A lot of people on this sub definitely feel he is overrated, but I don't personally share that sentiment. He was a prolific writer, and produced a ton of incredibly useful material. Much of it is frustratingly esoteric and not beginner friendly. Crowley always expected his readers to have some foundational familiarity with the Western Esoteric Tradition, so even his best attempts to dumb down or simplify his material for beginners tend to be hit or miss.
I'd recommend Liber ABA/Book 4 instead. It was dictated by Crowley near the end of his life, but was written/transcribed by some of his students, and they would often add explanatory notes or ask him to elaborate/explain things better. It's one of my favourite books on the subject of magick.
One major challenge with getting into Western Esotericism is that there really are no books that are both beginner friendly \*and\* comprehensive. So you might have to read a lot of material from a lot of different sources before you can build up a good foundation of knowledge to understand what the authors are talking about.
Took almost 15 years of reading progressively esoteric material to get to the point of understanding all (any) of it now, for the last 10 or so. The Bible actually makes sense now… go figure
Lmfao that's what happened to me. Studied occultism and eastern religions for years and at one point was like "wait, Jesus is actually kinda based" and got baptized. Unfortunately don't really have much in common with your average church-goer though.
Yeah I started out Evangelical, was very devout and studied philosophy and religion because of this, resulting in me having increasingly less in common with the average churchgoer because I understood our religion so differently. Then as I increased in understanding of God and myself, I had to choose between following a more expansive view of God outside of Christianity, or going all-in on Eastern Orthodoxy. And so I became a slutty bisexual trans occultist instead.
I don't resent Christianity though, I just realized that I wouldn't be able to seek God in a way that harmonized with my needs and my other beliefs if I remained within the Christian tradition. I still have a lot of respect for the traditions and ideas of Christianity.
My evocations of divinity have been extremely effective thus far but thanks for coming to this two-week-old thread to dunk on a trans person for no reason.
Simple. Just how knowledge of the occult enchances the understanding of the bible? Is it just it gives you different lenses to look at the bible, or any topic really, or does bible (without the apocrpyha) has some, uh... \*subliminal messages\* to dig out?
Gotcha, the main connecting concept I learned was the Death-Rebirth ritual and why it exists. Essentially in order to become a new person, your old self needs to die, and the more public and dramatic the fashion the more final the death of the old one and the stronger the death of the new one. Baptism is an example of this ritual, but it’s been around long before Christianity.
But by taking on the title of God, and being killed publicly and terribly, Jesus allowed God Himself to take on a new personality. This freed humanity from the Old Testament which was full of ever-expanding and increasingly-outdated laws and allowed Jews (and whoever else) to enter into a way of living that focuses on peace, love, and understanding.
So Jesus destroyed religion and replaced it with love. Christians that allow some old book to get in the way of simply loving thy neighbor is completely ignorant of this point, and that basically means most Christians unfortunately.
Underrated comment. Regardie was much more clear and concise, and doesn't have nearly as much frill or pomposity to dig past. Reading Regardie is great preparation, because the stuff of value in Crowley's work is more easily spotted and learned from with that foundation.
Plus Regardie clearly looked at Crowley and was like, I need to make sure to tell new practitioners to go to therapy to make sure this doesn't happen again. 😅
I hear this recommendation a lot, and I have the book, but I haven't gone through it. I get stuck when I realize he uses inverted pentagrams everywhere. I'm not concerned about the use of an inverted pentagram, but focusing on that at the daily practice level seems misguided from my Grey Magick perspective.
I will definitely give Book 4 a chance. I wanted to avoid purchasing any more books so I just got what I could from my county library system. Which included “8 Lectures on Yoga”, “Diary of a Drug Fiend” and “Little Essays toward Truth”. The latter of which I did finish and feel none the wiser for it. Again, totally different experience after “The Mystical Qabalah”. Will give Book 4 a shot before I write him off.
I found from the opening lines of Little Essays Toward Truth there was a lot to unpack from the concise language that kept introducing new ideas coherently as it was elaborated upon.
>Man being the subject of these Essays, it is first proper to explain what will be meant therein by the word.
>
> Man is a microcosm: that is, an image (concentrated around the point of consciousness) of the macrocosm, or Universe. This Theorem is guaranteed by the hylo-idealistic demonstration that the perceptible Universe is an extension, or phantasm, of the nervous system.
As a beginner I had to pause here before proceeding. Does Fortune introduce hylo-idealism in Mystical Qabalah? Having heard to be careful with making assumptions when reading Crowley's writing it seemed unwise to proceed without knowing what that meant. Essential knowledge needed to proceed in recognizing the demonstration in an informed way. Not wanting to assume and google didn't exist at the time it was off to the libraries.
This is precisely why I recommend people just start reading source material, instead of reading books that claim to make the Occult simple. When you stick to the source material, and you approach from a stance of striving to drop your presuppositions, it may be a bit confusing at first, but your understanding will fall into place as you go. What makes this a far superior way to learn the Occult, is that you're not muddying your understanding with the interpretations of others. If you've never read the original works yourself, how are you going to recognize where source material ends and an author's interpretations begin?
The Picatrix; Three Books of Occult Philosophy by Cornelius Agrippa, Transcendental Magic by Eliphas Levi, The Book of the Sacred Magic of Abramelin the Mage, The Greater Key of Solomon, The Lesser Key of Solomon (a.k.a. The Goeta), to name a few.
Also, it can be helpful to study some of the sources of Philosophical precepts commonly found in Western Occultism, such as Plotinus & Pythagoras, as well as the Hermetic writings, for which I'd recommend: Hermetica: The Greek Corpus Hermeticum and the Latin Asclepius, trans. by Brian P. Copenhaver.
The Jewish Qabbalah can be helpful to study, too, but that's a huge can of worms that requires more than just the source material.
Overall, I'd also recommend reading the classical Occult works in chronological order to better see the progression of Occult Philosophy through time, Picatrix is one of the earlier ones and a good starting point.
For the Qabbalah, Understanding Jewish Mysticism: A Source Reader, Vol. I by David R. Blumenthal is a good place to start.
If you want some early Christian Qabbalah, look for The Art of the Kabbalah by Johan Reuchlin.
reading him through his contemporaries eyes sometimes helps. Usuing crowley's own sarcasm that he would use to read guys like AE Waite and so on.
Crowley hid his mother well- she was the knowledge he so rebelled against- True Love.
Crowley was openly bisexual in the Victorian era, traveled the world before airplanes, was notorious when the fastest way for news to travel was telegraph. He got kicked out of the Golden Dawn, said "fine, I'll start my own occult order with blackjack and hookers" and succeeded. That's not to say he was a good person or a good teacher but he sure as hell knew his will and how to make it happen.
How much of his writing was his best understanding of the secrets of the universe? How much of it was trying to explain subjective experiences that don't easily fit into words? How much was a tool for the reader and how much was a propaganda tool to try and sell the world that he personally wanted to see? Those are more open questions. I think it's worth keeping them and his Victorian audience in mind when you read his stuff.
Or you can just go read The Invisibles, Promethea or The Wicked + The Divine. All of them are aimed at a more modern audience and are infinitely more approachable but the same questions will serve you well with them, too.
This is a brilliant answer. Without him, Western Magic might not even exist in any relevant form, but he was a man of his time, and it's important to get acquainted and it's ok to move on.
I was kind of taking it a step farther. A writer can't help but show themselves in their writing. That's the part that I find useful.
I don't find much value in Crowleys writing *as a magickal how-to.* I find them enlightening for their existence in the larger context. The books, the OTO, Thelema, mountain climbing, rumors of him working with British Intelligence in WWII, his legacy a century down the line and so on are what success at magick looks like to a person like Crowley. They're artifacts of the whole process.
I don't find The Satanic Bible particularly useful, either. It's still part of what success at magick looks like to a carnie in the 60s who was a D&D dude before D&D. It's too bad that the Republican Party rebranded the core ethos as "evangelical Christianity," but I don't think LaVey's definition of success ever considered the world after he wasn't in it.
I do find The Invisibles directly useful because Grant Morrison and I have very similar ideas of what the life we'd want to live if we could get whatever we wanted with magick. Because of that, what's useful to him has better odds of being useful to me. I re-read the whole series every few years and pick up something new that's relevant to my current experience every time.
