Aleister Crowley & The Book of the Law: A Magical Encounter in Egypt

Egypt in the Western Occult Tradition

January 21, 2018

Egyptian god of knowledge, wisdom & magic, Thoth, carved on the back of the throne of the seated statue of Rameses II. It was believed Thoth was the original source of important spiritual knowledge which was preserved in the Corpus Hermeticum.

By RICHARD SMOLEY

O Egypt, Egypt, of your reverent deeds only stories will survive, and they will be incredible to your children! Only words cut in stone will survive to tell your faithful works, and the Scythian or Indian or some such neighbour barbarian will dwell in Egypt.

This haunting passage comes from the Corpus Hermeticum, the celebrated ‘Hermetic’ body of writings, believed to go back to Hermes Trismegistus himself, a semidivine figure associated with the Greek god Hermes and his Egyptian equivalent, Thoth.

These texts go back no further than the early centuries of the Common Era. The passage above hints at their purpose: to preserve something of the knowledge of Ancient Egypt as its civilisation began to decay. Here is a good place to start when looking at Egypt’s role in the Western occult tradition.

The Corpus Hermeticum was brought to Italy in the mid-fifteenth century by Greeks fleeing the collapsing Byzantine Empire. The great patron of the arts, Cosimo de’ Medici, had these texts translated into Latin almost immediately. Because scholars thought they went back to Hermes Trismegistus, believed to be a contemporary, and perhaps a teacher, of Moses, they were held in the highest esteem for almost two centuries. When their true date was discovered, they lost much of their prestige, and they have never quite regained it. Nevertheless, they have shaped the Western esoteric tradition in innumerable ways.

Consider Athanasius Kircher, a seventeenth-century Jesuit who, in the subtitle of Joscelyn Godwin’s recent book about him, was “the last man to search for universal knowledge.” Part of the knowledge he sought was the meaning of the hieroglyphs. Kircher’s interpretation, created out of his own imagination, was almost entirely wrong. But his mistakes are instructive.

The symbol that he regarded as the key to this knowledge is a human-headed scarab from a bronze tabletop known as the Bembine Table of Isis. The body of the scarab, Kircher says, is the Earth; its wings are the airy sphere; several concentric ovals set in the place of the shoulders are the planetary orbs; the head is Horus, or the Sun; and a crescent above the head is a moon. A winged disk floating nearby is the anima mundi, the “soul of the world.”

Kircher’s representation reflects, not some genuine knowledge of Egyptian religion, but the system of the Corpus Hermeticum. The Hermetic texts were seen as the embodiment of Egyptian teaching. Their actual relationship to what the Egyptians taught is a much harder issue to sort out, if only because Egyptian religion was multifarious. Scholars used to think they were a mishmash of Neoplatonism, Gnosticism, and early Jewish and Christian mystical teaching. But the title of the main treatise is the Poimandres, a bewildering name that has inspired many fanciful etymologies. Today scholars believe it is a Grecised version of the Egyptian p-eime-n-re or “mind of sovereignty.” At the outset, Poimandres – who is described as an “enormous being” in the Corpus – announces he is the “mind of sovereignty.” There may well be more of Egypt in these texts than people used to think.

The Corpus Hermeticum was not the only attempt to preserve Egyptian knowledge. Another is a Greek text dating to the fifth century CE, and attributed to Horapollo, a priest of Isis and Osiris. The Horapollo, as it is called, explains the meaning of the hieroglyphs.

Here is one example. One passage (in a nineteenth-century translation) reads: “When they would represent the universe, they delineate a SERPENT bespeckled with variegated scales, devouring its own tail; by the scales intimating the stars in the universe.” And in fact the image of a snake devouring its tail – the ouroboros – does go back to Ancient Egypt, the first instance being found in a text going back to the fourteenth century bce.

Whether or not the ouroboros had the meaning given by Horapollo may be moot; it has sometimes been said to symbolise, not the universe per se, but the formless disorder that encircles the universe. In any case, the Horapollo probably reflects some real, though garbled, knowledge of the hieroglyphs. In any event, its interpretation has echoed down through the centuries. Like the Corpus Hermeticum, it shows how Egypt has operated on the Western occult imagination.

