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Aleister Crowley

Aleister Crowley, born Edward Alexander Crowley (12 October 1875 – 1 December 1947) was an occultist, prolific writer, mystic, hedonist, and sexual revolutionary.

Other interests and accomplishments were wide-ranging—he was a chess master, mountain climber, poet, painter, astrologer, drug experimenter, and social critic. He is perhaps best known today for his occult writings, especially The Book of the Law, the central sacred text of Thelema. Crowley was also an influential member in several occult organizations, including the Golden Dawn, the A.'.A.'., and Ordo Templi Orientis.

He gained much notoriety during his lifetime, and was famously dubbed "The Wickedest Man In the World."

Biography

See Main Article: Aleister Crowley (Biography)

Edward Alexander Crowley was born in Royal Leamington Spa, Warwickshire, England, between 11:00pm and 12:00 am on 12 October 1875.

Thelema

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Main article: Thelema

The religious or mystical system which Crowley founded, into which most of his writings fall, he named Thelema. Thelema combines a radical form of philosophical libertarianism, akin in some ways to Nietzsche, with a mystical initiatory system derived in part from the Golden Dawn.

Chief among the precepts of Thelema is the sovereignty of the individual will: "Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law." Crowley's idea of will, however, is not simply the individual's desires or wishes, but also incorporates a sense of the person's destiny or greater purpose: what he termed "True Will." Much of the initiatory system of Thelema is focused on discovering and manifesting one's Will, culminating in what he termed Knowledge and Conversation with the Holy Guardian Angel (See: Thelemic mysticism). Much else is devoted to an Eastern-inspired dissolution of the individual ego, as a means to that end (see Choronzon).

The second precept of Thelema is "Love is the law, love under will" — and Crowley's meaning of "Love" is as complex as that of "Will". It is frequently sexual: Crowley's system, like elements of the Golden Dawn before him, sees the dichotomy and tension between the male and female as fundamental to existence, and sexual "magick" and metaphor form a significant part of Thelemic ritual. However, Love is also discussed as the Union of Opposites, which Crowley thought was the key to enlightenment.

Thelema draws on numerous older sources and, like many other new religious movements of its time, combines "Western" and "Eastern" traditions. Its chief Western influences include the Golden Dawn and elements of Freemasonry; Eastern influences include aspects of yoga, Taoism, Kabbalah and Tantra.

Chess

Crowley maintained that he learned chess from books by the age of six, and first competed on the Eastbourne College chess team (where he was taking classes in 1892). He says that he showed immediate competence, beating the handicapped local champion and later editing a chess column for the local newspaper, the Eastbourne Gazette, through which he criticised the Eastbourne team.

He later joined the university chess club at Cambridge, where, he says, he beat the president in his freshman year and practised two hours a day towards becoming a champion — "My one serious worldly ambition had been to become the champion of the world at chess" . His writings make it clear that he and his supporters thought he would achieve this goal:

I had snatched a game from Blackburne in simultaneous play some years before. I was being beaten in the Sicilian defence. The only chance was the sacrifice of a rook. I remember the grand old master coming round to my board and cocking his alcoholized eye cunningly at me. 'Hullo,' said he. 'Morphy come to town again!' I am not coxcomb enough to think that he could not have won the game, even after my brilliancy. I believe that his colossal generosity let me win to encourage a promising youngster.

I had frequently beaten Bird at Simpson's and when I got to Cambridge I made a savagely intense study of the game. In my second year I was president of the university and had beaten such first-rate amateurs as Gunston and Cole. Outside the master class, Atkins was my only acknowledged superior. I made mincemeat of the man who was champion of Scotland a few years later, even after I had given up the game. I spent over two hours a day in study and more than that in practice. I was assured on all hands that another year would see me a master myself.

However, he explained that he gave up his chess aspirations in 1897 at the age of 22, when attending a chess conference in Berlin:

But I had hardly entered the room where the masters were playing when I was seized with what may justly be described as a mystical experience. I seemed to be looking on at the tournament from outside myself. I saw the masters — one, shabby, snuffy and blear-eyed; another, in badly fitting would-be respectable shoddy; a third, a mere parody of humanity, and so on for the rest. These were the people to whose ranks I was seeking admission. "There, but for the grace of God, goes Aleister Crowley," I exclaimed to myself with disgust, and there and then I registered a vow never to play another serious game of chess. I perceived with preternatural lucidity that I had not alighted on this planet with the object of playing chess.

Mountaineering

In the summer of 1902, Oscar Eckenstein and Crowley undertook the first attempt to scale Chogo Ri (known in the west as K2), located in Pakistan. The Eckenstein-Crowley Expedition consisted of Eckenstein, Crowley, Guy Knowles, H. Pfannl, V. Wesseley, and Dr Jules Jacot-Guillarmod. During this trip he won a world record for his hardships on the Baltoro Glacier, sixty-eight straight days of glacial life.

