FAMOUS WITCHES THROUGHOUT HISTORY

PAGE CONTENTS

i. MERLIN

ii. ZSUSSANA B BUDAPEST

iii. ANTON LA VEY

iv. ARTHUR EDWARD WAITE

v. DION FORTUNE

vi. ELIPHAS LEVI

vii. GERALD GARDNER

viii. MADAME BLAVATSKY (HELENA)

ix. MORGAN LE FEY

x. ALEISTER CROWLEY

Merlin

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia



"Merlyn" redirects here. For other uses, see Merlyn (disambiguation).
For other uses, see Merlin (disambiguation).



Merlin dictating his poems, as illustrated in a French book from the 13th century
Merlin is a legendary figure best known as the wizard featured in the Arthurian legend. The standard depiction of the character first appears in Geoffrey of Monmouth's Historia Regum Britanniae, written c. 1136, and is based on an amalgamation of previous historical and legendary figures. Geoffrey combined existing stories of Myrddin Wyllt (Merlinus Caledonensis), a North British madman with no connection to King Arthur, with tales of the Romano-British war leader Ambrosius Aurelianus to form the composite figure he called Merlin Ambrosius (Welsh: Myrddin Emrys).
Geoffrey's rendering of the character was immediately popular; later writers expanded the account to produce a fuller image of the wizard. Merlin's traditional biography casts him as a cambion; born of a mortal woman, sired by an incubus, the non-human wellspring from whom he inherits his supernatural powers and abilities.Merlin matures to an ascendant sagehood and engineers the birth of Arthur through magic and intrigue. Later authors have Merlin serve as the king's advisor until he is bewitched and imprisoned by the Lady of the Lake.

Contents

1 Name and etymology sources
2 Geoffrey's
2.1 Merlin Ambrosius, or Myrddin Emrys
3 Later adaptations of the legend
4 Fiction featuring Merlin
4.1 Literature
4.2 Film and television

Name and etymology

Merlin advising King Arthur in Gustave Doré's illustration
The Welsh name Myrddin (Welsh pronunciation: [ˈmərðɪn]) is usually explained as deriving from a (mistaken) folk etymology of the toponym Moridunum, the Roman era name of modern Carmarthen, as referring to a person (OED).
Some accounts describe two different figures named Merlin. For example, the Welsh Triads state there were three baptismal bards: Chief of Bards Taliesin, Myrddin Wyllt, and Myrddin Emrys (i.e., Merlinus Ambrosius). It is believed that these two bards called Myrddin were originally variants of the same figure. The stories of Wyllt and Emrys had become different in the earliest texts that they are treated as separate characters, even though similar incidents are ascribed to both.
Medievalist Gaston Paris suggested that Geoffrey chose the Latinization Merlinus rather than the regular Merdinus to avoid a resemblance to the Anglo-Norman word for "shit", merde.
The common name of Falco columbarius, "merlin" is unrelated, having lost an initial s- in Old French, originally deriving from a cognate of Old High German smerle (OED).

Geoffrey's sources

Geoffrey's composite Merlin is based primarily on Myrddin Wyllt, also called Merlinus Caledonensis, and Aurelius Ambrosius, a mostly fictionalized version of the historical war leader Ambrosius Aurelianus. The former had nothing to do with Arthur and flourished after the Arthurian period. According to lore he was a bard driven mad after witnessing the horrors of war, who fled civilization to become a wild man of the wood in the 6th century. Geoffrey had this individual in mind when he wrote his earliest surviving work, the Prophetiae Merlini (Prophecies of Merlin), which he claimed were the actual words of the legendary madman.
Geoffrey's Prophetiae do not reveal much about Merlin's background. When he included the prophet in his next work, Historia Regum Britanniae, he supplemented the characterization by attributing to him stories about Aurelius Ambrosius, taken from Nennius' Historia Brittonum. According to Nennius, Ambrosius was discovered when the British king Vortigern was trying to erect a tower. The tower always collapsed before completion, and his wise men told him the only solution was to sprinkle the foundation with the blood of a child born without a father. Ambrosius was rumored to be such a child, but when brought before the king, he revealed the real reason for the tower's collapse: below the foundation was a lake containing two dragons who destroyed the tower by fighting. Geoffrey retells this story in Historia Regum Britanniæ with some embellishments, and gives the fatherless child the name of the prophetic bard, Merlin. He keeps this new figure separate from Aurelius Ambrosius, and to disguise his changing of Nennius, he simply states that Ambrosius was another name for Merlin. He goes on to add new episodes that tie Merlin into the story of King Arthur and his predecessors.
Geoffrey dealt with Merlin again in his third work, Vita Merlini. He based the Vita on stories of the original 6th-century Myrddin. Though set long after his time frame for the life of "Merlin Ambrosius", he tries to assert the characters are the same with references to King Arthur and his death as told in the Historia Regum Britanniae.

Merlin Ambrosius, or Myrddin Emrys

Main article: Ambrosius Aurelianus

A giant helps Merlin build Stonehenge. From a manuscript of the Roman de Brut by Wace (British Library, Egerton 3208)
Geoffrey's account of Merlin Ambrosius' early life in the Historia Regum Britanniae is based on the story of Ambrosius in the Historia Brittonum. He adds his own embellishments to the tale, which he sets in Carmarthen, Wales (Welsh: Caerfyrddin). While Nennius' Ambrosius eventually reveals himself to be the son of a Roman consul, Geoffrey's Merlin is begotten on a king's daughter by an incubus. The story of Vortigern's tower is essentially the same; the underground dragons, one white and one red, represent the Saxons and the British, and their final battle is a portent of things to come.
At this point Geoffrey inserts a long section of Merlin's prophecies, taken from his earlier Prophetiae Merlini. He tells only two further tales of the character; in the first, Merlin creates Stonehenge as a burial place for Aurelius Ambrosius. In the second, Merlin's magic enables Uther Pendragon to enter into Tintagel in disguise and father his son Arthur with his enemy's wife, Igraine. These episodes appear in many later adaptations of Geoffrey's account. As Lewis Thorpe notes, Merlin disappears from the narrative after this; he does not tutor and advise Arthur as in later versions.
Later adaptations of the legend.

Merlin, from the Nuremberg Chronicle (1493)

Several decades later the poet Robert de Boron retold this material in his poem Merlin. Only a few lines of the poem have survived, but a prose retelling became popular and was later incorporated into two other romances. In Robert's account Merlin is begotten by a devil on a virgin as an intended Antichrist. This plot is thwarted when the expectant mother informs her confessor Blaise of her predicament; they immediately baptize the boy at birth, thus freeing him from the power of Satan. The demonic legacy invests Merlin with a preternatural knowledge of the past and present, which is supplemented by God, who gives the boy a prophetic knowledge of the future.
Robert de Boron lays great emphasis on Merlin's power to shapeshift, on his joking personality and on his connection to the Holy Grail. This text introduces Merlin's master Blaise, who is pictured as writing down Merlin's deeds, explaining how they came to be known and preserved. Robert was inspired by Wace's Roman de Brut, an Anglo-Norman adaptation of Geoffrey's Historia. Robert's poem was rewritten in prose in the 12th century as the Estoire de Merlin, also called the Vulgate or Prose Merlin. It was originally attached to a cycle of prose versions of Robert's poems, which tells the story of the Holy Grail: brought from the Middle East to Britain by followers of Joseph of Arimathea, the Grail is eventually recovered by Arthur's knight Percival.
The Prose Merlin contains many instances of Merlin's shapeshifting. He appears as a woodcutter with an axe about his neck, big shoes, a torn coat, bristly hair and a large beard. He is later found in the forest of Northumberland by a follower of Uther's disguised as an ugly man and tending a great herd of beasts. He then appears first as a handsome man and then as a beautiful boy. Years later, he approaches Arthur disguised as a peasant wearing leather boots, a wool coat, a hood and a belt of knotted sheepskin. He is described as tall, black and bristly, and as seeming cruel and fierce. Finally, he appears as an old man with a long beard, short and hunchbacked, in an old torn woolen coat, who carries a club and drives a multitude of beasts before him (Loomis, 1927).
The Prose Merlin later came to serve as a sort of prequel to the vast Lancelot-Grail, also known as the Vulgate Cycle. The authors of that work expanded it with the Vulgate Suite du Merlin (Vulgate Merlin Continuation), which describes King Arthur's early adventures. The Prose Merlin was also used as a prequel to the later Post-Vulgate Cycle, the authors of which added their own continuation, the Huth Merlin or Post-Vulgate Suite du Merlin.
In the Livre d'Artus, Merlin enters Rome in the form of a huge stag with a white fore-foot. He bursts into the presence of Julius Caesar and tells the emperor that only the wild man of the woods can interpret the dream that has been troubling him. Later, he returns in the form of a black, shaggy man, barefoot with a torn coat. In another episode, he decides to do something that will be spoken of forever. Going into the forest of Brocéliande, he transforms himself into a herdsman carrying a club and wearing a wolf-skin and leggings. He is large, bent, black, lean, hairy and old, and his ears hang down to his waist. His head is as big as a buffalo's, his hair is down to his waist, he has a hump on his back, his feet and hands are backwards, he's hideous, and is over 18 feet tall. By his arts, he calls a herd of deer to come and graze around him (Loomis, 1927).
These works were adapted and translated into several other languages; the Post-Vulgate Suite was the inspiration for the early parts of Sir Thomas Malory's English language Le Morte d'Arthur. Many later medieval works also deal with the Merlin legend. The Italian The Prophecies of Merlin contains long prophecies of Merlin (mostly concerned with 13th-century Italian politics), some by his ghost after his death. The prophecies are interspersed with episodes relating Merlin's deeds and with various Arthurian adventures in which Merlin does not appear at all. The earliest English verse romance concerning Merlin is Arthour and Merlin, which drew from the chronicles and the French Lancelot-Grail.
As the Arthurian mythos was retold and embellished, Merlin's prophetic aspects were sometimes de-emphasized in favor of portraying him as a wizard and elder advisor to Arthur. On the other hand in the Lancelot-Grail it is said that Merlin was never baptized and never did any good in his life, only evil. Medieval Arthurian tales abound in inconsistencies.
In the Lancelot-Grail and later accounts Merlin's eventual downfall came from his lusting after a huntress named Niviane (or Nymue, Nimue, Niniane, Nyneue, or Viviane in some versions of the legend), who was the daughter of the king of Northumberland. In the Suite du Merlin , for example, Niviane is about to depart from Arthur's court, but, with some encouragement from Merlin, Arthur asks her to stay in his castle with the queen. During her stay, Merlin falls in love with her and desires her. Niviane, frightened that Merlin might take advantage of her with his spells, swears that she will never love him unless he swears to teach her all of his magic. Merlin consents, unaware that throughout the course of her lessons, Niviane will use Merlin's own powers against him, forcing him to do her bidding.
When Niviane finally goes back to her country, Merlin escorts her. However, along the way, Merlin receives a vision that Arthur is in need of assistance against the schemes of Morgan le Fay. Niviane and Merlin rush back to Arthur's castle, but have to stop for the night in a stone chamber, once inhabited by two lovers. Merlin relates that when the lovers died, they were placed in a magic tomb within a room in the chamber. That night, while Merlin is asleep, Niviane, still disgusted with Merlin's desire for her, as well as his demon heritage, casts a spell over him and places him in the magic tomb so that he can never escape, thus causing his death.
Merlin's death is recounted differently in other versions of the narrative, the enchanted prison variously described as a cave (in the Lancelot-Grail), a large rock (in Le Morte d'Arthur), an invisible tower. In the Prophetiae Merlini, Niviane confines him in the forest of Brocéliande with walls of air, visible as mist to others but as a beautiful tower to him (Loomis, 1927). This is unfortunate for Arthur, who has lost his greatest counselor. Another version has it that Merlin angers Arthur to the point where he beheads, cuts in half, burns, and curses Merlin.

Fiction featuring Merlin

Further information: List of films in which Merlin appears and Fiction featuring Merlin

Literature

Many parts of Arthurian fiction include Merlin as a character. Mark Twain made Merlin the villain in his 1889 novel A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court. He is presented as a complete charlatan with no real magic power, and the character seems to stand for (and to satirise) superstition, yet at the very last chapter of the book Merlin suddenly seems to have a real magic power and he puts the protagonist into a centuries-long sleep (as Merlin himself was put to sleep in the original Arthurian canon). C. S. Lewis used the figure of Merlin Ambrosius in his 1946 novel That Hideous Strength, the third book in the Space Trilogy. In it, Merlin has supposedly lain asleep for centuries to be awakened for the battle against the materialistic agents of the devil, able to consort with the angelic powers because he came from a time when sorcery was not yet a corrupt art. Lewis's character of Ransom has apparently inherited the title of Pendragon from the Arthurian tradition.
Merlin is also portrayed in the T.A Barron book series(The Lost Years Of Merlin)and (The Great Tree Of Avalon) in the lost years he is young and has to find his identity after being washed up on shore in The Great Tree Of Avalon he is mentioned a lot but does not appear until the 3rd novel.In other books Merlin is a major character in T. H. White's collection The Once and Future King and the related The Book of Merlyn. White's Merlin is an old man living time backward, with final goodbyes being first encounters, and first encounters being fond farewells. Mary Stewart produced an influential quintet of Arthurian novels; Merlin is the protagonist in the first three: The Crystal Cave (1970), The Hollow Hills (1970) and The Last Enchantment (1979). Merlin plays a modern-day villain in Roger Zelazny's short story "The Last Defender of Camelot" (1979), which won the 1980 Balrog Award for short fiction and was adapted into an episode of the television series The Twilight Zone in 1986. Additionally, the last five books in Zelazny's Chronicles of Amber star a character named Merlin, with seemingly little to do with Arthurian legend, though other references to the legend seem to hint at a connection. Merlin also plays a major role in Stephen R. Lawhead's The Pendragon Cycle.
The character itself has inspired further writers such as Tolkien into crafting wizards with similar backgrounds. Gandalf, much like Merlin and Christ, is revived, chose intellect over strength and crowned a king.
And, in the books written by Karen Chance - the Cassie Palmer series - is said that John Pritkin is Merlin. He claims being the son of a demon lord and is currently protecting Cassie since she is the Pythia.

Film and television

Merlin is a main character in the 1963 animated Disney film The Sword in the Stone, based on T. H. White's novel of the same name. Disney's (and White's) version of the character aides and educates King Arthur about various things. He was voiced by Karl Swenson and animated by several of Disney's Nine Old Men, including Milt Kahl, Frank Thomas, Ollie Johnston, and John Lounsbery. Kahl also designed the character, refining the storyboard sketches of Bill Peet. Merlin later appeared in a number of Disney productions, where he has been voiced by several different actors. Merlin, played by Nicol Williamson, has a large role in the 1981 film Excalibur, which is roughly based on Malory's Le Morte D'Arthur. Laurence Naismith appears as Merlyn in the film version of the musical play Camelot, (based on T. H. White's The Once and Future King). In the 1998 miniseries Merlin, the protagonist Merlin (played by actor Sam Neill) battled the pagan goddess Queen Mab.
In 2006 and 2007, the television series Stargate SG1 used Merlin and Arthurian legend as major plot points in both Season 9 and 10. Specifically, Merlin is portrayed as an Ancient whose superior knowledge of the universe is the source of many components of the legends. Also in 2007, the film The Last Legion portrayed Merlin (initially called Ambrosinus) as a druid and tutor of both the last Roman Emperor Romulus Augustus Caesar, as well as of his son Arthur. In 2008, the BBC created a television series, also called Merlin, which deviated significantly from more traditional versions of the myth, portraying Merlin as the same age as Arthur, and Nimueh as an evil sorceress dedicated to his death. Merlin, portrayed by Simon Lloyd Roberts, was the protagonist of the 2008 fantasy film Merlin and the War of the Dragons, which was based loosely on the legends of King Arthur.

Zsuzsanna Budapest

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Zsuzsanna Emese Mokcsay (born 30 January 1940 in Budapest, Hungary) is an American author of Hungarian origin who writes on feminist spirituality and Dianic Wicca under the pen name and religious name Zsuzsanna Budapest or Z. Budapest. She is the High Priestess and the founding mother of the Susan B. Anthony Coven #1, the first feminist, women-only, witches' coven. She is the director of the Women's Spirituality Forum, a nonprofit organization featuring lectures, retreats and other events, and was the lead of a cable TV show called 13th Heaven She has an autobiography, Fly by Night, online, soon to be published in book form in the spring of 2010. She is a playwright, her work The Rise of the Fates having premiered in Los Angeles in the mid-seventies. She is the composer of the song, We All Come From the Goddess, as well as others.

Contents

1 Early life and education
2 Early career
3 Television
4 Honors
5 Books
6 Play
7 Recordings
8 Filmography

Early life and education

Budapest was born in Budapest, Hungary. Her mother, Masika Szilagyi, was a medium, a practicing witch, and a professional sculptress whose work reflected themes of Goddess and nature spirituality. In 1956, when the Hungarian Revolution broke out, Budapest left Hungary as a political refugee. She finished high school in Innsbruck, graduated from a bilingual gymnasium, and won a scholarship to the University of Vienna where she studied languages. In The Holy Book of Women's Mysteries, Z claims that her maternal grandmother was born by parthenogenesis (or virgin birth).
Budapest emigrated to the United States in 1959, where she studied at the University of Chicago, with groundbreaking originator of the art of improvisation, Viola Spolin, and the improvisational theater group The Second City. She married and had two sons, Laszlo and Gabor, but was later divorced after deciding that the traditional roles and confines of the marriage structure did not resonate with her. She also realized she identified as a lesbian and chose, in her words, to avoid the "duality" between man and woman.

Early career

She moved to Los Angeles from New York City in 1970, and became an activist in the women's liberation movement, was on the opening staff of the very first Women's Center in the US there for many years, and became the Founder and High Priestess of the Susan B. Anthony Coven #1, the first documented Women Only coven. [1]. She opened a candle and book store in Venice, California. She organized the first Anti-Rape Squad and was responsible for the conception and formation of the Take Back the Night Movement in Southern California, as well as organizer of many of their street marches. In 1974, she was arrested for fortune telling as a result of reading tarot cards, and that led to her being the last person to be arrested and tried for witchcraft in the United States. Following her trial and conviction, she engaged in nine years of appeals on the grounds that reading the Tarot was a form of women spiritually counseling women within the context of their religion, with pro bono legal representation, ultimately ending in her being acquitted and the laws against "fortune telling" being struck from the laws of California. [4]. Her first book was The Feminist Book of Lights and Shadows, later expanded upon and retitled The Holy Book Of Women's Mysteries. This was followed by The Grandmother of Time, Grandmother Moon, Goddess in the Office, "Goddess in the Bedroom", "Celestial Wisdom" (co-authored with Diana L. Paxson)and "Summoning the Fates". In 2007, "The Holy Book of Women's Mysteries" was republished. She has published 10 books, one play, and two CDs, as well as videos. There was a major documentary of her first festival called "Gathering the Goddess" done in south central Texas, available in 6 parts on youtube, and for purchase on her website www.zbudapest.com A documentary of the "Gathering the Goddess '08", held in LaHonda, California, is in development, as yet to be released.
Today Budapest lives in Oakland, California, where she gives workshops, lectures and continues to write. Budapest is the founder of the Women's Spirituality Forum, a not-for-profit organization which promotes women's spirituality globally. She applied as the first nonprofit Dianic Wicca religious organization. She has been hired by the San Francisco Examiner and its affiliates (112 outlets) to be the writer representing Pagan Religions for their religion section. She has a page on Facebook and on MySpace, as well as Twitter.

Television

Budapest worked as a Color Girl for the CBS Network in New York, and was later assigned to the Ed Sullivan Show. In the eighties, she created the TV show 13th Heaven, which ran on syndicated cable to thirteen channels in the San Francisco Bay Area for seven years. Today Z focuses her attentions on the development of her latest TV project called Femina Nation, which focuses on notable women[4]. Anecdotally, Budapest was also interviewed by Johnny Carson on his "The Tonight Show" surrounding the witch trial in which she was involved.

