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

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I may be in an alternate reality--though for years I haven't known what the 
alternatives are--but, Robin, does the first part of your post look 
Calvinist? Is there a connection? And, if so, is it worth anything? Did I 
miss an earlier, relevant post? Should I wear my trousers rolled?

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----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Michael Bailey" <michael.lee.bailey at gmail.com>
To: "Pynchon Liste" <pynchon-l at waste.org>
Sent: Friday, November 30, 2007 9:36 PM
Subject: Re: Sexx Laws; WAS: Patrick twisted my arm so now I'm reading 
Pynchon's latest


> 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
>
>
>
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