The
Modern Occultist
Interview #12
Lon Milo DuQuette
&
Young Aleister Crowley and the Magician’s Revolt: A Novel (with Jim Bratkowsky)
.jpg)
Lon Milo DuQuette is a living legend. An author, musician, and one of the world's foremost authorities on Aleister Crowley, Thelema, Kabbalah, and the Western magical tradition, he serves as Deputy Grand Master of Ordo Templi Orientis U.S.A. But he’s also a hell of a guitarist and storyteller, and has a great sense of humor.
Modern Occultist was able
to catch up with him regarding a few, seemingly, unrelated topics: his
Hollywood excursions in the 1960s, Scientology, and his own path towards
enlightenment. And be sure to watch for tomorrow's premiere of the MODERN OCCULTIST PODCAST, where Lon was generous enough to be our first guest, featuring an in-depth interview about his life and career!
MODERN OCCULTIST
We first connected due
to my research on Jack Parsons and L. Ron Hubbard—but you shared an amazing
Kenneth Anger story with me, and I was hoping you could relay it for our
readers?
LON MILO DUQUETTE
(Laughs) I took Michael
Powell to a screening at the Academy Theater—I just didn't know who he was at
the time. He was this distinguished-looking man in a cardigan sweater, and we
just called him “Mikey.” At some point during the evening, Mikey gets up to go
to the bathroom, and while he's gone, the place is filling up—and I mean
filling up with what looked like a cast of characters straight out of Sunset
Boulevard. Kenneth Anger was there. And then, one of these really glorious “swans”—you
know the type, four hundred years old, still beautiful like Gloria Swanson and
magnificent—decides she wants Mikey's seat. So, Kenneth Anger leans over and
says, “That seat is taken.” And this woman looks at him and says—and I love
this — she says, “Is it taken by anyone?” And Anger says, without missing a
beat, “Only the director of The Red Shoes!” And that's when I
realized — that's Michael Powell. That's who I'd brought to the thing.
He just hadn't made a big deal of who he was—almost no ego. You don't hear about
that a lot.
MO
I don’t mind sharing that
my new book’s central thesis is Hubbard’s apparent plundering of Aleister
Crowley’s legitimate Thelema writings—then watered down and presented in a
pseudo-Science Fiction stew, of sorts. Is the Hubbard/Crowley connection
genuine, in your view — and how direct was it?
LMD
That's common knowledge—or common lore, at least—among modern occultists. It doesn't take a rocket scientist—no pun intended towards Parsons!—to see that [Hubbard] pulled passages, sometimes full sections, out of work that was most available at the time. Magick in Theory and Practice is the obvious source. I can't quote you chapter and verse, but the mirrors are there for anyone who does a little homework.
And what's interesting—what may actually be helpful to you—is the question of what Hubbard would have had access to. If you go back to the original reading lists for Dianetics, some of that material has come out through WikiLeaks. He had Book Four on a list of required reading for new members, at least in the early 1950s—but he stopped that fairly quickly!
Now, Book Four is actually quite remarkable. Crowley's conception of it was: “Part One” was Mysticism, “Part Two” was Magic, “Part Three” was what's now published as Magick in Theory and Practice, and “Part Four” was the equivalent of The Equinox of the Gods—the story of the reception of The Book of the Law. But that full version was never published as a single volume until the '80s or '90s. What Hubbard was most likely referring to when he said “Book Four” was just the first two parts—the Mysticism and Magic essays—which were published separately by Sangreal Sodality Press, out of Texas, as a beautiful little art-bound edition. I can easily see a Scientologist reading that one without it raising too many flags. And given Hubbard's narcissism, he would only have recommended shorter books anyway—to make sure people had time to read his books, you know.
MO
If you had to name one
major figure—someone you knew personally or simply read—who first inspired you
to begin your spiritual path, who would it be?
LMD
Paramahansa Yogananda—right off the top. Though I'd have to give a prologue figure, and that would be Dr. Timothy Leary. I was in high school in Nebraska—I was in wasteland, okay?—and I was on the school newspaper, so we had access to Life, Look, Time, everything. And there was this piece, called something like “The God Pill,” about what Leary and Albert [Richard Alpert, later Ram Dass] were doing. I had been a fairly outspoken atheist since about the age of four. George Carlin said he reached the age of reason at six—I was a little ahead of schedule. But the second I read that article, I thought. “If I ever get a chance to try that LSD stuff, I am absolutely going to do it.”
