• We have updated the guidelines regarding posting political content: please see the stickied thread on Website Issues.

The Paris Working

MrRING

Android Futureman
Joined
Aug 7, 2002
Messages
6,053
What atualy happened at the Paris Working? I had a friend who's old band was named Paris Working, and I know it was an ocult event that involved Crowley, but what happened?
 
It was a series of invocations of Mercury and Jupiter conducted in Paris in 1914 by Crowley and Victor Neuberg. I understand it involved Crowley's first concerted use of XI degree (homo)sexual magic.
 
In his book, The Devil and all his works, Dennis Wheatly writes the following:
"Having had Crowley to dinner several times, I told my friend Z. that, although I found him intensely interesting, I was convinced that he could not harm a rabbit.
"'Ah!' replied Z. "Not now, perhaps. But he was very different before that affair in Paris.' THe affair in Paris was as follows.
"Crowley wanted to raise Pan. One of his disciples owned a small hotel on the Left Bank. Crowley, with his twelve disciples, took it over for the weekend and the servents were given a holiday. On Saturday night a big room at the top of the house was emptied and all of its furniture, swept and garnished. Crowley and his principle disciple, MacAleister (son of Aleister), were to perform the ceremony there, while the other eleven remained downstairs. He told them that, whatever noises they might hear, in no circumstances were they to enter the room before morning.
"Down in the little resteraunt a cold collation had been prepared. THe eleven had supper and waited uneasily. They all had a great deal to drink, but got only stale-tight. By midnight the place had become intensly cold. They heard shouting and banging in the room upstairs, but obeyed orders not to go up. In the morning they did go up. The door was locked and they could get no reply to their anxious calls, so they broke it down.
"Crowley had raised Pan all right. MacAleister was dead and Crowley, stripped of his magician's robes, a naked gibbering idiot crouching in a corner.
"Before he was fit to go about again, he spent four months in a lunatic asylum. Z., who told me all this, had been one of the disciples, and an eye-witness to this party."

Sounds like a sensationalist tall tale to me, best taken with a large pinch of salt - I think the true events were probably closer to what Ged said.
 
The official magickal record of the Paris Working can be found here
 
IIRC, Neuberg committed suicide quite some time after all this happened.
 
That record of the working was interesting until i reached the final lines (the first two plausible, the third somewhat less so) (Is this another example of chaos theory in action: 'ritualised sodomy in sleazy Paris hotel leads to the death of millions in international conflict.' ;) )


General result:

O.S.V. obtained the funds required, and was like unto Ammon-Ra all the summer.
L.T. became as Jupiter the hospitable, but had unworthy guests.
An unexpected result -- the Divine end of the stick was perhaps the war in the following August. See 0/2/ XI.
 
I'm surprised he wasn't arrested for murdering his own son.
 
Mythopoeika said:
I'm surprised he wasn't arrested for murdering his own son.
It all sounds like the end of one of those early tales by Arthur Machen, MR James, HP Lovecraft, or such. The 'Great God Pan' became very fashionable in tales of horror and the uncanny back at the beginning of the last century. Something ancient and 'just around the corner' promising 'pan-ic' and unspeakable horrors.

Pan even turns up in The Wind In The Willows' as the Piper At the Gates Of Dawn.

Something to do with the idyll of the Indian summer of Edwardian England heading into the primaeval horrors of World War I?
 
suicide is painless

93,

Correct me if I'm wrong, but I seem to remember Victor Neuberg died of natural causes. Perhaps you're confusing him with Norman Mudd who walked into the sea with his trousers bicycle clipped and filled with rocks.
There is a biog of Vicky, but I don't have it to hand as I'm slacking at work. Certainly he was one of the most important figures in Aleister's life for his contribution to the Paris Working and of course 'The Vision and the Voice'.

There is a temptation to ascribe awful ends to everyone who came into contact with AC, and not all of them are true..

93 93 93

Peter Grey
 
Back
Top