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Lon Milo DuQuette Interview January 25th, 2005 By Devin Galaudet | |
In an effort to add more aggravation and chaos to my already complicated life, I went back to school. My fear of being the OGOC (Old Guy On Campus) turned out to be small potatoes and I currently enjoy furthering my education. During this process, I received opportunity, in the form of assignments, to write papers and occasionally a personal interview. A recent project allowed me to compare Harry Potter and Aleister Crowley - sort of a Magic vs. Magick thesis. I had the good fortune of having Lon Milo DuQuette agree to interview for this assignment. We chatted about his magical life, Harry Potter and of course Crowley. I am grateful for his time, patience and candor.Celebrating his thirtieth year in the mysteries, Lon Milo DuQuette is one of the most import names in occultism and Thelema today as a high-ranking dignitary of the OTO and a noted writer of the Mysteries. He manages these positions with an articulate tongue, style, honesty and most of all humor. While the scope of the interview intends to speak to a general audience, I believe Thelemites will gain some insight and a bit of history as well. I hope so as it took a lot of time and coffee for transcription. For the basics, how did you get started? I get started with a cup of tea in the morning. Actually, I was initially introduced to Eastern mysticism in the early 1960's and then branched off looking for something similar to the Zen and the Tao, only a western Zen, a western Tao. I eventually got introduced to the Western Mysteries. First, through the Rosicrucian Order, AMORC, then I became interested in Qabalah, the Hermetic Qabalah. Not so much from a parochial standpoint but treating Qabalah as a Western Zen rather than something overtly Jewish. But the Hebrew Qabalah is the foundation for all of the Western Mysteries when you get right down to it everything that is based on the Hermetic pattern: elements, planets, zodiacal signs. So astrology, alchemy, all of it in one way or another can be considered Qabalah-based. Tarot cards things like that. Then that also includes the basis of Western Ceremonial Magick. That soon led me to the writing of Aleister Crowley and once I discovered Crowley nothing else seemed to satisfy in the same intensity as the works of Aleister Crowley. And so, in n1975, I was initiated into Ordo Templi Orientis. At the time I didn't know when I was making the arrangements for my initiations that there were only a handful of living members left still alive. I assumed there was a flourishing organization going and when I went to Dublin, California for my initiation I realized there were, I believe at the time only 6 living members. Five of the old crew that were alive during Crowley's time and one that they had initiated a few weeks before me. He had fallen - we haven't seen him since. At the moment, I don't know how you put it but, all the original members have died. As far as we know, nobody alive has been in the OTO longer than I. Back thirty years ago finding Crowley must have been an active pursuit even though today he can be found at any Borders. In those days, it was really, really hard. I had gotten a hold of a little book called, the Legend of Aleister Crowley and I got a hold of Aleister Crowley's Thoth tarot cards in 1969 or 70, and a very old Bantam Press edition of the Book of Thoth, and that's all I really had. The Book of Thoth made all kinds of references to the Book of the Law. I had never seen one of these Books of the Law. I was very curious about it and a man I gave guitar lessons to went to England. I told him this Crowley guy was an English-man; I bet there have more of his books over there. If you see any, buy me them and bring them back. And he picked up the book of the Law and oddly enough, it was a copy that was published by the OTO in California where a few years later I would go there and be initiated. It somehow made it to England and then back to me. So, he brought me back the Book of the Law and Liber Aleph. I read the comment in the back of the Book of the Law which said to destroy it after the first reading, and that those who disregard this warning do so at their own peril. So, I said, "This must be a real magick book." You know you pick up a book and thumb through it from the back forward; so I read that before I read the book. This is serious magic stuff; if I'm going to burn this book, I better read this slowly. So I set aside some time, read it ceremoniously, and opened up a Rosicrucian-like home temple. I lit up a couple of candles and slowly read the Book of the Law. It's a very short book. The first chapter was very beautiful and lovely, it made me spiritually horny. It was very, very lovely. There was this goddess Nuit and I can't imagine why anybody would want to burn this book; this is just lovely stuff. It certainly seemed harmless enough. Then I read the second chapter. It was almost spiritually pragmatic and I found nothing to object to in the second chapter. Now we have to remember, Crowley said he didn't write this book. He received this book; he channeled this book in 1904. I read that when Crowley read it, he ran away from it, to avoid it. It scared him. But after the first two chapters, what was there to be scared of? It's just some nice stuff. It might even be that Western Zen that I was looking for. That, "Western Tao. This, "Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law," seemed very close to "The Way." The human Will as the Way. I was really impressed by it. But I read the third chapter and it scared the bejeebaz out of me. Whatever the bejeebaz is? Because it's force and fire and bloodthirsty, "With