Star Wars and the Satanic
Nov. 20th, 2003 02:21 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
triadruidAmusing piece on why George Lucas and Alistar Crowley may not be so far apart after all: http://www.gordonthomas.ie/starwars.html
STAR WARS AND THE SATANIC
By Kevin Dowling
The Sunday Express was the first to brand high-society Satanist Alestair Crowley as the Wickedest Man in the World as long ago as 1923. (for facsimiles, see web links below)
Yet mad, bad and dangerous to know though he was, Crowley's debauched lifestyle and bizarre adventures fascinated the best-known writers of his generation.
Crowley appeared under various names in Somerset Maugham's The Magician, M R James's Casting the Runes, Dion Fortune's The Winged Bull, Dennis Wheatley's The Devil Rides Out, Christopher Isherwood's A Visit to Anselm Oakes, Ian Fleming's Casino Royale, Anthony Powell's A Dance to the Music of Time, Colin Wilson's Adrift in Soho and Satan Wants Me by Piers Paul Read.
Does the sex-magician's magic still live on? A controversial new study suggests that Annekin Skywalker, aka Darth Vader in the Stars Wars movies, is a Crowley clone.
Worse than that. The same research highlights a sequence of apparent coincidences which taken together suggest that writer-producer-director George Lucas borrowed heavily from Crowley's writings to create the box-office magic of the Star Wars films.
Crowley (1875-1947), author of Diary of a Drug Fiend and A Hymn to Lucifer, gained worldwide notoriety whilst leader of the freemasonic sect Ordo Templi Orientis - the Order of Oriental Templars (OTO).
Crowley's own mother compared her wayward son - a sort of Edwardian Darth Vader, - to the Great Beast 666 of the Book of Revelations.
The poet W. B. Yeats - a keen student of the occult, - called him 'an unspeakable degenerate,' while the novelist Somerset Maugham said that Crowley was one of the most evil men he had ever met.
Maugham worked for the British Secret Intelligence Service - and Crowley supplied both SIS and the KGB with scandalous tidbits for use in their 'honeypot' operations.
The windows in the Emperor's chambers at the climax of Return of the Jedi spell out the initials of the Crowley organisation - OTO, which is now headquartered in California.
In the first Star Wars scripts the Jedi Knights are called Jedi Templars," said Cavalorn, an historian of the occult seen recently in Channel 4's acclaimed Rasputin documentary.
Crowley's 'secret' name among the Oriental Templars was 'Phoenix,' - the symbol of the Rebel Alliance in the Lucas films.
The name of the swamp planet Dagobah is uncomfortably close to the title of the French King Dagobert, whose myth is central to the templars' story," said Cavalorn, who runs the New Aeon bookshop in Manchester.
Crowley makes references in his writings to 'the dwarf insane yet crafty' who is the source of true Wisdom, and that sounds very like Yoda, who lives on the planet Dagobah.
In his Book of the Law, Crowley: wrote; 'the obeah and the wanga, the work of the wand and the work of the sword, these he shall learn and teach.' Substitute Obi for Obeah and Wan for Wanga and you get Obi-Wan. And what device is a wand one moment and a sword the next? A lightsaber, of course; and the relevance of 'learn and teach' is obvious, since Obi-Wan is the teacher.
Darth Vader's sabre is red, the colour of the sphere of Geburah, or Severity, in Crowley's work; Obi-Wan's is blue, the colour of its opposing sphere, Chesed or Mercy.
The doctrine of the Aeon of Horus maintains that a new era has arisen, presided over by the Egyptian God of freedom, light, vengeance and liberation. It forms a critical part of Crowley's teaching, When one considers that an Aeon is a span of time, akin to the term 'millennium', and that Horus is often depicted as a falcon, it does compel one to look at the Millenium Falcon in a slightly different light.
The greatest ordeal in Crowley's system is the 'crossing of the abyss'. One reaches the brink of a great gulf and must either surrender everything one is and jump, or remain behind to become a 'black brother' or 'brother of the left hand path'.
