OTO, CAW, Stranger in a Strange Land

[mikebailey at speakeasy.net]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: robinlandseadel at comcast.net [mailto:robinlandseadel at comcast.net]
> Sent: Saturday, August 12, 2006 06:24 AM
> To: 'the Robot Vegetable', pynchon-l at waste.org
> Subject: Re: Crowley
> 
> My, my, my but isn't this little thread full of unintended consequences. In any case, There really is a "Church Of All Worlds", and practically all of the Heinleinian features of COAW's dogma persist in the Marin county weirdo cult/free expression of religious apostasy/what the hell ya gonna do about it, they call themselves a church anyway.
>  -------------- Original message ----------------------

OTO is the legal heir of Crowley's magickal legacy 
http://oto-usa.org/

CAW has had ups and downs, but I'd consider it harsh to call it weirdo apostasy;  basically the cool thing about them is their primo holy book is a work of fiction and they don't deny that; they have a whole lot of other books they recommend too, it's an ecumenical neo-pagan outlook they promote and I find merit in many of their ways
http://www.caw.org/

at various times I've belonged to both without denying my Judeo-Christian heritage...it's fair to say Crowley emanated both sublime and disgusting stuff...been both inspired and repelled by him...

Stranger in a Strange Land in a way is Heinlein's _Gravity's Rainbow_ 
of course Michael Valentine Smith is a Christ figure and the vision is of a generous cosmos where for some reason "love sweet love is deemed a crime"; also it has some great and moving prose, memorable characters, pretty fine stuff I'd say

There's sort of an SF- and psychedelic- canon including Stranger, Childhood's End, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Illuminatus!, Jack Kerouac and Alan Ginsberg, Timothy Leary (even if he was deep cover CIA), the Whole Earth Catalog (anybody remember "DR's trip" from the Last Whole Earth Catalog?), Baba Ram Dass, and a lot more writers and musicians in the 60s and 70s, that for me anyway developed the vocabulary and mental flexibility to enjoy Gravity's Rainbow and perhaps had a coherence when taken together to allow one to think of a workable counterculture...

no sooner does one think of such a thing than one remembers how the whole structure was (or was it?) a house of cards...but such a sweet one...