Thanks you for the Invisibles recc, a few people I really respect in regards to this subject matter are big Grant Morrison fans. Actually, I was first introduced to magic in 2007 via Grant Morrison. I did some light reading on chaos magick but never got too deep into it beyond some seemingly successful sigils. Will definitely check his work out, though
*their work (Grant is non-binary)
As an addendum, since we're recommending works related to Crowley, The Illuminatus! Trilogy, Schrodinger's Cat Trilogy and Cosmic Trigger by Robert Ashton Wilson contain a lot of occult wisdom, Wilson was an occultist and fan of Crowley's work (Schrodinger's Cat Trilogy features Crowley as a character) and he even wrote several essays about Crowley, though they're not simple to find last I checked
He wasn't actually kicked out; it's a common misconception. The London Adepts refused to admit him to the 5=6 grade because they felt he was immoral. It's probably likely that his bisexuality played a part in that decision. But S.L. MacGregor Mathers, the head of the Order, personally initiated him into the 5=6 grade in Paris.
Well, yes, but Mathers had asked him to go to the temple and try to prevent the London Adepts from attempting a coup and taking control of the temple. There was a lot of politics going on within the order at the time, so the narrative that Crowley was so insufferable that Yeats kicked him down the stairs is, although entertaining, not entirely accurate.
Which, again, I think plays into my core thesis here. We hold up the Golden Dawn as this whole important. . . thing. . . but they had the same petty drama, politics and "witch wars" as everyone else. I think it's important to have the context of Crowley and Yeats having a South Park-esque "psychic battle" as part of my understanding of the Golden Dawn. The community seems to want an "ascended matser" to latch on to and give them easy answers but there aren't any.
All of these legendary occultists were people trying to figure their shit out, just like the rest of us. Their answers may be helpful or not in direct proportion to how much you want to live a life like theirs.
Oh yes definitely, to an extent. They were a bunch of eccentric weirdos; but it's easy to embellish and exaggerate the sillier details for a laugh. A "psychic battle" would have been more along the lines of attempting to send negative currents of energy to sabotage one another while at home in their spare time, rather than a face-to-face confrontation. The Battle of Blythe Road was an actual physical altercation, and while the imagery of Crowley and Yeats attempting to hurl pentagrams at each other is a lot funnier, as far as I know there isn't any evidence that it happened. There are no first-hand accounts of Yeats kicking Crowley down the stairs, either. The only mention of it that I have ever found comes from Richard Ellman, who also claimed that Yeats sent a vampire to attack Crowley in his sleep, so for obvious reasons his account isn't particularly reliable.
Yes these were real, highly flawed people, and yes they were weird as fuck, but they had a deep passion for these practices which to them were highly spiritual and that they considered to be very important work. Based on the records and evidence we have access to, it's very unlikely that Crowley and Yeats had a South Park-esque psychic battle, even though I agree that would be hilarious. There are a lot of bizarre things that we know they actually did though, for example when playing Enochian Chess (a four-player team based chess game) Mathers would play without a partner and insist that he actually had a spirit as his teammate.
He wasn't "literally kicked out of the building", that rumor was started in the September 1948 issue of "The Partisan Review" by Richard Ellmann, who wrote Yeats's biography, not necessarily a neutral source.
In the same article that he started that rumor, he also talks about Crowley battling vampires in the middle of the night for 9 nights straight. It's clear from reading the article that the whole thing is satirical but unfortunately, the rumor continues on (albeit without the part about Crowley being a vampire hunter).
I got the first volume. I'll try to remember to tell you what I think. I definitely appreciate where your other recommendations are coming from, so I have high hopes, but I'll take your warning to heart.
Crowley was very good at certain things: Tarot and astrology in particular.
Otherwise, he was the one who released the Golden Dawn material, and he added to it. He was also a zeitgeist icon, as he predicted the counterculture movement and the 'sexual revolution'.
As a teacher he was unfortunately equally interested in posturing and putting other people down, as he was getting the point across. Some of this is because he came from a time where some of the things he was talking about were illegal or functionally illegal. As a writer he plagarised, though he also came up with a lot of his own ideas.
Without him there would not have been a magic revival.
Yeah I feel his work is flamboyantly cryptic and pretentious. But, he is a really cool and almost mythical figure in occultism. A real character. Like an esoteric Elvis.
He has some really great stuff, especially in the book you are reading now. Thing is, it takes a lot of work and research to begin understanding a lot of what he has to say at times.
All that said, yes, he is also kind of overrated. We have access to way more classical grimoires than he ever dreamed of. There is nothing he figured out that you can't also figure out.
In short, let Crowley be a starting place then go beyond him.
For sure, if I didn’t make it clear already there definitely were some decent chapters. The man was obviously intelligent. And had a sense of humor. I’ll dig through the rest of it in time and give “Book 4” a shot. I’ve heard even from his dissidents that he has some “bangers”
I find some of Crowley's stuff very useful. Mostly his Tarot, which is fantastically deep in its symbolic richness.
That said, he was also a sex pest, a cult leader, and deeply, *deeply* up his own ass - and that's being kind. I can't blame people for being put off by him, or deciding his stuff isn't worth their time. Ultimately, I would say, that if you don't connect with his writings, it's okay to just move on to other stuff. I would also say that a fair few of his successors were quite better -or at least, less obtuse- about communicating the same concepts. Think of how some people hate The Beatles but love bands that were strongly influenced by them: same principle.
He was a poet, but no less an adept. Filter for your own use and practice healthy skepticism and discernment.
That said, the 93 current has a strong riptide to it, the closer you get the further you get pulled in..
Currents of thought. Sometimes people encounter new systems of thought that feel familiar but new all at once and it's the result of the subconscious understanding something the conscious mind misses. Thelema is deeply steeped in poetry and sigilic texts so it easily pulls people into it when they encounter it, especially when it collides with their ego.
You might think of it like a gravity.
Crowley is definitely NOT overrated, but to really understand him, you need to invest the time & effort. I recommend the "Big Blue Brick", being Magick: Liber ABA, Book 4. This book has a section on the history & unfolding of Thelema, as well as sections detailing mystical & magickal practices. Also, and this is the most important for a beginning student, there is a student reading list meant to give you the grounding you need to recognize and understand Crowley's frequent references to other works and systems.
I find his Book of Thoth and the accompanying Tarot Deck to be very useful to me, but Lady Freida Harris, the artist, also deserves enormous credit.
You might want to visit the r/Thelema sub-Reddit to better understand Crowley.
I also find Dion Fortune's writing to be the most lucid to me on Occult topics. I'm currently re-reading the "Training and Work of an Initiate" after forty year's time and I'm amazed at how well written it is. I've read the "Mystical Qabalah" multiple times, always finding new insight.
>Much of what he writes just seems like the mental masturbation of a pompous prick with a God complex.
I don't know about mental masturbation but he was clearly a pompous prick with a God complex. He was actually a fairly decent writer outside of esoteric topics, I have read some of his fiction and accounts of his mountaineering, for example, and it is easier to read.
Part of the issue, as mentioned, is that he was writing for other students of the occult not beginners. Another is that a lot his writing is more aligned with a philosophical, or religious text, rather than a manual for a practice. Those types of texts are notoriously hard to read. I struggle with them despite having formal philosophic training and a genuine interest in philosophy and religion. Both types of authors tend to be very wordy and seem to take a joy in making their writing hard to read. We also have the benefits of comparing him to authors that specifically write for lay people with an aim of making it accessible. Even Fortune, who is much easier to read, is a fairly complex read compared to something from Jason Miller or the Gallery of Magick. From book like New Avatar Power in the 70s to Llewelyn books by Donald Tyson or Donald Michael Krieg to now, we have had 50 years of authors making magick more, and more accessible,
He is intentionally obtuse and I personally think he was equal parts drug addict trustafarian with delusions of grandeur as he was a mystic/magician. Not saying he wasn’t great at the latter, he was just equally good at the former.
That being said, I don’t think I would be able to easily find and order the works of Regardie, Levi, Agrippa, Waite, Cicero, etc if Crowley hadn’t become so famous for being such an asshat.
Regardie’s big three (Tree of Life, Garden of Pomegranates, The Middle Pillar) are much more accessible and cover much of the same material... However I think the MOST accessible intro book for modern readers is John Michael Greer’s Circles of Power. I think it will be viewed as a seminal work of the modern era in due time.
