Theos-Talk Archives (April 1996 Message tl00191)

Thoa Tran wrote:
> As far as that Crowley dude, I don't really have an opinion on him.  I was
> repeating what I was told.  I have no hesitation reading any of his
> writings, and I have read some of his writings.  Some accounts of him was
> that he's actually quite normal but hedonistic, and was reacting to
> hypocrisy that he witnessed in his childhood.  Thus, all those talk of
> satanism may just be his way of just stirring up the prim and proper
> bloods.  I have no doubt that some of his followers took him literally and
> may have done awful stuff.

	Another problem with Crowley was that he was openly bisexual in a
country where it was a scandal to be openly heterosexual.

	However, there are two main problems with Crowley. Like Blavatsky, he
believed that certain knowledge, without understanding, was extremely
dangerous. Like Blavatsky, he had a playful sense of humor, and hid the
knowledge in extremely dense prose to require that one read it very
carefully to understand it. Unlike Blavatsky, he specifically worded
things so that a reader just browsing through his books would come to
the conclusion that they were horribly evil (and thus not try anything
out; he did not realize that some people would be ATTRACTED by the
apparent evil).

	The other problem was that he was a very skilled writer with a bad
temper. Whenever he got angry with an acquaintance, he would write an
article which would tear the person apart, carefully hitting all the
person's sensitive spots.  He did this with Dion Fortune when she was
still President of the London Astrological Lodge of the Theosophical
Society; that is the origin of the bad feelings between the TS and the
Thelemites (who, actually, have quite a bit in common).

	The major difference between Theosophy and Thelema is that Theosophy
believes in spiritual development leading to sidhis as a side effect as
a means of evolution, while Thelema believes that development of sidhis
will lead to spiritual development as a side effect, as a means of
evolution.

	Bart Lidofsky