Varieties of Magical Experience - A. Crowley's View on Occult Practice

Varieties of Magical Experience: Aleister Crowley’s Views onOccult Practice

Marco Pasi

Magic, Ritual, and Witchcraft, Volume 6, Number 2, Winter 2011, pp.123-162 (Article)

Published by University of Pennsylvania PressDOI: 10.1353/mrw.2011.0018

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Varieties of Magical Experience:Aleister Crowley’s Views on Occult Practice

M A R C O PA S IUniversity of Amsterdam

It is undisputable that Aleister Crowley has a special place in the history ofoccultism.1 This is not only because of the enormous influence that he andhis works have had on the development of esoteric and new religious move-ments in the twentieth century.2 His importance also derives from the origi-nality and creativity of his thought, which renews and reinterprets themeaning of occult practices in a modern framework. He represents andencapsulates, almost paradigmatically, the attempts made by occultism as awhole to come to terms with traditional esoteric concepts in a world deeplytransformed culturally and socially by the impact of secularization and moder-nity.3

This historical phenomenon has taken on different forms. One of the most

A shorter version of this essay was presented at the 20th Congress of the InternationalAssociation for the History of Religions (IAHR), held in Toronto, August 15–20,2010, in a panel organized by Franz Winter and Karl Baier. I would like to thankClaire Fanger, Henrik Bogdan, Martin Starr, Karl Baier, as well as the anonymousreader involved in the reviewing procedure, for their comments on earlier drafts.

1. As I have explained elsewhere, by occultism I mean a specific current in thehistory of Western esotericism. See Marco Pasi, ‘‘Occultism,’’ in Kocku von Stuck-rad, ed., Dictionary of Religion (Leiden: Brill, 2005), v. 3, 1364–68. See also AntoineFaivre, ‘‘Occultism,’’ in Lindsay Jones, ed., Encyclopedia of Religion. Second Edition(Detroit: Macmillan Reference, 2005), v. 10, 6780–83.

2. Credit should be given to Massimo Introvigne for having been one of the firstscholars—if not the very first—to engage in a serious analysis of Crowley’s work andideas within the context of magical movements and modern Western esotericism. Seehis seminal work, Il cappello del mago. I nuovi movimenti magici, dallo spiritismo al satan-ismo (Milano: SugarCo, 1990), passim and esp. 268–79.

3. For a general analysis of the impact of secularization on modern Western esoter-icism see Wouter J. Hanegraaff in his New Age Religion and Western Culture: Esotericismin the Mirror of Secular Culture (Leiden: Brill, 1996). See especially 411–513.

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124 Magic, Ritual, and Witchcraft �Winter 2011

significant can be described as the psychologization and naturalization of eso-tericism, which is particularly visible between the second half of the nine-teenth and the first half of the twentieth centuries. This phenomenon hasattracted increasing interest from scholars in recent years, and some of them,such as Alex Owen, Wouter Hanegraaff, and Egil Asprem, have focused par-ticularly on the role played in it either by occultist magic in general or byAleister Crowley in particular.4

In this article I will first discuss Crowley’s attitudes toward psychic andspiritualist phenomena; then, I will focus on Crowley’s view of two aspectsof his occult practice, yoga and magic respectively. Obviously, it would farexceed the scope of this article to investigate these subjects exhaustively. Myaim here is more modestly to focus on the ways in which Crowley tried tonaturalize and psychologize traditional interpretations of spiritual practices,and therefore to show how his thought was significant in the process oftransformation of esotericism to which I have referred above. This will alsoallow me to address some related questions that may be particularly interest-ing. For instance, how radical was Crowley in his psychological and naturalis-tic interpretation of occult experiences? Did he invariably consider suchexperiences as the result of an alteration of consciousness, as he in some placesseems to imply, or was there a protected core where a ‘‘disenchanted’’ visionof occult experience would not be allowed? We will see that Crowley’s callas prophet of a new religion probably produced a cognitive obstacle thatprevented him from taking the process of psychologization to its logicalextreme.

Before I move on to my own analysis, however, I would like to positionmy work in relation to those authors who have addressed similar issues intheir recent works.

Wouter Hanegraaff has considered psychologization as one of the mainfactors in the transformation of magic from the nineteenth century on. Hecompares early modern magic to occultist magic on the basis of three aspects:theories, practices, and attempts at legitimation. At the end of his analysis

4. See Wouter J. Hanegraaff, ‘‘How Magic Survived the Disenchantment of theWorld,’’ Religion, 33 (2003): 357–80; Alex Owen, The Place of Enchantment: BritishOccultism and the Culture of the Modern (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press,2004), esp. chap. 6, ‘‘Aleister Crowley in the Desert’’ (186–220); and Egil Asprem,‘‘Magic Naturalized? Negotiating Science and Occult Experience in Aleister Crow-ley’s Scientific Illuminism,’’ Aries. Journal for the Study of Western Esotericism 8, no. 2(2008): 139–66. I should add that these aspects have also been one of the main fociof my own Ph.D. dissertation: La notion de magie dans le courant occultiste en Angleterre(1875–1947), Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes, Paris, 2004.

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125Pasi � Varieties of Magical Experience

Hanegraaff concludes that, between the nineteenth and the twentieth cen-tury, occultists profoundly transformed magic in order to ‘‘make sense’’ of itin the context of an increasingly secularized, disenchanted world.5 If onecan agree with the general conclusion that magic becomes increasingly (butcertainly not universally) psychologized in contemporary esotericism, it isalso important to note that Hanegraaff does not really engage with sourcesfrom the late nineteenth century or the early twentieth century. He focusesrather on later sources, especially from the second half of the twentieth cen-tury, such as Israel Regardie and R. G. Torrens.6 What we may see thereforeis the final stage of the process (at least for the time being), but not the processitself, because most of the intermediate phases are missing from the picture. Iwould contend that Crowley represents one of these intermediate phases,possibly even the most significant one at the turn of the twentieth century,and therefore deserves special attention.

Egil Asprem has contested some of Hanegraaff ’s conclusions, namely thatthe process of psychologization has served ‘‘to insulate magical practice fromrational critique, thereby legitimising it.’’7 As Hanegraaff had argued, as heargues, psychologization becomes just a process of ‘‘escapist’’ adaptationmade necessary for occultists by the cognitive pressures of an increasinglyrationalized, secularized culture. In other words, occultists create an alterna-tive, imaginary space (for instance the ‘‘astral plane’’) that is not affected bythe increasing disenchantment of daily reality. Asprem, however, takingCrowley as a convenient case study, sees no signs of an escapist psychologiz-ing attitude, but rather the opposite: an attempt to establish ‘‘scientific’’ con-ditions for an empirical testing of magic and its various claims.8 This he sees

5. At the end of his article Hanegraaff includes also a discussion on why magicremains important to some persons in modern societies, instead of disappearing alto-gether, as the idea of the disenchantment of the world—at least in its most simplisticform—would have it. His explanation makes use of the concept of ‘‘participation’’borrowed from Lucien Levy-Bruhl, but I do not need to dwell on it here because itis less relevant for the purpose of the present study.

6. See Hanegraaff, ‘‘How Magic Survived,’’ 365–71.7. Asprem, ‘‘Magic Naturalized?,’’ 142.8. It should be noted that Asprem considers the problem of naturalization of magic

in Crowley as being mostly related to the objectivization of experiences interpretedsubjectively as ‘‘magical’’ or ‘‘mystical’’ (ibid., 154–56). This means that Crowley,according to Asprem, tries to make his experiences ‘‘testable,’’ and therefore accessi-ble to intersubjective scrutiny and ‘‘scientific’’ analysis. In this sense, his attemptswould be intriguingly consonant with developments in contemporary experimentalpsychology (ibid., 154, n. 72). This point appears convincing to me, but covers alsoonly one aspect of the problem. In fact, Asprem seems to forget that in Crowley thereis an aspect of magic that is strongly empirical from the start, and that is not necessarily

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as a process of the ‘‘naturalization’’ of magic, rather than ‘‘psychologization’’in the sense used by Hanegraaff. He therefore suggests making a clear distinc-tion between naturalization and psychologization, and argues that Crowley,because he was not trying to escape from disenchantment into an alternative,nonempirical reality, can be better understood in the framework of the for-mer than of the latter.

In my view, Asprem has a point in his critique of Hanegraaff, but he failshistorically to contextualize the terms he is using. It is far from evident that asharp distinction between natural and psychological interpretations of meta-physical realities would have made much sense to authors writing around theturn of twentieth century. In the context of late Victorian Britain (the periodwhen Crowley was educated and that indelibly marked his intellectual devel-opment) the opposite of a naturalizing interpretation would not be a psycho-logical one, but a supernatural one. The main polemical target of scientificnaturalism was in fact supernaturalism in religious beliefs and theological dis-courses.9 Psychological interpretations of religious experience would thenrather be a particular aspect of naturalization, not something opposed to it,because they would be another way of reducing the supernatural qualities ofreligion to natural explanations.10 Furthermore, as I hope to show, it wouldbe even more difficult to apply this distinction to Crowley. We can observeseveral shifts in Crowley’s interpretation of magic and of other spiritual prac-

related to the problem of magical ‘‘experience.’’ This is rather related to instrumentalforms of magic, which aim at the acquisition of material gains, such as money, health,erotic success, and the like. There is no doubt that Crowley practiced this kind ofmagic as well (see Pasi, La notion de magie, 377–79). In this case, Asprem’s sophisti-cated methodological discussion would be less relevant, for the simple reason thatmagic is here empirically testable by default—at least in principle—on the basis of therelationship between stated goals and acquired results. Crowley consciously used hismagical diaries precisely for the purpose of ‘‘scientifically’’ testing the results of hismagical operations. It is noteworthy that Asprem, while referring to the significanceof Crowley’s magical diaries (ibid., 151–54), does not mention this important aspect.

9. For the concept of scientific naturalism in the context of late Victorian Britain,and its relationship to contemporary religion, see Frank Miller Turner, Between Scienceand Religion: The Reaction to Scientific Naturalism in Late Victorian England (New Haven,Conn.: Yale University Press, 1974), 8–37.

10. That at the turn of the twentieth century in England the process of naturaliza-tion of supernatural discourses was not an impersonal trend but a conscious goal of acultural agenda is exemplified, even in its very title, by such works as Frank Pod-more’s classic The Naturalisation of the Supernatural (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons,1908), which presents and discusses the main lines of research followed by the Societyfor Psychical Research since its foundation in 1882.

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tices. As we will see, he sometimes leans toward physiological, brain-basedinterpretations; sometimes toward psychological, mind-based interpretations;sometimes he mixes the two; and sometimes he just cannot let go of a moretraditional view of preternatural reality. He was therefore both naturalizingand psychologizing, depending on the moment in his intellectual trajectoryand the context in which he found himself.

It would be difficult to overestimate the importance of Alex Owen’s book,The Place of Enchantment, for the study of English occultism.11 The book hasbroken new ground and brought a number of fresh insights to bear on theambiguous relationship between occultism and modernity. A chapter of herbook is devoted to Crowley’s magic, and what she has to say about it is veryinteresting and relevant for my purpose, as it concerns the way in which theshaping of modern subjectivity can be related to occultist practices. Owen,however, is less interested in Crowley’s lifelong intellectual developmentthan in the psychological interpretation of a single episode, namely, theexploration of the Enochian system of magic that took place during a trip toAlgeria with his disciple and lover Victor B. Neuburg (1883–1940). What isstriking and, I would say, methodologically objectionable in Owen’s discus-sion is that she feels the need to engage in a spiritual assessment of Crowley’sexperience, positing that his magical work in the Sahara was ‘‘fatallyflawed.’’12 She also claims that Crowley’s story shows how ‘‘undisciplinedpsychologized magic in the hands of the ill-prepared could lead to personaldisintegration.’’13 It is not entirely clear what is meant by ‘‘psychologizedmagic’’ here, since Crowley’s own psychologizing discourse does not enterinto Owen’s analysis. More seriously, one wonders what kind of standardshe is using in order to determine whether Crowley’s magical or initiaticexperiences were successful or not. Furthermore, and independently fromthe methodological problem that I see here, it is hard to resist the idea thatCrowley’s evil reputation may have colored Owen’s assessment of his magicalachievements.

crowley’s attitudes toward psychic and spiritualist phenomena

When occultists offered new interpretations of occult practices, for themost part they were trying to make these practices understandable andacceptable to modern audiences.14 The conflict between religion and science

11. See above, n. 4.12. Owen, The Place of Enchantment, 219.13. Ibid., 187.14. This process corresponds partly to what Olav Hammer has described in terms

of ‘‘discursive strategies’’ within Western esotericism. See his Claiming Knowledge:

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was perceived during the second half of the nineteenth century as of supremeimportance for the destiny of human culture. For those who shared the idealsof positivism and scientific naturalism, traditional dogmatic religion had agrip on society that would sooner or later be broken as progress dispelled itssuperstitions and misconceptions. This ideology of progress as an emancipa-tion from the naiveties of the past had many implications on various social,cultural, and even political levels (for instance, in European colonial enter-prises, which reached their peak in the same period). Occultists were ofcourse not impermeable to the influence of these all-pervading ideologies,and it is no wonder that we find the latter absorbed and expressed particularlyby persons who were at one point or another part of the establishment thatproduced them. This is clearly the case with Aleister Crowley, in whoseformative years the experience of education at Cambridge University playeda crucial role.15 The direction that Crowley and other occultists took in orderto make sense of their occult endeavors was predictably in line with thedevelopments of late-nineteenth-century science, as far as the interpretationsof religious and spiritualist phenomena were concerned. It is in fact possibleto observe occultists like Crowley, around the turn of the twentieth century,beginning to be influenced by, or sometimes even anticipating, new dis-courses emerging in the field of psychology, of which the most importantwere psychical research on the one hand and psychoanalysis on the other.