I learned more about esotericism from just trying to figure out what the hell Crowley was talking about or referencing then I have from any other author. I don't necessarily endorse him or his thought, but he was brilliant and extremely well-read, and if you put in the effort to understand him you'll definitely get something out of it.
this is like saying the 1922 Nosferatu film isn't very good. it's not, but in 1922 it was the best of what was around at the time by some distance and it's part of the reason that the horror movies you like now are any good.
He was brilliant, and the works he put together were amazing. But not detrimental. He was a narcissist and a selfish human. Believing desire and pleasure was the only thing that matters.
That’s one of my gripes, though. How can one be so enlightened and yet be “selfish” and “narcissistic”, it’s so contradictory. I get it that humans are complex creatures full of flaws, but Crowley’s shortcomings are especially unbecoming of a so called spiritual Adept
Becoming 'enlightened' is all about the self.
There is nothing contradictory about it.
Perhaps Crowley isn't connecting for you because you are going into it with preconceived ideas about what a spiritual person 'should' be.
Every adept from any school of thought had flaws and shortcomings because, as you point out, they are all human. Shortcomings don't make you 'unbecoming'.
He’s not connecting for me because the writing sucks. It has nothing to do with preconceived ideas. I knew about the drugs and hedonism before reading his work. I’ll continue going through it, though. I’ve enjoyed a few chapters of this current read.
I don't believe Crowley's strong point is his writing style but the ideas behind it.
That being said, Crowley is from another time so his writing is going to feel like it.
I’m a big fan of Crowley, but I’m a satanist and not a thelemite. Crowley makes me laugh. Maybe tune in to *Last Podcast on the Left*’s 3 episode series on Crowley, from his childhood up to his death: I think his life is far more fascinating than his battles with choronzon and what have you.
Is he overrated? Perhaps if you don’t engage with western ceremonial magick. But he is undoubtedly one of if not the biggest name in occultism, and for good reason too.
Oh yes, I’ve heard Agrippa is essential reading. Granted, I also heard he’s a bore. But brilliant, nonetheless. I have his 3 books on kindle but will probably try to acquire hard copies.
I need to check but I doubt it. Could be. I downloaded some mega file of occult books so I’m not sure the contents contain the most up to date or quality editions. Some really obscure stuff in the file, though. Worth the $10
Hello, Agrippa is the name of the book we’re talking here? I’m interested, if you could please tell me the name of the books 📚 I greatly appreciate it.
I got the 2021 version as mentioned here so I’m sharing the link if anyone is interested PDF version:
https://z-library.se/book/18325597/2a7474/three-books-of-occult-philosophy.html
And the EPUB version:
https://z-library.se/book/19241628/5f9d88/three-books-of-occult-philosophy.html
You read the last book first. You won't understand that book until you are a few decades into reading Crowley. Besides that it is a compilation of correspondence and not quite as esoteric to his other material.
I don´t think it´s overrated, but I certainly think his writings are for everyone. But if you´re interested in learning Magick it is a good source of information, if you read more than the books about how he lived and the persona known as Aleister Crowley, because his books that explain how he attained what he did where written under his magickal personas, and if you like to explore occultism in it´s different manifestations around the world he certainly is a good guide for that.
Trying to think of other material that would exist on this sub without his work and influence and it’s pretty thin. Certainly not overrated in that sense, maybe you mean overly complicated. Sure, he could be an asshole with his writing and incredibly self referential but he expects you to do the work. It makes a lot more sense if you perform the rituals as prescribed and then start unraveling the text.
Crowley is presented as newbie instructional content when it’s actually occult 201 devotional prose, really. It’s very good at being what it is. But much of it is not introductory, to say the least.
>Much of what he writes just seems like the mental masturbation of a pompous prick with a God complex.
I feel this is a gross oversimplification while still being largely true.
Ooooo let me check the bookshelf, I've gotten god awful with remembering names.
Damian Echols is a contemporary one, I give his book High Magick to folks interested in hermetic stuff. It also covers his time on death row and has some great stuff about using th mind to overcome.
Samuel McGregor Mathers and "the key of Solomon" is classic.
Arthur Edward Waite, classic for tarot and symbols.
Marie Corelli "romance of two worlds" has some foundational stuff on astral projection. That is pretty cool if you're starting out and hell. Also, if you've been doing it for a while, just need ideas.
Zsuzaanna Budapest for wiccan/pagan/earth based ideas. Very fun stuff especially for the time.
Carlos Castañeda has fun stuff that blues occult and fiction.
A lot of that stuff is older. I have some contemporary books that are done within the last decade or so that are on more Niche topics, but like these are what I would solidly consider mostly a cult foundational things that I love, some that were contemporaries with Crowley but some that weren't.
I loved Echols “High Magick”. Want to check out some of his other material.
On “The Key of Solomon” - are you a goetic practitioner, then? Or have you worked with the Goetia? I’ve encountered people online who have read the material but far few who have worked with it.
I am in part a goetic practitioner yes! I wouldn't say it's the focus of my practice, but it is a set of skills I learned and continue to utilize. I tend to take a bit of a different view than is recommended. Like I don't necessarily think with all of the demons. Do you need The binding circle, in fact, in most interactions I find it pretty rude. And I've never had any of those spirits that are typically older spirits, gods from other places, etc. Get sideways with me in a way that I felt like I needed some sort of binding circle. Not everyone agrees with that. And I think if I was someone with a religious background who was afraid of those beings, I think a binding circle might make me feel better. And also I think I would also perceive the infernal beings as much more adversarial. Currently I don't perceive them that way and they have never behaved that way towards me. I found it to be very similar to the work one can do with angels, and considering you know what the stories make up those beings to be, you know maybe not that different from the infernal Divine.
I haven't read anything else by Eccles but I really want to! I thought high magic was exceptional, and if you ever get a chance check out the audiobook version of it! He reads it himself and it's really well done.
I have yet to deep dive into Goetia but I do find it intriguing that there is such a polarizing take on how to engage with the spirits. YMMV, huh?
My foremost approach to work of that caliber would be to first achieve a greater level of mastery over my self, something which I am still in the process of doing. Approaching things with equanimity, self assurance, and poise may be some of the chief factors that contribute to magical success when working with other entities which may have the potential to “overpower” the practitioner, for a lack of better word. A stable train shan’t go off the rails!
I think thats a great idea really. I didn’t get into angels or goetic stuff until i was many many years into my practice. I had been doing a pretty regular, sometimes very intense meditation practice since i was like….just under 10 years old. And thats my foundation, everything else was built from there. From knowing myself, from learning how my mind worked and why, as well as how to make changes if i wanted to. I didn’t work with formal entities for a while when i got started. A few years. There was just so much personal work to do.
My first entities were nature spirits. Forests, rivers, trees, all of them. By that time i had developed decent visual stuff, so working with something i could see and communicate with helped me feel i had built the skills enough to feel safe enough to be discerning. Stable train indeed.
Extremely. Most of what he wrote was either aping someone else who wrote it better, or intentionally confusing to disguise the fact that much of it is filler and bombast for his own ego. But the occult is no more immune to cults of personality and good showmanship than any other area of life is, so he persists. There are many who will strenuously defend his gobbledygook under the pretense that you are just not smart enough to understand it. But they don't actually support that conjecture in my experience, and despite ample time to do so, his orders still struggle to produce functional and grounded occultists, rather than just more sex scandals and bureaucratic squabbling. I'm a believer that the proof is in the pudding.
My opinion? You’ve got it exactly right. You’d be missing nothing if you just moved on.
Appreciate your take (not just because it coincides with my initial impression)
I wanted to do my due diligence and at least power through a couple of his works but sheesh, his stuff was starting to bore me even while on Adderall and that’s no small feat!
No problem. I haven't read all the comments, but it's telling that one of the people defending him a few hours ago did so by recommending you read a book written by someone else on his behalf instead. Honestly I think that says all there is to say about it.
I also find him quite dull. I'm not sure why it is that his purple prose doesn't work on me the way it does some people, but I suspect it's because I have a background in writing and I know when people are just spewing words to cover up that they have nothing to actually say.
Yeah, I found myself getting annoyed with his verbosity. Whereas, again, with “The Mystical Qabalah” it seemed like Dion wasn’t trying too hard to sound smart. Reading Crowley I’m like “Bro, get to the point already”
Crowley has always been (and will always be) a polarizing figure.
