ravenest said:
An unbiased and educated reading of most of the Old Testament will reveal that 'God' is actually a jealous, angry, space vampire, whose favorite offering is the burning fat from around the kidneys.
Ummm, I think I just peed my pantalones, ravenest. That was so beautifully, masterfully put. In a sentence, you just managed to sum up my entire University experience in theology classes. My professors used to say in a mock scolding tone, "Shawn, don't tease the monotheists." I just couldn't help myself. In fact I unconverted several born-again students who had never really questioned some of their basic beliefs.
Those arguments were some of the proudest moments of my academic career because they changed all of us.
Ross G Caldwell said:
As soon as you scratch the surface of pop culture, and ask the whys and hows, you have left pop culture and gone into scholarship.
Thank you for saying this! The minute we do more than mention memes and repeat soundbites we've crossed a threshhold. All of this discussion has gone far beyond the initial question, which was (as far as I can tell) intended as only a casual query more than a probing question. I think Crowley just brings out the Beast in people. In all these threads discussing him, I wind up learning more about the individual participants than about Crowley. But no harm, no foul.
Ross G Caldwell said:
For Crowley, he lived just before pop culture became an idea. His era was class-bound. Those influenced by him who lived in the pop culture era, our era, can be named and discussed, but like those who know them they are, essentially, under the surface of pop culture and are scholars of Aleister Crowley.
Hear hear! Crowley was born in the 19th century and is very much a product of industrialized, classist England. Like Oscar Wilde, and other cage-rattlers most of the things he got busted for are now commonplace on network television. The reverberations of those early iconoclasts continue in people who continue to see ways to push the envelope. All fresh ideas are greeted with Camus' "howls of execration," but in a generation or so they become banal through familiarity. Picasso was shocking and disgusting and a bastard, but his point in history is distant enough that he's no longer
avant and has become the new
garde. Socrates is one of the great minds of Western philosophy, even if Plato hated that he was a lecherous, loudmouthed drunk. The bourge-iest middlebrow can love "She Walks in Beauty" without being horrified about Byron's possible incestuous relationship with Augusta.
In a way, Rosanne is saying that she wants Crowley to be distant enough in time and space to be safe for the punters. But that's just time which will come. It is a strange cultural characteristic that we want our heroes to meet our terms of heroism, retroactively. Picasso, Byron, Wilde, Socrates and Crowley couldn't have given a rat's ass about making nice and often went out of their way to prevent it. Even so, memory is kind to genius and History slowly whittles away the sharp edges and rough patches on the biggest cads.
This is the story of the world: Death at the hands of Youth. The Old King is forever being slain and replaced. "Pop" culture just speeds the process up and dumbs it down. As Ross says, the minute we step outside the stream and observe it with some degree of detachment we are pushing our hands into the rich loam of cultural allusion and opinionated research. Which is why I always find these conversations interesting (even when they're repetitive); they afford me a chance to poke at my own intellectual discomfort and see where I'm expecting everyone else to live down to my expectations rather than up to their own.
Scion
