Well, the LCN/OTOA has a website called "Technicians of the Sacred" that has a lot of material on the history of the group. Frankly, I find it kind of dull reading (lots of stuff about grades and lines of succession and that sort of thing). I do like how the LCN is utterly against animal sacrifice. I also like how they seem to be more open to homosexual magicians (in fact, from what I've read, there are some branches of the LCN composed only of homosexuals). Which is refreshing considering how biased many other occult belief systems are re: homosexuality (sadly, my favorite occult writer, Kenneth Grant, falls into that category, which is a real shame, but I guess no one's perfect).
There is an interesting Livejournal community called "The Serpent Kalas." The user name is "couleuvra". Quite a few of the members seem to have been involved with the LCN/OTOA. That might be a good place to go to with questions about how people have benifited from using the VGW I suppose? I myself have never really used it for magical practice... hell, the first lessons alone involve drinking liquor which kind of disqualifies me from the get-go. I do like the whole section about creating your own bibles & holy books based on your own personal mytholgies and cosmic symbols. Seems very AOS I would think!
Sometimes I wonder if the VGW only makes sense if the reader has gone through the 4 year study program that precedes it. Each year costs about $200 it would seem. I managed to get my hands on the Year Four course and it's pretty riveting stuff... a little easier to understand than the VGW, if only because it seems to follow some sort of itinerary. There's this one crazy section about "Proto-Icelandic Sexual Radioactivity" that compares the gods of Norse mythology with those of the Voodoo Lwa. Like, Freyja & Erzulie and that kind of thing. "Tantra without the body?" Hell, in the Year Four course it's claimed that you can do phallus magic without the phallus! Plus there's the usual long Q&A sections Bertiaux seems to love... "Is it true that you become a werewolf in your sex magic?" Now there's a question for a job application.
I think my biggest problem with the VGW is how tedious it can be. Some sections are very, very good... as I've said, I think I like the Oerg-8 sections the best. But some parts of it are just so dull and boring. I do have a huge fetish for techno-jargon, but even I have limits. It also seems to be put together in a very sloppy way. It is obvious that the whole thing wasn't written in one year or anything like that, as some of the material has dates (for example, the "Grimoire Guedhe" appears to have been written in 1978, while the "Zothryian Metapsychology" papers are from 1979). There's a lot of times in the book where one paper will end with something like "In our next lesson we'll talk about (subject)" only for the following lesson to be about a completely different topic, or there will be many times where Bertiaux will claim that one particular topic is the highest form of occultism (like IFA) only to make the same claim later on about, say, Shintotronics. I don't know if the book was assembled in this way to disorient the reader on purpose, or if there really is no rhyme or reason to the whole thing. Even the ending papers seem kind of random, as if the book could have ended at any point with no real difference. Oh well.
In Kenneth Grant's "Hecate's Fountain" there is made a reference to a book that Bertiaux "transmitted" called "The Book of the Meon." Indeed, excerpts from this work appear in the VGW, mostly at the start of part two IIRC. Wonder if that will ever be released one day? Thinking the same thing about the long-advertised "Atlantean-Zorthyrian Workbook." I do have to hand it to Bertiaux, he's prolific. |