The 'crossing of the abyss' is foreshadowed in Star Wars: A New Hope, when Luke and Leia swing over the chasm, and it is actually repeated and achieved in full in Empire Strikes Back, at the climax of the film. At the climax of Empire, Luke's right hand is severed at the wrist, implying that he must take the left hand path and turn to the Dark Side, becoming a 'black brother.' Faced with the choice of crossing the Abyss or turning to the 'Left Hand Path', Luke chooses to jump, which is the act that redeems him from a future of corruption.
Revenge of the Jedi was the original title of Return of the Jedi, and Luke appears in it as the Horus figure, an avenger.
At the climax of Empire, Vader, previously identified as the murderer of Luke's father, is revealed to be himself the father.
A similar secret is revealed in the Eleusinian Mysteries concerning the Egyptian gods, namely that 'Osiris is a Black God!' Vader stands for the Egyptian god Osiris and his 'Black Brethren' are those who have 'shut themselves up', become encased and closed off from the Universe, exactly as Vader is encased in black armour.
Their sphere on the Tree of Life is Crowley's false sphere 'da'ath', - obviously the source for the name 'Darth'.
And Vader out of his armour proves to be a bald guy with an English accent, uncannily reminiscent of Crowley.
A part of the Star Wars universe is actually mentioned by name in one of Crowley's Holy Books. 'Thy messenger was more terrible than the Death-star,' Crowley says.
Vader is the messenger of the Emperor ,who possesses and represents a power far more terrible than the Death Star - the dark side of the Force itself. As he reminds his fellow Imperials, 'The ability to destroy a planet is insignificant next to the power of the Force.'
If George Lucas really is consciously promoting the philosophies of Crowley, then he understands Crowley much better than most - and I can say this because I've spent twenty years researching Crowley's books and I know his work inside out. Of course, we need not believe that this evidence justifies jumping to any bizarre conclusions about the films if we don't choose to.
One might instead see Lucas as having sounded the same depths as Crowley and come out with cinematic instead of ceremonial magic. We may be looking at some sort of subconscious mythic resonance. - although, you never know...
Crowley might have written the screenplay for the famous scene when Luke is trapped in the garbage compactor. 'The chamber was corrupt; the air stank," Crowley wrote. 'He enveloped me
with his demon tentacles; yea, the eight fears took hold upon me.' 'I slipped from the embrace as a stone from the sling of a boy of the woodlands. I was smooth and hard as ivory; the horror gat no hold.' Smooth and hard indeed, for Luke is wearing stormtrooper armour in that scene!
My original intention was to ridicule people who insist that there's evidence that contemporary witchcraft reflects an authentic 'ancient tradition,' said Cavalorn, 34, a self-styled Kabbalist who is one of
Britain's leading Goths.
Historically speaking that's nonsense. However, I can honestly say that once I started looking for correspondences between the work of Aleister Crowley and the Star Wars trilogy, I found far
more unexpected parallels than I could possibly have predicted.
There is a saying in occult circles that the habitual cry of the young magician is, 'Oh no, it's worked!' and that's just how I felt.
The Beatles put Crowley on the cover of Sgt. Pepper; Led Zeppelin engraved his most notorious saying at the centre vinyl of their third album; and in 1969, 22 years after his death, The Times of London endorsed him as one of the Thousand Makers of the Twentieth Century.
'I want blasphemy, murder, rape, revolution. Anything bad or good, but strong.' he declared. 'I have exposed myself to every form of disease, accident and violence. I have driven myself to delight in dirty and disgusting debauches.'
'Carl Jung, Claude Levi-Strauss, Joseph Campbell and Aleister Crowley all held one idea in common, vastly different though their personal philosophies were,' Cavalorn said. They each presented the theory that our manifest existence is shaped by stories; that myth is ultimately more real than the self-appointed storyteller.
Jung looked to the collective unconscious, Levi-Strauss to abstract notions of structure, Campbell to anthropology and Crowley to the ancient system of analysis called the Kabbalah, yet each in his own way said the same thing.
Did Lucas look to Crowley? Whatever it is that the universe is made of, stories are as fundamental to it as any quantifiable material particle.
'When I started out making the movies,' Lucas said in a May, 199 interview,
'I was working toward making it modern mythology. I had studied anthropology in college, and social sciences was my major before I got into film.'
