I love animals, but my love isn't blind. I like to look my love in the eye. One of the many, barely questioned, ideas about the animal kingdom is that those that inhabit it are somehow morally different than us in fundamental ways. Sure there's violence, but that's just the food chain. It's different than what we do. Human beings, scum that we are ( Read more... )

It’s easy to point out the things in The Chronicles of Narnia that might not be amenable to modern, or Thelemic, values. The not-so-covert racism, the total reliance on a deus ex machina figure to overcome all obstacles and temptations, the social commentary that gets painted in strokes that are sometimes painfully broad, but ultimately all of ( Read more... )

Although I find it fantastically uninspiring, I do try to keep up with the Thelema Now podcast.  Now... I hardly mean this to be taken in the sense of an attack because I don't know the guy at all, so let us please understand the following remarks in the context of a critique of his performance, and "stage" presence, but Frater Puck has the  ( Read more... )

In his writings on the subject, Aleister Crowley strongly advances the view, slightly adapted from Freud, that sexual repression is the root of sexual perversion. In this day and age, I don’t think anyone would dispute that. In the interest of striking a balance, we might add that excessive sexual expression can result in perversion as well (for ( Read more... )

Why do I call myself a feminist ( Read more... )

The more I read Jung, and explore his take on spirituality, the more disgusted I become with his basic methodology. When he’s talking about psychological complexes the man has some interesting and insightful things to say, but as soon as he starts on religion he goes off the reservation. I think that this is why Jung appeals so much to half-wit ( Read more... )

What causes childhood to disappear?

For the purposes of this discussion, let us consider childhood as a state in which one does not possess autonomy.
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“The final cause for the decline of story runs very deep. Values, the positive/negative charges of life, are at the soul of our art. The writer shapes story around the perception of what’s worth living for, what’s worth dying for, what’s foolish to pursue, the meaning of justice, truth-the essential values. In decades past, writer and society ( Read more... )

Although the encouragement of one’s essential individuality is one of Thelema’s highest values, it can still be misapplied. I’ve spent a lot of time over the past couple of months discoursing with people in different professions on this topic, and I see an isomorphism between numerous different forms of negative individuality, which we would ( Read more... )

“The extent to which the average person in America is filled with the same sense of fear and insignificance [that is, the same as ‘the marching soldier’ and the factory worker] seems to find a telling expression in the fact of the popularity of the Mickey Mouse pictures. There the one theme- in so many variations- is always this: something little ( Read more... )