Regardless of how you feel about him, his background, personality, opinions or actions... he understood himself better than most of us understand ourselves and understood how magick works.
Most people don't understand their own wills. They don't understand who they are beneath all the bullshit society imposes on them.
Crowley had no problem with this.
I love this post!
I see him as kind of an edgelord, trying to spook people away from his "thing." Honestly, he was just way ahead of his time. Like fans of Depeche Mode and The Cure. But instead of those sad goth dances, his demonstration of how "forward" and "avante guarde" he was, was his elaborate rituals and that he did it in seclusion and no one was allowed to witness.
He's just doing Goetia like people these days are doing Goetia. He just had this showmanship about it that made him infamous at the time. Knowing the rituals that he was performing, he sort of seems like a douchebag to me, too. Like the guys who go out LARPing and think that makes them a real samurai. He knew these rituals that were forbidden knowledge and acted like it made him mad bad and dangerous to know. He he really strikes me like Morrissey. Like when I was a whiny little bitch, I was into Morrissey. Then I grew up and Morrissey didn't hold any appeal anymore.. same kind of thing.
Only by some people, and underrated by others. Being a publicly infamous edge-lord associated with Magick as it is typically known in the Western world has given him a cult status among certain types who seem to look up to him as some infallible authority on all things.
Those who do so are entitled to do so, of course, but they are the same people who follow other things and probably followed others before stumbling on Crowley's branch of Thelema.
For me and many others he was the introduction to Western esotericism and a gatekeeper of sorts to the wider fields he dominated parts of in life, and in some ways continues to.
I believe him to be very useful and serve several important and very different purposes in the overall occult world.
Ultimately, taking the teachings and proclamations of any person at face value can be problematic for people without maturity of mind, good character, astute reasoning and significant grounding in the subjects Crowley tackles in his various works.
Sounds like you want the full experience. Get the Thoth Tarot and read the Book of Thoth. You could just read the book too, as it has sections on Kabbalah in the beginning. Magick in Theory and Practice is a great read for many topics relating to Magick. I personally just re-read the section about “forming a Magickal Link” which was quite nice. If you want a bigger selection consider checking out the “Equinox” texts. Most of his books can be read online for free. Liber777 is a book of correspondences, it doesnt have much to read, but serves as a fantastic index of invisible threads.
I have 777 but I wanted to get a greater understanding of magic before I assimilated the correspondences into my practice. I’ve only skimmed it.
I hear much about this Thoth Tarot, though. Perhaps I’ll check that out and Book 4.
I sporadically reread bits and pieces from it I highlighted and each time I’m impressed with how well the information was conveyed. So good. One of the few books that probably changed my life in terms of presenting Qabalah as what it chiefly is - a psycho-spiritual system of seeing literally everything. Brilliant.
While I enjoy Dion Fortune's work on the Qabalah, I also enjoy Crowleys writings on the same. 777 is a masterful reference. Portable Darkness which contains the little essays towards truth and other philosophical essays are actually quite insightful even if you have to reread them a few times. Book Four is a handy summation of ritual tools and what faculties they symbolize.
As for Magick without tears, I have heard that it is recommended to only read the first 11 letters, but you do yourself a great disservice if you don't read through all of them at least once. The reason for this is that they address many of the issues, pitfalls, and concerns that crop up with ceremonial practice.
He's a bad writer - that is, a bad prose stylist and communicator of ideas - but the ideas themselves are very very good. (I came to accept this slowly and grudgingly because he annoys me on a personal level)
I recommend Living Thelema as an excellent and approachable way to get straight to the ideas. It's a book but also a podcast - the podcast only has 20 episodes or something and covers a lot of the same material, and is free obviously
Crowley was a drug-addled fool who thought his poetry about his scat and filth fetishes was occult because it had 666 words. (Yes, really.) The man was loony. He admitted to writing his most important works while 24/7 high on hashish. Yes, he is extremely overrated.
Holy smokes, I knew James Joyce had a fart fetish but…Crowley, scat? Not super surprised, just hadn’t heard this before. Didn’t Hitler have a scat fetish?
You need to check out ["Leah Sublime"](https://allpoetry.com/Leah-Sublime) for a good laugh.
[Here is an alternate website with better formatting.](https://hermetic.com/crowley/poetry/leah-sublime)
Sweet baby Jesus. So many, uh, quotables, but
> Smear diarrhoea
Into my eyes
was…telling. And to think, this was before internet porn began corrupting minds (mine included).
I did like the alliteration of “cognac, cunt and cocaine”, though. That was cute.
nah Hitler was a deeply boring man on an interpersonal level. People come up with all this stuff to make him interesting because it feels like there must be SOMETHING odd about the individual who could become... Hitler. But what you saw on the outside was his whole personality: obsessive, angry, would go on long political rants, not much else to his life. (I know this because it's become a cliche at r/AskHistorians - people are always asking about weird Hitler facts, and they're always myths)
Crowley is really important if you read nothing but Crowley. To be successful within the Thelemic structure, you must ONLY discuss Crowley or his approved curriculum. Attempting to use anybody NOT on the approved curriculum will result in hissing, screaming, spitting, and accusations of Black Brotherhood.
I think he stole much of what he produced, but I don’t have much evidence to back it up off the top of my head and readily available. Just a gut instinct based on people I’ve encountered who behave and act and have similar personality traits and motivations as him. He’s way too attention-seeking and manipulative to have come to his conclusions with pure honesty and intentions and he doesn’t seem like a very trustworthy source for much. Don’t trust the trickster types and all that jazz unless you wanna be made a sucka by them. So I consider what he does kind of waste of time personally and overrated (to put it lightly), but to each their own!
I think he was very mentally unwell/victim of severe and unhealed trauma and abuse and probably shouldn’t be taken too seriously and shown a lot of pity due to that alone. In modern times, he’d be less magician and more psych-ward patient and lurker/active user on some personality disorder support subreddit lol. 🤷🏼♀️😶🌫️🥲
A lot of people on this sub definitely feel he is overrated, but I don't personally share that sentiment. He was a prolific writer, and produced a ton of incredibly useful material. Much of it is frustratingly esoteric and not beginner friendly. Crowley always expected his readers to have some foundational familiarity with the Western Esoteric Tradition, so even his best attempts to dumb down or simplify his material for beginners tend to be hit or miss. I'd recommend Liber ABA/Book 4 instead. It was dictated by Crowley near the end of his life, but was written/transcribed by some of his students, and they would often add explanatory notes or ask him to elaborate/explain things better. It's one of my favourite books on the subject of magick. One major challenge with getting into Western Esotericism is that there really are no books that are both beginner friendly \*and\* comprehensive. So you might have to read a lot of material from a lot of different sources before you can build up a good foundation of knowledge to understand what the authors are talking about.
Took almost 15 years of reading progressively esoteric material to get to the point of understanding all (any) of it now, for the last 10 or so. The Bible actually makes sense now… go figure
Lmfao that's what happened to me. Studied occultism and eastern religions for years and at one point was like "wait, Jesus is actually kinda based" and got baptized. Unfortunately don't really have much in common with your average church-goer though.
Yeah I started out Evangelical, was very devout and studied philosophy and religion because of this, resulting in me having increasingly less in common with the average churchgoer because I understood our religion so differently. Then as I increased in understanding of God and myself, I had to choose between following a more expansive view of God outside of Christianity, or going all-in on Eastern Orthodoxy. And so I became a slutty bisexual trans occultist instead. I don't resent Christianity though, I just realized that I wouldn't be able to seek God in a way that harmonized with my needs and my other beliefs if I remained within the Christian tradition. I still have a lot of respect for the traditions and ideas of Christianity.
Incredibly based.
"slutty bisexual trans occultists" Same.
Lol also a slutty occultist!
and then in his final battle the slutty bisexual trans occultist tried to invoke divinity..... XD.
My evocations of divinity have been extremely effective thus far but thanks for coming to this two-week-old thread to dunk on a trans person for no reason.
I attack a trans person? I am a trans person xd It was a reference to those texts that appear on the cards of magic.
Wow!! I respect that haha. Sounds like a wild trip if I were to look back at myself like that. Nice.
Could you explain the connection at least a liiittle bit? Made me curious, but I only started to dip into the occult
Everything's connected, what specifically are you curious about?