STAR WARS AND THE SATANIC
By Kevin Dowling
The Sunday Express was the first to brand high-society Satanist Alestair Crowley as the Wickedest Man in the World as long ago as 1923. (for facsimiles, see web links below)
Yet mad, bad and dangerous to know though he was, Crowley's debauched lifestyle and bizarre adventures fascinated the best-known writers of his generation.
Crowley appeared under various names in Somerset Maugham's The Magician, M R James's Casting the Runes, Dion Fortune's The Winged Bull, Dennis Wheatley's The Devil Rides Out, Christopher Isherwood's A Visit to Anselm Oakes, Ian Fleming's Casino Royale, Anthony Powell's A Dance to the Music of Time, Colin Wilson's Adrift in Soho and Satan Wants Me by Piers Paul Read.
Does the sex-magician's magic still live on? A controversial new study suggests that Annekin Skywalker, aka Darth Vader in the Stars Wars movies, is a Crowley clone.
Worse than that. The same research highlights a sequence of apparent coincidences which taken together suggest that writer-producer-director George Lucas borrowed heavily from Crowley's writings to create the box-office magic of the Star Wars films.
Crowley (1875-1947), author of Diary of a Drug Fiend and A Hymn to Lucifer, gained worldwide notoriety whilst leader of the freemasonic sect Ordo Templi Orientis - the Order of Oriental Templars (OTO).
Crowley's own mother compared her wayward son - a sort of Edwardian Darth Vader, - to the Great Beast 666 of the Book of Revelations.
The poet W. B. Yeats - a keen student of the occult, - called him 'an unspeakable degenerate,' while the novelist Somerset Maugham said that Crowley was one of the most evil men he had ever met.
Maugham worked for the British Secret Intelligence Service - and Crowley supplied both SIS and the KGB with scandalous tidbits for use in their 'honeypot' operations.
The windows in the Emperor's chambers at the climax of Return of the Jedi spell out the initials of the Crowley organisation - OTO, which is now headquartered in California.
In the first Star Wars scripts the Jedi Knights are called Jedi Templars," said Cavalorn, an historian of the occult seen recently in Channel 4's acclaimed Rasputin documentary.
Crowley's 'secret' name among the Oriental Templars was 'Phoenix,' - the symbol of the Rebel Alliance in the Lucas films.
The name of the swamp planet Dagobah is uncomfortably close to the title of the French King Dagobert, whose myth is central to the templars' story," said Cavalorn, who runs the New Aeon bookshop in Manchester.
Crowley makes references in his writings to 'the dwarf insane yet crafty' who is the source of true Wisdom, and that sounds very like Yoda, who lives on the planet Dagobah.
In his Book of the Law, Crowley: wrote; 'the obeah and the wanga, the work of the wand and the work of the sword, these he shall learn and teach.' Substitute Obi for Obeah and Wan for Wanga and you get Obi-Wan. And what device is a wand one moment and a sword the next? A lightsaber, of course; and the relevance of 'learn and teach' is obvious, since Obi-Wan is the teacher.
Darth Vader's sabre is red, the colour of the sphere of Geburah, or Severity, in Crowley's work; Obi-Wan's is blue, the colour of its opposing sphere, Chesed or Mercy.
The doctrine of the Aeon of Horus maintains that a new era has arisen, presided over by the Egyptian God of freedom, light, vengeance and liberation. It forms a critical part of Crowley's teaching, When one considers that an Aeon is a span of time, akin to the term 'millennium', and that Horus is often depicted as a falcon, it does compel one to look at the Millenium Falcon in a slightly different light.
The greatest ordeal in Crowley's system is the 'crossing of the abyss'. One reaches the brink of a great gulf and must either surrender everything one is and jump, or remain behind to become a 'black brother' or 'brother of the left hand path'.
The 'crossing of the abyss' is foreshadowed in Star Wars: A New Hope, when Luke and Leia swing over the chasm, and it is actually repeated and achieved in full in Empire Strikes Back, at the climax of the film. At the climax of Empire, Luke's right hand is severed at the wrist, implying that he must take the left hand path and turn to the Dark Side, becoming a 'black brother.' Faced with the choice of crossing the Abyss or turning to the 'Left Hand Path', Luke chooses to jump, which is the act that redeems him from a future of corruption.
