Rethinking Aleister Crowley and Thelema

Abstract

In recent decades, academic scholarship has increasingly recognised the British occultist, poet, and mountaineer Aleister Crowley (1875–1947) as a formative figure in the development of twentieth-century Western esotericism. Rejectingwhat he perceived as the repressivemorals of his conservative, Christian upbringing, Crowley espoused a new religion centred on individual will, self-development, and liberation, which was heavily informed by the evolutionist perspectives that shaped late-nineteenth-century theories of religion as well as the occultism of his time. Openly bisexual at a time when consensual sexual acts between men were still criminalised, Crowley can be situated among sexual visionaries such as Edward Carpenter, Havelock Ellis, and D.H. Lawrence, who viewed erotic liberation as key to social transformation. Departing from the sensationalised narratives characterising media reports on Crowley during his lifetime, academic scholarship from the 1990s on has, variously, addressed Crowley’s life and thought in the context of VictorianEdwardian negotiations of sexuality and subjectivity; the transmission of Yoga to the West; and interwar political tensions, as well as a host of other topics.1 Through these scholarly lenses, Crowley appears in many ways as a distillation of the cultural tensions and tendencies of his time. The details of Crowley’s life and magical career have been extensively explored elsewhere, but bear brief recapitulation.2 Growing up in the dispensationalist, Evangelical movement the Plymouth Brethren, Crowley rebelled