Honors

In 2003, the California Institute of Integral Studies recognized Z's contribution to the women's spirituality movement, declaring her a foremother of the Women's Spirituality Movement.

Books

The Feminist Book of Lights and Shadows, (1975) Feminist Wicca, Luna Publications
The Holy Book of Women's Mysteries: Feminist Witchcraft, Goddess Rituals, Spellcasting and Other Womanly Arts (1989) Wingbow Press ISBN 0914728679, ISBN 978-0914728672
The Grandmother of Time: A Woman's Book of Celebrations, Spells, and Sacred Objects for Every Month of the Year, (1989) HarperOne ISBN 0062501097, ISBN 978-0062501097
Grandmother Moon: Lunar Magic in Our Lives—Spells, Rituals, Goddesses, Legends, and Emotions Under the Moon (1991) HarperSanFrancisco ISBN 0062501143, ISBN 978-0062501141
The Goddess in the Office: A Personal Energy Guide for the Spiritual Warrior at Work (1993) HarperOne ISBN 0062500872, ISBN 978-0062500878
The Goddess in the Bedroom: A Passionate Woman's Guide to Celebrating Sexuality Every Night of the Week (1995) HarperSanFrancisco ISBN 0062511866, ISBN 978-0062511867
Summoning the Fates: A Woman's Guide to Destiny (1999) Three Rivers Press ISBN 0609802771, ISBN 978-0609802779
Celestial Wisdom for Every Year of Your Life: Discover the Hidden Meaning of Your Age (with Diana Paxson) (2003) Weiser Books ISBN 157863282X, ISBN 978-1578632824
Rasta Dogs (2003) Xlibris Corporation ISBN 1401093086, ISBN 978-1401093082
Selene, the Most Famous Bull-Leaper on Earth (1976) Diana Press ISBN 0884470105

Play

The Rise of the Fates: A Woman's Passion Play 1976
Recordings
Winter: The Goddess Monologues (with Bela Bartok and the Hungarian Women's Chorus from Gyor) 2003[5]
"Glad Woman's Song" on Robert Gass's "Ancient Mother" CD
Grandmother Moon CD
Goddess in the Bedroom CD

Filmography

The Occult Experience 1987 Cinetel Productions Ltd (released on VHS by Sony/Columbia-Tristar August 5, 1992)

Anton LaVey

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Anton LaVey

Born

Howard Stanton Levey
April 11, 1930(1930-04-11)
Chicago, Illinois, U.S.

Died

October 29, 1997 (aged 67)
San Francisco, California, U.S.

Known for

LaVeyan Satanism
Religion
Satanism (Church of Satan)

Spouse(s)

Carole Lansing (1935-1975) (m. 1951–1960) «start: (1951)–end+1: (1961)»"Marriage: Carole Lansing (1935-1975) to Anton LaVey" Location: (linkback:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anton_LaVey)
Diane Hegarty
Blanche Barton

Children

Karla LaVey (b. 1952)
Zeena LaVey (b. 1963)
Satan Xerxes Carnacki LaVey (b. 1993)



Anton Szandor LaVey, (April 11, 1930 – October 29, 1997) born Howard Stanton Levey, was the American founder and High Priest of the Church of Satan as well as a writer, occultist, and musician. He was the author of The Satanic Bible and the founder of LaVeyan Satanism, a synthesized system of his understanding of human nature and the insights of philosophers who advocated materialism and individualism, for which he claimed no supernatural, metaphysical, or theistic inspiration.

Contents

1 Biography
1.1 Ancestry and early life
1.2 Beginnings as Satanist
1.3 Death
2 LaVey related books
2.1 Books by LaVey
2.2 Books featuring writings by LaVey
2.3 Books about LaVey
3 Recordings of Anton LaVey
4 See also
5 References
6 External links
6.1 Writings by LaVey
6.2 Interviews with LaVey
6.3 About LaVey

Biography

Ancestry and early life

LaVey was born as Howard Stanton Levey in Chicago, Illinois to Jewish parents. His father, Michael Joseph Levey, was a liquor distributor and second-generation French-American from Omaha, Nebraska. His grandfather, Leon Levey, was born in Paris, France and emigrated to Douglas County, Nebraska in 1886, where he married Louisville-native Emma Goldsmith on October 23, 1888. Anton's mother, Gertrude Augusta Coultron,[was born to a Russian father and Ukrainian mother who emigrated to Ohio in 1893, and both became naturalized American citizens in 1900.
His family soon moved to California, where he spent most of his early life in the San Francisco Bay Area and later in Globe, Arizona. According to his biography, his ancestry includes French, Russian, Ukrainian[2], Alsatian, German, Georgian, and Romanian stock. His parents supported the development of his musical abilities as he tried his hand at various instruments, his favorite being keyboards such as the pipe organ and the calliope.
LaVey's biography tells of his dropping out of Globe High School in his junior year to join a circus and carnivals, first as a roustabout and cage boy in an act with the big cats, later as a musician playing the calliope. LaVey later noted that seeing many of the same men attending both the bawdy Saturday night shows and the tent revival meetings on Sunday mornings reinforced his increasingly cynical view of religion. He later had many stints as an organist in bars, lounges, and nightclubs. While playing organ in Los Angeles burlesque houses, he reportedly had a brief affair with the then-unknown Marilyn Monroe as she was dancing at the Mayan Theater. This claim has been challenged by those who knew Monroe at the time, as well as the manager of the Mayan, Paul Valentine, who stated that she had never been one of his dancers, nor had the theater ever been used as a burlesque house or for "bump and grind" shows.
According to his biography, LaVey moved back to San Francisco where he worked for three years as a photographer for the San Francisco Police Department (SFPD). He also dabbled as a psychic investigator, looking into "800 calls" referred to him by the police department. Later biographers have questioned whether LaVey ever worked with the SFPD, as there are no records substantiating the claim.
In 1950, LaVey met Carole Lansing and they married the following year. Lansing gave birth to LaVey's first daughter, Karla LaVey, born in 1952. They divorced in 1960 after LaVey became entranced by Diane Hegarty. Hegarty and LaVey never married, however she was his companion for many years, and mothered his second daughter, Zeena Galatea LaVey, in 1963.At the end of their relationship, Hegarty sued for palimony.

Beginnings as Satanist

Becoming a local celebrity through his paranormal research and live performances as an organist, including playing the Wurlitzer at the Lost Weekend cocktail lounge, he attracted many San Francisco notables to his parties. Guests included Carin de Plessin, Michael Harner, Chester A. Arthur III, Forrest J. Ackerman, Fritz Leiber, Dr. Cecil E. Nixon, and Kenneth Anger.
LaVey began presenting Friday night lectures on the occult to what he called a "Magic Circle" of associates who shared his interests. A member of this circle suggested that he had the basis for a new religion. On Walpurgisnacht, April 30, 1966, he ritualistically shaved his head in the tradition of ancient executioners, declared the founding of the Church of Satan and proclaimed 1966 as "the year One", Anno Satanas—the first year of the Age of Satan. Media attention followed the subsequent Satanic wedding ceremony of radical journalist John Raymond to New York socialite Judith Case on February 1, 1967. The Los Angeles Times and San Francisco Chronicle were among the newspapers that printed articles dubbing him "The Black Pope". LaVey performed Satanic baptisms (including one for Zeena) and Satanic funerals (including one for naval machinist-repairman third-class Edward Olsen, complete with a chrome-helmeted honor guard), and released a record album entitled The Satanic Mass.
In the late 1960s and early 1970s, LaVey melded ideological influences from Ayn Rand,[8] Friedrich Nietzsche, Aleister Crowley, H.L. Mencken, and Jack London with the ideology and ritual practices of the Church of Satan. He wrote essays introduced with reworked excerpts from Ragnar Redbeard’s Might is Right and concluded with “Satanized” versions of John Dee’s Enochian Keys to create books such as The Satanic Bible, The Compleat Witch (re-released in 1989 as The Satanic Witch), and The Satanic Rituals.
Due to increasing visibility through his books, LaVey was the subject of numerous articles in the news media throughout the world, including popular magazines such as Look, McCall's, Newsweek, and TIME, and men’s magazines. He also appeared on talk shows such as Joe Pyne, Phil Donahue, and Johnny Carson, and in a feature length documentary called Satanis: The Devil's Mass in 1970.

Death

LaVey’s third and final companion was Blanche Barton. Barton and LaVey are the parents of Satan Xerxes Carnacki LaVey, born November 1, 1993. She succeeded as the head of the Church after his death, and has since stepped down from that role and handed the reins of power to Magus Peter H. Gilmore.
Anton LaVey died on October 29, 1997, in St. Mary's Medical Center in San Francisco of pulmonary edema.[10] He was taken to St. Mary's, a Catholic hospital, because it was the closest available. For reasons open to speculation, the time and date of his death was incorrectly (by two days) listed as the morning of Halloween on his death certificate. His daughter Zeena Schreck claimed responsibility for LaVey's death through putting a ritual curse on him. A secret Satanic funeral, attended by invitation only, was held in Colma. LaVey's body was cremated, with his ashes eventually divided among his heirs as part of a settlement, on the assumption that they possess occult potency, and can be used for acts of Satanic ritual magic.

LaVey related books

Books by LaVey

The Satanic Bible (Avon, 1969, ISBN 0-380-01539-0)
The Compleat Witch, or, What to do When Virtue Fails (Dodd, Mead, 1971, ISBN 0-396-06266-0); republished as The Satanic Witch (Feral House, 1989, ISBN 0-922915-00-8); re-released with an introduction by Peggy Nadramia, and an afterword by Blanche Barton (2003, ISBN 0-922915-84-9).
The Satanic Rituals (Avon, 1972, ISBN 0-380-01392-4)
The Devil's Notebook (Feral House, 1992, ISBN 0-922915-11-3)
Satan Speaks!, introduction by Blanche Barton, foreword by Marilyn Manson (Feral House, 1998, ISBN 0-922915-66-0)
Books featuring writings by LaVey
"Misanthropia", Rants and Incendiary Tracts: Voices of Desperate Illuminations 1558-Present!, edited by Bob Black and Adam Parfrey (Amok Press and Loompanics Unlimited, 1989, ISBN 0-941693-03-1)
"The Invisible War", Apocalypse Culture: Expanded & revised edition, edited by Adam Parfrey (Amok Press, 1990, ISBN 0-922915-05-9)
"Forward", Might is Right, or The Survival of the Fittest by Ragnar Redbeard, LL.D., edited by Katja Lane (M.H.P. & Co., Ltd, 1996, ISBN 0-915179-12-1)(respected the book of the dead)

Books about LaVey

The Devil's Avenger: A Biography of Anton Szandor LaVey by Burton H. Wolfe (Pyramid Books, 1974, ISBN 0-515-03471-1, Out of print)
The Secret Life Of A Satanist: The Authorized Biography of Anton LaVey by Blanche Barton (Feral House, 1990, ISBN 0-922915-12-1)
Popular Witchcraft: Straight from the Witch's Mouth by Jack Fritscher ; featuring Anton LaVey (University of Wisconsin Press : Popular Press, 2004, ISBN 0-299-20300-X, hardcover, ISBN 0-299-20304-2, paperback)
The 2009 play 'Debate' by Irish author Seán Ferrick features LaVey as a character. He is one of four witnesses in a case between God and The Devil, and events from both his life and after his death are used as evidence. He was portrayed by Mark O'Brien and Fiachra MacNamara
About LaVey
Anton LaVey: Legend and Reality by Zeena LaVey and Nikolas Schreck, on the Church of Satan.org website.
Anton Szandor LaVey: A Biographical Sketch by Magus Peter H. Gilmore, on the Church of Satan's official website.
Anton Lavey by Alex Burns at disinformation.
Anton LaVey at the Internet Movie Database
Find A Grave Entry
People of Significance entry for LaVey
Anton LaVey entry on NNDB
Short biographical sketch with particular focus on his influence on Marilyn Manson, taken from "Spin magazine" (February 1998, pg. 64).
"Has the Church of Satan Gone to Hell?" by Jack Boulware "SF Weekly", Jun 17, 1998

Arthur Edward Waite

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Arthur Edward Waite

Arthur Edward Waite in the early 1880s

Born

October 2, 1857(1857-10-02)
Brooklyn, New York

Died

May 19, 1942 (aged 84)

Resting place

Bishopsbourne Village, in the county of Kent, England

Nationality

American

Known for

Rider-Waite Tarot deck

Spouse(s)

Ada Lakeman, Mary Broadbent Schofield

Children

Sybil Waite

Parents

Captain Charles F. Waite, Emma Lovell

Relatives

Frederika Waite

Arthur Edward Waite (October 2, 1857 – May 19, 1942) was a scholarly mystic who wrote extensively on occult and esoteric matters, and was the co-creator of the Rider-Waite Tarot deck. As his biographer, R.A. Gilbert described him, "Waite's name has survived because he was the first to attempt a systematic study of the history of western occultism — viewed as a spiritual tradition rather than as aspects of proto-science or as the pathology of religion."

Contents

1 Early life
2 Author and scholar
3 Tarot deck
4 Other works

Early life

Waite was born in the United States. Waite's father, Capt. Charles F. Waite, died when he was at a very young age, and his widowed mother, Emma Lovell, returned to her home country of England, where he was then raised. As they were not well off, Waite was educated at a small private school in North London. When he was thirteen, he was then educated at St. Charles' College.When he left school to become a clerk he wrote verse in his spare time. The death of his sister, Frederika Waite, in 1874 soon attracted him into psychical research. At twenty-one he began to read regularly in the Library of the British Museum, studying many branches of esotericism.
When Waite was almost thirty years old, he married Ada Lakeman (also called 'Lucasta') and they had one daughter, Sybil Waite. Some time after Lucasta's death in 1924, Waite married Mary Broadbent Schofield. He spent most of his life in or near London, connected to various publishing houses, and editing a magazine The Unknown World.
A.E. Waite joined the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn in January 1891 after being introduced by E.W. Berridge.[6] He became a Freemason in 1901,and entered the Societas Rosicruciana in Anglia in 1902. The Golden Dawn was torn by further internal feuding until Waite's departure in 1914; later he formed the Fellowship of the Rosy Cross,[8] not to be confused with the Societas Rosicruciana. By that time there existed some half-dozen offshoots from the original Golden Dawn, and as a whole it never recovered.
Aleister Crowley, foe of Waite, referred to him as a villainous Arthwate in his novel Moonchild and referred to him in his magazine Equinox. Lovecraft has a villainous wizard in his short story The Thing on the Doorstep called Ephraim Waite. According to Robert M. Price This character was based on Waite.

Author and scholar

Arthur Edward Waite in later years

Waite was a prolific author with many of his works being well received in academic circles. He wrote occult texts on subjects including divination, esotericism, Rosicrucianism, Freemasonry, and ceremonial magick, Kabbalism and alchemy; he also translated and reissued several important mystical and alchemical works. His works on the Holy Grail, influenced by his friendship with Arthur Machen, were particularly notable. A number of his volumes remain in print, the Book of Ceremonial Magic (1911), The Holy Kabbalah (1929), A New Encyclopedia of Freemasonry (1921), and his edited translation of Eliphas Levi's Transcendental Magic, its Doctrine and Ritual (1896) having seen reprints in recent years.

Tarot deck

Waite is best known as the co-creator of the popular and widely used Rider-Waite Tarot deck and author of its companion volume, the Key to the Tarot, republished in expanded form the following year, 1911, as the Pictorial Key to the Tarot, a guide to Tarot readin. The Rider-Waite-Smith tarot was notable for being one of the first tarot decks to illustrate all 78 cards fully, in addition to the 22 major arcana cards. Golden Dawn member Pamela Colman Smith illustrated the cards for Waite, and the deck was first published in 1909.

Other works

Waite, Edward, Inner and Outer Order Initiations of the Holy Order of the Golden Dawn, Canada:Burnaby, 2005. ISBN 0-9735931-7-2.
Waite, Arthur Edward, Israfel: Letters, Visions and Poems, London:Allen, 1886.
Waite, Arthur Edward, A New Encyclopaedia of Freemasonry (Ars Magna Latomorum) and of Cognate Instituted Mysteries: Their Rites, Literature, and History, New York:Wings Books, 1994. ISBN 0517191482.
Waite, Arthur Edward, Theories As to the Authorship of the Rosicrucian Manifestoes, Whitefish, MT:Kessinger Publishing, 2005. ISBN 1425332900.
Waite, Arthur Edward, The Hidden Church of the Holy Grail: Its Legends and Symbolism Considered in Their Affinity with Certain Mysteries of Initiation and Other Traces of a Secret Tradition in Christian Times, Amsterdam, the Netherlands:Fredonia Books, 2002. ISBN 1589639057.

Tarot

Tarot, tarock and tarocchi games
Cego  · French Tarot  · Königrufen  · Minchiate  · Tarocchini (Partita)  · Troccas  · Troggu

Major Arcana (Trump cards)

I (The Magician / The Juggler)  · II (The High Priestess / The Popess)  · III (The Empress)  · IV (The Emperor)  · V (The Hierophant / The Pope)  · VI (The Lovers)  · VII (The Chariot)  · VIII (XI) (Justice)  · IX (The Hermit)  · X (Wheel of Fortune)  · XI (VIII) (Strength / Fortitude)  · XII (The Hanged Man / The Traitor)  · XIII (Death)  · XIV (Temperance)  · XV (The Devil)  · XVI (The Tower / Fire)  · XVII (The Star)  · XVIII (The Moon)  · XIX (The Sun)  · XX (Judgement / The Angel)  · XXI (The World)  · Unnumbered or Zero (The Fool)

Minor Arcana (Suit cards)

Coins(Pentacles/Diamonds)

One (Ace) · Two · Three · Four · Five · Six · Seven · Eight · Nine  · Ten  · Page (Jack)  · Knight  · Queen  · King

Wands (Staves / Clubs)

One(Ace) · Two · Three · Four · Five · Six · Seven · Eight · Nine  · Ten  · Page (Jack) · Knight  · Queen · King

Cups (Hearts)

One (Ace) · Two · Three · Four · Five · Six · Seven · Eight · Nine · Ten · Page (Jack)  · Knight · Queen · King

Swords (Spades)

One (Ace) · Two · Three · Four · Five · Six · Seven · Eight · Nine  · Ten · Page (Jack) · Knight · Queen · King

Notable decks

French suits
Tarot Nouveau  · Tiertarock

Italian suits

de Marseille  · Piemontese  · Rider-Waite  · Thoth  · Visconti-Sforza

Divinatory, esoteric and occult tarot

Antoine Court de Gébelin · Etteilla · Eliphas Levi · Arthur Edward Waite

Dion Fortune

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Dion Fortune

Born

1890 (1890)

Died

1946 (1947)

Occupation

Occultist, Author

Personal data

NAME

Fortune, Dion

ALTERNATIVE NAMES

Violet Mary Firth, Violet Mary Firth Evans

SHORT DESCRIPTION

British Occultist and Author

DATE OF BIRTH

1890-12-06

PLACE OF BIRTH

Llandudno, Wales

DATE OF DEATH

1946 (1947)



Violet Mary Firth Evans, born Violet Mary Firth (December 6, 1890– January 8, 1946) and better known as Dion Fortune, was a British occultist and author. Her pseudonym was inspired by her family motto "Deo, non fortuna" (Latin for "by God, not fate").

Contents

1 Early life
2 Writing
3 Later magical career

Early life

She was born at Bryn-y-Bia in Llandudno, Wales, and grew up in a household where Christian Science was rigorously practiced. She reported visions of Atlantis at age four and the developing of psychic abilities during her twentieth year at which time she suffered a nervous breakdown; after her recovery she found herself drawn to the occult. She joined the Theosophical Society and attended courses in psychology and psychoanalysis at the University of London, and became a lay psychotherapist at the Medico-Psychological Clinic in Brunswick Square.
Her first magical mentor was the Irish occultist and Freemason Theodore Moriarty. In 1919 she was initiated into the London Temple of the Alpha et Omega[10] before transferring to the Stella Matutina order.

