The Beast with Two Backs: Aleister Crowley, Sex Magic and the Exhaustion of Modernity

2004 ◽  
Vol 7 (3) ◽  
pp. 7-25 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hugh B. Urban
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Sexual Practices ◽  
Western Society ◽  
New Religious Movements ◽  
Modern World ◽  
Level Of Consciousness ◽  
Aleister Crowley ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Media ◽  
Cultural Contradictions

ABSTRACT: Infamous for his drug use and extreme sexual practices, and proclaiming himself the ““Great Beast 666,”” Aleister Crowley remains to this day one of the most influential and yet most often misunderstood figures in the history of Western new religious movements. This article offers a fresh approach to Crowley, by placing him within contemporary debates about modernism and postmodernism. By no means the outcast enemy of modern Western society so often depicted in the media, Crowley was, I argue, a stunning reflection of some of the most acute cultural contradictions at the heart of modern Western civilization in the early twentieth century. A uniquely Janus-faced character, he reflects both the ““Faustian”” will of modernism as well as its tragic failure and exhaustion at mid-century in the aftermath of the two World Wars. Where does our modern world belong——to exhaustion or ascent?——Its manifoldness and unrest conditioned by the attainment of the highest level of consciousness. ——Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power1 The point about Crowley is that he seems to contain all these sorts of ideas and identities——indeed most of the vices of the Twentieth Century——and he was dead at the end of 1947. ——Snoo Wilson, author of the play ““The Beast”” (1974)2

Filthy Material

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Chris Forster
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
New Media ◽  
Twentieth Century Literature ◽  
Modernist Literature ◽  
Literary Value ◽  
Radclyffe Hall ◽  
Media Technologies ◽  
The Face ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Media

Modernist literature is inextricable from the history of obscenity. The trials of such figures as James Joyce, D. H. Lawrence, and Radclyffe Hall loom large in accounts of twentieth-century literature. Filthy Material: Modernism and the Media of Obscenity reveals the ways that debates about obscenity and literature were shaped by changes in the history of media. The emergence of film, photography, and new printing technologies shaped how “literary value” was understood, altering how obscenity was defined and which texts were considered obscene. Filthy Material rereads the history of modernist obscenity to discover the role played by technological media in debates about obscenity. The shift from the intense censorship of the early twentieth century to the effective “end of obscenity” for literature at the middle of the century was not simply a product of cultural liberalization but also of a changing media ecology. Filthy Material brings together media theory and archival research to offer a fresh account of modernist obscenity with novel readings of works of modernist literature. It sheds new light on figures at the center of modernism’s obscenity trials (such as Joyce and Lawrence), demonstrates the relevance of the discourse of obscenity to understanding figures not typically associated with obscenity debates (such as T. S. Eliot and Wyndham Lewis), and introduces new figures to our account of modernism (such as Norah James and Jack Kahane). It reveals how modernist obscenity reflected a contest over the literary in the face of new media technologies.

C. H. B. Quennell (1872–1935): Architecture, History and the Quest for the Modern

2007 ◽  
Vol 50 ◽  
pp. 211-246
Author(s):  
Elizabeth McKellar
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Modern World ◽  
Strong Interest ◽  
History Of ◽  
British Architecture ◽  
Building Conservation ◽  
Architecture History

Charles Quennell embodied many of the possibilities and contradictions of British architecture in the first decades of the twentieth century. He is a little-known figure today, but one who deserves further consideration, not only for his own remarkably interesting and varied career but also because of the light he sheds on some of the less explored aspects of architecture in the 1895–1935 period. Throughout his life he combined a strong interest in history with a search for efficiency and design appropriate for the modern world. Both of these preoccupations were widespread among his generation although, apart from a few notable exceptions, rarely can they be found combined to as great a degree as in Quennell. For example, in 1914 he was a keen exponent of standardization and at work on large romantic houses in Hampstead Garden Suburb. By 1918 he had designed what have been called the first modern houses in the country and had just published the first of the bestselling books in the series co-authored with his wife, A History of Everyday Things in England. In 1930 he was writing a contemporary tract The Good New Days and he built a neo-Palladian villa. He has been little studied to date, the main accounts being Alastair Service’s of his work in Hampstead, a Masters thesis by Nick Collins focused on issues of building conservation, and Graham Thurgood’s article on his 1920s work in Essex.

