Aleister Crowley and Islam (original) (raw)
Rethinking Aleister Crowley and Thelema: New Perspectives
Aries: Journal for the Study of Western Esotericism, 2021
against his upbringing at an early age, identifying himself with the Great Beast 666 of Revelation. He joined the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn in 1898 and rose quickly through the grades. Though Crowley's involvement with the Golden Dawn ended in 1900, its degree structure and magical curriculum came to comprise one of two basic components of his system of Magick, the second consisting of yogic techniques he learned while travelling in India, Burma, and Ceylon.3 1904 marked a turning point in Crowley's occult career. On honeymoon in Cairo, Crowley sought to impress his wife Rose (née Kelly, 1874-1932) with some invocations, when she entered a trance state, proclaiming that someone awaited him. This someone was later identified as the god Horus. At Rose's behest, Crowley over the course of April 8-10 penned The Book of the Law, which he claimed was dictated to him by a discarnate entity named Aiwass.4 The text announces the advent of a new epoch in the spiritual evolution of humanity, with Crowley, as the Beast, as its prophet. This new age was to be characterised by individual liberation and self-realisation, epitomised by the maxim: 'Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law' , and the word Thelema (Greek for "will"), which became the title of Crowley's religion.5 Crowley's magical teachings were structured within two initiatory orders. The first of these was A⸫A⸫, which Crowley co-founded with George Cecil Jones (1873-1960) in 1907, and whose curriculum combined ceremonial magic in the style of the Golden Dawn with yogic techniques and study of the "Holy Books of Thelema".6 The second order within which Crowley assumed a formative role was Ordo Templi Orientis (oto), an initiatory fraternity led by the German socialist and singer Theodor Reuss (1855-1923). oto claimed to possess the secret uniting all masonic and Hermetic systems, namely, that of sexual magic.7 Reuss made Crowley the head of oto in Britain in 1912, and from 1914 onward, he began experimenting systematically with sexual magic. Over time, he came to reshape oto's degree structure and rituals in accordance with Thelema, assuming international headship of the order after Reuss's death.8
The Role of Religious Experience in the Magical Philosophy of Aleister Crowley
A short paper which examines the role and importance of the concept of 'religious experience' in the magical and philosophical system of Aleister Crowley. Written for the 'Religious Experience' module of the Research Masters in Religious Studies at the University of Amsterdam 2014-2015. [Note: requires further editing.]
2013
The late nineteenth and early twentieth century occultists saw themselves, more than ever before, confronted with the intrusion of science on their traditional turfs. While occult phenomena were more and more explained by scientific discovery, the new science, psychology, took a stab at the workings of occult ritual. Under influence of these new challenges many occultists moved towards a more psychological interpretation of their rituals. In this paper I will demonstrate how “the great beast 666”, Aleister Crowley, dealt with these challenges and how they effected both his ideas and the development of his final philosophy.
Aleister Crowley and Occult Meaning
The Palgrave Handbook of Contemporary Gothic, 2020
(1875-1947) remains a controversial and divisive figure. Although his peerless contribution to the development of occult theory and practice during his own lifetime and after is unarguable, various aspects of his lifestyle made him notorious. However, he was also a prolific writer and critic, and began his adult life as a poet. This essay explores this side of his output, and specifically his engagement with contemporary writers of weird fiction, such as Arthur Machen and Lord Dunsany. The argument is also made that Crowley's occult practice shapes and informs his responses to fiction, and that examining his approach to the question of authorial intentionality can cast light on wider critical practice today. Weird fiction is a mode closely associated with the Gothic tradition from which it emerged. The period 1880 to 1940 is regarded by some commentators to have been its formative stage, an era designated 'haute Weird' by China Miéville, for example. 1 It was during this period that writers such as Arthur Machen, William Hope Hodgson, Lord Dunsany, and Algernon Blackwood, dispensed with the staples of the Gothic genre (haunted castles, ghosts, rattling chains, and so on) and through their fiction engaged with contemporary discourses including those on evolution, degeneration, and psychic phenomena. In the 1920s and 1930s, their innovations were built upon in the U.S. by, most famously, H. P. Lovecraft, as well as other writers for Weird Tales magazine, and therefore shaped much ensuing Gothic and horror media, an influence which shows no signs of abating to this day. Regarding the British haute Weird, one of its defining characteristics is its engagement with contemporaneous occulture. This essay will explore this specific context in more detail, drawing upon the critical writing and fiction of Aleister Crowley; one of the crucial figures-if not the crucial figure-in the occult discourses of the period. I will argue that Crowley's reactions to contemporaneous weird fiction reveal that, although Machen et al certainly used occult ideas and tropes in their writing, the use of