Arnold (documentary, Netflix)

The new Netflix docuseries about Arnold Schwarzenegger, "Arnold" has a lot going on. It's difficult to believe that one man could have done so much, but listening to Arnie's philosophy as he's interviewed today, at 75, you can see how he managed to push himself to get it all done. 

One thing that stood out to me is almost the first scene, a couple of minutes in. Arnold, at 22, wins the Mr. World championship, the career breakthrough that led to a string of bodybuilding titles. 

That's him (from Muscle Builder, reprinted at the Joe Weider website.) Incredible size--he weighed 230lbs. There are (nowadays) much bigger bodybuilders with much better cuts (and much better steroid regimes, it should be said), but this photo was taken when he was 22.  Talk about genetically gifted. I don't know how it's even possible for someone to grow this much by that age. Building muscle takes time as well as hard work. 

From the same webpage, here's Arnold in a line-up with Sergio Oliva (R) and Reg Park (L) at that Mr. World. 

Arnold is 22, Reg is 42 and Sergio is 29.  I can just about believe a man could get to Sergio's size approximately 17 years after puberty, but to get to Arnold's size after 10?

Anyway, there's about three hours more of the documentary after this, Arnold going from (sorry, I'm going to say it...) strength to strength. Jimmy Page once said that he (Jimmy) had followed Crowley's precepts, which he described as first determining your true will, then "forge ahead like a steam train."  In Arnold's case I guess he was built like a steam train and carried on from there. 

(I also watched the Arnie vehicle "FUBAR" which is also new on Netflix. Although Arnie is his usual lovable self, the series is barely watchable. If you're interested to see how many cliches and tropes it's possible to throw against the wall and see what sticks and then pick up the ones that didn't stick and use them as well, you can watch it with a cliche bingo card. If that's not your thing, watch something else.)

Plagiarism Corner: Open University lecturer, not student, 'borrows' a book from Crowley

It's hard to be *quite* this blatant - ripping off Aleister Crowley and publishing his poems under your own name. Ditto with a short story by Dylan Thomas - and many others. I should insert "allegedly" in front of those, though the gank from Crowley is pretty obvious and easy to check out for yourself.

Most of the information here came from Alex Boot Camp Keegan, who replied in the comments section to an article in the Daily Telegraph about Open University lecturer Dr. Joanne Benford. The Telegraph article said,

Dr Joanne Benford, a teacher of creative writing, is accused of multiple instances of copying the works of other writers and passing them off as her own over two decades.
One of her short fiction collections, Down By The Water, features a story called Holiday Memory. It appears to be a verbatim copy of a radio play of the same name written by Dylan Thomas and first broadcast on the BBC in 1946.
The allegations came to light after Alex Keegan, an author of short fiction, discovered a work called Postcards From BalloonLand in another book by Dr Benford, called Coming Up For Air.

In the comments, Alex Keegan suggests that Dr. Benford's Music of the Spheres is taken in large part verbatim from Aleister Crowley's The Rite of Eleusis. And this can be checkd as the OTO puts up original Crowley writings on the web. (I wouldn't like to be the lawyer who had to check out who owns Crowley's copyrights after all these years, but I'm willing to bet it's not Joanne Benford.) Google books has a preview of Benford's Spheres - not sure if she can take that down, but just in case, here's a screenshot:








  And here's some of the Crowley text of Eleusis:

Sweet, sweet, when Lion and Maiden,
The motley months of gold,
Swoop down with sunlight laden,
And eyes are bright and bold.
Life-swelling breasts uncover
Their warm involving deep--
Love, sleep!--
And lover lies with lover
On air's substantial steep.
Ah! sweeter was September--
The amber rain of leaves,
The harvest to remember
The load of sunny sheaves.
In gardens deeply scented,
In orchards heavily hung,
Love flung
Away the days demented
With lips that curled and clung.
Ah! sweeter still October,
When russet leaves go grey,
And sombre loves and sober
Make twilight of the day.

There's a lot more. The Open University is looking into it - they don't check their lecturers' non-work-related writing for plagiarism because why would they? It's usually the students who are attempting to filch things and pass them off as their own. 

Jimmy Page and thelemites

Wow - Jimmy Page's On This Day feature [link dead] on his website April 8th features something I never thought he'd speak about publicly.

On this day I VISITED CAIRO, EGYPT
On the centenary of Aleister Crowley's channelling 'The Book of the Law', I revisited the Egyptian Museum of Cairo to see the 'Stele of Revealing'; the conduit to that event. I was curious to see how many people might attend the museum and indeed there was a small gathering of Thelemites.

I filch the picture for you.

 

Eyes of Providence

Jimmy Page, wearing a shirt with an eye-in-the-pyramid design on the back. (That's Bill Graham, the famous promoter, with him.)

