This is a really trash article reverberating/regurgitating “hot takes” from schlock mainstream media narratives that are >100 years old.
However, it does prove that click bait isn’t a new phenomenon!
Aleister Crowley and William Butler Yeats get into an occult battle (2016)
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Re: Aleister Crowley and William Butler Yeats get into an occult battle (2016)
#12I dunno man. They both seem kinda intellectually obsessive. All that writing.
I would agree
Re: Aleister Crowley and William Butler Yeats get into an occult battle (2016)
#13I was heavily into this as a kid. There were some websites back in the early 2000s which would sell infomercial products about the Art of Sorcery and Aleister Crowley (The Wickedest Man In The World!) which were the creme de la creme. Later I learnt about his K2 expedition and other things.
I remember stumbling across the angelfire site for a defunct occult order (the master, “Sir Faustus” or something like that, had apparently mysteriously disappeared). I understood maybe 1% of what I was looking at, but it felt very momentous. They had hierarchically organized lists of books and films that contained occult knowledge. Fun memories.
Re: Aleister Crowley and William Butler Yeats get into an occult battle (2016)
#14Re: Aleister Crowley and William Butler Yeats get into an occult battle (2016)
#15If you want to see the "warring magicians on South Park" scene mentioned in the article (actually they were 'psychic detectives'):
https://youtu.be/22Tj_l4PcPs
Re: Aleister Crowley and William Butler Yeats get into an occult battle (2016)
#16Learning about the Golden Dawn is a trip. I have yet to encounter a strain of English-language occultism that doesn't have a connection with them somehow... they're Erdős for people real into candles.
Re: Aleister Crowley and William Butler Yeats get into an occult battle (2016)
#17Re: Aleister Crowley and William Butler Yeats get into an occult battle (2016)
#18Highly recommend W. Sommerset Maughm's "The Magician" for a treatment of Crowley's personality and influence. The occult is full of tedious charlatans, and yet they reappear in history in influential forms like Machiavelli, Rasputin, Crowley, Mesmer, Bernays, Marcuse, and other literal mesmerists, with lesser lights as 20th century cult leaders, and I think Klaus Schwab and his transhumanist hokum is the current equi…
> What fascinates me about the occult personally is that it's a fundamentally inferior ontology - where it's what you believe when you don't have belief
These characters are fascinating when they're safely in the past and they can be seen purely as drawing out an unacknowledged need in the zeitgeist. In the present, it's terrifying and infuriating to see people choosing their reality out of sheer self-indulgence.
Re: Aleister Crowley and William Butler Yeats get into an occult battle (2016)
#19I was heavily into this as a kid. There were some websites back in the early 2000s which would sell infomercial products about the Art of Sorcery and Aleister Crowley (The Wickedest Man In The World!) which were the creme de la creme. Later I learnt about his K2 expedition and other things.
Oh man. Crowley used to be such a good rabbit hole in the geocities days. There were so many weird people obsessed with him.
I mostly know Crowley from Bare Faced Messiah which is mostly about L Ron Hubbard, but mentions their association and how it played into the development of Scientology.
Re: Aleister Crowley and William Butler Yeats get into an occult battle (2016)
#20There seems to be interest on HN when it comes to articles about Crowley and similar figures.
Can some one help me understand why it's popular with this audience?