Aleister Crowley: The Beast in Berlin

Aleister Crowley: The Beast in Berlin

Author: Tobias Churton

Publisher: Simon and Schuster

Published: 2014-06-16

Total Pages: 425

ISBN-13: 1620552574

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A biographical history of Aleister Crowley’s activities in Berlin from 1930 to 1932 as Hitler was rising to power • Examines Crowley’s focus on his art, his work as a spy for British Intelligence, his colorful love life and sex magick exploits, and his contacts with magical orders • Explores Crowley’s relationships with Berlin’s artists, filmmakers, writers, and performers such as Christopher Isherwood, Jean Ross, and Aldous Huxley • Recounts the fates of Crowley’s friends and colleagues under the Nazis as well as what happened to Crowley’s lost art exhibition Gnostic poet, painter, writer, and magician Aleister Crowley arrived in Berlin on April 18, 1930. As prophet of his syncretic religion “Thelema,” he wanted to be among the leaders of art and thought, and Berlin, the liberated future-gazing metropolis, wanted him. There he would live, until his hurried departure on June 22, 1932, as Hitler was rapidly rising to power and the black curtain of intolerance came down upon the city. Known to his friends affectionately as “The Beast,” Crowley saw the closing lights of Berlin’s artistic renaissance of the Weimar period when Berlin played host to many of the world’s most outstanding artists, writers, filmmakers, performers, composers, architects, philosophers, and scientists, including Albert Einstein, Bertolt Brecht, Ethel Mannin, Otto Dix, Aldous Huxley, Jean Ross, Christopher Isherwood, and many other luminaries of a glittering world soon to be trampled into the mud by the global bloodbath of World War II. Drawing on previously unpublished letters and diary material by Crowley, Tobias Churton examines Crowley’s years in Berlin and his intense focus on his art, his work as a spy for British Intelligence, his colorful love life and sex magick exploits, and his contacts with German Theosophy, Freemasonry, and magical orders. He recounts the fates of Crowley’s colleagues under the Nazis as well as what happened to Crowley’s lost art exhibition--six crates of paintings left behind in Germany as the Gestapo was closing in. Revealing the real Crowley long hidden from the historical record, Churton presents “the Beast” anew in all his ambiguous and, for some, terrifying glory, at a blazing, seminal moment in the history of the world.


Anarchist Seeds Beneath the Snow

Anarchist Seeds Beneath the Snow

Author: David Goodway

Publisher: Liverpool University Press

Published: 2006-01-01

Total Pages: 414

ISBN-13: 1846310253

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From William Morris to Oscar Wilde to George Orwell left-libertarian thought has long been an important but neglected part of British cultural and political history. This work seeks to recover that indigenous anarchist tradition. It argues that a recovered anarchist tradition could be a touchstone for contemporary political radicals.


The Defeat of Youth and Other Poems

The Defeat of Youth and Other Poems

Author: Aldous Huxley

Publisher:

Published: 2017-01-27

Total Pages: 68

ISBN-13: 9781542778831

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The Defeat of Youth and Other Poems (1918) is Aldous Huxley's second book of poems after The Burning Wheel (1916)


Film Culture Reader

Film Culture Reader

Author: Adams P. Sitney

Publisher: Cooper Square Press

Published: 2000-10-17

Total Pages: 466

ISBN-13: 1461732018

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This compilation from Film Culture magazine—the pioneering periodical in avant-garde film commentary—includes contributors like Charles Boultenhouse, Erich von Stroheim, Michael McClure, Stan Brakhage, Annette Michelson, Arthur Miller, Dylan Thomas, Andrew Sarris, Rudolph Arnheim, Jonas Mekas, and Parker Tyler. This collection covers a range of topics in twentieth century cinema, from the Auteur Theory to the commercial cinema, from Orson Welles to Kenneth Anger.


