Has anyone here read his works? The Book of Law or The Book of

I've got the book of lies ... Thumbed through it but the poetry is weak and the ideas a hamfisted attempt at Kabbalah and the golden dawn.

Interesting for historical context only.

>>7895574
I've read Liber AL. It's solid if you're into mythological riddles and microwave meal-tier recipes for living.

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i have a copy of "The Magickal Record of the Beast 666" around here, somewhere.

funniest part was when he was taking cocaine. he'd make a journal entry, claim "this stuff isn't addictive and doesn't affect me at all". then he'd do some more, make another journal entry ten minutes later that would run for eight pages of densely packed verbiage, do some more cocaine, another journal entry and so on for about forty pages.

the content was your usual snow-head's gibberish, albeit a little better informed in terms of classical allusions, but ultimately going nowhere.

if there was anything to his magickal theories, he wouldn't have started out the rich heir of a brewer and ended up penniless and fucked up on heroin... unless THAT WAS HIS PLAN ALL ALONG.

>>7895574

I've read The Book of the Law and Portable Darkness, which contains a lot of his other works. His writing is interesting, but has limited value. He was a charlatan, a drug and a sex fiend, and it undermines his value a good deal.

>>7895574

Yes, I've read both of those because they're both extremely short.

Crowley is a mediocre poet, but one of the more complementary things that I have to say about him as a writer is that in addition to lying his own lies and promoting himself, he actually did put in a huge amount of legwork to learn a large number of occult and religious traditions (and cultural memes that we now take for granted), at a time when this actually entailed some difficulty. Before the internet, one had to actually find books of poetry, the occult, etc, on one's own initiative.

Although providing commentary on one's own poetry is a very dreary task (like a comedian explaining his jokes), the Book of Lies gives a pretty clear account of what I'm talking about. Crowley name-drops tarot, buddhist practices, his version of kabbalah, Carroll's Jabberwocky, Sade, Hindu words, and other things that we can recognize more easily today. The cumulative effect is: "Look at me, I know so much, look at all the culture I know." Although of course he also lied where it suited him, I stress that the point is that knowing /all/ of the above, familiar to us today, required serious legwork that we now take for granted, what with the internet.

The book of the law is very short, just google it.

The book of lies is perhaps the work that most successfully toes the line between brilliance and absolute idiocy that I've ever read. Don't go into the book of lies expecting so much a philosophy as a series of puzzles.

>>7897266
i like the idea of someone approaching the idea of magic with a scientific temperament. "let's try that shit, and see if it works."

>>7895578
Silence behooves the ignorant dilletante

>>7897266
This is more or less fair.

I count myself as a fan of Crowley, but the only work of his that I recommend is his eight lectures on yoga.

They are remarkable for their lucidity, sincerity and good humor.

If you're interested in yoga or meditation I can't give a higher endorsement