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Aleister Crowley and Western Esotericism (Hardcover)
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Aleister Crowley and Western Esotericism (Hardcover)
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Henrik Bogdan and Martin P. Starr offer the first comprehensive
examination of one of the twentieth century's most distinctive
occult iconoclasts. Aleister Crowley (1875-1947) was a study in
contradictions. He was born into a Fundamentalist Christian family,
then educated at Cambridge where he experienced both an
intellectual liberation from his religious upbringing and a psychic
awakening that led him into the study of magic. He was a stock
figure in the tabloid press of his day, vilified during his life as
a traitor, drug addict and debaucher; yet he became known as the
perhaps most influential thinker in contemporary esotericism. The
practice of the occult arts was understood in the light of
contemporary developments in psychology, and its advocates, such as
William Butler Yeats, were among the intellectual avant-garde of
the modernist project. Crowley took a more drastic step and
declared himself the revelator of a new age of individualism.
Crowley's occult bricolage, Magick, was a thoroughly eclectic
combination of spiritual exercises drawing from Western European
ceremonial magical traditions as practiced in the
nineteenth-century Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn. Crowley also
pioneered in his inclusion of Indic sources for the parallel
disciplines of meditation and yoga. The summa of this journey of
self-liberation was harnessing the power of sexuality as a magical
discipline, an instance of the "sacrilization of the self " as
practiced in his co-masonic magical group, the Ordo Templi
Orientis. The religion Crowley created, Thelema, legitimated his
role as a charismatic revelator and herald of a new age of freedom
under the law of ''Do what thou wilt.'' The influence of Aleister
Crowley is not only to be found in contemporary esotericism-he was,
for instance, a major influence on Gerald Gardner and the modern
witchcraft movement-but can also be seen in the counter-culture
movement of the late 1960s and early 1970s, and in many forms of
alternative spirituality and popular culture. This anthology, which
features essays by leading scholars of Western esotericism across a
wide array of disciplines, provides much-needed insight into
Crowley's critical role in the study of western esotericism, new
religious movements, and sexuality.
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