Veils of Mystery: Marie Leveau, Aleister Crowley, and the Hermetic Order

Previously

…I sat in the silence for a long time after she was gone. The candles burned to their ends. The photographs on my desk watched me with their fixed, eternal gazes. I picked up my pen again and wrote at the bottom of the page: Marie Laveau was more feared because her power was inescapable—woven into the fabric of a city, a people, a tradition. Crowley was more feared because his power was intimate—a scalpel that found the exact place where you were weakest. But she was right. Fear was never the point. Fear was only the door. What lay beyond it was the thing that mattered. I closed the journal and turned off the lamp. In the darkness, I could still smell the flowers.