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FT357

Back in the 1990s I went to a Halloween Costume Party. I shaved my head and put on a Tarot themed t-shirt and a cape, announcing that I was on a Crowley costume. I remember that almost everyone present congratulated me for my Uncle Fester impersonation. Damn...

You forgot the 666 on the forehead!
 
Me too. I'm not really bald, just trying to look like Crowley. He must have been wearing a wig in those early photos cos he seemed to go completely bald very fast.

Here's an attempt at Crowley.


upload_2017-8-15_22-36-31.png
 
You forgot the 666 on the forehead!
Damn! I knew there was something missing!! Anyway people would STILL believe that it was a good Uncle Fester impersonation. Oh dear...
 
Here's an attempt at Crowley.


View attachment 5701

Uncle Fest… Nah… I wouldn’t do it…. :evillaugh:

Errrrr…

Professor Xavier!!!

Well, jokes aside, it’s true that, apart from us, that lived the 1960s and the 1970s with different degrees of intensity, Aleister Crowley image is already fading on the oblivion. The younger generations simply can’t recognize him or either know his name bet can’t tell what he was or have done. And some Fortean battle horses are going the same way. It’s funny to see things like Enochian language being brought to the public on TV series (stripped to any mention of Dee or Kelley) or the omnipresent Ancient Aliens being sold as a reliable product, without any mention to Daniken, Bergier or Kolosimo. I keep thinking about what have we missed back in the late XXth century, what kind of information was already trimmed from all the accounts that made the Forteana universe to ourselves.

How much pop culture helps to keep Fortean issues alive and how much it dissolves the original stories and contexts to the novices in this universe?
 
I've been watching the 'In Search of' series from the late seventies with Mr Spock Leonard Nimoy and it's 90% woo presented as documentary, but interesting to see a number of Fortean staples presented, probably in some cases for the first time, for a late seventies audience. It's easy to forget that with no way to fact check beyond the often second hand opinions presented in a lot of the Fortean books being written at the time, even the most obvious whoppers can go unchallenged.

That said, one thing the internet does offer these days to the undiscerning fan of woo are any number of websites that act as echo chambers to probably the same whoppers the 'In search of' shows were peddling.
 
For love of (insert deity name here), not another wretched Crowley story? :dhorse:
Heh, I love to see Crowley in the mag.

No, no, no, NO!

Surely That Man can not be discussed any further in the magazine! Online, I understand, but surely any interesting stories have been mined dry? Assuming he had anything interesting about him worth mentioning! It seems he crops up in the magazine with disturbing regularity for someone with little to add to anything!
 
No, no, no, NO!

Surely That Man can not be discussed any further in the magazine! Online, I understand, but surely any interesting stories have been mined dry? Assuming he had anything interesting about him worth mentioning! It seems he crops up in the magazine with disturbing regularity for someone with little to add to anything!

Now I have this image in my head, of a future sleeve with the Cottingley Fairies dancing around Crowley... :(
 
Now I have this image in my head, of a future sleeve with the Cottingley Fairies dancing around Crowley... :(

It wouldn't surprise me if such an image existed (e.g., as the cover illustration on a book about the paranormal), but I couldn't find an example of such a thing.

Crowley's self-consciously over-dramatic portraits - particularly this one:

nk_crowley_crowleyeye.jpg


... have been reproduced and blended into artworks / graphics / illustrations so often that I suspect people recognize the image without any idea who it is.
 
It wouldn't surprise me if such an image existed (e.g., as the cover illustration on a book about the paranormal), but I couldn't find an example of such a thing.

Crowley's self-consciously over-dramatic portraits - particularly this one:

View attachment 5706

... have been reproduced and blended into artworks / graphics / illustrations so often that I suspect people recognize the image without any idea who it is.

You make it look so... possible. Let"s pray that no editor of the magazine is reading this thread. :eek:
 
have been reproduced and blended into artworks / graphics / illustrations so often that I suspect people recognize the image without any idea who it is.

Again, I agree. I remember pictures of silent movie stars being used, edited, recolorized, whatever, while the name of the actual movie stars was lost to the oblivion on the age of mechanical reproduction.
 
How much pop culture helps to keep Fortean issues alive and how much it dissolves the original stories and contexts to the novices in this universe?
This is such a valid concern.

or the omnipresent Ancient Aliens being sold as a reliable product,
Drives me crazy. It's now all presented as unassailable fact. Conflation, supposition, bias and sheer fiction, thrown together as fact. I despair, I really do.

Will everyone just shush? I'm trying to lay 15lb of sausages end to end
Is that actually legal? It certainly sounds quite tiring.

I just had 150g of cocktail sausages
More deviance. Crowley might've been proud of you all.
665-neighbor-of-the-beast-e1428093430645.jpg
 
It wouldn't surprise me if such an image existed (e.g., as the cover illustration on a book about the paranormal), but I couldn't find an example of such a thing.

Crowley's self-consciously over-dramatic portraits - particularly this one:

View attachment 5706

... have been reproduced and blended into artworks / graphics / illustrations so often that I suspect people recognize the image without any idea who it is.

He'd love that - people still seeing his face long after his death in a mystical context. :evillaugh:

As for the Cottingley Fairies dancing around Crowley, pfft, what d'you think Photoshop's for?
 
