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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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