Do What Thou Wilt

by Lawrence Sutin

  Let me explain in a few words how it came about that I blazoned the word

  MAGICK

  upon the Banner that I have borne before me all my life.

  Before I touched my teens, I was already aware that I was The Beast whose number is 666. I did not understand in the least what that implied; it was a passionately ecstatic sense of identity.

  In my third year at Cambridge [University, 1897–98], I devoted myself consciously to the Great Work, understanding thereby the Work of becoming a Spiritual Being free from the constraints, accidents, and deceptions of material existence.

  I found myself at a loss to designate my work, just as H. P. Blavatsky [the founder, in 1875, of the Theosophical Society] some years earlier. “Theosophy”, “Spiritualism”, “Occultism”, “Mysticism”, all involved undesirable connotations.

  I chose therefore the name

  “MAGICK”

  as essentially the most sublime, and actually the most discredited, of all the available terms.

  I swore to rehabilitate

  MAGICK,

  to identify it with my own career; and to compel mankind to respect, love, and trust that which they scorned, hated and feared. I have kept my Word.

  But the time is now come for me to carry my banner into the thick of the press of human life.

  I must make

  MAGICK

  the essential factor in the life of

  ALL.

  To comprehend Crowley, one must comprehend what he meant by “Magick”—the “discredited” tradition he swore to “rehabilitate.”

  Magick, for Crowley, is a way of life that takes in every facet of life. The keys to attainment within the magical tradition lie in the proper training of the human psyche itself—more specifically, in the development of the powers of will and imagination. The training of the will—which Crowley so stressed, thus placing himself squarely within that tradition—is the focusing of one’s energy, one’s essential being. The imagination provides, as it were, the target for this focus, by its capacity to ardently envision—and hence bring into magical being—possibilities and states beyond those of consensual reality. The will and the imagination must work synergistically. For the will, unilluminated by imagination, becomes a barren tool of earthly pursuits. And the imagination, ungoverned by a striving will, lapses into idle dreams and stupor.

  If one considers will and imagination alone, the precepts of magic and of everyday common sense seem in accord. The gulf arises with the question of how magic impacts upon the universe beyond the psyche of the adept. Magic claims that such impact is accomplished through dimensions variously termed as “etheric” or “astral” realms or the “divine light.” The unifying idea behind these terms is that these are media through which the magus may project his willed imagination. Such a view, anathema to common sense, is corroborated by the most revered mystics of every creed. The difference between magic and more ascetic lines of mysticism is that the mystic does not tarry in these realms, which are deemed dangerous as they distract from the ultimate goal of merging with the One. The magus, by contrast, explores each such realm and attains to a knowledge that shows the multifarious Self to be none other than the One. In this way, the mystic and the magus come at last (if they are worthy) to the same end.

  Magical practice is guided by a conviction as to the fundamental unity of macrocosm and microcosm. The famous injunction of the Hermetic Emerald Tablet—ascribed to Hermes Trismegistus, and dating from roughly the first century C.E.—proclaims: “In truth certainly and without doubt, whatever is below is like that which is above, and whatever is above is like that which is below, to accomplish the miracles of one thing.” From this insight derives the metaphor of the “magical mirror” favored by Crowley—the universe reflects the self and the self the universe, an infinite chain of myriad changes that the magus alone can encompass. As Crowley put it, with respect to the task of the human magus: “The Microcosm is an exact image of the Macrocosm; the Great Work is the raising of the whole man in perfect balance to the power of Infinity.” Such an aim can seem decidedly hubristic, and Crowley was vain enough, often enough, in its pursuit. But Crowley did also recognize the hubris of the swollen self, and his genuine revulsion against it spurred him to singular efforts at escaping its domain.

