THE |
|
a cache of usenet and other text files pertaining
to occult, mystical, and spiritual subjects. |
Newsgroups: alt.magick,alt.magick.tyagi,alt.magick.tantra,alt.thelema,alt.magick.moderated,alt.answers,news.answers Subject: alt.magick ACrowley/WoMeN REFerence file Followup-To: alt.magick Summary: This is a REFerence file for the alt.magick newsgroup. As such it constitutes an attendant file to the alt.magick FAQ, which is intended as an introductory file and its content may be discussed within the alt.magick.* contellation. The FAQ is available at: ftp://ftp.hollyfeld.org/pub/Esoteric/Usenet/Magick/FAQ.amgkfaq.9510 X-URL: http://www.hollyfeld.org/~tyagi/amgkfaq.html Keywords: Crowley Women feminism thelema Approved: tyagi@houseofkaos.abyss.com (alt.magick.moderated staff) Supercedes: 9511 References: ftp://www.hollyfeld.org/pub/Esoteric/Web/Amgkfaq/ From: tyagi@houseofkaos.abyss.com (tyaginator) Reply-to: tyagi@houseofkaos.abyss.com (tyaginator) Archive-name: magick/acwmnref Version: 9604 Posting-Frequency: every year or by necessity From: Frater Nigris (tyagi@houseofkaos.abyss.com) To: Thelema93-L and USEnet Subj: Thelema and Women (9305.thlmwmn.ac) Date: 49940711 (repost of 49930518) [recurrency: 1.25 yrs avg] The Revolution Begins Here and Now! Do what thou wilt! "Women under Christianity are kept virginal for the market as Strasbourg geese are nailed to boards till their livers putrify. The nature of women has been corrupted, her hope of a soul thwarted, her proper pleasure balked, and her mind poisoned, to titillate the jaded palates of senile bankers and ambassadors. "Why do men insist on 'innocence' in women? "1. To flatter their vanity 2. To give themselves the best chance of a) escaping venereal disease, b) propagating their noble selves. 3. To maintain power over their slaves by their possession of knowledge. 4. To keep them docile as long as possible by drawing out the debauching of their innocence. A sexually pleased woman is the best of willing helpers; one who is disappointed or disillusioned, a very psychical eczema. 5. In primitive communities, to serve as a guard against surprise and treachery. 6. To cover their secret shame in the matter of sex. "Hence the pretense that a woman is 'pure,' modest, delicate, aesthetically beautiful and morally exalted, ethereal and unfleshly, though in fact they may know her to be nauseatingly bestial both physically and mentally. The advertisements of 'dress shields,' perfumes, cosmetics, anti-sweat preparations, and 'beauty treatments' reveal woman's nature as seen by the clear eyes of those who would lose money if they misjudged her; and they are loathsomely revolting to read. Her mental and moral characteristics are those of the parrot and the monkey. Her physiology and pathology are hideously disgusting, a sickening slime of uncleanliness. "Her virgin life is a sick ape's, her sexual life a drunken sow's, her mother life all bulging filmy eyes and sagging udders. "These are the facts about 'innocence'; to this has man's Christian endeavor dragged her when he should rather have made her his comrade, frank, trusty, and gay, the tenderer self of himself, his consubstantial complement even as earth is to the sun. "We of Thelema say that 'Every man and every woman is a star." We do not fool and flatter women, we do not despise and abuse them. To us, a woman is herself, absolute, original, independent, free, self-justified, exactly as a man is. "We dare not thwart her going, Goddess she! We arrogate no right upon her will; we claim not to deflect her development, to dispose of her desires, or to determine her destiny. She is her own sole arbiter; we ask no more than to supply our strength to her, whose natural weakness else were prey to the world's pressure. Nay more, it were too zealous even to guard her in her going; for she were best by her own self-reliance to win her own way forth! "We do not want her as a slave; we want her free and royal, whether her love fight death in our arms by night, or her loyalty ride by day beside us in the charge of the battle of life. "'Let the woman be girt with a sword before me'! "'In her is all power given.' "So sayeth this our _Book of the Law_. We respect woman in the self of her own nature; we do not arrogate the right to criticize her. We welcome her as our ally, come to our camp as her will, free-flashing, sword-swinging, hath told her. Welcome, thou woman, we hail thee, star shouting to star! Welcome to rout and revel! Welcome to fray and to feast! Welcome to vigil and victory! Welcome to war with its wounds! Welcome to lust and to laughter! Welcome to peace with its pageants! Welcome to board and to bed! Welcome to trumpet and triumph; welcome to dirge and to death! "It is we of Thelema who truly love and respect woman, who hold her sinless and shameless even as we are; and those who say that we despise her are those who shrink from the flash of our falchion as we strike from her limbs the foul fetters. "Do we call woman whore? Ay, verily and amen, she is that; the air shudders and burns as we shout it, exulting and eager. "O ye! Was not this your