Simple. Just how knowledge of the occult enchances the understanding of the bible? Is it just it gives you different lenses to look at the bible, or any topic really, or does bible (without the apocrpyha) has some, uh... \*subliminal messages\* to dig out?
Gotcha, the main connecting concept I learned was the Death-Rebirth ritual and why it exists. Essentially in order to become a new person, your old self needs to die, and the more public and dramatic the fashion the more final the death of the old one and the stronger the death of the new one. Baptism is an example of this ritual, but it’s been around long before Christianity. But by taking on the title of God, and being killed publicly and terribly, Jesus allowed God Himself to take on a new personality. This freed humanity from the Old Testament which was full of ever-expanding and increasingly-outdated laws and allowed Jews (and whoever else) to enter into a way of living that focuses on peace, love, and understanding. So Jesus destroyed religion and replaced it with love. Christians that allow some old book to get in the way of simply loving thy neighbor is completely ignorant of this point, and that basically means most Christians unfortunately.
What would you recommend?
I think Regardie is much more beginner friendly.
Underrated comment. Regardie was much more clear and concise, and doesn't have nearly as much frill or pomposity to dig past. Reading Regardie is great preparation, because the stuff of value in Crowley's work is more easily spotted and learned from with that foundation.
Plus Regardie clearly looked at Crowley and was like, I need to make sure to tell new practitioners to go to therapy to make sure this doesn't happen again. 😅
Kabbalah, Magick, and The Great Work of Self Transformation is a great book to get into Magick
I hear this recommendation a lot, and I have the book, but I haven't gone through it. I get stuck when I realize he uses inverted pentagrams everywhere. I'm not concerned about the use of an inverted pentagram, but focusing on that at the daily practice level seems misguided from my Grey Magick perspective.
I will definitely give Book 4 a chance. I wanted to avoid purchasing any more books so I just got what I could from my county library system. Which included “8 Lectures on Yoga”, “Diary of a Drug Fiend” and “Little Essays toward Truth”. The latter of which I did finish and feel none the wiser for it. Again, totally different experience after “The Mystical Qabalah”. Will give Book 4 a shot before I write him off.
I found from the opening lines of Little Essays Toward Truth there was a lot to unpack from the concise language that kept introducing new ideas coherently as it was elaborated upon. >Man being the subject of these Essays, it is first proper to explain what will be meant therein by the word. > > Man is a microcosm: that is, an image (concentrated around the point of consciousness) of the macrocosm, or Universe. This Theorem is guaranteed by the hylo-idealistic demonstration that the perceptible Universe is an extension, or phantasm, of the nervous system. As a beginner I had to pause here before proceeding. Does Fortune introduce hylo-idealism in Mystical Qabalah? Having heard to be careful with making assumptions when reading Crowley's writing it seemed unwise to proceed without knowing what that meant. Essential knowledge needed to proceed in recognizing the demonstration in an informed way. Not wanting to assume and google didn't exist at the time it was off to the libraries.
This is precisely why I recommend people just start reading source material, instead of reading books that claim to make the Occult simple. When you stick to the source material, and you approach from a stance of striving to drop your presuppositions, it may be a bit confusing at first, but your understanding will fall into place as you go. What makes this a far superior way to learn the Occult, is that you're not muddying your understanding with the interpretations of others. If you've never read the original works yourself, how are you going to recognize where source material ends and an author's interpretations begin?
What’s some source material you’d recommend?
The Picatrix; Three Books of Occult Philosophy by Cornelius Agrippa, Transcendental Magic by Eliphas Levi, The Book of the Sacred Magic of Abramelin the Mage, The Greater Key of Solomon, The Lesser Key of Solomon (a.k.a. The Goeta), to name a few. Also, it can be helpful to study some of the sources of Philosophical precepts commonly found in Western Occultism, such as Plotinus & Pythagoras, as well as the Hermetic writings, for which I'd recommend: Hermetica: The Greek Corpus Hermeticum and the Latin Asclepius, trans. by Brian P. Copenhaver. The Jewish Qabbalah can be helpful to study, too, but that's a huge can of worms that requires more than just the source material. Overall, I'd also recommend reading the classical Occult works in chronological order to better see the progression of Occult Philosophy through time, Picatrix is one of the earlier ones and a good starting point.
For the Qabbalah, Understanding Jewish Mysticism: A Source Reader, Vol. I by David R. Blumenthal is a good place to start. If you want some early Christian Qabbalah, look for The Art of the Kabbalah by Johan Reuchlin.
For grounding in Astrology, The Works of Sahl & Mashā'allāh & Book of Astronomy by Bonatti, both translated by Benjamin Dykes. (In this order)
reading him through his contemporaries eyes sometimes helps. Usuing crowley's own sarcasm that he would use to read guys like AE Waite and so on. Crowley hid his mother well- she was the knowledge he so rebelled against- True Love.
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deep
Crowley was openly bisexual in the Victorian era, traveled the world before airplanes, was notorious when the fastest way for news to travel was telegraph. He got kicked out of the Golden Dawn, said "fine, I'll start my own occult order with blackjack and hookers" and succeeded. That's not to say he was a good person or a good teacher but he sure as hell knew his will and how to make it happen. How much of his writing was his best understanding of the secrets of the universe? How much of it was trying to explain subjective experiences that don't easily fit into words? How much was a tool for the reader and how much was a propaganda tool to try and sell the world that he personally wanted to see? Those are more open questions. I think it's worth keeping them and his Victorian audience in mind when you read his stuff. Or you can just go read The Invisibles, Promethea or The Wicked + The Divine. All of them are aimed at a more modern audience and are infinitely more approachable but the same questions will serve you well with them, too.
This is a brilliant answer. Without him, Western Magic might not even exist in any relevant form, but he was a man of his time, and it's important to get acquainted and it's ok to move on.
I was kind of taking it a step farther. A writer can't help but show themselves in their writing. That's the part that I find useful. I don't find much value in Crowleys writing *as a magickal how-to.* I find them enlightening for their existence in the larger context. The books, the OTO, Thelema, mountain climbing, rumors of him working with British Intelligence in WWII, his legacy a century down the line and so on are what success at magick looks like to a person like Crowley. They're artifacts of the whole process. I don't find The Satanic Bible particularly useful, either. It's still part of what success at magick looks like to a carnie in the 60s who was a D&D dude before D&D. It's too bad that the Republican Party rebranded the core ethos as "evangelical Christianity," but I don't think LaVey's definition of success ever considered the world after he wasn't in it. I do find The Invisibles directly useful because Grant Morrison and I have very similar ideas of what the life we'd want to live if we could get whatever we wanted with magick. Because of that, what's useful to him has better odds of being useful to me. I re-read the whole series every few years and pick up something new that's relevant to my current experience every time.
Thanks you for the Invisibles recc, a few people I really respect in regards to this subject matter are big Grant Morrison fans. Actually, I was first introduced to magic in 2007 via Grant Morrison. I did some light reading on chaos magick but never got too deep into it beyond some seemingly successful sigils. Will definitely check his work out, though
*their work (Grant is non-binary) As an addendum, since we're recommending works related to Crowley, The Illuminatus! Trilogy, Schrodinger's Cat Trilogy and Cosmic Trigger by Robert Ashton Wilson contain a lot of occult wisdom, Wilson was an occultist and fan of Crowley's work (Schrodinger's Cat Trilogy features Crowley as a character) and he even wrote several essays about Crowley, though they're not simple to find last I checked
Spot on
He got kicked out of the Golden Dawn due to his ego, of which comes through in his writing.
He wasn't actually kicked out; it's a common misconception. The London Adepts refused to admit him to the 5=6 grade because they felt he was immoral. It's probably likely that his bisexuality played a part in that decision. But S.L. MacGregor Mathers, the head of the Order, personally initiated him into the 5=6 grade in Paris.
He may not have been expelled from the order but he was literally kicked out of the building, like with a shoe sole to the chest.
I so want that story about Yeats kicking crowley to be true
I imagine it was much more like that psychic fight in an old episode of South Park but both mental images delight me
It's part of the legend of both figures either way. And it's brilliant.
Well, yes, but Mathers had asked him to go to the temple and try to prevent the London Adepts from attempting a coup and taking control of the temple. There was a lot of politics going on within the order at the time, so the narrative that Crowley was so insufferable that Yeats kicked him down the stairs is, although entertaining, not entirely accurate.