In Crowley’s case, this interest in new psychological theories was, to besure, also related to his intense use of psychoactive substances throughout hislife, often in a ritualized, magical context.16 In this field he was an experi-menter, and it could well be said that some of his experiments have a certainhistorical value. He was one of the first westerners, for instance, to experi-ment systematically with peyote (then called Anhalonium lewinii) in the con-text of spiritual practices.17 And there is reason to believe that he introducedAldous Huxley to the use of mescaline in Berlin in the early 1930s.18 This

Strategies of Epistemology from Theosophy to the New Age (Leiden: Brill, 2001), esp.42–45.

15. I have discussed this aspect in my ‘‘L’anticristianesimo in Aleister Crowley,’’in PierLuigi Zoccatelli, ed., Aleister Crowley: Un mago a Cefalu (Roma: Edizioni Me-diterranee, 1998), 47–51.

16. See the anthology of drug-related writings by Crowley: Israel Regardie, ed.,Roll Away the Stone (North Hollywood, Calif.: Newcastle Publishing, 1994). See alsoStephen Snelders, ‘‘Hasjiesj en de Heilige Beschermengel. Over westers occultismeen drugs,’’ Bres, 216 (Oct.–Nov. 2002): 89–103.

17. Mike Jay, Emperors of Dreams: Drugs in the Nineteenth Century (Sawtry: Dedalus,2000), 216.

18. Marco Pasi, Aleister Crowley und die Versuchung der Politik (Graz: Ares Verlag,

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episode, and more generally Crowley’s approach to the use of drugs, partlyexplains why he became a sort of countercultural icon during the psychedelicera of the 1960s, influencing such important figures as Timothy Leary and,more prosaically, ending up with his face (in the company of Aldous Huxleyhimself ) on the sleeve of the Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Bandalbum.

It is clear that Crowley used these substances consistently in order to alterhis consciousness and that this alteration was perceived to offer meaningfulspiritual insights. The correlation made between this kind of alteration andthe one produced through certain ‘‘occult’’ practices19 was particularly impor-tant for him and was the result of personal reflections and experimentationsthat went on during most of his life. But of course in order to relate all theseforms of alteration of consciousness to each other, and to attribute to them aspiritual/magical meaning, Crowley needed some pertinent theories con-cerning the human mind and/or the human brain. In the rest of this articlewe are going have a closer look at them.

As has been remarked by Wouter Hanegraaff, the psychologization of eso-tericism is a development that begins with F. A. Mesmer’s discovery of animalmagnetism and runs through the whole of the nineteenth century.20 On theother hand, Ann Taves has shown how, during the same period, those who‘‘offered naturalistic or secularizing explanations’’ of religious experienceswere not necessarily ‘‘critics’’ or outsiders to religion.21 In some cases in fact,such as in spiritualism, the ‘‘dominant tendency to dichotomize religiousexperience and naturalistic explanation’’ was actually challenged.22 Therefore,naturalistic explanations of religious experiences were not necessarily under-stood as incompatible with their religious meaning. The occultist movement

2006), 52–53, n. 80. This is the German translation of my book originally publishedin Italian: Aleister Crowley e la tentazione della politica (Milano: FrancoAngeli, 1999).Because the book has been revised and expanded for the German translation, this isthe edition I will be referring to throughout the present article. An English edition,titled Aleister Crowley and the Temptation of Politics, is now in preparation, and will bepublished by Equinox Publishing in 2012.

19. In which, as is well known, ceremonial magic and yoga featured prominently.With respect to yoga, the techniques he learned were based on traditional forms ofbreathing, bodily postures, concentration, and meditation, as taught to him in Ceylonin the early years of the century. I will return to this aspect below.

20. Cf. Hanegraaff, New Age Religion, 482–84. Hanegraaff refers there in particularto the works of Robert C. Fuller.

21. Ann Taves, Fits, Trances & Visions. Experiencing Religion and Explaining Experi-ence from Wesley to James (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1999), 3.

22. Ibid., 3.

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of the late nineteenth century takes a similar approach. In this case, as withspiritualism, the underlying rationale is the necessity of a reconciliationbetween science and religion. The attempt at a reconciliation between thesetwo fields, perceived as increasingly distant, if not radically opposed to eachother, has been in fact indicated as one of the fundamental characteristics ofoccultism.23 But there is something more specific in what takes place at theturn of the twentieth century, when new dynamic psychological theories arebeing developed and popularized. The interest of Crowley’s approach lies inthe fact that, being acquainted with these developments, he tries to applythem to his own understanding of magical and spiritual practices. With him,the psychologization of esotericism, and more specifically of magic and otherrelated practices, takes a new direction.24

One of the interesting aspects of Crowley’s psychological interpretations isthe clear influence of William James’s famous classic The Varieties of ReligiousExperience, originally published in 1902. This book seems to have played asignificant role in the way Crowley’s perception of magical experiences tookshape. In several of his works Crowley refers to James’s book.25 He seems tohave been particularly interested in the distinction made by James between‘‘once-born’’ and ‘‘twice-born’’ types of persons, and their respective attitudetoward religion.26 James took the distinction from the classical scholar and

23. For an overview that addresses also this aspect, see Pasi, ‘‘Occultism.’’24. In a number of previous works I have already touched upon subjects related

to these issues, and I have tried to offer some elements toward a better assessment ofthis important element in Crowley’s work. See in particular my ‘‘Aleister Crowley elo Yoga,’’ Arkete. Esoterismo Sacralita Gnosi 2, no. 1 (2001): 77–87; and La notion demagie, 341–79.

25. Perhaps the most obvious example of the influence of William James’s workon Crowley and his circle of disciples can be found in the first part of ‘‘The Templeof Solomon the King.’’ This was a serialized account of Crowley’s spiritual careercompiled by his disciple J. F. C. Fuller (surely under close supervision by Crowley)and published in several issues of Crowley’s periodical The Equinox. Significantly, theseries opens with a long quotation from James’s Varieties of Religious Experience, andthe first pages of the very first installment are full of references to, and quotationsfrom, James’s book. See [John Frederick Charles Fuller and Aleister Crowley], ‘‘TheTemple of Solomon the King (Book I),’’ The Equinox 1, no. 1 (1909): 141–57. OnCrowley’s relationship with Fuller, see my Aleister Crowley und die Versuchung der Poli-tik, 139–51.

26. See for instance The Master Therion [Aleister Crowley], Magick in Theory andPractice, ([London–Paris]: published for subscribers only, [1929–30]), 30, and 50, n. 1;and the unabridged chapters from Crowley’s autobiography, The Confessions, pub-lished as appendix IX of Aleister Crowley, Magick. Liber ABA. Book Four. Parts I–IV(York Beach, Maine: Weiser Books, 1997), 702. The latter title is a very useful edition

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religious thinker Francis W. Newman (1805–97), brother of the morefamous Cardinal John Henry Newman (1801–90).27 James describes once-born persons as having a naively optimistic worldview. They tend to thinkthat God is invariably benevolent and the world essentially good. As a conse-quence, they do not perceive the operating presence of a metaphysical princi-ple of evil in the world. Their religious views are best embodied in all formsof ‘‘natural’’ religion. Twice-born persons have, on the other hand, an oppo-site worldview, based on pessimism. They acknowledge the presence of evilin the world and fear its consequences, variously represented by sin, universalsuffering, and the like. As religious examples of this psychological type Jamesmentions ‘‘Brahmans, Buddhists, Christians, Mohameddans,’’ all ‘‘twice-bornpeople whose religion is non-naturalistic,’’ with their ‘‘creeds of mysticismand renunciation.’’28 Crowley claims that Thelema, the new religion foundedby him, transcends the two psychological attitudes in a higher synthesis,offering both the spontaneity of religious naturalism and the depth of a moremetaphysical approach to reality. More interestingly for our purpose here,Crowley was also interested in what James had to say about yoga, on the onehand, and about the experiences of religious ‘‘geniuses,’’ that is to say found-ers of religion, on the other. I will return to this aspect.

Another point of interest is that Crowley was also acquainted with theactivities of the Society for Psychical Research and with some of its members.In this respect there is an interesting detail in Crowley’s biography that shouldbe taken into account. In 1895 Crowley was admitted as an undergraduatestudent to Trinity College in Cambridge, where he would spend the nextthree years. In the end he did not get a degree, but, as I have argued else-where, the period spent in Cambridge was extremely important for him andleft an indelible mark on his intellectual development.29 However, Trinity

of the texts associated with Crowley’s Book Four project, which includes Magick inTheory and Practice, the two earlier texts that Crowley had published under the title ofBook Four in 1912 and 1913 (to which I will return), and other relevant material. Theedition has been prepared by William Breeze under the pseudonym of HymenaeusBeta, which is his name as current international head of the Ordo Templi Orientis(O.T.O.). His introduction and notes offer a wealth of useful factual informationabout the texts and their history.

27. See William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in HumanNature (New York: Longmans, Green and Co., 1920), 80–81.

28. Ibid., 143.29. See my ‘‘L’anticristianesimo in Aleister Crowley.’’ To give but one example,

in my Aleister Crowley und die Versuchung der Politik, 133, n. 214, I have noted that thefamous anthropologist James G. Frazer, whose work deeply influenced Crowley, wasa fellow of Trinity when Crowley was a student there.

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College was not only one of the oldest and most prestigious colleges of theUniversity of Cambridge; it was also a place closely connected with the Soci-ety for Psychical Research (SPR). Three of its most distinguished founders,Henry Sidgwick, Frederic Myers, and Edmund Gurney were in fact fellowsof that college.30 Sidgwick and Myers died in 1900 and 1901, respectively(Gurney had died even earlier, in 1888), and we do not know if Crowleyever met them personally. But he was acquainted at least with other youngermembers of the SPR, such as Everard Feilding (1867–1936), who served assecretary of the Society between 1903 and 1920, and Hereward Carrington(1880–1958), author of a popular book on the projection of the astral body.31

According to Crowley’s biographer R. Kaczynski, Feilding was so close toCrowley that he even signed the oath of the probationer of his occult order,the A�A�.32 Furthermore, Crowley depicted Feilding in the character ofLord Anthony Bowling in his novel Moonchild. Carrington, on the otherhand, wrote a small booklet where he recollected his memories of Crowley.It makes for interesting reading, though it is wildly inaccurate on a numberof biographical details.33 In 1908 Feilding and Carrington were sent on behalfof the SPR to investigate the famous Italian medium Eusapia Palladino. Thereport of this investigation was published one year later, and it was positivetoward the medium’s claims.34 In his autobiography, Crowley tells how hestudied the book carefully and took the first available opportunity, during astay in Italy in 1911–12, to pay a visit to Palladino and test her during aseance.35 It is interesting to note that Crowley seems to be much more

30. On the early history of the SPR and of its founders, see Alan Gauld, TheFounders of Psychical Research (New York: Schocken Books, 1968); Janet Oppenheim,The Other World: Spiritualism and Psychical Research in England 1850–1914 (Cam-bridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985); Turner, Between Science and Religion; andGermana Pareti, La tentazione dell’occulto: Scienza ed esoterismo nell’eta vittoriana (Torino:Bollati Boringhieri, 1990).

31. Hereward Carrington and Sylvan J. Muldoon, The Projection of the Astral Body(London: Rider & Co., 1929). On Crowley’s relationship with psychical research,and more particularly with Feilding and Carrington, see also Asprem, ‘‘Magic Natu-ralized?,’’ 148–49.

32. Richard Kaczynski, Perdurabo: The Life of Aleister Crowley (Berkeley, Calif.:North Atlantic Books, 2010), 185–88.

33. Hereward Carrington, Strange People I Have Known (Girard, Kans.: Haldeman-Julius Publications, [c1950]).

34. Hereward Carrington, Eusapia Palladino and Her Phenomena, (New York: B.W.Dodge & Company, 1909).

35. Aleister Crowley, The Confessions of Aleister Crowley: An Autohagiography (Lon-don: Arkana, 1989), 681–82.

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sceptical about the phenomena produced by Palladino than the two profes-sional psychical researchers. In the end he comes to the conclusion that allthe extraordinary phenomena he had witnessed during the seance were veryprobably the result of tricks and sleight of hand. In the same pages Crowleyalso describes a few experiences he has had with other mediums and offerssome general considerations about psychical research.36 His attitude is on thewhole negative. Not only has he failed to be convinced about the authentic-ity of the presumed psychic or spiritualist phenomena by any report he hasread or any seance he has witnessed, but he also elaborates a theory to explainwhy so many men of science, often with an impeccable reputation of sceptic-ism, ‘‘convert’’ at some point in their lives to belief in spiritualist phenomena.According to Crowley there is a pattern in the fact that this conversion oftentakes place at a certain age, when ‘‘sexual power begins to decline.’’37 Inother words, psychical researchers are subject to credulity because theirdeclining vital energies impair their judgment.

