On Occultism

[EgoDeath]

Anton Levey was a circus huckster.

Meaning... what exactly? He actually created a comprehensive, codified philosophy that a lot of people were into at the time. A lot of people still are. It's quite Libertarian in nature. Doesn't go over well with the regressive liberals of today, though.

The only reason his nonsense caught on was because LSD was readilly available in San Francisco at the time.he started his "church".

You won't find any MENSA members in the congregation......

I could just as easily dismiss any organization of any time period based on some outside factors that, in reality, have nothing to do with the organization itself.

LaVey actually spoke out against the use of things like LSD. If your idea is that these were a bunch of hippies, sitting around dropping acid and yelling, "Hail Satan," you've got it all wrong.

No surprise there though, OLB.

Most of them appear to be harmless idiots, a certain percentage are confidence tricksters.  But yes, I think most of them believe in their rubbish and have the ability to convince themselves that their spells and rituals do work, coupled with the ability to rationalize away the failures.

A good illustration of this kind of thinking can be found in a passage from Twain's 'The Adventures of Tom Sawyer'.  Tom has buried a marble and recited an incantation over it, firm in the belief that if he did this and left the marble alone for a fortnight, it would draw to it all the marbles he had ever lost.  When he goes back to dig it up, he finds a single marble, the very one he had buried. 'The foundations of his faith were shaken.  He had heard of this working many times before, but had never heard it to fail.'  Tom comes to the conclusion that a witch has interfered and broken the spell. He confirms this when a doodle-bug refuses to speak to him - the bug is afraid of the witch.


Boru

An interesting illustration of shaping reality around your beliefs instead of your beliefs around reality. Notice I didn't use the term, "your reality?"

I wonder if it's the same for occultists. The actually do believe in their nonsense but find ways to explain away the failures in their magical dealings.

Or maybe they do spells that you aren't supposed to see immediate results for. That way they keep plausible deniability... with themselves.

---

To be fair, I did come to that conclusion after reading the Books of Belial and Leviathan, the third and fourth books of The Satanic Bible. Then again, I suspect my reading of those books may have been coloured by sour grapes because I knew they wouldn't accept a 16-year-old as a member. That and as a cheap sumbitch who did not actually have a job at that point, I couldn't afford the $200 membership fee (which has since risen to $225.)

Yes; they're quite adamant about not accepting minors into their organization, lest their be some trickery or scamming going on. They'd rather scam adults out of their $225. LOL!

To be honest, I like a lot of what LaVey and Gilmore had and have to say, respectively. But I don't ever see myself giving $225 to an organization just for the hell of it. After all, as a group, what does the CoS actually do? They're actually quite vocal about the fact that they don't do anything as an organization as they consider themselves a group for non-joiners, so to speak. I suppose if you really believed in the philosophy and simply wanted the card for novelty's sake, I could understand it. Or if you were sixteen and trying to be a rebel! LOL