Writing

From 1919 she began writing a number of novels and short stories that explored various aspects of magic and mysticism, including The Demon Lover, The Winged Bull, The Goat-Foot God, and The Secrets of Dr. Taverner. This latter is a collection of short stories based on her experiences with Theodore Moriarty. Two of her novels, The Sea Priestess and Moon Magic, became influential within the religion of Wicca, especially upon Doreen Valiente.
Of her works on magical subjects, the best remembered of her books are; The Cosmic Doctrine, meant to be a summation of her basic teachings on mysticism, The Mystical Qabalah, an introduction to Hermetic Qabalah, and Psychic Self-Defense, a manual on how to protect oneself from psychic attacks. Though some of her writings may seem dated to contemporary readers, they have the virtue of lucidity and avoid the deliberate obscurity that characterised many of her forerunners and contemporaries.

Later magical career

Fortune fell out with Moina Mathers, head of the Alpha et Omega, and claimed she was coming under magical attack. In 1922, with Moina's consent, Dion Fortune left the Alpha et Omega and with her husband, Penry Evansformed the Fraternity of the Inner Light as an offshoot of the Alpha et Omega.This brought new members to the Alpha et Omega. Fortune's group was later renamed "The Fraternity of the Inner Light", and was, later still, renamed "The Society of the Inner Light". This society was to be the focus of her work for the rest of her life. The work that is considered her masterpiece by occultists and occult sympathizersThe Mystical Qabalah was first published in England in 1935, and is regarded by many occultists as one of the best books on magic ever written
Dion Fortune claimed to have participated in the "Magical Battle of Britain",which was supposedly an attempt by British occultists to magically aid the war effort and which aimed to forestall the impending German invasion during the darkest days of World War II. Her efforts in regard to this are recorded in a series of letters she wrote at the time.The effort involved in this endeavor is said to have contributed to her death shortly after the war ended.Her Society of the Inner Light continues to function, and has also given rise to other orders, including The London Group, until recently headed by Alan Adams (aka Charles Fielding),and Servants of the Light, headed by Dolores Ashcroft-Nowicki.
She died in 1946 from leukemia.

Bibliography

Fiction:

The Secrets of Dr. Taverner, 1926
The Demon Lover, 1927
The Winged Bull, 1935
The Goat-Foot God, 1936
Sea Priestess, 1938
Moon Magic, 1956
Non-fiction :
The Esoteric Philosophy of Love and Marriage, 1924
The Mystical Qabalah, 1935
The Cosmic Doctrine, 1949
Applied Magic, 1962
Psychic Self-Defense, 1971
Glastonbury: Avalon of the Heart, 1986
The Circuit of Force (with Gareth Knight)
The Training and Work of an Initiate (with Gareth Knight)
An Introduction to Ritual Magic (with Gareth Knight), 1997
What Is Occultism?, 2001
Mystical Meditations on the Christian Collects, 2006

Eliphas Levi

Eliphas Levi

Born

Alphonse Louis Constant
8 February 1810(1810-02-08)
France

Died

31 May 1875 (aged 65)
Eliphas Lévi, born Alphonse Louis Constant, (February 8, 1810 - May 31, 1875) was a French occult author and purported magician.
"Eliphas Lévi," the name under which he published his books, was his attempt to translate or transliterate his given names "Alphonse Louis" into Hebrew although he was not Jewish.
His second wife was French sculptress Marie-Noémi Cadiot.

Contents

1 Biography
2 Definition of Magic
3 Theory of magic
4 Bibliography

Biography

Lévi was the son of a shoemaker in Paris; he attended a seminary and began to study to enter the Roman Catholic priesthood. However, while at the seminary he fell in love, and left without being ordained. He wrote a number of minor religious works: Des Moeurs et des Doctrines du Rationalisme en France ("Of the Moral Customs and Doctrines of Rationalism in France", 1839) was a tract within the cultural stream of the Counter-Enlightenment. La Mère de Dieu ("The Mother of God", 1844) followed and, after leaving the seminary, two radical tracts, L'Evangile du Peuple ("The Gospel of the People," 1840), and Le Testament de la Liberté ("The Testament of Liberty"), published in the year of revolutions, 1848, led to two brief prison sentences.
Baphomet, in Dogme et Rituel de la Haute Magie 1855
In 1853, Lévi visited England, where he met the novelist Edward Bulwer-Lytton, who was interested in Rosicrucianism as a literary theme and was the president of a minor Rosicrucian order.[2] Levi's first treatise on magic appeared in 1854 under the title Dogme et Rituel de la Haute Magie, and was translated into English by Arthur Edward Waite as Transcendental Magic, its Doctrine and Ritual. Its famous opening lines present the single essential theme of Occultism and gives some of the flavor of its atmosphere:
Behind the veil of all the hieratic and mystical allegories of ancient doctrines, behind the darkness and strange ordeals of all initiations, under the seal of all sacred writings, in the ruins of Nineveh or Thebes, on the crumbling stones of old temples and on the blackened visage of the Assyrian or Egyptian sphinx, in the monstrous or marvelous paintings which interpret to the faithful of India the inspired pages of the Vedas, in the cryptic emblems of our old books on alchemy, in the ceremonies practised at reception by all secret societies, there are found indications of a doctrine which is everywhere the same and everywhere carefully concealed.

Introduction

In 1861, he published a sequel, La Clef des Grands Mystères (The Key to the Great Mysteries). Further magical works by Lévi include Fables et Symboles (Stories and Images), 1862, and La Science des Esprits (The Science of Spirits), 1865. In 1868, he wrote Le Grand Arcane, ou l'Occultisme Dévoilé (The Great Secret, or Occultism Unveiled); this, however, was only published posthumously in 1898.
Lévi's version of magic became a great success, especially after his death. That Spiritualism was popular on both sides of the Atlantic from the 1850s contributed to this success. His magical teachings were free from obvious fanaticisms, even if they remained rather murky; he had nothing to sell, and did not pretend to be the inititate of some ancient or fictitious secret society. He incorporated the Tarot cards into his magical system, and as a result the Tarot has been an important part of the paraphernalia of Western magicians. He had a deep impact on the magic of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn and later on the ex-Golden Dawn member Aleister Crowley. He was also the first to declare that a pentagram or five-pointed star with one point down and two points up represents "bad", while a pentagram with one point up and two points down is "good". It was largely through the occultists inspired by him that Lévi is remembered as one of the key founders of the twentieth century revival of magic.

Definition of Magic

Levi's works are filled with various definitions for "Magic" and the "Magician":

Magic

"To practice magic is to be a quack; to know magic is to be a sage."-from The Threshold of Magical Science
"Magic is the divinity of man achieved in union with faith..."-TMS

Magician

"He looks on the wicked as invalids whom one must pity and cure; the world, with its errors and vices, is to him God's hospital, and he wishes to serve in it."-KoM
"They are without fears and without desires, dominated by no falsehood, sharing no error, loving without illusion, suffering without impatience, reposing in the quietude of eternal thought..... a Magus cannot be ignorant, for magic implies superiority, mastership, majority, and majority signifies emancipation by knowledge. The Magus welcomes pleasure, accepts wealth, deserves honour, but is never the slave of one of them; he knows how to be poor, to abstain, and to suffer; he endures oblivion willingly because he is lord of his own happiness, and expects or fears nothing from the caprice of fortune. He can love without being beloved; he can create imperishable treasures, and exalt himself above the level of honours or the prizes of the lottery. He possesses that which he seeks, namely, profound peace. He regrets nothing which must end, but remembers with satisfaction that he has met with good in all. His hope is a certitude, for he knows that good is eternal and evil transitory. He enjoys solitude, but does not fly the society of man; he is a child with children, joyous with the young, staid with the old, patient with the foolish, happy with the wise. He smiles with all who smile, and mourns with all who weep; applauding strength, he is yet indulgent to weakness; offending no one, he has himself no need to pardon, for he never thinks himself offended; he pities those who misconceive him, and seeks an opportunity to serve them; by the force of kindness only does he avenge himself on the ungrateful..."-TMS
"Judge not; speak hardly at all; love and act."-KoM

Theory of magic

Levi identified three fundamental principles of magic:
1.That the material universe is only a small part of total reality, which includes many other planes and modes of consciousness. Full knowledge and full power in the universe are only attainable through awareness of these other aspects of reality. One of the most important of these levels or aspects of reality is the "astral light", a cosmic fluid which may be molded by will into physical forms.
"One can only define the unknown by its supposed and supposable relations with the known."-from The Key of the Mysteries
"The divine ideal of the ancient world made the civilization which came to an end, and one must not despair of seeing the god of our barbarous fathers become the devil of our more enlightened children."-KoM
2.That human willpower is a real force, capable of achieving absolutely anything, from the mundane to the miraculous.
AXIOM 1:"Nothing can resist the will of man when he knows what is true and wills what is good."
AXIOM 9:"The will of a just man is the Will of God Himself and the Law of Nature."
AXIOM 20:"A chain of iron is less difficult to break than a chain of flowers."
AXIOM 21:"Succeed in not fearing the lion, and the lion will fear YOU. Say to suffering, 'I will that you shall become a pleasure,' and it will prove to be such-- and even more than a pleasure, it will be a blessing."
3.That the human being is a microcosm, a miniature of the macrocosmic universe, and the two are fundamentally linked. Causes set in motion on one level may equally have effects on another.
"Man is the God of the world, and God is the man of Heaven."-KoM




Eliphas Levi's Tetragrammaton pentagram, which he considered to be a symbol of the microcosm, or human being.

Bibliography

Des Moeurs et des Doctrines du Rationalisme en France (Of the Moral Customs and Doctrines of Rationalism in France), 1839
La Mère de Dieu (The Mother of God), 1844
L'Evangile du Peuple (The Gospel of the People) 1840
Le Testament de la Liberté (The Testament of Liberty), 1848
Dogme et Rituel de la Haute Magie, (Transcendental Magic, its Doctrine and Ritual), 1855
La Clef des Grands Mystères (The Key to the Great Mysteries), 1861
Fables et Symboles (Stories and Images), 1862
La Science des Esprits (The Science of Spirits), 1865
Le Grand Arcane, ou l'Occultisme Dévoilé (The Great Secret, or Occultism Unveiled), 1868
Magical Rituals of the Sanctum Regnum, 1970

Tarot

Tarot, tarock and tarocchi games
Cego  · French Tarot  · Königrufen  · Minchiate  · Tarocchini (Partita)  · Troccas  · Troggu

Major Arcana (Trump cards)

I (The Magician / The Juggler)  · II (The High Priestess / The Popess)  · III (The Empress)  · IV (The Emperor)  · V (The Hierophant / The Pope)  · VI (The Lovers)  · VII (The Chariot)  · VIII (XI) (Justice)  · IX (The Hermit)  · X (Wheel of Fortune)  · XI (VIII) (Strength / Fortitude)  · XII (The Hanged Man / The Traitor)  · XIII (Death)  · XIV (Temperance)  · XV (The Devil)  · XVI (The Tower / Fire)  · XVII (The Star)  · XVIII (The Moon)  · XIX (The Sun)  · XX (Judgement / The Angel)  · XXI (The World)  · Unnumbered or Zero (The Fool)

Minor Arcana (Suit cards)

Coins (Pentacles / Diamonds)

One (Ace)  · Two  · Three  · Four  · Five  · Six  · Seven  · Eight  · Nine  · Ten  · Page (Jack)  · Knight  · Queen  · King

Wands (Staves / Clubs)

One (Ace)  · Two  · Three  · Four  · Five  · Six  · Seven  · Eight  · Nine  · Ten  · Page (Jack)  · Knight  · Queen  · King

Cups (Hearts)

One (Ace)  · Two  · Three  · Four  · Five  · Six  · Seven  · Eight  · Nine  · Ten  · Page (Jack)  · Knight  · Queen  · King

Swords (Spades)

One (Ace)  · Two  · Three  · Four  · Five  · Six  · Seven  · Eight  · Nine  · Ten  · Page (Jack)  · Knight  · Queen  · King

Notable decks

French suits
Tarot Nouveau  · Tiertarock

Italian suits

de Marseille  · Piemontese  · Rider-Waite  · Thoth  · Visconti-Sforza

Divinatory, esoteric and occult tarot

Antoine Court de Gébelin · Etteilla · Eliphas Levi · Arthur Edward Waite
For Gerald Gardner, scriptwriter for The Monkees and Get Smart, see Gerald C. Gardner.
For Gerald H. F. Gardner, the mathematician, geophysicist and social activist, see Gerald Gardner (mathematician).
"Scire" redirects here. For the Italian submarines, see Italian submarine Scirè.

Gerald Brousseau Gardner

Born

June 13, 1884
Blundellsands, Lancashire, England

Died

February 12, 1964 (aged 79)
at sea, returning from Lebanon

Occupation

Tea planter; rubber planter; customs officer; Wiccan Priest

Spouse(s)

Dorothea "Donna" Gardner née Rosedale

Parents

William Robert Gardner; ??? Gardner



Gerald Brousseau Gardner (June 13, 1884 - February 12, 1964), who sometimes used the craft name Scire, was an influential English Wiccan, as well as an amateur anthropologist and archaeologist, writer, weaponry expert and occultist. He was instrumental in bringing the religion of Wicca to public attention and wrote some of its definitive religious texts. He himself never used the term "Wicca", instead typically referring to the faith as "witchcraft" or "the witch-cult", and he claimed that it was the survival of a pre-Christian pagan Witch cult that he had been initated into by a New Forest coven in 1939.
Gardner spent much of his life abroad in southern and south-eastern Asia, where he developed an interest in many of the native peoples, and wrote about some of their magical practices. It was after his retirement and return to England that he was initiated into Wicca by the New Forest coven. Subsequently fearing that this religion, which he apparently believed to be a genuine continuance of ancient beliefs, would die out, he set about propagating it through initiating others, mainly through the Bricket Wood coven, and introduced a string of notable High Priestesses into Wicca, including Doreen Valiente, Lois Bourne, Patricia Crowther and Eleanor Bone. The tradition that he propagated took influence from such sources as Freemasonry and ceremonial magic, particularly The Key of Solomon and the writings of Gardner's aquaintance, the occultist Aleister Crowley, and has become known as Gardnerian Wicca. He also published two books on the subject of Wicca, Witchcraft Today and The Meaning of Witchcraft, and ran the Museum of Magic and Witchcraft devoted to the subject, as well as getting involved in other religious movements such as Druidry and Thelema. For this, he has sometimes been referred to as "the Father of Wicca".

Contents

1 Biography
1.1 Early life
1.2 Life in Asia
1.2.1 Ceylon and Borneo, 1900-1911
1.2.2 Malaya, 1911-1936
1.3 Return to Europe
1.4 The Rosicrucian Order and the New Forest Coven
1.5 Aleister Crowley and the Early Gardnerian Tradition, 1946-1950
1.6 Doreen Valiente and the Museum of Magic and Witchcraft, 1950-1957
1.7 Later Life and Death
2 Personal life
3 Bibliography

Biography

To date, there is only one dedicated biography about Gardner, which was Gerald Gardner: Witch, published in 1960, and written by his friend, Idries Shah (but attributed to Jack L. Bracelin) as one of the first titles of Shah's Octagon Press publishing house. Writers such as Ronald Hutton, Leo Ruickbie, Doreen Valiente, and Philip Heselton have also discussed Gardner's involvement with Wicca in their books.

Early life

Gardner was born at The Glen, The Serpentine, Blundellsands, near Liverpool in England to a well-off middle class family as one of four brothers, only two of which, Bob and Douglas, lived with Gerald at home. The family business was Joseph Gardner & Sons, the British Empire's oldest and largest importer of hardwood, and they were of Scottish ancestry.
The Gardners' had in their service an Irish nursemaid named Josephine "Com" McCombie, who was employed to take care of the young Gerald. Gardner had been suffering from asthma at the time, bearing the illness from a young age, and his nursemaid had offered to take him to warmer climates at his father's expense. This began in 1891, when the pair travelled to the Canary Islands,[5] and they then went on to Accra, followed by Madeira. According to Gardner's official biographer, J.C. Bracelin, Com was very flirtatious and "clearly looked on these trips as mainly manhunts"

Life in Asia

Ceylon and Borneo, 1900-1911

In 1900, Com married David Elkington, a wealthy man in Ceylon (modern Sri Lanka), and it was agreed with the Gardners that Gerald would live with her on a tea plantation named Ladbroke Estate. In 1905, Gardner came back to Britain for a visit, during which he spent a lot of time with family relations known as the Surgensons. Gerald became very friendly with this side of his family, whom his mother and father avoided because they were Methodists. The Surgensons readily talked about the paranormal with Gardner. The patriarch of the family, Ted Surgenson, who believed that fairies were living in his garden, would say "I can often feel they're there, and sometimes I've seen them", though he readily admitted the possibility that it was all in his imagination. It was from the Surgensons that Gardner discovered a family rumour that his grandfather, Joseph, had been a practising witch, after being converted to the practice by his mistress. Another family belief was that a Scottish ancestor, Grissell Gairdner, had been burned as a witch in Newburgh in 1610.
In 1908, after a brief stint in Singapore, Gardner moved to Borneo where he became a rubber planter on the Mawo Estate at Membuket, where he did not get on well with the manager, Graham,who had wanted to cut down all the local forest to grow rubber. Instead Gardner became friendly with many of the locals, including the Dyaks, a tribe of local headhunters. Gardner, as an amateur anthropologist, was fascinated by their way of life, particularly their weaponry, but also their beliefs in polytheism and spiritualism.

Malaya, 1911-1936

Gardner aboard his customs launch on the Johore river in Malaya.
In 1911, Gardner travelled to Malaya for a holiday, on his planned way back to Ceylon, however he was soon offered a job working on a rubber plantation and decided to stay. It was here that Gardner made friends with an American man known as Cornwall, who had converted to Islam, and married a local Malay woman.Through Cornwall, Gardner was introduced to many locals, whom he soon befriended. He went on to also befriend members of the Saki, a secretive jungle tribe of pygmies.
In 1916 Gardner once again returned to Britain. At the time, the country was fighting in the First World War, and so he attempted to join the British Navy, but was turned down due to ill health. Unable to fight on the front lines, he began working in a hospital treating injured soldiers from the western front. He soon had to give this up when he caught malaria, and so decided to return to Malaya. His mother died in 1920, though Gardner did not return home on this occasion. In 1923, he gave up his job as a rubber planter, and became a civil servant inspecting the various rubber plantations around the country. In this role he had to deal with a great deal of criminality, and was shot at on a number of occasions.
In 1927 his father became very ill and he returned to Britain. On this visit, he began to investigate spiritualism and mediumship. He soon had several encounters which he attributed to spirits of deceased family members. Continuing to visit Spiritualist churches and seances, he was highly critical of much of what he saw, but he encountered several mediums he considered genuine, some of which concerned obscure prophecies that later came true. That same year, Gardner married Dorothea Rosedale, who went by the name of Donna, and they honeymooned in Ryde, before both headed, via France, to Malaya. Gardner witnessed the magical practises performed by the Malay locals, and both he and Cornwall readily accepted a belief in magic. During his time in the country, Gardner became very interested in local customs, namely those involved in folk magic and weapons. In 1936, he published an authoritative text on the subject of the keris, a Malayan knife used for magical purposes: Keris and other Malay Weapons.[18] Gardner was not only interested in the anthropology of Malaya, but also in its archaeology. He began excavations at the city of Johore Lama, alone and in secret, as the local Sultan considered archaeologists little better than grave-robbers. Prior to Gardner's investigations, no serious archaeological excavation had occurred at the city, though he himself soon unearthed four miles of earthworks, and uncovered finds that included tombs, pottery, and porcelain dating from Ming China.He went on to begin further excavations at the royal cemetery of Kota Tinggi, and the jungle-city of Syong Penang. His finds were displayed as an exhibit on the "Early History of Johore", at the Museum of Singapore, and several beads that he had discovered helped to prove that trade went on between the Roman Empire and the Malays, presumably, Gardner thought, via India.