It is evident that Crowley’s scepticism toward the phenomena investigatedby the SPR was somehow connected to the polemics that had dividedoccultists and spiritualists since the two movements had come into exis-tence.38 The common polemical argument of the occultists had been to con-test the interpretation of spiritualist phenomena—particularly concerning theidentity of the entities supposedly involved in the seances—but not theirpreternatural status. Crowley, however, is taking a step further here anddecides to be even more radical in denying the very authenticity of the phe-nomena.

CROWLEY’S INTERPRETATION OF YOGA

Crowley’s naturalist interpretation of preternatural phenomena was not lim-ited to spiritualism or to psychical research. As I have already remarked, heapplied psychological and naturalistic interpretations also to his own spiritualpractices. In order to assess this aspect we are now going to focus on hisapproach to yoga on the one hand and to magic on the other hand.

Crowley ‘‘discovered’’ yoga ‘‘on the spot,’’ that is to say in India, or moreprecisely in Ceylon (nowadays Sri Lanka), in 1901. This was still an uncom-mon thing to do for a European in those times.39 All his subsequent work

36. Ibid., 681–86.37. Ibid., 685.38. On this issue, which still requires further investigation, see Oppenheim, The

Other World, 158–97.39. For a history of the ‘‘discovery’’ of yoga in the West and its relationship with

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was influenced by these experiences and yoga became an important aspect ofCrowley’s practical teachings.40

Crowley was only twenty-six when he went to India for the first time. Inearly August 1901, he was in Ceylon.41 By then, he had been traveling forsome months. In the spring of 1900 there had been the famous conflict inthe Order of the Golden Dawn, in which MacGregor Mathers’s leadershipin the order had been contested by a group of prominent members. Crowleyhad been involved in this conflict, siding with Mathers, and had been one ofthe protagonists in the dramatic events that had brought about chaos anddissension in this occultist order.42 In the aftermath, disappointed and disori-ented, he had decided to leave England for a long trip, one that would lastmore than a year.

His first destination was Mexico, which he reached in July 1900. Heremained in this country for several months and during his stay was joinedby his friend Oscar Eckenstein (1859–1921). Eckenstein was a railway engi-neer with a passion for mountaineering.43 He and Crowley had already

western esotericism, see Karl Baier, Meditation und Moderne. Zur Genese eines Kernbere-ichs moderner Spiritualitat in der Wechselwirkung zwischen Westeuropa, Nordamerika undAsien, 2 vols. (Wurzburg: Konigshausen & Neumann, 2009); and Elizabeth DeMichelis, A History of Modern Yoga: Patanjali and Western Esotericism (London: Contin-uum, 2004). For the developments in France, see Silvia Ceccomori, Cent ans de Yogaen France (Paris: Edidit, 2001). For Germany, see Walter Schmidt, Yoga in Deutschland:Verbreitung, Motive, Hintegrunde (Stuttgart: Kreuz-Verlag, 1967); and Christian Fuchs,Yoga in Deutschland. Rezeption—Organisation—Typologie (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer Ver-lag, 1990).

40. Crowley published two main works on yoga: Frater Perdurabo [AleisterCrowley] and Soror Virakam [Mary d’Este Sturges], Book Four. Part I. Meditation. TheWay of Attainment of Genius or Godhead considered as a Development of the Human Brain(London: Weiland & Co., 1912); and Mahatma Guru Sri Paramahansa Shivaji [Aleis-ter Crowley], Eight Lessons on Yoga (London: O.T.O., 1939). As will be clear frommy discussion below, the subtitle of Part I of Book Four is already indicative of Crow-ley’s approach to the interpretation of spiritual experiences.

41. On the period Crowley spent in Ceylon, see Crowley, The Confessions,232–54; [J. F. C. Fuller and A. Crowley], ‘‘The Temple of Solomon the King. IV,’’The Equinox 1, no. 4 (1910): 150–96; Israel Regardie, The Eye in the Triangle: AnInterpretation of Aleister Crowley (Phoenix, Ariz.: New Falcon Publications, 1993),229–65; Lawrence Sutin, Do What Thou Wilt: A Life of Aleister Crowley (New York:St. Martin’s Press, 2000), 90–95; Kaczynski, Perdurabo, 93–96.

42. Ellic Howe, The Magicians of the Golden Dawn: A Documentary History of aMagical Order 1887–1923 (Wellingborough: The Aquarian Press, 1985), chaps. 14and 15.

43. On Eckenstein, see the section ‘‘The Origins of Bouldering’’ in John Gill’swebsite, available at www128.pair.com/r3d4k7/Bouldering_History1.01.html (ac-

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climbed several peaks together in the Alps, and in Mexico they made furtherascents of some of the highest mountains in the country. This was also meantas training for an expedition the two were planning to the mountains ofHimalaya. From Crowley’s autobiography we learn that he admired Eck-enstein greatly, and that he considered him as his mentor in serious moun-taineering. But, interestingly enough, climbing was not the only field inwhich Crowley learned something from Eckenstein. In his autobiography infact, Crowley writes that his friend, during their stay in Mexico, taught hima basic technique of concentration, which consisted in visualizing an objectand trying to keep the image as steady as possible in one’s mind.44 The pur-pose was of course to achieve a certain control over the thought processes.Unfortunately, Crowley does not say where Eckenstein had learned this tech-nique, even if he makes it clear that his mentor had nothing to do with magic,and that he even made fun of his younger friend for his occult interests.45 Butit is interesting to note that, according to a source independent from Crow-ley, Eckenstein was particularly interested in telepathy.46 Crowley started fol-lowing the training suggested by his older friend.47 It is evident that theseearly experiments prepared the ground for his encounter with yoga a fewmonths later.

After having parted from Eckenstein and having left Mexico, Crowleycrossed the Pacific with the intention of reaching another friend, Allan Ben-nett (1872–1923), who had been a fellow member of the Golden Dawn andhad shared a flat with him in London for some time.48 Bennett had alsoplayed the role of mentor for Crowley, but this time more specifically inmagical matters, and it is with him that Crowley had begun experimentingwith drugs in relation to ceremonial magic. Bennett had left England a year

cessed June 5, 2011). See also the book version: John Gill, The Origins of Bouldering.An Informal Survey of the Sport from the Late 1800s to the 1960s and Beyond (n.p.: JohnGill—Blurb, 2008), 9–28.

44. See Crowley, The Confessions, 213–14.45. It should be noted that Eckenstein had spent a period in India, because he had

been a member of the Conway expedition, which made a first attempt at climbingK2 in 1892.

46. See Gill, ‘‘The Origins of Bouldering’’; and Gill, The Origins of Bouldering, 12.See also Crowley, The Confessions, 159 and 213.

47. An account of these experiments can be found in [Fuller and Crowley], ‘‘TheTemple of Solomon the King. IV,’’ 107–24. Eckenstein is indicated by the initials‘‘D.A.’’.

48. On Bennett, see John L. Crow, The White Knight in the Yellow Robe: AllanBennett’s Search for Truth (Research Master’s Thesis, University of Amsterdam), 2009.

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before on account of his bad health and had retired to Ceylon, where he hadconverted to Buddhism and had begun studying yoga with a native master.After his move to Ceylon, Bennett lost any interest in the practice of Westernritual magic as he had learned it in the Order of the Golden Dawn. Crowley’sdisappointment with the recent dramatic events in the order had also madehim lose his enthusiasm for magic and prepared him for new spiritual adven-tures.

Bennett’s yoga instructor was the Shaivite Sri Parananda Ramanathan(1851–1930), a highly respected figure in the island who had been appointedsolicitor general of Ceylon under British rule.49 Upon his arrival, Crowleyimmediately joined Bennett in his yogic exercises and experiments. Bothmen were determined, to use Crowley’s words, to ‘‘work out the Easternsystems under an Eastern sky and by Eastern methods alone.’’50 Crowleyconvinced Bennett to rent a bungalow in Kandy, in the inner part of theisland, and to continue their practices on their own. The techniques thatCrowley was practicing with in that period were mostly taken from ‘‘classi-cal’’ yoga, fixed in Patanjali’s principles. His daily exercises included asana,that is, holding a particular position with the body until perfect immobilityis achieved; pranayama, that is, techniques of breath control; dharana, that is,techniques of thought control that allow one to arrest the flow of thinking atwill. Crowley claims that in early October, after two full months of continu-ous training, he achieved one of the highest stages of yogic realization, thatis, dhyana. According to Patanjali, only samadhi is higher than dhyana, and canbe considered as the ultimate goal of yoga, leading to liberation from thehuman condition. What Crowley perceived as the experience of dhyana wasextremely important for him. According to Israel Regardie, it was ‘‘the mostimportant spiritual result that he had achieved thus far.’’51 However, afterthis early success Crowley discontinued his training, and toward the end ofNovember he left Ceylon. He wanted to travel up north in India, where hehad an appointment with Eckenstein for organizing a new expedition to K2.

An interesting aspect of Crowley’s direct experience of yoga is the factthat, during his apprenticeship, he kept a diary, which for him had the func-

49. It is interesting to note that Ramanathan belonged to a very prominent familyin Ceylon and that he was closely related to the family of the perennialist philosopherand art historian Ananda K. Coomaraswamy, whom Crowley befriended (and laterreviled) during his stay in the United States, in the First World War period. Ramana-than was also closely associated with the president of the Theosophical Society Colo-nel H. S. Olcott during the latter’s stay in Ceylon. See Kaczynski, Perdurabo, 93.

50. [Fuller and Crowley], ‘‘The Temple of Solomon the King. IV,’’ 123.51. Regardie, The Eye in the Triangle, 249.

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tion of a scientific record. During the months spent in Ceylon he carefullyrecorded all his exercises, including his physical and mental condition whenperformed, and the result obtained. This is a practice that he had learnedduring his membership in the Golden Dawn and that he continued using forthe rest of his life. For him, his spiritual and magical work always had an‘‘experimental’’ aspect that was not far removed in principle from that of themembers of the SPR.

It does not appear that Crowley took up the systematic practice of yogaagain in the following years, at least not with the same intensity as during the‘‘retreat’’ in Ceylon, although it is evident that the experiences of that periodhad a profound influence on him. Later on, he claimed to have achievedsamadhi as well, and therefore to have completed the path of realizationaccording to the canon of classical yoga, even if this achievement was notapparently related to the practice of yoga, but rather to ceremonial magic.

There is an aspect that should be kept in mind when discussing the rela-tionship of yoga and magic in Crowley.52 His experience of dhyana, and laterof samadhi, was interpreted by him as belonging to the same spiritual path ashis initiation in the Golden Dawn and his practice of magic.53 This meansthat Crowley continued to apply the same basic initiatic structure that he hadfound in the Golden Dawn to all his spiritual experiences. Everything fittedinto this paradigm, and was interpreted thereby. Being unable to progressfurther on that initiatic structure through formal rituals of initiation, becausehe had distanced himself from the order, he went on claiming the subsequentdegrees for himself on the basis of the experiences he was having. Crowleysaw a sort of continuity and consistency throughout his spiritual career; theimportance and meaning that these experiences had from his own personalperspective cannot be well understood apart from this.

On the other hand, this particular vision of his spiritual career did notprevent him from interpreting these experiences also from a perspective basedon psychology. In his autobiography, he writes that in the early months of1904 he was with his wife Rose, whom he had married a few months before,

52. See ibid., 253.53. The first systematic attempt made by Crowley to equate eastern doctrines with

western magic is made in Berashith, which dates back to 1903: Abhavananda [AleisterCrowley], Berashith. An Essay in Ontology. With some Remarks on Ceremonial Magic(Paris: Privately printed for the Sangha of the West, 1903). Then he expanded furtheron the topic in the first two parts of Book Four, published in 1912 and 1913 respec-tively: [Crowley and d’Este Sturges], Book Four. Part I; and Frater Perdurabo [AleisterCrowley] and Soror Virakam [Mary d’Este Sturges], Book Four. Part II—Magick (Lon-don: Wieland & Co., [1913]). See also Pasi, La notion de magie, 348–49 and 355–57.

