{"id":11466,"date":"2020-05-27T20:43:39","date_gmt":"2020-05-28T02:43:39","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=11466"},"modified":"2020-05-27T20:49:22","modified_gmt":"2020-05-28T02:49:22","slug":"thelema-new-york-and-esoteric-publishing-a-quick-review-of-in-the-center-of-the-fire","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=11466","title":{"rendered":"Thelema, New York, and Esoteric Publishing: A Quick Review of “In the Center of the Fire”"},"content":{"rendered":"

<\/a>
\nJames Wasserman, In the Center of the Fire: A Memoir of the Occult 1966\u20131989<\/em> (Lake Worth, Fla.: Ibis Press, 2012).<\/a><\/p>\n

(In the cover photo, Wasserman is in back and his business and magickal partner Bill Breeze in the foreground.)<\/p>\n

Before I found my first Wiccan coven, a friend connected me with (an) Abby of Thelema, a little group of 20-something magicians living in a run-down old house in a run-down neighborhood of Colorado Springs. Three or four other members lived elsewhere but came over for study and ritual.1<\/a><\/sup> There was a certain amount of drug use and not always enough food, but someone was the “imperator.”<\/p>\n

I learned some things there, but the combination of high-flown titles, material poverty, and self-delusion was pretty strange. The “abby” hit the rocks before long, and I moved on to a more compatible path.<\/p>\n

But yes, Thelema. Here, pre-O.T.O., is our protagonist at (the old) Antioch College<\/a> in Ohio: “This [academic] quarter was particularly laced with drugs, women, and spiritual seeking. School was simply off the radar.” The first quarter of the book, in fact, is a classic Seventies melange of road trips, dope, spiritual teachers, sexual relationships, and more road trips. (Wasserman and I could have passed on the street in Portland \u2014 or maybe in Taos.)<\/p>\n

Finally Wasserman is in New York City, working at Weiser’s, a pre-eminent metaphysical store, and meeting other esotericists with whom he shares memorable experiences: “How many mornings we later spent on the pier on Hudson River across from my Greenwich Street loft, greeting the dawn with a hit of speed<\/a>.” After a time, he shifts to the book-publishing side of the business, where he finds a home.<\/p>\n

Aleister Crowley’s magickal heirs are deeply involved with texts \u2014 and some of the best tales of this memoir involve books, manuscripts, correspondence, and libraries, complete with international court battles over rights, burglaries of occult libraries, leadership struggles within the O.T.O., and Wasserman’s own adventures in magickal pubishing and with heroin. Some times I wonder if you can have Thelemic magic without heroin; Crowley himself certainly could not.<\/p>\n

Wasserman’s recounting of his highs and lows through the Seventies and Eighties are brutally honest. A lot of what he tried, e.g. open marriage and the heavy drinking, simple did not work. They usually do not work long-term. Maybe what carried him through so many destructive periods was the magick \u2014 and yet, I have seen others on the same path sink to the depths and never rise. He sank, but he rose. In the Center of the Fire<\/em> is an honest book, and it stands in contrast to many occult memoirs I have read where I felt the author was hiding all the unpleasant stuff and making his or her life look like a sequence of triumphs.<\/p>\n

It should interest anyone interested in the late-20th century history of the O.T.O. (including how more of a place was made for women than Crowley had anticipated) in the American esoteric publishing and bookselling scene, and in the bohemian life in New York in the late Seventies and Eighties. You could put in the same shelf as Bull of Heaven: The Mythic Life of Eddie Buczynski and the Rise of the New York Pagan <\/em><\/a>or even with Patti Smith’s memoir Just Kids<\/em><\/a> (Smith makes a brief appearance in Wasserman’s book.)<\/p>\n

Maybe witches, magicians, and esotericists of the future will look at 1980s New York the way that would-be Hemingways and Fitzgeralds regard the Paris of the “Lost Generation.”.<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>

