Anyone else read "The Chicken Qabalah of Rabbi Lamed Ben Clifford"?

by Lon Milo Duquette?

I can't honestly say that I've read it. I'm actually still working my way through it.

If you haven't heard of it, tCQoRBBC is a Discordian/humorous book that removes all stuffy dogma that's usually attached to books on the Qabalah and writes about the subject in a very tongue-in-cheek manner.

BUT...it's also 100% serious. I've read Qabalah books off and on over the years, but this is the first book that I've come across that openly teaches you what's important to learn as a modern Magician and throws away the rest of the useless shit.

Or as the book says: "A new and improved Qabalistic text of great cynicism and wisdom written expressly for dilettantes with short attention spans who pretentiously consider themselves hermetic qabalists but who are nonetheless serious about utilizing a tiny portion of the Hebrew Qabalah for spiritual enlightenment."

This is NOT a joke or pop book, but it is funny AND enlightening. It's as dense and well researched as any scholarly tome on the subject...it's just that the author uses humor to teach it.

Think Robert Anton Wilson and you'll understand the style of writing I'm talking about.

When I mean "useless shit" I'm talking not about the core system but the attachments that have been added over the centuries. Duquette refers to it as "counting the nose-hairs of god". Many people think that to be able to use the Qabbala that one has to memorize tons and tons of charts of items that for the modern individual have no meaning. But that isn't true from my twenty years of reading on the subect. For the Qabbala to actually work as a spiritual tool its methods have to be automatic and natural--number, reality, and experience all need to merge in practice--and if you're spending your time trying to memorize charts of items that you've never even heard about then the system isn't living for you and if more likely to be simple rote learning instead of spirtual effort. (All imo, of course.)

Like I said, the book is as dense and filled with as much information as you'd read in any other well-researched book on the subject. Duquette just dusts off the subject and gets down to basics and explains in clear language the system itself while doing it in a tongue-in-cheek manner to make the dense material go down easier. Do a websearch on the author and you'll find that he isn't a fluffy-headed idiot. The man knows his stuff.

If you don't think there's any "useless stuff" on the subject, well, I guess you haven't read any Waite. (Just kidding. The guy's alright--just a little long-winded.)

(I should also stress that this isn't "new age" Qabalah of the brand that's going around in Holywood right now. Duquette's been on the scene much longer than that. Like I said in the original post--think Robert Anton Wilson--deep writing with a touch of satire and humor to make the difficult teachings go down easier--spoon full of sugar and all that. It's very Sufi/Zen in teaching style at times.)