Raël Against the World

As of the time of writing, the Remnant – a QAnon-inspired cult around Michael Protzman, AKA Negative 48, who have congregated in Dallas to await the return of JFK and JFK Jr., who they believe secretly rule the United States as the hidden President and Vice President. Protzman’s ability to rapidly rise to the status of conspiracy theory heresiarch is in part testimony to the power of the Internet to amplify a distinctive enough voice, coupled with an era of proliferating misinformation.

That said, people have been quick to latch onto hard-to-credit nonsense since before the Internet age. Such is the case with Raëlianism; it took one book and a few controversial media appearances in 1974 for Raël – former name Claude Vorilhon – to rapidly develop the nucleus of his brand-new UFO religion. Despite the fact that contactee narratives were well-known and well-debunked by this point in time, and despite the fact that Raël’s ancient aliens schtick wasn’t exactly all that original, clearly his ideas resonated in some people.

Raëlians are quite keen to get their message into people’s hands; for years various cheap editions of their central scriptures have been churned out, and more recently they’ve made Raël’s bibliography available for free via their website. (Devout Raëlians are supposed to annually tribute a portion of their income to the Raëlian Foundation, so book sales are not that exciting in comparison.) The three major books which form the core of Raëlianism are The Book Which Tells the Truth, Extra-Terrestrials Took Me To Their Planet, and Let’s Welcome the Extra-Terrestrials. These have been widely translated, re-translated, and compiled in various formats, the most recent omnibus (and the version freely available in PDF) being Intelligent Design: Message From the Designers, which puts all three between two covers. (For the impatient, there’s the manga adaptation which sums Raël’s main claims up in some 40-ish pages.)

Raëlianism has been fairly quiet recently; the movement got some attention when they claimed that their Clonaid division had produced human clones, and they sometimes crop up agitating for various pet causes, like opposing female genital mutilation, advocating for the right of women to go topless, promoting sex education (on which more later), and trying to persuade the world that the swastika isn’t that bad of a symbol. (The movement’s symbol is an alarming mashup of the swastika and the Star of David; for a while they changed it so the swastika was a spiral, but they seem to have decided that nobody was fooled by that and have gone back to the original design.) Their biggest ambition is to construct an embassy for the aliens in Israel.

Between this willingness to insert themselves into controversial subject matter and the whole “hierarchical religious organisation whose leader makes grandiose claims about himself and talks about how cool sexuality is to an uncomfortable extent and has his members tithe to him” deal, it feels inevitable that some sort of massive controversy related to the Raëlians will break sooner or later. So let’s read their central alien-inspired scripture so when it happens, we’ll have a handle on what the deal is. If nothing else, these books show us that we shouldn’t be surprised if people will go to Dallas to witness the resurrection of JFK on the word of some weirdo on Telegram: if you get a message out to enough people, you will find true believers, even if your message is risible on the face of it.

The Messianic Muddle of Plantard the Pretender

The Messianic Legacy, at least in the edition I own, boldly declares itself to be “the controversial sequel to the bestselling The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail“, and it is very much a sequel: it makes some fumbling attempts to cobble together some novel thesis and contribution of its own, but all it succeeds in doing is ploughing deeper into the intellectual cul-de-sacs that authors Michael Baigent, Richard Leigh, and Henry Lincoln had wander off down in the course of compiling the previous book. Having already become lost in the deep weeds, The Messianic Legacy marks the point where the start floundering.

Although I went over the background already in my review of the previous book, I think it is worth restating here in order to understand the context The Messianic Legacy exists in. In the late 19th and early 20th Century, Bérenger Saunière was the local priest of Rennes-le-Château, a picturesque hilltop village in the Languedoc region of France. It is generally accepted that Saunière was running some sort of Mass-by-mail-order scam which earned him an unusual amount of money, to the point where the Church authorities got wind of it and suspended him from his ecclesiastical duties.

Some time later, in the 1950s, restauranteur Noël Corbu had come into possession of Saunière’s home, the Villa Bethania, and turned it into the hotel. To drum up business, Corbu began circulating a rumour that Saunière’s wealth was in some respect related to mysterious documents he had discovered in the local church. In the early iteration of the story, the concept was that there was great treasure hidden in the vicinity of Rennes-le-Château, perhaps part of the lost horde of Blanche of Castile, which Saunière had discovered a portion of. This snowballed into a treasure-hunting fad centred on the town, and in the 1960s it came to the attention of a group of hoaxers, perhaps the most significant member of which in terms of his commitment to the joke and the way he inserted himself into the story was one Pierre Plantard.

