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To: alt.magick,alt.tarot,alt.magick.tyagi
From: catherine yronwode 
Subject: Re: The Winged-Disk and Hadit
Date: Wed, 09 Jul 2003 20:50:26 GMT

{ Secret Chief } wrote:
> 
> catherine yronwode  wrote :
> 
> > The ones who promoted Crowley to his present popularity
> > differed from my circle in several ways:
> 
> I'd suggest another couple of ways, which have to do with a broader
> shift in the counter-culture between the 60's and the 70's.
> 
> In the sixties, you've got your Woodstock and SDS.
> 
> In the seventies, you've got your Hell's Angels and Weathermen and
> Manson family.
> 
> Part of this shift (e.g. Weathermen) has to do with a generally more
> angry atmosphere in the country, and part of it has to do with less
> 'beautiful' people staking out a place for themselves in the
> counterculture (e.g. the Hell's Angel's).  And a general shift in
> emphasis away from politics when the draft ended; true, some groups
> like the Weathermen became even more insanely political, but this is
> clearly the result of a minority bunker-mentality.
> 
> Grady McMurtry was a Korean War vet and an Okie.  Lon Duquette is,
> IIRC, a machinist by profession.  Were they less dreamy and clever,
> they would have been a part and parcel of the Hell's Angels
> membership base.
> 
> Hym. Beta was, according to his own alleged words in a transcript on
> Ko-nig's website, "a hippy at Harvard in the 70's".  That makes him a
> horse of a different color from your crowd in at least two senses.
> 
> It would be my guess that this 70's counter-shift in the
> counterculture is something you never quite came to accept and
> understand.  And the Caliphate, clearly a product of this shift, in
> your home territory of the occult, seems especially offensive to you.
> 
> Just a guess, anyway.

You were doing okay there until you started making up
fantasy roles for me and guessing my reactions to people.
That kinda sucked. 

The "beautiful people" you theorize me to have been part of
in the 1960s were far, far from my reality. 

I went to college in 1964 but by 1965 i had dropped out, run
away, and lived on a back-to-the-land peace commune way up
in Eastern Washington's wheat country (50 miles west of
Spokane in a canyon filled with pine trees that led down to
Lake Roosevelt). I was milking cows and plowing with a horse
with about 20 other anti-war activists and picking fruit as
a migrant worker in the Yakima Valley to bring in cash,
until most everyone at the farm was busted for growing pot
in a big raid. 

After my brief jail time, i lived on a 9-person
back-to-the-land commune in Northern California from 1969 -
1972 where where we raised sheep and goats and pigs and grew
fancy vegetables for the local grocery trade and i practiced
astrology and sewing to bring in cash and had my first
child, who later died. My partner was a shade tree mechanic
with a degree in philosophy.

From 1972 - 1980 i was living in the Missouri Ozarks, first
on a back-to-the-land commune of about 16 people near Birch
Tree  raising sheep and dairy goats (and my second
daughter), hauling hay for local farmers, pruning apples,
making quilts, hand spinning woolen yarn, and writing
articles for crafts magazines to bring in cash -- and then,
after i left the commune, living with my daughter in a
series of log cabins and broken down farm houses in the
woods around Cabool and Mountain Grove, where i kept on
writing and practicing astrology to support myself. 

I never went to Woodstock -- but my fellow-communards and i
went swimming at the VFW camp courtesy of an invitation from
Virgil E.,  a local dairy farmer.

The folks for whom we did odd jobs, hauled hay, picked
fruit, and for whom i drew up astrological charts, were a
whole hell of a lot more like Victor and Cora Anderson and
Grady McMurtry than they were like Bill Breeze. They carried
guns in their trucks. They ran coon dogs. They butchered
road-kill if it was fresh -- and so did we. Whoever had the
first ripe tomatoes of the season had something to brag
about. Jim K., a logger, used to borrow our draft horse Omie
when he had trees to fell that were in ground too rough for
his Cat. He and his wife Penny K., who had lived through a
tornado carrying away the house she was in and dropping it
back in the 1940s but was now slowly dying of emphysema from
smoking four packs of cigarettes a day, let us sit in their
living room and watch the Watergate proceedings on
television because we didn't electricity down at our place. 

These folks had some very personal takes on magic. You ought
to have seen 65 year old Bessie J., who had hair braided all
the way down to her ankles, raised dairy goats, tanned the
furs of her pet dogs and made rugs out of them when they
died, and did automatic spirit writing  and communicated
with space aliens in Birch Tree, or her friend, 70 year old
Columba K., who planned to build a 7-rayed stained glass
healing temple in order to explain Theosophy and colour
harmony to the space aliens in Willow Springs. Then there
was Mr. W., who knew all the local herbs and how to use them
for medicine and magic and who bought slaughter ponies each
week at the livestock auction and took them out back in his
back field and shot them and let 'em lay so that his hunting
dogs would be able to help themselves whenever they were
hungry and he wouldn't have to bother with buying dog food
or mess around with cleaning up feed bowls. And we must not
forget Earl R., the Coon Ass Freemason tug boat captain from
Louisiana who raised Apaloosa horses as a hobby down at the
County Line, and could read Hebrew pretty good too,
especially the stuff that was in that big ole book of his
about the Sephirotic Tree. He could also sing and play
guitar and his cousin Graylin could play the keyboards and
together they knew three times as many cajun songs as there
were cans in every pack of beer they drank while singing.

The hippie cohort is a lot more diverse than you seem to
know -- and so are our friends and fellow occultists. 

cat yronwode