Morning of the Magicians

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Adams, Deborah (2009). "Review of "The Morning of the Magicians" ". Curled Up with a Good Book . Retrieved 9 April 2010. p. 230 He talks about the soul, but then he talks about the psychic powers of it in the weirdest way that I might be too dim to follow. "Men, then, are endowed with a special organ for transmitting the psychic forces needed to preserve the equilibrium of the Cosmos. This is what we call, vaguely, the soul, and all our religions according to this theory, are merely a relic of this forgotten primordial function, namely to play a part in maintaining the equilibrium of the cosmic force." ... but then he goes on to talk about the Nuremberg trials as being not necessary b/c the cosmic force that led these people was not of this world. It's really odd... and this is on p. 234 where he talks about how Hitler believed the Natzis, Jews, and non-whites were not human. Oh man.... it's all so weird. And then... A few lines traced with special ink on specially prepared paper serve as a receiver for electro-magnetic waves. The alchemist in the first place spends many years deciphering old texts that, deprived of any guiding Ariadne’s thread, are like a labyrinth where everything has been done deliberately and systematically to throw the uninitiated into a state of inextricable mental confusion. With the help of patience, humility, and faith he gradually begins to understand these texts. Having got so far, he is ready to begin actual alchemic operations. These we are going to describe, but there is one thing of which we have no knowledge. We know what happens in an alchemist’s laboratory, but we do not know what happens in the alchemist himself, in his mind and heart. It may be that spiritual energy plays a part in the physical and chemical operations of the alchemist. It may be that a certain method of acquiring, concentrating, and directing this spiritual energy is essential to the success of the alchemists’ work. This is not certain, but in this rare context it is impossible not to recall Dante’s saying: “I see that you believe these things because I tell you them; but you do not know the reason for them, and therefore, in spite of being believed, their meaning is still hidden.” p. 196 He then talks about the Thule Group. I cannot tell from this section precisely how the Golden Dawn, Thule Group and Hitler are related as he says: "The Golden Dawn is not enough to explain the thule Group or the Luminouse Lodge, the Alenenberbe." This is part of why I find this whole chapter disjointed. It reads like a naming exercise and then concludes, since I can name all of these private clubs existing at the same time and they all had secrets it means that they are related to Hitler. Uhm... how precisely? I don't understand. I need another book that doesn't require so much cleverness of association from me, the reader.

The names of Lovecraft's alien gods, like Cthulhu, Yog-Sothoth, and Shub-Niggurath, began to crop up in other stories during Lovecraft's lifetime. Lovecraft himself started this practice by inserting these names, or variants on them, into stories he ghostwrote or revised for other authors. In his revision of Zelia Bishop’s "The Mound," for example, Lovecraft slipped his alien god Cthulhu into the story under the variant name Tulu, giving magazine readers what they thought were independent stories featuring references to the same ancient gods. By the 1960s, several dozen authors were using elements of what came to be called "The Cthulhu Mythos" in stories they wrote for science fiction and horror magazines. Additionally, they would have no desire to brag about their accomplishments or explain their thoughts to us - for the same reason, we don't try to teach our dogs algebra. We simply could not understand anything meaningful they had to say.P. 189 I did not know the Golden Dawn's history. Nice. It was founded in 1887 as an offshoot of the Rosicrucian Society by Robert Wentworth Little and consisted of Freemasons and I did not realize that Yeats was a member of the Golden Dawn. In fact, only one of von Daniken's major claims is missing from the "Cthulhu" story, that the ancient gods created mankind in their own image. Lovecraft has an answer for that, too. In his 1931 story "At the Mountains of Madness," explorers find an incomparably old city in Antarctica, and the sculptures on the walls tell a horrifying story of how the Old Ones created Earth’s lifeforms: "It was under the sea, at first for food and later for other purposes, that they first created earth life—using available substances according to long-known methods… It interested us to see in some of the very last and most decadent sculptures a shambling, primitive mammal, used sometimes for food and sometimes as an amusing buffoon by the land dwellers, whose vaguely simian and human foreshadowings were unmistakable" [3]. p. 228 He talks about the idea that the society in Germany that was created existed there for years and did not exist in the same reality as we do. I'm kinda down with that, but it's unclear whether he means it figuratively, mentally, or if he all out believes these people are aliens from another place. At different times, it's unclear if he means the third option I just listed. I would explore these ideas decades later, in my first published book, Gawain and the Grail Quest: Healing the Waste Land in Our Time (2012), in which I present the Holy Grail as an imaginative symbol of healing – but that’s another story! Jason Colavito (2004). "Charioteer of the Gods: An investigation into H.P. Lovecraft and the invention of ancient astronauts". Skeptic. 10 (4).

