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To: alt.magick,alt.magick.tyagi From: catherine yronwodeSubject: Re: ac's alleged anti-Semitism (aaa) Date: Sat, 05 Jul 2003 15:10:50 -0800 Bilbo Baggins / blandcriminal wrote: -- with respect to charges that Aleister Crowley was anti-Semitic or, more properly speaking anti-Jewish and that evidence of this is found in the preface to the original edition of "777" -- Aleister Crowley wrote: > > "CAN any good thing come out of Palestine? is the broader anti- > > Semitic retort to the sneer cast by the Jews themselves against the > > harmless and natural Nazarene; one more example of the poetic > > justice of History. Crowley speaks here as a Christian, defending "the harmless and natural Nazarene" (Jesus) against the "sneer" of the Jews. The rhetorical question -- and hence endorsement of the idea -- that it is "the poetic justice of history" for Jews to suffer persecution by Christians because they (as a race, as a culture, as a religious group) "sneered" at Jesus is a justification that is pandemic in Christian anti-Jewish thought. Entire books have been written which support this logical fallacy, which Crowley endorses, and which has at its extreme the accusation that "the Jews Killed Christ." I recommend two recent books on the history of this anti-Jewish viewpoint, both written by Christians who seek to oppose and put and end to the hostility and damage caused by centuries of programmatic Christian anti-Jewish hatred: They are "Who Killed Jesus" by John Dominic Crossan and "The Sword of Constantine" by James Carroll. Next, skipping the portions of Crowley's arguments for and against a study of the Kabbalah, we arrive at Aleister Crowley writing this: > > Human sacrifices are to-day still practised by the Jews of > > Eastern Europe, > this misinformation, is this to be construed as anti-Semetic? It is certainly an anti-Jewish lie. Calling it "misinformation" is to soften the impact it was designed to have on the reader. Crowley states this as FACT. By the way, the word you were mentioning is spelled "Semitic," not "Semetic" and it refers to all Semites, not only Jews. Semites are those whose native tongue belongs to a particular language group known as Semitic, which includes Akkadian, Ugaritic, Hebrew, and Arabic. Semitic languages, in turn, are a sub-set of the Afro-Asiatic-Semitic language group, which also includes ancient Egyptian, Berber-Tuareg, Chushitic, and Chadic languages. Arabic Moslems are Semitic, and they are, quite obviously, not Jews. Cushite Ethiopians also are Semitic. Semitic is the oldest language family in continuous use, date back to 3,000 B.C. In Aleister Crowley's era -- and until fairly recently -- it was considered "polite" to call bigoted people who disliked Jews "anti-Semitic" -- as if they also hated Arabs and Ethiopians with equal venom, when in fact such people were generally unknown to them and the race-hatred was focussed almost entirely on Jews. With the entrance into world politics of formerly remote Semitic people who are not Jewish, and the mass migrations that have led most European and American cities to house large populations of Arabs as well as Jews, the term "anti-Semitic" has become obsolete, and modern usage recommends calling a spade a spade and identifying a person who expresses bigotry, prejudice, or hostility against Jews as "anti-Jewish." > > as is set forth at length by the late Sir Richard Burton in the MS. > > which the wealthy Jews of England > conspiracy mongering: is this to be the height of ac's 'anti- > Semitism?' No, it is not. I take the *height* of Aleister Crowley's anti-Jewish polemic to be the charge of contemporary human sacrifices in Eastern Europe, as he clearly stated above. Conspiracy-mongering is a lesser included offense. > > have compassed heaven and earth to suppress, and > > evidenced by the ever-recurring Pogroms against which so senseless > > an outcry is made by those who live among those degenerate Jews who > > are at least not cannibals." > sounds like he is *lampooning* an ignoramaus view to me. ac *does* do > this a lot, sometimes it is more obvious than other times. There is no evidence of lampooning here. Aleister Crowley flatly says that 1) "the wealthy Jews of England have compassed heaven and earth to suppress" the late Sir Richard Burton's documentation of human sacrifices practiced by Eastern European Jews 2) the recurring pogroms against Eastern European Jews are factual "evidence" of the these ritual murders by Jews, and 3) it is "senseless" for the attacks against Jews in Eastern Europe to be politically or socially protested by liberal non-Jews who live among the English Jews because the latter are "degenerate" human beings, albeit "not cannibals." > maybe someone can unpack this last part for us? 'Pogroms?' > 'at least not cannibals?' i can't make heads or tails of it to be > quite honest. i can only conjecture as i have done above, lacking > some history knowledge. Consult a dictionary -- or, do as i just have done for you and go to http://www.google.com and type in these words: pogrom definition Doing that results in a list of 4,080 web pages contain the terms "pogrom" and "definition", of which the page given top ranking for relevance by the google search engine is "Pogrom Definition" at http://www.humboldt.edu/~rescuers/book/Makuch/pogrom.html where you can read the following: ----------------------------------------------------------- Pogrom Derived from the Russian word meaning "wreak havoc," a pogrom is an organized attack, often a massacre, against a minority group, particularly Jews. For centuries the Jews in Russian lands were periodically victim to such persecutions, often with the active encouragement of local officials. ----------------------------------------------------------- Notice the definition mentions that Jews in Russia (part of Eastern Europe) were "periodically victim" to pogroms -- and that Aleister Crowley calls these attacks "the ever-recurring Pogroms" -- so the two authors agree that these pogroms or massacres of Jews were a periodic, recurrent phenomenon, which, in fact, a study of history will confirm. (I have no idea why Crowley capitalized "pogroms," by the way; it is not a proper noun.) Anti-Jewish legislation in various parts of Europe -- mass forced conversions to Christianity under threat of death, mass expulsions, laws forbidding Jews to own farmland, etc. -- began in the Medieval period of the Crusades and by way of the Catholic Inquisition it persisted through the Renaissance. For instance, all Jews were expelled from Spain and its colonies such as Sicily (now part of Italy) in 1492. Many of the Jews displaced from Western and Central Europe by the Inquisition and its allied legislative evictions settled in