sneer, yor [sic] vile whisper that scorned her and shamed her? Was not 'whore' the truth of her, the title of terror that you gave her in your fear of her, coward comforting coward with furtive glance and gesture? "But we fear her not; we cry whore, as her armies approach us. We beat on our shields with our swords. Earth echoes the clamor! "Is there any doubt of the victory? Your hordes of cringing slaves, afraid of themselves, afraid of their own slaves, hostile, despised and distrusted, yur only tacticians the ostrich, the opossum, and the cuttle, will you not break and flee at our first onset, as with leveled lances of lust we ride at the charge, with our allies, the whores whom we love and acclaim, free friends by our sides in the battle of life? "_The Book of the Law_ is the charter of woman; the word Thelema has opened the lock of her 'girdle of chastity.' Your Sphinx of stone has come to life; to know, to will, to dare and to keep silence. "Yea, I, the Beast, my Scarlet Whore bestriding me, naked and crowned, drunk on her golden cup of fornication, boasting herself my bedfellow, have trodden her in the market place, and roared this word that every woman is a star. And with that word is uttered woman's freedom; the fools and fribbles and flirts have heard my voice. The fox in woman hath heard the lion in man; fear, fainting, flabbiness, frivolity, falsehood - these are no more the mode. "In vain will the bully and brute and braggart man, priest, lawyer, or social censor knit his brows to devise him a new tamer's trick; once and for all the tradition is broken; vanished the vogue of bowstring, sack, stoning, nose-slitting, belt-buckling, cart's tail-tragging, whipping, pillory posting, walling-up, divorce court, eunuch, harem, mind-crippling, house-imprisoning, menial-world-wearying, creed-stultifying, social-ostracism marooning, divine-wrath-scaring, and even the device of creating and encouraging prostitution to keep one class of women in the abyss under the heel of the police, and the other on its brink, at the mercy of the husband's boot at the first sign of insubordination or even failure to please. "Man's torture-chamber had tools inexhaustibly varied; at one end murder crude and direct to subtler more callous, starvation; at the other moral agonies, from tearing her child from her breast to threatening her with a rival when her service had blasted her beauty. "Most masterful man, yet most cunning was not thy supreme strategem to band the woman's own sisters against her, to use their knowledge of her psychology and the cruelty of their jealousies to avenge thee on thy slave as thou thyself hadst neither wit nor spite to do? "And woman, weak in body, and starved of mind; woman, morally fettered by her heroic oath to save the race, no care of cost, helpless and hard, endured these things, endured from age to age. Hers was no loud spectacular sacrifice, no cross upon a hill-top, with the world agaze, and monstrous miracles to echo the applause of heaven. She suffered and triumphed in most shameful silence; she had no friend, no follower, none to aid or approve. For thanks she had but maudlin flatteries, and knew what cruel-cold scorn the hearts of men scarce cared to hide. "She agonized, ridiculous and obscene, gave all her beauty and strength to maidenhood to suffer sickness, weakness, danger of death, choosing to live a life of a cow - so that mankind might sail the sea of time. "She knew that man wanted nothing of her but service of his base appetites; in his true manhood-life she had no part nor lot; and all her wage was his careless contempt. "She hath been trampled thus through all the ages, and she hath tamed them thus. Her silence was the token of her triumph. "But now the word of me the Beast is this; not only art thou woman, sworn to purpose not thine own; thou art thyself a star, and in thyself a purpose to thyself. Not only mother of men art thou, or whore to men; serf to their need of life and love, not sharing in their light and liberty; nay, thou art mother and whore for thine own pleasure; the word I say to man I say to thee no less: Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law! "Ay, priest, ay, lawyer, ay, censor! Will ye not gather in secret once again, if in your hoard of juggler's tricks there be not one untried, or in your cunning and counsel one device new-false to save your pirate ship from sinking? "It has always been so easy up to now! What is the blasting magick in that word, first thesis of _The Book of the Law_, that 'every woman is a star.' "Alas! It is I the Beast that roared that word so loud, and wakened beauty. "Your tricks, your drowsy drugs, your lies, your hypnotic passes - they will not serve you. Make up your minds to be free men, fearless as I, fit mates for women no less free and fearless! For I, the Beast, have come; an end to the evils of old, to the duping and clubbing of abject and ailing animals, degraded to that shameful state to serve that shameful pleasure. "The essence of my word is to declare woman to be herself, of, to, and for, herself; and I give this one irresistible weapon, the