Aleister Crowley as Political Theorist, Part 1by Kerry Bolton
Counter-Currents Publishing
September 2, 2010
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No, it is not Winston Churchill. It is somebody far less evil.Aleister Crowley (1875–1947), who styled himself the “Great Beast 666,” is an enduring presence both in the occult subculture and contemporary popular culture. He is hailed by some as a philosopher, magician, and prophet. He is condemned by others as a depraved egomaniac. But, for the most part, he is merely consumed for his shock value and diverting eccentricities.
Yet not much is known about Crowley as a social and political theorist who addressed the problems of industrialism, democracy, and the rise of mass man and society. Crowley’s social and political theory is grounded in a Nietzschean critique of morality and a metaphysical critique of modernity that often parallels the Traditionalism of René Guénon and Julius Evola.
The influence of Nietzsche is evident in Crowley’s aim of creating a new religion that would replace the “slave morality” inherent in the “Aeon of Osiris,” represented in the West as Christianity. A new Aeon of “force and fire,” the Aeon of Horus, “the Crowned and conquering child,” would be predicated on a new “master morality” expressed in Crowley’s new religion of “Thelema,” meaning “Will,” to be understood in Nietzschean terms as “Will to Power”: an endless upward striving to higher forms, individual and collective.
Crowley and TraditionalismIt may be surprising to group Crowley with Evola and Guénon as part of the counter-current to the leveling creeds of materialism, rationalism, and liberalism. Crowley, after all, is generally thought to have emerged from initiatic societies like Freemasonry and the Illuminati that promoted liberal humanism as a new “rationalist” religion, much as communism became a religion with its own saints, martyrs, holy wars, dogmas, rituals, and liturgies, despite its materialistic intentions.[1] Crowley, for instance, included Adam Weishaupt, founder of the Illuminati in his list of “saints” for his Thelemite Gnostic Mass.[2] The vast bulk of Crowley’s followers, moreover, are liberal humanists as well.
Guénon dubbed the attempts to promote liberalism and materialism in the guise of Tradition the “counter-tradition.”[3] In the words of the well-known 19th Century authority on occultism Eliphas Lévi,[4] a former Freemason[5] and socialist propagandist turned Catholic:
Masonry has not merely been profaned but has served as the veil and the pretext of anarchic conspiracies. . . . The anarchists have resumed the rule, square and mallet, writing upon them the words Liberty, Equality, Fraternity—liberty, that is to say, for all the lusts, Equality in degradation and Fraternity in the work of destruction. Such are the men whom the Church has condemned justly and will condemn forever.[6]
To this day, the French Revolutionary slogan “Liberty, Equality, Fraternity” is the motto of the French Grand Orient lodge of Freemasons. These anti-initiatic secret societies were engaged in an occult war, with political, social, moral, and economic manifestations.
But this is not the whole story.
Even within these Masonic and illuminist movements, genuine occultists sought a return to the mythic and the re-establishment of the nexus between the earthly and the divine.[7] Pre-eminent among them was the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn in Britain, where Crowley entered his magical apprenticeship. The Golden Dawn was closely associated with Freemasonry, but it seems likely that its leadership such as Mathers and Westcott identified with a traditionalist and un-profaned form of Masonry.[8] W. B. Yeats’ membership in the Golden Dawn also counts as evidence of a traditionalist current (even though Yeats was in bitter conflict with Crowley).