As for the Cottingley Fairies dancing around Crowley, pfft, what d'you think Photoshop's for?

Ah, but you still can't beat Daler-Rowney coloured pencils, cow gum, foolscap parchment, long hat-pins, and those wicked sharp scissors from Nanny's sewing tin. Not forgetting that magic fairy dust (which is talc).

Yet somehow there can sometimes still be sightings, even you haven't double-clicked on the icon for Adobe Photoshop.
 
As for the Cottingley Fairies dancing around Crowley, pfft, what d'you think Photoshop's for?

My point, exactly. If you want to create sensation on a Fortean world, sell magazines because of a clever cover, you just have to create a Benjamin-esque event like a fairy Crowley and here we go.

I'm not complaining about FT covers, on the contrary. The 50 Shades Of Grey cover is a classic, I still show it to friends, here and there. The treatement given to the Cottingley Fairies last month was beautiful and all. Fortean Times is still my favorite magazine and I still wait for the next issue with antecipation. My concern is more in the line of : what Fortean events are we sending to the future readers? What kind of Forteana the next generations will (yes, I'm using the word) consume?

What about the ourselves, readers and occasional thread writers? Is there any wish to pass away our experiences, opinions, researches? Or are we still putting our bets on an endlessly postponed story about platypuses or Crowley?
 
He'd love that - people still seeing his face long after his death in a mystical context. :evillaugh:

As for the Cottingley Fairies dancing around Crowley, pfft, what d'you think Photoshop's for?

Crowley has no context! He was just someone with no real talent other than to dress weirdly, prance about shrieking "Give me some attention, I have not a damn thing to contribute!" - what's the point of constantly rehashing this tiresome little bottom blast?!
 
Crowley has no context! He was just someone with no real talent other than to dress weirdly, prance about shrieking "Give me some attention, I have not a damn thing to contribute!" - what's the point of constantly rehashing this tiresome little bottom blast?!

He's got you angry, hasn't he? :evillaugh:
 
I'm SURE that there is a story somewhere about Crowley in pantyhoses. Or fairies in pantyhoses. Or a venomous platypus in pantyhoses!! :D

It was Crowley. Crowley wrote that story.
 
OK, trying to come back to my original questions…

I could be described as a spoiled child : by 10 to 11 years old, I had already in my library books by Daniken, Bergier, Kolosimo, Holzer, Friedrich Jurgenson (Breakthrough)… By 12, I was reading Planète magazine (the square French magazine edited by Louis Pawels). By 13 I was proud of my Man, Myth and Magic collection and by the same time, I came across a small collection of my father’s books, about Parapsychology and became familiar with terms like SPR, Zenner or how a Faraday Cage works. I knew about UFOs and Cryptids. Yes, OK, by 14 the Les Paul landed on my life and it took a big slice of my attention, but anyway…

How young people have contact with Forteana today? YouTube videos? History Channel? Films like Annabelle (my 7 years old son was telling me about how eerie the movie poster on the Métro station is…)? I am happy that a magazine cover still shows the Cottingley Fairies, even if it’s to debunk or ridicule them, because this is an entry point to a special world.

By the way, it’s a pity that my FT 356 still haven’t showed on our letter box, so my boys can’t see the Fairies negligently left over the dinner table or over my bed, you know…

So, the question remains : related to the time when we discovered Fortean stuff, how strong the charm remains? Are we so tried and tested that we are passing a bitter image of Fortean stuff to the future generations? I know, I know, there was another thread with very similar questions elsewhere on the Forum, but it drifted away… I’m stumbling with the same questions while I read about the Cottingley Fairies and Aleister Crowley in 2017. And I ask myself if subjects like the Beast of Gévaudan, John Dee or the Tatra Mountains Moonshaft will still be relevant in 2027…
 
... How young people have contact with Forteana today? YouTube videos? History Channel? Films like Annabelle (my 7 years old son was telling me about how eerie the movie poster on the Métro station is…)? ...

Fort's approach was to publicize 'real news' about strange events / phenomena. His methodological baseline was more or less set at including / noting anything that made it into newspapers.

It's now generally accepted that some of the late 19th (and even early 20th) century stuff that's 'classic Forteana' was probably generated by journalists themselves to fill up space. This was particularly common during 'Silly Season' (mid- to late-summer, when many folks were vacationing and there wasn't a lot of mainstream news traffic).

In other words, some percentage (perhaps small, but not 'zero') of the stories that Fort and others promoted in starting the paranormal / weird phenomena genre were 'fake news'.

Insofar as we're obviously immersed in fake news and general sensationalism nowadays, there's every reason to believe young folks continue to be exposed to Fortean (or Fortean-style) stories.

The biggest - and most disturbing - difference between now and back then is that there are entire cottage industries and careers based on generating, elaborating, and / or promoting such stories (and explanations for them). In other words, there are people with a vested interest in disseminating and benefiting from such tales. All the dust kicked up by these follow-on entrepreneurs makes it harder and harder to get to the original facts of a given case.

The other big problem is that younger people are being bombarded with such stuff at an unnervingly rapid pace in 'hot' media (cf. McLuhan) - meaning they aren't afforded the time to reflect on the stories / reports as we could when engaging Forteana in print.
 
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