This shirt also starred in The Song Remains the Same.

And here's Alison Mosshart. (Picture found on Tumblr, so no credit for it.)



Result?

Best buddies!


(That last one is Ross Halfin's, if you can't 
tell by the watermark.)

Erik Davis on Aleister Crowley

Wish I could go to this, but I can't - Erik Davis, whom I've mentioned before on this blog as the writer of the best book on the fourth Led Zeppelin album, is giving a talk on Aleister Crowley at The Northwest Film Forum, including some material on Jimmy Page's work on Kenneth Anger's film Lucifer Rising.

August 13th at 9 PM in Seattle.

Details here.

You had me at 'Hello'

Talking of occult philosophy, here's a picture of an autograph penned by Jimmy Page.



93 93/93 is an Aleister Crowley-approved quick way to write, "Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law. Love is the law, love under will." Which is a slow way to write "Greetings".

Here's the explanation. I assume the autographee was a casual acquaintance - good friends don't ask for autographs usually. But it's still interesting that Jimmy Page can spell "Greetings" in his fan's native tongue. I think.

I don't know where the picture originally came from, or whether the owner is claiming copyright, so if it's being distributed without their knowledge, perhaps they could drop me a line and I'll remove it.

Dutch Masters of Cheese and occult philosophy

My local supermarket sells Dutch Masters - of cheese. I usually buy Rembrandt Cheese - I mean, who wouldn't? But yesterday they were selling my favorite Dutch Master, Mondrian.



Piet Mondrian (1872 to 1944) was a Dutch artist who developed a non-representational style called Neoplasticism. Although he passed through a vaguely Cubist phase, he was not a true cubist. He was a Theosophist, studying the work of Madame Blavatsky, and he developed his abstract art as he developed his spiritual philosophy. He believed that it was possible to render the true nature behind the actual form of a thing. Only the simplest possible elements were allowed, in order to get as close as possible to the ideal. Horizontal and vertical lines in black, filled with blocks of primary color or white, laid out with intuitive artistry, were the closest one can come to representing this underlying truth.

According to the Tate Gallery's online article on Neoplasticism, his essay 'Neo-Plasticism in Pictorial Art' sums up his artistic philosophy: 'As a pure representation of the human mind, art will express itself in an aesthetically purified, that is to say, abstract form …The new plastic idea cannot therefore, take the form of a natural or concrete representation … this new plastic idea will ignore the particulars of appearance, that is to say, natural form and colour. On the contrary it should find its expression in the abstraction of form and colour, that is to say, in the straight line and the clearly defined primary colour'.

According to Hermetic.com, in this review of the Book of Dyzan Theosophy was considered by Aleister Crowley to be a natural cousin of his philosophy, Thelema.

Crowley recognized Blavatsky as a Sister of the A\A\[...] specifically pointing her out as his immediate predecessor in "The Temple of Truth," published in The Heart of the Master through O.T.O. in 1938. He thought it especially noteworthy that he was born in the same year that the Theosophical Society was inaugurated. Crowley reissued Blavatsky's Voice of the Silence (Extracts from the Book of the Golden Precepts, including "The Two Paths" and "The Seven Portals") with his own commentary as Liber LXXI, a Class B publication of A\A\.
While Crowley boasted that O.T.O. was "the first of the great Old Aeon orders to accept the Law of Thelema," he evidently hoped that the Theosophical Society might be the second. In his Confessions, he claimed that the publication of Liber LXXI in the eleventh number of The Equinox was intended "to bring back Theosophists to the true principles of their founder."



With Theo Van Doesburg, Mondrian founded the Dutch movement called De Stijl.
So, I'm going to eat some cheese and listen to the White Stripes album of the same name. I deserve it after Six Degrees of Separationing Jack White and Aleister Crowley in only four steps.

Three books With The Word "Magus" in the Title: Part II: The Magus (A Different One)

Part II: The Magus, or Celestial Intelligencer, by Francis Barrett.

Subtitled A Complete System of Occult Philosophy, this one is not a novel. I got this one in a used-book shop in our local library for $1, which was a bargain. Hey, it's a Complete System of Occult Philosophy! For a buck!

This one fascinated me and I read it with thorough enjoyment. If you don't enjoy reading about how to make the Philosopher's Stone out of those things from toads heads and piles of dung, or how to conjure Saturday's demons, and more specifically if you don't like Neil Stephenson, then it's probably not a book for you.

My edition is a reprint with an awesomely sixties-colored cover, a sort of avocado green. It's in that familiar style of facsimile reprints that Dover uses – I can't remember what it's called – but this one was published by University Books in 1967. It is not the same edition as the Amazon one above in the link. This one doesn't have f's for s's and is consequently much easier on the eyes. Francis Barrett published the original in 1801.