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on a ship that was taking them from Colombo to Egypt during their honey-moon. This was shortly before the events that took place in Cairo in thespring of the same year and that led him to the revelation of the Book of theLaw. On the ship, he met the English psychiatrist Henry Maudsley (1835–1918), who had published a series of books on the relation between bodyand mind, including the possibility of supernatural aspects, from a strictlymaterialist perspective.54 Interestingly, Maudsley had also studied phenomenarelated to spiritualism and mysticism, and had published an article on Swe-denborg, in which he concluded that the Swedish visionary had suffered from‘‘messianic psychosis,’’ which he considered to be a ‘‘monomania,’’ possiblydue to epilepsy.55 According to John Johnson, the article was severely criti-cized by the Swedenborgian community, which perhaps led Maudsley toabstain from further reference to Swedenborg in his later works.56 The epi-sode is interesting, however, because it shows the kind of understanding thatMaudsley would have of mystical and spiritual phenomena in general, obvi-ously based on their reduction to psychopathology. Apparently, Crowley wasless than disturbed by Maudsley’s ideas on mysticism. In fact, he jumped onthe opportunity offered by this casual encounter and approached Maudsley

54. The most famous among them was Body and Mind: An Inquiry into their Connec-tion and Mutual Influence (London: Macmillan & Co., 1870). On the explanation ofalleged supernatural aspects see his Natural Causes and Supernatural Seemings (London:Kegan Paul, Trench & Co., 1887). On Maudsley, see Aubrey Lewis, ‘‘The Twenty-Fifth Maudsley Lecture. Henry Maudsley: His Work and Influence,’’ Journal of MentalScience 97, no. 407 (1951): 259–77; Michael Collie, Henry Maudsley: Victorian Psychia-trist. A Bibliographical Study (Winchester: St Paul’s Bibliographies, 1988); and TrevorTurner, ‘‘Henry Maudsley: Psychiatrist, Philosopher and Entrepreneur,’’ PsychologicalMedicine 18, no. 3 (Aug. 1988): 551–74. On Maudsley and Crowley, see Justin Saus-man, ‘‘Science, Drugs and Occultism: Aleister Crowley, Henry Maudsley and Late-nineteenth Century Degeneration Theories,’’ Journal of Literature and Science 1, no. 1(2007): 40–54; and Asprem, ‘‘Magic Naturalized?,’’ 147–48.

55. Henry Maudsley, ‘‘Emanuel Swedenborg,’’ Journal of Mental Science 15 (1869):169–96. See also John Johnson, ‘‘Henry Maudsley on Swedenborg’s Messianic Psy-chosis,’’ The British Journal of Psychiatry 165 (1994): 690–91; and the critical responseby Kurt Simons, ‘‘ ‘Henry Maudsley on Swedenborg’s Messianic Psychosis’: SomeComments,’’ The New Philosophy 101 (1998): 113–17. On Maudsley’s views on spiri-tualism as strictly related to forms of ‘‘lunacy,’’ and his medical treatment of a spiritual-ist medium along these lines, see Alex Owen, The Darkened Room. Women, Power andSpiritualism in Late Victorian England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press,1990), 144–48 and 183–92.

56. Johnson, ‘‘Henry Maudsley,’’ 690. Simons however contests this, pointing outthat Johnson omits mentioning his sources for this episode. See Simons, ‘‘ ‘HenryMaudsley,’ ’’ 113.

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with the intention of discussing the subject of yoga with him. Crowley’saccount in the Confessions deserves to be quoted in full:

We talked about Dhyana. I was quite sure that the attainment of this state, and afortiori of Samadhi, meant that they remove the inhibitions which repress the mani-festations of genius, or (practically the same thing in other words) enable to tap theenergy of the universe. Now, Samadhi, whatever it is, is at least a state of mind exactlyas are deep thought, anger, sleep, intoxication and melancholia. Very good. Any stateof mind is accompanied by corresponding states of the body. Lesions of the substanceof the brain, disturbances of the blood supply, and so on, are observed in apparentlynecessary relation to these spiritual states. Furthermore, we already know that certainspiritual or mental conditions may be induced by acting on physico- and chemico-physiological conditions. For instance, we can make a man hilarious, angry or whatnot by giving him whisky. We can induce sleep by administering such drugs as vero-nal. We even give him the courage of anaesthesia (if we want him to go over the top)by means of ether, cocaine and so on. We can produce fantastic dreams by hashish,hallucinations of colour by anhalonium Lewinii; we can even make him ‘see stars’ bythe use of a sandbag. Why then should we not be able to devise some pharmaceutical,electrical or surgical method of inducing Samadhi; create genius as simply as we doother kinds of specific excitement? Morphine makes men holy and happy in a nega-tive way; why should there not be some drug which will produce the positive equiva-lent? The mystic gasps with horror, but we really can’t worry about him. It is he thatis blaspheming nature by postulating discontinuity in her processes. Admit that Sama-dhi is sui generis and back comes the whole discarded humbug of the supernatural.57

This is perhaps one of the most fascinating passages of Crowley’s autobiog-raphy, because, with its ostentation of a psychological jargon (‘‘inhibitionswhich repress’’), it introduces us directly to the complexity of his attitudetoward spiritual practices. We can clearly see the kind of discourse that he istrying to develop in order to make these practices acceptable for the scien-tifically minded modern man, even in his most radically reductionist tenden-cies, which were represented by a figure such as Maudsley. Crowley claimsthat the famous psychiatrist reacted positively to the arguments of his fellowtraveler: ‘‘Maudsley—rather to my surprise—agreed with all these proposi-tions, but could not suggest any plausible line of research.’’58 It is a pity thatwe do not have Maudsley’s version of the episode and that we will neverknow what he really thought of this casual conversation. However, consider-

57. Crowley, The Confessions, 386.58. Ibid., 386.

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ing his rather unsympathetic attitude toward mysticism in general, it is nottoo surprising that in the end he would not offer advice for a ‘‘plausible lineof research.’’

What is also interesting here is that in the lines quoted above one cantrace the possible influence of William James and his discussion of ‘‘religiousgeniuses’’ at the beginning of his Varieties of Religious Experience.59 Thisreminds us of the fact that, even if in the above passage Crowley is at painsto show how acceptable his ideas were for a hardcore materialist such asMaudsley, it is rather with James that he should have felt an affinity. In fact,it is important to note that James, together with the main figures involved inpsychical research in England and in America, represented a much less radicalposition than Maudsley with respect to the ultimate spiritual value of reli-gious experiences.60 The idea of ‘‘genius’’ associated with the founders of

59. James, The Varieties of Religious Experience, 6.60. It is on the other hand very significant that, in the first part of the ‘‘The

Temple of Solomon the King,’’ to which I have already referred, a passage fromJames’s Varieties of Religious Experience is also quoted, in which James tries to reconcilehis own position with that of Maudsley on the basis of a common ‘‘empiricist crite-rion’’ in testing religious beliefs. Crowley evidently agrees to that. See [Fuller andCrowley], ‘‘The Temple of Solomon the King (Book I),’’ 150. Another interestingexample is that of Frederic W. H. Myers, whom I have already mentioned as one ofthe Trinity fellows who gave the impulse for the foundation of the Society for Psychi-cal Research in 1882. Myers was apparently much less willing to find a commonground of understanding with Maudsley than James. He wrote in fact in 1884 in aletter to J. A. Symonds: ‘‘The kind of adversary present to my mind is a man like Dr.Maudsley:—a man for whose private character I can well believe that I should feelrespect, but who represents a school of thought which, if it prevails, will bring theworld to the Nihilism of the brutes of the field’’ (quoted in Turner, Between Science andReligion, 115–16). Turner paraphrases: ‘‘So long as Maudsley’s version of psychologyprevailed, not only was human immortality impossible but also any form of humanrelationship that rose above man’s animal nature’’ (ibid., 116). It is interesting to seethat Crowley did not appear to be so sensitive to this kind of argument and couldremain much more open to Maudsley’s position. It is also intriguing to see howTurner describes Myers’s ideas for a new religion of the future, which he hoped wasforthcoming (ibid., 116–17). Two elements of his vision should be emphasized here:(a) that Christianity is coming to an end; and (b) that the new religion will embodythe spirit of ‘‘adolescence’’ and ‘‘puberty,’’ as opposed to the ‘‘senility’’ of Christian-ity. This resonates well with the way in which Crowley envisioned Thelema, a reli-gion represented by a child god (Horus) as opposed to an older, fatherly figuresymbolizing the previous era (Osiris). The fact that, through Myers, similar ideascould have had some currency at Trinity College even before Crowley went there asa student is of course tantalizing and may open new perspectives for a contextualiza-tion of his work.

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religions is a theme that returns in Crowley’s works. In another passage inthe Confessions Crowley mentions James explicitly, precisely in relation to theproblem of genius:

The general idea of Eastern religions [. . .] is liberation from the illusion of existence.The effect of Samadhi is firstly to produce the bliss which comes from the relief frompain. Later, this bliss disappears and one attains perfect indifference. But we need notgo so far into their philosophy or accept it. Thanks partly to William James’s Varietiesof Religious Experience, I got the idea of employing the methods of Yoga to producegenius at will. James points out that various religious teachers attained their power toinfluence mankind in what is essentially the same way; that is, by getting into Sama-dhi. The trance gives supreme spiritual energy and absolute self-confidence; itremoves the normal inhibitions to action. I propose then that any man should usethis power to develop his faculties and inspire his ambitions by directing the effectsof the trance into the channel of his career. This idea at once connects mysticism withMagick; for one of the principal operations of Magick is to invoke the God appro-priate to the thing you want, identify yourself with Him and flood your work withhis immaculate impulse. This is, in fact, to make Samadhi with that God.61

Crowley here is surely thinking of the section on yoga in James’s Varietiesof Religious Experience.62 In reality, in that section James is less than explicitabout the role of samadhi—or of analogous mystical experiences—in the lifeof religious leaders, but this is indeed a theme that recurs in other parts of the

61. Crowley, The Confessions, 244.62. James, The Varieties of Religious Experience, 400–401. The fact that Crowley

read carefully this section of James’s work is also interesting for a different reason,because it provides an indirect link to a figure, the German industrialist and occultistKarl Kellner (1850–1905), who plays a significant role in the history (or rather prehis-tory) of the Ordo Templi Orientis, the occultist group of which Crowley became theinternational leader around 1923. Kellner was one of the first Westerners to write onyoga from a practical point of view: Yoga: Eine Skizze uber den psycho-physiologischenTeil der alten indischen Yogalehre (Munchen: Kastner & Lossen, 1896). James refers tothis booklet in a footnote at p. 401, also quoting from it. Crowley was never person-ally in contact with Kellner and, although he must have known of his role in thehistory of the O.T.O., he does not make any comment about him in relation toJames’s quotation. On Kellner, see Wolfgang Weirauch, ‘‘Eine Reise nach Wien: Beiden Quellen des O.T.O. Interview mit Josef Dvorak,’’ Flensburger Hefte 63, no. 4(Winter 1998): 171–222; and Richard Kaczynski, ‘‘Carl Kellner’s Esoteric Roots: Sexand Sex Magic in the Victorian Age,’’ in idem, ed., Notocon VI: Beauty and Strength.Proceedings of the Sixth Biennial National Ordo Templi Orientis Conference (Riverside,Calif.: United States Grand Lodge—Ordo Templi Orientis, 2009), 77–103.

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book, although not necessarily in the way Crowley renders it. Crowley hadalready presented the theme at greater length at the beginning of Book Four,in the part devoted to yoga.63 It is important to understand that in those pagesCrowley not only develops his own peculiar magical doctrine, but also offershis interpretation of mystical experience as the basis for a comparative under-standing of religious phenomena. In doing that he is clearly building uponhis reading of James.

According to Crowley, all founders of religion disappear or hide in a retreatat some given moment in their life. When they reappear, they possess thenecessary spiritual energy to found a new religion. What happens during thisretreat? According to Crowley, what has happened to Moses, Jesus, Moham-mad, Buddha, and all other founders of religions is a mystical experience thatis analogous to what is defined as samadhi in the tradition of yoga. In othertraditions, such as Christian mysticism, it is referred to as ‘‘union withGod.’’64 If these religious leaders have described their experience in differentways it is because they belonged to different cultures, but the phenomenonitself has been always and everywhere the same. Therefore, for instance,Mohammad has conversed with the archangel Gabriel, Buddha has reachedillumination, Moses has met with God on Mount Sinai.

The implications of Crowley’s reasoning are not difficult to see. If theexperiences of these religious leaders are all the same phenomenon and canbe equated with samadhi, then yoga (or a similar method, such as ceremonialmagic) potentially offers a technique validated experimentally to obtaingenius ‘‘at will,’’ and consequently, the capacity of founding a new religion.This is the conclusion that Crowley does not make explicit, but which istransparent enough. Crowley himself, according to his own testimony, hadachieved samadhi, and this had entitled him to found a new religion. This isexactly what Crowley claimed he had done after he received the text of theBook of the Law from what he thought to be a preterhuman entity, only a few

63. [Crowley and d’Este Sturges], Book Four. Part I.64. The equivalence between samadhi and the ‘‘union with God,’’ which has some

importance (as we will see) for Crowley’s understanding of magic as well, was clearlybased on the idea of a comparative phenomenology of mystical experiences that wasalso at the core of William James’s work. Crowley refers to this equivalence in severalplaces in his works. For instance, it is justified with an etymological argument in thefirst part of Book Four: ‘‘In the first place, what is the meaning of the term [samadhi]?Etymologically, Sam is the Greek συν, the English prefix ‘syn-’ meaning ‘togetherwith.’ Adhi means ‘Lord,’ and a reasonable translation of the whole word would be‘Union with God,’ the exact term used by Christian mystics to describe their attain-ment’’ ([Crowley and d’Este Sturges], Book Four. Part I, 79–80).