Crowley In Small Doses

Regardless of what you think of his esoteric endeavours; you can’t deny that Aleister Crowley tried his hands at a wide range of endeavours. Between being a mountaineer, an occultist, a chess enthusiast, and a poet, he also turned his hand to prose fiction from time to time. His novels Diary of a Drug Fiend and Moonchild get most of the infamy, but he also produced a good chunk of short fiction in his time.

David Tibet, though he was deep into Crowley when he started the Current 93 industrial music project that he is most famous for and has retained a long-standing appreciation of the man, does not seem to be a dogmatic Thelemite these days; however, he is on at least good enough terms with William Breeze, AKA Hymenaeus Beta – the current head of the “Caliphate” faction of the Ordo Templi Orientis (Crowley’s most famous magical order) – to have featured Breeze on a few Current 93 recordings and to have been appointed to the International OTO Cabinet. In this latter capacity, he’s a “non-initiate” advisor to the OTO – essentially acting as someone that the leadership can turn to for advice on his particular areas of expertise.

Among Tibet’s eclectic range of other contacts is Mark Valentine, who has edited anthologies for Wordsworth Editions’ Tales of Mystery & the Supernatural line. Wordsworth Editions, for those of you not in the UK, are known primarily as publishers of out-of-copyright work at a modest price; these days of course, there are absolute tons of small press outfits doing precisely this on Amazon, crapping out books on CreateSpace that are by and large horribly presented and feel nasty and cheap. Wordsworth are better than that: by and large the books they put out are nicely laid-out and properly edited, and by putting these out at a decent price they make a good selection of old literature easily available in hard copy for readers who might be on a tight budget, or might understandably object to paying a premium for a book which is nothing more than a reprint of something nabbed from the public domain.

The Tibet-Valentine connection makes sense when you think about it, given that both of them have made something of a career of researching into classic ghost and horror stories. (For an example of Tibet’s contributions in this vein, see my Stenbock article.) Tibet suggested to Valentine that a collection of Crowley’s short stories might be a nice addition to the Wordsworth Mystery & the Supernatural portfolio, and helped put Wordsworth in touch with William Breeze. Since the OTO believes it has a duty to make Crowley’s work available, Breeze was amenable to the idea, and though the copyright on the material had not yet run out (in the UK the copyright to material published by Crowley in his lifetime expired in 2017; posthumously-published material may still be in copyright depending on when it was first released), Breeze agreed to accept only a token royalty on the OTO’s behalf so that Wordsworth’s standard pricing could apply.

In the end two collections were produced. 2012’s The Simon Iff Stories and Other Works brought together two sets of stories that Crowley wrote as a series – Golden Twigs, a clutch of stories inspired by The Golden Bough, and the titular stories of the psychic detective Simon Iff, who would also appear as the protagonist of the novel Moonchild. Preceding it in 2010 is the book I’m going to review here: The Drug & Other Stories, collecting various standalone short stories Crowley wrote in a span of time from 1902 to 1922.

Mini-Review: Book 4

So before I did my Foucault’s Pendulum review, I decided to take a look over some of the sources for the magical traditions that clash by the end of the novel, which is kind of why there’s been a trickle of occult content on the blog for a bit; having first read the novel knowing very little about the stuff it was riffing on, I wanted to see how it read to someone who actually knew the territory (it’s just as good).

Here’s a leftover from that research project. Crowley’s attempt to produce an all-encompassing manual of magic – published previously in several separate parts including Magick In Theory and Practice and The Equinox of the Gods – boldly proclaims that it intends to be a guide to magic which is accessible to everyone, and then spends most of its page count mired in technicalities, presenting various arguments trying to insist on the authenticity of The Book of the Law, and giving a somewhat confusing rundown of ceremonial magical procedure, with brief sections at the beginning giving a somewhat more coherent rundown of the basic practices of meditation and an idealised version of magical practice which seems to be entirely logistically unattainable for most practitioners.

The magical information in here is largely the Golden Dawn material, plus Crowley’s fixation on The Book of the Law and some other concepts added by Crowley, and it is perhaps more interesting as a worked example of how an actual practitioner might use and further develop the Golden Dawn system than a system in its own right.