Surprisingly, Evola himself concedes that Crowley was, at least in part, a genuine initiate. Evola claims that the Golden Dawn, with which Crowley was involved, was “to some extent” a successor “to those of an initiatic character.”[9] Evola also granted that Crowley’s system of “magick” was drawn from traditional initiatic practices: “It is certain that in Crowleyism the inoculation of magico-initiatic applications is precise, and the references or orientations of ancient traditions are evident.”[10] (Given that Evola was writing of Crowley at a time when the world was in political ferment, and Evola was himself very much involved with that ferment as a critical supporter of Fascism, it is notable that even Evola did not explore the social and political implications of “Crowleyism,” especially given that Crowley’s expressed views were largely in accord with Evola’s.[11])
Crowley, therefore, despite some of his associations, should not be counted among the counter-tradition. “Liberty, Equality, Fraternity” were repugnant to him, and it was frankly absurd for him enroll Weishaupt[12] among the Telemite “saints.” Crowley’s inclusion of Weishaupt can perhaps be explained not by what he was for, but by what he was against. For Wesihaupt directed much of his conspiratorial energy against the Catholic Church, which on a very superficial level might have prompted Crowley’s admiration.
The initiatic Tradition championed by Evola and Guénon is fundamentally and frankly elitist and aristocratic. In Traditional society, “magick” was an integral part of life, a means of harmonizing human life with the cosmos. Thus there is no foundation for equality and democracy, as Lévi writes:
Affirmation rests on negation; the strong can only triumph because of weakness; the aristocracy cannot be manifested except by rising above the people. . . . The weak will ever be weak . . . the people in like manner will ever remain the people, the mass which is ruled and which is not capable of ruling. There are two classes: freemen and slaves; man is born in the bondage of his passions, but he can reach emancipation through intelligence. Between those who are free already and those who are as yet not here is no equality possible.[13]
Crowley rejected democracy for the same reasons as Lévi, Evola, and Guénon. In the Thelemic ‘bible’ The Book of the Law, Crowley writes of democracy: “Ye are against the people, o my chosen;”[14] about which Crowley commented: “The cant of democracy condemned.”[15]
Having rejected democracy and other mass movements as innately alien to the “Royal Art,” Crowley sought to develop the political and social aspects of Thelema, writing an uncharacteristically clear commentary on his ‘bible,’ The Law is for All: An Extended Commentary on the Book of the Law.
The Book of the LawAfter Crowley predictably fell out with the leadership of the Golden Dawn, he spent several years traveling. In 1904 Crowley and his wife Rose were in Egypt, where according to Crowley, an event occurred that was of “Aeonic” significance. Crowley claims to have received a scripture for the “New Aeon,” channeled from the “Gods” through a supernatural entity called Aiwas from whom Crowley claimed to have received Liber Legis via automatic writing.[16] What was written by Crowley over the course of three days became the bible of Thelema, a Greek word meaning Will, which the Liber Legis proclaims as the name of the doctrine.[17]
Liber Legis reads in parts like a mystical rendering of Nietzsche, with a strident rejection of herd doctrines including Christianity and democracy. (Crowley lists Nietzsche as a “saint” in his Gnostic Mass.[18])
Under Thelema all doctrines and systems that restrict the fulfillment of the “will” or the “True Will,” whether social, political, economic, or religious, are to be replaced by the Crowleyite religion in a new aeon, the Aeon of Horus, “The Conquering Child.”[19] “Will” is the basis of Nietzschean evolution, and it becomes clear that Crowley was attempting to establish a Western mystical system of self-overcoming along the lines of ancient yogic practices of self-overcoming to achieve higher states of Being.
“Do what thou wilt” is the foundation of Thelema.[20] It does not mean a nihilistic “do what you want,” but “do your will” that is, your “true will,” which must be discovered by rigorous processes. Crowley states that the dictum “must not be regarded as individualism run wild.”[21]
Reflecting the individual “true will,” Thelemic doctrine describes “every man and every woman [as] a star.”[22] That is, each individual is a part of the cosmos but with his or her own orbit;[23] or what one might call an individual life-course.
