Aleister Crowley: Spiritual Revolutionary

What is a ‘spiritual revolutionary’? Usu-ally understood as a partial or complete overturning of a social or political system, a ‘revolution’ may also refer to Earth’s revolving relation to the stars. Novel stel-lar, zodiacal and planetary configurations have been taken to signal the inauguration of fresh ‘aeons’ or ‘ages’: new time-scapes with evolved priorities or change of terrestrial governance. Social or political revolutions have been judged by astrologers as mere by-products of cosmic re-alignments: the proverbial ‘signs of the times’.

A spiritual revolution would involve a fresh dispensation in religious history, a change or evolution in the understand-ing of the spiritual rules of the game. A ‘spiritual revolution-ary’ then, is properly one who announces or formulates such change. Aleister Crowley’s claim for his magico-religious system of ‘Thelema’, hypothetically at least, satisfies thedefinition.

Crowley’s expressions of exasperation printed above were conveyed to a friend in 1941, a few months after the heaviest German Blitz on London. Crowley was already thinking of what would follow a victory he believed inevitable, believing that his system, whether adopted consciously or unconsciously by the most intelligent dynamos of civilisation (not necessar-ily the visible ‘leaders’), would powerfully influence the post-victory era. How Crowley understood the spiritual revolution may be seen in how he applied it to the conditions of World War Two and, in particular, his coining of the inspirational ‘Victory-V’ sign in 1941. By that time, Crowley had assumed full internal possession of the chief tenets of the message of ‘Thelema’ (Greek for ‘Will’) and had come to accept that, whether he liked it or not, he held an office as its prophet, sworn to help all who sought from him illumination, upon the significant teaching principle: ‘The Aim of Religion, the Method of Science’. The aim of Religion he took to be God or Self-realisation, and the method of Science he took to mean patient experimentation, verification and recording of results in an objective spirit without prejudice, given proper allow-ance for new knowledge and the guidance of established, spiritual traditions, proven in practice.

Here was a religious system free of all institutional or dogmatic control: a spiritual revolution. And it was Magical; Thelema relies upon the experience that the highest spiritual reality exists at the core of every man and woman: thus to do ‘God’s Will’ is equivalent to accomplishing one’s ‘True Will’, in conformity with the ‘Star’ or ‘Spirit’ or ‘Soul’ or ‘Holy Guardian Angel’ or ‘unconscious being’ or whatever you want to call the personified aim of the initiatory process. Initiation, as Freemasonry has long taught, means know-ing oneself; it involves recognising the persistent, if blind, opposition of the earthly ego to enlightenment. For Crowley initiation meant acquiring ‘Knowledge and Conversation of the Holy Guardian Angel’, the unconscious Self, and get-ting on with one’s business in the context of a universe that exhibits like attention to its essential purpose. Planets follow their courses, vines bear fruit; so should Man in whom is God: ‘Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law’.

How did Crowley’s spiritual revolution, or ‘New Aeon’, begin?

In the New Year of 1904, Crowley, aged 28, was in Cairo, suffering from a tongue lesion whose poison caused minor hallucinations. He was also struggling with one of his periodic phases of exhaustion with rational philosophy. Like Blake and Nietzsche before him, Crowley decided he had better devise a system “of his own” to account for the universe and his place in it, than be enslaved to anyone else’s. Practically on cue, the volatile poet became involved with his pregnant wife Rose’s sudden conviction that the child sun-god, Horus, bore a message for her husband. This was Rose’s second visit to Cairo in six months; her baby was conceived in the King’s Chamber of the Great Pyramid dur-ing the first visit.

Having magically invoked Horus in a ceremony conduct-ed in their rented apartment, Rose clairvoyantly declared that “the equinox of the gods” had come. The Child Horus had succeeded his father Osiris, the self-sacrificial ‘dying god’ (as Crowley, following J.G. Frazer, saw it). Crowley was
to be ‘kerux’ or herald of the New Order: a ‘John the Bap-tist’, not a ‘Messiah’ role, it should be noted. The ‘messiah’ of the myth was the ‘Child’, the avenging Child, who was to rule in his father’s stead. ‘Horus’ was the unblinking Sun or solar ‘zeitgeist’.

Rose then told her partly sceptical husband that the messenger Crowley should heed was ‘Aiwass’, presumably an ‘angel’, with a commission from the Most High. Crowley had been studying Arabic with a member of the Aissawa Sufi ‘path’, founded by Saint Sidi Mohammed Ben Aissa (d.1526). Crowley, writing years later of his initial scepticism concerning ‘Aiwass’, never mentioned the name’s being a near anagram of ‘Aissawa’. In some Sufi traditions, names of humans, angels and saints have a fluidity alien to Western thinking. After 1918, Crowley wondered whether ‘Aiwass’ could not also manifest as an inspired human being living in New Jersey. He also came to intuit a link of identity between ‘Aiwass’ and the sovereign angel of the Sufi-influenced Yezidis: Melek Tawusi or Ta’wus. Crowley would iden-tify Aiwass as his ‘Holy Guardian Angel’ or True Will, so perhaps Rose was very perceptive, for the Holy Guardian Angel dwells in a world of pure intelligence. It is also worth mentioning that at one point in his life, Crowley asked him-self whether Aiwass was ‘Jesus’, but doubted it on account of Aiwass’s apparent hostility to the orthodox crucifixion-atonement-by-shedding-of-blood doctrine. Crowley and Aiwass were of one mind on this issue it seems.

