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I mean, regardless of what you think about his scruples, he was the single most influential occultist of the 20th century (barring maybe LaVey), and calling him
by LordDragonfang 4y ago
I mean, regardless of what you think about his scruples, he was the single most influential occultist of the 20th century (barring maybe LaVey), and calling him "just another charlatan" kind of ignores the things that actually make him notable. Like calling Houdini "just another street magician".
- mattigames 4y agoWhen I go to Wikipedia I'm far more interested in truth than historical relevance, both are important in its own but I -and many like me- are far more interested in what has been proven and disproven, in how something snaps with our current understanding of reality, history is mostly just a log of the foolishness of mankind, which I don't deny has some anthropological value but it's not my principal aim when I'm visiting Wikipedia, it would have saved me a lot of time if the first paragraph of Crowley's entry said he was a famous 20th century charlatan, but it doesn't, so a lot of mental processing power has to be wasted by me and every other reader of that long article to reach a judgement as easy to fact check such as water being wet.
- JasonFruit 4y agoThere's a lot to disagree with there, and I do. I'm very frequently interested in what makes a person or event important to others in the past, and I'm not able to sustain your confidence that 2023 has it all figured out, where every year prior did not.
- mattigames 4y agoI never said that it all figured it out, thats an strawman fallacy; at most I implied that we know slightly better than decades before.