Student of Trinity
Silver Meritorious Patron
Ah, thanks. In fact I think I've tracked down 1913 as the year it was published, in some magazine Crowley was putting out at the time. So it was certainly based on some quite primitive astronomy. People have been looking at the stars for so long, it's hard to realize how recent most of our knowledge about the universe has been learned.
Meh. Visualization tasks are interesting up to a point, and can be surprisingly difficult, but I'm skeptical about them actually being useful for anything. It seems suspiciously like a great way to keep your 'practicus' busy, making him do difficult mental imagery tasks. Until he succeeds, he's your student. Once he succeeds, he's invested. It's like making someone pay you for the privilege of paying you.
A depiction of magic and outer space that haunts me much more than Crowley's earnest notions is in Dunsany's early fantasy novel, The Charwoman's Shadow. It features a very spooky magician who buys people's shadows, because by his arts he can then send the shadows into deep space, and thereby communicate with the unearthly spirits of the icy void. It also vividly portrays a disembodied voyage into the sun. The fact that space and the sun are conceived in the story as they really are, and not as they were imagined in medieval fantasy, makes the magic a lot more believable to me, and creepier.
