Crowley: What’s to Like (or Not)?
The subject of Aleister Crowley is a polarizing one among tarot enthusiasts. Many of those who truly “get” his Thoth Tarot and particularly its erudite and challenging companion tome, the Book of Thoth, think he can do no wrong, while others (when they don’t find him completely opaque) consider him a preening egomaniac, the self-anointed “black hat” to Arthur Edward Waite’s somewhat tarnished “white hat,” a perception he encouraged and a posture he actively promoted, obviously for his own amusement. He was entirely too comfortable in his own amoral skin to be labeled a “misunderstood genius;” in hindsight, misanthropic and maligned might be more appropriate adjectives, although he would have vehemently rejected the first assessment and proudly flaunted the second.
I come down somewhere in the middle. He was undoubtedly intelligent and frequently brilliant, with a command of language and an expository acumen almost unparalleled in the annals of visionary literature, especially of the sarcastically dismissive kind that he often unleashed in needling his contemporary, Waite, and demeaning other historical occultists (Alliette, Papus, etc.) whom he deemed imposters and posers. His wit was razor-sharp and his sense of humor meticulously refined, but his disdainful attitude was more than a little uncharitable toward the fuzzy mental conjurations of his magical peers. At times he comes across as scornful and perversely overbearing in his writing, unless he is read with the same kind of scientific detachment he professed; on the other hand, his more deeply mystical work is profoundly abstract and serious-minded.
He was on his best behavior in the Book of Thoth, for the most part staying on-topic and seldom straying into the withering ad hominem attacks that he seemed to relish. There he was building on an existing foundation with the intent of updating Medieval assumptions about the tarot while distilling and imparting his own broadly eclectic and syncretic “magickal” knowledge. But in his much earlier Book of the Law, the seminal document for the modern religion of Thelema, he often presented himself (in the guise of the disembodied entity, Aiwass) as an arrogant elitist, espousing ideas that require careful reading between the lines in order to find the legitimate wellspring of truth amid the flood of harsh invective. It’s hard to tell when he was being honest and when he was merely dissembling in an attempt to mislead the uninitiated, whom it is said he wasn’t interested in enlightening in the first place; the Book of Thoth amply demonstrates this since there is very little novitiate “hand-holding” in it.
For the record, although I’ve been immersed in his work since 1972, I’m not a serious Crowley scholar by any stretch. I have a reasonably good cross-section of his published material, but my collection is nowhere near complete. Call me an interested admirer (of his diverse advances in metaphysical thought if not of his lifestyle) with a taste for complex philosophical concepts that demand dedicated effort to fathom. Those who want to explore his thinking beyond the Book of Thoth and the Book of the Law should consider Gems from the Equinox, a collection of the best (or at least the most representative) essays from his esoteric periodical that was published continuously at the seasonal equinoxes between 1909 and 1913, and one more time in the Spring of 1919.
Originally published at http://parsifalswheeldivination.wordpress.com on July 4, 2022.
