This guy. Even the ultra-cautions - I had almost said sceptical - Father Thurston acknowledges: "In the face of Holy Scripture and the teaching of the Fathers and theologians the abstract possibility of a pact with the Devil adn of a diabolical interference in human affairs can hardly be denied." Imposture, trickery, self-deception, hypnotism, a morbid imagination have, no doubt, all played an important part in legends of this kind. It is not enough quite sincerely to claim magical powers to possess them in reality. Plainly, a man who not only firmly believes in a Power of evil but also that this Power can and does meddle with and mar human affections and human destinies, may invoke and may ask this Power to accomplish his wishes and ends, and so succeed in persuading himself that he has entered into a mysterious contract with evil whose slave and servant he is become. Moreover, as we should expect, the records teem with instances of common charlatanry, of cunning villainies and crime masquerading under the cloak of superstition, of clever fraud, of what was clearly play acting and mumming to impress the ignorant and vulgar, of diseased vanity, sick for notoriety, that craved the name and reputation of witch, of quackery and cozening that proved lucrative and comfortable enough.
pg 45 - Three years ago, in 1923, six chiefs of the Mashonas of the Mount Darwen district of Rhodesia were sentenced to death for sacrificing a girl who lived in a cave in the hills, in order to bring to an end a protracted drought. They urged in their defense that the day after the sacrifice abundant rain actually fell.
@Dr. Rice @Solution @lulzbomb Summers said of Crowley: "one of the few original and really interesting men of our age."
The Good Rev. Monty was fruit cake but thanks to his work we have been graced with such cultural greatness as underworld and twilight.... F'n thnx Of course he did, thought the were good friends till the day he died, the perfect sucker. Little Sunshine got his jollys from twisting beliefs and butt fucking perceptions. From all his stable pussy in the O.t.O. to L. Ron Hubbard to Gerald Gardner and every other lucky semi-intellectual twat that crossed his path, he'd reel em' in, find what makes'em tick and (figuratively and literally) have them smile as they bent themselves upside-down then he would fuck their shit all up. To this day he still ropes the smart-stupid in to bad life choices; laughing, no doubt, in his grave.
I have quoted many and great names, men of science, men of learning, men of authority, men to whom the world yet looks up with admiration, nay, with reverence and love, inasmuch as to-day it is difficult, wellnigh inconceivable in most cases, for the modern mind to credit the possibility of these dark deeds of devilry, these foul lusts of incubi and succubi. They seem to be some sick and loathly fantasy of dim medieval days shrieked out on the rack by a poor wretch crazed with agony and fear, and written down in long-forgotten tomes by fanatics credulous to childishness and more ignorant than savages. "Even if such horrors ever could have taken place in the dark ages' - those vague Dark Ages! men say," they would never be permitted now." And he who knows, the priest sitting in the grated confessional, in whose ears are poured for shriving the filth and folly of the world, sighs to himself, "Would God that in truth it were so!" But the sceptics arc happier in their singleness and their simplicity, happy that they do not, will not, realize the monstrous things that lie only just beneath the surface of our cracking civilization.
You are mistaken. He is not a priest, he simply styled himself as one. Don't go on your instinctual gut on what Summers is and therefor what he is saying. He presents his bold faced heresies as an orthodoxy so extreme as to be radical. Not only does Summers adhere to a peculiar set of vows within the roman catholic traditions, he ascribes to a peculiar orthodox political understanding of those vows as well. I will talk about the implications of this later on. For now I want to properly flesh out some real gems from the best Twilight ever; oh yes @Solution, this man knew exactly what he was a patron to: Happy sceptic! But unfortunately the Sabbat did and does- take place ; formerly in deserted wastes, on the hill-side, in secluded spots, now, as often as not, in the privacy of vaults and cellars, and in those lone empty houses innocently placarded *To be Sold*
Yeah I know I was playing on his self given holy name "Reverend Alphonsus Joseph-Mary Augustus Montague Summers" Compulsive preoccupation with in a limited subject range, taking anything in his interest (no mater how obscure or absurd) at face value, odd/inappropriate social behavior everything I have read about Monty leads me to believe he was an autistic.
Probably, would explain his seemingly superhuman breath of knowledge and his capacity to synthesize it. The only snag in this interpretation is that regardless of what you may think his literary style wasn't considered awful for its time, quite the opposite, so he must of been doing something right. The odd/inappropriate social interactions may best be explained by his perverse desires, pederasty seems to be a particularly nasty one of them as he was caught for it.
In a time of not only a ton of British authors (no doubt due to the boom in publishing houses of 1890-1900) but also more publicly acceptable and reaching interest in the esoteric/ macabre with or rather due to being, for decades, home to many now swelling temples (O.t.O./A.'.A.'., Golden Dawn, Order of the Temple of the Rosy Cross etc.), "Not awful" would seem to translate now to "Meh". I am a fairly patient reader but Monty's books, to me, are pretentious rants interspersed between very poor instruction manuals. Here Idk, the early 1900's saw a lot of pedo accusations. Perhaps it was the tool of the day for discrediting foes or just a really bad time to be a kid.
I'm working through his academic publications where most of his primo stuff is, he's really good at art history. Most of his books are really academic polemics against various strains of scholarship. As you mentioned there was a boom in interest in the occult which was mimed out in the academy. You have Margaret Murray take up and promote a line of scholarship on witches, that they were a loving and saintly bunch of old fashioned pagans persecuted by cruel biggotry and sexism. This is sort of due to the SJW crap u see now and then. For instance you had scholars rejecting roman accounts of human sacrifice in North Africa passed off as roman ethnocentric biggotry, until someone literally dug up hundreds of dead babies. Murray takes up the opposite line of reasoning that this wasn't a happy lot of plucky underdogs, but that the church was right and they were baby killers and murderous conspirators. The debate between Murray and Summers pretty much set the tone on witchcraft scholarship to this day. You have two options: new age touchy-feely lying hack or a well known academic laying out a well reasoned argument that is well sourced who also believes in the devil, demons, magic, and complains not only that Jewish blood libel occurred but bitches that the records leave out how bad it really was. It's almost as if they wanted things to turn out the way they did... probably both. He was acquitted but I wouldn't put it past the guy, most people who knew him well seem to be in agreement he's a perv. I'm running through his stuff and it's not easy to tell what this guys deal specifically is. He's useful in that he gives a weird perspective on witches in that it's presented from that of a believer in witchcraft but is arguing against it.