Eastern Europe. In Poland, Lithuania, and Russia (the former two nations eventually absorbed by the latter), anti-Jewish campaigns waxed and waned in frequency and intensity and were incited by leaders of the local Christian churches. The massacres of Jews in 1349 in Silesia and 1648-1649 in Poland typify the sporadic onset of non-legislative attacks on Jews in Eastern Europe. Eventually, under Tsar Alexander III of Russia (1845 - 1894; Tsar from 1881 - 1894) there was a distinct rise in non-legislative anti-Jewish violence and term "pogrom" came to be universally applied to such violent attacks and massacres. During the late 1880s and early 1890s, political protests against the tacit governmental condoning of illegal pogroms in Russia began to be made by Jews living in Western Europe and the Americas. These protests included attempts to document government and Christian church collusion in supposedly "spontaneous" pogroms. One such protest was held in London. It is these outcries to which Crowley is referring when he says it is "senseless" for British non-Jews to speak out against the pogroms because, he claims, the Jews of Eastern are actually guilty of ritual murder "as evidenced by" the pogroms. The mid-19th century pogroms at Kiev and 30 nearby villages, the devastating 1903-4 pogroms at Kishinev in Southeastern Russia, and the 1905 pogrom in Minsk led to the waves of emigration by Jews from Russia. Many of the refugees relocated to the USA and England. The Russian pogroms -- and worldwide protests against them -- continued after the fall of the Russian empire in 1917, for during the Russian Civil War, there were pogroms in the Ukraine in 1919. However, the Bolsheviks put an end to the pogroms. (They had other failings as rulers, but that is another story.) You can read a bit of documentation of the pogroms that were contemporary to Aleister Crowley's life in the writings of the Anarchist Jew Emma Goldman, who described the pogroms in Kiev in her book "My Disillusionment in Russia" (1923). Find an excerpt online at: dwardmac.pitzer.edu/Anarchist_Archives/ goldman/disillusion/ch21.html You can learn much more about the centuries long history of Eastern European pogroms -- and quite a bit about the history of the Kabbalah as well -- by reading a book called "History of the Jews in Poland and Russia" by Simon Dubnow. It was originally published in 1918 but is still in print, and well worth checking out. A table of contents (and an order button) for this book can be found at http://www.avotaynu.com/dubnow.htm I suggest that you *at least* read Dubnow's table of contents -- and i am therefore appending it to the bottom of this post so that its keywords will be searchable if anyone needs some historical backgrounding in what Aleister Crowley was referring to in "777" and why people say Aleister Crowley is anti-Semitic or, more properly, anti-Jewish. With respect to the other portion of the Aleister Crowley text from "777" which you said you could not understand -- the reference to Jews who were 'at least not cannibals' -- look in Dubnow's book for "The Ritual Murder Trial of Velizh" in the early 19th century and "The Ritual Murder Trial of Saratov" in the mid 19th century. Jews were frequently accused of ritual sacrifice, murder, and cannibalism in Eastern Europe -- and what Aleister Crowley is claiming is that it is "senseless" to make an "outcry against" or to politically protest the pogroms and concomitant accusations of ritual murder in Eastern Europe -- because the pogroms themselves are confirmation that the ritual murders took place -- and that it is "especially" senseless when the political protests are "made by those [English NON-Jews] who live among those degenerate [English] Jews who are at least not cannibals" -- that is, not themselves personally guilty of ritual murder. In other words, Aleister Crowley is saying something to this effect: "Jews deserve persecution because they sneered at Jesus Christ .... The wealthy Jews of England may not be cannibals, but they are degenerate human beings and they are moving heaven and earth to suppress evidence of the ritual murders and cannibalism committed by their fellow Jews in Eastern Europe, as documented by Sir Richard Burton. Don't be fooled into protesting the pogroms against Jews in Eastern Europe, because those pogroms are proof that Eastern European Jews do commit ritual murder and it would be senseless for a non-Jew to take the side of the degenerate wealthy English Jews in making such protests against the pogroms." This is no joke and no lampoon. And this is why folks say that Aleister Crowley was an anti-Jewish bigot and racist. cat yronwode P.S. Here is the table of contents for Simon Dubnow's 618 page "History of the Jews in Poland and Russia" (1918), followed by a brief description of the book itself, all from http://www.avotaynu.com/dubnow.htm Contents CHAPTER I: THE JEWISH DIASPORA IN EASTERN EUROPE 1. The Jewish Settlements on the Shores of the Black Sea. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 2. The Kingdom of the Khazars . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4 3. The Jews in the Early Russian Principalities and in the Tataric Khanate of the Crimea . . . . . . . 9 CHAPTER II: THE JEWISH COLONIES IN POLAND AND LITHUANIA 1. The Immigration from Western Europe During the Period of the Crusades. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14 2. The Charter of Prince Boleslav and the Canons of the Church. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 16 3. Rise of Polish Jewry Under Casimir The Great . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 19 4. Polish Jewry during the Reign of Yaghello. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 22 5. The Jews of Lithuania during the Reign of Vitovt . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 24 6. The Conflict between Royalty and Clergy Under Casimir IV. and His Sons . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 25 CHAPTER III: THE AUTONOMOUS CENTER IN POLAND AT ITS ZENITH (1501-1648) 1. Social and Economic Conditions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 28 2. The Liberal Regime of Sigismund I. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 30 3. Liberalism and Reaction in the Reigns of Sigismund Augustus and Stephen Batory . . . . . . . . . . . 36 4. Shlakhta and Royalty in the Reigns of Sigismund III and Vladislav IV . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 40 CHAPTER IV: THE INNER LIFE OF POLISH JEWRY AT ITS ZENITH 1. Kahal Autonomy and the Jewish Diets. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 46 2. The Instruction of the Young . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 51 3. The High-Water Mark of Rabbinic Learning . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 55 4. Secular Sciences, Philosophy, Cabala, and Apologetics. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 61 CHAPTER V: THE AUTONOMOUS CENTER IN POLAND DURING ITS DECLINE (1648-1772) 1. Economic and National Antagonism in the Ukraina. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 66 2. The Pogroms and Massacres of 1648-1649 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 69 3. The Russian and Swedish Invasions (1654-1658). . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 73 4. The Restoration (1658-1697). . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 76 5. Social and Political Dissolution . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 80 6. A Frenzy of Blood Accusations. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 82 7. The Massacre of Uman and the First Partition of Poland . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 87 CHAPTER VI: THE INNER LIFE OF POLISH JEWRY DURING THE PERIOD OF DECLINE 1. Jewish Self-Government . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 91 2. Rabbinical and Mystical Literature . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 96 3. The Sabbatian Movement . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 99 4. The Frankist Sect. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 102 5. The Rise of Hasidism and Israel Baal-Shem-Tob. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 107 6. The Hasidic Propaganda and the Growth of Tzaddikism. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 111 7. Rabbinism, Hasidism, and the Forerunners of Enlightenment. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 114 CHAPTER VII: THE RUSSIAN QUARANTINE AGAINST JEWS (TILL 1772) 1. The Anti-Jewish Attitude of Muscovy During the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries. . . . . .. . . . 117 2. The Jews under Peter I and His Successors. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 119 3. Elizabeth Petrovna and the First Years of Catherine II . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 123 CHAPTER VIII: POLISH JEWRY DURING THE PERIOD OF THE PARTITIONS 1. The Jews of Poland after the First Partition . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 127 2. The Period of the Quadrennial Diet (1788-1791) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 135 3. The Last Two Partitions and Berek Yoselovich . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 141 4. The Duchy of Warsaw and the Reaction under Napoleon. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 144 CHAPTER IX: THE BEGINNINGS OF THE RUSSIAN REGIME 1. The Jewish Policy of Catherine II (1772-1796). . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 148 2. Jewish Legislative Schemes during the Reign of Paul I. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 155 3. Dyerzhavin's "Opinion" on the Jewish Problem . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 158 CHAPTER X: THE "ENLIGHTENED ABSOLUTISM" OF ALEXANDER I 1. "The Committee for the Amelioration of the Jews.". . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 162 2. The "Jewish Constitution" of 1804. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 165 3. The Projected Expulsion from the Villages. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 167 4. The Patriotic Attitude of Russian Jewry during the War of 1812 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 171 5. Economic and Agricultural Experiments. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 173 CHAPTER XI: THE INNER LIFE OF RUSSIAN JEWRY DURING THE PERIOD OF "ENLIGHTENED ABSOLUTISM" 1. Kahal Autonomy and City Government . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 177 2. The Hasidic Schism and the Intervention of the Government. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 179 3. Rabbinism, Hasidism, and Enlightened "Berlinerdom" . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 183 CHAPTER XII: THE LAST YEARS OF ALEXANDER I 1. "The Deputation of the Jewish People". . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 189 2. Christianizing Endeavors . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 192 3. "Judaizing" Sects in Russia. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 194 4. Recrudescence of Anti-Jewish Legislation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 195 5. The Russian Revolutionaries and the Jews . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 198 TRANSLATOR'S PREFACE-VOLUME II CHAPTER XIII: THE MILITARY DESPOTISM OF NICHOLAS I 1. Military Service as a Means of De-Judaization. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 203 2. The Recruiting Ukase of 1827 and Juvenile Conscription . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 205 3. Military Martyrdom . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 208 4. The Policy of Expulsions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 211 5. The Codification of Jewish Disabilities. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 213 6. The Russian Censorship and Conversionist Endeavors . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 218 CHAPTER XIV: COMPULSORY ENLIGHTENMENT AND INCREASED OPPRESSION 1. Enlightenment as a Means of Assimilation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 220 2. Uvarov and Lilienthal. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 222 3. The Abolition of Jewish Autonomy and Renewed Persecutions. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 226 4. Intercession of Western European Jewry . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 230 5. The Economic Plight of Russian Jewry and Agricultural Experiments. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 231 6. The Ritual Murder Trial of Velizh. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 233 7. The Mstislavl Affair . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 238 CHAPTER XV: THE JEWS IN THE KINGDOM OF POLAND 1. Plans of Jewish Emancipation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 241 2. Political Reaction And Literary Anti-Semitism. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 244 3. Assimilationist Tendencies Among the Jews of Poland. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 247 4. The Jews and the Polish Insurrection Of 1831 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 250 CHAPTER XVI: THE INNER LIFE OF RUSSIAN JEWRY DURING THE PERIOD OF MILITARY DESPOTISM 1. The Uncompromising Attitude of Rabbinism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 254 2. The Stagnation of Hasidism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 256 3. The Russian Mendelssohn (Isaac Baer Levinsohn) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 261 4. The Rise of Neo-Hebraic Culture. