Aleister Crowley Quotes
To me a book is a message from the gods to mankind; or, if not, should never be published at all. A message from the gods should be delivered at once. It is damnably blasphemous to talk about the autumn season and so on. How dare the author or publisher demand a price for doing his duty, the highest and most honorable to which a man can be called?
Crowley, Aleister. The Confessions of Aleister Crowley. Hill and Wang, 1969.
The Judge, a fundamentalist Christian, unilaterally had a large granite monument of the Ten Commandments installed in the Rotunda of the Supreme Court Building. A Federal Judge in deciding a lawsuit ordered him to remove the monument which was held to have been placed there to symbolically uphold the supremacy of the Judeo-Christian tradition in our legal system. Judge Moore appealed to the U. S. Supreme Court which let the removal decision stand. However, the judge still resisted. The other 8 Alabama Supreme Court justices then removed the Chief Justice and ordered the monument removed. Moore who had been selected to office in a “Bible-Belt State,” still blocked the removal forcing a showdown with the Federal Courts and his colleagues in Alabama. Shortly thereafter, both the monument and Judge Moore were removed.
Al-Maarri’s quotations are not only meaningful in their own right, but they illustrate the openness and free thinking that was allowed in the early days of Islam before about 1100. If anyone wrote such things today in most Islamic countries he would at least be jailed if not executed for blasphemy. And if any Christian in Europe made the same statement, he would have been excommunicated at least if not tortured and murdered.
In 2016 Hoffman was part of a congregation of Jews who carried Holy Torahs (Handwritten scrolls of the first 5 Books of the Old Testament and most sacred document to Jewish people) to the Wailing Wall in Jerusalem. The group included men and women. With the religious politics of Israel, the “custody and management” of the holiest of Jewish site, the Western Wall of the original Temple, had been awarded to an Ultra-Orthodox sect which had ruled that women should not be allowed to pray at the Wailing Wall—only males. The majority of Jews, Orthodox, Conservative, Reform and Modern have no such gender bias. When they were rebuffed beforeaall, the case ended up in the Israeli Supreme Court which ruled that women as well as man had an absolute right to pray. After some delay, the government created an area where women and gender integrated groups could pray and hold ceremonies at The Wall. However, the ultra orthodox, still managing the facility, also believed that women carrying and leading prayers from a Torah was sacrilegious. When the mixed gender group approached The Wall with Torahs, a mob of ultra orthodox surrounded the gender integrated group and started roughing them up. The quotation describes the feelings of the the group who for the fist time since Israel regained control of the Western Wall in 1967 (Arabs then prevented any Jews from praying at The Wal) had a gender mixed group of Jews conduct a service at the Wailing Wall.
Aleister Crowley was an English occultist, ceremonial magician, poet, painter, novelist, and mountaineer. He founded the religion of Thelema, identifying himself as the prophet entrusted with guiding humanity into the Æon of Horus in the early 20th century. A prolific writer, he published widely over the course of his life.