Liber Legis states, “the slaves shall serve.”[24] Again this is Nietzschean in the sense that many individuals, probably the vast majority, do not have the will to discover and fulfill their “true will.” While everyone is a “star,” some shine brighter than others. In The Star Sponge Vision,[25] an astral revelation, Crowley explained this inequality as reflecting the “highly organized structure of the universe” which includes stars that are of “greater magnitude and brilliance than the rest.”[26] The mass of humanity whose natures are servile and incapable of what Nietzsche called “self-overcoming”[27] will remain as they are, their true wills being to serve the followers of—again in Nietzschean terms—a “master morality,”[28] those whom Liber Legis describes as being “Kings of the Earth,” those whose starry wills are that of rulers.[29] (If some of the prose supposedly dictated to Crowley by Aiwaz sounds remarkably similar to Eliphas Lévi, it might be because Crowley claimed to be reincarnated from, among many sages from ancient to recent times, Lévi himself![30])
Such a doctrine while individualistic is not anarchistic, nihilistic, or even liberal. It is the revival of castes. More here is implied than classes, which are an economic and materialistic debasement; castes reflecting a metaphysical order where each individual fulfils his function according to his true will—or duty, dharma—as manifestation of the cosmic order. To followers of the Perennial Tradition, caste is a manifestation of the divine order and not merely a some economic division of labor for crass exploitation.[31]
Crowley (or Aiwaz) does explain the fundamental anti-democratic and anti-egalitarian doctrine of Thelema in these terms, again reminiscent of Nietzsche:
We are not for the poor and sad: the lords of the earth are our kinsfolk. Beauty and strength, leaping laughter, and delicious languor, force and fire are of us . . . we have nothing to do with the outcast and unfit. For they feel not. Compassion is the vice of kings; stamp down the wretched and the weak: this is the law of the strong; this is our law and the joy of the world.[32]
This hierarchical social order, while in accord with the perennial tradition, postulates a new aristocracy, the old having become debased and beholden to commerce. (Crowley himself was of bourgeois origins, so he ennobled himself with the title of “Sir Aleister Crowley.”[33]) Under the “Aeon of Horus”[34] the new aristocracy would consist of Nietzschean self-overcomers. Crowley specifically refers to the influence of Nietzsche in explaining the Thelemic concept: “The highest are those who have mastered and transcended accidental environment. . . . There is a good deal of the Nietzschean standpoint in this verse.”[35]
However, in contrast to Nietzsche as well as Guénon and Evola, Crowley also draws on Darwinism. After referring to the “Nietzschean standpoint” Crowley states in Darwinesque terms:
It is the evolutionary and natural view . . . Nature’s way is to weed out the weak. This is the most merciful way too. At present all the strong are being damaged, and their progress being hindered by the dead weight of the weak limbs and the missing limbs, the diseased limbs and the atrophied limbs. The Christians to the lions.[36]
Crowley saw an era of turmoil preceding the New Aeon during which the masses and the elite, or the new aristocracy, would be in conflict. Crowley wrote of this revolutionary prelude to the New Aeon: “And when the trouble begins, we aristocrats of freedom, from the castle to the cottage, the tower or the tenement, shall have the slave mob against us.”[37]
Crowley describes “the people” as “that canting, whining, servile breed of whipped dogs which refuses to admit its deity . . . ”[38] The undisciplined mob at the whim of its emotions, devoid of Will, is described as “the natural enemy of good government.” The new aristocracy of governing elite will be those who have discovered and pursued their “true will,” who have mastered themselves through self-overcoming, to use Nietzsche’s term. This governing caste would pursue a “consistent policy” without being subjected to the democratic whims of the masses.[39]
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Notes[1] Note for example the embalming of Lenin and his entombment at an edifice reminiscent of the stepped pyramids of ancient priest-kings.
[2] Aleister Crowley, Magick (Maine: Samuel Weiser, 1984), p. 430.
[3] Guénon, René, The Reign of Quantity & the Signs of the Times (New York: Sophia Perennis, 2002).
[4] Pen name for Alphonse Louis Constant.
[5] Lévi makes an allusion to having taken the oath of the “Rosy Cross,” indicating he had been initiated into the quite high degree of Rosicrucian in Freemasonry. Eliphas Lévi, The History of Magic (London: Rider, 1982), p. 286.
[6] Eliphas Lévi, p. 287.