Return to Europe

"It has been proved in many wars that if the civil population will fight delaying actions they can be most troublesome to invaders and may even beat them... By Magna Carta every free-born Englishman is entitled to have arms to defend himself and his household. Let us now claim our right."
—Gardner, in a letter to the Daily Telegraph
In 1936, Gardner left Malaya, and on his way back to Britain, visited Palestine, where he became involved in the archaeological excavations at Lachish. Here he grew particularly interested in a temple containing statues to both the male deity Yahweh of Judeo-Christian theology and the pagan goddess Astaroth.[24] From there he went on to Turkey, visiting several local museums, and to Greece, followed by Hungary and Germany (which at the time was under the Nazi regime). He eventually reached England, but soon went on a visit to Denmark to attend a conference on weaponry.
In 1938 he sailed to Cyprus. Gardner was a believer in reincarnation, and felt that he had lived on the island once before; he wrote his first novel, A Goddess Arrives, partially based upon his supposed recollections of a past life on the island. A Goddess Arrives which was set in ancient Cyprus and featured a queen, Dayonis, that practiced sorcery in an attempt to help her people defend themselves from invading Egyptians. In 1938, Gardner returned from Cyprus to Britain, where he and Donna settled down and remained for much of the rest of his life. Despite initially living in London, the pair soon moved to Highcliffe, just south of the New Forest, Hampshire.[25] With the threat of war with Nazi Germany looming, Gardner joined the Air Raid Precautions as a warden,[26] and he went on to arm, from his own personal collection of weapons, many of the members of his local A.R.P.

The Rosicrucian Order and the New Forest Coven

Main article: New Forest Coven
In 1939, Gardner took his wife to a theatrical performance on the life of Pythagoras held by a local dramatic society known as the Rosicrucian Theatre. Donna, herself an amateur thespian, hated it, thinking the quality of both actors and script terrible, and she refused to go again.Gardner was intrigued, however, and joined the group running the theatre - the Corona Fellowship of Rosicrucians, an occult society based upon Rosicrucianism. However, Gardner was quite critical of many of the group's practices; their leader, who went by the name of Aurelius, claimed to be the reincarnation of Pythagoras, Cornelius Agrippa and Francis Bacon. Gardner facetiously asked if he was also the Wandering Jew, much to the annoyance of Aurelius himself. Another belief held by the group that Gardner found amusing was that a lamp hanging from one of the ceilings was the disguised holy grail of Arthurian legend.Gardner's dissatisfaction with the group grew, particularly when in 1939, one of the group's leaders sent a letter out to all members in which she shated that war would not come. The very next day, Britain declared war on Germany,greatly unimpressing the increasingly cynical Gardner.
Prior to his encounter with Wicca, Gardner was already an accomplished writer on the topic of magic and witchcraft. For instance, he had become a member of the Folklore Society in 1939. His first contribution to its journal Folklore, appeared in the June 1939 issue and described a box of witchcraft relics that he believed had belonged to the 17th century 'Witch-Finder General', Matthew Hopkins. In 1946 he became a member of the society's council,and anxious to achieve academic acceptance, claimed to have doctoral degrees from the Universities of Singapore and Toulouse. Doreen Valiente has shown these claims were untrue.
Latimers in Highcliffe, where Gardner was supposedly initiated into the Craft.
Meanwhile, Gardner became good friends with a group of people within the Rosicrucian Crotona Fellowship who the later researcher Philip Heselton speculated to be the siblings Ernest and Susie Mason. According to Gardner, "unlike many of the others, had to earn their livings, were cheerful and optimistic and had a real interest in the occult". Gardner later said of them:
I was really very fond of them, and I knew that they had all sorts of magical beliefs. They had been very interested when I told them that an ancestress of mine had been burned alive as a witch at Newborough in Scotland about 1640; although I did not mention Grandfather. And I would have gone through hell and high water even then for any of them.
One night in September 1939 they took him to a large house owned by "Old Dorothy" Clutterbuck,[34] a wealthy local woman, where he was made to strip naked and taken through an initiation ceremony. Halfway through the ceremony, he heard the word "Wica", and he recognised it as an Old English word for witchcraft. He was already acquainted with Margaret Murray's theory of the Witch-cult, and "I then knew that that which I had thought burnt out hundreds of years ago still survived. How wonderful; to think that these things still survive." This group, he claimed, were the New Forest coven, and he believed them to be one of the few surviving covens of the ancient, pre-Christian Witch-Cult religion. Subsequent research by the likes of Hutton and Heselton has shown that in fact the New Forest coven was probably only formed in the early 20th century, based upon such sources as folk magic and the theories of Margaret Murray. It has also been speculated that the woman who initiated Gardner was an elocution teacher named Edith Woodford-Grimes, who went under the pseudonym of "Dafo" and the two would certainly remain friends for the rest of their lives.
Gardner only ever described one of their rituals in depth, and this was an event that he termed "Operation Cone of Power". According to his own account, it took place in 1940 in a part of the New Forest and was designed to ward off the Nazis from invading Britain by magical means. Gardner said of this:
We were taken at night to a place in the Forest, where the Great Circle was erected; and that was done which may not be done except in great emergency. And the great cone of power was raised and slowly directed in the general direction of Hitler. The command was given: "you cannot cross the sea, you cannot cross the sea, you cannot come, you cannot come". Just as, we were told, was done to Napoleon, when he had his army ready to invade England and never came. And, as was done to the Spanish Armada, mighty forces were used, of which I may not speak.

Aleister Crowley and the Early Gardnerian Tradition, 1946-1950

Main article: Gardnerian Wicca
In 1946, with the end of the Second World War, Gardner and his wife Donna left the New Forest and returned to London. However, Gardner did not want to abandon his new faith, and fearing that it would die out, founded his own coven, the Bricket Wood Coven, with himself as High Priest and Edith Woodford-Grimes as High Priestess. The new group met on the grounds of the Fiveacres Nudist Club, Bricket Wood, outside St Albans, which Gardner, being a keen nudist, had purchased the previous year. They celebrated their rites and rituals for the esbats and sabbats in a building known as the Witches' Cottage, which Gardner had assembled in the centre of the Club's woodland; the cottage itself had been purchased off of his friend, the Freemason J.S.M Ward, who was a pioneer of the restoration of historical buildings.
The Witches' Cottage, where Gardner and his Bricket Wood coven performed their rituals.
Alongside his work with the Craft in his coven, Gardner became interested in many other forms of esotericism and the occult around this time. He joined the Ancient Druid Order, an organisation that promoted the Neopagan religion of Druidry, as well as a mystical Christian group, the Ancient British Church, who ordained him as a priest. The researcher Philip Heselton also speculated that Gardner may well have met Dion Byngham, the leader of the pagan wing of the Order of Woodcraft Chivalry, whose beliefs and practices, termed Dionisianism after the Greco-Roman god Dionysus, bore many similarities with Gardnerian Wicca.
On May Day 1947, his friend, the stage magician Arnold Crowther, introduced Gardner to his friend, the notorious occultist Aleister Crowley. Shortly before his death, Crowley elevated Gardner to the VII° of Ordo Templi Orientis(O.T.O.) and issued a charter decreeing that Gardner could perform its preliminary initiation rituals. The charter itself was written in Gardner's handwriting and only signed by Crowley.Crowley's friend and student, Gerald Yorke, was reported to have stated that Gardner had paid £300 for Crowley to sign the charter, though this story seems highly apocryphal.Despite owning it, and later displaying it in his Museum of Magic and Witchcraft, Gardner never made use of his O.T.O. charter or performed any of the rituals it allowed him to, claiming that he "had neither the money, energy or time".Crowley also sold Gardner some of his books, including The Book of the Law and The Blue Equinox which may have been the source of Crowley material later used within Gardner's witchcraft rites.This is consistent with Gardner's claims that the rituals he had received were fragmentary, and that he had incorporated other material to make a coherent system.
After Crowley's death on December 1, 1947, Gardner was considered the highest ranking O.T.O. member in Europe, and contacted another English member Lady Frieda Harris (painter of the Thoth tarot deck) about continuing the work of the Order in the U.K. Lady Harris wrote to Karl Germer, Crowley's successor as head of O.T.O., on January 2 1948 that Gardner was now the "Head of the O.T.O. in Europe". Gardner later met with Germer in New York to formulate further plans for the O.T.O. However Gardner's continuing ill health during this period led to the abandonment of the plans, and in 1951 he was replaced by Frederic Mellinger as the O.T.O's European representative.
Dr Leo Ruickbie concluded that Aleister Crowley played a crucial role in inspiring Gardner to establish a new pagan religion.Ruickbie, Hutton, Rankine & d'Este, and Orpheus all argue that much of what has been published of Gardnerian Wicca, as Gardner's practice came to be known by, was derived from works by Aleister Crowley and also contains borrowings from other identifiable sources.

Doreen Valiente and the Museum of Magic and Witchcraft, 1950-1957

Gardner at the wishing well outside the Museum of Magic and Witchcraft at the Witches' Mill on the Isle of Man.
In 1950, Gardner met the Witch Cecil Williamson in London's Atlantis Bookshop during a talk which Gardner was giving. Williamson later revealed that he was planning to open a museum devoted to witchcraft and magic, the Folklore Centre of Superstition and Witchcraft, in Castletown on the Isle of Man. The following year Gardner and his wife moved to the island, where Gardner became employed as the museum's "resident witch". On 29 July, The Sunday Pictorial published an article about the museum in which Gardner declared "Of course I'm a witch. And I get great fun out of it." The museum was not a financial success, and the relationship between Gardner and Williamson deteriorated. In 1954, Gardner bought the museum off of Williamson, who returned to England to found the rival Museum of Witchcraft, eventually settling it in Boscastle, Cornwall. Gardner renamed his exhibition the Museum of Magic and Witchcraft and continued running it up until his death.
In 1952, Gardner had begun to correspond with a young woman named Doreen Valiente. She eventually requested initiation into the Craft, and though Gardner was hesitant at first, he agreed that they could meet during the winter at the home of Edith Woodford-Grimes. Valiente got on well with both Gardner and Woodford-Grimes, and having no objections to either ritual nudity or scourging (which she had read about in a copy of Gardner's novel High Magic's Aid that he had given to her), she was initiated by Gardner into Wicca on Midsummer 1953. Valiente went on to join the Bricket Wood Coven. She soon rose to become the High Priestess of the coven, and helped Gardner to rewrite his Book of Shadows, cutting out Crowley's influence, which she feared was too shrouded in bad publicity.

The first edition cover of Witchcraft Today.

In 1954, Gardner published a non-fiction book, Witchcraft Today, containing a preface by Margaret Murray, who had published her theory of a surviving Witch-Cult in her 1921 book, The Witch-Cult in Western Europe. In his book, Gardner not only espoused the survival of the Witch-Cult, but also his theory that a belief in faeries in Europe was due to a secretive pygmy race that lived alongside other communities, and that the Knights Templar had been initiates of the Craft. Alongside this book, Gardner began to increasingly court publicity, going so far as to invite the press to write articles about the religion. Many of these turned out very negatively for the cult; one declared "Witches Devil-Worship in London!", and another accused him of whitewashing witchcraft in his luring of people into covens. Gardner continued courting publicity, despite the negative articles that many tabloids were producing, and believed that only through publicity could more people become interested in witchcraft, so preventing the "Old Religion", as he called it, from dying out.
Gardner's increasingly overt attempts at garnering media attention was one of the major reasons for rifts in his coven (and others). Many Witches felt he was threatening their traditional vows of secrecy and bringing about too much bad publicity, which in turn led to social ostracisation and job losses. Gardner introduced the Wiccan Laws to his coven, which drastically limited the powers of the High Priestess and even allowed the High Priest to call for the retirement of the High Priestess when he considered her too old. Valiente and other members of the coven were furious and left in disgust. Valiente herself said "we had had enough of the gospel according to Gerald, but we still believed that the ancient religion of Witchcraft had existed".

Later Life and Death

The first edition cover of The Meaning of Witchcraft.

In 1960, Gardner's official biography, entitled Gerald Gardner: Witch, was published. It was written by a friend of his, the Sufi mystic Idries Shah, but used the name of one of Gardner's High Priests, Jack L. Bracelin, because Shah was wary about being associated with Witchcraft. In May of that year, Gardner travelled to Buckingham Palace, where he enjoyed a garden party in recognition of his years of service to the Empire in the Far East. Soon after his trip, Gardner's wife Donna died, and Gardner himself once again began to suffer badly from asthma. The following year he, along with Shah and Lois Bourne, travelled to the island of Majorca to holiday with the poet Robert Graves, whose The White Goddess would play a significant part in the burgeoning Wiccan religion. In 1963, Gardner decided to go to Lebanon over the winter. Whilst returning home on the ship, The Scottish Prince on February 12 1964, he suffered a fatal heart attack at the breakfast table. He was buried in Tunisia, the ship's next port of call, and his funeral was attended only by the ship's captain.He was 79 years old.
Though having bequeathed the museum, all his artifacts, and the copyright to his books in his will to one of his High Priestess', Monique Wilson, she and her husband sold off the artefact collection to the American Ripley’s, Believe It Or Not organisation several years later. Ripley's took the collection to America, where it was displayed in two museums before being sold off during the 1980s. Gardner had also left parts of his inheritance to Patricia Crowther, Doreen Valiente, Lois Bourne and Jack Bracelin,the latter inheriting the Fiveacres Nudist Club and taking over as full-time High Priest of the Bricket Wood coven.
Several years after Gardner's death, the Wiccan High Priestess Eleanor Bone visited North Africa and went looking for Gardner's grave. She discovered that the cemetery he was interned in was to be redeveloped, and so she raised enough money for his body to be moved to another cemetery in Tunis,where it currently remains. In 2007, a new plaque was attached to his grave, describing him as being "Father of Modern Wicca. Beloved of the Great Goddess".

Personal life

Gardner only married once in his life, to Donna, and several who knew him made the claim that he was devoted to her. Indeed, after her death in 1960, he began to again suffer serious asthma attacks. Despite this, as many coven members slept over at his cottage due to living too far away to travel home safely, he was known to cuddle up to his young High Priestess, Dayonis, after rituals. The author Philip Heselton, who largely researched Wicca's origins, came to the conclusion that Gardner had held a long-term affair with Dafo, a theory expanded upon by Adrian Bott. Gardner was a nudist, taking up the hobby on doctor's instructions after getting a bad cold. Those who knew him within the modern witchcraft movement recalled how he was a firm believer in the therapeutic benefits of sunbathing.] He also had several tattoos on his body, depicting magical symbols such as a snake, dragon, anchor and dagger. is later life he wore a "heavy bronze bracelet... denoting the three degrees... of witchcraft" as well as a "large silver ring with... signs on it, which... represented his witch-name 'Scire', in the letters of the magical Theban alphabet."
According to Bricket Wood coven member Fred Lamond, Gardner also used to comb his beard into a narrow barbiche and his hair into two horn like peaks, giving him "a somewhat demonic appearance" Doreen Valiente, who had split from Gardner's Bricket Wood coven over disagreements regarding his handling of publicity and his control over the group, recounted many years after his death:
With all his faults (and who among us is faultless?), Gerald was a great person, and he did great work in bringing back the Old Religion to many people. I am glad to have known him.

Bibliography

High Magic's Aid, Gardner's second novel, about witchcraft in the Middle Ages.

Books by Gardner:




1936: Keris and Other Malay Weapons
1939: A Goddess Arrives (fiction)
1949: High Magic's Aid (fiction)
1954: Witchcraft Today
1959: The Meaning of Witchcraft
The Story of the famous Witches Museum at Castletown, Isle of Man, a guidebook
Books about Gardner:
1960: Gerald Gardner: Witch by J.L. Bracelin
2000: Wiccan Roots: Gerald Gardner and the Modern Witchcraft Revival by Philip Heselton
2003: Gerald Gardner and the Cauldron of Inspiration by Philip Heselton
Works by or about Gerald Gardner in libraries (WorldCat catalog)

Helena Blavatsky

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Personal data

NAME

Blavatsky, Helena Petrovna

ALTERNATIVE NAMES

Ган, Елена Петровна; Gan, Helena Petrovna

SHORT DESCRIPTION

Russian writer

DATE OF BIRTH

August 12, 1831

PLACE OF BIRTH

Yekaterinoslav, Russian Empire

DATE OF DEATH

May 8, 1891

PLACE OF DEATH

London

Helena Blavatsky, co-founder of the Theosophical Society

Helena Petrovna Blavatsky (Russian: Елена Петровна Блаватская, Ukrainian: Олена Петрівна Блаватська), (born as Helena von Hahn (Russian: Елена Петровна Ган, Ukrainian: Олена Петрівна Ган); 12 August [O.S. 31 July] 1831, Yekaterinoslav, Yekaterinoslav, Russian Empire (today Dnipropetrovsk, Ukraine) – died 8 May, 1891, London), was a founder of Theosophy and the Theosophical Society.

Contents

1 Biography
1.1 Family
1.2 First marriage
1.3 Wandering years
1.4 Agardi Metrovitch
1.5 To New York
1.6 Foundation of Theosophical Society
1.7 To India
1.8 Final years
1.9 Controversies of authenticity, plagiarism, influence, and Aryanism
2 Works
3 Books about her

Biography

Family

Her parents were Colonel Peter von Hahn (Russian: Пётр Алексеевич Ган, 1798–1873) of the ancient von Hahn family of German nobility (German: uradel) from Basedow (Mecklenburg) and Helena Fadeyeva (Russian: Елена Андреевна Фадеева, 1814–1843), the author, under the pen-name "Zeneida R-va", of a dozen novels. Described by Belinsky as the "Russian George Sand", she died at the age of 28, when Helena was eleven. Helena's sister Vera Zhelikhovsky was a writer of occult/fantastic fiction. Helena's first cousin was Sergei Witte, who was Russian Minister, and then Prime Minister in the reign of Tsar Nicholas II. In his memoirs, Count Witte recalls his encounters with Helena.
Helena's maternal grandparents were Andrey Mikhailovich Fadeyev, Governor of Saratov, later of Tbilisi, and his wife Princess Helene Dolgoruki prominent figures of the age of Russian enlightenment. Helena grew up amid a culture rich in spirituality and traditional Russian mythologies, which introduced her to the realm of the supernatural.
Helena's great-grand nephew Boris de Zirkoff (Борис Цирков, 1902–1981) was an active member of the Theosophical Society and editor of the Blavatsky Collected Writings; her great-grand niece, also Helena (b. 1935), lives in Moscow and her resemblance to HPB is striking.

First marriage

She was married four weeks before she turned seventeen, on July 7, 1848, to the forty-year old Nikifor (also Nicephor) Vassilievich Blavatsky, vice-governor of Erivan. After three unhappy months, she stole a horse and escaped back over the mountains to her grandfather in Tiflis. Her grandfather decided that she should be shipped off immediately to her father, who was retired and living near Saint Petersburg. Although her father travelled two thousand miles to meet her at Odessa, she was not there. She had missed the steamer, and sailed away with the skipper of an English bark bound for Istanbul. According to her account, they never consummated their marriage,and she remained a virgin her entire life.

Wandering years

According to her own story as told to a later biographer, she spent the years 1848 to 1858 traveling the world, and is said to have visited Egypt, France, Canada (Quebec), England, South America, Germany, Mexico, India, Greece and especially Tibet to study for two years with the men she called Brothers. She claimed to have become Buddhist while in Sri Lanka[3] and to have been initiated in Tibet. She returned to Russia in 1858 and went first to see her sister Vera, a young widow living in Rugodevo, a village which she had inherited from her husband.

