Aleister Crowley's Poetic Fin de Siècle: Swinburne's Legacy, Decadent Drag, and Spiritual Sex Magick

2021 ◽  
Vol 49 (4) ◽  
pp. 777-805
Author(s):  
Joseph Bristow
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Fifteenth Century ◽  
Fin De Siecle ◽  
Extreme Type ◽  
Fin De Siècle ◽  
Aleister Crowley ◽  
The Voice

This article explores the extreme type of decadent eroticism that Aleister Crowley developed while an undergraduate at Cambridge in the later 1890s. The discussion focuses of Crowley's desire to appear as the main legatee of Algernon Charles Swinburne's poetry from the 1860s and 1870s. Especially significant here is Crowley's volume White Stains, which the maverick publisher Leonard Smithers issued in a privately circulated edition in 1898. In the 1920s, Crowley acknowledged that his sexual affair with Herbert Charles (“Jerome”) Pollitt was largely responsible for introducing him to the works of English and French decadent writers. Pollitt—who gained celebrity as an aesthete, art collector, and drag artist in fin de siècle Cambridge—became the major patron of Aubrey Beardsley. In 1910 Crowley acknowledged the legacy of Pollitt's decadent influence into the two concluding faux-ghazals that appear in The Scented Garden of Abdullah the Satirist of Shiraz, which is in part modeled upon Richard Burton's translation of The Perfumed Garden (1886), based on the fifteenth-century heteroerotic manual by Muhammad ibn Muhammad al-Nefzawi. This 1910 volume, which celebrates sodomy through the voice of an imaginary seventeenth-century Persian poet, belongs to Crowley's established interest in taboo forms of erotic experience that relate to the occult rituals he practiced in relation to sex magick.

The voice of an ancient spring

Street Songs ◽  
2018 ◽  
pp. 115-137
Author(s):  
Daniel Karlin
Keyword(s):  
Art Song ◽  
Fin De Siecle ◽  
Fin De Siècle ◽  
Solid Foundation ◽  
Underground Station ◽  
Regent's Park ◽  
The Voice ◽  
Determinate Form

In Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, an old beggar woman is heard singing outside Regent’s Park underground station. The song itself cannot be fixed: it is given to us, first, as a string of meaningless syllables, then ‘translated’ by the narrator of the book into an ancient, primordial song of sexual love, and then heard in the form of a modern German lied—a melancholy fin-de-siècle art-song which is inconceivable as a song sung by a beggar on a London street in 1925. The solid foundation of realism dissolves in Woolf’s playful handling, but she has good reasons for refusing to pin the song down to a single determinate form. The characters who see and hear the old woman—Peter Walsh, Rezia and Septimus Smith—do not really ‘see’ her for what she is, and do not understand that she is not begging, but offering; and they pass her by.

The Scarlet Goddess and the Wine of Her Fornications

2019 ◽  
pp. 35-80
Author(s):  
Manon Hedenborg White
Keyword(s):  
Fin De Siecle ◽  
Femme Fatale ◽  
Great Goddess ◽  
Positive Reinterpretation ◽  
Fin De Siècle ◽  
Aleister Crowley

Beginning with an overview of feminine stereotypes in fin-de-siècle culture, the chapter introduces Aleister Crowley and his concepts of Babalon and the related figure of the Scarlet Woman. An unconventional figure and founder of the religion Thelema, Crowley led an openly bisexual life and advocated free sexuality. In 1909, Crowley experimented with Enochian magic in the Algerian desert with his lover and disciple Victor B. Neuburg, beholding a series of visions, including one featuring a great goddess. Based on a positive reinterpretation of the Whore of Babylon (Rev. 17), Crowley linked this goddess—called Babalon—to the initiatory ordeal of crossing the Abyss, when the seeker must annihilate their ego to become one with all. I argue that Crowley’s articulation of Babalon built on the fin-de-siècle trope of the femme fatale, which he reinterpreted as a soteriological ideal, thus challenging notions of feminine sexual modesty and bourgeois, masculine rationality.

Encountering the Scarlet Goddess

2019 ◽  
pp. 1-16
Author(s):  
Manon Hedenborg White
Keyword(s):  
Source Material ◽  
Fin De Siecle ◽  
Fin De Siècle ◽  
Aleister Crowley ◽  
History Of Religions ◽  
Feminine Sexuality ◽  
History Of ◽  
Western Esotericism

This chapter sets the scene for the study by briefly introducing some of its core contents and defining the aim of the book: to analyze constructions of femininity and feminine sexuality in interpretations of the goddess Babalon from the fin-de-siècle until today. The chapter presents Babalon and her origins in the writings of the British occultist Aleister Crowley and establishes the focus of the study. The idea of a “Babalon discourse,” comprising written, verbal, textual, and embodied interpretations of the goddess, is introduced. The source material for the present study is related to broader categories within the history of religions, such as Western esotericism, occultism, and magic, which are briefly explained and demarcated. Sources and methodology are cursorily presented, and the chapter concludes with an outline of the study.

Occultism in the Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christopher Partridge
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Drug Use ◽  
Fin De Siecle ◽  
Fin De Siècle ◽  
Aleister Crowley ◽  
Late Nineteenth

This chapter explores the use of drugs in the occult milieu of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The focus is fin de siècle occultism. While it examines the significance of drug use in the life and work of key figures such as W. B. Yeats, Helena Blavatsky, and Aleister Crowley, it also looks at little-known but important occultists such as Paschal Beverly Randolph and Louis-Alphonse Cahagnet, as well as organizations such as the Hermetic Brotherhood of Luxor and the Order of the Golden Dawn. There is also some analysis of temperance discourses within Theosophy and particularly Spiritualism. Finally, there is an overview of drug use in post-Crowleyan Thelemic thought later in the twentieth century.

Illustrated Media, the Built Environment and Identity Politics in Fin-de-siècle Catalonia: Printing Images, Making the Nation

2015 ◽  
Vol 4 (2) ◽  
pp. 113-135
Author(s):  
Lucila Mallart
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Built Environment ◽  
Identity Politics ◽  
Nation Building ◽  
Constitutive Relationship ◽  
Fin De Siecle ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Fin De Siècle ◽  
Late Nineteenth

This article explores the role of visuality in the identity politics of fin-de-siècle Catalonia. It engages with the recent reevaluation of the visual, both as a source for the history of modern nation-building, and as a constitutive element in the emergence of civic identities in the liberal urban environment. In doing so, it offers a reading of the mutually constitutive relationship of the built environment and the print media in late-nineteenth century Catalonia, and explores the role of this relation as the mechanism by which the so-called ‘imagined communities’ come to exist. Engaging with debates on urban planning and educational policies, it challenges established views on the interplay between tradition and modernity in modern nation-building, and reveals long-term connections between late-nineteenth-century imaginaries and early-twentieth-century beliefs and practices.

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