Deus est Homo

Abstract

Despite the centrality of the concept of God in Christian theology and Western philosophy for over two millennia, little attention has been given the concept of God in twentieth-century occultism in general, and in the writings of Aleister Crowley (1875–1947) in particular. In this article it is argued that Crowley’s multifaceted and sometimes conflicting approaches to God, are dependent on five main factors: (1) his childhood experiences of Christianity in the form of the Plymouth Brethren, (2) the impact of Empirical Scepticism and Comparative Religion, (3) the emanationist concept of God that he encountered through his membership in the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, (4) the revelation of The Book of the Law and the claim of being a Prophet, The Great Beast 666, of a New Age, and finally (5) solar-phallicism as expressed through the Ordo Templi Orientis. These apparently contradictory strands in Crowley’s biography and intellectual armoury are in fact interlinked, and it is by studying them together that it is possible to identify the concept of God in Crowley’s magical writings.