Pub Date : 2020-12-14DOI: 10.1163/15700593-02101003
W. J. Hanegraaff
{"title":"De Londres à Saint-Pétersbourg: Carl Friedrich Tieman (1743–1802) aux carrefours des courants illuministes et maçonniques, by Antoine Faivre","authors":"W. J. Hanegraaff","doi":"10.1163/15700593-02101003","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1163/15700593-02101003","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":41783,"journal":{"name":"Aries-Journal for the Study of Western Esotericism","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2020-12-14","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48184227","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2020-12-14DOI: 10.1163/15700593-02101002
Keith E. Cantú
{"title":"The Super Natural: A New Vision of the Unexplained, by Jeffrey J. Kripal and Whitley Strieber","authors":"Keith E. Cantú","doi":"10.1163/15700593-02101002","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1163/15700593-02101002","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":41783,"journal":{"name":"Aries-Journal for the Study of Western Esotericism","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2020-12-14","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46711208","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2020-12-14DOI: 10.1163/15700593-02101006
H. Bogdan
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.
尽管上帝的概念在基督教神学和西方哲学中占据了两千多年的中心地位，但在20世纪的神秘主义中，特别是在阿莱斯特·克劳利(1875-1947)的著作中，很少有人关注上帝的概念。在这篇文章中，我们认为克劳利对上帝的多面性，有时是相互矛盾的方法，取决于五个主要因素:(1)他童年时期在普利茅斯兄弟会的基督教经历，(2)经验怀疑主义和比较宗教的影响，(3)他在金色黎明的赫尔墨斯教团的成员身份中遇到的上帝的散发论概念，(4)《律法书》的启示和新时代的先知，大野兽666的主张，最后(5)通过Ordo Templi Orientis表达的太阳性物论。在克劳利的传记和知识宝库中，这些看似矛盾的线索实际上是相互联系的，只有把它们放在一起研究，才有可能在克劳利的魔法作品中识别出上帝的概念。
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Pub Date : 2020-12-14DOI: 10.1163/15700593-02101005
Deja Whitehouse
Frieda, Lady Harris, wife of Sir Percy Harris, Liberal M.P. and party Chief Whip, created the magnificent Tarot paintings that underpin Aleister Crowley’s The Book of Thoth. Harris conformed to the conventional appearance of a respectable middle-class lady until she was in her sixties. However, her unwavering commitment to Aleister Crowley and the Tarot project eventually threatened not only her social standing, but also her marriage. Despite her dedication to the Thoth Tarot, she never fully engaged with Thelema, which she anthropomorphised as the bossy and interfering ‘Miss Thelema’. Nevertheless, she progressed through the grades of Crowley’s magical orders and remained loyal to Crowley and the Great Work to the end of her days, endeavouring to secure a publishing deal for a general release of The Book of Thoth and the Thoth Tarot deck. Using extracts from Harris and Crowley’s correspondence and Crowley’s diaries, this paper will explore Harris’s personal involvement with Thelema, both in her collaborative activities with Crowley, and her endeavours to preserve his legacy after his death.
{"title":"‘Mercury is in a Very Ape-Like Mood’","authors":"Deja Whitehouse","doi":"10.1163/15700593-02101005","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1163/15700593-02101005","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 Frieda, Lady Harris, wife of Sir Percy Harris, Liberal M.P. and party Chief Whip, created the magnificent Tarot paintings that underpin Aleister Crowley’s The Book of Thoth. Harris conformed to the conventional appearance of a respectable middle-class lady until she was in her sixties. However, her unwavering commitment to Aleister Crowley and the Tarot project eventually threatened not only her social standing, but also her marriage. Despite her dedication to the Thoth Tarot, she never fully engaged with Thelema, which she anthropomorphised as the bossy and interfering ‘Miss Thelema’. Nevertheless, she progressed through the grades of Crowley’s magical orders and remained loyal to Crowley and the Great Work to the end of her days, endeavouring to secure a publishing deal for a general release of The Book of Thoth and the Thoth Tarot deck. Using extracts from Harris and Crowley’s correspondence and Crowley’s diaries, this paper will explore Harris’s personal involvement with Thelema, both in her collaborative activities with Crowley, and her endeavours to preserve his legacy after his death.","PeriodicalId":41783,"journal":{"name":"Aries-Journal for the Study of Western Esotericism","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2020-12-14","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49294804","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2020-12-14DOI: 10.1163/15700593-02101007
Christian Giudice
This paper will deal with one of the earliest phases of Aleister Crowley’s (1875–1947) life: his university years spent writing Decadent poetry. Contrary to the vast majority of previous critics, biographer John Symonds in primis, I will set forth the hypothesis that, far from being an amateur and inconsistent lyricist, Crowley fit perfectly within the British Decadent milieu of his day, and should also be considered a bona fide Decadent poet, alongside his more famous colleagues Arthur Symons and Ernest Dowson. Through an analysis of Crowley’s Cambridge years, literary influences, and of the poet’s own verse, it will be my resolve to prove this hypothesis and situate the figure of Crowley qua poet as a legitimate representative of the Naughty Nineties, and to position his poetic output within the already accepted canon of British Decadent verse.
