ATDTDA 719

[robinlandseadel at comcast.net]

I've got so much [too much] to say on the subject, so enjoy the 
ride. Well, first of all, It's great to hear from Kai again. The more 
I find out about Magic/Magick [nothing like working in a shop that 
sells crystals for therapists that work with moving subtle energy 
fields to get you into a real "AtD" kinda mood, all Belle Epoque 
and smoky if you catch my drift] the more I realize how little I know. 
[just got "The Encyclopedia of Crystals" by Judy Hall:

http://www.boonebridgebooks.com/book_details.php?isbn=1592332668

just about the most luscious portfolio of eye candy heretofore assembled,
and now realize yet another layer of magic in Against the Day, other uses 
for all those crystal formations.]

Just to get this out of the way, Blavatsky is in Against the Day, 
Arthur Edward Waite is in Against the Day and out in the open, this time 
[he's in Gravity's Rainbow, but to know that you have to know him by 
his works, anyway GR is clogged with kabbalistic references intelligible 
in no other context, can't confuse it with no bowling alley action, if you 
catch my drift:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Lfjc4Q9pso  ]

The Golden Dawn is name-checked in there somewhere, 
that's enough right there, there's your Enochian references right there, 
now take it away Mr. Firstnighter!!! And I do believe that the Grace the 
Chums are flying into is Christian Grace, is Buddhist Grace, is 
Goddesses Grace--- hey folks, slack is slack: All Hail Bob!!!---but yeah, 
way up there beyond the limitless light.

However, given that, what goes on in the stretch between pages 219-242 
reads, to me, as a an obvious, smack you in the head with a frying pan 
[as directed by Bob Clampett] parody version of Aleister Crowley and the 
British version of the O.T.O. Knowing Crowley's interest and engagement 
in the Kaballah and Enochian Magic, I'm dead cert as regards the Nicholas 
Nookshaft/Aleister Crowley mirroring. This is not a total, one-for-one 
correspondence, mind you. But the parodisical elements of the total 
T.W.I.T./Nookshaft enterprise serve to illuminate sources and contexts. 
I'll give a few examples from the mouldering halls of the p-list archives:

http://tinyurl.com/23gpvu
http://tinyurl.com/yrt9tc
http://tinyurl.com/yrplhg

           Ya Sam:
           Robin, the fact that there is Crowley inside 
           Nookshaft  is very persuasive. However, I 
           have some doubts that Nookshaft is, let's 
           say an 'unadulterated' parody of Crowley. 
           Can he be a composite image of various 
           mystical characters about whom, judging 
           by the way you handle this section, you 
           obviously would know more than many 
           of us? The same would go with TWIT, 
           are they a sligh reference only to OTO or 
           rather to a number of suchlike organisations?

Excellent question. No caricature of Pynchon's---or anyone else's---is 
unadulterated. However there is one single chareteristic that makes 
Crowley the linchpin I've posited: Crowley's (and the O.T.O.'s) 
involvement in espionage:

           A PRO-GERMAN. 

           The outbreak of war put an end to Crowley’s activities 
           in England. In November 1914 Crowley went to the 
           United States, where he entered into close relations 
           with the pro-German propagandists. He edited the 
           New York "International", a German propagandist 
           paper run by the notorious George Silvester Viereck, 
           and published, among other things, an obscene attack 
           on the King and a glorification of the Kaiser. 

           Crowley ran occultism as a side line, and seems to 
           have been known as the "Purple Priest." Later on he 
           publicly destroyed his British passport before the 
           Statue of Liberty, declared in favour of the Irish 
           Republican cause, and made a theatrical declaration 
           of "war" on England. According to another version of 
           this story he proclaimed himself at the same time 
           "King of Ireland."

           . . . AND REVOLUTIONARY. 

           During his stay in America Crowley was associated 
           with a body known as the "Secret Revolutionary 
           Committee," which was working for the establishment 
           of an Irish Republic. He is known also as the writer 
           of a defeatist manifesto circulated in France in 1915. 
           Crowley arrived in France at the beginning of 1920, 
           and subsequently went to Cefalu, Sicily. Here he 
           was head of a community of kindred spirits 
           established at the Villa Santa Barbara, renamed 
           by them "Ad Spiritum Sanctum." Free sexual 
           intercourse seems to have been one of their tenets.

http://www.lashtal.com/nuke/module-subjects-viewpage-pageid-13.phtml

Aleister Nookshaft was notorious for his involvement in espionage with the 
Germans in World War I. There is much more to be found, and as I discover
and recover more useful data I'll share it. But make no mistake, no one else 
at the time had the combination of specifics as Weird Uncle Al.