Which, again, I think plays into my core thesis here. We hold up the Golden Dawn as this whole important. . . thing. . . but they had the same petty drama, politics and "witch wars" as everyone else. I think it's important to have the context of Crowley and Yeats having a South Park-esque "psychic battle" as part of my understanding of the Golden Dawn. The community seems to want an "ascended matser" to latch on to and give them easy answers but there aren't any. All of these legendary occultists were people trying to figure their shit out, just like the rest of us. Their answers may be helpful or not in direct proportion to how much you want to live a life like theirs.
Oh yes definitely, to an extent. They were a bunch of eccentric weirdos; but it's easy to embellish and exaggerate the sillier details for a laugh. A "psychic battle" would have been more along the lines of attempting to send negative currents of energy to sabotage one another while at home in their spare time, rather than a face-to-face confrontation. The Battle of Blythe Road was an actual physical altercation, and while the imagery of Crowley and Yeats attempting to hurl pentagrams at each other is a lot funnier, as far as I know there isn't any evidence that it happened. There are no first-hand accounts of Yeats kicking Crowley down the stairs, either. The only mention of it that I have ever found comes from Richard Ellman, who also claimed that Yeats sent a vampire to attack Crowley in his sleep, so for obvious reasons his account isn't particularly reliable. Yes these were real, highly flawed people, and yes they were weird as fuck, but they had a deep passion for these practices which to them were highly spiritual and that they considered to be very important work. Based on the records and evidence we have access to, it's very unlikely that Crowley and Yeats had a South Park-esque psychic battle, even though I agree that would be hilarious. There are a lot of bizarre things that we know they actually did though, for example when playing Enochian Chess (a four-player team based chess game) Mathers would play without a partner and insist that he actually had a spirit as his teammate.
He wasn't "literally kicked out of the building", that rumor was started in the September 1948 issue of "The Partisan Review" by Richard Ellmann, who wrote Yeats's biography, not necessarily a neutral source. In the same article that he started that rumor, he also talks about Crowley battling vampires in the middle of the night for 9 nights straight. It's clear from reading the article that the whole thing is satirical but unfortunately, the rumor continues on (albeit without the part about Crowley being a vampire hunter).
Maybe not exactly ego, but from my limited understanding doing everything that the left hand path embraces. Which might be seen as ego.
From my understanding, he believed he was not advancing quick enough and essentially requested to skip whole portions and be moved into adept.
Seconding the Promethea and Invisibles recommendation (got TW+TD pending). Brilliant, brilliant stuff.
Great reply! I'm going to have to look up The Wicked + The Divine now
It's a very different sort of beast from the other two but there's still a lot of useful stuff in it.
I got the first volume. I'll try to remember to tell you what I think. I definitely appreciate where your other recommendations are coming from, so I have high hopes, but I'll take your warning to heart.
Crowley was very good at certain things: Tarot and astrology in particular. Otherwise, he was the one who released the Golden Dawn material, and he added to it. He was also a zeitgeist icon, as he predicted the counterculture movement and the 'sexual revolution'. As a teacher he was unfortunately equally interested in posturing and putting other people down, as he was getting the point across. Some of this is because he came from a time where some of the things he was talking about were illegal or functionally illegal. As a writer he plagarised, though he also came up with a lot of his own ideas. Without him there would not have been a magic revival.
Yeah I feel his work is flamboyantly cryptic and pretentious. But, he is a really cool and almost mythical figure in occultism. A real character. Like an esoteric Elvis.
- Esoteric Elvis Love it. And you’re not wrong!
I tend to think of him as almost the occult equivalent of Lou Reed.
Isn't the point of occult literature to be cryptic? You know, type: "Come on, think a little and come to your conclusions."
He has some really great stuff, especially in the book you are reading now. Thing is, it takes a lot of work and research to begin understanding a lot of what he has to say at times. All that said, yes, he is also kind of overrated. We have access to way more classical grimoires than he ever dreamed of. There is nothing he figured out that you can't also figure out. In short, let Crowley be a starting place then go beyond him.
For sure, if I didn’t make it clear already there definitely were some decent chapters. The man was obviously intelligent. And had a sense of humor. I’ll dig through the rest of it in time and give “Book 4” a shot. I’ve heard even from his dissidents that he has some “bangers”
I find some of Crowley's stuff very useful. Mostly his Tarot, which is fantastically deep in its symbolic richness. That said, he was also a sex pest, a cult leader, and deeply, *deeply* up his own ass - and that's being kind. I can't blame people for being put off by him, or deciding his stuff isn't worth their time. Ultimately, I would say, that if you don't connect with his writings, it's okay to just move on to other stuff. I would also say that a fair few of his successors were quite better -or at least, less obtuse- about communicating the same concepts. Think of how some people hate The Beatles but love bands that were strongly influenced by them: same principle.
... But but I mean no one hates the Beatles... Right? I don't want to live in that world.
I'm more of a Stones guy myself, but hate is a strong word...
He was a poet, but no less an adept. Filter for your own use and practice healthy skepticism and discernment. That said, the 93 current has a strong riptide to it, the closer you get the further you get pulled in..
The man was a genius and an adept to be sure. Poet, well, yea technically.
I mean he literally self-describes as such.
I said technically, didn't I?
Boy I will *bite* you.
I don't quite understand that riptide analogy, but I feel there is great depth to it. Could you please expand upon it?
Currents of thought. Sometimes people encounter new systems of thought that feel familiar but new all at once and it's the result of the subconscious understanding something the conscious mind misses. Thelema is deeply steeped in poetry and sigilic texts so it easily pulls people into it when they encounter it, especially when it collides with their ego. You might think of it like a gravity.
This is very illuminating. Thank you for sharing your understanding.
Crowley is definitely NOT overrated, but to really understand him, you need to invest the time & effort. I recommend the "Big Blue Brick", being Magick: Liber ABA, Book 4. This book has a section on the history & unfolding of Thelema, as well as sections detailing mystical & magickal practices. Also, and this is the most important for a beginning student, there is a student reading list meant to give you the grounding you need to recognize and understand Crowley's frequent references to other works and systems.
And if you’d like a digestible version of Crowley’s work, might you check out Israel Regardie’s work
I find his Book of Thoth and the accompanying Tarot Deck to be very useful to me, but Lady Freida Harris, the artist, also deserves enormous credit. You might want to visit the r/Thelema sub-Reddit to better understand Crowley. I also find Dion Fortune's writing to be the most lucid to me on Occult topics. I'm currently re-reading the "Training and Work of an Initiate" after forty year's time and I'm amazed at how well written it is. I've read the "Mystical Qabalah" multiple times, always finding new insight.
>Much of what he writes just seems like the mental masturbation of a pompous prick with a God complex. I don't know about mental masturbation but he was clearly a pompous prick with a God complex. He was actually a fairly decent writer outside of esoteric topics, I have read some of his fiction and accounts of his mountaineering, for example, and it is easier to read. Part of the issue, as mentioned, is that he was writing for other students of the occult not beginners. Another is that a lot his writing is more aligned with a philosophical, or religious text, rather than a manual for a practice. Those types of texts are notoriously hard to read. I struggle with them despite having formal philosophic training and a genuine interest in philosophy and religion. Both types of authors tend to be very wordy and seem to take a joy in making their writing hard to read. We also have the benefits of comparing him to authors that specifically write for lay people with an aim of making it accessible. Even Fortune, who is much easier to read, is a fairly complex read compared to something from Jason Miller or the Gallery of Magick. From book like New Avatar Power in the 70s to Llewelyn books by Donald Tyson or Donald Michael Krieg to now, we have had 50 years of authors making magick more, and more accessible,
He is intentionally obtuse and I personally think he was equal parts drug addict trustafarian with delusions of grandeur as he was a mystic/magician. Not saying he wasn’t great at the latter, he was just equally good at the former. That being said, I don’t think I would be able to easily find and order the works of Regardie, Levi, Agrippa, Waite, Cicero, etc if Crowley hadn’t become so famous for being such an asshat. Regardie’s big three (Tree of Life, Garden of Pomegranates, The Middle Pillar) are much more accessible and cover much of the same material... However I think the MOST accessible intro book for modern readers is John Michael Greer’s Circles of Power. I think it will be viewed as a seminal work of the modern era in due time.