The table of contents gives three books inside as The Science of Natural Magic, which includes Alchymy; Talismanic Magic, or the Constellatory Practice; and Magnetism, including Cabalistical or Ceremonial Magic. There's no resetting the page numbers between the first part and the second part, and the front cover only mentions two books.

Natural Magic includes all the sorts of bollocks you'd expect, like how to use Hare's Fat to pull a thorn, or the explanation that the hairs of a menstruous woman, put under dung, will breed serpents.

Talismanic Magic discusses the stars and their correspondences, like the numbers and colors associated with them. It also gives the method of deriving the magickal seals (talismans) themselves from number tables (which it gives) and wraps it up very prettily with descriptions. There are a lot of illustrations.

Magnetism and Cabalistic Magic describes what most of us Dennis Wheatley/Hammer Horror fans think of as magic, or Magick – how to conjure things like familiar spirits using circles, pentacles, and swords. (And how to get rid of them again.) In order to get there, it has a great digression into the Cabala. Assuming you've done all that – learned Hebrew, studied the Cabala figured out all these relationships, learned the names of God and the angels and memorized all the other ancillary information, you're ready to start fasting, purifying, meditating and finally to do some magick. The illos here are very nice too, including some drawings of demons that look like ordinary people down the pub, except with more bat-wings than average. There's a couple of cautionary tales in here about what happens if you don't get this correct, and I particularly liked the story of the guy who summoned something in someone else's house and got killed. When the others returned, wanting to destroy the evidence, they made the hapless spirit animate the dead man's body and walk it a long distance away and leave it there. Clever, I thought. Barrett says it most likely isn't true.

Reviews on Amazon from people who may or may not know what they are talking about suggest that you should skip this, as it is a rip-off of Agrippa's Three Books of Occult Philosophy. Unless you find that in a library book sale instead, I wouldn't. It's $26 from Amazon. Mind you, that in itself is fascinating, since this was genuinely occult (i.e. hidden) knowledge not long ago. Now you can order it with 1-Click®. Another work they recommend is Crowley's 777, if you're going to study Cabala; that's on the shelf next to this and so I can reveal it doesn't have such pretty illustrations. It's more likely to be accurate, though, as Crowley really did believe in experimentation, whereas I suspect Barrett believed everything he was told.

What is most appealing about The Magus is the era in which it was put together. 1801 was a little late for studying Hebrew simply because it is the language of God and mankind before the fall and therefore contains all truths, or for assuming that the planets are running on some sort of cosmic roller-coaster track. The foreword puts this down to the Gothic revival sweeping Britain at the time, when all things medieval seemed so much more true and fundamental than things which were scientific. The practical Scotsmen, northerners and Cornishmen building iron bridges and railways and heavier-than-water ships at that time must have produced quite a backlash; I suppose they should be proud of themselves. We see this denial also in the Gothic novels such as Frankenstein so popular at that time, and work of the romantic poets.

The difference between the type of man who can look, without irony, for stones in toads' heads, and the type of man who uses experimentation and seeks out "a complete system" like some premature ISO standards board, is normally so great that Barrett's book is an exercise in cognitive dissonance. In fact, it reads like a modern Steampunk work, or more precisely, like the postcyberpunk novels of Neil Stephenson. As you may recall, Stephenson's early book Snow Crash was about computer viruses and Sumerian gods; A Diamond Age was a Victorian novel featuring nanotechnology. Although I have never actually managed to get more than 100 pages into any of Stephenson's subsequent doorstoppers, I have read enough to know that entire paragraphs of them are not dissimilar from this book.

See if you can tell which is which:

"So, when you think about the spoon, is your mind manipulating the spoon?"
"No. The spoon is unaffected, no matter what I think about it."
"Because our minds cannot manipulate physical objects – cup, saucer, spoon – instead they manipulate symbols of them, which are stored in the mind…now, you yourself helped Lord Chester devise the Philosophical Language, whose chief virtue is that it assigns all things in the world positions in certain tables – positions that can be encoded by numbers." (…)
"Suppose the number three represents a chicken, and the number twelve the rings of Saturn – what then is three times twelve?"
"Well, you can't just do it at random," Liebnitz said.

"The doctrines of mathematics are so necessary to and have such an affinity with magic, that they who profess it without them are quite out of the way …. For whatsoever things are, and are done in these inferior natural virtues, are all done and governed by number, weight, measure, harmony, motion and light, and all things which we see in these inferiors have root and foundation in them. … So there are made glasses (some concave, others of the form of a column) making the representations of things in the air seem like shadows at a distance."