Agardi Metrovitch

About this time, she met and left with Agardi Metrovich, an Italian opera singer. While unconfirmed gossip of that time referred to a child named Yuri, whom she loved dearly, she clarified it in writing that Yuri was a child of her friends the Metroviches (C.W.I p. xlvi–ii, HPB TO APS p. 147). To balance this statement, Count Witte, her first cousin on her mother's side, stated in his memoirs (as quoted by G. Williams), that her father read aloud a letter in which Metrovich signed himself as "your affectionate grandson". This is evidence that Metrovich considered himself Helena's husband at this point. Yuri died at the age of five, and Blavatsky said that she ceased to believe in the Russian Orthodox God at this point.
Two different versions of how Agardi died are extant. In one, G. Williams states that Agardi had been taken sick with a fever and delirium in Ramleh, and that he died in bed on April 19, 1870. In the second version, while bound for Cairo on a boat, the Evmonia, in 1871, an explosion claimed Agardi's life, and Blavatsky continued on to Cairo alone.During her stay in Cairo in the early 1870s, Blavatsky established herself as a medium, and began to hold séances.
Another unfounded account is that while in Cairo she formed the Société Spirité for occult phenomena with Emma Cutting (later Emma Coulomb), which is said to have closed after dissatisfied customers complained of fraudulent activities.



Blavatsky and Henry Steel Olcott, a lawyer, agricultural expert, and journalist who covered the Spiritualist phenomenon
To New York
It was in 1873 that she emigrated to New York City. Impressing people with her professed psychic abilities, she was spurred on to continue her mediumship. Mediumship (among other psychical and spiritual sciences of the time), based upon the belief known as Spiritualism which began at Rochester, NY, was a widely popular and fast-spreading field upon which Blavatsky based her career.
Throughout her career she claimed to have demonstrated physical and mental psychic feats which included levitation, clairvoyance, out-of-body projection, telepathy, and clairaudience. Another claim of hers was materialization, that is, producing physical objects out of nothing, though in general, her interests were more in the area of 'theory' and 'laws' rather than demonstration.
In 1874 at the farm of the Eddy Brothers, Helena met Henry Steel Olcott, a lawyer, agricultural expert, and journalist who covered the Spiritualist phenomenon. Soon they were working together in the "Lamasery" (alternate spelling: "Lamastery") where her book Isis Unveiled was written.
Blavatsky married her second husband, Michael C. Betanelly on April 3, 1875 in New York City. She separated from Betanelly after a few months, and their divorce was legalized on May 25, 1878. On July 8, 1878, she became a naturalized citizen of the United States, but after leaving for India later that year she never returned to the country.
Foundation of Theosophical Society
Living in New York City, she helped found the Theosophical Society in September 1875, with Henry Steel Olcott, William Quan Judge and others.

Part of a series on
Theosophy

 
Founders of the T. S.
Helena Blavatsky · Henry Steel Olcott
William Quan Judge
Theosophists
Alfred Percy Sinnett
Abner Doubleday · Geoffrey Hodson
Archibald Keightley · C.W. Leadbeater
Annie Besant · G. R. S. Mead
Katherine Tingley · Ernest Wood
Philosophical concepts
Seven Rays
Organisations
Theosophical Society
TS Adyar · TS Pasadena
TS Point Loma-Covina · TSA Hargrove
United Lodge of Theosophists
Theosophical texts
Isis Unveiled · The Key to Theosophy
Mahatma Letters · The Secret Doctrine
The Voice of the Silence

More...
Theosophical Masters

Sanat Kumara · Maitreya
Djwal Khul · Morya
Kuthumi · Paul the Venetian
Serapis Bey · Master Hilarion
Master Jesus · Master Rakoczi
Related topics
Agni Yoga · Anthroposophy
Esotericism · Jiddu Krishnamurti

Neo-Theosophy

Liberal Catholic Church
Living Ethics · Alice A. Bailey
Ascended Master Teachings
Benjamin Creme



Blavatsky wrote that all religions were both true in their inner teachings and problematic or imperfect in their external conventional manifestations.[citation needed] Her writings connecting esoteric spiritual knowledge with new science may be considered to be the first instance of what is now called New Age thinking, "the hippy movement of the last quarter of the twentieth century".
She also lived in Philadelphia for part of 1875, where she resided at 3420 Sansom Street, now home of the White Dog Cafe.While living on Sansom Street, Madame Blavatsky became ill with an infected leg. She claimed to have undergone a "transformation" during her illness which inspired her to found the Theosophical Society. In a letter dated June 12, 1875, she described her recovery, explaining that she dismissed the doctors and surgeons who threatened amputation. She is quoted as saying "Fancy my leg going to the spirit land before me!", and had a white dog sleep across her leg by night.

To India

She had moved to India, landing at Bombay on February 16, 1879, where she first made the acquaintance of A. P. Sinnett. In his book Occult World he describes how she stayed at his home in Allahabad for six weeks that year, and again the following year.
Sometime around December 1880, while at a dinner party with a group including A. O. Hume and his wife, she is claimed to have been instrumental in causing the materialization of Mrs Hume's lost brooch.
By 1882 the Theosophical Society became an international organization, and it was at this time that she moved the headquarters to Adyar near Madras, India (now Chennai).
The society headquartered here for some time, but she later went to Germany for a while, in between she stayed at Ostend (July 15, 1886 – May 1, 1887) where she could easily meet her English friends. She wrote a big part of the Secret Doctrine in Ostend and there she claimed a revelation during an illness telling her to continue the book at any cost. Finally she went to England.
A disciple put her up in her own house in England and it was here that she lived until the end of her life.
Final years
In August, 1890 she formed the "Inner Circle" of 12 disciples: "Countess Constance Wachtmeister, Mrs Isabel Cooper-Oakley, Miss Emily Kislingbury, Miss Laura Cooper, Mrs Annie Besant, Mrs Alice Cleather, Dr Archibald Keightley, Herbert Coryn, Claude Wright, G. R. S. Mead, E. T. Sturdy, and Walter Old".
Suffering from Bright's disease and complications from influenza, Blavatsky died in her home at 19 Avenue Road, St Johns Wood, London, on May 8, 1891.Her last words in regard to her work were: "Keep the link unbroken! Do not let my last incarnation be a failure." Her body was cremated at Woking on May 11;one third of her ashes were sent to Europe, one third with William Quan Judge to the United States, and one third to India where her ashes were scattered in the Ganges River. May 8 is celebrated by Theosophists, and it is called White Lotus Day.
Following Blavatsky's death, the Theosophical Society split in two, each part claiming her as its "rightful progenitor". One branch was headed by her protégé, Annie Besant, and the other, the American Section, by her friend W. Q. Judge.
Controversies of authenticity, plagiarism, influence, and Aryanism
Well-known and controversial during her life, Blavatsky was influential on spiritualism and related subcultures: "the western esoteric tradition has no more important figure in modern times." She wrote prolifically, publishing thousands of pages, and debate continues about her claims.
Throughout much of Blavatsky's public life, her work drew harsh criticism from some of the learned authorities of her day, who accused her of being a charlatan, an impostor, and a fraud.
In The New York Times Edward Hower wrote, "Theosophical writers have defended her sources vehemently. Skeptics have painted her as a great fraud."
The authenticity and originality of her writings were questioned. Blavatsky was accused of having plagiarized a number of sources, copying the texts crudely enough to misspell the more difficult words. See: The Sources of Madame Blavatsky's Writings by William Emmette Coleman from Modern Priestess of Isis by Vsevolod Sergyeevich Solovyoff (author), Walter Leaf (translator).
In his 1885 report to the Society for Psychical Research (SPR), Richard Hodgson concluded that Blavatsky was a fraud. However, in a 1986 press release to the newspapers and leading magazines in Great Britain, Canada and the USA the same SPR retracted the Hodgson report, after a re-examination of the case by the Fortean psychic Dr. Vernon Harrison, past president of The Royal Photographic Society and formerly Research Manager to Thomas De La Rue, an expert on forgery, as follows: "Madame Blavatsky, co-founder of the Theosophical Society, was unjustly condemned, new study concludes."
Blavatsky famously favored an Aryan race and for her advocation of a superior race, based on Indian culture. Blavatsky argued that all humanity descended from seven root races, with the fifth one being the Aryan race.
Since her death, Blavatsky's work has shown its influence in the works of dictators, political leaders, new religion leaders, writers, musicians, and other public figures.
Blavatsky argued that humanity had descended from a series of "Root Races", naming the fifth root race (out of seven) the Aryan Race. She thought that the Aryans originally came from Atlantis and described the Aryan races with the following words:
"The Aryan races, for instance, now varying from dark brown, almost black, red-brown-yellow, down to the whitest creamy colour, are yet all of one and the same stock -- the Fifth Root-Race -- and spring from one single progenitor, (...) who is said to have lived over 18,000,000 years ago, and also 850,000 years ago -- at the time of the sinking of the last remnants of the great continent of Atlantis."
Blavatsky used "Root Race" as a technical term to describe human evolution over the large time periods in her cosmology. However, she also claimed that there were modern non-Aryan peoples who were inferior to Aryans. She regularly contrasts "Aryan" with "Semitic" culture, to the detriment of the latter, asserting that Semitic peoples are an offshoot of Aryans who have become "degenerate in spirituality and perfected in materiality." She also states that some peoples are "semi-animal creatures". These latter include "the Tasmanians, a portion of the Australians and a mountain tribe in China." There are also "considerable numbers of the mixed Lemuro-Atlantean peoples produced by various crossings with such semi-human stocks -- e.g., the wild men of Borneo, the Veddhas of Ceylon, classed by Prof. Flower among Aryans (!), most of the remaining Australians, Bushmen, Negritos, Andaman Islanders, etc."
Despite this, Blavatsky's admirers claim that her thinking was not connected to fascist or racialist ideas, asserting that she believed in a Universal Brotherhood of humanity and wrote that "all men have spiritually and physically the same origin" and that "mankind is essentially of one and the same essence". On the other hand, in The Secret Doctrine, Blavatsky states: "Verily mankind is 'of one blood,' but not of the same essence."
Blavatsky connects physical race with spiritual attributes constantly throughout her works:
"Esoteric history teaches that idols and their worship died out with the Fourth Race, until the survivors of the hybrid races of the latter (Chinamen, African Negroes, &c.) gradually brought the worship back. The Vedas countenance no idols; all the modern Hindu writings do".
"The intellectual difference between the Aryan and other civilized nations and such savages as the South Sea Islanders, is inexplicable on any other grounds. No amount of culture, nor generations of training amid civilization, could raise such human specimens as the Bushmen, the Veddhas of Ceylon, and some African tribes, to the same intellectual level as the Aryans, the Semites, and the Turanians so called. The 'sacred spark' is missing in them and it is they who are the only inferior races on the globe, now happily -- owing to the wise adjustment of nature which ever works in that direction -- fast dying out. Verily mankind is 'of one blood,' but not of the same essence. We are the hot-house, artificially quickened plants in nature, having in us a spark, which in them is latent".
According to Blavatsky, "the MONADS of the lowest specimens of humanity (the "narrow-brained" savage South-Sea Islander, the African, the Australian) had no Karma to work out when first born as men, as their more favoured brethren in intelligence had".
She also prophecies of the destruction of the racial "failures of nature" as the future "higher race" ascends:
"Thus will mankind, race after race, perform its appointed cycle-pilgrimage. Climates will, and have already begun, to change, each tropical year after the other dropping one sub-race, but only to beget another higher race on the ascending cycle; while a series of other less favoured groups -- the failures of nature -- will, like some individual men, vanish from the human family without even leaving a trace behind".
It is interesting to note that the second subrace of the Fifth or Aryan root race, the Arabian, is regarded by Theosophists as one of the Aryan subraces. It is believed by Theosophists that the Arabians, although asserted in traditional Theosophy to be of Aryan (i.e., Indo-European) ancestry, adopted the Semitic language of the people around them who had migrated earlier from Atlantis (the fifth or (original) Semite subrace of the Atlantean root race). Theosophists assert that the Jews originated as an offshoot of the Arabian subrace in what is now Yemen about 30,000 BC. They migrated first to Somalia and then later to Egypt where they lived until the time of Moses. Thus, according to the teachings of Theosophy, the Jews are part of the Aryan race.

Works

The books written by Madame Blavatsky included:
Blavatsky, H P (1877), Isis unveiled, J.W. Bouton, OCLC 7211493, http://isisunveiled.net 
Blavatsky, H P (1880), From the Caves and Jungles of Hindostan, Floating Press, ISBN 1775416038, http://www.virtuescience.com/caves-and-jungles.html 
Blavatskaja, Elena Petrovna (1888), The secret doctrine, Theosophical Publ. Co, OCLC 61915001, http://secretdoctrine.net 
Blavatsky, H P (1933) [1889], The voice of the silence, Theosophy Co. (India) Ltd, OCLC 220858481, http://voiceofthesilence.net 
Blavatsky, H P (1889), The key to theosophy, Theosophical Pub. Co, OCLC 612505, http://keytotheosophy.net 
Blavatsky, H P (1892), Nightmare tales, London, Theosophical publishing society, OCLC 454984121, http://www.archive.org/details/nightmaretales01blavgoog 
Blavatsky, H P; Neff, Mary Katherine (1937), Personal memoirs, London, OCLC 84938217 
Blavatsky, H P; Goodrick-Clarke, Nicholas (2004), Helena Blavatsky, Western esoteric masters series, North Atlantic Books, ISBN 9781556434570, http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/53992973 
Her many articles have been collected in the Collected Writings of H. P. Blavatsky. This series has 15 numbered volumes including the index.

Books about her

Bleiler, Everett Franklin (1948), The checklist of fantastic literature; a bibliography of fantasy, weird and science fiction books published in the English language, Chicago, Shasta Publishers, OCLC 1113926 
Caldwell, Daniel H (2000), The esoteric world of Madame Blavatsky : insights into the life of a modern sphinx, Theosophical Pub. House, ISBN 9780835607940, http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/44613194 
Cranston, S L (1994) [1993], HPB : the extraordinary life and influence of Helena Blavatsky, founder of the modern Theosophical movement, Putnam, ISBN 9780874777697, http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/28666454 
Guénon, René (2001), Theosophy : history of a pseudo-religion, Sophia Perennis, ISBN 9780900588808, http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/46364622, retrieved 2009-11-26 
Hanson, Virginia (1988), H.P. Blavatsky and The secret doctrine, A Quest book, Theosophical Pub. House, ISBN 9780835606301, http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/17477685, retrieved 2009-11-26 
Harrison, Vernon (1997), H.P. Blavatsky and the SPR : an examination of the Hodgson report of 1885, Theosophical University Press, ISBN 9781557001184, http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/36565944, retrieved 2009-11-26 
Meade, Marion (1980), Madame Blavatsky, the woman behind the myth, Putnam, ISBN 9780399123764 
Ryan, Charles J; Knoche, Grace F, H.P. Blavatsky and the theosophical movement : a brief historical sketch, Theosophical University Press, ISBN 9781557000903, http://www.theosociety.org/pasadena/hpb-tm/hpbtm-hp.htm 
Symonds, John (2006) [1959], The lady with the magic eyes : Madame Blavatsky, medium and magician, Kessinger Pub, ISBN 9781425487096, http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/122353386 
Vonnegut, Kurt (1989) (in Repr), Wampeters foma & granfalloons : (opinions), Dell fiction; Laurel edition, Dell Publ, ISBN 9780440185338, http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/256160488 

Morgan le Fay

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
For other uses, see Morgan le Fay (disambiguation).
"Morgana" and "Morgaine" redirect here. For other uses, see Morgana (disambiguation) and Morgaine (disambiguation).



Morgan le Fay, by Anthony Frederick Sandys (1829 - 1904), 1864 (Birmingham Art Gallery): a spell-brewing Morgaine distinctly of Tennyson's generationjavascript:void(0).
Morgan le Fay, alternatively known as Morgane, Morgaine, Morgana and other variants, is a powerful sorceress in the Arthurian legend. Early works featuring Morgan do not elaborate her character beyond her role as a fay or magician. She became much more prominent in the later cyclical prose works such as the Lancelot-Grail and the Post-Vulgate Cycle, in which she becomes an antagonist to King Arthur and Queen Guinevere: she is said to be the daughter of Arthur's mother, the Lady Igraine, and her first husband, Gorlois, Duke of Cornwall, so that Arthur is her half brother (by Igraine and Uther Pendragon).
The early accounts of Geoffrey of Monmouth and Gerald of Wales refer to Morgan in conjunction with the Isle of Apples (later Avalon) to which the fatally-wounded Arthur was carried. To the former she was an enchantress, one of nine sisters, while to the latter she was the ruler and patroness of an area near Glastonbury and a close blood-relation of King Arthur. In the early romances of Chrétien de Troyes, also, she figures as a healer.
Though in later stories she becomes an adversary of the Round Table when Guinevere discovers her adultery with one of her husband's knights, she eventually reconciles with her brother, and even retains her original role, serving as one of the four enchantresses who carry the king to Avalon after his final battle at Camlann. She has at least two older sisters, Elaine and Morgause, the latter of whom is the mother of Gawain and the traitor Mordred. In Sir Thomas Malory's Le Morte d'Arthur and elsewhere, she is married, unhappily, to King Urien of Gore and Ywain is her son.

Contents

1 Origins
2 Later medieval literature
3 Later interpretations
4 In folklore

Origins

As her epithet "le Fay" (from the French la fée, meaning fairy) indicates, the figure of Morgan appears to have been originally a supernatural being. While later works make her specifically human, her magical powers are retained.[1] Inspiration for her character came from earlier Welsh mythology and literature; she has often been compared with the goddess Modron, a figure derived from the continental Dea Matrona featured with some frequency in medieval Welsh literature. Modron appears in Welsh Triad 70, in which her children by Urien, Owain and Morfydd, are called the "Three Blessed Womb-Burdens of the Island of Britain," and a later folktale preserved in Peniarth MS 147 records the story behind this conception more fully.Urien is Morgan le Fay's husband in the continental romances, while Owain mab Urien is the historical figure behind their son Ywain. Additionally, Modron is called "daughter of Avallach," a Welsh ancestor deity whose name can also be interpreted as a noun meaning "a place of apples". In fact, in the story of Owain and Morvydd's conception in Peniarth 147, Modron is called the "daughter of the king of Avallach." This is similar to Avalon, the "Isle of Apples" with which Morgan le Fay has been associated since her earliest appearances. Additional speculation sometimes connects Morgan with the Irish goddess Morrígan, though there are few similarities between the two beyond the spelling of their names.
Morgan first appears by name in Geoffrey of Monmouth's Vita Merlini, written about 1150. Purportedly an account of the wizard Merlin's later adventures, it elaborates some episodes from Geoffrey's more famous earlier work, Historia Regum Britanniae. In the Historia, Geoffrey explains that after Arthur is seriously wounded at the Battle of Camlann, he is taken off to Avalon, the Isle of Apples, to be healed. In the Vita Merlini he describes this island in more detail and names "Morgen" as the chief of nine magical sisters who dwell there. Morgan retains this role as Arthur's otherworldly healer in much later literature.
Before the cyclical Old French romances, appearances of Morgan are few. Chrétien de Troyes mentions her in his first romance Erec and Enide, completed around 1170; he says one guest at the titular characters' wedding, a certain Guigomar, lord of the Isle of Avalon, is a friend of Morgan. She is later mentioned in the same poem when Arthur provides a wounded Erec with a healing balm made by his sister Morgan; this episode both affirms her early role as a healer and provides the first mention of Morgan as Arthur's sister. Chrétien again refers to Morgan as a great healer in his later romance Yvain, the Knight of the Lion, in an episode in which two ladies restore the maddened hero to his senses with a concoction provided by Morgan. However, it should be noted that while Modron is the mother of Owain in Welsh literature, and Morgan would be assigned this role in later French literature, this first continental association between Ywain and Morgan does not imply they are son and mother.