[7] Julius Evola, Revolt Against the Modern World (Vermont: Inner Traditions, 1995).
[8] In this writer’s opinion in regard to Freemasonry, it is all a bunch of scabrous bastardy, which should be treated with suspicion, whether in its Grand Orient, “irregular” or United Grand Lodge forms. Westcott, founder of the Golden Dawn, for example regarded the “true religion” of Freemasonry to be Cabbalism. R. A. Gilbert, The Magical Mason: Forgotten Hermetic Writings of William Wynn Westcott, Physician and Magus (Northamptonshire: The Aquarian Press, 1983), Westcott, “The religion of Freemasonry illuminated by the Kabbalah,” ch. 21, pp. 114–23.
[9] Julius Evola, “Aleister Crowley,” Mask and Face of Contemporary Spiritualism, (Bocca, 1932), chapter IX,
https://www.counter-currents.com/2010/0 ... r-crowley/[10] Julius Evola, “Aleister Crowley.”
[11] The most comprehensive examination of Evola’s political and social views available in English translation is Men Among the Ruins, (Vermont: Inner Traditions, 1992).
[12] Robison John, Proofs of a Conspiracy (Boston: Western Islands, 1967).
[13] Eliphas Lévi, The History of Magic, (London: rider, 1982), p. 44.
[14] Crowley, Liber Legis (“The Book of the Law”), (Maine: Samuel Weiser, 1976), 2: 25.
[15] Crowley, The Law Is For All (Arizona: Falcon Press, 1985), p. 192.
[16] Crowley was also however to call Aiwaz his own “Holy Guardian Angel,” or in mundane psychological terms his unconscious; therefore Liber al Legis could be regarded as an example of automatic writing, a likely explanation given that the writing styles of Aiwaz and Crowley are remarkably similar.
[17] For an account of Crowley’s occult career and the so-called “Cairo Working” where Liber Al Legis was written, see Colin Wilson, Aleister Crowley: The Nature of the Beast, (Northamptonshire: The Aquarian Press, 1987).
[18] Crowley, Magick (Maine: Samuel Weiser, 1984), p. 430.
[19] Part 3 of Liber Legis is the revelation of Horus as the God of the New Aeon , which aeonically follows that of Isis (matriarchy), and the present Aeon of Osiris, the religions of the sacrificial god, including Christianity. Horus is described as the god of war and vengeance. (Liber Legis 3:3).
[20] “There is no law beyond do what thou wilt.” Liber Legis 3: 60.
[21] Crowley, The Law is for all, p. 321.
[22] Liber Legis, 1: 3.
[23] The Law is for all, pp. 72–75.
[24] Liber Legis 2: 58.
[25] Crowley, The Law is for all, pp. 143–45.
[26] Crowley, The Law is for all, pp. 143–45
[27] Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spake Zarathustra (Middlesex: Penguin Books, 1969), pp. 136–38.
[28] “There is a master morality and slave morality…” Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil (Middlesex: Penguin Books, 1984), p. 175.
[29] Liber Legis 2:58.
[30] Magick, p. 430. Other “Thelemic saints” listed in the Gnostic Mass from whom Crowley claimed to be reincarnated included Mohammed and Swinburne. Thankfully, Weishaupt is not among the lineage.
[31] Evola, The Hermetic Tradition (Vermont: Inner Traditions, 1995), pp. 89–100.
[32] Liber Legis 2: 17–21.
[33] Crowley, Magick, “Gnostic Mass,” “The Saints,” p. 430.
[34] “I am the Hawke-headed god of silence and of strength.” (Liber Legis 3:70).
[35] The Law is for all, p. 175.
[36] The Law is for all, p. 175.
[37] The Law is for all, p. 192.
[38] The Law is for all, p. 192.
[39] The Law is for all, p. 193.
***
Part 2 of 2.