In May 1905, he was approached by Dr Jules Jacot-Guillarmod (1868 - 1925) to accompany him on the first expedition to Kanchenjunga in Nepal, the third largest mountain in the world. Guillarmod was left to organize the personnel while Crowley left to get things ready in Darjeeling. On July 31 Guillarmod joined Crowley in Darjeeling, bringing with him two countrymen, Charles-Adolphe Reymond and Alexis Pache. Meanwhile, Crowley had recruited a local man, Alcesti C. Rigo de Righi, to act as Transport Manager. The team left Darjeeling on August 8, 1905, and used the Singalila Ridge approach to Kangchenjunga. At Chabanjong they ran into the rear of the 135 coolies who had been sent ahead on July 24 and July 25, who were carrying food rations for the team. The trek was led by Aleister Crowley, but four members of that party were killed in an avalanche. Some claims say they reached around 21,300 feet before turning back, however Crowley's autobiography claims they reached about 25,000 feet.

Crowley was sometimes famously scathing about other climbers, in particular O. G. Jones, whom he considered a risk-taking self-publicist, and his 'two photographers' (George and Ashley Abraham).

Science, magick, and sexuality

Crowley claimed to use a scientific method to study what people at the time called "spiritual" experiences, making "The Method of Science, the Aim of Religion" the catchphrase of his magazine The Equinox. By this he meant that mystical experiences should not be taken at face value, but critiqued and experimented with in order to arrive at their underlying religious meaning. In this he may be considered to foreshadow Dr. Timothy Leary, who at one point sought to apply the same method to psychedelic drug experiences. Yet like Leary's, Crowley's method has received little "scientific" attention outside the circle of Thelema's practitioners.

Crowley's magical and initiatory system has amongst its innermost reaches a set of teachings on sex "magick." He frequently expressed views about sex that were radical for his time, and published numerous poems and tracts combining pagan religious themes with sexual imagery both heterosexual and homosexual, as well as pederastic. One of his most notorious poetry collections, entitled White Stains (1898), was published in Amsterdam in 1898 and dealt specifically with sexually explicit subject matter. However, most of the hundred copies printed for the initial release were later seized and destroyed by British customs.

Sex Magick is the use of the sex act—or the energies, passions or arousal states it evokes—as a point upon which to focus the will or magical desire for effects in the non-sexual world. In this, Crowley was inspired by Paschal Beverly Randolph, an American Abolitionist, Spiritualist medium, and author of the mid-19th century, who wrote (in Eulis!, 1874) of using the "nuptive moment" (orgasm) as the time to make a "prayer" for events to occur.

Drugs

Crowley was a habitual drug user and also maintained a meticulous record of his drug-induced experiences with laudanum, opium, cocaine, hashish, alcohol, ether, and heroin. Allan Bennett, Crowley's mentor, was said to have "instructed Crowley in the magical use of drugs." While in Paris during the 1920s, Crowley also experimented with psychedelic substances.

Crowley's life as an addict influenced his 1922 novel, Diary of a Drug Fiend, but the fiction presented a hopeful outcome of rehabilitation and recovery by means of Magickal techniques and the exercise of True Will that the author himself could never achieve. At the time of his death he was addicted to opium, his narcotic of choice

Women

During March 1899 Crowley met, at one of the semi-public performances of MacGregor Mathers' Rites of Isis, an American soprano by the name of Susan Strong (3 August, 1870 - 11 March, 1946). Susan was the daughter of Dennis Strong, an American Congressman and mayor of Brooklyn. She had gone to the UK at the age of 21 and had enrolled in the Royal College of Music, London under the tutelage of the famous Hungarian musician Francis Korbay. Crowley met up with her again in London when she sang the part of Venus in Tannhäuser on 22 June 1899. A torrid romance followed during which Susan swore to divorce her American husband and devote herself to Crowley. However on her return to the US, around October 1899, she apparently cooled in ardour. Crowley followed her to New York City in June of the following year, but by then she was already on her way back to the UK to appear in performances of the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden. During 1900, while in Mexico City, Crowley experienced an epiphany, during which he transcribed his play, titled Tannhäuser. He attributed the inspiration of this play to his romance with Susan Strong.

Writings

Template:Crowleybooks

Main article: Works of Aleister Crowley

Crowley was a highly prolific writer, not only on the topic of Thelema and magick, but on philosophy, politics, and culture. He was also a published poet and playwright and left behind a countless number of personal letters and daily journal entries. He self-published many of his books, expending the majority of his inheritance to disseminate his views.

