OTO, CAW, Stranger in a Strange Land

[robinlandseadel at comcast.net]

My niece is in the OTO, charming lass, that one and I'm situated closer to the Wiccan cheering section than anywhere else in the seating plan. Kinda like them Quakers, too. Of course my tongue is (at least partially) in cheek when calling someone else's kettle black, still, "Though Art God", group marriage and communistic distribution of wealth does seem to be swimming against the dominant religious paradigm. 

Add to that little shelf of "Required Hippie Reading" Richard Brautigan, "Another Roadside Attraction", "Demian", "Dune" and a frayed mass market copy (with disolving pages) of "The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test".

 -------------- Original message ----------------------
From: mikebailey at speakeasy.net-------------------
> 
> 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...
> 
> 
>