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months after meeting with Maudsley on his way to Egypt. In Book Four aswell Crowley seems to deny the necessity of a supernatural explanation forthe occurrence of this experience and what follows from it:

To sum up, we assert a secret source of energy which explains the phenomenon ofGenius. We do not believe in any supernatural explanations, but insist that this sourcemay be reached by the following out of definite rules, the degree of success depend-ing upon the capacity of the seeker, and not upon the favour of any Divine Being.We assert that the critical phenomenon which determines success is an occurrence inthe brain characterized essentially by the uniting of subject and object.65

CROWLEY’S INTERPRETATION OF MAGIC

IN RELATION TO SPIRITUAL ENTITIES

With the creation of genius at will, and the consequent power to impose anew religion on humanity, we find ourselves at the crossroad between yogaand magic, because, in Crowley’s view, both pathways could potentially leadto this extraordinary result. I will therefore focus now on Crowley’s attitudestoward magic, especially for what concerns the status of the entities withwhich the magician is supposed to communicate by means of magical rituals.

As I have already pointed out, a thorough discussion of all the complexaspects of Crowley’s relationship with magic, both from a theoretical andpractical point of view, goes beyond the scope of this article. It will, however,be useful to mention at least certain fundamental points. Aleister Crowley’sentire life hinges on this relationship, which is therefore essential for under-standing the man and his ideas. It could be argued that, in the specific contextof occultism before Crowley, magic had been mostly an intellectual pursuit,and not the focus of a person’s entire life in all its aspects. For many personsinvolved in occultism it was hardly more than an eccentric hobby, as it seemsto have been the case with many members of the Hermetic Order of theGolden Dawn.66 For Crowley magic becomes an all-consuming activity, thefocus of all aspirations and ambitions a man may have in his life. It is a pathof spiritual search that not only encompasses the whole course of one’s exis-tence, but demands also an integral, absolute commitment. As a consequence,

65. [Crowley and d’Este Sturges], Book Four. Part I, 19–20.66. But not for all of course. MacGregor Mathers is an obvious case in point. It

seems clear that he was a model for Crowley also in this respect. For other members,such as the aforementioned Allan Bennett, it could be argued that magic was also avery important pursuit that included both speculative and practical aspects, and had avery deep existential meaning (in Bennett’s case at least until he converted to Bud-dhism).

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success in daily matters cannot serve as a measurement of the achievementson the spiritual path.67 In principle, one should be prepared to give up allone’s affections and earthly interests in order to reach the highest steps of theinitiatory ladder.68 Crowley claimed on several occasions that this was pre-cisely what he had done in his life, and that this was the main reason forthe loss of the fortune inherited from his family and for his other personalmisfortunes.69 This, unexpectedly perhaps, introduces a form of asceticisminto Crowley’s magical system that seems to be at odds not only with theexuberant hedonism of Thelema, as expressed clearly in the Book of the Law,but also with Crowley’s proclaimed intention of making magic accessible tothe masses.70

Unlike some of his predecessors, such as Eliphas Levi or H. P. Blavatsky,who had used a similar rhetoric in describing magic but without necessarilygoing into its practical consequences, Crowley sees in magic not only a theo-retical concern, but also one that is existentially experienced in all its aspects,up to its most extreme consequences. Moreover—once again unlike his pre-

67. This, for instance, differentiates Crowley’s system strongly from certain formsof contemporary Satanism, especially those that are inspired by Anton SzandorLaVey’s ideas and his Church of Satan, despite the obvious influence of Crowley’sideas on them. For an analysis of the opposition between this-worldly and other-worldly ideologies in contemporary Satanism, see my ‘‘Dieu du desir, dieu de laraison (Le Diable en Californie dans les annees soixante),’’ in Le Diable (Paris: Dervy,1998), 87–98.

68. On crossing the ‘‘Abyss,’’ one enters the last stage of initiation according toCrowley’s magical system. At that moment one is supposed to have ‘‘destroyed allthat He is and all that He has’’: Aleister Crowley, ‘‘One Star in Sight,’’ in [Crowley],Magick in Theory and Practice, 233–34. This can of course be attained only by the mostadvanced adepts.

69. See for instance Crowley, The Confessions, 795–97.70. The hedonistic aspects of Thelema, in relation to sex, food, and drugs are

prominent in some of the most famous verses of The Book of the Law, such as I, 51(‘‘Be goodly therefore: dress ye all in fine apparel; eat rich foods and drink sweetwines and that foam! Also, take your fill and will of love as ye will, when, where andwith whom you will! But always unto me.’’). As to the ‘‘popularization’’ of magic,this is particularly evident in the introduction to Magick in Theory and Practice, xi–xii.The aspect of asceticism in Crowley, and the implicit tension that it creates with otherparts of his doctrinal system, has been hardly noted by commentators, who usuallyprefer to insist on the much more visible, and perhaps even glamorous (if sometimesmisunderstood), ‘‘anarchistic’’ aspect of Thelema. This is of course also related to thepolitical side of Crowley’s ideas, which has been the focus of my Aleister Crowley unddie Versuchung der Politik. In relation to these problems, see in particular the secondchapter.

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decessors—he demands from his disciples and followers the same kind ofabsolute commitment to magic he is prepared to make for himself. As iswell known, this radicalization of the idea of magic had as one of its logicalconsequences the foundation of a ‘‘magical’’ commune: the famous Abbeyof Thelema in Cefalu, where, in 1920, Crowley thought he could bring hisvision of a new society, based on magic and Thelema, to life.71 Here, the ideaof a personal magical realization was linked to a form of retreat from theworld, which was something relatively new in the context of occultism.

On the other hand, Crowley is the author who tries the hardest, amongEnglish occultists, to elaborate an accomplished ‘‘philosophy’’ of magic,focusing especially on its epistemological and psychological aspects. We havealready mentioned the importance of the years spent in Cambridge forCrowley’s intellectual development. This experience also made him one ofthe very few occultists to have received a formal higher education, even if inthe end he did not care to get a degree. Many authors have emphasized theinaccuracies and superficiality that occultists often show in their works, forinstance with respect to history or philology, even as they claim to possessultimate knowledge in all fields of human learning.72 There are no doubtsocial reasons why this was so, including the fact that most of them, unlikeRenaissance authors such as Marsilio Ficino and Pico della Mirandola, coulddevote only their spare time to magic and occultism, and did not have theleisure or the means to achieve an all-round education in the humanities orin the natural sciences. It is also for this reason that Crowley represents, bothfor his intellectual gifts and for the amount of his work explicitly devoted tomagic, a particularly important moment in the history of occultism.Throughout his life his cultural interests remained extremely wide and eclec-tic. He drew ideas and inspiration from many disparate sources, both Westernand Eastern, and blended them into his own peculiar system.

In a general sense, Crowley saw magic as a convenient term to define hisdoctrine as a whole, including the religion of Thelema. More specifically,Crowley understood magic mainly in two ways, both of which are far fromuncommon in the context of occultist literature. The first one is mostly prag-matic in nature, and considers magic as a technique for achieving specificgoals by means that cannot as yet be explained scientifically, but the resultsof which can (in theory at least) be tested in an empirical way. Gaining con-siderable sums of money or the effortless acquisition of extensive knowledge

71. See Crowley, The Confessions, 848–55.72. See, for instance, Francois Secret, ‘‘Eliphas Levi et la Kabbale,’’ Charis. Archives

de l’Unicorne 1 (1988): 81–89, with respect to French occultism.

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in a particular field could be mentioned in this respect as classic examples. InMagick in Theory and Practice, which is the summa of his mature thought onmagic, Crowley presented his most famous definition of magic, which hasbeen subsequently adopted (and adapted) by a plethora of authors: ‘‘Magick isthe Science and Art of causing Change to occur in conformity with Will.’’73

According to this definition any intentional act could be defined as magical,and this would of course seem to reduce the specificity of magic as a particu-lar field of action. In reality, in referring to magic in this context Crowley hadin mind a rather precise set of practices and ideas, based mostly on traditionalceremonial magic. He had learned their fundamentals during his membershipin the Golden Dawn, and considerably developed them on the basis of hissubsequent experiences. In later years, his discovery of sexual magic led himto change his understanding and practice of magic significantly; in fact, sexualmagic made most of the material apparatus of ceremonial magic superfluous.Sexual magical workings, based on notions of subtle physiology mostly bor-rowed from Eastern doctrines (in particular hatha yoga), may use the bodyof the magician as the only magical tool, eliminating the need for externalimplements such as a ‘‘temple’’ (the sacred space where the magician oper-ates) or the traditional ‘‘weapons’’ of ceremonial magic. The aim of magic inthis sense is not necessarily material in nature: magic can also be used toobtain communications from spiritual entities, or to explore the ‘‘astralplane’’ by means of the techniques of astral travel that Crowley had learnedin the Golden Dawn. The messages that he received through these magicalpractices often had a meaning that was specific to his own spiritual evolution(but they could also be set on a grander scale and concern the evolution ofmankind, as in the case of the Book of the Law). By the same token, throughthese practices Crowley thought he could improve his knowledge of thesymbolic network of correspondences that are supposed to create a unifyinglink between all the parts of the universe. It is to be noted that, especially inrelation to this first, pragmatic sense of magic, Crowley claimed to have ascientific, rational approach—again, something far from uncommon in thecontext of occultist literature.

The other sense in which Crowley understood magic was certainly seenby him as the most important, although it can be considered as complemen-tary to the first one. According to this second perspective, magic is not somuch orientated toward immediate ends, but rather becomes a way toachieve what Crowley considered as the supreme goal of one’s life: spiritual

73. [Crowley], Magick in Theory and Practice, xii.

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attainment. Magic then loses its instrumental character, and becomes insteada practice and a worldview that encompass all aspects of a person’s life. Onthe whole, the difference lies not so much in the kind of techniques that arebeing used, but in the interpretation that is being given of them. Traditionalceremonial and sexual magic could be used, in Crowley’s vision, both forimmediate purposes and as a means to achieve the ultimate goal of spiritualrealization. In the latter case, as we have already noted, the individual shouldideally fully devote himself to this pursuit, and be ready to sacrifice all hisearthly possessions and affections for its sake. Crowley uses various expres-sions to define the aim of magic in this spiritual sense. In some passages hedescribes it as comparable to the mystical ‘‘union with God.’’ In Magick inTheory and Practice he describes what he considers to be the ultimate goal ofmagical practice:

There is a single main definition of the object of all magical Ritual. It is the unitingof the Microcosm with the Macrocosm. The Supreme and Complete Ritual is there-fore the Invocation of the Holy Guardian Angel; or, in the language of Mysticism,union with God.74

We have already seen that this concept was also equated by him withsamadhi. In the context of the Golden Dawn, this same notion had beenexpressed as the ‘‘Union with the Higher Self.’’75 But perhaps his mostfamous definition describes it as the attainment of the ‘‘knowledge and con-versation of the Holy Guardian Angel’’ (HGA), a notion taken from thefamous Book of the Sacred Magic of Abra-Melin, a magical text that had beendiscovered by S. L. MacGregor Mathers in the Bibliotheque de l’Arsenal inParis and that had been translated by him in 1898, the same year in whichCrowley joined the Golden Dawn.76 This book, whose origin dates back to

74. Ibid., 11.75. See for instance Samuel Liddell MacGregor Mathers, et al., Astral Projection,

Ritual Magic and Alchemy, ed. by Francis King (London: Neville Spearman, 1971),115, 151, and 156. See also Israel Regardie, What You Should Know About The GoldenDawn (Phoenix, Ariz.: New Falcon Publications, 1993), 51.

76. Samuel Liddell MacGregor Mathers, ed., The Book of the Sacred Magic of Abra-Melin the Mage, As Delivered by Abraham the Jew unto his Son Lamech, A.D. 1458(London: J. M. Watkins, 1898). Robert Ambelain later edited the text in its originalFrench version: La magie sacree ou livre d’Abramelin le mage (Paris: Niclaus, 1959).Authors writing on the Golden Dawn (even the most serious ones) have longbelieved that the French manuscript in the Bibliotheque de l’Arsenal was unique, andthat Mathers’s translation was (as he himself thought) the very first printed version ofthe book of Abramelin. In reality Gershom Scholem, in his Bibliographia Kabbalistica(Leipzig: Verlag von W. Drugulin, 1927), 2, had already drawn attention to several

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the sixteenth or seventeenth century, describes a system of ritual practicesaimed at establishing contact with the guardian angel, that is, the angelicentity traditionally seen as attached to our person with the special task ofadvising and protecting us in moments of trouble. The goal of this magicalsystem is therefore the ‘‘knowledge and conversation with one’s GuardianAngel.’’77 Among the members of the original (pre-1900) Golden Dawn,Crowley was certainly the one who was influenced the most by this book(which, as should be remembered, was never a part of the official curriculumof the order). He is probably also the only one who, among the members ofthe original order, actually tried to put its instructions into practice.78 Crow-ley claimed to have attained the goal described in the book in 1906, and thiswas certainly a very important step in his spiritual career.

