BLK Celebration 2018 – Michael Bertiaux and Martin Starr!!!

A very special event has been added to the Saturday portion of

BLK Celebration

“The Occult History of Chicago”

Featuring Michael Bertiaux and Martin Starr

Chitown

Martin and Michael will have a live discussion on Saturday entitled “The Occult History of Chicago.” Michael is internationally known through his books and art, but he was a young man with a dream when he arrived in Wheaton, IL in the 1960’s to report for his job with the Theosophical Society. He traveled frequently for lectures to Chicago, and fell in love with the city. Although readers of his work know about his Gnostic Voudon rituals, Church Orders and the work of the Ordo Templi Orientis Antiqua & La Couleuvre Noire and other groups he worked with over the years, Chicago’s occult history stretches back considerably further. Michael has an insatiable lust for knowledge, and being immersed in these bizarre legacies energized him and inspired him to discover more. Over the years, he has learned of the people, places and things of Hidden Chicago, and is eager to share these tales before they are lost.

This talk will cover the little-known “hot points” of the city’s esoteric history with a long-time participant/observer.

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Martin P. Starr is an independent scholar of Western Esotericism and New Religious Movements with four decades of research and writing on the English synthetic occultist Aleister Crowley and his disciples Wilfred Talbot Smith, Charles Stansfeld Jones, C. F. Russell and Kenneth Grant. His current academic interests revolve around the interplay of Neo-Rosicrucianism, Independent Eucharistic Church Movements, Theosophy, and Freemasonry.

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For more info, read the posts on this page, or click

 BLK Celebration

BLK Celebration 2018 – Zalmat Bernstein presents “The Black Pilgrimage of the Lovecraftian Coven”

Zalmat Bernstein will join us at BLK Celebration 2018 to present

“The Black Pilgrimage of the Lovecraftian Coven”

“The subject of my talk is the Black Pilgrimage to Chorazin as it appears in fiction, apocrypha, Typhonian exegesis, and in the sorceries of the Lovecraftian Coven.
With our reawakening of Michael Bertiaux’s Lovecraftian Coven, we embarked on a nine month ritual to establish it’s current with that which lies Beyond.
To accomplish this we sought to embody within a vessel an egregore of the Black Man of the Sabbath, a mask of Nyarlathotep. Conceived as a moonchild, who would gestate through a nine month working. I will recount the pilgrimage of the Lovecraftian Coven and what slouches toward Chorazin to be born”.

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As a member of the Ordo Templi Orientis Antiqua (O.T.O.A.), and the La Couleuvre Noire (L.C.N.), Zalmat Bernstein has been active with the work of Michael Bertiaux and Kenneth Grant’s Typhonian tradition for three decades. As an early evangelist of the Voudon Gnostic Workbook, he published articles as author of the Liber Atom website. In recent years he has been instrumental in starting a Monastery of the Seven Rays study group that broadcasts from a Theosophical occult library. Immersing himself in the source material from which these traditions drew inspiration enabled him to lead study groups on Theosophy, Madame Blavatsky’s Secret Doctrine, and the Western Esoteric Traditions for over a decade. This led to an additional calling, seeing him regularly performing the Eucharist, Zalmat is an ordained Catholic priest and the progenitor of the Society for the Reparation of the Astral Light (SRAL), a Gnostic Catholic Spiritualist society modeled after the work of Abbe Boullan. and he is helping to re-establish the current of Michael Bertiaux’s Lovecraftian Coven.

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