Path: shell.portal.com!svc.portal.com!sdd.hp.com!swrinde!newsfeed.internetmci.com!howland.reston.ans.net!nntp.crl.com!pacbell.com!toad.com!tim From: tim@toad.com (Tim Maroney) Newsgroups: alt.pagan Subject: Re: Eric Pryor & Larry Lea Message-ID: <82487@toad.com> Date: 20 Jan 96 02:14:42 GMT References: <1996Jan11.174955.22020@ccc.amdahl.com> Reply-To: tim@toad.com.UUCP (Tim Maroney) Organization: As Little As Possible Lines: 39 joshu@primenet.com (Kenneth R Hall) writes: >There is some question about Eric Pryor's "legitimacy"; he claimed initiations >in several different Traditions, all of which turned out to be bogus. These initiations were disavowed by the purported initiators. However, I personally witnessed people who had been great supporters of Pryor before his conversion (Eric Marsh and Janet Christian) insist afterwards that they had never supported him, so I view all disavowals of support for Pryor as inherently suspect. History has clearly been rewriten in some cases. >The best guess that I've heard so far is that he may have been a deliberate >"plant" on the part of Lea. I have seen no evidence for this. It's plausible but entirely unsupported. >There are several accounts from people who knew >Pryor prior (nice wordplay if you can get away with it) to his "conversion" >that relate as to how he was always looking for a big "score". Up until then >he was a cheap street hustler always working on some scam. Funny, then, that they decided to make him a ritual leader during the anti-Lea protest. >I don't think that Pryor was ever a Satanist. The only one who knew of Pryor >was Herman Slater, the late owner of Magickal Childe. He mentioned that Pryor >would often pretend to be a Satanist to impress the young boys that he was >after. Other than that, Slater said that Pryor was never a student of his and >that no one really took him seriously. That's not what Herman Slater told me when I called him in the year before his death. He said that he personally knew that Pryor was an initiated witch and had seen paperwork to demonstrate the fact. I also understand that Herman performed a number of about-faces on the Pryor question, so I do not regard this as reliable testimony: I mention his vacillation to demonstrate the difficulty of accepting disavowals of involvement with Pryor at face value. -- Tim Maroney. Please CC all public responses to tim@toad.com.