German manuscript versions of this text, one of which had already been publishedprobably around 1800 (but antedated to 1725): Abraham von Worms, Die egyptischengrossen Offenbarungen, in sich begreifend die aufgefundenen Geheimnißbucher Mosis; oder desJuden Abraham von Worms. Buch der wahren Praktik [etc.] (Koln am Rhein: Peter Ham-mer, 1725). Moreover, there is a Hebrew version, probably translated from one ofthe German manuscripts, in the Bodleian Library in Oxford, to which Rafael Pataidevotes a chapter of his The Jewish Alchemists: A History and a Source Book (Princeton,N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1994), 271–88. See also the more recent contribu-tion by Bernd Roling, ‘‘The Complete Nature of Christ. Sources and Structures of aChristological Theurgy in the Works of Johannes Reuchlin,’’ in Jan N. Bremmer andJan R. Veenstra, eds., The Metamorphosis of Magic from Late Antiquity to the Early ModernPeriod (Leuven, etc: Peeters, 2002), 244–49. An edition of the text based on theknown German manuscripts has been recently produced by Georg Dehn: Buch Abra-melin, das ist Die egyptischen großen Offenbarungen oder das Abraham von Worms Buch derwahren Praktik in der uralten gottlichen Magie, ed. G. Dehn (Saarbrucken: Verlag NeueErde, 1995; 2nd ed.: Leipzig: Edition Araki, 2001), and translated into English (withDehn’s collaboration) by Steven Guth as The Book of Abramelin. A New Translation(Lake Worth, Fla.: Ibis Press, 2006). In Mathers’s edition the name in the title of thebook is spelled ‘‘Abra-Melin,’’ but ‘‘Abramelin’’ is a much more common spellingamong authors referring to the book (including Crowley) or in other editions of thetext. This is therefore the spelling I will be using throughout the present article.

77. This is how the goal is described by Mathers in his introduction to the book,see Mathers, ed., The Book of the Sacred Magic, xxvi. In the same page, Mathers suggeststhat this operation is related, ‘‘in the language of the Theosophy of the present day,[to] the knowledge of the Higher Self.’’

78. Interesting material on Crowley’s use of the book and also on later attemptsmade by other occultists to practice Abramelin’s system can be found in Peter-R.Konig, ed., Abramelin & Co. (Munchen: Abeitsgemeinschaft fur Religions- und Welt-anschauungsfragen, 1995). See also Christopher McIntosh, The Devil’s Bookshelf. AHistory of the Written Word in Western Magic from Ancient Egypt to the Present Day (Wel-lingborough: The Aquarian Press, 1985), 113–22.

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But who was this guardian angel? The importance given to this entity inthe context of magical practices should not come as a surprise. After all,traditional ceremonial magic, as described and taught in a plethora of gri-moires, almost invariably insists on the necessity for the practicing magicianof a contact with nonhuman or superhuman entities, who are supposed tohelp him or be at his service. This would mean of course mainly demons andangels, but sometimes also other kinds of entities such as the spirits of thedead (for instance in necromancy) or elementals. But the guardian angelseems to have a special role in this army of invisible creatures, because it issupposed to have a special, unique relationship with the magician.79

Crowley interpreted this relationship as akin to the mystical experiencethat for him was one of the essential—if not the essential tout court—goals ofmagic. But before we have a closer look at Crowley’s understanding of thisnotion, it is perhaps interesting to see what his general attitude was towardthe entities with whom the magician is supposed to make contact duringmagical operations. This is especially relevant in relation to Crowley’s ration-alizing approach to spiritual matters, which I have discussed so far.

In 1904 Crowley published a version of the Goetia, a section of a famousgrimoire, The Lesser Key of King Solomon (or Lemegeton).80 The adaptation (notreally a translation) into modern English had been done by Mathers, withwhom Crowley had by then fallen out. The editing and the publication ofthese old magical texts by Mathers is to be understood as part of that magicalsynthesis that had been one of the main features of the Golden Dawn sinceits inception.81 The Abramelin book that we have mentioned was also anexpression of this attempt at a synthesis. This explains why different notions

79. On this issue, see also my ‘‘Anges gardiens et esprits familiers dans le spiritismeet dans l’occultisme,’’ in Jean-Patrice Boudet, ed., De Socrate a Tintin: Anges gardienset demons familiers de l’Antiquite a nos jours (Rennes: Presses Universitaires de Rennes,forthcoming).

80. See Aleister Crowley, ed., The Goetia. The Book of the Goetia of Solomon theKing (Foyers: Society for the Propagation of Religious Truth, 1904). For a recentedition: Aleister Crowley and Samuel Liddell MacGregor Mathers, eds., The Goetia.The Lesser Key of Solomon the King (York Beach, Maine: Samuel Weiser, 1995). Arecent Ph.D. dissertation by Francisco Silva focusing on Mathers’s edition of anothergrimoire, The Key of Solomon the King (London: George Redway, 1889), discusses alsoat length his edition of the Goetia: Mathers’ Translation of the Clavicula Salomonis: TheRelationship between Translator, Text and Transmission of a ‘‘Religious Text’’ (Universityof Manchester, 2009), passim.

81. For a general discussion of Mathers’s editions of ancient magical texts, seeFrancis King, Modern Ritual Magic (Bridport, Dorset: Prism Press, 1989), 194–97; andSilva, Mathers’ Translation, chaps. 4 and 5.

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derived from these texts could be put together in order to form a coherenttheoretical framework for the magical activities of the Golden Dawn mem-bers. One could mention as an example of this magical syncretism the use ofa ritual found in a Greco-Egyptian papyrus of the Hellenistic period, usuallyreferred to as the ‘‘Bornless Ritual.’’82 In Crowley’s interpretation the ritualcontained in this text was believed to provide access to the ‘‘Higher Genius’’or ‘‘Higher Self,’’ a notion that had primordial importance in the teachingsof the Golden Dawn and to which I will return.

When Crowley published Mathers’s adaptation of the Goetia he added asmall introductory essay, entitled ‘‘The Initiated Interpretation of CeremonialMagic,’’ where he addressed the efficacy of magic and the problem of thereality of the entities described by the grimoire.83 In this text, he expressedthe view that it is not necessary to consider these spirits and demons as‘‘really’’ existing, that is to say as existing independently from the magician’sself. They can be seen on the contrary as ‘‘portions of the human brain.’’84

As a result of the invocation of one of these spirits, a specific part of themagician’s brain is stimulated that corresponds to that particular spirit. Hereis how Crowley presents this idea:

If, then, I say, with Solomon: ‘‘The Spirit Cimieries teaches logic,’’ what I mean is:

‘‘Those portions of my brain which subserve the logical faculty may be stimulated

and developed by following out the processes called ‘The Invocation of Cimieries’ ’’.

And this a purely materialistic rational statement.85

82. See Hymenaeus Beta [William Breeze], ‘‘Editor’s Foreword,’’ in Crowley andMathers, eds., The Goetia, xxi–xxii. It would appear that this particular text was notpart of the curriculum of the Golden Dawn and was not generally practiced by itsmembers, but was adapted by Allan Bennett into a workable ritual on his own initia-tive (see ibid., xxii, n. 39). However, Bennett’s idea was perfectly consonant with thegeneral syncretistic enterprise of the order. The original Greek text had been pub-lished in 1852 by the famous pioneer of English Egyptology, Charles Wycliffe Good-win, as Fragment of a Graeco-Egyptian Work upon Magic from a Papyrus in the BritishMuseum (Cambridge, etc.: Macmillan, J. W. Parker, J. H. Parker, 1852). It was laterrewritten and transformed by Crowley into his ‘‘Liber Samekh,’’ a ritual that is sup-posed to offer a shortcut to the final goal of Abramelin’s system (i.e., the Knowledgeand Conversation of the Holy Guardian Angel): Aleister Crowley, ‘‘Liber Samekh,’’in [Crowley], Magick in Theory and Practice, 265–301.

83. Aleister Crowley, ‘‘The Initiated Interpretation of Ceremonial Magic,’’ inCrowley and Mathers, eds., The Goetia, 15–20.

84. Crowley, ‘‘The Initiated Interpretation,’’ 17.85. Ibid., 17.

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From this quotation it seems clear that Crowley was willing, at least incertain contexts, to interpret the effects of ceremonial magic, and the entitiestraditionally involved with them, purely in physiological (not even psycho-logical) terms. Magical phenomena are explained from a strictly materialisticpoint of view: they take place only in the brain, and this creates, as a second-ary effect, the illusionary perception of spiritual entities. This is of course akind of reductionist explanation of magic, one in fact that even someonelike Maudsley may have found worth considering together with Crowley’sinterpretation of yoga. And again, as with yoga, it seems fairly evident thatthis approach is motivated by the desire to make sense of traditional spiritualpractices in a modern, secular context, in order to make them compatible toa positivist and naturalist way of thinking.

This naturalistic interpretation of magic was presented by Crowley in theearly years of his spiritual career (by an interesting coincidence, it was pub-lished in 1904, the same year in which Crowley received the text of the Bookof the Law from Aiwass). It appears however that, while significant to himfrom an intellectual point of view, naturalistic interpretations were notadopted consistently, nor did Crowley remain faithful to them in the follow-ing years. We have in fact plenty of instances in Crowley’s magical curricu-lum where he makes contact with entities that he is far from considering asmere ‘‘portions of his brain’’ or as parts of his unconscious psyche (as hisdiscovery of psychoanalysis may have lead him to believe). Interestinglyenough, the initial contact with most of these entities was established byCrowley through the aid of a visionary partner, very often a woman. This isin fact how things went with the most spectacular case among them, namelythe apparition of Aiwass through his wife Rose and the consequent revelationof the Book of the Law. But it is also true for such ‘‘minor’’ entities as Amalan-trah or Ab-ul-Diz.86 It appears that Crowley generally did not consider theseentities as products of his (or his partner’s) unconscious mind or brain. Theywere not figments, albeit spiritually significant ones: they were independent,preterhuman beings, with their own autonomous personality and existence.The fact that all these entities were subjected to a very careful testing is a

86. See Crowley, The Confessions, 676–78 (Ab-ul-Diz), and 832–35 (Amalantrah).See also John Symonds, The King of the Shadow Realm: Aleister Crowley: His Life andMagic (London: Duckworth, 1989), 135–51 (Ab-ul-Diz), and 222–32 (Amalantrah).Crowley’s account of these experiences can be found in: Aleister Crowley with Vic-tor B. Neuburg and Mary Desti, The Vision and the Voice with Commentary and OtherPapers (York Beach, Maine: Samuel Weiser, 1998). The communications receivedfrom Ab-ul-Diz were at the origin of the Book Four project.

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clear indicator of this.87 The point of the testing was precisely to prove notonly the identity of the entities (so that the possibility of an evil creature indisguise would be ruled out), but also their autonomy from the personality ofthe magician and/or of his skryer. In that sense Aiwass and his kin ratherresembled the mysterious ‘‘Secret Chiefs’’ of the Golden Dawn, or the elu-sive ‘‘Mahatmas’’ of the Theosophical Society, who were understood asenlightened masters who had reached a very high level of initiation but werestill living on this planet.88

In Crowley’s interpretation, the concept of the ‘‘Holy Guardian Angel’’was the same as the ‘‘Higher Self ’’ (or ‘‘Higher Genius’’).89 Crowley clearlygot the idea that magic offered the magician a technique to discover his(or her) ‘‘Higher Self ’’ from the Golden Dawn, and this influenced himconsiderably. The immediate origin of this idea was to be found in the writ-ings of Mme. Blavatsky and of the Theosophical Society.90 Spiritual realiza-

87. It may be noted that the testing itself, usually based on a series of questions,resembled the procedures already in use for years in the circles of spiritualism and ofpsychical research. On the role of testing in Crowley’s magical practice, see Asprem,‘‘Magic Naturalized?,’’ 156–62.

88. On the Mahatmas of the Theosophical Society and their possible identificationwith living persons with whom Madame Blavatsky had been in contact, see K. PaulJohnson, The Masters Revealed: Madame Blavatsky and the Myth of the Great White Lodge(Albany: State University of New York Press, 1994) and Initiates of the TheosophicalMasters (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1995).

89. We have seen that Mathers had already suggested the equation between theHoly Guardian Angel and the Higher Self. See above, n. 77. In contemporary Crow-leyan circles the relationship between the Holy Guardian Angel, Aiwass, and theHigher Self has drawn a lot of attention and has sometimes led to original analysis andinterpretation. The most significant example is that of the California-based J. EdwardCornelius, who is presently the leader of one of the most important branches ofCrowley’s magical order, the A�A�. He has devoted several essays and articles to thesubject, obviously from a practitioner’s point of view, but sometimes also with inter-esting historical insight. Some of the points he makes are actually quite close to whatI argue here. He has published most of the material related to this topic in his self-produced magazine Cornelia. The Magazine of the Magickal, Mystical and often PersonalWritings of J. Edward Cornelius and Associates, published in twenty issues between 2007and 2009. See the series ‘‘The Magickal Essence of Aleister Crowley,’’ in particularthe Epistle no. 1 (‘‘An Open Letter regarding the Holy Guardian Angel,’’ 1 [2007]:33–44); and the series ‘‘In Quest of the Holy Guardian Angel,’’ in particular part 3(‘‘Is This Tenuous Something an Objective or Subjective Reality?,’’ 3 [2007]: 22–25);and 4 (‘‘The Higher Self,’’ 4 [2007]: 9–15).