The Art Of Seduction

The Art Of Seduction

Author: Robert Greene

Publisher: Profile Books

Published: 2010-09-03

Total Pages: 496

ISBN-13: 1847651402

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Which sort of seducer could you be? Siren? Rake? Cold Coquette? Star? Comedian? Charismatic? Or Saint? This book will show you which. Charm, persuasion, the ability to create illusions: these are some of the many dazzling gifts of the Seducer, the compelling figure who is able to manipulate, mislead and give pleasure all at once. When raised to the level of art, seduction, an indirect and subtle form of power, has toppled empires, won elections and enslaved great minds. In this beautiful, sensually designed book, Greene unearths the two sides of seduction: the characters and the process. Discover who you, or your pursuer, most resembles. Learn, too, the pitfalls of the anti-Seducer. Immerse yourself in the twenty-four manoeuvres and strategies of the seductive process, the ritual by which a seducer gains mastery over their target. Understand how to 'Choose the Right Victim', 'Appear to Be an Object of Desire' and 'Confuse Desire and Reality'. In addition, Greene provides instruction on how to identify victims by type. Each fascinating character and each cunning tactic demonstrates a fundamental truth about who we are, and the targets we've become - or hope to win over. The Art of Seduction is an indispensable primer on the essence of one of history's greatest weapons and the ultimate power trip. From the internationally bestselling author of The 48 Laws of Power, Mastery, and The 33 Strategies Of War.


Obiter Dicta

Obiter Dicta

Author: Erick Verran

Publisher: punctum books

Published: 2021-10-14

Total Pages: 391

ISBN-13: 1685710026

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Stitched together over five years of journaling, Obiter Dicta is a commonplace book of freewheeling explorations representing the transcription of a dozen notebooks, since painstakingly reimagined for publication. Organized after Theodor Adorno's Minima Moralia, this unschooled exercise in aesthetic thought--gleefully dilettantish, oftentimes dangerously close to the epigrammatic--interrogates an array of subject matter (although inescapably circling back to the curiously resemblant histories of Western visual art and instrumental music) through the lens of drive-by speculation. Erick Verran's approach to philosophical inquiry follows the brute-force literary technique of Jacques Derrida to exhaustively favor the material grammar of a signifier over hand-me-down meaning, juxtaposing outer semblances with their buried systems and our etched-in-stone intuitions about color and illusion, shape and value, with lessons stolen from seemingly unrelatable disciplines. Interlarded with extracts of Ludwig Wittgenstein but also Wallace Stevens, Cormac McCarthy as well as Roland Barthes, this cache of incidental remarks eschews what's granular for the biggest picture available, leaving below the hyper-specialized fields of academia for a bird's-eye view of their crop circles. Obiter Dicta is an unapologetic experiment in intellectual dot-connecting that challenges much long-standing wisdom about everything from illuminated manuscripts to Minecraft and the evolution of European music with lyrical brevity; that is, before jumping to the next topic.


The Defeat of Youth

The Defeat of Youth

Author: Aldous Huxley

Publisher: The Floating Press

Published: 2011-02-01

Total Pages: 83

ISBN-13: 1775451542

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By all accounts, Aldous Huxley was a brilliant and voracious thinker and artist whose creative output knew no literary bounds. This volume gathers some of his best-remembered verse, including the memorable title poem, which is a sequence of 22 thematically interwoven sonnets.


Young Archimedes

Young Archimedes

Author: Aldous Huxley

Publisher: Cosimo Classics

Published: 1924

Total Pages: 324

ISBN-13:

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"Every day he made the discovery of something which seemed to him exquisitely beautiful..." -Aldous Huxley, Young Archimedes and Other Stories (1924) Young Archimedes and Other Stories (1924) by Aldous Huxley is a collection of six stories considered to be semi-autobiographical and originally published under the title of Little Mexican and Other Stories. The collection includes the aforementioned titles as well as Uncle Spencer, Hubert and Minnie, Fard, and The Portrait and diverge from his well-known dystopian writing. All are set in Europe and offer thoughtful discourse on childhood, love, life, death, and society. This anthology is a must-read for lovers of short stories, early twentieth century literature, and Huxley's writing.