I'm changing my mind about having dinner with Crowley
I think a good cup of bracing black tea--say on a cold day--and a nice afternoon stretched before us...
A rather sensible woman, Sybil Leek...who eventually became known as an astrologer...at least I thought so from reading this:
http://www.controverscial.com/Sybil Leek.htm
By the way, I looked at another opinion of her, and maybe it's not credible reading:
http://www.tarotforum.net/showthread.php?t=49967&highlight=sybil+leek
In an inexpensive book, "My Life in Astrology" I read about a country-bred young girl surrounded by loving parents (Father was a kind of philosopher and mother a Theophist) and a quite sensible grandmother who helped run an farm that housed about 17 relatives...she said Alexander Crowley, among other people, would come to the farm...even though H.G. Wells was kinder to her, she didn't feel Crowley was a bad man at all. He might have spoken frankly to her grandmother about his beliefs, never hid his ideas around the 'child' (her), but he wasn't about being the baddest influence in a family setting.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0136085210/ref=sr_11_1/102-0619825-9170543?_encoding=UTF8
Not certain what people think of Sybil Leek, but here's a synopsis of her hardback paragraph that I've read so far:
"...certainly he respected her (grandmother), because he was mad about astrology. My father thought he was slipshod, but Grandmother thought he might make it if he practised more. She could always beat him in a quick assessment about a chart, and he took it in better humor than he did most things. He loved to be thought superior in mental activities as much as he loved to boast of his sexual conquests. No one ever hushed him or said "Not beefore the child", so my small pink ears were full of conversations with my Grandmother. Contrary to popular opinion, Crowley did not talk lasciviously about sex, at least not in front of me, but neither did he put any false values on it. It was a tool to be used in life, just as astrology was. "Old lady," he would say, although Grandmother was probably younger than he was, "you teach this child all you can. Sex is in the world and she'd better know about it; astrology is in the world, and sh'ed better know about that. And maybe you could teach some simple forms of magic."
That usually pricked my grandmother into action; she would come back at him about those "simple forms of magic" and they would verbally chase each other with formulas in a game of cat-and-mouse.
Crowley's form of astrology was too mystical for my father, who preferred an academic and purely scientific method and Grandmother resented the idea that an astrologer had to be psychic, although she would grudgingly admit tha psychic ability really mattered in most things--so why not add a dash of it to astrology? Both she and Father agreed that astrology had to be put into simple forms and intelligible language, but Crowley disagreed. He certainly evolved a strange form of astrology--valid, but practically unintelligible, even to expert astrologers. He loved tarot cards, too, and he linked them to astrology of course, which is proper, but can cause some confusion for the run-of-the-mill astrology students. To this day, I am not sure which one of the three was completely right, if any of them were right..."
Anyway, it's kind of refreshing to have a person's childhood story about Crowley and a grandmother chatting away over a cuppa tea...might help to calm people's nervous fears of too strong a tarot, when it might be slipshod editing, bad press and awful color copies putting one off to the Thoth decks...don't know if her work is credible, as I picked up the book used and thought it was fun reading. Maybe too silly, though?
Cerulean