my hawks head I peck at the eyes of Jesus and all this blasphemy stuff. I got upset. I got scared. My ears got hot and I couldn't wait to finish reading so I could burn this book. I did just that I burned the book. Watching it burn I had a little nervous breakdown. Not that the book gave me a nervous breakdown but my reaction to it. I was embarrassed, I came from a very liberal background, burning a book was one of the worst things you could do. It's better to kill someone than it was to burn a book. Books are alive in ways people aren't alive. You just don't burn books and here I was through some kind of irrational fear, from something, I don't know what forced me to commit the ultimate taboo, burning a book. So before it was through burning I had to ask myself some serious questions about myself. I more or less came to the conclusion that it wasn't anything in the book that had a problem but that it was me that had the problem. I thought I should find another copy of this book and deal with what's in it. I haven't met anyone else who has gone through such a traumatic experience as I had after first reading it but it certainly was a growth experience for me and a very profound introduction to Thelema. It was less than a year after that when I was initiated into the OTO. Since your initiation, things have blossomed. There are numerous Thelemic organizations worldwide, what do you think created that boon? Constance and I have worked very hard (Constance breaks down in laughter, heard from the other room) in the last thirty years. For a few years we were doing a goodly portion of initiations. We stopped counting initiations at around 500. The thing is, it is an idea whose time has come. In the 60's and 70's, people who read Aleister Crowley… most of the old Crowley contemporaries were either dead or had moved on to other things. It was very difficult to be a Thelemite or try to be a Thelemite in Crowley's day. Remember we are talking about Crowley as a prophet. A prophet of an age that was initiated in 1904. Anyone born before 1904 was born in the old aeon, the old age, and encumbered with all the obsolete formula of that old aeon. Now all of magic formulae, social formulae, and cultural formulae are not thrown out the window when a new age happens but things are tweaked. Things are discarded. So Crowley contemporaries and Crowley himself were products of the old aeon. So only a few of the Crowley contemporaries were left alive, I had only met three of them: Grady McMurtry, Phyllis Seckler-Wade and Helen Parsons-Smith. There's Mildred Burlingham, Max Schneider's wife, I never met either of them, and they both died shortly after I joined. People who were born in the old aeon, you can't expect them to have a masterful grasp or even have the equipment - the emotional equipment the psychological equipment to act as a new aeon person. They were heroes, they were pioneers, and they were old aeon people trying to act new aeon-ish. So today people have a much better tolerance of others personalities, diversity of others sexual expression, diversity of thought and such. In those days, old people trying to act like new aeon, those manifested as clumsy attempts at wife swapping and not that it was a joyous attempt at that. Burdened with guilt and so on. The younger a person is the easier it is for that person to act in harmony with the current of the new aeon. The fact that as years go by, more and more people are being born better and better thelemites than the hard-core Thelemites of the 30's and 40's busting their humps. They just had so much more baggage to overcome. Nowadays people are born without that baggage to begin with so less shocking when they come across Crowley and his works and read about all the wild and crazy things he did, which now wouldn't even be considered wild and crazy. Timothy Leary did wilder and weirder things. So why do you think Aleister Crowley was labeled the Satanist and the "wickedest" man in the world? Well, first off he wanted to be. He cultivated his persona, he like to terrorize anyone who was capable of being terrorized and he felt that any publicity was good publicity and If person had half a brain they could see what he was doing and would appreciate what he was doing. His big flaw was that he overestimated the intelligence of society. When he saw that he was being vilified, almost as a cavalier game cultivated that but later he really got into it. Thinking that in years to come that if he was not appreciated for his work now, that if he didn't have this notorious reputation no one would reprint his work at all when he was dead. The ideas was, he would be published, if only by the people that hated him. So the reality was that he was not a Satanist. He never killed anyone or had done anything truly against society? Well, he was a wild guy. I probably would feel real comfortable around him most of the time. To answer your first question that he wasn't a Satanist. What we think of in 2005 as a Satanist. A person, that for one reason or another, does evil for evil's sake because evil is somehow opposed to something they would call good, a Satanist that worships anthropomorphic deity that is a personification of evil as opposed to an all-good god. Crowley wasn't that. You would have to be a Christian. You have to buy into the entire Christian doctrine. As if there was a good god and an evil god and they were fighting all the time. So if that is what a popular view of what a Satanist is then Crowley was not that at all. He might bandy about the term "Satan." He might have claimed to be a Satanist to freak-out the freak-outable but his philosophy was anti-Christian … not so much Anti-Christian toward the individual but against the formula that