What all this might mean on planet Earth is difficult to as-certain. In 1924, Crowley reckoned his hallucinatory state of mind somehow affected his nervous system, not as we might suppose, to furnish the phenomenon itself, but rather to enable him to hear in sensory form a voice external to himself. The voice dictated the exotic and pen-etrating three chapter work known
as The Book of the Law.
     In spite of his desire for a new system of religion and philosophy, Crowley found the phenomena ex-perienced in Cairo in March-April 1904 perplexing. While favouring the mantle of young warrior for a new, or arguably revived, sexually liberated religion, he felt strongly inhibited from thrusting ‘Aiwass’ forwards as the ‘latest prophecy’ and himself as sect-leader. Crowley would come to consider the ‘revelation’ fit for private attention by students of initiation, but forbade the making of dogmatic conclusions from the book; he was its sole interpreter, and even he did not know everything there was to know about it; sublime or spiritual interpretations of the work were always to be preferred to gross or literal ones; readers take note. He could see the work’s potential dangers. That it derived from ‘higher intelligence’ he was convinced, not by argument but from accumulated experience. The writing of The Book of the Law marked, for Crowley, an historic event and spiritual revo-lution: one he long resisted, a resistance to which he attributed many subsequent personal disasters, disasters judged by the world as the products of ineptitude, malice or madness.

Crowley judged the world wars as birth pangs of Man’s awakening, signs of resistance to a New Aeon of ‘life, light, love and liberty’ involving the end of the ‘Existence is Sor-row’, ‘Human effort: futile’, ‘Death is good’, ‘Sex is bad’, ‘We’re born sinners with no health in us’ schools of religion:
rather the self-realised individual would be sovereign of the new system while ‘the slaves’ would ‘serve’, the ‘slaves’ being content to live on their masters’ and mistresses’ bread and board, unready, unable or unwilling to grasp freedom. Sex would come to be seen as the basis for a higher sacra-ment of divine union: a higher magick.

Crowley regarded Magick as the primal basis for an All-Knowledge system: ancient root of both science and religion: the ‘Can-do’ principle par excellence: the creed of the ‘Serpent’s’ (or Knowledge) Party. He revolutionised ‘occultism’ by reconciling Eastern and Western spiritual traditions and by introducing science and psychology into its methodology. He put sex back into ‘Rosicrucianism’.Crowley did not regard conflict as necessarily evil; cow-ardice was much worse: refusal to face facts and ‘see out’ the brother-enemy resulted in far worse than the brother-enemy could inflict: “Fear is failure, and the beginning of failure,” Crowley intoned frequently. Conflict might be the product of conflicting or demented wills, of which one might be the True Will. If so, the True Will would, in time, triumph, since its source was rooted in the unconscious and could not be resisted forever: “Thou hast no right but to do thy will.”

As for the war with Hitler, from out of the flames a phoe-nix would arise: Man Reborn, casting off the lumber of the centuries – Prometheus, the fire-stealer, unbound at last. For Crowley, the war was a conflict both spiritual and material. Matter and spirit coagulated in blood, sweat and tears. On the night of the heaviest German attack in May, Crowley recorded a vision:Vision May 9 [1941]. Above earth vast dull sphere-crust. Hard to pierce. Within, rich cream formed by danc-ing figures. Then immense crimson-and-cream robed Man-Angels; they seemed to be directing the war. Many [May?] land! And sea-scapes, vast scale, utmost beauty. I was concentrating badly, and could not make much of it. But They wanted me among them robed as a warrior. Was Crowley waging astral battle with Hitler, fighting on planes unseen by the eyes of the world? The 9th of May was extraordinary. That night deputy Führer Rudolf Hess flew to Britain and was captured. The same night saw the Royal
Navy capture the Germans’ Enigma decryption machine from a U-boat: arguably the most vital contribution to vic-tory after the Americans joined the war effort at the year’s end.

As far back as 1924, the magician had seen the war com-ing, his reference to it almost casual, as one bored by time and accustomed to glimpse aeons:Foch [leader of the French forces] failed to push home his victory, apparently from sheer sickness of heart at the slaughter, thus leaving Germany in an excellent posi-tion to retrieve the disaster and make another attempt to wipe out civilisation within the next ten years. That project again, even if successful, would probably break down for some similar reason. [lack of access to higher intelligence].
Crowley linked the war with the plans of preternatural ‘Secret Chiefs’, from which source, he believed, Thelema derived. In May 1938, Crowley replied to a letter from a consultant in psychopathology. Dr. A Greville-Gascoigne argued that The Book of the Law went completely over the heads of ordinary folk; it would simply “frighten them.” Undeterred, Crowley insisted people would get it, eventu-ally. While some wars could be seen as backward steps for the human race, the great wars of the 20th century were the inevitable means of waking up the human race. Were we awake, they would not happen. Crowley foresaw enormous progress as a possible outcome of the next war:The forces behind the Book [of the Law] determine the time and place of wars; and if you are in a position to put a spoke in the wheel of such people, I certainly am not. I fought against these forces with the whole of my power for many years, and I came out at the little end of the horn. You must read up the history of the business if you want to understand the actual position.