Sexx Laws; WAS: Patrick twisted my arm so now I'm reading Pynchon's latest

[Michael Bailey]

stepping foot into one of Robin's previous preoccupations --

this whole Scurvhamite thing is quite reminiscent of
Aleister Crowley's family background: his father tried
to bring him up in the "Plymouth Brethren", a small
sect very similar to the Scurvhamites.

Crowley lampooned the sect in some of his writings,
and there's also an interesting essay somewhere in
his oeuvre that is almost sympathetic, a father-son
conversation (sorry, can't cite chapter & verse)

anyway, this coincidence could point to an awareness,
on OBA's part, of To Mega Therion well before AtD...


On 11/30/07, Daniel Julius <daniel.julius at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hahaha, Glumdalclitch
>
>
> On Nov 29, 2007 12:04 AM, <robinlandseadel at comcast.net> wrote:
>
> >
> >  Note:
> >
> >            Robert Scurvham had founded, during the reign of Charles I,
> >            a sect of most pure Puritans. Their central hangup had to do
> >            with predestination. There were two kinds. Nothing for a
> >            Scurvhamite ever happened by accident, Creation was a vast,
> >            intricate machine. But one part of it, the Scurvhamite part,
> ran
> >            off the will of God, its prime mover. The rest ran off some
> >            opposite Principle, something blind, soulless; a brute
> automatism
> >            that led to eternal death. The idea was to woo converts into
> the
> >            Godly and purposeful sodality of the Scurvhamite. But somehow
> >            those few saved Scurvhamites found themselves looking out
> >            into the gaudy clockwork of the doomed with a certain sick and
> >            fascinated horror, and this was to prove fatal. One by one the
> >            glamorous prospect of annihilation coaxed them over, until
> >            there was no one left in the sect, not even Robert Scurvham,
> >            who, like a ship's master, had been last to go.
>
>
>
>
> And in regard to the Scurvhamite theological philosophy, see also Judge
> Holden's view of the universe and war within it:
>
> "Suppose two men at cards with nothing to wager save their lives.  Who has
> not heard such a tale?  A turn of the card.  The whole universe for such a
> player has labored clanking to this moment which will tell if he is to die
> at that man's hand or that man at his. [...] This enhancement of the game to
> its ultimate state admits no argument concerning the notion of fate." -
> Blood Merdian, 249
>
> Because Fate is tautologically true and evident, what "argument" could there
> even be?  So I don't see him so much as a Satan as has been discussed on
> this list lately, but rather the Judge is that "brute automism that [leads]
> to eternal death," which Robin mentioned, manifest in human flesh.  He is
> Principle moving in a mechanized cosmos, where God has pressed Start and
> then let it run w/out touching it or its occupants again.
>
> I believe this belief system is at least partially expressed in strands of
> gnosticism?
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gnosticism
>
> And if you accept the wiki article's portrayal of the gnostic tenet that "In
> order to free oneself from the inferior material world, one needs gnosis, or
> esoteric spiritual knowledge available only to a learned elite," well then,
> friend, you don't have to look too far to see the implications of Holden's
> immense erudition, or the notions of the Preterite v. Elect in GR and
> elsewhere.
>
> --
> Dan