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Wednesday, January 18, 2023

New Hilaritas book in the works: RAW on Crowley


Aleister Crowley (public domain photo) 

Exciting news from Mike Gathers, host of the Hilaritas Press podcast: A new book is being put together of Robert Anton Wilson writing about Aleister Crowley, built around the 72-page RAW manuscript reported as being found last year in the Harvard University library.

Here is what Mike reports: 

"We're taking the Harvard document and, at this point, 5 other pieces already in various forms of circulation, and compiling them into a book - kinda like Natural Law with the supplemental material, and maybe like Sex Drugs and Magic with several folks writing commentary if we can get them recruited.

"I'm basically acting as project manager.

"Chad Nelson as editor - I guess that's what you call it - he's taking all the documents and putting them into one master document, correcting OCR errors, noting typos, and doing all the major formatting.

"Oz Fritz is also acting as editor on a bigger scale - helping select what essays to include, and what order to put them in.  And noting inaccuracies and questionable claims by RAW based on his vast knowledge of Crowley's work.  

"We're soliciting several folks like Oz and Mike Johnson, but also several "big" names in the Crowley world to write commentaries  (Forward/Afterword).

"Meanwhile, Rasa and Christina are working on publishing rights for the additional essays.  Some fall in the New Falcon/Original Falcon domain, so we're not sure where all that stands and there is some uncertainty there."

Mike did not mention a planned publication date, but in my experience that's not how Hilaritas works. Rasa and the gang work on a book, and when it's ready, it's released.

I'm expecting more Hilaritas news soon, so stay tuned. 


2 comments:

quackenbush said...

I think the technical term for what Chad is doing is "proofing" and it appears that Oz will be helping with the proofing as well.

Lon Milo DQ has agreed to write a forward, but I'm actually more excited about "regular folk" like Oz and RMJon writing something. Based on your suggestion, I'll be pursuing one more "regular folk" to write something.

I have a very loose deadline of the end of March to put everything together, but that's rather arbitrary, and there will still be steps on Rasa's end, such as generating a cover, that have to take place after that.

Spookah said...

That is amazing news for the community, thanks for letting us know, and all the best to everyone involved in the project !