preceded this current age. Christianity had decayed and corrupted and became the exact opposite of what it was when it started. If true Christianity started as a philosophy, as a way of life, of love and compassion, the principles set forward on the Sermon on the Mount, the things that Jesus actually said, a cult of pacifists that embraced the formula of self-sacrifice as a step forward in spiritual evolution, then that Christianity had turned into its exact opposite by 1904. World War One was the culmination of that, Christians killing Christian's, a blood bath we can trace back even further to the Crusades. The Crusades were just evil. Church had turned into what we think of as Satan in the Dark Ages. Suffocating thoughts, suffocating normal human behavior. A perversion, a dark thing. That's the Christianity that Aleister Crowley was "anti." On the flip side, what do you make of the fascination with Crowley? Everybody loves a villain. What is the fascination with Adolph Hitler? What's the fascination with the Nazis? Now those were real evil things. People just love it; they can't get enough of it. I read somewhere that in the publishing industry if they put a swastika on a book cover, it doesn't matter what the book would be about, it could be a cookbook, put that on the book cover, put it in the supermarket and that thing is going to disappear at the point of sale. Everyone loves a villain, they are fascinated. Crowley was happy to let people be attracted to him for all the wrong reasons and he stated when talking about magick that he didn't care if someone wanted to learn magick so they could do evil. An example, kill their neighbor. He didn't care if they wanted to do magick to kill their neighbor because by the time they learned magick well enough, and became a magician and went through the meditations, the purifications, the consecrations, achieved the states of conscientiousness necessary with the power to theoretically to kill their neighbor, that killing their neighbor would be the last thing on their minds. What do you think made Crowley unique in his time? Our time? The future? I probably should have asked that one at a time. So for simplicities sake let's do that, what do you think made Crowley unique in his time? There are lots of holy men. Lot of gurus. There are lots of talented men. There are even prophets. Joseph Smith was a prophet, not my prophet. There are very few gurus with such child-like naiveté as Crowley. He thought that people were as smart as he was or at least the people that counted were as smart as he was. He had this child-like relationship with his women. When he fell in love, he fell in love completely, totally gaga. It is almost embarrassing how he gushes and dotes on his loves. Can't say that he was unique in his bisexuality. People like Oscar Wilde came before him. Was Oscar Wilde as open? Oscar Wilde was open enough to get himself thrown in prison. Crowley wasn't open. He wrote poetry was certainly reveals him to be bisexual but no one can understand his poetry either. The thing is, going back to uniqueness. And perhaps this is where the answer should start the answer. In fact, he was not afraid, in fact, he was very happy to be outrageous. When you look at holy people of today, the majareeshi who turned on the Beatles, got the whole Transcendental Meditation thing off the ground. In a way, he was outrageous. He wasn't afraid to do outrageous things. How do you think Crowley plays today? He plays very well today. In fact, Crowley's outrageous personality will create the next big wave of Crowley popularity. Crowley is posed to be a character of movie star stature. There will by Crowley movies, Crowley fantasies; Crowley will turn into a popular anti-hero in cinema and other things. And that's going to be a good thing and a bad thing. The good thing… well let's just say you found out there was a real Indiana Jones, a real life historical Indiana Jones. The guy lived and he was kind of a black magician. Now if you had discovered that wouldn't you be just crazy to find out more about him? We'll that what's going to happen with Crowley - and pretty soon. Crowley did a lot of things that weren't associated with magick. Everything Crowley did was magick as magick is causing change to occur in conformity with Will. That is the definition of it. He changed the world regularly. England had been fighting Germany from 1913 to 1915 - and losing. The United States did not want to go into the war and if we did, popular opinion was to go into the war on Germany's side. Crowley moved to New York and got a job at a German propaganda newspaper, an English language propaganda newspaper. And started writing editorials that were so outrageously nutty that he convinced with his editorials where he called Keiser Wilhelm the new Jesus Christ, the Percival incarnate. Crowley editorials advocated unrestricted submarine warfare against civilian shipping. This was not German foreign policy. Germany wanted the U.S. to stay out of it or come in on Germany's side but it was Crowley who said that Germany was going to rule the world. Crowley wrote that Germany was the only race of people qualified to enslave the rest of the world. Crowley said that Germany advocated unrestricted submarine warfare and United States congressmen and senators believed the newspaper articles and said that, "Germany is nutso, look at this." It was Crowley's articles that helped push the U.S. into the war on England's side. So how do we know Crowley was not pro-German? Because he spent the rest of his life being a nutso British patriot. Because England let this, so-called traitor come back in and live happily in England and we are not sure where he got his rent money and cigar money. When