Subject: Re: (urth) Crowley, then ...
From: Josh Geller 
Date: 28 Jul 2003 08:28:22 -0700

On Mon, 2003-07-28 at 06:57, Craig Brewer wrote:

> I'd have to agree with most of this and add that LB is
> the kind of book that I could only enjoy now after
> having read a lot of other stuff that's become more of
> a literary memory than something fresh. I personally
> enjoyed it because of the strains of Renaissance
> philosophy (ie., Bruno and neoplatonism) that ran
> through it.

Well, yes.

If Wolfe is the Catholic writer, Crowley is the Brunian/Gnostic/Hermetic
whatever-you-want-to-call-it Religion Mundi (that's the term!) writer 
(to draw a false exemplar).

> I read in an interview that Crowley began LB as a kind
> of a "concept book," intending to just write a book
> about a family with their own private religion.

All religion is private religion. If you are a member of a particular
sect, all that means is that you get together with other people whose
religion incorporates some of the same stuff as yours.

You know, there are really a lot of people, when you add them
all together, to whom fairies actually are part of their religion.

>                                               And
> the fairy stuff began as just a way to make that
> private religion more accessible to readers. 

Hmm.

I have an electronic copy of that enlightening book 'The Secret
Commonwealth Of Elves, Fauns And Fairies', by the Rev. Robert
Kirk. It dates from the seventeenth century. If anyone wants to
learn more about this intensely interesting subject, I will be
happy to email them a copy upon request.

I will have to think about that comment of Crowley's some more.

>                                             But then
> the fairy motifs took over. In the same interview (I
> think), Crowley admitted that it was a book which
> didn't have the same universal scope as he tried to
> get in his Aegypt series - it was something that was
> more of a playing out of a minor personal obsession.

I thought that was 'The Deep', which I actually prefer slightly
to 'Engine Summer' and 'Little, Big'. But all three of them
rank very high in my esteem. Or perhaps it was my minor personal
obsession that Crowley was writing about in 'The Deep'. How he 
might have managed that I have no idea, as he and I have never
met.
 
> The real reason I so love that book, though, is that
> as a kid I was always hunting for fairy hills and
> circle dances...which I always felt were just around
> the corner. 

They are not?






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