Within the subject of occultism Crowley wrote widely, penning commentaries on magick, the Tarot, Yoga, the Kabbalah, astrology, and numerous other subjects. He also wrote a Thelemic interpolation of the Tao Te Ching, based on earlier English translations since he knew little or no Chinese. Like the Golden Dawn mystics before him, Crowley evidently sought to comprehend the entire human religious and mystical experience in a single philosophy.

Some of his most influential books include:

He also edited and produced a series of publications in book form called The Equinox (subtitled "The Review of Scientific Illuminism"), which served as the voice of his magical order, the A.'.A.'.. Although the entire set is influential and remains one of the definitive works on occultism, some of the more notable issues include:

  • III:1 "The Blue Equinox" (largely regarding the structure of OTO)
  • III:3, The Equinox of the Gods (covering the events leading up to the writing of Liber Legis)
  • III:4, Eight Lectures on Yoga
  • III:5, The Book of Thoth (a full treatise on his Thoth Tarot)
  • III:6, Liber Aleph (An extended and elaborate commentary on Liber Legis in the form of short letters)
  • III:9, The Holy Books of Thelema (the "received" works of Crowley)

Crowley also wrote fiction and plays, most of which have not received significant notice outside of occult circles. Some of his fictional/theatrical works include:

Crowley also had a peculiar sense of humour. He wrote a polemic arguing against George Bernard Shaw's interpretation of the Gospels in his preface to Androcles and the Lion, which was edited by Francis King and published as Crowley on Christ, and shows him at his erudite and witty best. In his Magick, Book 4 he includes a chapter purporting to illuminate the Qabalistic significance of Mother Goose nursery rhymes. In re Humpty Dumpty, for instance, he recommends the occult authority "Ludovicus Carolus" -- better known as Lewis Carroll. In a footnote to the chapter he admits that he had invented the alleged meanings, to show that one can find occult "Truth" in everything. In The Book of Lies, the title to chapter 69 is given as "The Way to Succeed - and the Way to Suck Eggs!" a pun, as the chapter concerns the 69 sex position as a mystical act.

Crowley was also a published, if minor, poet. He wrote the 1929 Hymn to Pan , perhaps his most widely read and anthologized poem. Three pieces by Crowley, "The Quest ", "The Neophyte ", and "The Rose and the Cross ", appear in the 1917 collection The Oxford Book of English Mystical Verse. Crowley's unusual sense of humour is on display in White Stains , an 1898 collection of pornographic verse pretended to be "the literary remains of George Archibald Bishop, a neuropath of the Second Empire;" the volume is prefaced with a notice that says that " The Editor hopes that Mental Pathologists, for whose eyes alone this treatise is destined, will spare no precaution to prevent it falling into other hands."

Some of his published poetry includes:

  • Clouds Without Water. (1974).
  • White Stains. (1973).
  • The Star and the Garter. (1974).
  • Snowdrops From a Curate’s Garden. (1986).
  • Golden Twigs. (1988).
  • The Scented Garden of Abdullah the Satirist of Shiraz. (1991).
  • The Winged Beetle. (1992).

Prejudice

Crowley made numerous public expressions typically considered racist, nationalist, and sexist to his audience through the written word.

His sexism, in part, was influenced by his failed marriage. These feelings were further advanced by his experiences with pupils who abandoned their studies for women. Among his beliefs were that women, except "a few rare individuals," care most about having children and will conspire against their husbands if they lack children to devote themselves to. Furthermore, he claimed that their intentions were to force a man to abandon his life's work for their interests. He only found women "tolerable" when they served the role of solely helping a man in his life's work. However, he said that they were incapable of actually understanding the work. He also felt that women did not have individuality and were solely guided by their impulses.

Crowley made racist statements against the Chinese, specifically the lower classes, the Indians, the Italians, and the Jews. Crowley may have had other prejudices against people of various races, and his derogatory application of the term "nigger" to Indians and Italians suggests he had a prejudice against Africans as well.

His chauvinistic nationalism, expressed in the belief that the British military conquest of India had been won not by superior technology, but "by sheer moral superiority" may have been in tune with ideas concerning white supremacism that were held by the average British gentleman of his time, but in England during the era after World War I, public expressions concerning doctrines of racial purity, such as his claim that British "white women" should not intermarry with other races were generally associated with far-right extremists .

Crowley's anti-Semitism was disturbing enough to later editors of his works, that one of them, Israel Regardie, attempted to suppress it. In 777 and Other Qabalistic Writings of Aleister Crowley (Samuel Weiser, 1975), Regardie, a Jew, explained his complete excision of Crowley's anti-Semitic commentary on the Kabbalah in the 6th unnumbered page of his editorial "Introduction":

"I am ... omitting Crowley's Preface to the book. It is a nasty, malicious piece of writing, and does not do justice to the system with which he is dealing."