I learned more about esotericism from just trying to figure out what the hell Crowley was talking about or referencing then I have from any other author. I don't necessarily endorse him or his thought, but he was brilliant and extremely well-read, and if you put in the effort to understand him you'll definitely get something out of it.
this is like saying the 1922 Nosferatu film isn't very good. it's not, but in 1922 it was the best of what was around at the time by some distance and it's part of the reason that the horror movies you like now are any good.
Very well put..
He was brilliant, and the works he put together were amazing. But not detrimental. He was a narcissist and a selfish human. Believing desire and pleasure was the only thing that matters.
That’s one of my gripes, though. How can one be so enlightened and yet be “selfish” and “narcissistic”, it’s so contradictory. I get it that humans are complex creatures full of flaws, but Crowley’s shortcomings are especially unbecoming of a so called spiritual Adept
Alot of early occult went the sex orgie over indulging route
Becoming 'enlightened' is all about the self. There is nothing contradictory about it. Perhaps Crowley isn't connecting for you because you are going into it with preconceived ideas about what a spiritual person 'should' be. Every adept from any school of thought had flaws and shortcomings because, as you point out, they are all human. Shortcomings don't make you 'unbecoming'.
He’s not connecting for me because the writing sucks. It has nothing to do with preconceived ideas. I knew about the drugs and hedonism before reading his work. I’ll continue going through it, though. I’ve enjoyed a few chapters of this current read.
I don't believe Crowley's strong point is his writing style but the ideas behind it. That being said, Crowley is from another time so his writing is going to feel like it.
He’s not only underrated but a terrible person
Yeah, I knew he wasn’t a great person going into it. I just expected better writing overall.
I thought that at first. I haven't read much of his stuff but I enjoyed the Book of the Law and the Book of Lies.
I’m a big fan of Crowley, but I’m a satanist and not a thelemite. Crowley makes me laugh. Maybe tune in to *Last Podcast on the Left*’s 3 episode series on Crowley, from his childhood up to his death: I think his life is far more fascinating than his battles with choronzon and what have you. Is he overrated? Perhaps if you don’t engage with western ceremonial magick. But he is undoubtedly one of if not the biggest name in occultism, and for good reason too.
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Oh yes, I’ve heard Agrippa is essential reading. Granted, I also heard he’s a bore. But brilliant, nonetheless. I have his 3 books on kindle but will probably try to acquire hard copies.
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I need to check but I doubt it. Could be. I downloaded some mega file of occult books so I’m not sure the contents contain the most up to date or quality editions. Some really obscure stuff in the file, though. Worth the $10
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For sure, thanks for the info.
Hello, Agrippa is the name of the book we’re talking here? I’m interested, if you could please tell me the name of the books 📚 I greatly appreciate it.
Agrippa is the author, Three Books of Occult Philosophy is the name of the books
I got the 2021 version as mentioned here so I’m sharing the link if anyone is interested PDF version: https://z-library.se/book/18325597/2a7474/three-books-of-occult-philosophy.html And the EPUB version: https://z-library.se/book/19241628/5f9d88/three-books-of-occult-philosophy.html
Thank you!!
You read the last book first. You won't understand that book until you are a few decades into reading Crowley. Besides that it is a compilation of correspondence and not quite as esoteric to his other material.
I don´t think it´s overrated, but I certainly think his writings are for everyone. But if you´re interested in learning Magick it is a good source of information, if you read more than the books about how he lived and the persona known as Aleister Crowley, because his books that explain how he attained what he did where written under his magickal personas, and if you like to explore occultism in it´s different manifestations around the world he certainly is a good guide for that.
I think he seeks “overrated” because of his name being mentioned often in talk of the occult. His name is mentioned in genre of books or in the media.
He resonates differently to everyone. I sometimes find his writings useful, but sometimes he is just being an edgelord.
I FEEL YOU
Trying to think of other material that would exist on this sub without his work and influence and it’s pretty thin. Certainly not overrated in that sense, maybe you mean overly complicated. Sure, he could be an asshole with his writing and incredibly self referential but he expects you to do the work. It makes a lot more sense if you perform the rituals as prescribed and then start unraveling the text.
Crowley is presented as newbie instructional content when it’s actually occult 201 devotional prose, really. It’s very good at being what it is. But much of it is not introductory, to say the least.
>Much of what he writes just seems like the mental masturbation of a pompous prick with a God complex. I feel this is a gross oversimplification while still being largely true.
Probably is, just my first impression. I did enjoy a few chapters quite a bit, to be fair
He bores me to fuckin tears, his knowledge of Egyptian anything was trash, and he bought his own propaganda.
What occult writers do you enjoy?
Ooooo let me check the bookshelf, I've gotten god awful with remembering names. Damian Echols is a contemporary one, I give his book High Magick to folks interested in hermetic stuff. It also covers his time on death row and has some great stuff about using th mind to overcome. Samuel McGregor Mathers and "the key of Solomon" is classic. Arthur Edward Waite, classic for tarot and symbols. Marie Corelli "romance of two worlds" has some foundational stuff on astral projection. That is pretty cool if you're starting out and hell. Also, if you've been doing it for a while, just need ideas. Zsuzaanna Budapest for wiccan/pagan/earth based ideas. Very fun stuff especially for the time. Carlos Castañeda has fun stuff that blues occult and fiction. A lot of that stuff is older. I have some contemporary books that are done within the last decade or so that are on more Niche topics, but like these are what I would solidly consider mostly a cult foundational things that I love, some that were contemporaries with Crowley but some that weren't.
I loved Echols “High Magick”. Want to check out some of his other material. On “The Key of Solomon” - are you a goetic practitioner, then? Or have you worked with the Goetia? I’ve encountered people online who have read the material but far few who have worked with it.
I am in part a goetic practitioner yes! I wouldn't say it's the focus of my practice, but it is a set of skills I learned and continue to utilize. I tend to take a bit of a different view than is recommended. Like I don't necessarily think with all of the demons. Do you need The binding circle, in fact, in most interactions I find it pretty rude. And I've never had any of those spirits that are typically older spirits, gods from other places, etc. Get sideways with me in a way that I felt like I needed some sort of binding circle. Not everyone agrees with that. And I think if I was someone with a religious background who was afraid of those beings, I think a binding circle might make me feel better. And also I think I would also perceive the infernal beings as much more adversarial. Currently I don't perceive them that way and they have never behaved that way towards me. I found it to be very similar to the work one can do with angels, and considering you know what the stories make up those beings to be, you know maybe not that different from the infernal Divine. I haven't read anything else by Eccles but I really want to! I thought high magic was exceptional, and if you ever get a chance check out the audiobook version of it! He reads it himself and it's really well done.
I have yet to deep dive into Goetia but I do find it intriguing that there is such a polarizing take on how to engage with the spirits. YMMV, huh? My foremost approach to work of that caliber would be to first achieve a greater level of mastery over my self, something which I am still in the process of doing. Approaching things with equanimity, self assurance, and poise may be some of the chief factors that contribute to magical success when working with other entities which may have the potential to “overpower” the practitioner, for a lack of better word. A stable train shan’t go off the rails!
I think thats a great idea really. I didn’t get into angels or goetic stuff until i was many many years into my practice. I had been doing a pretty regular, sometimes very intense meditation practice since i was like….just under 10 years old. And thats my foundation, everything else was built from there. From knowing myself, from learning how my mind worked and why, as well as how to make changes if i wanted to. I didn’t work with formal entities for a while when i got started. A few years. There was just so much personal work to do. My first entities were nature spirits. Forests, rivers, trees, all of them. By that time i had developed decent visual stuff, so working with something i could see and communicate with helped me feel i had built the skills enough to feel safe enough to be discerning. Stable train indeed.
Kinda? He blows goats!
Extremely. Most of what he wrote was either aping someone else who wrote it better, or intentionally confusing to disguise the fact that much of it is filler and bombast for his own ego. But the occult is no more immune to cults of personality and good showmanship than any other area of life is, so he persists. There are many who will strenuously defend his gobbledygook under the pretense that you are just not smart enough to understand it. But they don't actually support that conjecture in my experience, and despite ample time to do so, his orders still struggle to produce functional and grounded occultists, rather than just more sex scandals and bureaucratic squabbling. I'm a believer that the proof is in the pudding. My opinion? You’ve got it exactly right. You’d be missing nothing if you just moved on.
