Aleister Crowley, the Wickedest Man alive. He’s often portrayed as the king of transgression, evil and dissolute sex as well as the Godfather of contemporary Satanism. But what has the history of religion to say about this incredibly influential figure?

Stay tuned to find out!

Hello everyone, I’m Dr Angela Puca and welcome to my Symposium. I’m a PhD and a University Lecturer and this is your online resource for the academic study of Magick, Esotericism, Paganism, Shamanism and all things occult.

Today’s video is brought to you by the kind friend of the Symposium, Vocatus! Thank you so much for commissioning this video and it really it brings some value to you.

(Bogdan & Starr, 2012, pp.3–8)
Aleister Crowley is undoubtedly one of the most influential occultists of the twentieth century. Whether you like him or not, he has been and still is historically relevant in the comprehension of most Western esoteric thought and practices, contemporary Paganism and any tradition that includes some form of Magick really!

Much has been written on this enticing figure but, as per usual, here we will focus on what academic scholarship says on the matter. I’m also hoping to make an entire series on Crowley and Thelema and would truly appreciate any support you could offer to make that possible.

As Bogdan and Starr point out, Crowley was a religious synthesis.

His esotericism was not sourced from a past worldview but rather it was a harbinger of modernity with its specific view of the self.

Crowley was aware of his negative reputation and used it as a filter for his peers so that they could prove the acceptance of his philosophy. His mission was to proclaim the absolute liberty of the individual to self-actualize without regard for the moral codes and religious structures of prior ages. To this end, he promoted the practice of his occult bricolage, which he called “Magick” with the K – a thoroughly eclectic and individually-tailored combination of spiritual exercises drawn from Western European magical traditions and Indian sources for meditation and Yoga disciplines.

To this journey of self-liberation, Crowley added the power of sexuality as a magical tool. Crowley saw sex Magick as a simple and direct method of achieving the aims of the practitioner without – what he perceived as – the material trappings of ceremonial Magic. And that’s because the power is seen to ultimately reside in the mind of practitioners.

Does that remind you of anything? Eclectic Witchcraft, Chaos Magick… basically, most of the non-ceremonial non-initiatory Magick practices!

Back to Crowley; he was also the proponent of a new religious movement that embraced this worldview.

Before taking on the role of the prophet of a new aeon and promulgator of scripture, The Book of the Law (1904), he sought to understand Philosophy and empirical science during his time as a university student. Indeed, his reaction against the fundamentalist faith of his childhood predicated on the Bible led him to search for religious truths that could be justified through science and philosophy, disciplines he was first exposed to at Cambridge. In Crowley’s perspective, contemporary science and revealed religion had failed to answer their own questions because of their intrinsic methodological limitations; the ultimate truths were to be found only in a union of their epistemological strengths.

Telling is the motto Crowley chose for his occult journal, The Equinox, “The Method of Science; the Aim of Religion.” Where Magick represented the third way.

Crowley was born in 1875 into a normative British upper-middle-class Victorian family, committed to the totalising religious culture of the Exclusive Brethren sect of the Plymouth Brethren – that was a tongue twister! – an evangelical Christian, restorationist movement. The demanding religious practices and rigid morality of the Plymouth Brethren led teenage Crowley to become a rebel against those norms. In this process of distancing himself from his family, he defined himself in contrast to their God, taking as a model the “Great Beast” of Revelation.

As I mentioned, Crowley attended Cambridge but did not get a degree, as he had a revelation that he should devote his life to religion. His religious devotion had two main drivers: sex and esotericism. He learned the former… on his own accord. But as for the latter, he sought more formal learning. In 1898 he found the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, which seemed to offer authentic instruction in Western esotericism and an initiatic gateway to the true invisible Rosicrucian order.

His involvement with the Golden Dawn was short-lived, as the London body broke apart over disputes regarding the legitimacy of its historical claims and the derived authority of one of its founders, MacGregor Mathers. However, the Golden Dawn left a lasting influence on Crowley, especially in the hierarchical structure of initiation based on the kabbalistic Tree of Life and its synthesis of Western esotericism. Disappointed he hadn’t found the “Hidden Church of the Holy Grail” incarnate in the Golden Dawn, Crowley turned to the East and explored Yoga and Buddhism in India and Burma. Mysticism as such had not been a central aspect of the programme offered by the Golden Dawn and Crowley found that the training of concentration through yogic exercises was rather useful in combination with the ceremonial methods of Western esotericism.

There is a seminal event that Crowley described as a break from his past and it took place in Cairo in April of 1904. He was practising ceremonial magical invocations with his wife, who, according to Crowley, told him that the Egyptian god Horus was waiting for him. Following her ritual instructions, Crowley claims to have received a text via direct voice, The Book of the Law, a revelation of a new age of which Crowley, in his persona of the “Great Beast,” was the prophet.

The past Aeon of Osiris manifested as patriarchal religion and society, was to be replaced by the coming Aeon of Horus, the divine child, an icon of individual freedom.

The Greek word Thelema – will – which in Ancient Greek is actually pronounced Thèlema but I will henceforth pronounce it as anglophones do- which is Thelema – was the “word” of the “law” of the Aeon of Horus, encapsulated in its seemingly antinomian dictum “Do what thou wilt.” This revelation gave him the sense that he was now at the head of the spiritual hierarchy left vacant by MacGregor Mathers and led Crowley to form the A∴A∴ or Astrum Argenteum in 1909; an order that combined the ceremonial Magick of the Golden Dawn with the Eastern practices Crowley had learned. The teachings were structured as a teacher-student chain of authority. He published the teachings of the order in a semi-annual journal, The Equinox (1909–1913). MacGregor Mathers sued Crowley over his publication in The Equinox of the “Rosicrucian” inner-order ritual of the Golden Dawn.