The Thelemic StateAleister Crowley, 1875-1947The form of Thelemic government is vaguely outlined in Liber Legis, suggesting the type of corporatism: “Let it be the state of manyhood bound and loathing: thou has no right but to do what thou will.”[1] Contrary to the anarchistic or nihilistic interpretation often given Thelema’s “do what thou wilt,” Crowley defined the Thelemic state as a free association for the common good. The individual will is accomplished through social co-operation. Individual will and social duty should be in accord, the individual “absolutely disciplined to serve his own, and the common purpose, without friction.”[2]
Crowley emphasized his meaning so as not to be confused with anarchism or liberalism. While his Liber Oz (“Rights of Man”)[3] seems to be a formula for total individual sovereignty devoid of social restraint, Crowley stated: “This statement must not be regarded as individualism run wild.”[4]
In what might appear to be his own effort at a “papal encyclical” on good government, Crowley explains:
I have set limits to individual freedom. For each man in this state which I propose is fulfilling his own True Will by his eager Acquiescence in the Order necessary to the Welfare of all, and therefore of himself also.[5]
Crowley’s rejection of democracy and anything of what might be termed a “slave morality”[6] necessitated a new view of the state. Like others of his time, including fellow mystics such as Evola and Yeats,[7] Crowley was concerned with the future of culture under the reign of mercantilism, materialism, and industrialism. He feared that an epoch of mass uniformity was emerging. He saw equality as the harbinger of uniformity, again drawing on biology:
There is no creature on earth the same. All the members, let them be different in their qualities, and let there be no creature equal with another. Here also is the voice of true science, crying aloud: “Variety is the key of evolution.” Know then, o my son, that all laws, all systems, all customs, all ideals and standards which tend to produce uniformity, being in direct opposition to nature’s will to change and develop through variety, are accursed. Do thou with all thou might of manhood strive against these forces, for they resist change which is life, and they are of death.[8]
This biological rather than metaphysical approach was emphasized by reference to differences among humanity being caused by “race, climate, and other such conditions. And this standard shall be based upon a large interpretation of Facts Biological.”[9]
Referring to the passage in Liber Legis that states: “Ye are against the people, o my chosen!”[10] Crowley explained:
The cant of democracy condemned. It is useless to pretend that men are equal: facts are against it. And we are not going to stay dull and contended as oxen, in the ruck of humanity.”[11]
Thelema and CorporatismThe democratic state as a manifestation of equality and consequent uniformity was to be replaced by what is often termed the “organic state” or the “corporatist state.” This state conception may be viewed both biologically as in the organism of the body (hence “corporatist”) with the separate organs (individuals, families, crafts, etc) functioning according to their own nature while contributing to the health of the whole organism (society), with the state playing the role of the “brain,” the organ that coordinates the separate parts. In England corporatism was called “guild socialism,” among the Continental Left “syndicalism.”
Corporatism also had a metaphysical aspect, being the basis of social organization in traditional societies, including the guilds of Medieval Europe and the corporations of ancient Rome. In traditional societies, guild or corporatist social organization was, like all else, seen as a terrestrial manifestation of the cosmic order, the divine organism, and castes were primarily spiritual, ethical, and cultural organs, as distinct from the economic “classes” of debased secular societies. Hence, corporatism was advocated by Evola as the traditionalist answer to class society.[12]
Crowley’s conception of an organic state is described in De Ordine Rerum:
In the body every cell is subordinated to the general physiological Control, and we who will that Control do not ask whether each individual Unit of that Structure be consciously happy. But we do care that each shall fulfill its Function, with Contentment, respecting his own task as necessary and holy, not envious of another’s. For only mayst thou build up a Free State, whose directing will shall be to the Welfare of all.[13]
Hence Crowley, far from being a misanthrope, was concerned with freeing the individual from being part of a nebulous mass and providing sustenance for his material and thereafter cultural well-being as far as his nature allows. The deliberate cultivation of his image as “evil” must be viewed primarily as a perverse quirk, and in particular a result of his perverse sense of humor, his narcissistic personality, and his strict upbringing among the Plymouth Brethren, where he was delighted to have a mother who called him the Anti-Christ, which seems to have had a lasting effect on his thoughts and deeds throughout his life.