Second, and a broader audience can appreciate this, I found the author's description of Nazi mysticism utterly chilling. Hitler as a medium for dark, subterranean powers, Himmler as a high priest, Nazism as an alien society focused on global war and mass murder as part of a magic ritual to create the ubermensch is one of the best horror stories written. I found it to be honestly terrifying. The last word on Le Matin should, I think, go to Jeffrey J. Kripal who, in his book Mutants and Mystics: Science Fiction, Superhero Comics, and the Paranormal, writes: “Read literally, the book is perfectly outrageous. Read fantastically, that is, as an act of imagination in touch with some deeper stream of physical and cultural reality, the book is perfectly prescient.” This was actually suggested to me because of a conversation I was having about the incredibleness of the human mind to manifest thought into reality. I think the person was trying to use this book to tell me I am on a dangerous path associated with conspiracy theories. Problem is, this book is big on references, loose on a real thread of discussion. It reads like an underdeveloped academic that regurgitates lots of names, books, references and quotes but isn't actually going anywhere with it. Lovecraft's works banished the supernatural by recasting it in materialist terms. He took the idea of a pantheon of ancient gods and made them a group of aliens who descended to earth in the distant past. So, how do I rate this book? About eighty percent of it is altogether stupid. Between outright errors and ludicrous overstatements, it layers on this banal vision of possibilities that is quite frankly the origin story of the X-Men - that nuclear waste created by atomic explosions is creating mutants with strange powers. Combined with a long section on alchemy, it's very much like the Marvel Universe - where magicians, psychics, and mutants fight Nazi evildoers and dark powers. But presented as non-fiction? It is to laugh. Plus, when not talking about Nazi mysticism, Pauwels repeats himself ad nauseum.Unfortunately now long out of print [Note: The book was reprinted after this article was first published.], the book Morning of the Magicians laid the foundation for all the lost civilizations books to follow, including Chariots of the Gods. As R.T. Gault comments, "It's all here, from the Piri Reis map to pyramidology. The authors are frankly fascinated by the idea that ancient peoples may have been more advanced in some of their technologies than we generally believe" [5]. In a 2004 article for Skeptic, the author Jason Colavito wrote that the book's tales of ancient astronauts predated Erich von Däniken's works on the topic, and that the ideas are so close to the fictional works of H. P. Lovecraft such as " The Call of Cthulhu" or At the Mountains of Madness (published in 1928 and 1931, respectively) that, according to Colavito, it is probable that Lovecraft's fiction directly inspired the book. [5] If you're an atheist it's also the same. It's a bit to me like saying this is a piece of salt in a salt shaker full of salt, which we do not differentiate from. So when I shake it onto my food, what does sweet taste like. It makes no sense as a question. That's how I read this. especially in the context of a forth dimension time. The groundbreaking and classic study that first popularized occultism, alchemy, and paranormal phenomena in the 1960s We do not know all the laws of matter. If alchemy is a more advanced form of knowledge than our own science, it employs simpler methods.