Later medieval literature

Morgan's role is greatly expanded in the 13th-century Lancelot-Grail (Vulgate Cycle) and the subsequent works inspired by it. The youngest of Gorlois and Igraine's daughters, she is sent to a convent when Uther Pendragon kills her father and marries her mother. There she begins her study of magic, but is interrupted when Uther betroths her to his ally Urien. Unhappy with her husband, she takes a string of lovers until she is caught by a young Guinevere, who expels her from court in disgust. Morgan continues her magical studies under Merlin, all the while plotting against Guinevere. In subsequent chapters she uses her skills to foil Arthur's knights, especially Lancelot, whom she alternately tries to seduce and to expose as Guinevere's adulterous lover. In the Prose Tristan, she delivers to Arthur's court a magic drinking horn from which no unfaithful lady can drink without spilling, hoping to reveal the infidelity.
Thomas Malory mostly follows the portrayal of Morgan in the Vulgate and Post-Vulgate Cycles in his book Le Morte d'Arthur, though he expands her role in some cases. Through magic and mortal means, she tries to arrange Arthur's downfall, most famously when she arranges for her lover Accolon to obtain the sword Excalibur and use it against Arthur in single combat. Failing in this, Morgan throws Excalibur's protective scabbard into a lake. The Fay turns up throughout the High and Late Middle Ages, generally in works related to the cycles of Arthur or Charlemagne. At the end of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, it is revealed that the entire supernatural episode has been instigated by Morgan as a test for Arthur and his knights, and to frighten Guinevere. Morgan's importance to this particular narrative has been disputed and called a deus ex machina [5] and simply an artistic device to further connect Gawain's episode to the Arthurian story.
In the legends of Charlemagne she is most famous for her association with Ogier the Dane, whom she takes to her mystical island palace to be her lover. In the chanson de geste of Huon de Bordeaux, Morgan is the mother of the fairy king Oberon by none other than Julius Caesar.

Later interpretations




The stereotypical image of Morgan is often that of a villainess: a seductive, megalomaniacal sorceress who wishes to overthrow Arthur. Contemporary interpretations of the Arthurian myth sometimes assign to Morgan the role of seducing Arthur and giving birth to the wicked Mordred, though traditionally Mordred's mother was Morgause, another sister. In these works Mordred is often her pawn, used to bring about the end of the Arthurian age. Starting in the later 20th century, however, some feminists adopted Morgan as a representation of female power or of a fading form of feminine spirituality supposedly practiced by the Celts or earlier peoples. These interpretations draw upon the French romances which portray Morgan as a "benevolent figure" with extraordinary healing powers. This has led to Morgan's expanded role in feminist Arthurian literature such as Marion Zimmer Bradley's The Mists of Avalon, which goes so far as to give her credit for the major events of the traditional story.

In folklore

"The Fata Morgana, As Observed In The Harbour Of Messina"
Morgan eventually became connected with the mirage known as the Fata Morgana. Wolfram von Eschenbach in his Parzival calls the famous Sicilian volcano Etna "The Mountain of Morgan the Fairy". At the same time legends claimed that sirens in the waters around Sicily lured the unwary to their deaths. Subsequently Morgan le Fay became associated not only with Etna, but also with sirens. In the medieval French Arthurian romance Floriant et Florete, she is called "mistress of the fairies of the salt sea", La mestresse [des] fées de la mer salée.
Other legends claim she created boats that fly above the sea and never approach the shore and caused golden castles to float in the air above the straits of Messina, castles that no one was ever able to reach and that were nothing more than an optical illusion - a mirage, the Fata Morgana, as she was called in Italy.

Aleister Crowley

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Aleister Crowley Personal Details

Born

12 October 1875(1875-10-12)
Royal Leamington Spa, Warwickshire, England
Died
1 December 1947 (aged 72)
Hastings, East Sussex, England

Personal data

NAME

Crowley, Aleister

ALTERNATIVE NAMES

Crowley, Edward Alexander (birth); Perdurabo (motto); Therion, Master (pen)

SHORT DESCRIPTION

poet, mountaineer, occultist

DATE OF BIRTH

12 October 1875(1875-10-12)

PLACE OF BIRTH

Clarendon Square, Leamington Spa, Warwickshire, England

DATE OF DEATH

1 December 1947

PLACE OF DEATH

Netherwood, Hastings, East Sussex, England




Aleister Crowley (pronounced /ˈkroʊli/; 12 October 1875 – 1 December 1947), born Edward Alexander Crowley, and also known as both Frater Perdurabo and The Great Beast, was an influential English occultist and ceremonial magician, responsible for founding the religion of Thelema. He was a member of the esoteric Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, as well as a co-founder of the A∴A∴ and eventually a leader of the Ordo Templi Orientis (O.T.O.). He is known today for his magical writings, especially The Book of the Law, the central sacred text of Thelema, although he also wrote on other esoteric subjects such as astrology and magick.
Crowley was also a hedonist, bisexual, recreational drug experimenter and social critic. In many of these exploits he "was in revolt against the moral and religious values of his time", espousing a form of libertarianism based upon the rule of "Do What Thou Wilt".Because of this, he gained widespread notoriety during his lifetime, and was denounced in the popular press of the day as "the wickedest man in the world."Alongside his esoteric activities, he was an avid chess player, mountaineer, poet and playwright, and it has also been alleged that he was a spy for the British government, although this remains unproven.
In 2002, a BBC poll described Crowley as being the seventy-third greatest Briton of all time, whilst he has influenced and been referenced to by numerous writers, musicians and film-makers including Alan Moore, Ozzy Osbourne, Jimmy Page, Kenneth Anger and Harry Everett Smith. He has also been cited as a key influence on many later esoteric groups and individuals, including figures like Kenneth Grant, Gerald Gardner, and to some degree Austin Osman Spare.

Contents

1 Biography
1.1 Early years, 1875-1894
1.2 University, 1895-1897
1.3 The Golden Dawn, 1898-1899
1.4 Travels around the World, 1900-1903
1.5 Aiwass and The Book of the Law, 1904-1906
1.6 The A∴A∴, 1907-1911
1.7 The Ordo Templi Orientis, 1912-1913
1.8 Theory of Crowley as a British spy
1.9 Crowley's magical life in the United States, 1914-1918
1.10 Abbey of Thelema
1.11 After the Abbey
1.12 Death
2 Beliefs and viewpoints
2.1 Thelema
2.2 Science and magick
2.3 Sex magick
3 Controversy
3.1 Spiritual and recreational use of drugs
3.2 Other drug use
3.3 Racism
3.4 Sexism
4 Writings
5 Legacy and influence
5.1 Occult
5.2 Popular culture

Biography

Early years, 1875-1894

Aleister Crowley, aged 13.
Edward Alexander Crowley was born at 30 Clarendon Square in Royal Leamington Spa, Warwickshire, England, between 11:00 p.m and midnight on 12 October 1875. His father, Edward Crowley, was trained as an engineer but, according to Aleister, never worked as one.He did, however, own shares in a lucrative family brewery business, which allowed him to retire before Aleister was born. Through his father's business he was an acquaintance of the illustrator Aubrey Beardsley. His mother, Emily Bertha Bishop, drew roots from a Devon and Somerset family.Both of his parents were Exclusive Brethren, a more conservative faction of a Christian denomination known as the Plymouth Brethren,[10] and his father used to be a travelling preacher for the sect. As such the young Crowley was himself raised to be a Plymouth Brother, and subjected to daily reading of a chapter from the Bible.
On 29 February 1880, a sister, Grace Mary Elizabeth, was born but lived only five hours. Crowley was taken to see the body and, in his own words in The Confessions of Aleister Crowley, which he wrote in the third person:
The incident made a curious impression on him. He did not see why he should be disturbed so uselessly. He couldn't do any good; the child was dead; it was none of his business. This attitude continued through his life. He has never attended any funeral but that of his father, which he did not mind doing, as he felt himself to be the real centre of interest.
On 5 March 1887, when Crowley was only eleven, his father died of tongue cancer. He would later describe this as a turning point in his life, and it is from this point that he began to describe his childhood in the first person in his later Confessions. Inheriting his father's wealth, he was subsequently sent to a private Plymouth Brethren school, but was expelled for "attempting to corrupt another boy."Following this he attended Tonbridge School and then Malvern College, both of which he despised. He became increasingly sceptical about Christianity, and went against the Christian morality of his upbringing, for instance visiting prostitutes, from one of whom he caught gonorrhea.

University, 1895-1897

In 1895 Crowley began a three year course at Trinity College, Cambridge, where he was entered for the Moral Science Tripos studying philosophy, but with approval from his personal tutor, he switched to English literature, which was not then a part of the curriculum offered. It was here that he further severed his ties with Christianity, later stating that:
The Church of England [...] had seemed a narrow tyranny, as detestable as that of the Plymouth Brethren; less logical and more hypocritical... When I discovered that chapel was compulsory I immediately struck back. The junior dean halled me for not attending chapel, which I was certainly not going to do, because it involved early rising. I excused myself on the ground that I had been brought up among the Plymouth Brethren. The dean asked me to come and see him occasionally and discuss the matter, and I had the astonishing impudence to write to him that 'The seed planted by my father, watered by my mother's tears, would prove too hardy a growth to be uprooted even by his eloquence and learning.'
It was also at university that he made the decision to change his name from Edward Alexander to Aleister. Of this, he later stated that:
For many years I had loathed being called Alick, partly because of the unpleasant sound and sight of the word, partly because it was the name by which my mother called me. Edward did not seem to suit me and the diminutives Ted or Ned were even less appropriate. Alexander was too long and Sandy suggested tow hair and freckles. I had read in some book or other that the most favourable name for becoming famous was one consisting of a dactyl followed by a spondee, as at the end of a hexameter: like Jeremy Taylor. Aleister Crowley fulfilled these conditions and Aleister is the Gaelic form of Alexander. To adopt it would satisfy my romantic ideals. The atrocious spelling A-L-E-I-S-T-E-R was suggested as the correct form by Cousin Gregor, who ought to have known better. In any case, A-L-A-I-S-D-A-I-R makes a very bad dactyl. For these reasons I saddled myself with my present nom-de-guerre—I can't say that I feel sure that I facilitated the process of becoming famous. I should doubtless have done so, whatever name I had chosen.

Aleister Crowley, whilst still a young man.

Crowley largely spent his time at university engaged in his pastimes, one of which was mountaineering; he went on holiday to the Alps to do so every year from 1894 to 1898, and various other mountaineers who knew him at this time recognised him as "a promising climber, although somewhat erratic".Another of his hobbies was writing poetry, which he had been doing since the age of ten, and in 1898 he privately published one hundred copies of one of his poems, Aceldama, but it was not a particular success.Nonetheless, that same year he published a string of other poems, the most notable of which appeared in White Stains, a piece of erotica that had to be printed abroad as a safety measure in case it caused trouble with the British authorities.Part of this work "deserves a place in any wide-ranging anthology of gay poetry."[22] A third hobby of his was chess, and he joined the university's chess club, where, he later stated, he beat the president in his first year and practised two hours a day towards becoming a champion—"My one serious worldly ambition had been to become the champion of the world at chess."He also related having beaten famous chess players Joseph Henry Blackburne and Henry Bird and was on his way to becoming a master chess player, till he visited an important 1897 tournament in Berlin where "I saw the masters — one, shabby, snuffy and blear-eyed; another, in badly fitting would-be respectable shoddy; a third, a mere parody of humanity, and so on for the rest. These were the people to whose ranks I was seeking admission. "There, but for the grace of God, goes Aleister Crowley", I exclaimed to myself with disgust, and there and then I registered a vow never to play another serious game of chess."
At university, he also maintained a vigorous sex life, which was largely conducted with prostitutes and girls he picked up at local pubs and cigar shops, but eventually he took part in same-sex activities in which he played a passive role during anal sex. In 1897, Crowley met a man named Herbert Charles Pollitt, and the two subsequently had a relationship,but broke up because Pollitt did not share Crowley's increasing interest in the esoteric. As Crowley himself stated, "I told him frankly that I had given my life to religion and that he did not fit into the scheme. I see now how imbecile I was, how hideously wrong and weak it is to reject any part of one's personality."
It was in December 1896 that he had his first significant mystical experience from which he would later claim, "this philosophy was born in me." His later biographer, Lawrence Sutin, believed that this was the result of Crowley's first homosexual experience, which brought him "an encounter with an immanent deity." Following this experience, Crowley began to read up on the subject of occultism and mysticism, and by the next year, he began reading books by alchemists and mystics, and books on magic. In October a brief illness triggered considerations of mortality and "the futility of all human endeavour," or at least the futility of the diplomatic career that Crowley had previously considered - instead he decided to devote his life to the occult. In 1897 he left Cambridge, not having taken any degree at all despite a "first class" showing in his spring 1897 exams and consistent "second class honours" results before that.

The Golden Dawn, 1898-1899

Main article: Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn
In 1898, Crowley was staying in Zermatt, Switzerland, where he met the chemist Julian L. Baker, and the two began talking on their common interest in alchemy. Upon their return to England, Baker introduced Crowley to George Cecil Jones, a member of the occult society known as the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn. Crowley was subsequently initiated into the Outer Order of the Golden Dawn on 18 November 1898 by the group's head, S. L. MacGregor Mathers.The ceremony itself took place at Mark Mason's Hall in London, where Crowley accepted his motto and magical name of Frater Perdurabo, meaning "I shall endure to the end." At around this time, he moved from the elegant accommodation at the Hotel Cecil to his own luxury flat at 67-69 Chancery Lane. There, Crowley would prepare two different rooms; one for the practice of White Magic and the other one for Black Magic. He soon invited a Golden Dawn associate, Allan Bennett, to live with him, and Bennett became his personal tutor, teaching him more about ceremonial magic and the ritual usage of drugs.However, in 1900, Bennett left for Ceylon (modern Sri Lanka) to study Buddhism, whilst in 1899 Crowley acquired Boleskine House, in Foyers on the shore of Loch Ness in Scotland. He subsequently developed a love of Scottish culture, describing himself as the "Laird of Boleskine" and took to wearing traditional highland dress, even during visits back to London.
However, a schism had developed in the Golden Dawn, with MacGregor Mathers, the organization's leader, being ousted by a group of members who were unhappy at his autocratic rule. Crowley had previously approached this group asking to be initiated into further orders of the Golden Dawn, but they had declined him. Unfazed, he went directly to MacGregor Mathers, who still held the post of chief at the time and who initiated him into the Second Order after learning of the situation. Now loyal to Mathers, Crowley (with the help of his then mistress and fellow initiate, Elaine Simpson) attempted to help crush the rebellion, and unsuccessfully attempted to seize a London temple space known as the Vault of Rosenkreutz from the rebels. Crowley had also developed more personal feuds with some of the Golden Dawn's members; he disliked the poet W.B. Yeats, who had been one of the rebels, because Yeats had not been particularly favourable towards one of his own poems, Jephthat. He also disliked Arthur Edward Waite, who would rouse the anger of his fellows at the Golden Dawn with his pedantry. Crowley voiced the view that Waite was a pretentious bore through searing critiques of Waite's writings and editorials of other authors' writings. In his periodical The Equinox, Crowley titled one diatribe, "Wisdom While You Waite", and his note on the passing of Waite bore the title, "Dead Waite".

Travels around the World, 1900-1903

The first Europeans ever to attempt to climb K2. Crowley, here bearded, is the third from the left on the upper row.
In 1900, Crowley travelled to Mexico via the United States on a whim, taking a local woman as his mistress, and with his good friend Oscar Eckenstein proceeded to climb several mountains, including Ixtaccihuatl, Popocatepetl and even Colima, the latter of which they had to abandon due to a volcanic eruption.[44] During this period Eckenstein revealed mystical leanings of his own, and told him that he needed to improve the control of his mind, and recommended the practice of raja yoga. Crowley had continued his magical experimentation on his own after leaving Mathers and the Golden Dawn, and his writings suggest that he discovered the word Abrahadabra during this time.[45] Leaving Mexico, a country that he would always remain fond of, Crowley visited San Francisco, Hawaii, Japan, Hong Kong and Ceylon, where he met up with Allan Bennett and devoted himself further to yoga, from which he claimed to have achieved the spiritual state of dhyana. It was during this visit that Bennett decided to become a Buddhist monk in the Theravada tradition, travelling to Burma, whilst Crowley went on to India, studying various Hindu practices.[46] In 1902, he was joined in India by Eckenstein and several other mountaineers named Guy Knowles, H. Pfannl, V. Wesseley, and Dr Jules Jacot-Guillarmod. Together the Eckenstein-Crowley expedition attempted to climb the mountain K2, which at that time no other Europeans had attempted. Upon the journey, Crowley was afflicted with influenza, malaria and snow blindness, whilst other expedition members were similarly stricken with illness. They finally reached a point of 20,000 feet before deciding to turn back.
Returning to Europe, he visited MacGregor Mathers in Paris, and although they had once been friends, the two soon fell out; Crowley stated that Mathers had been stealing from him whilst he had been away (he subsequently stole the items back), and as Crowley's biographer John Symonds noted, both figures now considered themselves the superior esotericist and refused to submit to the other. In 1903 Crowley wedded Rose Edith Kelly, who was the sister of Crowley's friend, the painter Gerard Kelly, in a "marriage of conveniance". However soon after their marriage, Crowley actually fell in love with her and set about to woo her. Gerard Kelly was in fact a very good friend of W. Somerset Maugham, who would later use Crowley as model for his novel The Magician, published in 1908.

