Swinburne Sider, Justin A
Victorian Poetry,
09/2022, Letnik:
60, Številka:
3
Journal Article, Book Review
Recenzirano
In the introduction to Decadent Ecology in British Literature and Art, 1860-1910: The death of Christianity foreseen by the dramatic monologue's speaker hands over power "not to the human mind but to ...a nontranscendent entity outside the human self," yet the speaker's own prophetic act nonetheless "affirms the richness of the imagination" (p. 306). In their efforts to depict expanses of geological or evolutionary time stretching beyond human comprehension, Lyell and Darwin, like Swinburne's pagan speaker, understand time as "both a source of awe and an index of man's power" (p. 309). Particularly important for Bristow's argument, Crowley's relationship to "avant garde 1890s culture" was mediated through "the queer milieu of fin de siecle Cambridge"-specifically his affair with Herbert Charles ("Jerome") Pollitt, the queer aesthete, art collector, and drag artist who shaped his tastes in the last years of the nineteenth century.
In 1914, Aleister Crowley moved to Manhattan, where he remained throughout the duration of World War I. While living in New York, Crowley made the acquaintance of George Sylvester Viereck, the editor ...of a periodical entitled The International. The International published poetry, drama, literature, articles on mysticism, social and political commentary, and reviews of books and performances. Viereck was a champion of alternative views that did not align with conservative or traditional viewpoints, as his decision to hire Crowley as a contributing editor at The International makes clear. Here, Lingan discusses Crowley's fundamental approach of The Savior.
This text discusses how W. B. Yeats, Aleister Crowley, Ezra Pound and Robert Graves had access to the forbidden knowledge of the Goddess. These four poets experienced a confrontation with their ...unconscious and let the grace of the Goddess touch their heart strings. Consequently, through this surrendering, they created avant-garde poetry and were inspired to write seditious manifestos that would teach humanity an esoteric creed. This creed, based on humans' eternal divine essence, aspires to liberate the eternal feminine. These poets became the instruments of the Goddess. As defenders of the Light, they took arms against the forces of inertia and proclaimed the eleusis of a new faith. This creed pledges to overthrow the anachronistic religious and social institutions and initiate a new world order and a new divinity based on the ancient rites of the Great Goddess. No matter how disparate these four were in character, they shared the vision of transmitting esoteric knowledge to profane humanity. They were specifically chosen by the Goddess as Her troubadours and they pave Her way to the religious consciousness of the people.
The ritual plays of William Butler Yeats and Aleister Crowley question the dominant political, social, and religious values of their time, contravening traditional ideas of ritual as a conservative ...social force. This study analyses Yeats’s Celtic Mysteries rituals and Crowley’s Rites of Eleusis according to changing scholarly theories of ritual.
Henrik Bogdan and Martin P. Starr offer the first comprehensive examination of one of the twentieth century's most distinctive occult iconoclasts, Aleister Crowley (1875-1947), one of the most ...influential thinkers in contemporary western esotericism.
This book offers an examination of one of the twentieth century's most distinctive occult iconoclasts. Aleister Crowley (1875–1947) was a study in contradictions. He was born into a Fundamentalist ...Christian family, and then he was educated at Cambridge where he experienced both an intellectual liberation from his religious upbringing and a psychic awakening that led him into the study of magic. He was a stock figure in the tabloid press of his day, vilified during his life as a traitor, drug addict and debaucher; yet he became known as perhaps the most influential thinker in contemporary esotericism. The practice of the occult arts was understood in the light of contemporary developments in psychology, and its advocates, such as William Butler Yeats, were among the intellectual avant-garde of the modernist project. Crowley took a more drastic step and declared himself the revelator of a new age of individualism. Crowley's occult bricolage, Magick, was a thoroughly eclectic combination of spiritual exercises drawing from Western European ceremonial magical traditions as practiced in the nineteenth-century Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn. Crowley also pioneered in his inclusion of Indic sources for the parallel disciplines of meditation and yoga. The summa of this journey of self-liberation was harnessing the power of sexuality as a magical discipline, an instance of the “sacrilization of the self” as practiced in his co-masonic magical group, the Ordo Templi Orientis. The religion Crowley created, Thelema, legitimated his role as a charismatic revelator and herald of a new age of freedom under the law of “Do what thou wilt.” The influence of Aleister Crowley is not only to be found in contemporary esotericism—he was, for instance, a major influence on Gerald Gardner and the modern witchcraft movement—but can also be seen in the counter-culture movement of the late 1960s and early 1970s, and in many forms of alternative spirituality and popular culture. This book provides insight into Crowley's critical role in the study of western esotericism, new religious movements, and sexuality.
First Impressions There is no doubt that, to a certain extent, Haddo is a version of Crowley, whom Maugham had encountered in Paris while staying with his friend, the painter Gerald Kelly. ...both ...have become notorious during their student years, though Haddo's at Oxford, reminiscent of those enjoyed by 'Tubby' in G. S. Street's The Autobiography of a Boy (1894), have yielded greater fruit than did Crowley's at Cambridge. ...his one-act play, Marriages Are Made in Heaven, performed in Berlin in January 1902, unsuccessfully graft ed Wildean quips on to the moral content of Ibsen and a plot from Pinero.22 Undaunted by its failure, Maugham published the play in The Venture, a magazine in The Yellow Book mode that he co-edited with Laurence Housman, himself a Yellow Book contributor, in the autumn of 1903. Eager to remain abreast of literary fashion, Maugham would turn against his former idols aft er the First World War, dismissing The Yellow Book as 'jejeune' and Pater as 'as dull as a picture of Alma Tadema ... a feeble creature ... filled with the conceit of culture.'41 In later life he regarded The Magician with embarrassment, though the novel remained popular.
In late 1909, two Englishmen, scions of the comfortable middle classes, undertook a journey to Algiers. Aleister Crowley, later to be dubbed “the wickedest man in the world,” was in his early ...thirties; his companion, Victor Neuburg, had only recently graduated from Cambridge. The stated purpose of the trip was pleasure. Crowley, widely traveled and an experienced mountaineer and big-game hunter, loved North Africa and had personal reasons for wanting to be out of England. Neuburg probably had little say in the matter. Junior in years, dreamy and mystical by nature, and in awe of a man whom he both loved and admired, Neuburg was inclined to acquiesce without demur in Crowley's various projects. There was, however, another highly significant factor in Neuburg's quiescence. He was Crowley's chela, a novice initiate of the magical Order of the Silver Star which Crowley had founded two years earlier. As such, Neuburg had taken a vow of obedience to Crowley as his Master and affectionately dubbed “holy guru” and had already learned that in much that related to his life Crowley's word was now law. It was at Crowley's instigation that the two men began to make their way, first by tram and then by foot, into the North African desert to the southwest of Algiers; and it was Crowley's decision to perform there a series of magical ceremonies which prefigured his elaboration of the techniques of sex magic. In this case, the ceremonies combined the performance of advanced ritual magic with homosexual acts.