It’s not Crowley’s fault that the book is a bit of a mess, since it had a long and frequently disrupted writing process and several aspects of it were dictated to Crowley by, he thought, spirits talking through his personal mediums, right down to the questionable decision to call a book for beginners “Book 4”. (There are numerological reasons for doing so, but it’s still confusing.)

Current editions have a biographical essay from the current head of the OTO, William Breeze, discussing how Crowley produced the book. It is notable how Breeze shines a light on Crowley’s use of a succession of “Scarlet Women” as mediums, a rather exploitative-sounding process which led to a trail of human wreckage in Crowley’s wake. If trampling down others in this fashion was the price of producing this book, I am not altogether sure it was worth it.

Three Books of Warehoused Notions

Just as Israel Regardie’s The Golden Dawn is, though it has its shortcomings, a widely-recommended source of raw information concerning late Victorian British occultism, Agrippa’s Three Books of Occult Philosophy is widely considered the encyclopedia of occultism as it was studied in Renaissance Europe. Indeed, it and the Golden Dawn’s system are not unconnected; Francis Barrett catalysed a resurgence of occult interest in Britain in 1801 with his The Magus, or the Celestial Intelligencer, which largely just plagiarised substantial chunks of the Three Books and perhaps a pinch of a different source in order to deliver its information, and then later when the Golden Dawn was formed great chunks of their inner practices were adopted either from that or, less likely, Agrippa directly.

The reason that it’s more likely that the Golden Dawn leadership got their details from Barrett rather than Agrippa is that for a good long time a full English translation of Agrippa wasn’t available, aside from a 17th Century translation riddled with errors. Donald Tyson’s presentation of the Three Books is the product of a laborious process of reconstruction, bringing the full text back into print in English for the first time in ages, repairing errors, and extensively annotating everything (and when I say “extensively” I mean “in many chapters there’s a greater word count in Tyson’s footnotes than in Agrippa’s actual text”).

Gems of Criticism

Of all the incidents in Aleister Crowley’s extensive history of shit-stirring in the occult subculture of the early 20th Century, The Equinox is the one which left behind the most material for later generations to pick over. The Equinox was Crowley’s journal of esoteric philosophy and practice; with the motto of “The Method of Science, the Aim of Religion”, it had an initial run from 1909 to 1913, then returned briefly for a bumper issue in 1919 (the so-called “Blue Equinox”), and then for all intents and purposes that was that. (Such subsequent volumes as issued during Crowley’s lifetime were basically self-contained books on a single subject, rather than journals with articles on varied topics; in the case of books issued during World War II, this was a wheeze intended to take advantage of the fact that magazines were under different paper rationing restrictions from books.)

For its brief run, the original Equinox was supposed to be the teaching organ of the A∴A∴, a splinter group of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn founded by Crowley and some of his allies. Crowley’s eclectic approach to spirituality doesn’t quite hide the fact that, overall, the entire shebang is basically a sort of repackaged Theravada Buddhism, the magical goal of communication and union with one’s Holy Guardian Angel being part of the process of attaining the enlightenment of ego-death.

Apocalypse Culture

No book provides a more complete one-stop summation of the Feral House publishing company’s ethos than Apocalypse Culture: criminality, avant-garde art, dark musical subcultures, fetishes which range from the unusual-but-consensual to the taboo-and-definitely-not-consensual, extreme politics of all stripes, secret societies, conspiracy theories and cultural meditations all sit cheek-by-jowl in this collection of essays edited by the late Adam Parfrey, founder of Feral House itself.

For Parfrey, it was all about freedom of speech and giving a platform to anyone, no matter how offensive or controversial – if anything, the controversy helped. As Eric Bischoff coined the phrase, “controversy creates cash”, and it’s notable that Feral House’s boom period in the 1990s coincided with an era in which this was never more true. Parfrey’s decisions about what to publish would occasionally spark controversy; Feral House got a tidal wave of condemnation when it put out The Gates of Janus, a meditation on serial killers by Ian Brady, and Parfrey’s pre-Feral publishing venture, Amok Press, put out an English translation of Michael, a novel by Joseph Goebbels.