  1. They did have a lot of Crowley’s books, and if I had been more attuned and had had some extra money, I could have bought them all from the member who ended up with them, held them a while, and re-sold them at a profit. But I didn’t. I just wanted to move on. [↩<\/a>]<\/span><\/li><\/ol>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    James Wasserman, In the Center of the Fire: A Memoir of the Occult 1966\u20131989 (Lake Worth, Fla.: Ibis Press, 2012). (In the cover photo, Wasserman is in back and his business and magickal partner Bill Breeze in the foreground.) Before I found my first Wiccan coven, a friend connected me with (an) Abby of Thelema, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"advanced_seo_description":"","jetpack_seo_html_title":"","jetpack_seo_noindex":false,"jetpack_seo_schema_type":"","_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[1],"tags":[57,89,72,335,7],"class_list":["post-11466","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-books","tag-esotericism","tag-magick","tag-new-york","tag-publishing"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p6xQTg-2YW","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":12811,"url":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=12811","url_meta":{"origin":11466,"position":0},"title":"New Pomegranate Published \u2014\u00a0New Editor Joins","author":"Chas S. Clifton","date":"April 8, 2022","format":false,"excerpt":"A new issue of The Pomegranate: The International Journal of Pagan Studies has been published online. The special double issue on the theme of Pagans, museums, and heritage organizations was guest-edited by Pomegranate's new associate editor, Caroline Tully. She is an archaeologist at the University of Melbourne, Australia and the\u2026","rel":"","context":"In \"academia\"","block_context":{"text":"academia","link":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?tag=academia"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/blog.chasclifton.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/04\/POME-23.1-2-TOC-2.jpg?resize=350%2C200&ssl=1","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":7622,"url":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=7622","url_meta":{"origin":11466,"position":1},"title":"A Petition to Save Aleister Crowley’s “Abbey”","author":"Chas S. Clifton","date":"November 25, 2015","format":false,"excerpt":"Aleister Crowley's \"abbey\" in Sicily is still there, but the building seriously needs help. This petition is partly designed, I am told, to persuade local authorities that it is worth saving as a historical site \u2014 and presumably as a tourist destination. Aleister Crowley took up his residence at Villa\u2026","rel":"","context":"Similar post","block_context":{"text":"Similar post","link":""},"img":{"alt_text":"crowley art","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/blog.chasclifton.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/11\/crowley-art.jpg?resize=350%2C200","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":4866,"url":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=4866","url_meta":{"origin":11466,"position":2},"title":"Pomegranate 13.2 in Production","author":"Chas S. Clifton","date":"December 26, 2012","format":false,"excerpt":"Pomegranate 13.2 is in its final proofreading stages. Online articles may be available this week, and depending on when I get the cover from the graphic designer, it should go to the printers (yes, there are two different printers) within two weeks. I intend to make Ronald Hutton's review article\u2026","rel":"","context":"Similar post","block_context":{"text":"Similar post","link":""},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":794,"url":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=794","url_meta":{"origin":11466,"position":3},"title":"My Catholic\/Wiccan\/Asatru ex-girlfriend","author":"Chas S. Clifton","date":"January 18, 2007","format":false,"excerpt":"Al Billings shares some religious\/magickal paths personified as ex-girlfriends.Thelema and the OTOThe freaky ex-girlfriend who likes her sex kinky, her parties wild, and her drugs. She goes clubbing, dresses all in black, and has the razor scars on the wrists to show that she\u2019s serious. She has a lot of\u2026","rel":"","context":"In \"American religion\"","block_context":{"text":"American religion","link":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?tag=american-religion"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":2976,"url":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=2976","url_meta":{"origin":11466,"position":4},"title":"‘Therapy Tourism’ & Why Talking Doesn’t Help","author":"Chas S. Clifton","date":"July 31, 2011","format":false,"excerpt":"Ten years after the September 2011 terrorist attacks, follow-up research shows that much post-trauma therapy is useless and possibly makes things worse. Mental health professionals flooded [New York City] in a wave of 'trauma tourism' after two planes struck the World Trade Center in 2001 according to the report. But\u2026","rel":"","context":"In \"psychology\"","block_context":{"text":"psychology","link":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?tag=psychology"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":2405,"url":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=2405","url_meta":{"origin":11466,"position":5},"title":"The Pomegranate 12:1","author":"Chas S. Clifton","date":"February 26, 2011","format":false,"excerpt":"I have let weeks go by without mentioning the latest issue of The Pomegranate: The International Journal of Pagan Studies! Here is the table of contents. All book reviews and article abstracts are free. Articles \"Franz S\u00e4ttler (Dr. Musallam) and the Twentieth-Century Cult of Adonism\" Hans Thomas Hakl \"Walk Like\u2026","rel":"","context":"In \"scholarship\"","block_context":{"text":"scholarship","link":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?tag=scholarship"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]}],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11466","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=11466"}],"version-history":[{"count":15,"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11466\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":11481,"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11466\/revisions\/11481"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=11466"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=11466"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=11466"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}