Lovecraftian fiction became increasingly popular in Europe, where the French embraced him as a bent genius, much as they embraced Edgar Allan Poe and would soon embrace Jerry Lewis. Lovecraft became especially popular with the French magazine Planète, which throughout the 1960s reprinted Lovecraft’s stories in French translation. In a 2004 article for Skeptic, the author Jason Colavito wrote that the book's tales of ancient astronauts predated Erich von Däniken's works on the topic, and that the ideas are so close to the fictional works of H. P. Lovecraft such as " The Call of Cthulhu" or At the Mountains of Madness (published in 1928 and 1931, respectively) that, according to Colavito, it is probable that Lovecraft's fiction directly inspired the book. [5] When he set about writing his own works, he began to blend the modern world of science fiction with his favorite tales of Gothic gloom. Lovecraft tried to bring the Gothic tale into the twentieth century, modernizing the trappings of ancient horror for a new century of science. Lovecraft published his work in pulp fiction magazines, notably Weird Tales, though many of his works were not published until after his death in 1937. Throughout the 1940s and 1950s, science fiction and horror magazines reprinted Lovecraft's tales numerous times, and he became one of the most popular pulp authors.p. 160 "If God is higher than all reality, we shall find God when we know everything that is reality. And if man possesses powers which enable him to understand the whole Universe, God is perhaps the whole Universe, plus something else." This is what always makes me troubled by this approach to thinking about it. If God is everything and you are a part of that everything, then you are a part of God, not separate. Under such a framework, the whole sentence doesn't even make sense. Hence, this idea and concept of truth next is ... to me, under the wrong framework all together. Where to watch The Magicians Buy Seasons 1-5 Subscription Seasons 1-5 Buy Seasons 1-5 Buy Seasons 1-5 In Julius Evola's intellectual autobiography The Path of Cinnabar, the baron discusses how The Morning of the Magicians, using falsehoods and fantasies, attempted to taint the name of pioneering Radical Traditionalist René Guénon. The authors make the claim that Nazism was "Guénon with tanks." Interestingly enough, The Morning of the Magicians author Louis Pauwels would later became a figure in the French New Right. Co-Author Jacques Bergier was a Russian Jew whose cousin Anatoly was a member of the firing squad that shot Tsar Nicholas II. One can only assume that Mr. Bergier was a little biased when writing The Morning of the Magicians, his butt-love for Albert Einstein is more than obvious. On writing style: This is written in 1960 and a lot of people writing at that time had an approach that is no longer used. They would quote lots of scholars with little context surrounding it and provide large citations without then stating why that particular citation. You'll notice this if you listen to boomers talk. They tend to do the same thing. That just doesn't work in 2020 because the audience is far broader and there are just far more people with the same name. As a result of this style, you really have to work to make sure you understood the author's point. In some cases, this technique is simply to just say "A-ha! I've quoted you into submission," at the end of a series of unconnected points. I mean in some cases, I literally had to re-read the entire section or even chapter but with the intention of diagramming out the main idea. What is the alchemist’s working material? The same as that used for high temperature mineral chemistry: furnaces, crucibles, scales, measuring instruments with, in addition, modern apparatus for detecting nuclear radiation--Geiger counters, scintillometers, etc.

What's Great: The reason it doesn't have 1 star is because it does a fantastic job of providing details on things that are actually quite hard to find. I did not know the history of Golden Dawn and its relationship with other brotherhoods that led to Hitler and the Natzi's. That said. I wish he would have gone into more about these different brotherhoods and why they split. The book has a bit of the wrong mix on this for me personally. But it's hard to get any of this info, so I can't give it less than 2 stars. Additionally, it references several books that must have been quite common at the time. I do think that the science or other theories of these books are probably now dated some 70 years later. That said, if they were common enough in his time, I'd like to read it so I can understand the history of knowledge better. The book is the origin of the claims of a fictional Maria Orsic, a Vienna-born Croatian woman who was supposedly involved with the Vril Society ( Vril Gesellschaft) and vanished in 1945, going to " Aldebaran". The mythology of Maria Orsic has spread in the internet age, particularly among those inclined to Esoteric Nazism. [ citation needed]I had mostly just thought to give The Morning of the Magicians a one-star rating and move on. Most of the book is profoundly stupid, and often in factual error. (Piri Reis was NOT a 19th-century admiral, but a 16th-century one thus could have presented the US with anything. And radio waves and gamma rays are both forms of light, so, yeah, you can compare them. Plus, computers are binary - the nigh definition of binary, even - and human-style intelligence is analog. Stuff like that.)