What Regardie had removed was Crowley's "Preface to Sephir Sephiroth", originally published in Equinox 1:8. Written in 1911, it contained a clear statement of Crowley's belief in the blood libel against the Jews:

"Human sacrifices are today still practised by the Jews of Eastern Europe, as is set forth at length by the late Sir Richard Burton in the MS. which the wealthy Jews of England have compassed heaven and earth to suppress, and evidenced by the ever-recurring Pogroms against which so senseless an outcry is made by those who live among those degenerate Jews who are at least not cannibals."

After defending the anti-Semitic pogroms then raging in Russia as a rational response to the danger of Jewish cannibalism, Crowley rhetorically asked how a system of value such as Qabala could come from "an entirely barbarous race, devoid of any spiritual pursuit": "Is it to such people, indeed, that we are to look for the highest and subtlest spiritual knowledge?" He answered his own questions by saying that the immorality of the source is not a valid critique of the material.

Despite his racist expressions, Crowley studied and promoted the mystical and magical teachings of some of the same ethnic groups he saw as inferior, in particular Indian yoga, Jewish Kabbalah and goetia, and the Chinese I Ching. He left no written account of why he accepted these spiritual teachings while simultaneously publishing denouncements of the people whose cultures had produced them.

Miscellany

  • He was extremely happy when he heard of the death of Queen Victoria.
  • One of his recommended techniques of training oneself in mental discipline: He encouraged his students to choose a commonly-used word, such as "I", and instructed them to cut themselves with a blade whenever they said it, for a pre-selected period such as one week.
  • Crowley also tried to mint a number of new terms instead of the established ones he felt inadequate. For example he spelled magic "magick" and renamed theurgy "high magick" and thaumaturgy "low magick". The reason for the spelling was to distinguish magick from sleight-of-hand "magic"; as well, Crowley had a particular fondness for the number 11, writing in Book of The Law, "My number is 11, as all their numbers who are of us."
  • "In World War I Aleister Crowley ingratiated himself with a Hermetic sect in order to reveal to the Americans that its head was a highly dangerous German agent. In World War II it was well known in British Intelligence that many leading Nazis were interested in the occult and especially in astrology. Crowley did some work for MI5, but his project for dropping occult information by leaflet on the enemy was rejected by the authorities." - Richard Deacon, Spyclopaedia

Crowley in popular culture

Main article: Aleister Crowley in popular culture

Crowley has exerted a significant and enduring influence in popular culture, from mentions in Ernest Hemingway novels, to tributes from rock musicians such as David Bowie, Jimmy Page, Ozzy Osbourne,Cradle of Filth and The Beatles (his face appeared on their album, Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band), to incorporation into L. Ron Hubbard's occult religions. Some appearances are "important," i.e., meaningful and widely promulgated. Others are simple homages or only locally known. Crowley remains a popular icon of libertines and those interested in the theory and practice of magick.

See also

Notes

  1. The term first appeared in 1928 in John Bull, a tabloid pictorial of the day
  2. (Sutin, "Do What Thou Wilt", p.33)Lawrence Sutin. Do What Thou Wilt: A Life of Aleister Crowley. ISBN 0312252439.
  3. (Confessions, p. 140)
  4. (Confessions, p. 140).
  5. (Confessions, p. 140).
  9. ["Do What Thou Wilt: A Life of Aleister Crowley" by Lawrence Sutin. (St. Martin's Press, 2000)]
  10. (Crowley Confessions p.254); Aleister Crowley. The Confessions of Aleister Crowley: An Autohagiography. ISBN 0140191895.
  11. (Crowley Confessions p. 96)
  12. (Crowley Magick Without Tears p. 254); Aleister Crowley. Magick Without Tears. ISBN 094140417X.
  13. (Crowley Confessions pp. 96-7)
  14. (Crowley Confessions pp. 471-4) "One cannot fraternize with the Chinese of the lower classes; one must treat them with the utmost contempt and callousness."
  15. (Crowley Confessions pp. 471-4)
  16. (Crowley Diary of a Drug Fiend Book I, Chapter 9) Aleister Crowley. Diary of a Drug Fiend. ISBN 0877281467.
  17. (Crowley Confessions pp. 762-3)
  18. (Crowley Confessions pp. 283-4)
  19. (Crowley Confessions pp. 283-4)
  20. Racism#United Kingdom (primarily England)
  21. (The MS was "Human Sacrifice among the Sephardine or Eastern Jews" by Sir Richard Francis Burton; it was thought so inflammatory and damaging to the author's reputation that it was never published, and in her will Burton's widow Isabel asked for it to be destroyed to protect her husband's name. and )


References

External links

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