90. See, for instance, Helena Petrovna Blavatsky, The Theosophical Glossary (Lon-don: The Theosophical Publishing Society, 1892), 141. See also my discussion in Lanotion de magie, 307–8.

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tion was understood as the reintegration of a divine or superior part of theself that is, in normal conditions, unknown and inaccessible.

The presence of the guardian angel in Western esoteric, and more specifi-cally magical, literature certainly deserves closer attention, as it has rarely beenthe object of scholarly research. One of the reasons surely is that the tradi-tional concept of the guardian angel has not been so prominent in the contextof modern western esotericism, even in its more magically-oriented currents,as that of other entities. One can surely find in the modern period manyexamples of magical or theurgical practices where angels are very much pres-ent, sometimes even hundreds of them. One need only to think of the Eno-chian evocations of John Dee, the theurgical operations of Martinez dePasqually’s Elus Coens, or Cagliostro’s Egyptian masonic rites.91 But in all ofthese examples, the guardian angel as a specific entity does not seem to bepresent.

A possible exception could be the group of the Illumines d’Avignon,which was led during the 1780s by Dom Antoine-Joseph Pernety.92 In theteachings of this group we find a series of spiritual practices (which, interest-ingly, are not referred to as ‘‘magic’’) whose final goal is the apparition of aperson’s guardian angel.93 Apparently, the necessary instructions were trans-mitted by the ‘‘Sainte Parole,’’ a mysterious oracle whose responses deter-mined the activities and the agenda of the group.94 It would appear that the

91. The literature concerning these examples is of course very abundant. In ageneral perspective, concerning the different forms of theurgy involving angels inmodern Western esoteric currents, see Massimo Introvigne, ‘‘Arcana Arcanorum:Cagliostro’s Legacy in Contemporary Magical Movements,’’ Syzygy. Journal of Alter-native Religion and Culture 1, nos. 2–3 (1992), 122.

92. For an overview of the history of this group, see Jan A. M. Snoek, ‘‘Illuminesd’Avignon,’’ in Wouter J. Hanegraaff et al., eds., Dictionary of Gnosis and WesternEsotericism, Leiden, Boston: Brill, 2005), v. 2, 597–600, which also includes anexhaustive bibliography. The classical study on this group is Micheline Meillassoux-Le Cerf, Dom Pernety et les Illumines d’Avignon suivi de la transcription integrale de laSainte Parole (Milano: Arche—Edidit, 1992).

93. On this point, see Rene Le Forestier, La franc-maconnerie templiere et occultiste(Paris: La Table d’Emeraude, 1987), 877–81; and Joanny Bricaud, Les Illumines d’Avi-gnon: Etude sur Dom Pernety et son groupe (Paris: Nourry, 1927), 45–52.

94. This has been discovered by Reinhard Breymayer: see his ‘‘ ‘Elie Artiste’:Johann Daniel Muller de Wissenbach/Nassau (1716 jusqu’apres 1785). Un aventurierentre le pietisme radical et l’illuminisme,’’ in Mario Matucci, ed., Actes du ColloqueInternational Lumieres et Illuminisme (Pisa: Pacini, 1984), 65–84. See also Antoine Fai-vre, ‘‘Elie Artiste, ou le messie des Philosophes de la Nature (premiere partie),’’ Aries.Journal for the Study of Western Esotericism 2, no. 2 (2002): 145–49.

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messages of the Sainte Parole were in fact coming from Johann Daniel Muller(1716–apres 1785), an esotericist who was known in the milieus of Germanilluminism under the pseudonym of ‘‘Elias Artiste.’’ One might wonder whatMuller’s sources were for the teachings related to the guardian angel, andwhether he knew the text of the Abramelin book, which—it will be remem-bered—has its probable origins in Germany and was first published in thatcountry toward the end of the eighteenth century. More research would beneeded in order to clarify this point.

However that may be, it is important to consider that, well before Per-nety’s group, a specific tradition of manuscripts existed where guardian angelsplayed a very important role in the context of magical practices. This tradi-tion seems to have taken shape toward the end of the Middle Ages and wasrelated to the Ars Notoria. The writings of Pelagius, the Hermit of Majorca,which have been studied by Jean Dupebe and Julien Veronese, clearly belongto this tradition, and so does the Book of the Sacred Magic of Abra-Melin.95 Ifwe exclude the exceptional case of the Illumines d’Avignon, we can concludethat Mathers’s publication was largely responsible for the revitalization in thenineteenth century of a magical tradition that had long fallen into oblivion.

The book of Abramelin prescribed a solitary retreat of six months, whichincluded a regime of prayers and fasting. It is obvious that this system ofpractices was not so easy to perform for persons who had a normal social life,as was the case for many members of the Golden Dawn. The interestingaspect of the interpretation of the Abramelin book that emerged in this con-text, first suggested by Mathers and then further developed by Crowley, isthe identification of the guardian angel described therein with the concept ofthe ‘‘Higher Self ’’ or ‘‘Higher Genius,’’ which could be found in the litera-

95. The analogies between Pelagius’s works and the Book of the Sacred Magic arestriking and can hardly be taken as mere coincidences. Dupebe first studied Pelagiusin relation to Trithemius: Jean Dupebe, ‘‘Curiosite et magie chez Johannes Trithem-ius,’’ in Jean Ceard, ed., La curiosite a la Renaissance (Paris: Societe d’Edition d’Enseig-nement Superieur, 1986), 71–97. He went on with his research on Pelagius in‘‘L’ecriture chez l’ermite Pelagius. Un cas de theurgie chretienne au xve siecle,’’ inR. Laufer, ed., Le texte et son inscription (Paris: Editions du Centre National de laRecherche Scientifique, 1989), 113–53; and ‘‘L’ermite Pelagius et les Rose-Croix,’’in Rosenkreuz als europaisches Phanomen im 17. Jahrhundert (Amsterdam: In de Pelikaan,2002), 137–56. See also Julien Veronese, ‘‘La notion d’‘auteur-magicien’ a la fin duMoyen Age: Le cas de l’ermite Pelagius de Majorque († v. 1480),’’ Medievales 51(Autumn 2006): 119–38. R. Amadou has published a facsimile of a relatively recentmanuscript of L’Anacrise, one of Pelagius’s most significant texts: Pelagius ermite deMajorque, L’Anacrise, ed. Robert Amadou (Paris: Cariscript, 1988).

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ture of the Theosophical Society and in the teachings of the Golden Dawn.96

It is also clear that this identification was made quite early by Crowley,because we find it already in the text of a magical oath he took in 1900,when he first attempted to perform the Abramelin operation shortly beforethe end of his experience as a member of the Golden Dawn.97 On the otherhand, another aspect of this identification was his interpretation of the ancienttext of the ‘‘Bornless Ritual,’’ which for him became the main ritual to beused in order to achieve the contact with the Higher Self.98

In 1904 Crowley claimed to have received from Aiwass the Book of theLaw, which would play a fundamental role in his life.99 The book eventuallybecame the basis of Crowley’s new religion, Thelema. Obviously, he sawhimself as the prophet of this new religious revelation, which would super-

96. This is made clear in a text quoted in the first installment of ‘‘The Temple ofSolomon the King,’’ and which was probably a letter Crowley wrote to his discipleJ. F. C. Fuller: ‘‘Lytton calls him Adonai in Zanoni [. . .]. Abramelin calls him HolyGuardian Angel. [. . .] Theosophists call him the Higher Self, Silent Watcher, or GreatMaster. The Golden Dawn calls him the Genius. Egyptians say Asar Un-nefer’’ (159).In this text a complete synthesis between all these different concepts (and others wehave omitted here) is made. See also James A. Eshelman The Mystical & Magical Systemof the A�A�. The Spiritual System of Aleister Crowley & George Cecil Jones Step-by-Step(Los Angeles: The College of Thelema, 2000), 122. As we have seen, the Higher Self(or Genius) had already been identified in the Theosophical literature with Adon-Ai(or Adonai) and the Augoeides, both taken from E. Bulwer Lytton’s Rosicruciannovel Zanoni, to which Crowley also refers in the above quotation. Bulwer Lyttonhad borrowed the term Augoeides from ancient Neoplatonism, in particular fromIamblichus (De Myst., III, 11). Asar Un-nefer refers, on the other hand, to the ‘‘Born-less Ritual.’’ About Mathers’s identification between the Guardian Angel and theHigher Self with reference to theosophical teachings, see above, n. 77.

97. ‘‘I, Perdurabo [Crowley’s magical motto in the Order] [. . .] do this day spiri-tually bind myself anew: [. . .] That I will devote myself to the Great Work: theobtaining of Communion with my own Higher and Divine Genius (called theGuardian Angel) by means of the prescribed course; and that I will use my Power soobtained in the Redemption of the Universe. So help me the Lord of the Universeand my own Higher Soul!’’ (Crowley, The Confessions, 190). Another early examplecan be found in a footnote appended to the poem ‘‘The Athanor’’ in The CollectedWorks of Aleister Crowley, v. I (Foyers: Society for the Propagation of Religious Truth,1905), 209, where Crowley explains that the verse ‘‘O angel of my spiritual desire!’’refers to ‘‘the ‘Genius’ of Socrates; the ‘Holy Guardian Angel’ of Abramelin theMage; or the ‘Higher Self ’ of the Theosophists.’’

98. This was especially the case in the version that he prepared during the Cefaluperiod (1920–23) and that goes under the title of ‘‘Liber Samekh.’’ See above, n. 82.

99. The text has been published many times and is widely available in severalformats and editions. It can be found in Crowley, Magick. Liber ABA, 305–18.

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sede all existing religions. I will not enter into details here concerning thephilosophical and ethical principles of this system because this would take usfar from our topic.100 However, the Cairo revelation is important here asregards the nature of Aiwass himself. Did Crowley perceive Aiwass as beinghis holy guardian angel, as described in the Abramelin book? It is difficult togive a clear-cut answer, because Crowley’s ideas in this respect seem to havechanged with time. When Crowley received the book, and then in the yearsimmediately following the event, there seemed to be no identification at allbetween Aiwass and his own guardian angel. As we have seen, Aiwass wasconsistently perceived by Crowley as a distinct personality, who had a com-pletely autonomous existence from him. It is easy enough to understand,from a psychological point of view, why Crowley always remained adamanton this point. It seems likely that Crowley could not understand Aiwass asbeing simply a manifestation of his psyche, be it called ‘‘unconscious’’ (inpsychoanalytical terms), ‘‘Higher Self ’’ (in occultist terms), or otherwise.This, in fact, would have undermined the universality of his religious claimsconcerning Thelema. The source of the revelation had to be in a metaphysi-cal (or at least preterhuman) dimension that was completely distinct fromCrowley’s individual personality. How could he have claimed that his mes-sage was going to change the destiny of millions of people for centuries tocome, if its ultimate source was just his unconscious (or even higher) mind?For Crowley, Thelema was a message of the gods, and Aiwass had been sentby them in order to carry their message. This is why Aiwass, as we havealready observed, rather belonged to the same class of entities as Ab-ul-Dizand Amalantrah, and as the Mahatmas of the Theosophical Society.101 AndCrowley, after all, makes it clear that the status of Aiwass as an entity whollyindependent from his psyche is crucial for the recognition of Thelema as atrue religion. In the section of The Confessions where he discusses the recep-tion of the Book of the Law, he remarks in fact that ‘‘the existence of truereligion presupposes that of some discarnate intelligence, whether we callhim God or anything else.’’102 In a nearby passage, Crowley also argues in

100. A summary of the fundamental tenets of Thelema can be found in Pasi,‘‘Crowley, Aleister,’’ in Hanegraaff et al., eds., Dictionary, v. 1, 281–87.

101. J. Symonds’s comment on this respect seems to me particularly to the point:‘‘in spite of his knowledge of symbolism, and his familiarity with the works of Freud,and with Jung’s Psychology of the Unconscious [. . . Crowley] made no attempt to inter-pret this material in terms of consciousness. [. . .] He would not have been surprisedto meet Ab-ul-Diz or Amalantrah strolling up Fifth Avenue’’ (Symonds, The King ofthe Shadow Realm, 225).