Leisure, the Basis of CultureCrowley addressed himself to a major problem for unorthodox economic and social theorists, that of the reduction of working hours when a new economic system had secured physical abundance for all, and freed humanity from the economic treadmill.
Once the obligations to the social order had been met, there should be “a surplus of leisure and energy” that can be spent “in pursuit of individual satisfaction.”[14] Sufficient amount of leisure time free from strictly material pursuits is the basis of culture, and a flowering of culture in the Medieval era for example was a product of this, coupled with the spiritual basis of society.
Crowley, like the Social Crediters and certain non-Marxian socialists or social reformers, wished to change the economic system to reduce working hours. His comments about the role of money are astute. Like the Social Crediters, Crowley believed that a change in the role of money is necessary for changing the social and economic system. He was certainly aware of A. R. Orage’s New Age magazine, where the minds of Social Crediters, guild socialists, and literati met. (Crowley referred to the journal in another context in his autobiography.[15]) Crowley rather perceptively set out his economic and financial policy:
What IS money? A means of exchange devised to facilitate the transaction of business. Oil in the engine. Very good then: if instead of letting it flow as smoothly and freely as possible, you baulk its very nature; you prevent it from doing its True Will. So every “restriction” on the exchange of wealth is a direct violation of the Law of Thelema.[16]
Once the material welfare of the citizen is secured, then the energy expended on economic necessities can be turned to the pursuit of culture. Under the Thelemic state the citizen would be directed by the ruling caste to pursue the higher aspects of life leading to the flowering of culture: “And because the people are oft-time unlearned, not understanding pleasure, let them be instructed on the Art of Life.”[17] From this regime would follow a high culture in which each citizen would have the capacity to participate or at least appreciate: “These things [economic welfare] being first secured, thou mayst afterward lead them to the Heavens of Poesy and Tale, of Music, Painting and Sculpture, and into the love of the mind itself, with its insatiable Joy of all Knowledge.”[18]
Under the Thelemic state every individual would be given the opportunity to fulfill his true will. Crowley maintained, however, that most true wills or “stars” would be content with a satisfying material existence, having no ambition beyond “ease and animal happiness,” and would thus be content to stay where they are in the hierarchy. Those whose true will was to pursue higher aims would be given opportunities to do so, to “establish a class of morally and intellectually superior men and women.” In this state, while the people “lack for nothing,” their abilities according to their natures would be utilized by the ruling caste in the pursuance of a higher policy and a higher culture.[19]
Crafts and GuildsCrowley also addressed the problem of industrialization and the role of the machine in the process of dehumanization, or what might also be termed by Traditionalists desacralisation,[20]:
Machines have already nearly completed the destruction of craftsmanship. A man is no longer a worker, but a machine-feeder. The product is standardized; the result, mediocrity. . . . Instead of every man and every women being a star, we have an amorphous population of vermin.[21]
Consistent with his advocacy of an organic state and with the re-sacralization of work as craft, Crowley expounded the guild as the basis of a Thelemic social organization. The guild was the fundamental unit of his own esoteric order, Ordo Templi Orientis (OTO):
Before the face of the Areopagus stands an independent Parliament of the Guilds. Within the Order, irrespective of Grade, the members of each craft, trade, science, or profession form themselves into a Guild, making their own laws, and prosecute their own good, in all matters pertaining to their labor and means of livelihood. Each Guild chooses the man most eminent in it to represent it before the Areopagus of the Eighth Degree; and all disputes between the various Guild are argued before that Body, which will decide according to the grand principles of the Order. Its decisions pass for ratification to the Sanctuary of the Gnosis, and thence to the Throne.[22]
This guild organization of the OTO thus represents society as a microcosm as the ideal social order that Crowley would have established under a Thelemic regime: “For, in True Things, all are but images one of another; man is but a map of the universe, and Society is but the same on a larger scale.”[23]
In Crowley’s blueprint of the corporatist state, each self-governing profession is represented in a “parliament of guilds.” This corporatist system was widely supported as an alternative to both capitalism and Marxism and was advocated by Evola and D’Annunzio, syndicalists, and Catholic traditionalists. It was embryonically inaugurated under Mussolini. Ironically from a Crowleyan perspective, Dollfuss’ Austria and Salazar’s Portugal embraced corporatism as applications of Catholic social doctrine.