So, the second I graduated
from high school, I made a beeline back to California, where I'd been born. I went
to Orange Coast College—the most psychedelic party school in the universe, I'm
fairly sure. I was a drama major just so I could learn to act like a student! [Laughs]
I didn't even take enough credits for a student deferment. The war was going
on, and when I got letters from the service, I just threw them away. I was playing folk music at a place called the Barbary
Coast, and I went into the bathroom and there was this surfer character—very
pleasant looking young man—who said, “Would you like to buy some LSD?” Well, I
sure would! Now, I don't want to say I “saw
God” on LSD and all that, But I realized that inside here was so much bigger
than even outside there. And at the same time, culturally, the Beatles were
into Eastern philosophy, and that got me exploring. Now, one of the earliest
books was Paramahansa Yogananda's Autobiography of a Yogi, and that was
my introduction to not only the tradition, but to what study actually means
to people. It's not just theory or scripture—here was a guy who just grew up to
be a saint. So that got me into reading the Bhagavad Gita, and
then the Upanishads, and then one thing led to another. For years I wanted to be a first-class Eastern mystic.
But I realized I'm just hard-wired a little differently, because I'm such a
Western nerd—I like stuff outside of myself to work with, even if it's inner
stuff. And that's when Kabbalah and magic came in. It's Western Eastern
mysticism, really.
MO
When you sit down to
write, do you consider it a spiritual practice—a meditation, even? And, if so,
do you do any kind of banishing or blessing before you begin?
LMD
Well, first of all, it's not “work” work. Just like when a person prays, they assume there's an ear to hear it. If I don't have a deadline, I don't have an ear to hear it. So, deadlines are important.
I may spend eight or ten
hours on two or three sentences — just to make them sound like they came off
the top of my head. Here's how it actually happens: let's say I write four
pages into something, just to prime the pump. The next time I sit down to write,
I read it from the very, very beginning. And then, like the moving lines in an I
Ching hexagram, one moves into the next and I know what's coming up
next—I'm hearing it for the first time myself. And then I do four more pages. I
don't count. And then the next day I start from the very beginning again.
So, I can move along pretty fast for the first
three weeks, until you have to reread the entire book just to get started.
Hemingway did the same thing—reread the chapters every day, not only for
consistency, but because there's a music to it—a flow, a rhythm. Even if it
doesn't rhyme, there's a poetry to it. The
ear I'm writing for is my own ear, and I think being a musician has something
to do with that. You approach putting sentences together a little more
structurally, a little more consciously. I see in a lot of younger writers that
flow isn't always there. But I like that each sentence is its own thing. And
very often I'm working on two or three projects at the same time—I'll work on
one until I'm burned out on it, then get a drink of water, and pick up the
other project, and I'm totally full of fresh new energy. All I have to do is
change the subject.
MO
Is there something you
yourself practice daily that you'd consider essential?
LMD
I don't like giving people advice—I really don't think it's anybody's business. But I can tell you what I do! For my own mental health, I've found it convenient, at least for now, to wrap all of the concepts of the singularity of consciousness—the universe that people call “God”—into the form of the Hindu god Ganesha—just because it's a form I can pour the infinite into and feel comfortable with.
And almost from the minute I wake up and hobble around with the various aches and pains a seventy-seven-year-old man has, I express my gratitude to the big, cool, smooth singularity. And I somehow feel that I'm thanking myself—if that makes any sense. That one little connection puts everything else in perspective. And all through the day, I recognize not only my own fortunateness to simply be, but also my responsibility to do what I can to be—as I guess everybody has always called it—the light of the world.
(Every day, Modern Occultist News will present "This Day in Occult History" and your "Daily Occult Review" and will dive into the birthdays, rituals, breakthroughs, and crucial moments that shaped today’s many esoteric traditions. From the Hermetic revival to Witchcraft, from Crowley to cyberspace, we’ll bring the best stories and latest trends to today’s own modern occultists everywhere.)
Modern Occultist
2026. Modern Occultist Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.