The Revival of Magick - Aleister Crowley
The Revival of Magick - Aleister Crowley
The Revival of Magick - Aleister Crowley
OF MAGICK
ALEISTER CROWLEY
Celephaïs Press
Ulthar - Sarkomand - Inquanok - Leeds
2019
[This essay was first published in The International (New York) in
four parts from August through to November 1917, under the
byline ‚The Master Therion‛ and reprinted in The Revival of Magic
and other essays (O.T.O. / New Falcon, 1998). Footnotes in square
brackets are by the present editor. — T.S.]
1
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the fact is disputed by none, that the Sun, within the limits of
its own system, is, physically speaking, the source of all light,
heat, Energy in all its forms, as well as of the earth itself, Being
or Matter in all its forms as we know it.
Now if we wish to obtain heat from the Sun, we can go and
sit on Palm Beach; or we can dig up solar energy in the form of
coal—and so on; in a hundred ways we can make commun-
ication with that material source of heat. Very good; magick
pretends to be able to do the same thing with the Secret Source
of all Being and all Form, all Matter and all Motion.
It claims to be able to draw water from the Fountain of all
Things, according to its needs, by certain methods. And
though ordinary prayer is a part of Magick, this point is to be
considered, that in the purely religious theory, God may or
may not think it fit to answer prayer. This then is the great
heresy of Magick—or of religion, if you happen to be a
Magician! The Magician claims to be able to force a favourable
answer. If he tries to make the Elixir of Life, and fails, he has
simply failed. He is a bad Magician, just as a chemist is a bad
chemist who tries to make oxygen and fails. The chemist does
not excuse himself by saying that it was the Will of God that
he should not make oxygen that day!1
The explanation is simple. What the Magician calls God is
merely the divine Emanation in himself. And the reconcili-
ation with orthodox theology follows at once. The Magician is
using the formula of Hermes Trismegistus, ‚That which is
below is like that which is above, and that which is above is
like that which is below, for the performance of the miracles of
the One Substance.‛2 That is to say, in order to perform his
1 *In Wagner’s opera, based on a version of the Grail romance by Wolfram von
Eschenbach, Klingsor had been refused admittance to the Grail Knights for
failing to keep the traditional obligation of chastity, and responded by castrating
himself, whereupon he was once more told to get lost.]
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was indeed the question: what should I call it? (For I am first
of all a poet, and expert in the use of words.) I decided to call
my life-work magick. For this very reason, that it was fallen so
utterly into disuse. I cut myself deliberately off from the
modern jargon ‚theosophy,‛ ‚occultism,‛ and so on, all words
with an up-to-date connotation: I would make my own conno-
tation, and impose it on the world. The only chance of
confusion was with prestidigitation, and that not being of the
same universe of discourse, hurt no more than the homo-
nymity of ‚box,‛ ‚game‛ and a hundred other words. There
was something of boyish defiance, too, no doubt, in my choice
of the word. However, I labelled myself with it, and I used
good gum!
It has been necessary to insist that Magick is done by an
identification of the magus with the Supreme in order to show
how in practice one goes to work.
There are two branches of this one tree; we may
conveniently call them the Catholic and Protestant.
The Protestant method is that of direct prayer. As a child
asks its father for a toy, so the magician asks God to cause rain,
or whatever he may need at the moment. The prayer book is
full of such spells, even to the extreme use of ‚Oh, Lord, who
alone workest great marvels, send down upon our Bishops
and Curates the healthful spirit of Thy grace.‛ But there is no
record of any favourable answer to this particular prayer!
In the supreme prayer of Christ in Gethsemane we find the
advanced magician speaking. ‚If it be Thy will, let this cup
pass from me; nevertheless not my will, but Thine, be done.‛
This ends in ‚My will, which is Thine, be done,‛ for by-and-by
Christ tells Pilate that if He wished He could have twelve
legions of angels to defend Him. But he no longer wishes the
cup to pass from Him; His will is one with the Father’s.
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writers who were unable to resolve their plot, had a god turn up, in some
instances literally lowered onto the scene by stage machinery, to sort everything
out.]
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1 [This prayer was used in the Adeptus Minor ritual of Mathers’ R.R. et A.C.,
having been translated from one appearing in Geheime Figuren der Rosenkreuzer,
a late 18th-century German ‚Rosicrucian‛ work.+
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II
It is in this somewhat dry disquisition, bordering as it does, I
am afraid, on metaphysics, that is to be sought the reason for
the revival of magick. Unless this explanation were first given,
it might seem a mere phenomenon of folly, an hysterical
exacerbation due to over-civilization.
But assuming that irrefutable form of idealism which
contents itself with the demonstration that, knowledge being a
function of the mind, as the materialists not merely concede,
but insist, the universe as we know it is equivalent to the
contents of that mind; and assuming also that the mind
contains a power able to control thought; then there is no
absurdity in asserting that mind may be the master of matter.
And the empirical rules laid down by the magicians of old
may prove to some extent of use in practice.
