Crowley, the Orient, and the Occult

This chapter examines the life and work of the British magus Aleister Crowley, focusing on the place of Orientalism and the subtle body in the development of his magical system. After a short biographical section where the chapter traces his life to the age of thirty when his occult vocation began in earnest, the chapter shifts to Crowley’s interest in the Orient, analyzing his engagement with Kabbalah, Daoism, yoga, and Islamic mysticism. The chapter then zeroes in on Crowley’s presentation of the subtle body in his magnum opus before moving on to theoretical analysis of the basic philosophical tenets of Crowley’s system, interrogating his skepticism and inductive method in engaging with occult and Astral phenomena. The chapter ends with a brief discussion on the process of cultural transformation, following the subtle body as it moves from a term of translation to a creolized fusion (ala Blavatsky) where Oriental terminology forms a sort of veneer over a Neoplatonic concept, to a fully hybrid concept (as in Crowley) that is neither fully a Neoplatonic idea nor an Oriental import, but something in between.

Profane Illuminations: Robert Anton Wilson’s Hedonic Ascesis

The writer Robert Anton Wilson (1932–2007) played a significant intellectual role in the American counterculture in the late 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s. Drawing from a wide range of discourses, as well as his own occultural fictions and personal experiments in “hedonic engineering,” Wilson presented a pluralistic view of reality that combined a pragmatic skepticism with a creative and esoteric embrace of the “meta-programming” possibilities of altered states of consciousness. In his 1975 Illuminatus! trilogy, written with Robert Shea, Wilson wove anarchist, psychedelic, and occult themes into a prophetic conspiracy fiction written with a satiric and willfully pulp sensibility. Ritually experimenting with psychedelic drugs and sexual magic – experiences related in his 1977 book Cosmic Trigger – Wilson developed a wayward if deeply self-reflexive theory and dialectical method of visionary practice, one that, amidst the paranoia, presented its own deconstructive and libertarian vision of gnosis. This essay contextualizes and unpacks Wilson’s visionary pragmatism in terms of Foucault’s roughly contemporaneous notion of “technologies of self,” later elaborated by Peter Sloterdijk as “anthropotechnics.” It also traces the specific debts that Wilson owed to other esoteric and psychedelic technologists of the self, including Aleister Crowley, Timothy Leary, and John Lilly.

O sexo e o corpo como veículos das práticas mágicas no esoterismo do século XX: reflexões sobre magia sexual em Thelema

This article aims to demonstrate the importance of sex magic in the construction of a specific form of corporeality within the esoteric practices of the 20th century, using Thelema, a magical-religious system developed by Aleister Crowley, as a case study. The body, through the re-signification of sexual practices and their space in social life, gains centrality as a locus of lived experience and as a potential for active transformation of itself and the world. This new way of building the body, positifying it as the space of subjectivity and plasticity, is totally inserted in the socio-political demands of the fin-desiècle. This way of building the body will be investigated using a mythical-ritual pparatus that reinforces, through the repetition of the rite, this new corpus of values linked to already existing categories, with an emphasis on sex, showing another face of foundational discursive duality of modernity: the body as a double of the subject (LE BRETON, 2002 [1990])

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

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.

Proximal Authority

In 1920, the Swiss-American music teacher and occultist Leah Hirsig (1883–1975) was appointed ‘Scarlet Woman’ by the British occultist Aleister Crowley (1875–1947), founder of the religion Thelema. In this role, Hirsig was Crowley’s right-hand woman during a formative period in the Thelemic movement, but her position shifted when Crowley found a new Scarlet Woman in 1924. Hirsig’s importance in Thelema gradually declined, and she distanced herself from the movement in the late 1920s. The article analyses Hirsig’s changing status in Thelema 1919–1930, proposing the term proximal authority as an auxiliary category to Max Weber’s tripartite typology. Proximal authority is defined as authority ascribed to or enacted by a person based on their real or perceived relational closeness to a leader. The article briefly draws on two parallel cases so as to demonstrate the broader applicability of the term in highlighting how relational closeness to a leadership figure can entail considerable yet precarious power.

‘Mercury is in a Very Ape-Like Mood’

Frieda, Lady Harris, wife of Sir Percy Harris, Liberal M.P. and party Chief Whip, created the magnificent Tarot paintings that underpin Aleister Crowley’s The Book of Thoth. Harris conformed to the conventional appearance of a respectable middle-class lady until she was in her sixties. However, her unwavering commitment to Aleister Crowley and the Tarot project eventually threatened not only her social standing, but also her marriage. Despite her dedication to the Thoth Tarot, she never fully engaged with Thelema, which she anthropomorphised as the bossy and interfering ‘Miss Thelema’. Nevertheless, she progressed through the grades of Crowley’s magical orders and remained loyal to Crowley and the Great Work to the end of her days, endeavouring to secure a publishing deal for a general release of The Book of Thoth and the Thoth Tarot deck. Using extracts from Harris and Crowley’s correspondence and Crowley’s diaries, this paper will explore Harris’s personal involvement with Thelema, both in her collaborative activities with Crowley, and her endeavours to preserve his legacy after his death.

Deus est Homo

Despite the centrality of the concept of God in Christian theology and Western philosophy for over two millennia, little attention has been given the concept of God in twentieth-century occultism in general, and in the writings of Aleister Crowley (1875–1947) in particular. In this article it is argued that Crowley’s multifaceted and sometimes conflicting approaches to God, are dependent on five main factors: (1) his childhood experiences of Christianity in the form of the Plymouth Brethren, (2) the impact of Empirical Scepticism and Comparative Religion, (3) the emanationist concept of God that he encountered through his membership in the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, (4) the revelation of The Book of the Law and the claim of being a Prophet, The Great Beast 666, of a New Age, and finally (5) solar-phallicism as expressed through the Ordo Templi Orientis. These apparently contradictory strands in Crowley’s biography and intellectual armoury are in fact interlinked, and it is by studying them together that it is possible to identify the concept of God in Crowley’s magical writings.

‘The sphinx will speak at last’: Visions, Communications and Esoteric Experience

This chapter investigates visions of ancient Egypt that were understood to be grounded in supernatural truth. It examines the Egyptologists on the peripheries of magical orders, including E. A. Wallis Budge and Battiscombe Gunn, those who took part in spiritualistic activities, such as Howard Carter, as well as the individuals who involved these specialists in their magical and spiritual undertakings. Examining the lives and works of Golden Dawn magicians Florence Farr and Aleister Crowley alongside writers including Sax Rohmer and H. Rider Haggard, it exposes networks of collaboration between Egyptologists and individuals interested in Egyptian rites, and connects these relationships with the Egyptological sites, works and artefacts. Egyptological experts often attempted to distance themselves from the supernatural tales that Egyptian artefacts were particularly liable to inspire, but this was by no means universal. Examining literary overlaps between esotericism and Egyptology illuminates one of the most intriguing aspects of cultural exchange taking place between this scholarly field and culture more broadly: Egyptian spirits and magical ceremonies which Egyptologists frequently claimed had no potency in the modern world (besides in fiction) did, in fact, impress upon several practitioners; esotericists, meanwhile, turned to Egyptology and Egyptologists to buttress their rites, beliefs and experiences.