expression of herself and her will through sex, to her on precisely the same terms as to man. "Murder is no longer dreaded; the economic weapon is powerless since female labor has been found industrially valuable; and the social weapon is entirely in her own hands. "The best women have always been sexually free, like the best men; it is only necessary to remove the penalties for being found out. Let Women's labor organizations support any individual who is economically harried on sexual grounds. Let social organizations honor in public what their members practice in private.... "The modern woman is not going to be dupe, slave, and victim anymore; the woman who gives herself freely to her own enjoyment, without asking recompense, will earn the respect of her brothers, and will openly despise her 'chaste' or venal sisters, as men now despise 'milksops,' 'sissies,' and 'tango lizards.' Love is to be divorced utterly and irrevocably from social and financial agreements, especially marriage. Love is a sport, an art, a religion, as you will; ol' clo' emporium. _The Law is For All_, by Aleister Crowley, Edited by Israel Regardie, New Falcon Publications, 1991; pages 305-12. ----------------------------------------------------------------- "Just as a woman's body is deformed and diseased by the corset demanded by Jagannath fashion, so is her soul by the compression of convention, which is a fashion as fitful, arbitrary, and senseless as that of the man-milliner, though they call him God, and his freakish fiat pass for everlasting law. "The English Bible sanctions the polygamy and concubinage of Abraham, Solomon and others, the incest of Lot, the wholesale rape of captured virgins, as well as the promiscuity of the first Christians, the prostitution of temple servants, men and women, the relation of Johannes with his master, and the putting of wandering prophets to stud, as well as the celibacy of such people as Paul. Jehovah went so far as to slay Onan because he balked at fertilizing his brother's widow, condoned adultery, with murder of the husband, of David, and commanded Hosea to intrigue with a 'wife of whoredom.' He only drew the moral line at any self-assertion on the part of women. "In the past, man has bludgeoned woman into gratifying the lust of her loathed tyrant, and trampled the flower of her own love into the mire; making her rape more beastly by calling her antipathy chastity, and proving her an unclean thing on the evidence of the torn soiled blossom. "She has had no chance to love unless she first renounced the respect of society, and found a way to drive the world of hunger from her door. "Her chance has come! In any abbey of Thelema any woman is welcome; there she is free to do her will, and held in honor for the doing. The child of love is a star, even as all are stars; but such an one we especially cherish; it is a trophy of battle to be fought and won!" Ibid, pages 315-6. ------------------------------- I would note that there are other editions of these words, capitalized in ways which might change the meaning to even greater intensity (notably that of Symonds and Grant), yet Regardie's shows, I think, clearly enough what Crowley's attitude toward women was, on the whole. Free love, right now! Mu! tyagi@houseofkaos.abyss.com ------------------------------------------ This document is Copyright (c) 1996, authors cited. All rights reserved. Permission to distribute the collection is hereby granted providing that distribution is electronic, no money is involved, reasonable attempts are made to use the latest version and all credits and this copyright notice are maintained. Other requests for distribution should be directed to the individual authors of the particular articles. nagasiva, tyagi tyagI@houseofkaos.Abyss.coM (I@AM)
The Arcane Archive is copyright by the authors cited.
Send comments to the Arcane Archivist: tyaginator@arcane-archive.org. |
Did you like what you read here? Find it useful?
Then please click on the Paypal Secure Server logo and make a small donation to the site maintainer for the creation and upkeep of this site. |
The ARCANE ARCHIVE is a large domain,
organized into a number of sub-directories, each dealing with a different branch of religion, mysticism, occultism, or esoteric knowledge. Here are the major ARCANE ARCHIVE directories you can visit: |
|
interdisciplinary:
geometry, natural proportion, ratio, archaeoastronomy
mysticism: enlightenment, self-realization, trance, meditation, consciousness occultism: divination, hermeticism, amulets, sigils, magick, witchcraft, spells religion: buddhism, christianity, hinduism, islam, judaism, taoism, wicca, voodoo societies and fraternal orders: freemasonry, golden dawn, rosicrucians, etc. |
SEARCH THE ARCANE ARCHIVE
There are thousands of web pages at the ARCANE ARCHIVE. You can use ATOMZ.COM
to search for a single word (like witchcraft, hoodoo, pagan, or magic) or an
exact phrase (like Kwan Yin, golden ratio, or book of shadows):
OTHER ESOTERIC AND OCCULT SITES OF INTEREST
Southern
Spirits: 19th and 20th century accounts of hoodoo,
including slave narratives & interviews
|