Well, obviously the one with the funny multilayered science joke and the direct speech is Neil Stephenson (from Quicksilver). The one with the angels is Barrett. But they're drawing water from the same well. Stephenson is making wine with his water, and Barrett is spreading cholera with his.

If you can find it for a buck, here's your magus for your bookshelf, right here.

Three books With The Word "Magus" in the Title: Part I: The Magus

I know that many people have looked at their bookshelves and said to themselves, "What my collection really needs is a book with the word "magus" in the title to really round it off. But - " (they think) "- can someone please recommend me one, because I surely don't know where to start!"

You're in luck. I have three books with the word "magus" in the title in my estimable book collection, and I read them all recently so I could bring you thrilling, hands-on reviews!


The first book on my shelf with the word "magus" in the title is "The Magus" by John Fowles. I get the impression John Fowles is a clever bloke who is highly renowned by what my usual group of friends call mundanes. (I believe the rest of the world calls them literary types.). He won a prize for "The French Lieutenant's Woman", which was made into a popular movie. That film made me decide never to read a John Fowles book. I could not stand the title. It's the sort of title I wouldn't even poke with a stick to see if it's dead. However, when I started my "read 'em and most likely weep" magus-reading project, I realized I would have to put my feelings about the Woman Who Had a French Lieutenant (see, isn't that a better title?) to one side, bite the bullet as it were and get on with it.

It took me seven weeks to read The Magus all the way through. It's a 'can't pick it up' book. This edition is only 604 pages – I read the original edition, although there's some sort of Special Director's Cut edition of it also on the shelves in my house – but every page was a hard slog. Each one was remarkably similar to the last one and contained so much whining on the part of the narrator that I couldn't take him in doses larger than about three pages.

I eventually buckled down to it because the waiter at the Argentine restaurant in Valencia – the one who looked like a Satyr – made a remark about the book that meant I felt compelled to finish. (He was the waiter who alarmed me when I first got talking to him since at that time I was reading Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows (long book, short read) and the Satyr said he'd grown up with Harry: the first book had come out when he was in 5th grade. This made this apparent adult (the waiter, and for that matter Harry) young enough to be my son.) Of course, my stint in Valencia is long over, now, and so I'll probably never get back there to tell him I finished it.

Warning: Major spoilers below.

The Magus is ostensibly about A Man With A Meaningful Name, Urfe, and his
whiningrelationship with women. After various bruising encounters with the female of the species, he goes to be a teacher on a remote island in Greece. He meets a strange man, Conchis, who introduces him to another woman. She may be a spirit, or an amnesiac, or a 'schizophrenic' (split personality), or an actress, or a twin. Conchis, the woman/women and a few other characters who may also be actors, go through an elaborate charade, using many layers of deception and revelation, to loosen Urfe's grip on reality, break down his personality and initiate him into something or other vaguely magical-orderish that remains irksomely unexplained at the end of the book.

I will guess that Fowles thought of Conchis while contemplating the idea of Aleister Crowley on Cefalu, a magus in his island abbey, wrecking the egos of spiritual seekers who get caught up in his sphere of influence in order to make something greater out of them. I did spot the name Crowley once, but it was so sudden and unlikely in its context it seemed to me that it was overlooked during editing and he had planned to substitute something else. Then again, I was skipping entire paragraphs by that point.

Whatever. Crowley himself wrote a book touching on the same theme, which was rather more compelling, and it includes free instruction in Thelema, which you certainly don't get from Fowles. Crowley's book is called Diary of a Drug Fiend. There are actually a fair number of death/rebirth as initiate novels around. If that's what you're after I'd recommend Illuminatus! which hit all my sweet spots and entertained me mightily, although it's probably a bit dated. If you want something more, I'd recommend the astonishing A Scanner Darkly by Philip K Dick, in which a young man's personality is ablated to nothing, leaving *him* too attenuated to be devastated, but leaving the reader quite wrecked enough on his behalf. Why this happens and whether anybody wins in the end, I won't say, as I have no intention of spoiling *that* book.

People have often told me that men and women are different inside; that men do not brood. If there is a troubled relationship, I'm told, it doesn't occur to men to think about why that may be or if things could have been different. If they look troubled during these times, they say, it's because they've run out of beer, or there's no football on the TV. I've never wholeheartedly subscribed to that view, and this book certainly blows it out of the water. The narrator obsesses like a teenage girl over his perceived errors with the opposite sex from the first page all the way through the last. It's like a soap opera only with longer words and the occasional passage in Greek.

The Magus is the sort of book you'll like if you like this sort of book. I don't. I saw enough web pages saying it was "gripping" or a "powerful experience" to see that I'm in the minority though. If you still want a copy, you can have mine . . .

Synopsis here.

Next: Another book with "magus" in the title!