Revenge of the Jedi was the original title of Return of the Jedi, and Luke appears in it as the Horus figure, an avenger.
At the climax of Empire, Vader, previously identified as the murderer of Luke's father, is revealed to be himself the father.
A similar secret is revealed in the Eleusinian Mysteries concerning the Egyptian gods, namely that 'Osiris is a Black God!' Vader stands for the Egyptian god Osiris and his 'Black Brethren' are those who have 'shut themselves up', become encased and closed off from the Universe, exactly as Vader is encased in black armour.
Their sphere on the Tree of Life is Crowley's false sphere 'da'ath', - obviously the source for the name 'Darth'.
And Vader out of his armour proves to be a bald guy with an English accent, uncannily reminiscent of Crowley.
A part of the Star Wars universe is actually mentioned by name in one of Crowley's Holy Books. 'Thy messenger was more terrible than the Death-star,' Crowley says.
Vader is the messenger of the Emperor ,who possesses and represents a power far more terrible than the Death Star - the dark side of the Force itself. As he reminds his fellow Imperials, 'The ability to destroy a planet is insignificant next to the power of the Force.'
If George Lucas really is consciously promoting the philosophies of Crowley, then he understands Crowley much better than most - and I can say this because I've spent twenty years researching Crowley's books and I know his work inside out. Of course, we need not believe that this evidence justifies jumping to any bizarre conclusions about the films if we don't choose to.
One might instead see Lucas as having sounded the same depths as Crowley and come out with cinematic instead of ceremonial magic. We may be looking at some sort of subconscious mythic resonance. - although, you never know...
Crowley might have written the screenplay for the famous scene when Luke is trapped in the garbage compactor. 'The chamber was corrupt; the air stank," Crowley wrote. 'He enveloped me
with his demon tentacles; yea, the eight fears took hold upon me.' 'I slipped from the embrace as a stone from the sling of a boy of the woodlands. I was smooth and hard as ivory; the horror gat no hold.' Smooth and hard indeed, for Luke is wearing stormtrooper armour in that scene!
My original intention was to ridicule people who insist that there's evidence that contemporary witchcraft reflects an authentic 'ancient tradition,' said Cavalorn, 34, a self-styled Kabbalist who is one of
Britain's leading Goths.
Historically speaking that's nonsense. However, I can honestly say that once I started looking for correspondences between the work of Aleister Crowley and the Star Wars trilogy, I found far
more unexpected parallels than I could possibly have predicted.
There is a saying in occult circles that the habitual cry of the young magician is, 'Oh no, it's worked!' and that's just how I felt.
The Beatles put Crowley on the cover of Sgt. Pepper; Led Zeppelin engraved his most notorious saying at the centre vinyl of their third album; and in 1969, 22 years after his death, The Times of London endorsed him as one of the Thousand Makers of the Twentieth Century.
'I want blasphemy, murder, rape, revolution. Anything bad or good, but strong.' he declared. 'I have exposed myself to every form of disease, accident and violence. I have driven myself to delight in dirty and disgusting debauches.'
'Carl Jung, Claude Levi-Strauss, Joseph Campbell and Aleister Crowley all held one idea in common, vastly different though their personal philosophies were,' Cavalorn said. They each presented the theory that our manifest existence is shaped by stories; that myth is ultimately more real than the self-appointed storyteller.
Jung looked to the collective unconscious, Levi-Strauss to abstract notions of structure, Campbell to anthropology and Crowley to the ancient system of analysis called the Kabbalah, yet each in his own way said the same thing.
Did Lucas look to Crowley? Whatever it is that the universe is made of, stories are as fundamental to it as any quantifiable material particle.
'When I started out making the movies,' Lucas said in a May, 199 interview,
'I was working toward making it modern mythology. I had studied anthropology in college, and social sciences was my major before I got into film.'
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2003-11-20 12:49 pm (UTC)You started this, as I recall
Re: You started this, as I recall
And then, in a puff of logic, she was gone
Date: 2003-11-20 02:32 pm (UTC)I'll continue on and let you know more when I get closer to 'the end'.
no subject
Date: 2003-11-20 02:38 pm (UTC)