he died there was a folded up letter from Naval Intelligence inviting him for the pleasure of his company. Crowley left the only proof that an intelligence agency can admit to. He was actually brought in by long-time British Intelligence agent Ian Fleming. The guy who wrote the James Bond stuff for the interrogation of Rudolf Hess. He was brought in on the early days when Churchill wanted to explore the superstitions of the high-ranking members of the third Reich. Fleming revealed that it was Crowley who had given Churchill the "V" for victory, the two-fingered sign, which is the sign of Apophis and Typhon. A symbol that is direct opposite and destructive of the solar symbol of the swastika. There are few people today that will try to refute that Crowley was, not only, a patriot but also an agent provocateur working in New York to help in a disinformation campaign. With the unbelievable popularity with Harry Potter, how might this help or hurt the magical community? I can't see it doing anything but help magick. First of all, it presents magick in a positive light and I have to hand it to Rowling's she captures an almost Thelemic neutrality between good and evil. It is Harry's will that remains pure. Harry can lie. Sometimes Harry can deceive good and bad influences. It is a wonderful focus. The focus is on his Will. It is very interesting and I think Harry Potter fans of today will be real magicians of tomorrow. Not just the play-acting, there are web-clubs and things you can join and be taught the rudiments of Wicca and things like that, something relatively harmless but probably not a major factor in creating serious magicians. If it weren't for Edgar Allen Poe, who I read as a youngster, I probably wouldn't be posed for this kind of stuff either. Does that mean Poe created a generation of magicians? No, but it probably helped. This is very overt. It creates a magickal world and although simultaneously real magick is much, much duller and less colorful and at the same time much more frightening and sometimes more colorful than Harry Potter. I think it is a wholesome introduction and if nothing else it drives the old aeon, especially evangelical types, it just drives them crazy and well it should, from their point of view. Does this help bring Aleister Crowley into more of a mainstream light? Even though Crowley isn't mentioned, other magicians are mentioned, Robert Fludd and other magicians of the past. Look at it this way, a person who has been reading Harry Potter since the books were shorter and by the time series is complete they will be young adults and some of those folks will wonder, "what if there really is magick?" And all you have to do is "Google" magick. Like I say all these people are born in the new aeon. All that stuff I said earlier about burning the Book of the Law, when I first read it. Kids are reading that third chapter and it doesn't even disturb them, they are looking deeper into the stuff. Stuff that took me years and years to strip away all my old programming. By the time these kids are "Googling" Crowley will be there. Never in his lifetime was Crowley as popular as he is today. Most of his books if they were published at all were published in editions of fifty or two hundred. In terms of the future, how do you think Crowley will be viewed? Oh I don't know. He had his way. He we always be admired by a few and vilified by everybody else, but I don't think that's the way it's going to be. I think Crowley is going to be… every year his contribution to the field of magick and the psychology magick is appreciated more and more. Crowley is mentioned in college courses now. He will have much better reputation than Rasputin although he would just love to have Rasputin's reputation, but I don't think it will work out that way. Rasputin is still viewed with hideous awe at how he used his personal magnetism. More and more people are going to appreciate Crowley. Those who are going to will appreciate him more. Those who think he was a stinker are always going think of him as a stinker and take the pornography that he wrote for his wife and say what a nasty man he was. So he will remain famous and infamous? I believe so. You know he went to a lot of work to make himself infamous; it would be a shame if that were to disappear completely. You have written a screenplay on Crowley? I have written a screenplay and it has been optioned. A production company has picked it up. They are moving forward with it. They haven't asked me to rewrite it yet. Really, Hollywood, they can encourage you to death. So it's fair to say that you are an authority on Crowley's philosophy and occult teachings? It's really not a virtue on my part. You just wake up after thirty years and find that most of the people who knew more are dead. Any new books coming up? In a day or so. The new book is called, the Book of Ordinary Oracles, and it is sort of a light sorbet something to cleanse the palette after my last book, Understanding Crowley's Thoth Tarot, which was a big three year thing. Divination is a big part of a magician's arsenal and usually someone who gets into it finds they can read somebody's cards or interpret I Ching. They really can do it fabulous for other people but can't do it a damn for themselves. I just lie to myself. "Death and the Tower, oh I was hoping I would get that." So it is book about getting out of your own way long enough to be your own oracle and how to use stuff that is just laying around the house, as your oracular material, oracular machines. Officially, out in the bookstores February 20th by Weiser Book Publishers. I am honored to be with Weiser. I do a book with them about every 18 months.
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