Such rules are in fact the inheritance of the Magi. This is
not the place to discuss the disputed cases of the Rosicrucians,
of the Comte de St. Germain, of Cagliostro, and others whose
names will readily occur. The periods in which they lived are
obscure, and the controversies sterile. But it is at least evident
that some valid tradition lurked somewhere, for within the
memory of living men are Éliphas Lévi1 and his pupil Bulwer
an end in the Franco-Prussian war (1870-1), specifically after the battle of Sedan
(September 1st, 1870). Wörth, Gravelotte and Metz were earlier battles in this
war, which all went badly for the French.]
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friend and colleague of Crowley; later emigrated and became a Buddhist monk.]
3 [See Levi, Rituel de Haute Magie (English trans. as Ritual of Transcendental
III
Allan Bennett was born at the time of the Franco-Prussian war.
His father, an engineer, died when he was a young child, and
his mother brought him up a strict Catholic.
When he was about 8 years old he happened to hear that if
you repeated the ‚Lord’s Prayer‛ backwards, the Devil would
come. This enterprising infant at once set himself to learn it
backwards, and, when letter-perfect, went into the garden and
said it. Something—the Devil or one of his angels—did
IV
I was in my third year at Cambridge when the call came. I had
been intended for the Diplomatic Service, and had also a great
ambition to be a poet. In fact, I had written many hundred
thousand lines, all of which I diligently destroyed in one great
holocaust of paraffin and paper a matter of eight years later. It
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dinner, and before leaving the room, I noticed that the temple
door was slightly open. It was locked by a Yale key of which
there was but one, which had never left my possession. In
those days my chief alarm was that some one would get into
my magical affairs.
(Nowadays I callously let them in; if they blow their heads
off, that’s their affair, not mine!) So I sedulously slammed and
tested the door, and out we went to dinner. On the stairs was a
black cat—not a real cat, either. Back we came from a perfectly
temperate meal, found the outer door secure as we had left it,
entered, found the temple door wide open, though with no
sign of violence, and the altar overthrown, and its furniture
tossed in all directions.—And then the fun began!
Round and round the big library tramped the devils all the
evening, an endless procession; 316 of them we counted,
described, named, and put down in a book. It was the most
awesome and ghastly experience I had known. Strange how
they love to open doors! In the East of my big temple in
Scotland was a secret shrine, on to which folding doors
opened. These I would lock, padlock, seal, nail down, fasten
(in short) by every manner of means; yet, every time I left the
room, I expected to find them open. Too often to recount, I
did so. I set all kinds of traps for the spirits; it was useless. As
long as I was in the room nothing would happen; the moment
I shut the outer doors behind me, the inner ones would open
noiselessly. I ultimately had to perform a special ceremony to
get rid of the annoyance. The demons who played this game
were the 49 servitors of Beelzebub; when tamed they became
exceedingly useful.
There is a manuscript in the Arsenal Library of Paris which
has been translated and published under this title, The Book of
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the Sacred Magic of Abramelin the Mage.1 It is the best and the most
dangerous book ever written. The translator, who lived at the
other end of Paris, had to give up cycling to the library, so many
were his accidents. Even afoot, he was in constant danger of
his life. And he misused the book, fell from a very creditable
degree of attainment as a magician to be a loafer, a dipsoman-
iac, a sponger, and a blackmailer; in the end he died insane.2
The book is the address of one ‚Abraham the Jew‛ to his
second son, Lamech, bestowing this magick upon him. The
author records his research, his many travels and dis-
appointments. At last he meets with one Abramelin in Egypt,
goes with him into an oasis, and is there initiated by the
bestowal of this Sacred Magick. He returns, achieves the task,
and employs his powers to the glory of God and the benefit of
his neighbor, ‚forcing even bishops to restore stolen
property,‛ winning battles for Electors by the timely creation
of ‚artificial cavalry,‛ healing the sick wholesale, and
generally bestirring himself as a philanthropist.
The substance of the operation is as follows: Get a house in
a quiet place, have a terrace opening to the North of your
Oratory, have robes and a crown, a wand, and a few other not-
too-Persian apparatus, and then get busy. Pray more and
more every day to obtain the Knowledge and Conversation of
your Holy Guardian Angel. After two months cut out all
distractions and pray harder. After two months of that, pray
harder still.
following the world war; he was alive at the time this was written.]
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1 [The AA was established by Crowley and Jones ca. 1907 as a reformation of
the Golden Dawn system, but with a much greater emphasis on individual
practical work and—probably with the intention of avoiding the personality
conflicts which broke up the G.D.—no Temple-based group work.]
2 [Theodor Reuss (1858-1923), founded the Ordo Templi Orientis in 1906 as an
amalgamation of various fringe and ‚high grade‛ Masonic systems with the
Illuminati and Heremtic Brotherhood of Light, and the remains of Carl Kellner’s
Yoga circle. In April 1912 he chartered Crowley as head of a British section, and
shortly afterwards issued a further authorisation to A.C. to establish the Order
in other English-speaking countries.]
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contradiction in terms. But then it was never made clear how the requirement
for AA members not to know each other as such with the stated exceptions
was to be reconciled with the clause in the Task of every grade from Probationer
to Dominus Liminis (Liber 185) to everywhere openly proclaim one’s connection
with the AA etc.]
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1[This, like many of Crowley’s public statements concerning O.T.O., was a piece
of exaggerated hyperbole, or just flat-out untrue as regards the actual extent to
which the order was established at the time he was writing.]
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