Happy Birthday Aleister Crowley

Aleister Crowley aka Frater Perdurabo aka The Great Beast would have been 135 years old today. People who go to church and stuff still consider Aleister to be only a small step down from the Antichrist, and the fact that most popular musicians have quoted, or have at least referenced him at some point in their careers, really bothers them.

One of Aleister's most well-known snippets of advice is "Do What Thou Wilt," which he lifted from François Rabelais's Gargantua and Pantagruel. Fact is, that advice can be taken any number of ways, pretty much all of which are positive if you don't believe in devils and have even a slight amount of faith in the moral compass most people have. Lots of crazy people however, understand it as a call to anarchy, and think that if everyone does what they want, without consulting the Bible, that we'll all be sacrificing babies, goats, probably cats, and whatever else we think would look cool covered in blood on an alter.

On Labor Day we featured a video called Hell's Bells: The Dangers of Rock and Roll, which was very awesome. Today, as we were scouring the internet for Satan stuff (usually takes up the hour of about 10:30 - 11:30) we came across the sequel, Hell's Bell's 2: The Power and Spirit of Popular Music. This one looks like it came out at least 15 years after the original, and the host hasn't changed his clothes--much less his mustache and mullet, which have been frozen in time throughout the last decade and a half as well.

As is usually the case, the original is way better than the sequel, but Hell's Bells 2 has a whole section dedicated to Crowley and all the awesome, pagan-y influences that he had on music (especially the "do what thou wilt" stuff). Here it is.