I find it very interesting that so many readers of Pynchon were seeking 
Einstein in AtD. He's there, infusing the book with light nearly everywhere. 
But I've always been aware that Pynchon's knowledge of the Occult was 
probably greater than his knowledge of Physics, and was aware of a 
singular figure from the era who was mixed in the background of 
Pynchon's other (in particular COL49 and GR) books, playing a 
major part, but not spoken due to a "ritual reluctance" akin to 
Harry Potter's "He Whose Name Shall Not Be Spoken". In fact, 
his name hasn't been mentioned once, has it? But the exactitude 
of the characterization of "The Great Beast" is as precise as that 
of ther Governor of Jeshimon, the specific "vectors" of Nicholas 
Crowley's enterprises are not of all those other theosophists and 
occultists---Blavatsky, A.E. Waite, the Golden Dawn, others--- that, 
in fact, are mentioned in AtD. I've had some sense of Crowley's
prescence for quite some time:


           Well, here's my weird theory. In "Goldbug Variations", 
           Richard Powers manages to include Glenn Gould as 
           part of the story without even mentioning his name. 
           The prescence/abscence of Alstaire Crowley in 
           "Gravity's Rainbow" may be more chimerical than 
           Gould's in "Goldbug Variations, but so many of the 
           specifics in the "White Visitation" point in that 
           direction, that you have to factor in one of the 
           biggest occult prescences active during WWII, 
           making the failure to mention him in "GR" somewhat 
           sinister. Somehow (thanks in large part to the 
           "Courier's Tragedy") John Dee occcupies a similar 
           abscence in "The Crying of Lot 49". At least in my mind. 

http://tinyurl.com/ytwbh2

Let me note, that Dee's "Enochian Magic" was central to Crowley's concept  of
"Magick". 

http://tinyurl.com/yw22z5

This little phrase here---"Agencies of the Angelic"---is yet another pointer 
to the beast. I see a clear link between the British tabloid portrait of 
Crowley and "The White Vistation".

http://tinyurl.com/23d4ky

If that ain't enough, well, I dunno, cause it like sounds cool to say it?

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ 
          Me:
          My undestanding is that the Occult and Cryptography 
          really got rolling with John Dee.

          Kai:
          I don't know, perhaps this is too ethnocentric as far as 
          the occult is concerned. 

While you could be right, I'm thinking of the building of an empire 
[think it was Dee who came up with the meme of British Empire 
which you gotta admit is one hell of an act of conjuration, I mean, 
you try pulling that one out of your ass, ok?] with loads of spying 
and incription and having that cluster of buds blossom into the Tudor
rose of British Intelligence [Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Lord 
Tweedsmuir, Graham Greene] which brigs us back to Crowley.

          Anyway, Dee is quite up-to-date 
          these days, no? My daughter who will be 11 years old 
          next week she just read Livi Michael's "The Angel Stone" 
          (dtsch. "Das Flüstern der Engel") and already knew about 
          Dee from another novel. I gave her some further 
          information. Explained the sigill, told her about the 
          Enochian chess game. Since your magick-ear-listening 
          of CoL49 (its play-in-play COURIER'S TRAGEDY can 
          perhaps be read as being about the failing of the new 
          communication between Angels and humans) makes 
          some sense to me, it would be important to actually 
          find that "Enochian material in AtD" you promised us. 
          If one could, this would indeed be a strong indicator 
          that "long-practiced, all-out, contrary-to-fact, capital M 
          Magic" (TRP: SJ intro) is among Pynchon's primary 
          concerns. In all of his books.  

This is pretty recent, and it's really more meditating on what sort 
of impact family history would bear on Pynchon's revisionist histories.
I see a lot of the ass end of the Burning Times in this sequence. That 
"zany paraclete" line, with the flaming tongue makes me think of 
Giordano Bruno's awful demise. 

http://www.infidels.org/library/historical/john_kessler/giordano_bruno.html

Pynchon has a marked interest in all things heretical, I trace that back to 
William Pynchon, founder of Springfield Mass. and the first guy in the 
north american colonies to have his book burned, in this case due to 
steaming heaps of heresies, not the least of which was the heresy of 
inclusion, thus TRP's fascination with excluded middles and deviates of 
all stripes. 
 
          Me:
          Just the other day Thelma, my Ceremonial Magician of a 
          niece-by marriage, was complaining about how hard it was 
          to utter the Enochian names John Dee had cooked up on 
          account of them having been so devilishly encrypted.

 
          Kai:
          In part X of his edition of the Golden Dawn documents 
          Regardie gives useful hints.Take for example the first call:
 
          OL SONUF VAORSAGI GOHO IADA BALTA. LEXARPH, 
          COMANAN, TABITOM, ZODAKARA
          EKA ZODAKARE OD ZODAMARAN. ODO KIKLE QAA, 
          PIAPE PIAMOEL OD VAOAN.
 
          Mathers & Westcott gave some advice largely orientated 
          at the pronunciation of the Hebrew language (which plays, 
          as you know, via the QBL an important role in Western
          occultism). However, "there is no final version of authoritative 
          character", as Regardie writes, and like in other comparable 
          cases the proof of the pudding is in the eating. If you wanna 
          play around a little with the first call (on your own responsibility, 
          that is), I'd start like this:
 
          O-el Zo-nuf Ve-o-ar-sa-dschi, Goho I-a-da Balta. El-ex-arpe-he. 
          Ko-ma-na-nu. Ta-bi-to-em. Sod-a-ka-ra e-ka sod-a-ka-re o-da 
          Sod-a-mer-a-nu. Oh-da ki-kle ka-a. Pi-a-pe pi-a-mo-el o-da 
          ve-o-a-nu.  

Well, gee, thanks for the tip. Very fortunately Thelma's not shy in the 
least regarding calls & such, pronunciation and nuances. In a safe 
context, mind you. I mean, you don't want all hell breaking loose, do you?
 
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
"In 1932 Crowley went off to Europe to show his paintings in Berlin, 
where subsequently they were destroyed by the Nazis. Anyway, he 
was gone several years ..." 
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
You ever see those things? They're like, atrocities, man. 
Aesthetically speaking, of course.