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Posts tagged ‘Thelema’

  1. Book review: City of the Beast

    As a subject for occult biography, Aleister Crowley seems to get the lion’s – or perhaps the beast’s would be a better term – share of attention. Phil Baker’s new biographical study, City of the Beast: The London of Aleister Crowley (Strange Attractor, 2022) is something special though. Described as a ‘biography by sites’, City of the Beast explores Crowley’s life via his relationship with the city of London, a place where he spent much of his adult life.

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  2. Introducing Mary Butts: Storm Goddess

    “I have a weakness for Queer Street, and people who have that are soon past being astonished at anything.”

    “Imaginary Letters”, Ashe of Rings and Other Writings

    “These weeks I have been hindered wanting a formula. These books an occultism with their bastard words, credulities, falsities on facts, emotion & aesthetic falsities, inwardly revolt me. The symbols save when they were purely numeral & abstract, seemed but poor correspondences. Then I came back on a sudden turn. I remembered Prolegomena & the others, the profoundest study of my adolescence – mystery cults from Thrace to Eleusis. I remembered the Bacchae. There are my formulae, there my words of power. I am rereading the Prolegomena – it reels off before me in plain script (all the more because it was written by a woman, with no magical thesis to prove). There I shall find the way.”

    Journal entry, 21 April, 1920

    Sometimes the pieces I’ve scheduled to write for this blog just don’t seem to come together. What seemed like a good idea two months ago now seems flat and lifeless. My enthusiasm for ‘x’ essay has flown the coop – and anyone who’s been reading enfolding regularly will know that I have several not-quite-finished series of posts left hanging around. I’ll come back to them one day, or so I keep telling myself.

    The fallback plan is to go through my numerous ‘writing’ folders and see what pops up. The other day I found a collection of jottings and related files in a folder labeled “Mary Butts 2013”. Looks as though a mere eight years ago I’d planned on writing something about Mary Butts, a novelist and magician whose life and work has been a long-time interest of mine, and whom I feel could do with more recognition and attention by contemporary occultists. Hence this post, a short introduction to the life and literary career of one of the twentieth-centuries most flamboyant occult practitioners, of whom composer Virgil Thomas said she was able to “stir up others with drink and drugs and magic incantations” calling her, “the storm goddess.”

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  3. Book Review: Aleister Crowley in India

    Anyone interested in the passage of South Asian esoteric traditions into Western occultism can’t really ignore the influence of Aleister Crowley. I recently had to re-acquaint myself with Crowley’s work as part of my research for my lecture at Treadwells last year on Yoga and Magic, and just after the lecture, picked up a copy of Tobias Churton’s new book Aleister Crowley in India: The Secret Influence of Eastern Mysticism on Magic and the Occult (Inner Traditions, 2019, Hdbk with dustjacket). Continue reading »

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  4. East meets West: New Thought, Thelema, and The Holy Order of Krishna

    We are once again being taken to task for some of our writers quoting often the slogan of verse I8.63 of the Bhagavad Gita “Yatha ischasi tathha kuru” – of which we accepted Crowley’s “Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law” as the best English paraphrase; and if there is so much public opposition to the very mention of Crowley’s name we have to bow thereto, and do so. But that is not to deny that Crowley had been trained in India of men who were great Yogis such as Karunananda, Sabapati Svami’s disciple. In deference to occidental opinion we shall paraphrase the Gita dictum by the English in “Fulfill thy Will”.
    The Kalpaka, Volume 26, 1931, issues 4-5

    Much has been written about the westward transmission of Indian esoteric themes in the early twentieth century – via movements such as the Theosophical Society, esoteric groups such as the OTO, and charismatic teachers such as Pierre Bernard, but instances of transmissions in the other direction – of Indian esotericists engaging with western occultism, seem to be rarer. Continue reading »

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