Aiwass and The Book of the Law, 1904-1906

Main article: The Book of the Law
In 1904, Crowley and his new wife Rose traveled to Egypt using the pseudonym of Prince and Princess Chioa Khan, titles which Crowley claimed had been bestowed upon him by an eastern potentate.During this time, according to Crowley's own account, Rose, who was pregnant, had become somewhat delusional, regularly informing him that "they are waiting for you". It was on 18 March, after Crowley sought the aid of the Egyptian god Thoth, that she actually revealed who the "they" were - the god Horus and his alleged messenger. She then led him to a nearby museum in Cairo where she showed him a seventh century BCE mortuary stele known as the Stele of Ankh-ef-en-Khonsu (it would later come to be revered in Thelema as the "Stele of Revealing"); Crowley was astounded for the exhibit's number was 666, the number of the beast.He took this all to be a sign and on 20 March began invoking the god Horus in his room. It was after this invocation that Rose, or as he now referred to her, Ouarda the Seeress, informed him that "the Equinox of the Gods had come".This referred to a more cosmic version of the regular Golden Dawn ritual of the Equinox, when they changed their initiating officer and password. The Equinox of the Gods supposedly replaces the office's ruling deity Osiris with Horus.
"Had! The manifestation of Nuit.
The unveiling of the company of heaven.
Every man and woman is a star.
Every number is infinite; there is no difference.
Help me, o warrior lord of Thebes, in my unveiling before the Children of men!"
—The opening lines of The Book of the Law, as told to Crowley.
It was on 8 April that Crowley first heard a voice talking to him and calling itself Aiwass. The nature of Aiwass has never been fully explained. Crowley's disciple and secretary Israel Regardie believes that this voice came from Crowley's subconscious, but opinions among Thelemites differ widely. Aiwass claimed to be a messenger from the god Hoor-Paar-Kraat, meaning Horus as the child of Isis and Osiris. Crowley wrote down everything the voice told him over the course of the next three days, and subsequently titled it Liber AL vel Legis or The Book of the Law. The god's commands explained that a new Aeon for mankind had begun, and that Crowley would serve as its prophet. As a supreme moral law, it declared "do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law", and that people should learn to live in tune with their "True Will".
Returning to Scotland, in July, Rose and Aleister had a daughter, whom Crowley named Nuit Ma Ahathoor Hecate Sappho Jezebel Lilith Crowley after his favourite mythological females. Meanwhile in 1905 Crowley traveled once more to India in order to lead a mountaineering expedition up the Kangchenjunga, although they failed to reach the top, and four men were killed by an avalanche. Crowley's apparently uncaring attitudes towards the deaths and the fact that he beat one of the porters made "himself odious in the eyes of all mountaineers."[56] Following the expedition, he stayed in Nepal a while, taking a local girl as his mistress[57][dubious – discuss] before traveling to China, where he met up with Rose and his daughter.[58][dubious – discuss] Leaving them in Indo-China (modern Vietnam), he traveled to Shanghai where he met up with Elaine Simpson once again who encouraged him to follow Aiwass and The Book of the Law. Upon his return to Britain, he learned that his daughter had died in Rangoon, something that he blamed upon his wife.
The couple had another daughter, Lola Zaza, in the summer of that year, and Crowley devised a special ritual of thanksgiving for her birth.
He also performed a thanksgiving ritual before his first claimed success in what he called the "Abramelin operation", on 9 October 1906. This was his implementation of a magical work described in The Book of the Sacred Magic of Abramelin the Mage – Crowley had begun his version in China. The events of that year gave the Abramelin book a central role in Crowley's system. He described the primary goal of the "Great Work" using a term from this book which he also applied to the voice of Aiwass: "the Knowledge and Conversation of the Holy Guardian Angel". An essay in the first number of
The Equinox gives several reasons for this choice of names:
1.Because Abramelin's system is so simple and effective.
2.Because since all theories of the universe are absurd it is better to talk in the language of one which is patently absurd, so as to mortify the metaphysical man.
3.Because a child can understand it.
These rituals, combined with hashish, produced the mystic experience of Samadhi as promised by the god Horus (according to Crowley's diary) in March 1904. Meanwhile Crowley and his old mentor George Cecil Jones had discussed the formation of a new magical order that the younger man would lead. In September they began reconstructing or reforming Golden Dawn ritual. After Crowley reported Samadhi, Jones urged him to claim one of the titles Mathers had reserved for the Secret Chiefs. He refrained at this time, but did feel that he had clearly surpassed his magical father and could take his place as a mystical authority.

The A∴A∴, 1907-1911




Main article: A∴A∴
Leila Waddell (Laylah), Crowley's muse during the writing of The Book of Lies 1907 saw two important events in Crowley's life. The first was the creation of a new magical Order called A∴A∴, and the second was the composition of the Holy Books of Thelema.[64] In Paris during October 1908, he again produced Samadhi by the use of ritual and this time did so without hashish. He published an account of this success in order to show that his method worked and that one could achieve great mystical results without living as a hermit. On 30 December 1908, Aleister Crowley using the pseudonym Oliver Haddo made accusations of plagiarism against Somerset Maugham, author of the novel The Magician. Crowley's article appeared in Vanity Fair, edited then by Frank Harris who admired Crowley and who would later write the famous work My Life and Loves. Admittedly, Maugham did model the character of his magician Oliver Haddo after Crowley himself and Crowley confessed Maugham acquiesced privately on the question of plagiarism.
In 1909, Aleister and Rose divorced, largely due to her alcoholism. She was subsequently admitted to an asylum suffering from alcoholic dementia. Meanwhile, Crowley soon moved on and took a woman named Leila Waddell as his lover or "Scarlet Woman."In 1910, Crowley performed his series of dramatic rites, the Rites of Eleusis, with A∴A∴ members Leila Waddell (Laylah) and Victor Neuburg.

The Ordo Templi Orientis, 1912-1913

Main article: Ordo Templi Orientis
According to Crowley, Theodor Reuss called on him in 1912 to accuse him of publishing O.T.O. secrets, which Crowley dismissed on the grounds of having never attained the grade in which these secrets were given (IXth Degree). Reuss opened up Crowley's latest book, The Book of Lies, and showed Crowley the passage. This sparked a long conversation which led to Crowley assuming the Xth Degree of O.T.O. and becoming Grand Master of the British section of O.T.O. called Mysteria Mystica Maxima.
Crowley would eventually introduce the practice of male homosexual Sex Magick into O.T.O. as one of the highest degrees of the Order for he believed it to be the most powerful formula.Crowley placed the new degree above the Tenth Degree – not to be confused with any title in his own Order – and numbered it the Eleventh Degree.There was a protest from some members of O.T.O. in Germany and the rest of continental Europe that occasioned a persistent rift with Crowley.
In March 1913, producer Crowley introduced Leila Waddell in The Ragged Ragtime Girls follies review at the Old Tivoli in London where it enjoyed a brief run. In July 1913, the production enjoyed a six-week run in Moscow where Crowley met a young Hungarian girl named Anny Ringler. Crowley went on to practice sado-masochistic Sex Magick with Anny Ringler. According to Crowley, "... She had passed beyond the region where pleasure had meaning for her. She could only feel through pain, and my own means of making her happy was to inflict physical cruelties as she directed. The kind of relation was altogether new to me; and it was because of this, intensified as it was by the environment of the self-torturing soul of Russia, that I became inspired to create by the next six weeks." While in Moscow, Crowley would see Anny for an hour and then he would write poetry. During this summer in Moscow, Crowley would write two of his most memorable works, the Hymn to Pan and the Gnostic Mass or Ecclesiae Gnosticae Catholicae Canon Missae. The Hymn to Pan would be read at his funeral thirty four years later. Certain Thelemites regularly perform the Gnostic Mass to this day. It symbolizes the act of sex as a magical or religious ritual. Crowley would perform the literal version in privacy and there is no record that Crowley ever practiced sex magick in the presence of more than two other individuals. Upon returning to London in the autumn of 1913, Crowley published the tenth and final number of volume one of The Equinox. In December 1913 in Paris, Crowley would engage Victor B. Neuburg in The Paris Working. The first ritual took place on New Year's Eve 1914, witnessed by Walter Duranty. In a period of seven weeks, Crowley and Neuburg performed a total of twenty four rituals which they recorded in the 'holy' or partially holy book formally entitled Opus Lutetianum.Around eight months later Neuburg had a nervous breakdown. Afterward, Crowley and Neuburg would never see each other again.

Theory of Crowley as a British spy

Richard B. Spence writes in his 2008 book Secret Agent 666: Aleister Crowley, British Intelligence and the Occult that Crowley could have been a lifelong agent for British Intelligence. While this may have already been the case during his many travels to Tsarist Russia, Switzerland, Asia, Mexico and North Africa that had started in his student days, he could have been involved with this line of work during his life in America during the First World War, under a cover of being a German propaganda agent and a supporter of Irish independence. Crowley's mission might have been to gather information about the German intelligence network, the Irish independent activists and produce aberrant propaganda, aiming at compromising the German and Irish ideals. As an agent provocateur he could have played some role in provoking the sinking of the RMS Lusitania, thereby bringing the United States closer to active involvement in the war alongside the Allies. He also used German magazines The Fatherland and The International as outlets for his other writings. The question of whether Crowley was a spy has always been subject to debate, but Spence uncovered a document from the US Army's old Military Intelligence Division supporting Crowley's own claim to having been a spy:
Aleister Crowley was an employee of the British Government ... in this country on official business of which the British Consul, New York City has full cognizance.

Crowley's magical life in the United States, 1914-1918

Aleister Crowley’s rendition of the Unicursal Hexagram.
During his time in the U.S., Crowley practiced the task of a Magister Templi in the A∴A∴ as he conceived it, namely interpreting every phenomenon as a particular dealing of "God" with his soul.He began to see various women he met as officers in his ongoing initiation, associating them with priests wearing animal masks in Egyptian ritual.A meditation during his relationship with one of these woman, the poet Jeanne Robert Foster, led him to claim the title of Magus, also referring to the system of the A∴A∴.
In June 1915, Crowley met Jeanne Robert Foster in the company of her friend Hellen Hollis, a journalist; Crowley would have Sex Magick affairs with both women. Foster was a famous New York fashion model, journalist, editor, poet and married. Crowley's Sex Magick plan with Foster was to produce his first male offspring but in spite of a series of Magical Operations, she did not get pregnant. By the end of 1915, the affair would be over.During a trip to Vancouver in 1915, Crowley met Wilfred Smith, Frater 132 of the Vancouver Lodge of O.T.O., and in 1930 granted him permission to establish Agape Lodge in Southern California.
In early 1916, Crowley had an illicit liaison with Alice Richardson, the wife of Ananda Coomaraswamy, one the greatest art historians of the day. On the stage, Richardson was known as Ratan Devi, mezzo-soprano interpreter of East Indian music. Richardson became pregnant but on a voyage back to England, in mid-1916, she had a miscarriage. Just before his affair with Ratan Devi, Crowley was practicing Sex Magick with Gerda Maria von Kothek, a German prostitute.
Two periods of magical experimentation followed. In June 1916, he began the first of these at the New Hampshire cottage of Evangeline Adams, having ghostwritten most of her two books on astrology. His diaries at first show discontent at the gap between his view of the grade of Magus and his view of himself: "It is no good making up my mind to do anything material; for I have no means. But this would vanish if I could make up my mind." Despite his objections to sacrificing a living animal, he resolved to crucify a frog as part of a rehearsal of the life of Jesus in the Gospels (afterward declaring it his willing familiar), "with the idea ... that some supreme violation of all the laws of my being would break down my Karma or dissolve the spell that seems to bind me." Slightly more than a month later, having taken ether (ethyl oxide), he had a vision of the universe from a modern scientific cosmology that he frequently referred to in later writings.
Crowley began another period of magical work on an island in the Hudson River after buying large amounts of red paint instead of food. Having painted "Do what thou wilt" on the cliffs at both sides of the island, he received gifts from curious visitors. Here at the island he had visions of seeming past lives, though he refused to endorse any theory of what they meant beyond linking them to his unconscious. Towards the end of his stay, he had a shocking experience he linked to "the Chinese wisdom" which made even Thelema appear insignificant. Nevertheless, he continued in his work. Before leaving the country he formed a sexual and magical relationship with Leah Hirsig, whom he had met earlier, and with her help began painting canvases with more creativity and passion.

Abbey of Thelema

Main article: Abbey of Thelema
Soon after moving from West 9th St. in Greenwich Village New York City with their newborn daughter Anne Leah nicknamed Poupée (born February 1920 and died in a hospital in Palermo 14 October 1920), Crowley, along with Leah Hirsig, founded the Abbey of Thelema in Cefalù (Palermo), Sicily on 14 April 1920, the day the lease for the villa Santa Barbara was signed by Sir Alastor de Kerval (Crowley) and Contessa Lea Harcourt (Leah Hirsig). The Crowleys arrived in Cefalu on 1 April 1920.During their stay at the abbey, Ms Hirsig was known as Soror Alostrael, Crowley's Scarlet Woman, the name Crowley used for his female Sex Magick practitioners in reference to the consort of the Beast of the Apocalypse whose number is 666.The name of the abbey was borrowed from Rabelais's satire Gargantua,[88] where the "Abbey of Thélème" is described as a sort of anti-monastery where the lives of the inhabitants were "spent not in laws, statutes, or rules, but according to their own free will and pleasure."This idealistic utopia was to be the model of Crowley's commune, while also being a type of magical school, giving it the designation "Collegium ad Spiritum Sanctum," The College of the Holy Spirit. The general programme was in line with the A∴A∴ course of training, and included daily adorations to the Sun, a study of Crowley's writings, regular yogic and ritual practices (which were to be recorded), as well as general domestic labour. The object, naturally, was for students to devote themselves to the Great Work of discovering and manifesting their True Wills. Two women, Hirsig and Shumway (her magical name was Sister Cypris after Aphrodite), were both carrying Crowley's seed. Hirsig had a two-year old son named Hansi and Shumway had a three-year old boy named Howard; they were not Crowley's but he nicknamed them Dionysus and Hermes respectively. After Hirsig's Poupée died, Hirsig had a miscarriage but Shumway gave birth to a daughter, Astarte Lulu Panthea. Hirsig suspected Shumway's Black Magic foul play and what Crowley found when reading Shumway's diary (everybody had to keep one while at the abbey) appalled him. Shumway was banished from the abbey and the Beast lamented the death of his children. However, Shumway was pretty soon back in the abbey again to take care of her offspring.
Mussolini's Fascist government expelled Crowley from the country at the end of April 1923.

After the Abbey

In February 1924, Crowley visited Gurdjieff's Institute for the Harmonious Development of Man. He did not meet the founder on that occasion, but called Gurdjieff a "tip-top man" in his diary.Crowley privately criticized some of the Institute's practices and teachings, but doubted that what he heard from disciple Pindar reflected the master's true position. Some claim that on a later visit he met Gurdjieff—who firmly repudiated Crowley.[Biographer Sutin expresses skepticism,and Gurdjieff's student C.S. Nott tells a different version. Nott perceives Crowley as a black or at least ignorant magician and says his teacher "kept a sharp watch" on the visitor, but mentions no open confrontation.
On 16 August 1929, Crowley married Maria de Miramar, from Nicaragua, while in Leipzig. They separated by 1930, but they were never divorced. In July 1931, de Miramar was admitted to the Colney Hatch Mental Hospital in New Southgate where she remained until her death thirty years later.
In September 1930 Crowley visited Lisbon and with the assistance of Fernando Pessoa faked his death at the notorious rock formation, Boca do Inferno (Mouth of Hell). In fact Crowley left the country and enjoyed the newspaper reports of his death – reappearing three weeks later at an exhibition in Berlin.
In 1934, Crowley was declared bankrupt after losing a court case in which he sued the artist Nina Hamnett for calling him a black magician in her 1932 book, Laughing Torso. In addressing the jury, Mr. Justice Swift said:
I have been over forty years engaged in the administration of the law in one capacity or another. I thought that I knew of every conceivable form of wickedness. I thought that everything which was vicious and bad had been produced at one time or another before me. I have learnt in this case that we can always learn something more if we live long enough. I have never heard such dreadful, horrible, blasphemous and abominable stuff as that which has been produced by the man (Crowley) who describes himself to you as the greatest living poet.
—Mr. Justice Swift
However, Patricia "Deirdre" MacAlpine approached Crowley on the day of the verdict and offered to bear him a child, whom he named Aleister Atatürk. She sought no mystical or religious role in Crowley's life and rarely saw him after the birth, "an arrangement that suited them both."
In March 1939, Dion Fortune and Aleister Crowley met publicly for the first time. Fortune had already used Crowley as a model for the black magician Hugo Astley in her 1935 novel The Winged Bull.
During World War II, Ian Fleming and others proposed a disinformation plot in which Crowley would have helped an MI5 agent supply Nazi official Rudolf Hess with faked horoscopes. They could then pass along false information about an alleged pro-German circle in Britain. The government abandoned this plan when Hess flew to Scotland, crashing his plane on the moors near Eaglesham, and was captured. Fleming then suggested using Crowley as an interrogator to determine the influence of astrology on other Nazi leaders, but his superiors rejected this plan. At some point, Fleming also suggested that Britain could use Enochian as a code in order to plant evidence.
On 21 March 1944, Crowley undertook what he considered his crowning achievement, the publication of The Book of Thoth, limited to 200 numbered and signed copies bound in Morocco leather and printed on pre-wartime paper. Crowley sold ₤1,500 worth of the edition in less than three months.
In April 1944, Crowley moved from 93 Jermyn St. to Bell Inn at Anston Clinton, Bucks. Daphne Harris was the landlady.

Death

In January 1945, Crowley moved to Netherwood, a Hastings boarding house where in the first three months he was visited twice by Dion Fortune; she died herself of leukemia in January 1946. On 14 March 1945, in a letter Fortune wrote to Crowley, she declares: "... The acknowledgement I made in the introduction of The Mystical Qabalah of my indebtness to your work, which seemed to me to be no more than common literary honesty, has been used as a rod for my back by people who look on you as Antichrist."
Crowley died at Netherwood on 1 December 1947 at the age of 72. According to one biographer the cause of death was a respiratory infection. He had become addicted to heroin after being prescribed morphine for his asthma and bronchitis many years earlier. He and his last doctor died within 24 hours of each other; newspapers would claim, in differing accounts, that Dr. Thomson had refused to continue his opiate prescription and that Crowley had put a curse on him.
Biographer Lawrence Sutin passes on various stories about Crowley's death and last words. Frieda Harris supposedly reported him saying, "I am perplexed," though she did not see him at the very end. According to John Symonds, a Mr. Rowe witnessed Crowley's death along with a nurse, and reported his last words as "Sometimes I hate myself." Biographer Gerald Suster accepted the version of events he received from a "Mr W.H." who worked at the house, in which Crowley dies pacing in his living room.Supposedly Mr W.H. heard a crash while polishing furniture on the floor below, and entered Crowley's rooms to find him dead on the floor. Patricia "Deirdre" MacAlpine, who visited Crowley with their son and her three other children, denied all this and reports a sudden gust of wind and peal of thunder at the (otherwise quiet) moment of his death. According to MacAlpine, Crowley remained bedridden for the last few days of his life, but was in light spirits and conversational. Readings at the cremation service in nearby Brighton included one of his own works, Hymn to Pan, and newspapers referred to the service as a black mass. The Brighton council subsequently resolved to take all the necessary steps to prevent such an incident from occurring again.

Beliefs and viewpoints

Thelema
Thelema
Category:Thelema
Core topics
The Book of the Law
Aleister Crowley
True Will · 93
Magick
Mysticism
Thelemic mysticism
The Great Work
Holy Guardian Angel
The Gnostic Mass
Thelemic texts
Works of Crowley
The Holy Books
Thelemite texts
Organizations
A∴A∴ · EGC · OTO
OSOGD · TO
Deities
Nuit · Hadit · Horus
Babalon · Chaos
Baphomet · Choronzon
Ankh-f-n-khonsu
Aiwass · Ma'at
Other topics
Stele of Revealing
Abrahadabra
Unicursal Hexagram
Abramelin oil

Thoth tarot deck

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Main articles: Thelema and Thelemic mysticism
Thelema is the mystical cosmology Crowley announced in 1904 and expanded upon for the remainder of his life. The diversity of his writings illustrate his difficulty in classifying Thelema from any one vantage. It can be considered a form of magical philosophy, religious traditionalism, humanistic positivism, and/or an elitist meritocracy.
The chief precept of Thelema, derived from the works of François Rabelais, is the sovereignty of Will: "Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law." Crowley's idea of will, however, is not simply the individual's desires or wishes, but also incorporates a sense of the person's destiny or greater purpose: what he termed "True Will."
The second precept of Thelema is "Love is the law, love under will"—and Crowley's meaning of "Love" is as complex as that of "Will." It is frequently sexual: Crowley's system, like elements of the Golden Dawn before him, sees the dichotomy and tension between the male and female as fundamental to existence, and sexual "magick" and metaphor form a significant part of Thelemic ritual. However, Love is also discussed as the Union of Opposites, which Crowley thought was the key to enlightenment.

Science and magick

Crowley claimed to use a scientific method to study what people at the time called spiritual experiences, making "The Method of Science, the Aim of Religion" the catchphrase of his magazine The Equinox. By this he meant that religious experiences should not be taken at face value, but critiqued and experimented with in order to arrive at their underlying mystical or neurological meaning.
In this connection there was also the point that I was anxious to prove that spiritual progress did not depend on religious or moral codes, but was like any other science. Magick would yield its secrets to the infidel and the libertine, just as one does not have to be a churchwarden in order to discover a new kind of orchid. There are, of course, certain virtues necessary to the Magician; but they are of the same order as those which make a successful chemist.
Crowley's magical and initiatory system has amongst its innermost reaches a set of teachings on sex magick. He frequently expressed views about sex that were radical for his time, and published numerous poems and tracts combining pagan religious themes with sexual imagery both heterosexual and homosexual, as well as pederastic. One of his most notorious poetry collections, titled "White Stains" (1898), was published in Amsterdam in 1898 and dealt specifically with sexually explicit subject matter. However, most of the hundred copies printed for the initial release were later seized and destroyed by British customs.

