Aleister Crowley in the Media III

It's been a week since the last 'Crowley in the media' post, so I may have missed a couple of things.

Lonelygirl15 is still making the news after all these weeks. Who the hell cares? The Stanford Daily has a fairly decent article on the subject, though.

More interesting is Slate's story on L. Ron Hubbard and Scientology. They briefly rehash Hubbard's involvedment with Jack Parsons:
In the mid-1940s, he [Hubbard] fell in with John Parsons, a wealthy and brilliant young rocket scientist in California, who also happened to be under the tutelage of the infamous satanist Aleister Crowley (no relation to yours truly, thankfully)... followed by the whole sad yacht incident.
Infamous Satanist indeed. Just when we thought Crowley was beginning to get a fair shake in the media.

From the Los Angeles City Beat comes a nice article on symbolism in Led Zepplin's music. Of course Jimmy Page's interest in The Beast is mentioned:
The real attractions for Page were Crowley’s theories on self-liberation... If he signed his own deal at his own crossroads, somewhere outside swinging London, any devotion to the occult was private, a quiet avocation. In 1998, the reunited Page & Plant invited the young violinist Lili Haydn to join the tour as opening act. By chance, her father had published a volume of Crowley writings in the ’60s, but Page had no interest in discussing it. No comment at all. He just smiled and nodded.

Metroactive (a Silicon Valley weekly) has a review of Eric Davis' book on spirituality in California, The Visionary State. Crowley gets a mention in the discussion of Spencer Lewis and AMORC:
The man who claimed to have disinterred Rosicrucian documents from California's soil was H. Spencer Lewis, an energetic Egyptophile and adman who founded the Ancient Mystical Order Rosae Crucis in New York in 1915. Lewis was initiated by a Rosicrucian master in Toulouse and spent time as well in the Ordo Templi Orientis, an occult order led by the notorious Aleister Crowley; Spence took AMORC's Rosicrucian emblem from the pages of Crowley's journal, The Equinox.
I suppose that 'notorious' is rather better than 'infamous Satanist.'

And finishing off this bumper edition is the San Francisco Bay Guardian's account of a visit to the publishers Red Wheel-Weiser-Conari, an outfit that has its roots securely planted in a to-die-for occult backlist that includes Aleister Crowley’s life’s work — the whirlwind novel Diary of a Drug Fiend, the massive, lifetime’s-worth-of-reading-material Magick, the ever-popular Thoth tarot deck — the publisher has a foundation of street cred.