Crowleyisms

Sometimes, for no good reason, something sticks in my head and I just can't shake it. Like everyone else, it's usually a snippet of a song or some insipid commercial jingle, but from time to time, it is a quote, saying, or just some kind of random something I've seen, heard, or read.

This week, it's a famous Aleister Crowley quote: "Everybody is a star."

Now, Crowley was a famed Occultist who referred to himself as "The Beast" and was called "the wickedest man alive" in his day. But to his defense, Crowley was more than just your run-of-the-mill "Satanist" and he lived during the Victorian Age, so the fact that openly espoused hanging out with hookers, doing drugs, and being just generally amoral (if not downright immoral) went a long way toward helping how he was judged.

But his writings are fantastic. I mean, much of them are blasphemous ravings of what was surely a drug-addled mind and it is said he died insane (possibly from Syphilis), but Crowley had a way with words that has rarely been equalled. And Crowley practiced and developed a number of Magickal systems; he did not just get together with some friends, make a half-assed prayer to "The Devil," and then engage in drunken orgies (though let's be assured, this was probably a part of his regimen from time to time).

So while I do not know this quote in context, the thing I have always wondered about it is what, exactly, he meant by it. Crowley's works are infamous for their multiple meanings and this one in particular can be taken any number of ways.

But I have always thought that Crowley was alluding to the idea that, with extremities outstretched, every body is a five-pointed object.

Maybe it's just me and I have no idea why this quote has been in my head this week, but I wanted to jot it down and share because I have always thought that whenever I have mused on this particular saying.