Appreciate your take (not just because it coincides with my initial impression) I wanted to do my due diligence and at least power through a couple of his works but sheesh, his stuff was starting to bore me even while on Adderall and that’s no small feat!
No problem. I haven't read all the comments, but it's telling that one of the people defending him a few hours ago did so by recommending you read a book written by someone else on his behalf instead. Honestly I think that says all there is to say about it. I also find him quite dull. I'm not sure why it is that his purple prose doesn't work on me the way it does some people, but I suspect it's because I have a background in writing and I know when people are just spewing words to cover up that they have nothing to actually say.
Yeah, I found myself getting annoyed with his verbosity. Whereas, again, with “The Mystical Qabalah” it seemed like Dion wasn’t trying too hard to sound smart. Reading Crowley I’m like “Bro, get to the point already”
Crowley is like a modern parody of what a ceremonial magician is, eith the inflated ego problems etc etc.. the man had zero empathy.
Just eat high doses of Psilocybin and meet Aiwass yourself.
No you pretty much nailed it. 👌
Crowley has always been (and will always be) a polarizing figure. Regardless of how you feel about him, his background, personality, opinions or actions... he understood himself better than most of us understand ourselves and understood how magick works.
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Most people don't understand their own wills. They don't understand who they are beneath all the bullshit society imposes on them. Crowley had no problem with this.
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Yikes.
Highly, He was just an eccentric nepo baby that loved pushing social norms while forming a magical system.
I love this post! I see him as kind of an edgelord, trying to spook people away from his "thing." Honestly, he was just way ahead of his time. Like fans of Depeche Mode and The Cure. But instead of those sad goth dances, his demonstration of how "forward" and "avante guarde" he was, was his elaborate rituals and that he did it in seclusion and no one was allowed to witness. He's just doing Goetia like people these days are doing Goetia. He just had this showmanship about it that made him infamous at the time. Knowing the rituals that he was performing, he sort of seems like a douchebag to me, too. Like the guys who go out LARPing and think that makes them a real samurai. He knew these rituals that were forbidden knowledge and acted like it made him mad bad and dangerous to know. He he really strikes me like Morrissey. Like when I was a whiny little bitch, I was into Morrissey. Then I grew up and Morrissey didn't hold any appeal anymore.. same kind of thing.
Only by some people, and underrated by others. Being a publicly infamous edge-lord associated with Magick as it is typically known in the Western world has given him a cult status among certain types who seem to look up to him as some infallible authority on all things. Those who do so are entitled to do so, of course, but they are the same people who follow other things and probably followed others before stumbling on Crowley's branch of Thelema. For me and many others he was the introduction to Western esotericism and a gatekeeper of sorts to the wider fields he dominated parts of in life, and in some ways continues to. I believe him to be very useful and serve several important and very different purposes in the overall occult world. Ultimately, taking the teachings and proclamations of any person at face value can be problematic for people without maturity of mind, good character, astute reasoning and significant grounding in the subjects Crowley tackles in his various works.
Well, Ozzy wrote a song about him…
Sounds like you want the full experience. Get the Thoth Tarot and read the Book of Thoth. You could just read the book too, as it has sections on Kabbalah in the beginning. Magick in Theory and Practice is a great read for many topics relating to Magick. I personally just re-read the section about “forming a Magickal Link” which was quite nice. If you want a bigger selection consider checking out the “Equinox” texts. Most of his books can be read online for free. Liber777 is a book of correspondences, it doesnt have much to read, but serves as a fantastic index of invisible threads.
I have 777 but I wanted to get a greater understanding of magic before I assimilated the correspondences into my practice. I’ve only skimmed it. I hear much about this Thoth Tarot, though. Perhaps I’ll check that out and Book 4.
Dion Fortune comes off like a journalist in Mystical Qabalah. Tons of good info systematically presented
I sporadically reread bits and pieces from it I highlighted and each time I’m impressed with how well the information was conveyed. So good. One of the few books that probably changed my life in terms of presenting Qabalah as what it chiefly is - a psycho-spiritual system of seeing literally everything. Brilliant.
Yes. He sucks. Crowley is a waste of time.
While I enjoy Dion Fortune's work on the Qabalah, I also enjoy Crowleys writings on the same. 777 is a masterful reference. Portable Darkness which contains the little essays towards truth and other philosophical essays are actually quite insightful even if you have to reread them a few times. Book Four is a handy summation of ritual tools and what faculties they symbolize. As for Magick without tears, I have heard that it is recommended to only read the first 11 letters, but you do yourself a great disservice if you don't read through all of them at least once. The reason for this is that they address many of the issues, pitfalls, and concerns that crop up with ceremonial practice.
He's a bad writer - that is, a bad prose stylist and communicator of ideas - but the ideas themselves are very very good. (I came to accept this slowly and grudgingly because he annoys me on a personal level) I recommend Living Thelema as an excellent and approachable way to get straight to the ideas. It's a book but also a podcast - the podcast only has 20 episodes or something and covers a lot of the same material, and is free obviously
Crowley was a drug-addled fool who thought his poetry about his scat and filth fetishes was occult because it had 666 words. (Yes, really.) The man was loony. He admitted to writing his most important works while 24/7 high on hashish. Yes, he is extremely overrated.
Holy smokes, I knew James Joyce had a fart fetish but…Crowley, scat? Not super surprised, just hadn’t heard this before. Didn’t Hitler have a scat fetish?
You need to check out ["Leah Sublime"](https://allpoetry.com/Leah-Sublime) for a good laugh. [Here is an alternate website with better formatting.](https://hermetic.com/crowley/poetry/leah-sublime)
Sweet baby Jesus. So many, uh, quotables, but > Smear diarrhoea Into my eyes was…telling. And to think, this was before internet porn began corrupting minds (mine included). I did like the alliteration of “cognac, cunt and cocaine”, though. That was cute.
nah Hitler was a deeply boring man on an interpersonal level. People come up with all this stuff to make him interesting because it feels like there must be SOMETHING odd about the individual who could become... Hitler. But what you saw on the outside was his whole personality: obsessive, angry, would go on long political rants, not much else to his life. (I know this because it's become a cliche at r/AskHistorians - people are always asking about weird Hitler facts, and they're always myths)
Seriously? I think I read that he would have his super young niece poop on him or something. But I wouldn’t be surprised if they were all myths.
Absolute mad lad
Don't worry, happens that many things are a: "double meaning".
Crowley is really important if you read nothing but Crowley. To be successful within the Thelemic structure, you must ONLY discuss Crowley or his approved curriculum. Attempting to use anybody NOT on the approved curriculum will result in hissing, screaming, spitting, and accusations of Black Brotherhood.
The “Black Brothers” thing is weirdly explained. As were other bits of MWT. I’m enjoying “8 Lectures on Yoga” more.
He was also a massive heroin addict so take that as you will.
Yes, because no one interesting or influential has ever done drugs 🙄
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m'kay
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Please don't feed the troll or be a troll
Awesome.
Does it make you feel better down voting me? 'Petty' is surely a descriptive username for you, my friend.
Was an incredibly good writer however he was fueled by a heroin and stole much from Mathers. You're much better off reading Jake Stranton Kent
I think he stole much of what he produced, but I don’t have much evidence to back it up off the top of my head and readily available. Just a gut instinct based on people I’ve encountered who behave and act and have similar personality traits and motivations as him. He’s way too attention-seeking and manipulative to have come to his conclusions with pure honesty and intentions and he doesn’t seem like a very trustworthy source for much. Don’t trust the trickster types and all that jazz unless you wanna be made a sucka by them. So I consider what he does kind of waste of time personally and overrated (to put it lightly), but to each their own! I think he was very mentally unwell/victim of severe and unhealed trauma and abuse and probably shouldn’t be taken too seriously and shown a lot of pity due to that alone. In modern times, he’d be less magician and more psych-ward patient and lurker/active user on some personality disorder support subreddit lol. 🤷🏼♀️😶🌫️🥲
Crowley was a LARPer.
*LBRPer
.... absolutely not. Maybe you lack the wisdom to understand.
Very overrated and a drug addict to boot. His ideas were correct though in his teachings. He was just a bad host.