Lords of the Left-Hand Path: Forbidden Practices and Spiritual Heresies by Flowers Stephen E. Ph.D

Author:Flowers, Stephen E., Ph.D. [Flowers, Stephen E., Ph.D.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Occult/Spirituality
ISBN: 9781594776922
Publisher: Inner Traditions/Bear & Company
Published: 2012-06-14T22:00:00+00:00

THE GREAT BEAST

Aleister Crowley

No man is more enigmatic in the history of the occult revival than Edward Alexander Crowley (1875–1947), better known as Aleister Crowley. He is so enigmatic because although opinions of him and his work are often strong, they hardly ever agree. What makes matters even more knotty is the fact that Crowley himself seems to have been somewhat unsure of his own nature: was he the “Great Wild Beast” or the “World Teacher”—or both?

Most discussions of Crowley quickly descend into recounting various legends and anecdotes concerning his exploits. These may be found in numerous books, for example John Symonds’s The Great Beast (1972), as well as Crowley’s own Confessions. My intention here is to concentrate on the ideas of Crowley as they possibly relate to the left-hand-path system of magical philosophy.

Crowley’s father was a well-to-do beer baron and member of a fundamentalist Christian sect known popularly as “the Plymouth Brethren.” His father died in 1886, and Crowley’s future exploits were largely financed through his inheritance. As a young man, his avocations were poetry and mountain climbing. In the last month of 1896, while in Stockholm, he was awakened to the possibilities of magical philosophy. Two years later, on November 18, 1898, he was initiated into the “Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn.” By 1900, he had been initiated to the Adeptus Minor grade in the GD,*10 but he was soon thereafter alienated from the organization and began an independent career in magical studies.

In April of 1904, Crowley conducted a series of magical workings in Cairo, Egypt, in which he received the words of a text entitled Liber AL vel Legis: The Book of the Law from a discarnate entity called Aiwass (sometimes spelled Aiwaz). In Crowley’s own mythology, this event (and the transformation it brought about in Crowley himself) is said to have ushered in a new Aeon in human history. It was this event, and the product of it—The Book of the Law—that would certainly reshape the rest of Crowley’s life. In 1907, he founded his own magical order, the Argenteum Astrum (Silver Star; AA). In 1909, Crowley claimed to have attained the magical grades of initiation referred to as Adeptus Exemptus and Magister Templi in the GD system. But his claims were for his own magical order, the AA.

In 1912, he began an alliance with a pseudo-Masonic German lodge, the Ordo Templi Orientis (Order of Eastern Templars; O.T.O.). The O.T.O. teaches forms of sexual magic akin to Indian tantrism, and Crowley was to become absorbed in this kind of magic for the rest of his life.

On his birthday in 1915, he claimed the initiatory grade of Magus, assuming the motto or magical name Tô Mega Therion, “the Great Beast” (see Revelation 13:1–18). The last initiatory grade was claimed in May 1921, that of Ipsissimus (Latin for “his very utmost self”).

The “Great Beast” died in relative obscurity in Hastings, England, on December 1, 1947, in the fullness of seventy-two years of age. But even more so

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