  There is a strict distinction between low (or “black”) and high (or “white”) magical aspirations—a distinction which Crowley regarded as of utmost importance. The difficulty of drawing a manageable line is explained by occult historian Richard Cavendish: “High magic is an attempt to gain so consummate an understanding and mastery of oneself and the environment as to transcend all human limitations and become superhuman or divine.[ … ] Low magic is comparatively minor and mechanical, undertaken for immediate worldly advantage, to make money or take revenge on an enemy or make a conquest in love. It tails off into the peddling of spells and lucky charms. The distinction between the two types is blurred in practice and many magicians have engaged in both.”

  Among these latter was Crowley. For one who devotes his life to magic, it becomes all but inevitable to blur the distinction between “high” and “low,” for one is readily seduced into seeing the distinction as meaningless. As above, so below. Who but the magus, who has experienced “above” and “below”—and not merely read of them—may judge what actions bring about their true harmony? Why heed the criticisms of the visionless ones, bound by a morality that merely serves their own base, practical ends?

  As Emile Durkheim noted, “Magic takes a sort of professional pleasure in profaning holy things.” If so, then Crowley was a consummate magical professional. But there have been professionals on the religious side as well—persons who were adept at linking all magical practice with nefarious powers. These accusers play a role in what scholar Elaine Pagels has termed “the social history of Satan”—“because Christians as they read the gospels have characteristically identified themselves with the disciples for some two thousand years they have also identified their opponents, whether Jews, pagans, or heretics, with forces of evil, and so with Satan.” In the course of human history, the dividing line between “respectable” religion and “disrespectable” magic has depended less upon careful analysis than upon the fiat of the governing belief system of society.

  Make no mistake. Magic is, at its highest levels of theory and practice, a most articulate challenge to the ways of the dominant religions. And why not? Its lineages are as rich and varied as theirs.

  The magus is the figure who stands before the gates of religion and issues the most powerful challenge of all—equality of knowledge of, and access to, the divine realm. The magus dares to reach out toward the gods by way of theurgy—high magic capable of influencing, and even merging with, Godhead itself. Such a challenge cannot be ignored by those who preach in the name of any one true faith.

  * * *

  No civilization lacks its efflorescence of magical beliefs. The Babylonians, Egyptians, and Hebrews all fertilized the growth of a body of magical lore that spawned myriad fulsome visions of the universe—each with its teachings and legends. Hermes Trismegistus, Zoroaster, King Solomon, Apollonius of Tyre, Pythagoras—these were the names of magi to which legends attached most vividly.

  With these visions, with these claims to power, the newly founded Christian religion waged combat. Nowhere is the battle more clearly described than in the accounts—in the Book of Acts, and in various apocryphal works and patristic writings—of the downfall of the Gnostic leader Simon, dubbed Simon Magus. Simon was born in Samaria and was said to have early on learned the arts of magic by traveling to Egypt. During the early Apostolic era, Simon gained control of a Gnostic group after besting its former leader, one Dositheus, in a magical contest. The sole female member of the group, Helen (alleged by Christians to have been a prostitute), became the consort of Simon and the embodiment of Ennoia, the First Thought of the Father and the Mother of All. As Mircea Eliade has noted, “The union of the ‘magician’ and
the prostitute insured universal salvation because their union is, in reality, the reunion of God and divine Wisdom.”

  Simon and Helen were worshipped as gods in Samaria and even in Rome; statues of Zeus and Athena were at times adapted to the worship of the new Gnostic couple. Christian opponents of Simon alleged that he and his followers practiced magic and free love—a coupling of vices which would recur in attacks against magi (such as Aleister Crowley, who, as the Great Beast, coupled with a series of Scarlet Women) down through the centuries.

