Talk:The Monks of Thelema
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The plagiarism of "The Monks of Thelema" is significant because Aleister Crowley's religion "Thelema" and volumnous works never cite or footnote these authors or their text, especially in the "Gnostic Mass." The book gives detailed outlines and was written long before Aleister Crowley's religion -- which is significant.
How so, anonymous? I finally found an online reference at an Obscure Books community:
- The only ideas resembling modern Thelemic philosophy are put in the mouth of an unsympathetic character, Mr. Paul Rondelet, a Fellow of Oxford who is repeatedly described as a "prig". (Besant himself was a Cambridge man.) He gives a speech of particular interest on page 145 in which he sarcastically praises Alan Dunlop's social improvement efforts, saying that in the future people will worship Dunlop as a kind of solar myth! The character subscribes to the New Paganism fashionable with the Oxford intelligentsia; he is scorned by Miranda in his pursuit for her hand in favor of the (practially pre-destined) Alan Dunlop.
- As a work, The Monks of Thelema is only really valuable as a curiousity. And the curiousity it arouses is this: "Did Crowley read it?" The book was published when he was 12 years old, about the age at which he says in Confessions that he would sneak novels into the watercloset because his mother had forbidden him to read them. The idea that his youthful mind could have been more influenced by this popular, widely-available work than by Rabelais seems compelling.