these ideas was ad hoc and largely aesthetic, rather than didactic and organised. Although contemporaneous occult practice was a clear influence on the weird fiction of the period, attempts to glean 'truths' about that occult practice from the tales of, for example, Blackwood or Lovecraft, under the aegis of the contemporary academic practice of textual analysis, are in practice little different from Crowley's insistence that such texts contain occult 'truths' that can only be discovered by select initiates. The wider context of this essay is, therefore, the possible elisions between hermeticism and hermeneutics, beyond their shared etymological provenance. Lovecraft, especially, has been singled out for febrile claims about the alleged occult truths secreted in his fiction, despite his professed atheism and blithe scepticism regarding all things supernatural. The authors of pop-occult crypto-history The Dark Gods (1985), for example, get round the problem presented by Lovecraft's atheism by arguing breathlessly that Lovecraft was an 2 involuntary or subconscious conduit for supernatural forces: 'Lovecraft was a classic victim or unconscious medium for the extracosmic "sendings" of the Dark Gods'. 2 The trope that Lovecraft's Cthulhu Mythos is to a greater or lesser extent founded on a 'reality' had by then already precipitated something of an occult cottage industry, the productions of which included various 'authentic' editions of Lovecraft's infamous occult tome the Necronomicon-for example, the 'Simon' Necronomicon published by Avon in 1977, or the version published by Skoob Esoterica in 1992-that occupy an obscure space between high-concept hoax and pot-boiling deception. Similarly obscure, though rather more ambiguous in terms of intentionality, is the exact nature of the co-option of Lovecraft's fiction by practicing occultists. In books like Cults of the Shadow (1975), for example, Kenneth Grant (1924-2011)-certainly one of the most significant figures in British twentieth-century occulture after Crowley-regularly incorporated the Cthulhu Mythos into his work with little apparent regard for ontological distinctions between fiction and reality. Passages like the following give a flavour of Grant's comingling of recondite lore and Lovecraftian fiction: The Lovecraftian Coven is assumed to the seventh ray of [the contemporary occult order] The Monastery of Seven Rays. This is the ray of ceremonial magic and it forms a space-time corridor between [Lovecraft's] Yuggoth (Pluto) and the ultimate trans-Neptune planets represented on the [Kabbalistic] Tree of Life by Kether and Chokmah respectively. 3
Great as were Frater P.'s accomplishments in the ancient sciences of the East, swiftly and securely as he had passed in a bare year the arduous road which so many fail to traverse in lifetime, satisfied as himself was-in a sense-with his own progress, it was not yet by these paths that he was destined to reach the Sublime Threshold of the Mystic Temple. For though it is written, "To the persevering mortal the blessed immortals are swift," yet, were it otherwise, no mortal however persevering could attain the immortal shore. As it is written in the Fifteenth Chapter of St. Luke's Gospel, "And when he was yet afar off, his Father saw him and ran." Had it not been so, the weary Prodigal, exhausted by his early debauches (astral visions and magic) and his later mental toil (yoga) would never have had the strength to reach the House of his Father. One little point St. Luke unaccountable omitted. When a man is as hungry and weary as was the Prodigal, he is apt to see phantoms. He is apt to clasp shadows to him, and cry: "Father!" And, the devil being subtle, capable of disguising himself as an angel of light, it behoves the Prodigal to have some test of truth. Some great mystics have laid down the law, "Accept no messenger of God," banish all, until at last the Father himself comes forth. A counsel of perfection. The Father himself does send messengers, as we learn in St. Mark xii.; and if we stone them, we may perhaps in our blindness stone the Son himself when he is sent. So that is no vain counsel of "St. John" (1 John iv. 1), "Try the spirits, whether they be of God," no mistake when "St. Paul" claims the discernment of Spirits to be a principal point of the armour of salvation (1 Cor. xii. 10). Now how should Frater P. or another test the truth of any message purporting to come from the Most High? On the astral plane, its phantoms are easily governed by the Pentagram, the Elemental Weapons, the Robes, the God-forms, and such childish toys. We set phantoms to chase phantoms. We make our Scin-Laeca 1 pure and hard and glittering, all glorious within, like the veritable daughter of the King; yet she is but the King's daughter, the Nephesch adorned: she is not the King himself, the Holy Ruach or mind of man. As as we have seen in our chapter on Yoga, 2 this mind is a very aspen; and as we may see in the last chapter of Captain Fuller's "Star in the West," this mind is a very cockpit of contradiction. What then is the standard of truth? What tests shall we apply to revelation, when our tests of experience have been found wanting? If I must doubt my eyes that have served me (well, on the whole) for so many years, must I not much more doubt my spiritual vision, my vision just open like a babe's, my vision untested by comparison and uncriticized by reason? Footnotes indicated by *, †, etc. appeared in the Equinox publication and are presumably by Crowley (hence I have initialled them "A.C."); footnotes indicated by numbers are by myself.