The Hierarchy of the Thelemic StateCrowley calls the mass of people under his system of governance “the Men of the Earth” who have not yet reached a stage of development to participate in government, and would be represented before the Kingly head of state by those who are committed to service.[24] The governing caste comprises a Senate drawn from an Electoral College,[25] those individuals committed to service through personal “renunciation,” including the renunciation of property and wealth, having taken a “vow of poverty.”[26] Of course the universal franchise has no place in the selection of Thelemic government:
The principle of popular election is a fatal folly; its results are visible in every so-called democracy. The elected man is always the mediocrity; he is the safe man, the sound man, the man who displeases the majority less than any other; and therefore never the genius, the man of progress and illumination.[27]
The Electoral College is selected by the King from volunteers who must show acumen in athletics and learning, a “profound general knowledge” of history and the art of government and a knowledge of philosophy.[28]
This corporatist and monarchical system was designed to “gather up all the threads of human passion and interest, and weave them into a harmonious tapestry . . .” reflecting the order of the cosmos.[29]
Crowley and FascismThe Italian poet and war veteran D’Annunzio might have come closest to the Thelemite ideal with his short-lived Free City of Fiume, a regime governed by the arts that attracted numerous rebels, from anarchists and syndicalists to nationalists.[30] Crowley does not mention D’Annunzio in his autobiography, even though Crowley was in Italy in 1920, and D’Annunzio’s enterprise ended in December of that year.[31]
As for the Italian Fascists, Crowley wrote: “For some time I had interested myself in Fascismo which I regarded with entire sympathy even excluding its illegitimacy on the ground that constitutional authority had become to all intents and purposes a dead letter.”[32] Crowley saw the Fascisti in a characteristically poetic way, describing the blackshirts patrolling the railway as “delightful.” “They had all the picturesqueness of opera brigands.” As for the “March on Rome,” Crowley stated that he thought the behavior of the Fascisiti “admirable.”
Crowley quickly became disillusioned, however, and regarded Mussolini as a typical politico who compromised his principles for popular support. The mass nature of Fascism caused suspicion among many of the literati who had originally supported it, such as Wyndham Lewis and W. B. Yeats. Crowley observed developments in Rome for three days, and was disappointed with Mussolini’s compromises with the Catholic Church, which Crowley regarded as Mussolini’s “most dangerous foe.”[33] Of course such criticisms are common among observers of events rather than participants. Critics from afar can afford the luxury of theorizing without having to test their theories, and themselves, in the practicalities of office.
Crowley moved to Cefalu where he established his “Abbey of Thelema” in a ramshackle house. The death of follower Raoul Loveday resulted in Crowley’s expulsion from Italy in 1923, by which time he had become an embarrassment to the Fascist regime.[34]
However, one eminent individual who must have discerned a proto-fascist element in Thelema, before himself becoming one of the more significant spokesmen of Sir Oswald Mosley’s British fascism was J. F. C. Fuller, who achieved fame as the architect of modern tank warfare and as a military historian. Fuller had heard of Crowley in 1905, and was therefore one of Crowley’s earliest devotees. He was, like Crowley, a Nietzschean with occult interests who regarded socialism as a leveling creed: “the scum on the democratic cauldron.” His opposition to Christianity was likewise Nietzschean.[35]
Fuller met Crowley in London in 1906 and wrote Crowley’s first biography, The Star in the West, which was the winner (and only entrant) of a competition to promote Crowley’s poetry. Although Fuller’s interest in the occult and mysticism was life-long, he had broken with Crowley in 1911, embarrassed by Crowley’s escapades that drew blazing headlines from the tabloid press.