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Pub Date : 2020-10-28DOI: 10.1163/15700593-20211002
C. Ferguson
Over the last decade, esotericism studies has witnessed a distinct literary turn, as more and more of the field’s primarily religious studies-based researchers have recognized the value, and indeed, centrality, of imaginative literature to the transmission of occult and new religious ideas. Although welcome, this impetus has sometimes taken an anti-aesthetic shape, reducing the texts it incorporates to little more than empirical evidence of authorial belief or practical occult experience. Accompanying this tendency has been a suspicion of the formalist, post-modern, and/or political forms of interpretation common within contemporary literary studies as being ideologically tainted or even wilfully perverse in their resistance to surface meaning. My article uses a case study of Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Land of Mist (1926), a seemingly straightforward example of an emic novel whose author’s spiritualist belief and conversionist intentions are well known, to demonstrate the limitations of such a biographically reductionist hermeneutic, and to call for a greater diversity of approach within literary esotericism studies.
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Pub Date : 2020-10-09DOI: 10.1163/15700593-20201001
M. Sedgwick
The Traditionalist movement that derives from the French esoteric philosopher René Guénon is known to have been influential in Europe and North America, especially through the activities of religious groups, usually of Sufi origin, and also through the growing impact of the political version of Traditionalism first developed by the Italian esoteric philosopher Julius Evola. This article looks at Traditionalism beyond Europe and North America, taking the important case of Brazil during the 1980s and 1990s, where one of the main Traditionalist Sufi groups, the US-based Maryamiyya, became established, and where two local groups developed, one of which focused exclusively on doctrine, and one of which turned not to Sufism but to T’ai chi and Brazilian indigenous religion. The article also considers a new and important political philosopher, Olavo de Carvalho, who emerged from the Brazilian Traditionalist milieu. Carvalho applied Guénon to political issues rather as Evola had, but unlike Evola combined Traditionalism with Roman Catholicism, a development also found in Argentina during the early twentieth century. During the 2010s, Carvalho’s radical rightist philosophy became widely known in Brazil, where his admirers included the president, Jair Bolsonaro.
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Pub Date : 2020-09-30DOI: 10.1163/15700593-02101001
M. Fletcher
Aleister Crowley’s The Book of Thoth makes four substantive changes to the traditional titles of the tarot trumps. Three of these relate to the cardinal virtues which had remained in the deck despite the almost complete esoteric revisioning of the tarot that had taken place over the preceding two centuries; the fourth is an integral part of the same topic. This article focuses on why Crowley felt impelled to make these changes as well as the significance of the new names (and associated iconography). The discussion centres around Crowley’s rejection of the cardinal virtues that underly Christian ethics in favour of the new system of morality laid out in The Book of the Law and subsequently encapsulated in Thelema. Consequently, the article first examines the development of the cardinal virtues in patristic and medieval theology and then shows how Crowley sought to overturn these values in his agenda of cultural reprogramming of which The Book of Thoth arguably constitutes the high-water mark.
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Pub Date : 2020-07-01DOI: 10.1163/15700593-02002007
Malin Fitger
{"title":"Recycled Lives: A History of Reincarnation in Blavatsky’s Theosophy, by Julie Chajes","authors":"Malin Fitger","doi":"10.1163/15700593-02002007","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1163/15700593-02002007","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":41783,"journal":{"name":"Aries-Journal for the Study of Western Esotericism","volume":"20 1","pages":"281-283"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2020-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1163/15700593-02002007","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46382213","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2020-07-01DOI: 10.1163/15700593-02002010
F. Kwiatkowski
{"title":"New Antiquities: Transformations of Ancient Religion in the New Age and Beyond, by Dylan Michael Burns and Almut-Barbara Renger (eds.)","authors":"F. Kwiatkowski","doi":"10.1163/15700593-02002010","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1163/15700593-02002010","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":41783,"journal":{"name":"Aries-Journal for the Study of Western Esotericism","volume":"20 1","pages":"277-280"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2020-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1163/15700593-02002010","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46636101","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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