10/29/2022 0 Comments Alseter owely![]() 9Ĭrowley’s A⸫A⸫ and OTO had few members during his lifetime, and his publications generally had modest distribution, including his introductory textbook Magick in Theory and Practice (1929), and his work on the tarot, The Book of Thoth (1944), born from more than two decades of Crowley wanting to craft a tarot deck of his own. #Alseter owely seriesHowever, a series of scandals prompted Crowley’s expulsion from Italy by order of Mussolini in 1923, and the commune died out a few years later. Over the following years, several of Crowley’s disciples would periodically reside at the Abbey. 8Īfter spending the WWI-years in the U.S., Crowley returned to Europe, where he established an “Abbey of Thelema” at Cefalù, Sicily, in 1920, together with his lover and disciple Leah Hirsig (1883–1975). Over time, he came to reshape OTO’s degree structure and rituals in accordance with Thelema, assuming international headship of the order after Reuss’s death. 7 Reuss made Crowley the head of OTO in Britain in 1912, and from 1914 onward, he began experimenting systematically with sexual magic. ![]() OTO claimed to possess the secret uniting all masonic and Hermetic systems, namely, that of sexual magic. 6 The second order within which Crowley assumed a formative role was Ordo Templi Orientis ( OTO), an initiatory fraternity led by the German socialist and singer Theodor Reuss (1855–1923). The first of these was A⸫A⸫, which Crowley co-founded with George Cecil Jones (1873–1960) in 1907, and whose curriculum combined ceremonial magic in the style of the Golden Dawn with yogic techniques and study of the “Holy Books of Thelema”. 5Ĭrowley’s magical teachings were structured within two initiatory orders. This new age was to be characterised by individual liberation and self-realisation, epitomised by the maxim: ‘Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law’, and the word Thelema (Greek for “will”), which became the title of Crowley’s religion. 4 The text announces the advent of a new epoch in the spiritual evolution of humanity, with Crowley, as the Beast, as its prophet. At Rose’s behest, Crowley over the course of April 8–10 penned The Book of the Law, which he claimed was dictated to him by a discarnate entity named Aiwass. ![]() This someone was later identified as the god Horus. On honeymoon in Cairo, Crowley sought to impress his wife Rose (née Kelly, 1874–1932) with some invocations, when she entered a trance state, proclaiming that someone awaited him. 3 1904 marked a turning point in Crowley’s occult career. Though Crowley’s involvement with the Golden Dawn ended in 1900, its degree structure and magical curriculum came to comprise one of two basic components of his system of Magick, the second consisting of yogic techniques he learned while travelling in India, Burma, and Ceylon. He joined the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn in 1898 and rose quickly through the grades. 2 Growing up in the dispensationalist, Evangelical movement the Plymouth Brethren, Crowley rebelled against his upbringing at an early age, identifying himself with the Great Beast 666 of Revelation. The details of Crowley’s life and magical career have been extensively explored elsewhere, but bear brief recapitulation. ![]() 1 Through these scholarly lenses, Crowley appears in many ways as a distillation of the cultural tensions and tendencies of his time. Departing from the sensationalised narratives characterising media reports on Crowley during his lifetime, academic scholarship from the 1990s on has, variously, addressed Crowley’s life and thought in the context of Victorian-Edwardian negotiations of sexuality and subjectivity the transmission of Yoga to the West and interwar political tensions, as well as a host of other topics. Openly bisexual at a time when consensual sexual acts between men were still criminalised, Crowley can be situated among sexual visionaries such as Edward Carpenter, Havelock Ellis, and D.H. Lawrence, who viewed erotic liberation as key to social transformation. ![]() Rejecting what he perceived as the repressive morals of his conservative, Christian upbringing, Crowley espoused a new religion centred on individual will, self-development, and liberation, which was heavily informed by the evolutionist perspectives that shaped late-nineteenth-century theories of religion as well as the occultism of his time. In recent decades, academic scholarship has increasingly recognised the British occultist, poet, and mountaineer Aleister Crowley (1875–1947) as a formative figure in the development of twentieth-century Western esotericism. ![]()
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