Episode 9: On Aleister Crowley and the Idea of Magick

Weird Studies

Phil Ford and J. F. Martel

Society & Culture, Arts, Philosophy

4.8 • 688 Ratings

🗓️ 11 April 2018

⏱️ 76 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

The plan was to discuss the introduction to Aleister Crowley's classic work, Magick in Theory and Practice (1924), a powerful text on the nature and purpose of magical practice. JF and Phil stick to the plan for the first part of the show, and then veer off into a dialogue on the basic idea of magic. Along the way, they share some of the intriguing results of their own occult experiments. REFERENCES Photo of JF's "large sum" cheque Aleister Crowley, Magick in Theory and Practice The Gospel According to Thomas James George Frazer, The Golden Bough: A Study in Magic and Religion Erik Davis, "Weird Shit" I Ching, The Book of Changes Joshua Gunn, Modern Occult Rhetoric: Mass Media and the Drama of Secrecy in the Twentieth Century The Book of the Sacred Magic of Abramelin the Mage The Shackleton Expedition Grant Morrison on how to do sigil magic Alan Chapman, Advanced Magick for Beginners David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature David Hume, An Enquiry Concerning the Human Understanding Joshua Ramey, "Contingency Without Unreason" Quentin Meillassoux, After Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency E. E. Evans-Pritchard, Witchcraft, Oracles and Magic Among the Azande H. P. Lovecraft, At the Mountains of Madness Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	Specter Vision Radio.
0:03.3	Welcome to Weird Studies, an art and philosophy podcast with hosts Phil Ford and J.F. Martel.
0:21.9	For more episodes and to support the podcast, go to're recording this podcast.
0:52.3	The first time we recorded a couple of hours and didn't sit with us somehow, didn't feel right.
0:59.7	And one thing that came up when we were talking later after that first recording session
1:05.1	was realizing that we were each sort of thinking about totally different audiences.
1:12.5	Like maybe that's just the nature of this podcast,
1:15.5	is just going to have a necessarily, I don't know, heterogeneous audience.
1:20.7	But you were saying, well, you know, God, another podcast on Alster Crowley,
1:25.7	that's like the most normie thing ever,
1:27.3	which in the kind of weirdosphere, like if you're looking at like other like a cult podcast or something, then yeah, Alster Crowley is yesterday's news.
1:35.1	But I pointed out that in my world, in the academic world, Alster Crowley is still pretty goddamn strange.
1:42.9	I actually was telling somebody one of my colleagues this recently.
1:46.7	I said basically just that.
1:48.3	And he's like, oh, yeah, Alster Crowley's fucked up.
1:50.7	That's really weird.
1:52.3	So that's, you know, one of the things I always told my students, know your audience.
1:56.7	And so that actually presents an interesting question for us in particular, for this podcast that we're trying to do, is how to approach Alster Crowley.
2:07.1	He is, depending on who's listening, either a totally marginal, unimportant, perhaps rather mad figure.
2:13.8	And for another part of the audience, it's going to be maybe the most important possible figure.
2:19.0	Yeah. And for maybe a even smaller portion of the audience, he's an unknown figure. So maybe we
2:25.2	should like just give a brief, yeah, just a brief bio. Well, just, maybe you should do that, Phil.
	...

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