• they/them

plural system in Seattle, WA (b. 1974)
lots of fictives from lots of media, some horses, some dragons, I dunno. the Pnictogen Wing is poorly mapped.

host: Mx. Kris Dreemurr (they/them)

chief messenger and usual front: Mx. Chara or Χαρά (they/them)

other members:
Mx. Frisk, historian (they/them)
Monophylos Fortikos, unicorn (he/him)
Kel the Purple, smol derg (xe/xem)
Pim the Dragon, Kel's sister (she/her)


Aleister "The Beast" Crowley, that is, not Crawly / Crowley from Terry Pratchett and/or Neil Gaiman. I wonder which one of the two was responsible for Crowley. In general, when it comes to "Good Omens", I assume that Pratchett wrote the good bits and Gaiman wrote the bits that aren't so good, and I think Crowley's in the latter category.

Anyway we have reason to believe that Aleister Crowley's 1917 roman a clef supernatural thriller, Moonchild, has some personal relevance. Our partner Kaylin's of the opinion that we shouldn't waste a single millisecond on Crowley's bullshit but we feel like it's inevitable that we should at least confront the guy's legacy. We use the "Thoth" tarot deck sometimes and have Crowley's book on it, though I tend to credit Lady Frieda Harris with what's good about the deck. And this Moonchild book casts a long shadow: self-taught rocket scientist and Thelemic occultist Jack Parsons was entranced by this book and it inspired his infamous 1946 "Babalon Working" (q.v. https://sci-hub.se/10.1163/15685276-12341406) which, so far as I can tell so far, was carried out at Parsons's headquarters in Pasadena (less than a mile from Caltech) with the assistance of L. Ron fucking Hubbard. Such rituals, I suggest, have lasting consequences even if they look like mere comical failures from the outside.

This review of Moonchild (https://archive.is/Lr7ac) doesn't seem at all promising. Apparently much of the book is taken up by Crowley's labored fictionalizations and piss-takes on numerous real-life persons—A. E. Waite features as a bumbling villain, William Butler Yeats (who humiliated Crowley in the ridiculous "Battle of Blythe Road" at the London headquarters of the Order of the Golden Dawn) also figures as a villain, and Preston Sturges's mom Mary D'Este helps support the improbably amazing hero of the piece, who is of course Crowley's auctorial self-insert. I think I'm going to have to find an annotated copy if I'm to make sense of this farrago. Maybe Kaylin's right and I'm wasting my time.

~Chara of Pnictogen


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