  The inevitable magical contest for supremacy—one which parallels that of Moses and the Egyptian priests before Pharaoh—took place in Rome. Peter accuses Simon before Emperor Nero. The irony of the mad Nero acting as judge between two such adversaries emphasizes that the stakes here had to do with practical concerns of political prestige. Peter allows that Simon is a powerful magus; but he insists that Simon’s power is as nought before his own. The reply of Simon, according to one account (that of a Christian apologist of roughly the third century A.D.), set the prevailing tone for the battle between Church and magus for centuries to come:

  But you [Peter] will, as it were bewildered with astonishment, constantly stop your ears that they should not be defiled by blasphemies, and you will turn to flight, for you will find nothing to reply; but the foolish people will agree with you, indeed will come to love you, for you teach what is customary with them, but they will curse me, for I proclaim something new and unheard of …

  Just such a gauntlet, in just such a tone—earnest in its fervor, enticing in its promise of “new and unheard of” wisdom, hubristic in its scorn for the beliefs and loves of the “foolish people”—was thrown by Crowley to the preachers of Christendom.

  * * *

  Sexuality, in both its active and its chaste forms, has played a pervasive role in the Western magical tradition. There have undoubtedly been numerous sexual abuses committed by occult pretenders and rapacious Satanists. Nonetheless, the consistent approach of the Church and of Christian writers has been to link all magic with moral licentiousness—a licentiousness which, in the case of genuine adepts, disappears when the difference in spiritual frameworks is recognized.

  The practice of sexual magic—which forms one of the primary bases for Crowley’s notoriety—will be examined in greater detail as the events of his life unfold. For now, be it noted that sexuality played a persistent role in magico-mystical practices of the West in the centuries prior to Christ—and has continued to do so, albeit in a surreptitious manner, in the centuries since. Eliade compared Indian Tantric and Shivaite sexual practices with those of certain Gnostic sects. For the reader who experiences visceral disgust at the thought of sexual emissions as sacred components of worship, Eliade’s scholarly conclusion may serve as a palliative: “All of these systems seem to have in common the hope that the primordial spiritual unity can be reconstituted through erotic bliss and the consumption of semen and the menses. In all three systems the genital secretions represent the two divine modes of being, the god and the goddess; consequently, their ritual consumption augments and accelerates the sanctification of the celebrants.”

  What is described here is sexuality as sacramental ritual, with semen and menses serving the same efficacious role—for those who believe—as the wine and wafer. If the reader can give no credence to sexuality in this sense, a goodly portion of the life and writings of Aleister Crowley is instantaneously transformed into the worst sort of libertine shamming.

  Whatever one thinks of Crowley’s sexual morés—and Crowley could be lustful and crude and, at times, even vicious toward his partners—sexuality as a means to gnosis became, from the middle decades of his life, a guiding reality for him. As such, purely personal attachments could seem as nothing to him: a personal love between sexual partners is unnecessary for the religious sexual practices cited by Eliade. Indeed, the cruelty that shows itself in too many of Crowley’s relationships was clearly fostered by the impersonality that sex took on for him. But Crowley was no hypocrite and his magick was no mere ruse for obtaining sex; when sex was all Crowley wanted, he was hardly ashamed to say so.

  * * *

  The once proud standing of the magus was utterly shattered for those who accepted the Christian teaching that all magical powers and supplications (aside from those practiced by the Church) stemmed from the demonic realm. The Inquisition, formally established in 1233, had as its task to root out the heresies, including magic, that beset the Church despite the best efforts of its scholastic Doctors to establish doctrinal unity. Recall that “heretic” derives from the Greek hairetikos, meaning “able to choose.”

  The heretical choice was viewed unequivocally as wrong. Raymond Lull, Paracelsus, and Cornelius Agrippa—three of the foremost magi of the late Medieval and Renaissance eras—were among the large number of authors whose works were banned under the Index Librorum Prohibitorum (Index of Forbidden Books) established by the Church; this Index was not discontinued until 1966, nineteen years after Crowley’s death. The burning at the stake in 1600 of Giordano Bruno, the most gifted of Renaissance magi, was a stern reminder of the consequences of heresy. Crowley, some three centuries later, paid a price—ostracism—that fell short of execution, but still reflected the old warfare.

