Mark Pilkington (photograph by Etienne Gilfillan)
The inaugural event at the four-day Transmissions VI festival in Ravenna was a talk by Strange Attractor Press’ publisher, writer and editor Mark Pilkington entitled ‘From The Akashic Jukebox: A Pop History of British Magick: 1888 – 1980’.
The esoteric, historic theme of this address was fully in keeping with the Strange Attractor philosophy of seeking out neglected cultural and anthropological trends from the past and connecting them to the modern world.
The little I have read about Aleister Crowley, which I admit is not much, has led me to conclude that he was a bit of a dickhead. Pilkington did nothing to dispel this assumption, describing him as being more famous as a hell-raiser than as a thinker and saying that he was like the evil twin of his contemporary Robert Baden-Powell.
While Baden-Powell was promoting the wholesome, though borderline fascist, boy scout movement, Crowley dabbled in the black arts to the point that his own mother nicknamed him The Great Beast. He founded his Thelema ‘religion’ based on the (un)ethical code ‘Do what thy wilt’, an invitation to excessive self-indulgence if ever there was one.
The ‘K’ was used to signify that his brand of ‘magic’ had nothing in common with the Hogwarts variety. Pilkington observed that the K also stood for Kteis, the Greek word for vagina, which says a lot about what track Crowley’s mind was on. Continue reading
