Worthwhile or insane mystical psychobabble?

worthwhile or insane mystical psychobabble?

it's both in varying degrees of interest.

i read his book "eight lectures on yoga".

didn't say anything about yoga, but had a lot of disdain for OTHER writers who have written on yoga.

Rly, OP, again?

He's a meme, but he was very good at self-publishing and successfully forcing himself as a meme into history. As literature he's actually childish trash, but this is precisely the appeal when put together with his personal life, like the Marquis de Sade. He led a very interesting life which is fun to read about, but not one that one would want to live, of course.

It's exactly /because/ his literature is childish trash that it has the appeal that it does. He constantly does these AABB, ABBA rhyme things, even inserting them into the Book of the Law itself. It's just how he was poetically wired, and it's not all bad. The Hymn to Pan's bravado is right at home with the swagger of a modern rap song:

And I rave; and I rape and I rip and I rend
Everlasting, world without end,
Mannikin, maiden, Maenad, man,
In the might of Pan.
Io Pan! Io Pan Pan! Pan! Io Pan!

Such can easily be put to modern beat.

t. spent some time actually studying his works and made pic related as a sample.

he can be interesting if you are into counterculture, but you won't get much actual exploration of tradition from him

it's interesting how his 'scientific investigation' of the effects of various drugs kind of stopped when he discovered heroin.

In one sense, your second clause is redundant due to your first clause. But in another, more important sense, your second clause is dumb, and you don't even have to like Crowley to realize that truth.

Crowley spent his life reading and writing about old traditions, and popularizing them. You can take reasonable issue with his cult/project/lies, but the idea that to read and read about Crowley will not entail much "actual exploration of tradition", if done the right way (with engagement, which even he usually invites) is objectively false.

Your rebuttal to this is that Crowley did various bastardizations of real tradition, which also holds water. My rebuttal to your rebuttal is that for a general reader, looking into the topics which Crowley brings up leads straight to "the good stuff", if you want to call it that: buddhism, yoga, conventional religion.

IIRC a passage right near the end of the book of the Law goes like "him righteous, righteous still" etc etc. the point being that it's clearly an upset of the old thing at the end of Revelation, which the boy-Crowley knew very well (and thus inserted), being a good youthful bible student.

Crowley is responsible for purposefully mistranslating the Pali Cannon from "Attachment is the cause of suffering" to "Desire is the cause of suffering". This is called in Christianity "blaspheming the Holy Spirit", which leads to a slow escalator descent through all the 7 layers of Hell and finally into Tartarus, forever. Unforgivable, as they say. Spiritual ones, know that desire causes no suffering, if but for some boredom. And as for Sir Crouton over here, if you want to skim his work without getting an itch in your throat, just know that every sentence he ever wrote has the secret message of "I am raping you". Be well xx

Basically Max Stirner, but more interesting. He is probably the "rough beast" "slouching" toward Bethlehem in WB. Yeats' poem the Second Coming. Yeats would have known him in their mutual membership of the Order of the Golden Dawn. I.e. He was the antichrist.

Trump is a reincarnation of his awful soul. First time as tragedy, second as farce you know.