  Magic, by the time Crowley came to it, was a fragmented body of knowledge that had been periodically taken apart and assembled again by its more—and less—illuminated theorists. Perceptive critics such as Idries Shah have pointed to “deteriorated psychological procedures” that were thus incorporated into the magical literature. A sign of this deterioration, according to Shah, is excessive reliance upon induced peaks of emotion that do not complete the work of spiritual transformation:

  Magic is worked through the heightening of emotion. No magical phenomena take place in the cool emotion of the laboratory. When the emotion is heightened to a certain extent, a spark (as it were) jumps the gap, and what appears to be supernormal happenings are experienced.{…] Because certain emotions are more easily roused than others, magic tends to center around personal power, love and hatred. It is these sensations, in the undeveloped individual, which provide the easiest fuel, emotion, “electicity” for the spark to jump the gap which will leap to join a more continuous current.

  The root motives that spurred Crowley’s magical explorations were based—we have his testimony as to this, in his Confessions—upon emotional forces that had dominated him from childhood. While it would be extreme to characterize a man of Crowley’s brilliance as an “undeveloped individual,” power, love, and hatred are indeed vital fuels—and temptations—in his life.

  Crowley, a gifted dialectician, made the task of measurement as difficult as possible for his biographers. Esoteric traditions universally acknowledge that the black-and-white distinctions of ordinary consciousness may be merely shallow delusions. Crowley, secure in having transcended such delusions, insisted that any deviation from the sacred “Great Work”—the forging of a link between the human soul and the divine presence, or, as Crowley often phrased it, the “Knowledge and Conversation of the Holy Guardian Angel”—is “black magic.” In Magick in Theory and Practice, he reminded readers of their lack of competence to judge a Master of the Temple—that is, an adept such as Crowley believed himself to have become. The boldfacing is Crowley’s own:

  There are, however, many shades of grey. It is not every magician who is well armed with theory.[ … ] Until the Great Work has been performed, it is presumptuous for the magician to pretend to understand the universe, and dictate its policy. Only a Master of the Temple can say whether any given act is a crime. “Slay that innocent child?” (I hear the ignorant say) “What a horror!” “Ah!” replies the Knower, with foresight of history, “but that child will become Nero. Hasten to strangle him!”

  There is a third, above these, who understands that Nero was as necessary as Julius Caesar.

  And there may be a fourth who recognizes the limitations of the “foreknowledge” of even the
wisest Knowers, as well as the absence of proof that any murder or other act of cruelty is so “necessary” as to justify suffering.

  Magic, it may be, lends itself all too readily to base temptations. Crowley was sorely tempted, and too often the temptations prevailed. Surely it is not too much to say on his behalf that there were times, as well, where he prevailed and cast useful light. If a general rule for assessment of Crowley’s work may be offered: He was at his best when pointing the way to diligent individual effort, and at his worst when purporting to govern his fellows and to forecast the course of history. Alike at his best and at his worst, he may be seen as instructive.

  We now conclude what is, of necessity, a mere sketch of the Western magical tradition. But without such a sketch, the life of Crowley might seem as no more—to a reader accustomed to standard categories of cultural attainment—than a series of puzzling delusions and barbarities.

  But always, underlying the whole of that life, there is the promise of spiritual transformation—of Crowley himself, and of the world in which he lived—through magic. That promise has retained its allure through the ages, not least in our “modern” era.

  Indeed, as Crowley argued in “modern” terms, magical phenomena are as real—or questionable—as any other phenomena. That is, their “reality” depends on sense perceptions acting upon our brain; these sense perceptions cannot be equated with noumenal or ultimate reality. But they are all we have, whether we speak of the existence of a chair or of an angelic or demonic spirit. Their creative employment in magical ritual—by means of sight and touch (the special setting, wardrobe, and implements), sound (invocations), smell (incense and perfume), taste (sacramental wine and bread), and mind (the experience itself, and reflection thereon)—cannot be dismissed as unreal. For the human brain responds to magical ritual as it does to a stirring sunset or a beautiful painting.