Apocalypse Culture doesn’t quite include any full articles by authors on Goebbels or Boyd’s level (though Parfrey does quote Hitler at one point), but the material here is pretty extreme. That said, whilst Parfrey himself seems to have particular obsessions and points of focus, at the same time the sheer range of extremist opinion offered here is incredible. You wouldn’t expect many of the authors in here to see eye-to-eye on much, except perhaps a certain disregard both for societal norms (as they existed in the late 1980s/early 1990s) and the centre ground which tends to reinforce them. Indeed, the title of the book comes from Parfrey’s contention that the centre cannot hold, and an apocalypse of bizarre and aberrant behaviours is just around the corner.

Pickin’ Up Truth Vibrations, Part 1: In the Light of (Turquoise) Experience

There is today an active Gnostic sect. Few people can be said to be consciously enthusiastic members, but it is nonetheless a sect. It teaches a worldview which has evolved somewhat over the sect’s existence, but was from the beginning rooted in Gnosticism and has become increasingly reminiscent of Gnosticism with the passage of time, and in recent years has openly switched to some specifically Gnostic terminology to explain its ideas.

Its adherents wouldn’t necessarily think of it as a religious movement, and many of them actively follow other spiritual traditions in parallel to it – but if they have taken the teachings of this sect seriously, then that will inevitably affect their relationship with those other traditions and how they view them. Different levels of involvement exist, ranging from people who just read a few books or watch a few DVDs to more enthusiastic members who discuss the leader’s teachings enthusiastically on his website forums, or who attend massive, day-long lectures which the sect’s leader holds in major venues like Wembley Arena in order to endlessly restate, reiterate, and reinforce his essential points.

Dissecting Lovecraft Part 7: Innsmouth, Heald, and Hitler

This article was originally published on Ferretbrain. I’ve backdated it to its original Ferretbrain publication date but it may have been edited and amended since its original appearance.

We’ve previously seen how Lovecraft’s work reached its peak of ambition with At the Mountains of Madness, only for Lovecraft to become disheartened at his failure to sell it. Still, Lovecraft couldn’t stop writing if he wanted to eat, so the next phase of his writing saw him trying to rekindle his enthusiasm for his solo sories whilst doing plenty of revision work to try and scrape out a living.

The Trap is a revision Lovecraft did for Henry Whitehead. This is seen as a “secondary” revision and in truth there does not seem to be much Lovecraft in it to my eyes, though it’s an interest enough story about a mirror that traps a boarding school student who must be rescued by his teacher. The close of the story, in which the student turns up back in the teacher’s room and they need to come up with some sort of convoluted ruse to avoid any dodgy questions arising from the boy just turning up in the teacher’s room in the middle of the night, makes for slightly uncomfortable reading in a “How did this guy who was a teacher in his day job put so much thought into smuggling boys into and out of his room?” sort of way, and to be honest there doesn’t seem to be an enormous amount to it that’s especially Lovecraftian beyond one mild touch in which, as a result of being caught in the mirror, the kid ends up with his organs mirrored so his heart is on the right-hand side and so on, which borrows an entertainingly discomforting idea from The Mound.

Dissecting Lovecraft Part 5: Home Again, Home Again, Cthulhu Fhtagn

This article was originally published on Ferretbrain. I’ve backdated it to its original Ferretbrain publication date but it may have been edited and amended since its original appearance.

In March 1926, a little over 2 years since he hopped off to New York to get married, Lovecraft accepted an invitation from his aunt Lillian to come back to Providence and live there again, returning in April. This brought a de facto end to his marriage, even if it took some time to actually legally dissolve (and indeed, even after the legal procedures had been carried out Lovecraft was tardy about signing the final decrees, meaning that Sonia’s subsequent marriage was inadvertently bigamous). Lillian’s invitation came in part from the urging of Frank Belknap Long and his family, who had observed Lovecraft’s increasingly miserable state and were afraid of what would happen if he stayed in the city. (Long’s reports on this are inconsistent on whether it was him or his mother who wrote to Lillian imploring her to take Lovecraft back – Joshi points out that it is quite possible that they both worked on the letter in question.)

We’ve previously seen how prior to moving to New York Lovecraft had developed his craft to a high level of accomplishment, only for his New York-era stories to reflect either a glum lack of inspiration at best or bigoted axe-grinding at worst. Back in his habitual stamping ground, however, Lovecraft would begin a productive period of his writing. We get an early look at where his thinking is at in The Materialist Today. In this essay, Lovecraft expresses the view that people, whoever they are, are better off practicing the cultures of their forefathers. In this ethnoseparatist worldview, cultural diversity is fine in theory but in practice can be maintained only by careful segregation; cultural mingling and experimentation leads to disaster.