However! the notoriety coming from this incident led to Crowley’s taking a leadership role in another neo-Rosicrucian group, the Ordo Templi Orientis – OTO, a mixed masonic group that had at its centre a closely guarded secret: the theory and practice of sexual Magick.

By the end of 1913, Crowley was now in the United States and had two interconnected esoteric movements under his direction. He then turned them gradually into vehicles for promoting his revelation of Thelema and the Aeon of Horus. Like the Golden Dawn, both groups had small memberships.

An interesting element about Crowley’s following that distinguished him from other esoteric leaders was that he attracted mainly followers of marginal cultural and social influence. During World War I Crowley stayed in the United States, from where he led the small groups of his followers in Canada, Britain, South Africa, and Australia. These movements did not grow as he expected, which also meant that Crowley couldn’t find a market for his books.

He then wandered Europe and North Africa in obscurity only briefly interrupted by the enthusiasm over the publication of his novel “The Diary of a Drug Fiend” in 1922. Another novel he authored was “Moonchild,” perhaps better known than the latter among practitioners today, first published in 1929. His textbook “Magick in Theory and Practice” (1930) had little distribution at first and – other than that – he published other occult texts privately in small editions primarily for his disciples. His last major work was “The Book of Thoth” (1944), an exposition of the tarot cards designed under his direction. When Crowley died in Hastings, England, in 1947, his life was portrayed in American news magazines, such as Time and Newsweek, as that of a fringe religious eccentric; a view of Crowley that remained prevalent for several decades.

During the late 1960s and early 1970s, there was a revival of interest in Crowley, and many works he authored that had been out of print for decades were reissued. Conducive to these publishing endeavours were two of Crowley’s former secretaries, Israel Regardie in the United States and Kenneth Grant in England. Regardie, who had been Crowley’s secretary from 1928 to 1932, was a prolific author and central to the re-emergence of the Golden Dawn.

Apart from his biography of Crowley, The Eye in the Triangle (1970), Regardie edited and introduced Crowley’s A∴A∴ (1969), “The Vision and the Voice” (1972), “The Holy Books of Thelema” (1972), “Book Four” (1972), “Magick without Tears” (1973), “The Qabalah of Aleister Crowley” (1973), “The Law Is for All” (1975), and “Gems from ‘The Equinox’” (1974), a massive volume that included the bulk of the magical and mystical writings from the first volume of The Equinox.

Grant, who had acted as Crowley’s secretary for a period in 1944, collaborated with Crowley’s literary executor, John Symonds, in introducing and editing several of Crowley’s writings on magick, mysticism, sexuality, and drugs. These texts were appealing at the time, and Crowley was rapidly turned into an antinomian icon for the counterculture movement and the flower-power generation.

The increasing number of books in print by Crowley came along with a resurgence of activity within Thelemic organizations. Some of these groups were quite small and only active for a few years. An example is the Solar Lodge, active in the United States during the late 1960s, while other organizations established themselves more solidly within the esoteric scene. The largest group is the Ordo Templi Orientis, which was reactivated around 1969 in California by several old-time members of the OTO under the leadership of Grady Louis McMurtry, who assumed the title of Caliph. McMurtry’s authority was challenged, however, by the Brazilian Thelemite Marcelo Motta and his Society Ordo Templi Orientis.

In 1985 a court in California ruled in favour of McMurtry, and the OTO has since established itself as an international organization with a few thousand members worldwide.

The early 1970s also saw the commencement of what is usually referred to as the Typhonian OTO, now called the Typhonian Order, under the leadership of Kenneth Grant, with its first official announcement published around 1973. However – as Bogdan and Starr highlight (Bogdan & Starr, 2012, pp.3-8) – the importance of Crowley in the field of esotericism lies not so much in his reception by the counterculture movement and popular culture, or in the various Thelemic new religious movements, as much as in the fact that Crowley can be seen as an example of religious change in Western culture.

Not only can Crowley’s esoteric writings be seen as a prime example of what Wouter Hanegraaff has described as “secularized esotericism,” but also, and perhaps more importantly, the study of Crowley reveals that he, in many ways, encapsulates central discourses of modernity and contemporary spirituality. Indeed, Crowley is a harbinger of what Paul Heelas has termed the “sacralization of the self.”

This is definitely not an exhaustive video on Crowley and I hope many more will come to illustrate all the nuances of this esoteric thought and its pervasive impact on Magick-practising traditions in the Western World.

The idea that Magick is for all and not just a few elects, the eclectic nature of Magick where every practitioner is allowed to individually tailor their practice borrowing from different traditions, the concept that the Will of the Magician is what matters the most and the psychologising of entities and of the practice… the desire to incorporate science and philosophy … and… Wicca! Well – that’s an episode on its own – these are but a few core contributions that contemporary esotericism owes to Crowley.

Whether he was a bad guy or a nice guy, whatever that means, doesn’t change his historical influence on Western Esotericism, one that still looms large on the contemporary scene.

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REFERENCES

Bogdan, H. & Starr, M.P. eds. (2012) Aleister Crowley and Western Esotericism. Oxford University Press.

First uploaded 30 Apr 2022