ago that I would not have expressed this opinion of his books but when one really takes on working with this material on the levels that a lot of us here have done you find yourself confronted with having to be honest with yourself and others about it. I've grown to have almost a disdain for DuQuette's books and other authors like him.

"uselessness" emphasized.
This will always be a 100% accurate assessment. I think his influence on the Thelemic subculture is more likened to a cancer, replacing esotericism with politically-motivated eXotericism, practically just republishing Crowley works with his own obnoxious opinions tagged on, no substance, nothing of value to add. 

When I first discovered him though, he featured in some Crowley documentary saying about the first time he read Liber Legis and that he actually burnt it. His story interested me at first (as I have never burnt any of my copies of Liber Legis, I think Crowley's later 'comment' tagged onto #220 is bullshit) but it didn't take me long to notice he was just banking off and trying to sell a kind of corporate "Thelema for the whole family" brand.

If I was to burn any books, his would be among the only (of course I wouldn't be stupid enough to buy them just to burn them, lol)

[The Double-wanded One]

Mar 26, 2015 8:02:50 GMT N0T 2 said:

In terms of post-Crowley Thelemic writings, I'd certainly include the wonderful books by Frater Shiva (of Solar Lodge). These include occultism and autobiographical documentation of past events which I believe Crowley would have been blown away by, had he lived to observe them. When the OTO in the USA had basically died on Germer's watch, Shiva -independently- led a group which dynamically created its own working methods using Crowley's works, both OTO and AA structural principles, and basically took over an entire town for several years.

The account is in Inside Solar Lodge: Behind the Veil, which I would regard as seminal Thelemic history. All of Shiva's books I would regard as having a Thelemic essence, influenced as they are by various other things as well.

I've got that book and it's pretty good, very interesting story. 

[The Double-Wanded One]

Feb 6, 2015 15:29:26 GMT Edward Gauntlett said:

Hello Nalyd,

Of the books you list I've read only the Stein Mystery of the Letters, which I thought spectacularly awful. I'm interested in what people have made of the other titles as I'm a bit wary of shelling out for books which might turn out to be merely pot-boilers.

As for Stein... He makes a big deal about close study, and dependence on accurate reading of the MS of Liber Legis - fair enough. But then his own book is full of mistakes: he gets the numbers of paths, Atus and various Libri wrong, misquotes Liber AL, and more or less states that he is the long awaited genius who has solved the II 76 riddle. Personally I found his 'solution' unconvincing. Crowley indicated that the solution would be simple and obvious once found but Stein has created a rather involved 3D "Quantum Tree" with a bundle of extra paths to sort it out.

He claims that “The Riddle [i.e. AL II 76] lists the Paths on the 3-d Quantum Tree (QT) Tree [sic] in order. This Tree has a greater complement of paths than the traditional 2-d TL.” He then groups the letters and numbers in II 76 as it suits him rather than in accordance with the relative size of spaces between them in the MS. I don’t find his analysis compelling; nor is it immediately clear that the paths are listed “in order”, especially as he starts with number 4; but obviously they are in an order. He begins reasonably enough by attributing the first four numbers in the riddle: 4, 6, 3, and 8 to the paths of Daleth, Vau, Gimel and Cheth. The letters A and B are then attributed to Aleph and Beth. The K, however, he attributes to Samech in Briah on the grounds that in Greek it could be Ksi, which sounds like X or S and so fits with Samech. Coming to 2 and 4 he finds the obvious paths for these already taken, so uses the “next available 2 = 2(0) = Yod” and similarly takes the 4 as 40 because the 4 looks like the symbol for Jupiter and so “Chance shape applies.” I disagree that this particular instance of the figure 4 in the MS bears a close resemblance to a ?. He then switches to astrological signs in his attributions of: A (to Aries = Heh), L (Leo = Teth) and G (Gemini = Zain). Reverting back to Hebrew, M is attributed to Mem; but things become a bit more stretched at O, when he attributes this to “Samech in Yetzirah” on the basis that if you write a Samech carelessly enough it looks like an O and “Chance shape applies here.” Similarly R is attributed to Peh because in Greek Rho is written as P, which looks like a P and so must equal Peh. And so on. It becomes even more involved when he brings in the Hebrew finals and incorporates the brackets Crowley put to indicate that 24 and 89 should be read as such and not as 2, 4, 8, and 9. (The brackets, it seems, all relate to Nun final in different phases of paths leading from Daath to Yesod and Tiphareth.)


He also takes the view that the squiggle Crowley said was Tzaddi in "Tzaddi is not the Star" isn't Tzaddi at all but "Glyph" (which he attributes to one of his new paths). The problem here is that Aiwass must have said something Crowley heard as "Tzaddi" but Stein's explanation is that the verse is warning against confusing Tzaddi with "Glyph" and uses this as justification for putting Heh and Tzaddi back where they were and switching Lust and Adjustment back to numbers VIII and XI respectively because the Marseilles Tarot numbering was deliberately wrong.

I'd be interested to read what others made of the book and if anyone found it convincing.

The Tzaddi question is one I find very interesting as it is something I stumbled across elsewhere and find convincing myself. The actual symbol in the MS doesn't really look much like Tzaddi, it looks more like a Serpent to me. 
It's not evident if he actually heard Aiwass state the name of the letter Tzaddi or not, but I understand that argument. 

The Tzaddi thing, like many incidents in Thelema, to me feel like happy syncros. Crowley interprets it one way, someone else interprets it another wise, rinse and repeat, however multiplous some of the interpretations get, we wind back at a unified sense of coherence to these various interpretations. 
Remember, Liber Legis is not a blank text, it is a living energy force transmission from Aiwass, an ever expanding talismanic scripture at the heart of the world we are currently in and moving towards, since 1904.

[IMIL ˙.˙]

Feb 28, 2015 16:09:22 GMT triveni93 said:

Please accept my apologies if this is inappropriate, but I can't resist giving a quick plug for Magickal Union of East and West: The Spiritual Path to New Aeon Tantra by Gregory Peters here. It undoubtedly pushes Thelema in different directions, and is heavily influenced by the Typhonian current.

*added to cart*

[IMIL ˙.˙]

Feb 6, 2015 15:29:26 GMT Edward Gauntlett said:

Hello Nalyd,

Of the books you list I've read only the Stein Mystery of the Letters, which I thought spectacularly awful. I'm interested in what people have made of the other titles as I'm a bit wary of shelling out for books which might turn out to be merely pot-boilers.

As for Stein... He makes a big deal about close study, and dependence on accurate reading of the MS of Liber Legis - fair enough. But then his own book is full of mistakes: he gets the numbers of paths, Atus and various Libri wrong, misquotes Liber AL, and more or less states that he is the long awaited genius who has solved the II 76 riddle.

Rats! I found reading this to be especially troubling. I had a rather interesting occurrence that was expounded upon utilizing this book. Although, I took another look at the portion in question and compared to other correspondence materials and it all seems to be in order. I'd mention specifics, but it is part of my Ordo Typhonis probationer work and I'd be remiss to elucidate further.

I will say that it involves ATU III. The Empress. Pages 136-137 in particular. Is there any way anyone could take a look at that portion and let me know if I'm overlooking something (if he gets anything wrong in a major way), because I'm not seeing anything that is.

Likewise, I found the "Quantum" Tree of Life to be of little use practically. Interesting stuff, but expanding a bike on it's Y-axis and/or X-axis, adding two extra tires and calling it a car doesn't necessarily make it so.