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 265 5. The Jews and the Russian People. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 268 CHAPTER XVII: THE LAST YEARS OF NICHOLAS I 1. The "Assortment" of the Jews . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 269 2. Compulsory Assimilation. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 271 3. New Conscription Horrors . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 271 4. The Ritual Murder Trial of Saratov . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 274 CHAPTER XVIII: THE ERA OF REFORMS UNDER ALEXANDER II 1. The Abolition of Juvenile Conscription . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 276 2. "Homeopathic" Emancipation and the Policy of "Fusion". . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 277 3. The Extension of the Right of Residence. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 279 4. Further Alleviations and Attempts at Russification . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 285 5. The Jews and the Polish Insurrection of 1863 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 288 CHAPTER XIX: THE REACTION UNDER ALEXANDER II 1. Change of Attitude Toward the Jewish Problem . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 292 2. The Informer Jacob Brafman . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 293 3. The Fight Against Jewish "Separatism". . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 295 4. The Drift Toward Oppression. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 299 CHAPTER XX: THE INNER LIFE OF RUSSIAN JEWRY DURING THE REIGN OF ALEXANDER II 1. The Russification of the Jewish Intelligenzia. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 303 2. The Society for the Diffusion of Enlightenment . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 307 3. The Jewish Press . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 308 4. The Jews and the Revolutionary Movement. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 311 5. The Neo-Hebraic Renaissance. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 312 6. The Harbinger of Jewish Nationalism (Perez Smolenskin) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 317 7. Jewish Literature in the Russian Language. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 319 CHAPTER XXI: THE ACCESSION OF ALEXANDER III AND THE INAUGURATION OF POGROMS 1. The Triumph of Autocracy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 322 2. The Initiation of the Pogrom Policy. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 324 3. The Pogrom at Kiev . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 326 4. Further Outbreaks in South Russia. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 328 CHAPTER XXII: THE ANTI-JEWISH POLICIES OF IGNATYEV 1. The Vacillating Attitude of the Authorities. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 331 2. The Pogrom Panic and the Beginning of the Exodus . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 334 3. The Gubernatorial Commissions. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 336 4. The Spread of Anti-Semitism. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 339 5. The Pogrom at Warsaw . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 342 CHAPTER XXIII: NEW MEASURES OF OPPRESSION AND PUBLIC PROTESTS 1. The Despair of Russian Jewry . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 344 2. The Voice of England and America . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 345 3. The Problem of Emigration and the Pogrom at Balta. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 351 4. The Conference of Jewish Notables at St. Petersburg. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 354 CHAPTER XXIV: LEGISLATIVE POGROMS 1. The "Temporary Rules" of May 3, 1882 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 357 2. Abandonment of the Pogrom Policy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 358 3. Disabilities and Emigration. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 361 CHAPTER XXV: INNER UPHEAVALS 1. Disillusionment of the Intelligenzia and the National Revival. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 365 2. Pinsker's "Autoemancipation" . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 368 3. Miscarried Religious Reforms . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 369 CHAPTER XXVI: INCREASED JEWISH DISABILITIES 1. The Pahlen Commission and New Schemes of Oppression. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 372 2. Jewish Disabilities Outside the Pale . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 375 3. Restrictions in Education and in the Legal Profession. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 378 4. Discrimination in Military Service . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 381 CHAPTER XXVII: RUSSIAN REACTION AND JEWISH EMIGRATION 1. Aftermath of the Pogrom Policy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 384 2. The Conclusions of the Pahlen Commission . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 386 3. The Triumph of Reaction. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 389 4. American and Palestinian Emigration. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 391 CHAPTER XXVIII: JUDAEOPHOBIA TRIUMPHANT 1. Intensified Reaction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 394 2. Continued Harassing. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 396 3. The Guildhall Meeting in London. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 399 4. The Protest of America . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 402 CHAPTER XXIX: THE EXPULSION FROM MOSCOW 1. Preparing the Blow . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 405 2. The Horrors of Expulsion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 406 3. Effect of Protests . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 409 4. Pogrom Interludes. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 411 CHAPTER XXX: BARON HIRSCH'S EMIGRATION SCHEME AND UNRELIEVED SUFFERING 1. Negotiations with the Russian Government . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 413 2. The Jewish Colonization Association and Collapse of the Argentinian Scheme . . . . . . . . . . . . . 415 3. Continued Humiliations and Death of Alexander III. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 417 CHAPTER XXXI: THE ACCESSION OF NICHOLAS II 1. Continued Policy of Oppression . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 422 2. The Martyrdom of the Moscow Community. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 424 3. Restrictions in the Right of Residence . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 426 4. The Economic Collapse of Russian Jewry . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 429 5. Professional and Educational Restrictions. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 431 6. Anti-Semitic Propaganda and Pogroms. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 433 CHAPTER XXXII: THE NATIONAL AWAKENING 1. The Rise of Political Zionism. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 438 2. Spiritual Zionism, or Ahad-Ha'amism. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 441 3. Spiritual Nationalism, or National-Cultural Autonomism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 443 4. The Jewish Socialistic Movement. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 445 5. The Revival of Jewish Letters. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 446 CHAPTER XXXIII: THE KISHINEV MASSACRE 1. Pogroms as a Counter-Revolutionary Measure . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 450 2. The Organized Kishinev Butchery. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 451 4. Doctor Herzl's Visit to Russia . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 457 CHAPTER XXXIV: CONTINUED POGROMS AND THE RUSSO-JAPANESE WAR 1. The Pogrom at Homel and the Jewish Self-Defence. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 460 2. The Kishinev Massacre at the Bar of Russian Justice. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 461 3. The Jews in the Russo-Japanese War . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 463 4. The "Political Spring" . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 465 5. The Homel Pogrom before the Russian Courts . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 466 CHAPTER XXXV: THE REVOLUTION OF 1905 AND THE FIGHT FOR EMANCIPATION 1. The Jews in the Revolutionary Movement . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 469 2. The Struggle for Equal Rights. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 470 3. The "Black Hundred" and the "Patriotic" Pogroms. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 472 4. The Jewish Franchise . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 476 CHAPTER XXXVI: THE COUNTER-REVOLUTION AND THE OCTOBER MASSACRES 1. The Fiendish Designs of the "Black Hundred". . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 478 2. The Russian St. Bartholomew Night. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 479 3. The Undaunted Struggle for Equal Rights. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 481 4. The Jewish Question before the First Duma. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 483 5. The Spread of Anarchy and the Second Duma. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 485 CHAPTER XXXVII: EXTERNAL OPPRESSION AND INTERNAL CONSOLIDATION 1. The New Alignments within Russian Jewry. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 487 2. The Triumph of the "Black Hundred" . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 489 3. The Third, or Black, Duma. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 491 4. New Jewish Disabilities. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 493 5. The Spiritual Revival of Russian Jewry . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 495 RUSSIAN JEWRY SINCE 1911 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 497 BIBLIOGRAPHY . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 500 INDEX. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 515 Publisher's Note: ---- One of the great histories of the Jews of Eastern Europe is Simon Dubnow's History of the Jews in Poland and Russia. This three-volume work, which was published in 1918, has been republished by Avotaynu as a single 600-page volume. Dubnow was considered to be one of the greatest Jewish historians of the 20th century, and History of the Jews in Poland and Russia was one of his most important works. It details the history of the Jews of Eastern Europe from their earliest presence in Greek times to about 1910. Discussed are the Khazars, the Crusades, the rise of Polish Jewry under the early kings of Poland, the Cossack rebellion of 1648, the rise of Hasidism, the false Messiahs, the creation of the Pale of Settlement, and Jewish life under the laws created by the czars, and the pogroms of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. 7" x 10" 618 pages hardcover $69.50 --- From alt.magick.tyagi Thu Jul 10 00:21:37 2003 Path: typhoon.sonic.net!not-for-mail Message-ID: <3F07A2EA.B4A7497F@luckymojo.com> From: catherine yronwode Reply-To: cat@luckymojo.com Organization: Lucky Mojo Curio Co. X-Mailer: Mozilla 4.7 (Macintosh; U; PPC) X-Accept-Language: en MIME-Version: 1.0 Newsgroups: alt.magick,alt.magick.tyagi Subject: Re: ac's alleged anti-Semitism (aaa) References: <20030704183542.13292.00000091@mb-m13.aol.com> <3F0626D2.4070502@cox.net> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Lines: 150 Date: Sun, 06 Jul 2003 04:07:53 GMT NNTP-Posting-Host: 209.204.150.92 X-Complaints-To: abuse@sonic.net X-Trace: typhoon.sonic.net 1057464473 209.204.150.92 (Sat, 05 Jul 2003 21:07:53 PDT) NNTP-Posting-Date: Sat, 05 Jul 2003 21:07:53 PDT Xref: typhoon.sonic.net alt.magick:351128 alt.magick.tyagi:40294 Regarding Aleister Crowley's claim in "Sepher Sephiroth" -- collected in "777 and Other Qabalistic Writings of Aleister Crowley" -- that (and i quote from Crowley here): > > Human sacrifices are to-day still practised by the Jews of > > Eastern Europe, as is set forth at length by the late Sir > > Richard Burton in the MS. which the wealthy Jews of England > > have compassed heaven and earth to suppress, and evidenced by > > the ever-recurring Pogroms against which so senseless an > > outcry is made by those who live among those degenerate Jews > > who are at least not cannibals." First, for those completely unfamiliar with Sir Richard Burton (1821-1890), the great 19th century explorer and Orientalist, i recommend a google search or a trip to the library. With respect to the writings of Aleister Crowley, the most notable of Sir Richard Burton's works is "The Perfumed Garden of Sheikh Nefzaoui" -- Burton's translation of an Arabic heterosexual erotic manuscript, which Crowley in turn used as the direct stylistic and format template for his own homosexual erotic pastiche published under the title "The Scented Garden of Abdullah the Satirist of Shiraz." The evident leader-follower connection between Burton the explorer and author and Crowley the tourist and pastiche-writer makes Aleister Crowley's admiration for and debt to the works of Sir Richard Burton quite obvious to all of his biographers and to even the most casual reader of Crowley. Back in the 1980s or 1990s, when Bill Heidrick typed out and posted the electronic file version of Crowley's