It's an enduring question, how to separate the artist from the art.

 

Does it actually take black magick to do it?  

 

What is one to make of the fact that Aleister Crowley was a British Intelligence agent, 

 

and that he promoted the occult as a cover for Intelligence projects as well as the general disruption of culture?  

 

Are Crowley's books pure disinformation, or is there something of value hidden within them, in spite of it all?  

 

Even if he wasn't inspired in the way we are told, was he possibly inspired nonetheless?

 

We cannot pinpoint a time when news or literature or the other arts weren't propaganda.  

 

If everyone has heard of an artist, you can rest assured that that artist was promoted, for a purpose, by the powers that be.  

 

All we can be sure of is that works of propaganda can become art only after enough time has passed, 

 

so that the specific brainwashing contexts are lost.  

 

Then the works' poisons are finally inert or at safer, more obvious levels of toxicity 

 

and can be seen with fresher eyes.  

 

It's extremely difficult to detect propaganda when one is immersed in a milieu.  

 

Objectivity requires the passing of time—often many decades.

 

If you're being put-on, make it an evening of interactive, improvisational theatre in which the audience are also the actors.

 

In other words, bring some awareness to the proceedings and do some conscious, active putting-on yourself.  

 

If there are props in this theatrical put-on, like chalices, daggers, and wands, by all means make them, as showily -- even as garishly -- as possible, to play up the theatricality.  Or acquire the props from a purveyor of stage magic paraphernalia.  It's been said that theater is only real when it is unreal; the theare is a place of magic and enchantment, the role of the imagination being foremost.

 

Trick props can be enormous fun, and you can even use them to entertain your friends outside of your magickal rituals.

 

The great surrealist painter and author Ithell Colquhoun once saw Crowley in a bookstore in Cornwall.  

 

She was struck by how there was no dramatic aura of evil about him, 

 

and by the fact that he resembled only two of the photos she had seen of him.  

 

She didn't seem to realize the reason for that -- those other photos were most likely of other people -- different actors.  Crowley was never who he said he was.  Photographs don't lie, especially when they're faked.

 

Crowley famously added the letter k to magick.  

 

Since he was a spook by profession, why not add another o and make him even spo-o-okier?  

 

Or add some c's to his name so that you sound terrified to speak it: C-c-c-c-rowley.

 

Though C-c-c-c-rowly wasn't the wickedest man in the world, 

 

he was a genuine spook.  

 

If, outside the assignments dictated by his governors, 

 

he communicated anything of value … well, here's how to tell.  Spread the pages of his writings across the floor of the henhouse and see which one gets pecked by a black pullet.   

Seriously!  There's a whole world out there.  Have you seen that video of the mother hen sitting atop an entire litter of kittens?

 

May every ending harbor kittens.

I'm Prof. Oddfellow.  (For a better understanding, check out my videos, here.)