In 1932 Fuller was still writing in Nietzschean terms of socialism and democracy as products of Christianity. Joining the British Union of Fascists and becoming Mosley’s military adviser, Fuller remained a lifelong Mosleyite, even after World War II, but refused any further contact with Crowley.
* * *
While Fascists (particularly “clerical-fascists”), guild socialists, Social Crediters, Distributists, syndicalists et al. attempted to resolve the problems of the machine age, and Evola offered something of a practical plan in his Men Among the Ruins, Crowley’s Thelemic social conceptions remained as otherworldly as his mysticism, and few of his followers seem to have given much attention to the political implications or implementation of Thelema.
Crowley, a poet and a mystic, not an agitator or a politician, had his own conception of historical cycles, albeit somewhat limited, in which the Aeon of Horus, a the new age of “force and fire,” would emerge with Crowley as its “prophet.” As Marx assured us that the victory of communism was the end of an inexorable historical process, Crowley thought the Thelemic world order would arise as a product of inexorable cosmic laws. Nonetheless, like Marx who called upon socialists to become active agents of this historical process, Crowley envisioned that the ordeals demanded by his Holy Order would give rise to Thelemic Knights who would wage jihad against all old creeds:
We have to fight for freedom against oppressors, religious, social or industrial, and we are utterly opposed to compromise, every fight is to be a fight to the finish; each one of us for himself, to do his own will, and all of us for all, to establish the law of Liberty. . . . Let every man bear arms, swift to resent oppression . . . generous and ardent to draw sword in any cause, if justice or freedom summon him.[36]
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Notes[1] Liber Legis, 1: 42.
[2] The Law is for all, p. 101.
[3] The Law is for all, p. 321 Liber Oz.
[4] The Law is for all, p. 321
[5] Crowley, The Book of Wisdom or Folly (Maine: Samuel Weiser., Maine 1991), clause 39, Liber Aleph Vel CXI.
[6] Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil (Middlesex: Penguin Books, 1991), p. 175.
[7] K. R. Bolton, Thinkers of the Right (Luton: Luton Publications, 2003).
[8] The Law is for all, p. 228.
[9] The Law is for all, p. 228.
[10] Liber Legis 2: 25
[11] The Law is for all, p. 192.
[12] Evola, Men Among the Ruins, pp. 224-34
[13] The Law is for all, pp.251-52
[14] The Law is for all, p. 230.
[15] Crowley, The Confessions of Aleister Crowley (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul,1986), p.544.
[16] Crowley, Magick Without Tears (Arizona: Falcon Press, 1983), p. 346
[17] The Law is for all, p. 251
[18] The Law is for all, p. 251
[19] The Law is for all, p.227
[20] Evola, Men among the ruins (Vermont: Inner Traditions, 2002), p. 224
[21] Crowley, The Law is for all, p. 281.
[22] Crowley, Liber CXCIV, “O.T.O. An Intimation with Reference to the Constitution of the Order,” paragraph 21, The Equinox, vol. III, no. 1, 1919.
[23] An Intimation, paragraph 1.
[24] An Intimation, paragraph 5.
[25] An Intimation, paragraph 9.
[26] An Intimation, paragraph 30.
[27] An Intimation, paragraph 10.
[28] An Intimation, paragraph 12 and 13.
[29] An Intimation, concluding remarks.
[30] Anthony Rhodes, The Poet As Superman – D’Annunzio (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1959).
[31] Rhodes, p. 221
[32] Crowley, Confessions, p.911
[33] Crowley, Confessions, p. 911
[34] Wilson, Aleister Crowley: The Nature of the Beast, p.133
[35] Anthony Trythall, Boney Fuller: The Intellectual General (London: Cassell, 1977).
[36] The Law is for all, p. 317