Climate, Catastrophe, and Faith

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Philip Jenkins
Keyword(s):  
Remote Memory ◽  
New Religious Movements ◽  
Modern World ◽  
Religion And Spirituality ◽  
Mass Migration ◽  
Faith Traditions ◽  
History Of Religions ◽  
History Of ◽  
Social Upheaval ◽  
Climate Crisis

Repeatedly through history, the world has been subject to severe climate-driven shocks, which have caused famine, disease, violence, social upheaval, and mass migration. Commonly, such episodes have been understood in religious terms, through the language of apocalypse, millennium, and Judgment. Often too, such eras have sparked far-reaching changes in the nature of religion and spirituality. Depending on the circumstances, the response to climatic visitations might include explosions in religious passion and commitment; the stirring of mystical and apocalyptic expectations; waves of religious scapegoating and persecution; or the spawning of new religious movements and revivals. In many cases, such responses have had lasting impacts, to the point of fundamentally reshaping particular faith traditions. From those eras have emerged passionate sects—some political and theocratic, some revivalistic and enthusiastic, others millenarian and subversive. The movements and ideas emerging from such conditions might last for many decades and become a familiar part of the religious landscape, although with their origins in particular moments of crisis increasingly consigned to remote memory. By stirring conflicts and provoking persecutions that defined themselves in religious terms, such eras have redrawn the world’s religious maps and created the global concentrations of believers as we know them today. Whether we are looking at the Christian tradition or at Jews, Muslims, or Buddhists, the history of religions must take account of this climate dimension. In the modern world, it is very likely that the growing climate crisis will likely have a comparable religious impact across much of the global South.

scholarly journals La Guerra de Ifni, ecos amordazados y huellas disipadas por la prensa del franquismo.

2020 ◽  
Vol 2 (15) ◽  
pp. 212-241
Author(s):  
Mónica Yanguas Muñoz
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Professional Relationship ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Media ◽  
Spanish Press

This research focuses on the analysis of Spanish press which chronologically concurs with the Ifni War, studied contrasting the events and testimonies of those who experienced this war and those who entail a professional relationship with it (a journalist specifically). It was a conflict in the framework of the Francoist dictatorship and the process of decolonisation and expansion of Morocco in the mid-twentieth century. The general aim that we consider is to verify the interference of the media during the war, specifically press, and simultaneously contribute to unearth Ifni from the abyss of oblivion. This article brings to light the history of Ifni in relation to Spain, the Francoist mechanisms of informative control and some of the current outcomes of the war.

The limits of comparison: institutional mortality rates, long-term confinement and causes of death during the early twentieth century

2012 ◽  
Vol 23 (4) ◽  
pp. 404-418 ◽  
Author(s):  
Waltraud Ernst
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Causes Of Death ◽  
Modern World ◽  
British India ◽  
Psychiatric Institution ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
The Status ◽  
History Of ◽  
New Material

This article presents a case study of institutional trends in a psychiatric institution in British India during the early twentieth century. It focuses on mortality statistics and long-term confinement rates as well as causes of death. The intention is two-fold: first, to provide new material that potentially lends itself to comparison with the few existing institutional case studies that have explored this particular period; second, to highlight some of the problems inherent in the status of the statistics and the conceptual categories used, and to consider the challenges these pose for any intended comparative and transnational assessment. Furthermore, it is suggested that historians working on the history of western institutions ought to look beyond the confining rim of Eurocentric self-containment and relate their research to other institutions around the world. It is important for social historians to abstain from uncritically reproducing hegemonic histories of the modern world in which western cultures and nations are posited by default as the centre or metropolis and the rest as peripheries whose social and scientific developments may be seen to be of exotic interest, but merely derivative and peripheral.

Christians, Muslims and the State in Twentieth-Century Egypt and Indonesia

2015 ◽  
Vol 51 ◽  
pp. 412-434
Author(s):  
Brian Stanley
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Balance Of Power ◽  
The State ◽  
Religious Communities ◽  
Modern World ◽  
Christian Communities ◽  
Communal Relations ◽  
History Of ◽  
Muslim Majority ◽  
Historical Relationship

Surveys of the historical relationship between Christianity and other faiths often suggest that through a process of theological enlightenment the churches have moved from crusade to cooperation and from diatribe to dialogue. This trajectory is most marked in studies of Christian-Muslim relations, overshadowed as they are by the legacy of the Crusades. Hugh Goddard’sA History of Christian-Muslim Relationsproceeds from a focus on the frequently confrontational inter-communal relations of earlier periods to attempts by Western theologians over the last two centuries to define a more irenic stance towards Islam.1 For liberal-minded Western Christians this is an attractive thesis: who would not wish to assert that we have left bigotry and antagonism behind, and moved on to stances of mutual respect and tolerance? However laudable the concern to promote harmonious intercommunal relations today, dangers arise from trawling the oceans of history in order to catch in our nets only those episodes that will be most morally edifying for the present. What Herbert Butterfield famously labelled ‘the Whig interpretation of history’ is not irrelevant to the history of interreligious relations. In this essay I shall use the experience of Christian communities in twentieth-century Egypt and Indonesia to argue that the determinative influences on Christian-Muslim relations in the modern world have not been the progressive liberalization of stances among academic theologians but rather the changing views taken by governments in Muslim majority states towards both their majority and minority religious communities. Questions of the balance of power, and of the territorial integrity of the state, have affected Christian Muslim relations more deeply than questions of religious truth and concerns for interreligious dialogue.

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