anti-Jewish preface to "Sepher Sephiroth," he added an editorial note to the Crowley paragraph above. He claimed that Crowley was writing with "irony." Said Heidrick: WEH NOTE: Crowley's irony at times has led to his detriment. Elsewhere, and much later, he denies the validity of the "Blood Libel." Here he writes in somewhat dubious humor an anti-Semitic seeming introduction to a book on Jewish mysticism You can find copies of the Crowley manuscript, as edited and annotated by Bill Heidrick, at several places on the web. One such place is: www.luckymojo.com/esoteric/occultism/magic/ceremonial/crowley/500ssephiroth.txt However, Heidrick's editorial note aside, there is absolutely no literary or biographical evidence that the passage in question was intended by Crowley as "irony" or even as "humor." It is, rather, Crowley's simple, straightforward acceptance of and agreement with Sir Richard Burton's claim that human sacrifice was, during the late Victorian era, circa 1880 - 1890, actually being practiced by Jews in Eastern Europe -- and it is accompanied by a simple, factual comment by Crowley that a group of wealthy Jews in England had paid a lot of money to suppress the Burton's manuscript detailing these charges and to see that it was not published. There is current documentation that proves that Crowley's comment that a group of wealthy Jews in England had bought the unpublished anti-Jewish Burton manuscript with the aim of suppressing it is entirely factual and not in any way humourous. In fact, this group of Jews succeeded in suppressing the Burton manuscript for almost 100 years -- until 2001. Please go to http://www.jewishsf.com/bk010608/ip8b.shtml where there is an article titled "Controversial sale of anti-Semitic book falls through," written by Richard Allen Green of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. The Greene article is protected by copyright and so i cannot reproduce it here, but hitting the high spots, it says that "nearly 100 years ago" (e.g. circa 1903-5, at the time when the violent anti-Jewish pogroms and massacres at Kishinev and Minsk in Russia were in the headlines) "the Board of Deputies of British Jews," an "umbrella organization" of Jewish groups in England, gained possession of "a controversial Victorian manuscript" written by Sir Richard Burton, titled "Human Sacrifice Among the Sephardine or Eastern Jews." The manuscript has never been published and in fact only a few scholars have read it. The article further states that in June 2001 the Burton manuscript was put up for auction at Christie's in London in order to raise funds for the British "umbrella group" -- a highly controversial plan that ultimately failed when the bidding did not achieve the pre-set reserve price and the manuscript therefore remained unsold. The failed sale of "Human Sacrifice Among the Sephardine or Eastern Jews" created a lot of negative publicity about both the long-dead Sir Richard Burton and the Jews who had suppressed the manuscript and whose descendants then tried to sell it for ready cash. The ensuing controversy tore apart inter-Jewish alliances in England at the time. The Burton manuscript specifically targeted one group of Jews, the Sephardim (called Sephardine by Burton, who evidently did not count Hebrew among the many languages he spoke) and the Sephardic Jews on the Board of Deputies of British Jews were said to be "'shocked and surprised' at not having been consulted about the sale" by the board members who were Ashkenazy Jews. Further discussion that took place in 2001 regarding the Burton manuscript and its implications can be found at this web-board archive: www.isidore-of-seville.com/burton/board/38.html I hope that these notes help O.T.O. members and others understand that when a Jew such as myself says in usenet or on the web that Aleister Crowley was a racist, an anti-Jewish bigot, or that he was prejudiced against Jews, it is not a failure of "humour" or an inability to appreciate "irony" that elicits the comment. Further, while i appreciate Bill Heidrick's diligence and have sympathy for his thankless task, i cannot condone his attempt to mislead people into thinking that Crowley's paragraph stating a clear belief in the premises expounded by Sir Richard Burton in "Human Sacrifice Among the Sephardine or Eastern Jews" was some sort of literary prank. It was not. Crowley admired Sir Richard Burton beyond all measure. He wrote an entire book aping a book by Sir Richard Burton. He knew that around the time of the violent anti-Jewish pogroms and massacres in Kishinev and Minsk, the Board of Deputies of British Jews had purchased the manuscript copy of Burton's "Human Sacrifice Among the Sephardine or Eastern Jews" in order to suppress it, and he alerted his non-Jewish readers to this fact, while also citing the pogroms themselves as "evidence" of the truth of Burton's charges, and labelling as "senseless" the political protests in England, Western Europe, and the Americas that were then being mounted against the pogroms by people he called "degenerate" Jews. catherine yronwode From alt.magick.tyagi Thu Jul 10 00:26:54 2003 Path: typhoon.sonic.net!not-for-mail Message-ID: <3F08D079.4CA8829C@luckymojo.com> From: catherine yronwode Reply-To: cat@luckymojo.com Organization: Lucky Mojo Curio Co. X-Mailer: Mozilla 4.7 (Macintosh; U; PPC) X-Accept-Language: en MIME-Version: 1.0 Newsgroups: alt.magick,alt.magick.tyagi Subject: Re: ac's alleged anti-Jewish sentiments (aaa) References: <20030704183542.13292.00000091@mb-m13.aol.com> <3F0626D2.4070502@cox.net> <3F07A2EA.B4A7497F@luckymojo.com> <3F084C42.8090204@cox.net> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=iso-8859-1 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit Lines: 320 Date: Mon, 07 Jul 2003 01:34:33 GMT NNTP-Posting-Host: 209.204.150.173 X-Complaints-To: abuse@sonic.net X-Trace: typhoon.sonic.net 1057541673 209.204.150.173 (Sun, 06 Jul 2003 18:34:33 PDT) NNTP-Posting-Date: Sun, 06 Jul 2003 18:34:33 PDT Xref: typhoon.sonic.net alt.magick:351193 alt.magick.tyagi:40303 Blandcriminal / Bilbo Baggins / Satanas -- Let us agree to disagree. I did not come to the writings of Aleister Crowley *expecting* to find a racist. I came to his writings as an aspiring student of magic who happened to be Jewish, and this during the height of the Civil Rights Movement, at that. I was privileged to be able to read all of his books in their first editions, one after another, because my parents owned an antiquarian bookstore and in the mid 1960s had purchased the estate of an elderly wealthy woman who had known Crowley well and had amassed an extensive library on ceremonial magic, physical culture, sex magic, and Theosophy. She was known to me as "The Mistress of the Lotus Lodge," and had lived in