Egypt touched the minds of occultists in other ways as well. The renegade seventeenth-century Italian monk Giordano Bruno harked back to Egypt as a way of reviving and purifying the degenerate Christianity of his time. Bruno’s Egyptian religion has little to do with the Egyptian religion dug up by archaeologists in the last two centuries. Rather it is, again, the doctrine of the Corpus Hermeticum, which in Bruno’s time was still believed to date back to the great age of Egypt. That Bruno wanted to revive the Egyptian religion wholesale may seem eccentric, but it’s understandable in light of the history of the seventeenth century, with its appalling religious warfare. For Bruno, Egyptian Hermeticism was a means of rising above these petty conflicts, a means of fostering tolerance and awakening a higher awareness.

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I like Book IV

The Magus Was A Spy: Aleister Crowley and the Curious Connections Between Intelligence and the Occult

January 21, 2018

A war time photo of Aleister Crowley imitating Britain’s Prime Minister Winston Churchill, for whom he claimed to have invented the “V for Victory” hand sign.

By DR RICHARD SPENCE

In Magick Without Tears, Aleister Crowley observed a fundamental similarity between the “Secret Chiefs,” the invisible and inaccessible Masters to whom he professed obedience, and “Captain A. and Admiral B. of the Naval Intelligence Service.” Both, he noted, “keep in the dark for precisely the same reasons; and these qualities disappear instantaneously the moment They want to get hold of you.”1

Crowley, arguably the most famous – or infamous – occultist of the last century, spoke from personal experience. Throughout his career, Mr. Crowley, aka “The Great Beast 666” and “the Wickedest Man in the World,” maintained some kind of connection with one or another aspect of British intelligence, most notably the Admiralty’s Naval Intelligence branch. His case is by no means exceptional. Many of his associates in the occult realm, among them Everard Feilding, Theodore Reuss, Hanns Heinz Ewers, and Maxwell Knight, also had links to one spy agency or another.

The inter-connection of occultism and espionage goes back at least to the Elizabethan intrigues of Dr. John Dee, and certainly is much older than that. For Crowley, Dr. Dee was a role-model in more ways than one. Occult orders and spy agencies do share much in common. Both are focused on the acquisition and safeguarding of specialised knowledge and embrace secrecy as a cardinal virtue. They are selective in recruitment and members are bound by oaths of silence and loyalty. They operate, so much as possible, outside public view or even public awareness. The pursuit of occult knowledge provides an excellent training ground for espionage and kindred intrigue, and vice versa. As Crowley’s literary creation Sir Anthony Bowling put it, “investigation of spiritualism makes a capital training ground for secret service work, one soon gets up to all the tricks.”2

What follows is a selective and inevitably brief survey of various persons who were involved in intelligence work and occult pursuits. The common denominator and main object of attention will be Crowley himself.

Crowley makes scattered allusions to intelligence work in his autobiographical writings but never offers any details. Generally, friend and foe have dismissed such claims as flights of fancy. However, far from inventing or exaggerating his clandestine exploits, he deliberately downplayed them or avoided mentioning them at all. A case in point is Crowley’s reference in his Confessions to his involvement in a 1899 conspiracy to foment a rebellion in Spain with the aim of restoring Don Carlos II to the country’s throne.3 Crowley teasingly offered to someday reveal the full and true story of the incident, but he never did.

There was much more involved in this affair than Crowley let on. The key figure in the British-based plot was Lord Betram Ashburnham. He was the leader of a small but determined cabal of British “Legitimists” whose aim was the replacement of Queen Victoria and her line with a restored Stuart dynasty. Ashburnham also reigned as grand master of a neo-Templar outfit dubbed the Order of St. Thomas of Acon. Another leading light among the Legitimists was S. L. MacGregor Mathers, who just happened to be the dominating figure of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn (HOGD) and Crowley’s mentor and promoter in that esoteric organisation. The HOGD included a number of persons, among them William Butler Yeats, who were sympathetic to Irish nationalism and Celtic revivalism, ideas actively encouraged by the Legitimists.

Such sentiments inevitably aroused the curiosity of the guardians of the realm. The Spanish plot fizzled when someone, odds are Crowley, betrayed it from within. The Golden Dawn soon splintered as the result of internal rivalries in no small part exacerbated by Crowley’s disruptive antics. This episode represents one of his first forays into clandestine work and reveals the primary roles he played later on: infiltrator, informer and provocateur.

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