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alt.magick ACrowley/WoMeN REFerence file

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
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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
------------------------------------------

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tyagI@houseofkaos.Abyss.coM (I@AM)

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