Sex magick

Sex magick is the use of the sex act—or the energies, passions or arousal states it evokes—as a point upon which to focus the will or magical desire for effects in the non-sexual world. In the view of Allen Greenfield, Crowley was inspired by Paschal Beverly Randolph, an American Abolitionist, Spiritualist medium, and author of the mid-19th century who wrote (in Eulis!, 1874) of using the "nuptive moment" (orgasm) as the time to make a "prayer" for events to occur.
Crowley often introduced new terminology for spiritual and magickal practices and theory. In The Book of the Law and The Vision and the Voice, the Aramaic magickal formula Abracadabra was changed to Abrahadabra, which he called the new formula of the Aeon. He also famously spelled magic in the archaic manner, as magick, to differentiate "the true science of the Magi from all its counterfeits."
He urged his students to learn to control their own mental and behavioural habits, to the point of switching political views and personalities at will. For control of speech (symbolised as the unicorn) he recommended to choose a commonly used word, letter, or pronouns and adjectives of the first person (such as the word "I"), and avoid using it for a week or more. Should they say the word he instructed them to cut themselves with a blade on each occasion to serve as warning or reminder. Later the student could move on to the "Horse" of action and the "Ox" of thought. (These symbols derive from the cabala of Crowley's book 777.) In this respect Crowley has been a strong influence on post-modern Chaos Magic with the concept of the different Selves, and the idea, and practice, of Belief Shifting. Crowley has also been labeled by some anthropologists as a practitioner of neoshamanism and revivalist of shamanistic philosophies in the early 20th century.

Controversy

Author and Crowley expert Lon Milo Duquette wrote in his 1993 work The Magick of Aleister Crowley that:
"Crowley clothed many of his teachings in the thin veil of sensational titillation. By doing so he assured himself that one, his works would only be appreciated by the few individuals capable of doing so, and two, his works would continue to generate interest and be published by and for the benefit of both his admirers and his enemies long after death. He did not—I repeat not—perform or advocate human sacrifice. He was often guilty, however, of the crime of poor judgment. Like all of us, Crowley had many flaws and shortcomings. The greatest of those, in my opinion, was his inability to understand that everyone else in the world was not as educated and clever as he. It is clear, even in his earliest works, he often took fiendish delight in terrifying those who were either too lazy, too bigoted, or too slow-witted to understand him."
In this vein many of Crowley's more audacious and outright shocking writings were often thinly veiled attempts to communicate methods of sexual magick, often using words like "blood", "death" and "kill" to replace "semen", "ecstacy" and "ejaculation" in the yet puritanical sexual environment of late 19th/early 20th century England. Take for instance the highly repeated quote from his thickly veiled Book Four: "It would be unwise to condemn as irrational the practice of devouring the heart and liver of an adversary while yet warm. For the highest spiritual working one must choose that victim which contains the greatest and purest force; a male child of perfect innocence and high intelligence is the most satisfactory."Author Robert Anton Wilson, in his 1977 The Final Secret of the Illuminati (aka Cosmic Trigger Volume One), interpreted the child as a reference to genes in sperm. Crowley added in a footnote to the text on sacrifice, "the intelligence and innocence of that male child are the perfect understanding of the Magician, his one aim, without lust of result."
In the "New Comment" to The Book of the Law, "the Beast 666 adviseth that all children shall be accustomed from infancy to witness every type of sexual act, as also the process of birth, lest falsehood fog, and mystery stupefy, their minds ... Politeness has forbidden any direct reference to the subject of sex to secure no happier result than to allow Sigmund Freud and others to prove that our every thought, speech, and gesture, conscious or unconscious, is an indirect reference!"

Spiritual and recreational use of drugs

Crowley was a habitual drug user and also maintained a meticulous record of his drug-induced experiences with opium, cocaine, hashish, marijuana, alcohol, ether, mescaline, morphine, and heroin. Allan Bennett, Crowley's mentor, was said to have "instructed Crowley in the magical use of drugs."
The Cairo revelation from Aiwass/Aiwaz specifically recommended indulgence in "strange drugs". While in Paris during the 1920s, Crowley experimented with psychedelic substances, specifically Anhalonium lewinii, an obsolete scientific name for the mescaline-bearing cactus peyote and initiated the writers Katherine Mansfield and Theodore Dreiser in its use.In October 1930, Crowley dined with Aldous Huxley in Berlin, and to this day rumours persist that he introduced Huxley to peyote on that occasion.

Other drug use

Crowley developed a drug addiction after a London doctor prescribed heroin for his asthma and bronchitis.[119] His life as an addict influenced his 1922 novel, Diary of a Drug Fiend, but the fiction presented a hopeful outcome of rehabilitation and recovery by means of magical techniques and the exercise of True Will. At the time of his death he was taking heroin on his doctor's prescription.

Racism

Biographer Lawrence Sutin stated that "blatant bigotry is a persistent minor element in Crowley's writings." The book's introduction calls Crowley "a spoiled scion of a wealthy Victorian family who embodied many of the worst John Bull racial and social prejudices of his upper-class contemporaries,"Sutin also writes, "Crowley embodied the contradiction that writhed within many Western intellectuals of the time: deeply held racist viewpoints courtesy of their culture, coupled with a fascination with people of colour."
Crowley defended the use of violence against the Chinese, specifically the lower classes. He applied the term "nigger" to Italians (in Diary of a Drug Fiend Book I, Chapter 9) and Indians, and called the Indian theosophist Jiddu Krishnamurti "negroid."
Crowley, according to the biographer, Lawrence Sutin, used racial epithets to bully Victor Neuburg during a sadomasochistic magical working: "Crowley leveled numerous brutal verbal attacks on Neuburg's family and Jewish ancestry".The two became lovers by the end of that year if not before, but "[w]hether or not Crowley and Neuburg had sexual relations during this magical retirement is unclear," according to Sutin.
Crowley's published expressions of antisemitism were disturbing enough to later editors of his works that one of them, Israel Regardie, who had also been a student of Crowley, attempted to suppress them. In 777 and Other Qabalistic Writings of Aleister Crowley (Samuel Weiser, 1975), Regardie, who was Jewish, explained his complete excision of Crowley's antisemitic commentary on the Kabbalah in the sixth unnumbered page of his editorial introduction: "I am ... omitting Crowley's Preface to the book. It is a nasty, malicious piece of writing, and does not do justice to the system with which he is dealing."
What Regardie had removed was Crowley's "Preface to Sepher Sephiroth", originally published in Equinox 1:8. Written in 1911, which contained a statement of Crowley's belief in the blood libel against the Jews:
Human sacrifices are today still practised by the Jews of Eastern Europe, as is set forth at length by Sir Richard Burton in the MS. which the wealthy Jews of England have compassed heaven and earth to suppress,[130] and evidenced by the ever-recurring Pogroms against which so senseless an outcry is made by those who live among those degenerate Jews who are at least not cannibals.
Crowley rhetorically asked how a system of value such as Qabala could come from what "the general position of the ethnologist" called "an entirely barbarous race, devoid of any spiritual pursuit," and "polytheists" to boot. rowley himself practiced polytheism, some read these remarks as deliberate irony.
Crowley repeated his claim that Jews in Eastern Europe practice ritual child-murder in at least one later work as well, namely the section on mysticism in Book Four or Magick. Here he uses quotation marks for "ritual murder" and for "Christian" children
An article at The Cauldron: A Pagan Forum makes the following claim while speaking of the previously mentioned remark elsewhere in Magick:
At first glance Crowley seems to be advocating an atrocity, the sacrifice of a child, the bugaboo of witchhunters and anti-Semites everywhere. But in fact he is claiming that the historical legend of child sacrifice, used to persecute so many "witches" and Jews, veils a sexual formula of self-sacrifice. In a secret document of the IX*, the "blood libel" against the Jews – the story that they celebrate covert rituals employing the blood of sacrificed children – is taken as a statement that certain sects of the Hassidim possess this secret. The early Christians were accused of such practices by the Roman establishment, and the Gnostic Catholic Church considers this to be evidence of a continuity of the sexual secret from the Gnostics.[133]
Crowley studied and promoted the mystical and magical teachings of some of the same ethnic groups he attacked, in particular Indian yoga, Jewish Kabbalah and goetia, and the Chinese I Ching. Also, in Confessions Chapter 86, as well as a private diary which Lawrence Sutin quotes in Do What Thou Wilt chapter 7, Crowley recorded a memory of a "past life" as the Chinese Taoist writer Ko Hsuan. In another remembered life, Crowley said, he took part in a "Council of Masters" that included many from Asia. He has this to say about the virtues of "Eurasians" and then Jews:
I do not believe that their universally admitted baseness is due to a mixture of blood or the presumable peculiarity of their parents; but that they are forced into vileness by the attitude of both their white and coloured neighbours. A similar case is presented by the Jew, who really does only too often possess the bad qualities for which he is disliked; but they are not proper to his race. No people can show finer specimens of humanity. The Hebrew poets and prophets are sublime. The Jewish soldier is courageous, the Jewish rich man generous. The race possesses imagination, romance, loyalty, probity and humanity in an exceptional degree.
But the Jew has been persecuted so relentlessly that his survival has depended on the development of his worst qualities; avarice, servility, falseness, cunning and the rest. Even the highest-class Eurasians such as Ananda Koomaraswamy suffer acutely from the shame of being considered outcast. The irrationality and injustice of their neighbours heightens the feeling and it breeds the very abominations which the snobbish inhumanity of their fellow-men expects of them.
All these remarks must necessarily be contrasted with Crowley's explicit philosophical instructions in his last book Magick Without Tears. Chapter 73, which is titled "'Monsters', Niggers, Jews, etc," states his essentially individualistic and anti-racialist views:
... you say, "Every man and every woman is a star." does need some attention to the definition of "man" and "woman." What is the position, you say, of "monsters"? And men of "inferior" races, like the Veddah, Hottentot and the Australian Blackfellow? There must be a line somewhere, and will I please draw it? ... Not only does it seem to me the only conceivable way of reconciling this and similar passages with "Every man and every woman is a star." to assert the sovereignty of the individual, and to deny the right-to-exist to "class-consciousness," "crowd-psychology," and so to mob-rule and Lynch-Law, but also the only practicable plan whereby we may each one of us settle down peaceably to mind his own business, to pursue his True Will, and to accomplish the Great Work.
The "Thelemic" philosophical position which he taught in this volume (which is a series of letters of direct personal instruction to a student of Magick) is clearly an anti-racist one. Even in private comments on Mein Kampf, Crowley said that his own preferred "master class" was above all distinctions of race.

Sexism

Biographer Lawrence Sutin stated that Crowley "largely accepted the notion, implicitly embodied in Victorian sexology, of women as secondary social beings in terms of intellect and sensibility." Occult scholar Tim Maroney compares him to other figures and movements of the time and suggests that some others might have shown more respect for women.[138] Another biographer, Martin Booth, while describing Crowley's misogyny, asserts that in other ways he was pro-feminist who thought women were badly served by the law. He considered abortion to be tantamount to murder and thought little of a society that condoned it, believing that women, when left to choose outside of prevailing social influences, would never want to end a pregnancy.
Crowley stated that women, except "a few rare individuals," care most about having children and will conspire against their husbands if they lack children to whom to devote themselves. In Confessions, Crowley says he learned this from his first marriage. He claimed that their intentions were to force a man to abandon his life's work for their interests. He found women "tolerable", he wrote, only when they served the sole role of helping a man in his life's work. However, he said that they were incapable of actually understanding the nature of this work itself. He also claimed that women did not have individuality and were solely guided by their habits or impulses In this respect Crowley displayed the attitude to women conventional for a male of his time.
Nevertheless, when he sought what he called the supreme magical-mystical attainment, Crowley asked Leah Hirsig to direct his ordeals, marking the first time since the schism in the Golden Dawn that another person verifiably took charge of his initiation.In the Hierophant section of The Book of Thoth, Crowley interprets a verse from The Book of the Law that speaks of "the woman girt with a sword; she represents the Scarlet Woman in the hierarchy of the new Aeon.(...)This woman represents Venus as she now is in this new aeon; no longer the mere vehicle of her male counterpart, but armed and militant."
In his Commentaries on The Book of the Law Crowley stated what he considered to be the correct Thelemic position towards women:
We of Thelema say that "Every man and every woman is a star." We do not fool and flatter women; we do not despise and abuse them. To us, a woman is herself, absolute, original, independent, free, self-justified, exactly as a man is.

Writings

Crowley's 1917 novel, Moonchild.
Main article: Works of Aleister Crowley
Crowley was a highly prolific writer, not only on the topic of Thelema and magick, but on philosophy, politics, and culture, as well as producing much poetry and fiction. Widely seen as his most important work was The Book of the Law (1904), the central text of the Thelemic religion, although he claimed that he himself was not its writer, but merely its scribe for the angelic being Aiwass. He also wrote books on ceremonial magick, namely Magick (Book 4), The Vision and the Voice and 777 and other Qabalistic writings, and edited a copy of the grimoire known as The Goetia: The Lesser Key of Solomon the King. Another of his important works was a book on mysticism, The Book of Lies (1912), whilst another was a collection of different essays entitled Little Essays Toward Truth (1938). He also penned an autobiography, entitled The Confessions of Aleister Crowley (1929). Throughout his lifetime he wrote many letters and meticulously kept diaries, some of which were posthumously published as Magick Without Tears. During his lifetime he also edited and produced a series of publications in book form called The Equinox (subtitled "The Review of Scientific Illuminism"), which served as the voice of his magical order, the A∴A∴. Although the entire set is influential and remains one of the definitive works on occultism, some of the more notable issues are "The Blue Equinox", "The Equinox of the Gods", "Eight Lectures on Yoga", "The Book of Thoth" and "Liber Aleph".
Crowley also wrote fiction, including plays and later novels, most of which have not received significant notice outside of occult circles. His most notable fictional works include Moonchild (1917), Diary of a Drug Fiend (1922) and The Stratagem and other Stories (1929). He also self-published much of his poetry, including the erotic White Stains (1898) and Clouds without Water (1909), although perhaps his best known poem was his ode to the ancient god Pan, Hymn to Pan (1929). The influence of Crowley's poetry can be seen through the fact that three of his compositions, "The Quest", "The Neophyte", and "The Rose and the Cross",were included in the 1917 collection The Oxford Book of English Mystical Verse.
Legacy and influence
Crowley has remained an influential figure, both amongst occultists and in popular culture, particularly that of Britain, but also of other parts of the world.

Occult

After Crowley's death, various of his colleagues and fellow Thelemites continued with his work. One of his British disciples, Kenneth Grant, subsequently founded the Typhonian O.T.O. in the 1950s. In America, his followers also continued, one of the most prominent of whom was Jack Parsons, the influential rocket scientist. Parsons performed what he described as the Babalon Working in 1946, and subsequently claimed to have been taught the fourth part of the Book of the Law. Parsons would also later work with and influence L. Ron Hubbard, the later founder of Scientology.
One of Crowley's acquaintances in the last month of his life was Gerald Gardner, who told him about his own personal initiation into the New Forest coven of Witches in 1939. Gardner, who was initiated into the O.T.O. by Crowley, subsequently went on to found Gardnerian Wicca, an early form of the Neopagan religion of Wicca, and various scholars on early Wiccan history, such as Ronald Hutton, Philip Heselton and Leo Ruickbie concurred that Gardnerianism's early rituals, as devised by Gardner, contained much from Crowley's writings such as the Gnostic Mass. Indeed, Gardner liked Crowley's writings because he believed that they "breathed the very spirit of paganism." In the 1950s, Gardner's High Priestess Doreen Valiente went through many of the early Wiccan scriptures in the Book of Shadows and removed what she saw as "Crowleyanity", believing it to have a damaging effect on the new tradition, and describing Crowley himself as a "brilliant writer and a splendid poet but as a person he was simply a nasty piece of work"
In Britain during the 1970s, an occultist calling himself Amado Crowley who claimed to be Aleister's illegitimate son emerged on the esoteric scene. He made the claim that the Book of the Law had in fact been a hoax and that he himself knew the true understanding to Crowley's teachings, which he subsequently published through several books.

Popular culture

Fictionalised accounts of Crowley or characters based upon him have been included in a number of literary works, published both during his life and after. The writer W. Somerset Maugham used him as the model for the character in his novel The Magician, published in 1908.[151] Whilst recognising this plagiarism, Crowley was flattered by Maugham's fictionalised depiction of himself, stating that "he had done more than justice to the qualities of which I was proud... The Magician was, in fact, an appreciation of my genius such as I had never dreamed of inspiring."Similarly, in Dennis Wheatley's popular thriller The Devil Rides Out, the Satanic cult leader Mocata is inspired by Crowley, and in turn the deceased Satanist Adrian Marcato referred to in Ira Levin's Rosemary's Baby is likewise a Crowley-like figure. Long after his death Crowley was still being used for similar purposes, appearing as a main character in Robert Anton Wilson's 1981 novel Masks of the Illuminati. Meanwhile, the acclaimed comic book author Alan Moore, himself a practitioner of ceremonial magic, has also included Crowley in several of his works. In Moore's From Hell, he appears in a cameo as a young boy declaring that magic is real, whilst in the series Promethea he appears several times existing in a realm of the imagination called the Immateria. Moore has also discussed Crowley's associations with the Highbury area of London in his recorded magical working, The Highbury Working.[153] Other comic book writers have also made use of him, with Pat Mills and Olivier Ledroit portraying him as a reincarnated vampire in their series Requiem Chevalier Vampire. He has also appeared in Japanese manga, such as D.Gray-Man, as well as the hentai series Bible Black, where he has a fictional daughter named Jody Crowley who continues her father's search for the Scarlet Woman.
Crowley has been an influence for a string of popular musicians throughout the 20th century. The hugely popular band The Beatles included him as one of the many figures on the cover sleeve of their 1967 album Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, where he is situated between Sri Yukteswar Giri and Mae West. A more intent interest in Crowley was held by Jimmy Page, the guitarist and co-founder of 1970s rock band Led Zeppelin. Despite not describing himself as a Thelemite or being a member of the Ordo Templi Orientis, Page was still fascinated by Crowley, and owned some of his clothing, manuscripts and ritual objects, and during the 1970s bought Boleskine House, which also appears in the band's movie The Song Remains the Same. The later rock musician Ozzy Osbourne released a song titled "Mr. Crowley" on his solo album Blizzard of Ozz, whilst a comparison of Crowley and Osbourne in the context of their media portrayals can be found in the Journal of Religion and Popular Culture.
Crowley has also had an influence in cinema; in particular, he was a major influence and inspiration to the work on the radical avant garde underground film-maker Kenneth Anger, especially his Magick Lantern Cycle series of works. One of Anger's works is a film of Crowley's paintings, and in 2009 he gave a lecture on the subject of Crowley. Bruce Dickinson, singer with Iron Maiden, wrote the screenplay of Chemical Wedding (released in America on DVD as Crowley), which features Simon Callow as Oliver Haddo, the name taken from the Magician-villain character in the Somerset Maugham book "The Magician", who was in turn inspired by Maugham's meeting with Crowley
The Italian historian of esotericism Giordano Berti, in his book Tarocchi Aleister Crowley (1998) quotes a number of literary works and films inspired by Crowley's life and legends. Some of the films are The Magician (1926) by Rex Ingram, based upon the eponymous book written by William Somerset Maugham (1908); Night of the Demon (1957) by Jacques Tourneur, based on the story "Casting the Runes" by M. R. James; and The Devils Rides Out (1968) by Terence Fisher, from the eponymous thriller by Dennis Wheatley. Also: "Dance To The Music of Time" by Anthony Powell, "Black Easter" by James Blish, and "The Winged Bull" by Dion Fortune.