What influence did Aleister Crowley have on the inception of the Wiccan religion? This idea is controversial so let’s look at the history. Wicca’s founder, Gerald Gardner and Crowley certainly met and both were leaders of the Ordo Templi Orientis. The communicated and discussed establishing a witch religion. The outcome can only be surmised to be on a spectrum from a minimal input to saying that without Crowley there would be no Wicca. Reportedly Crowley rejected involvement because he did not want to “be bossed around by a damn woman.

Summary

Did Crowley play any significant part in the birth of Wicca and has Thelema influenced in any way this contemporary form of Paganism?

Let’s find out together what history suggests.

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 Magic, Paganism, Esotericism, Shamanism and all things occult.

As Ronald Hutton, source of this video’s content, explains – both the origins of Wicca and the role played by Crowley are controversial matters and remain quite uncertain as the research on the topic is scant and somewhat insufficient to have one definite and conclusive answer. (Hutton, 2012, pp.285–306)

However, I can present to you some historical evidence we have and the main theories about the relationship between Crowley and Wicca. We know from Crowley’s diary that he and Gerald Gardner met for the first time on May Day 1947, when Gardner visited the older man in his boardinghouse, his retirement home, at Hastings. Surviving letters show that in the course of these visits, Crowley initiated Gardner up to the fourth degree of his organization, the Ordo Templi Orientis, (OTO), with the name of “Scire” (Latin for “to know”), which remained Gardner’s “magical” pseudonym thereafter. This degree of progression might have empowered him to found his own division, or “encampment,” of the OTO, as this is precisely what Gardner set out to eagerly do.

Gardner bought the entire stock of Crowley’s work The Equinox of the Gods, consisting of an extended commentary on The Book of the Law, attempting to gather further copies – presumably to use them to educate new recruits in the doctrine of Thelema. Crowley also provided his new disciple with a list of people whom Gardner needed to contact in order to launch his own group, and Gardner sought advice in return regarding the fees that he should charge trainees for initiation to the first degree. At the time, the OTO was declining in Britain and Gardner was trying to revive it and make himself its leading figure under Crowley himself. Crowley did what he could to support his new initiate in this work, inviting the prominent London occultist W. B. Crow to direct “all his following” to Gardner for initiation into the order, with the intent of founding more new camps. However, the relationship between the two men was short-lived.

At the time of their meeting, Crowley was already a dying man, and he passed away that same year. In the second half of 1947, Gardner himself was unwell and needed a warmer climate to recover. This is the reason that led him to spend the winter with his brother’s family in Memphis, Tennessee. That’s where he was when Crowley died in December and, upon receiving the news, Gardner wrote immediately to Crowley’s landlord, Vernon Symonds, to inform him that Crowley had chartered Gardner as leader of the OTO in Europe. Gardner used this claim in an attempt to get his hands on any manuscripts of rituals of the order, and any ceremonial equipment, that had been in Crowley’s possession when he died, offering to buy them from his executors.

Clearly, his ambitions had now expanded from reviving the order in Britain, by initiating new members to the lower grades, to becoming head of the order in the European continent. Crowley’s closest remaining friends in England seemed to think that no one was better equipped or willing to take on the job, and Frieda Harris wrote to Karl Germer, leader of the OTO in the United States, to try and locate Gardner and offer the leadership in Europe to him. In January Gardner and Germer came into contact, and the former asked the latter to meet him in New York on March 19, as he was preparing to sail for England. Later on, Gardner claimed that the meeting had taken place, and Germer had indeed recognized him as head of the order in Europe.

Gardner’s primary interest was obtaining rituals rather than understanding and articulating a theoretical structure to accompany them. In the letter to Symonds, he confessed that he had never come into possession of scripts for any of the order’s ceremonies above the fourth, and these lower-grade workings entailed very little when it came to magic.

In 1949 Gardner published a novel, “High Magic’s Aid,” his swan song to the order. On its title page, he proudly defined himself as a member of the OTO, giving his magical name and his degree. However, the content had nothing to do with the OTO or any of Crowley’s teachings. It was indeed a mixture of high ceremonial magic of the traditional kind, especially taken from MacGregor Mathers’ Victorian edition of the Greater Key of Solomon, and beliefs and rites of the witch religion that he was soon to promote. From the moment that this book appeared, Gerald Gardner devoted himself wholly to Wicca, and he never behaved again as a member of Crowley’s order, let alone as its European head. In all the contemporary documents that chronicle the relationship between Crowley and Gardner, there is no mention of witchcraft of any kind.

By 1950, however, in his letter to Symonds, Gardner told a story of a meeting with Crowley that he would henceforth repeat regularly in various forms. By this date, he was starting to promote his witch religion, and he claimed that Crowley “was very interested in the witch cult, and had some idea of combining it with the Order, but nothing came of it.” Ten years later, in his ghosted autobiography, Gardner added a substantial detail to the story, saying that Crowley had asserted that he would not himself enter the witch religion because “he refused to be bossed around by a damn woman”. The reason is that Wicca is centred upon a High Priestess. Crowley, in Gardner’s story, had also struggled to understand the lack of financial profit in Wicca. This account was later repeated by Arnold Crowther, although it is not clear from the published evidence that Crowley made the alleged comment on the first meeting when Arnold was present as a witness or during the later visits that Gardner paid to him alone.

So, can we really say that Wicca retains some legacy of Aleister Crowley’s system of magic, considering that after the 1950s the religion developed completely independently from any of Crowley’s teachings?

As Prof Hutton explains, all that we can confidently infer about the relationship between Aleister Crowley and Wicca is that it must have lain somewhere on a spectrum defined by two extreme positions.

The “minimalist” position is that Gerald Gardner’s account of his own past was broadly correct, and that his central loyalty was given to the witch religion ever since he discovered and entered it in 1939, but that Crowley’s writings functioned to fill, temporarily, gaps in the original Wiccan rituals and hence allowing Gardner to present new initiates with a more impressive and coherent body of liturgy. So, as you can see, even the most minimalist position, would credit Crowley with a significant, albeit limited and transitory role in the success of Wicca as a modern religion, both in terms of the quantity of his work employed for this purpose and for its contribution to, or compatibility with, the ideology of Wiccan practice.

The “maximalist” position, on the other hand, maintains that without Crowley there would have been no Wicca, because Gardner’s encounter with the man and his writings, in 1947, provided the vital influence and motivation for Gardner to develop a new religion in partnership with his own collaborators and initiates.

Where exactly the truth lies within this spectrum is a question that we will probably never find an answer but, as Hutton remarks, it seems that all interpretations acknowledge two things for certain.

The first is that, even though Wicca at first sourced heavily from Crowley’s writings, it was fundamentally a distinctively different tradition from anything that Crowley described or sought to establish himself.

The second is that, when Wicca was presented to the world at the beginning of the 1950s, Aleister Crowley was undeniably the single most important identifiable influence upon it next to Gerald Gardner himself.

So this is it for today’s video. What are your thoughts on the relationship between Crowley and Wicca? Do you think we will still have this very popular contemporary Pagan religion without Crowley? And do you have anything to add to the conversation? Let me know everything in the comment section!

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REFERENCES

Hutton, R. (2012) Crowley and Wicca. In: H. Bogdan & M. P. Starr eds. Aleister Crowley and Western Esotericism. 285-306, Oxford University Press.

First uploaded 7 May 2022