Oakland, California during her retirement, dying of a heart attack while performing what seems to have been a money drawing spell, for she was found dead within a circle of gold coins worth many many thousands of dollars with a spiral of flung-out tarot cards around her (the first printing of the Waite-Smith deck, as it happened, although she also had Crowley-Harris cards and even a brochure for the art gallery display of Harris' original tarot paintings in London, with a colour cover and text by Crowley). My parents bought not only her books, but other things of value from her estate; i received a theatrical golden ceremonial headdress with pears and leaves worked into it (silver-marked from London in the late 1880s and plated with gold) for my part in cataloguing the library for sale. As i catalogued, i read each book -- and some i was able to read twice or three times before they sold. I took extensive notes, for there were no xerox machines in those days. I copied out entire pages by hand, complete with sigils and diagrams. I still recall the beautiful raised leather bindings, some with gilded edges, some with fore-edge marbling, and the soft smell of the pure rag paper. For the most part, i read the books in the order of their publication, trying to recreate the way The Mistress of the Lotus Lodge must have encountered them, interspersing Crowley with Waite and Mathers and lesser-known (but to me no less valuable) authors like John William Lloyd the sex-mystic, and Bernarr Mcfadden the proponent of physical culture. After reading dozens, perhaps even a hundred racial slurs, epithets, put-downs, and denigrations in these Victorian and Edwardian era books, i began to feel oppressed. There was so much in them about "race purity" and "the Negro Problem" and "the Jewish Problem" -- and, of course, i knew full well where that had led, because my mother had fled Hitler's Germany in 1936 and settled in the United States to escape anti-Jewish violence. Many of the racist authors of these books on magic and the occult were British or lived in Britain, and i knew that Britain had "been our Ally during the War." So if they hated Hitler, why did they also hate Jews? And why did they write books on the Kabbalah? My family was highly political. I had marched in support of racial integration and nuclear disarmament with my parents since i was a young child. We were just then, during the Lyndon Johnson administration, on the brink of finally, irrevocably bringing equal rights to all Americans, or so i believed, not knowing how long it would actually take in the case of Americans who were female, gay, or transgendered. I was (and am) a person of strong convictions, and the conviction of racial equality had been upon me since i was five years old and first met my fellow classmates in kindergarten, an assortment of children who self-identified variously as English, Scots-Irish, Portuguese, Italian, Jewish, Armenian, Mexican, Negro, Chinese, Japanese, and "Heinz 57." The most unremittingly and consistently racist writings i found in the library of the Mistress of the Lotus Lodge were the works of Helena Petrovna Blavatsky and Aleister Crowley. I finally stopped reading the Blavatsky books. They just made me sick. Their prose was tedious, they seemed full of fabulous lies, and i was not enjoying them, so i felt no remorse at removing them from my bedside stacks. Aleister Crowley was another matter. His work was lively, engaging, filled with wit, and it emanated a hint of shared jokes with his educated readers. And those beautiful bindings! The rich paper stock! I gave him chance after chance after chance. But after reading the third or fourth dozen racist remark in 777, the Confessions, and the bound volumes of the Equinox, i finally came to the conclusion that he was a racist. And yet i finished his books, and read some twice, and the Book of Thoth three times at least. I will admit, however, that i had more enjoyment from the works of Arthur Edward Waite. They were doggedly scholarly and certainly gave my Latin dictionary a work-out, but Waite projected a friendliness and acceptance of all people among the agate-point footnotes that littered the bottoms of his pages and continued from page to page until some pages were more footnote than text. Within the next two years, after leaving home, i embarked upon a formal program of esoteric study, working my way through the various magical disciplines from their earliest times to the present -- alchemy, spell-craft, demonology, sex magic, Kabbalah. When i began concentrating on astrology -- an area of study that lasted 20 years and which i still find useful -- i discovered the wonderful writings of the 1930s newspaper columnist and astrological popularizer Evangaline Adams, whose two major books, it later came as no surprise to me, had been ghostwritten for her by Aleister Crowley. I've always liked Crowley's writing, even when i thought someone else had done it. But he's still a racist. That's just all there is to it, in my opinion. I could, i suppose, argue each instance of Crowley's racist writings, paragraph by paragraph, in usenet, in order to sway your opinion (or Bill Heidrick's, which i value more, truth to tell). I could spend hours every day, submitting each racist remark he made, book by book and chapter by chapter, to the test of irony and to a thorough backgrounding in historical context. I could even meet the racist Crowley more than halfway, relating each racial epithet to his personal sexual relationships at the time of writing -- for he tended to praise the racial make-up of those with whom he was having sex at the moment and to grotesquely derogate the racial make-up of his lovers' husbands or anyone with whom he was breaking up or by whom he had been dumped. But the very fact that he did this -- the horrible things he said about the racial background of the Indian author and scholar Ananda Coomaraswamy (1877-1947), for instance, merely because he was engaged in a failing affair with Coomaraswamy's wife! -- indicates that to him, the cheap and handy racial slur was second nature. And why? Because Aleister Crowley was a racist, a racial bigot. And now, today's data points, placing Crowley's racism in historical context: 1) Ananda Coomaraswamy was born on August 22, 1877 at Kollupitiya, Ceylon (now Sri Lanka). He was two years younger than Aleister Crowley and died the year Crowley died; in other words, they were almost exact contemporaries. Coomaraswamy's mother was an English woman named Elizabeth Clay-Beeby and his father, Sir Muttu Coomaraswamy, was a legislator in Ceylon, the first Hindu to be called to the English Bar, and the first Asian to receive a British knighthood. After his father's untimely death, Ananda Coomaraswamy was raised in England