102. Crowley, The Confessions, 397.

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favour of the existence of ‘‘discarnate intelligences’’ against rationalist sceptic-ism because this is clearly functional to the legitimation of Thelema as areligion:

there is no a priori reason for doubting the existence of such beings. We have longbeen acquainted with many discarnate forces. [. . .] Yet the average man of sciencestill denies the existence of the elementals of the Rosicrucian, the Angels of theQabalist, the natas, pisacas, and devas of Southern Asia, and the djinn of Islam, withthe same blind misosophy as in Victorian days. It has apparently not occurred to himthat his position in doubting the existence of consciousness except in connectionwith certain types of anatomical structure, is really identical with that of the narrowestgeocentric and anthropocentric Evangelicals.103

Clearly, in Crowley’s view Aiwass had to belong to this category of discar-nate beings. On the other hand, if Aiwass had been perceived by him as hisguardian angel, then he might have interpreted the very reception of theBook of the Law as the ‘‘Knowledge and Conversation of the Holy GuardianAngel’’ described in the Abramelin book. But Crowley made no such claim.The Knowledge and Conversation was always interpreted by him as a mysti-cal experience, which had its framework of reference in the teachings of theGolden Dawn and in William James’s psychological theories. This is madeeven more evident by the fact that Crowley claimed to have attained theKnowledge and Conversation (and the initiatic degree that was equated byhim with this experience) only in 1906, that is two years after the revelationof the Book of the Law. This means that in 1904, in his perception, this resulthad not been attained yet, because the contact with Aiwass had not beeninterpreted by him as the Knowledge and Conversation of his GuardianAngel. Interestingly enough, the ritual by which he achieved the final goal ofAbramelin’s magic in 1906 was called by him ‘‘Augoeides,’’ thereby referringexplicitly to the constellation of concepts (Holy Guardian Angel, HigherSelf/Genius, Augoeides, Adonai) that he had tried to synthesize from differ-ent sources since his days in the Golden Dawn.104

103. I quote in this case from the unabridged excerpt of Crowley’s Confessionsincluded in Crowley, Magick. Liber ABA, 699. In several other places Crowley insistson the reality of spiritual, preterhuman, or discarnate entities. A particularly signifi-cant example is given by an unpublished text preserved in the O.T.O. archives. It isa typescript, and its date of composition is unknown: Perdurabo [Aleister Crowley],‘‘On the Ontological Quality of Phantoms.’’

104. The ritual of the Augoeides was based on Crowley’s version of the ‘‘BornlessRitual,’’ to which I have already referred above. About the term ‘‘Augoeides,’’ seeabove, n. 96.

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The ritual of the Augoeides is interesting because it took place almostexclusively in an imagined ritual space.105 Since it was performed during along trip in China, where a physical ritual space according to Abramelin’sinstructions was not available, Crowley decided to use his imagination.Therefore he followed the instructions given in the book carefully but onlyby visualizing the actions that were necessary for performing the ritual, aswell as the particular ritual space in which they were supposed to take place.In his autobiography, Crowley claims that in the end he obtained the samefinal result, that is, the Knowledge and Conversation, as if he had performedthe ritual physically. It was a mystical experience, and one of the most impor-tant magical achievements of his all life.

Between 1929 and 1930 Crowley published his Magick in Theory and Prac-tice, which presents his views on magic in the most systematic fashion. Whatinterests us here is that in this book we can observe a radical innovationconcerning the concept of the Holy Guardian Angel. Crowley now identifiesthis concept with Aiwass. In the context of a discussion on black magic andon the existence of the Christian ‘‘Devil,’’ he adds in a footnote:

‘‘The Devil’’ is, historically, the God of any people that one personally dislikes. Thishas led to so much confusion of thought that The Beast 666 has preferred to letnames stand as they are, and to proclaim simply that Aiwaz—the solar-phallic-her-metic ‘‘Lucifer’’—is His own Holy Guardian Angel, and ‘‘The Devil’’ Satan orHadit of our particular unit of the Starry Universe.106

The identification between Aiwass and Satan is interesting enough, and ithas of course offered some arguments to those who perceive Crowley as aSatanist.107 However, it is the change of perspective in relation to the Holy

105. See Crowley, The Confessions, 514–33. See also Regardie, The Eye in theTriangle, 303–37; and Pasi, La notion de magie, 373–76.

106. [Crowley], Magick in Theory and Practice, 193, n. 1.107. On Crowley and Satanism, see Massimo Introvigne, Enquete sur le satanisme

(Paris: Dervy, 1997), 209–19. Introvigne discusses and rightly dismisses interpreta-tions of Crowley as a Satanist. Introvigne refers to this passage as well (see ibid., 216).His interpretation, however, differs from mine. He does not seem to realize, in fact,that Aiwass, until Magick in Theory and Practice, had nothing to do with Crowley’sHoly Guardian Angel, and that he was always seen by Crowley as an autonomouspersonality. On the other hand, Introvigne quotes a passage (ibid., 215) taken fromone of the commentaries on the Book of the Law, written at around the same time asMagick in Theory and Practice (early 1920s, during the Cefalu period), where Crowleystill claims that the Holy Guardian Angel ‘‘represents the Higher Self ’’ and that ‘‘heis almost the ‘unconscious’ of Freud’’ (Aleister Crowley, The Law is for All [Phoenix,Ariz.: New Falcon Publications, 1993], 78 and 80). It seems likely therefore that the

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Guardian Angel that is particularly significant here. If Crowley’s guardianangel is Aiwass, and if he considers Aiwass as an autonomous entity, then theguardian angel is not a higher aspect of the ‘‘self ’’ that must be awakenedand attained through certain magical techniques or through yoga. It is notthe ‘‘Higher Genius’’ of the Golden Dawn anymore. At first sight, the reasonfor this shift of perspective is not clear. I have already suggested why, in myopinion, Crowley was already so deeply convinced that Aiwass could not beinterpreted in the same way as the spirits of the Lemegeton or as the higherself. A completely autonomous status of Aiwass was perceived by Crowley asmore compatible with the universal religious claims of Thelema. TheKnowledge and Conversation of the Holy Guardian Angel, on the otherhand, remained an individual experience, which mainly concerned the spiri-tual advancement of a single person. But then why would Crowley at onepoint identify Aiwass as his guardian angel? One possible explanation lies inCrowley’s personal evolution, and his increasing conviction, since the 1910s,of being the prophet of a universal religious message.108 Magick in Theory andPractice is full of references to the Book of the Law and of discussions of Thele-mic principles. It is therefore likely that Crowley at one point felt it necessaryto identify Aiwass with his guardian angel because he was now perceivinghimself as fully invested in his role of prophet and messiah. Crowley the manwas increasingly replaced by the Beast 666, the Logos of the Æon. Everythingwas then reinterpreted and subsumed within the framework of the new reli-gion.

This new interpretation was not modified in Crowley’ later years. In hislast book, which was written in the 1940s and published posthumously,Crowley comes to a conclusion that was already implicit in the identificationof Aiwass with the guardian angel, and confirms thereby the validity of thesuggestion I have made:

We may readily concur that the Augoeides, the ‘‘Genius’’ of Socrates, and the ‘‘HolyGuardian Angel’’ of Abramelin the Mage, are identical. But we cannot include this

Cefalu period was a transitional one, in which Crowley developed his new interpreta-tion of the Holy Guardian Angel but had not abandoned the old one yet. Furtherevidence of this is an entry in his diary dated August 30, 1923, where he states explic-itly that ‘‘the essential truth necessary at the present period of history is revealed byAiwass, the H[oly] G[uardian] A[ngel] of The Beast’’ (Aleister Crowley, The MagicalDiaries of Aleister Crowley [Jersey: Neville Spearman, 1979], 136). On the other hand,the footnote to Magick in Theory and Practice could have been added in any momentbetween the writing of the bulk of the book in the early 1920s and its actual printingin 1929.

108. On this point, see Pasi, Aleister Crowley und die Versuchung der Politik, 62–65.

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‘‘Higher Self ’’; for the Angel is an actual Individual with his own Universe, exactlyas a man is; or for the matter of that, a bluebottle. He is not a mere abstraction, aselection from, and exaltation of, one’s own favourite qualities, as the ‘‘Higher Self ’’seems to be.109

In the same context, Crowley eventually rejects any psychological expla-nation concerning the existence of preterhuman entities: ‘‘They are objec-tive, not subjective.’’110 Obviously, he realized that this idea was incompatiblewith what he had written in the foreword to the Lemegeton or in the first partof Book Four. In both cases, Crowley had suggested a rationalizing, psycho-logical interpretation of the entities involved in magical practices. But, assoon as the ‘‘Guardian Angel,’’ or the ‘‘Augoeides,’’ becomes an autonomousentity, things are not the same anymore. The contact that a magician mayhave with the guardian angel is not necessarily related to spiritual realizationanymore. This relationship is now rather ‘‘of friendship, of community, ofbrotherhood, or Fatherhood [sic].’’111 But then, from the psychologizinginterpretation that Crowley seemed to have adopted, we find ourselves backto a traditional one: the magician evokes the spirits in order to ask for theirhelp as someone may call for a doctor or a plumber in case of need. In thisrespect, it is interesting to note that in Magick Without Tears Crowley makesan explicit, sharp distinction between magic on the one hand, and mysticismand yoga on the other, and expresses his preference for the former.112 Thisdistinction would have made much less sense in the earlier period, when hewrote Book Four or even Magick in Theory and Practice.

CONCLUSION

The influence of authors such as William James and Henry Maudsley on anoccultist such as Crowley can only be understood in the context of the moregeneral attempt made by nineteenth-century occultism at coming to termswith modernity. This influence shaped not only Crowley’s understanding ofmagic, but also his understanding of yoga, and made it possible for him toapply a comparative perspective to spiritual practice, which allowed him toequate Western ritual magic with yoga. The desire to find commonalities

109. Aleister Crowley, Magick Without Tears (Saint Paul, Minn.: Llewellyn Publi-cations, 1973), 276. See also ibid., 94, where Crowley wonders whether Aiwass is aman or an angel, but does not even mention the possibility of the ‘‘Higher Self.’’

110. Ibid., 282.111. Ibid.112. Ibid., 495–506.

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between different spiritual traditions was certainly not new in esotericism.What was perhaps new was the idea of doing it by using new psychologicaland scientific theories, rather than mystical insight or traditional wisdom.

Crowley was considerably influenced by the ideas of scientific naturalismthat were widespread in England in the last quarter of the nineteenth century,and that were also expressed in new psychological theories applied to reli-gion. However, this attempt at modernizing magic, by psychologizing andnaturalizing it, found an unexpected and unavoidable obstacle in the religiousrevelation of Thelema. From the moment in which Crowley became con-vinced that his personal mission on this planet was to spread the new religioustruth he had found, the tension with his naturalizing interpretations of magicwas destined to surface sooner or later. This tension is precisely what ledCrowley increasingly to identify his own guardian angel with Aiwass, andconsequently implicitly to deny the purely mystical value of the experiencedescribed in Abramelin’s book. Aiwass had to exist not in his mind, but inthe realms of a spiritual reality that was as objective as the material one, if notmore. This is why, although the psychologization of magic and of relatedspiritual practices attained, with him a degree of boldness that was probablyunprecedented in esotericism, it still was not—nor could be—complete. Acomparison with the ideas of one of his most interesting disciples, IsraelRegardie, is very useful.113 It is impossible to enter into details here, but Iwill give at least a couple of quotations from Regardie to show his basicattitude toward magic:

What modern psychology has quite possibly accomplished is an advance over the

efforts of our predecessors in the way of a cathartic technique. Moreover, because of

modern devices, the methods of analytical psychology have been brought nearer to

the understanding and convenience of the ordinary man of the street. In the past, the

techniques of attainment, Mysticism, Magic, and Yoga, or by whatever name such

systems were denoted, were always several removes from the ken of the average

113. I have discussed at length Regardie’s ideas on magic, also in relation toCrowley, in my La notion de magie, 390–98. As I have already pointed out, Regardieoffers his interpretation of Crowley’s magical system in The Eye in the Triangle. Hepresents his own ideas on the relationship between magic and psychoanalysis espe-cially in The Middle Pillar: A Co-Relation of the Principles of Analytical Psychology and theElementary Techniques of Magic (Saint Paul, Minn.: Llewellyn, 1970). Logically, Hane-graaff cannot avoid referring to Regardie as a most significant example in his discus-sion of psychologization in contemporary occultist magic: see Hanegraaff, ‘‘HowMagic Survived,’’ 366–67.

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individual. The psychologies of the past may be summarised by the use of the wordsYoga and Magic.114

And:

Analytical Psychology and Magic comprise in my estimation two halves or aspects ofa single technical system. Just as the body and mind are not two separate units, butare simply the dual manifestations of an interior dynamic ‘‘something’’ so psychologyand magic comprise similarly a single system whose goal is the integration of thehuman personality.115

For Regardie, there seems to be an almost perfect equation between psy-chology and magic, to the extent that they even share the same goal (the‘‘integration of the human personality’’). Metaphysical aspects related to thepractice of magic seem to disappear from sight in even a more radical waythan with Crowley. If Crowley could not go all the way down to a completenaturalization and psychologization of magic, in order to preserve the univer-sal claims of his religion, Regardie did not have the same kind of limitation.Because he was not interested in creating a new religion, or in adoptingCrowley’s, he was able to bring the process of psychologization of magic toits ultimate extreme, by using the psychoanalytical theories he had beenstudying. For Regardie, magic and psychoanalysis use similar means in orderto achieve similar goals, and he had no need to maintain a belief in preternat-ural entities as Crowley did.

114. Regardie, The Middle Pillar, 15.115. Ibid., 16.

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Varieties of Magical Experience - A. Crowley's View on Occult Practice

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