by his mother and graduated as a Doctor of Geology from the University of London. He worked in Sri Lanka as a geologist and mineralogist, but was better known in later years for his writings on metaphysics, religious iconography, and Asian art. He was a Sri Lanka nationalist who founded the Ceylon Social Reform Society and a newspaper called the "Ceylon National Review." He travelled widely and his many books were translated into numerous languages. He ended his career as the curator of the Boston Museum of Fine Arts in the USA. 3) Ananda Coomaraswamy's first wife was an English woman named Ethel Mary Partridge (1872 -1952). Gifted both musically and artistically, she had a teaching degree in music from the Royal Academy of Music. Coomaraswamy and Partridge were married in England and moved to Ceylon in 1903 where Coomaraswamy worked as a geologist until 1907. They divorced in 1913. Shortly thereafter, Ethel married Philip Mairet. She became world-renowned as a craft spinner and weaver, travelled and lectured widely, and her six still- influential books on vegetable textile dyes and hand weaving were published under the name Ethel M. Mairet, beginning in 1916. See pictures of her textiles and information about the large hand-weaving workshop she founded in 1918 and ran until her death, at: http://216.239.57.100/search?q=cache:EJdru0hgUaIJ:vads.ahds.ac.uk/learning/pictiva/CSC/mairet.html+ethel+mairet&hl=en&ie=UTF-8 And notice the Indian sitar displayed among her collection of Ceylonese textiles. [Note: this URL is google's cache in early July 2003 of a VADS site web page that is in the process of being transferred to the Surrey Institute of Art and Design's new web site and is not yet online there. If the link does not work by the time you read this, simply do a google search on "Ethel Mairet."] See a photograph of Ethel Mairet here: http://www.petercollingwood.co.uk/bio2%20mairet.htm Recall Crowley's comment that Britain should not allow Indian students to study in England because they will have sex with and marry English women. 4) Ananda Coomaraswamy's second wife was another musical and artistic English woman, a singer named Alice Richardson. She was a mezzo-soprano who used the stage name Ratan Devi when singing Indian music. Her picture can be found at www.allinsongallery.com/kinney/roshan.html In 1916, she had an affair with Crowley, got pregnant (Crowley says he was the father), dumped Crowley, went back to her husband, and had a miscarriage (all this according to Crowley). Again recall Crowley's racist statement that if male Indian students are allowed to study in England they will have sex with and marry English wives. 5) Ananda Coomaraswamy and Ratan Devi eventually divorced and in 1928 Ratan Devi, as Alice Richardson, married her second husband, who also had a Ph.D. in mining and metallurgy. He was an American man Francis Bitter. This is from: www.allinsongallery.com/kinney/roshan.html Francis Bitter (FB) was born in Weehawken, N. J. on July 22, 1902 to Karl Bitter, the sculptor, and Marie Schevill Bitter. He grew up in Weehawken and New York City. Starting in 1919, FB attended the University of Chicago but, after working on a cattle boat in order to visit Europe in 1922, he transferred to Columbia University. He received his Bachelor of Science degree in 1925 and spent the next year studying in Berlin. He began a lifelong study of magnets when he returned to Columbia for graduate work. Under A. P. Wills' supervision, FB wrote his dissertation on the diamagnetic susceptibility of hydrocarbons. FB received his doctoral degree in 1928 and continued his studies under Robert Millikan at the California Institute of Technology with the support of a National Research Fellowship. The same year FB married Mrs. Alice Coomara [sic] (née Richardson). Under the stage name of Ratan Devi his wife was a popular singer. [Snip many paragraphs about Bitter's pioneering work with magnets.] Francis Bitter died on July 26, 1967. In his honor, the National Magnet Laboratory was renamed the Francis Bitter National Magnet Laboratory on November 21, 1967. 6) Now we finally come to Crowley's very brief role in these people's active lives. Too long to quote here is the account by Crowley of his affair with Ratan Devi in 1916. It contains many scurrilous, factually unsupported -- and technically libelous -- statements that are not found in other biographical treatments of Coomaraswamy's or Ratan Devi's lives. See the full text at: www.hermetic.com/crowley/confess/chapter77.html beginning with this paragraph: The next act was the appearance of Ananda K. Koomaraswamy, the Eurasian critic of religion and art, with his wife, Ratan Devi, a musician from Yorkshire, who had fallen in love with him and filched him from his first wife. He soon got sick of her and took refuge in India, but finding it a continual nuisance to have to send her supplies, wrote her to join him. It had been suggested, with the secret hope that the climate would rid him of his incubus. She made the journey in charge of his best friend, a wealthy Punjabi, whom she promptly seduced. [etc. ad nauseum] 7) See "The Yogic Quest" by Richard Boyle at www.geocities.com/Athens/Acropolis/ 1896/yogicquest.html From which this is extracted: "Crowley had one underlying problem with Coomaraswamy: the fact that he was Eurasian. Crowley disliked Eurasians in general, confessing that they got on his nerves, and even describing them as 'anaemic abortions'. At one point in his autobiography, after recounting an unfortunate incident with a Eurasian in Burma, Crowley digresses in order to malign Eurasians in more detail. He states: 'Even the highest class Eurasians such as Ananda Koomaraswamy suffer acutely from the shame of being considered outcast.' "For some unexplained reason, Crowley consistently spells Coomaraswamy with a K, although the name appears correctly in the index. Did Crowley perhaps change the spelling to avoid having the same initials as the man he ended up referring to as The Worm?" My point? These were real people with real accomplishments -- English, and Ceylonese and American -- geologists, musicians, artists, lecturers, and, above all, authors. Crowley reduces them to a series of racial stereotypes -- the two English women seduced by the scheming anaemic abortion of a Eurasian student who should never have been allowed into Britain, the Punjabi seduced by the defiled English woman who now poses as an Indian, the magician Crowley fathering a magical child by the accomplished English woman which is wrested from him and killed by the scheming of the adulterous and perfidious Eurasian half-breed. It's stupid. It's racist. I hate it. cat yronwode Sacred Sex: http://www.luckymojo.com/sacredsex.html
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