Aleister Crowley and Islam

Pasi, Marco

doi:10.1007/978-3-030-61788-2_8

Marco Pasi⁵

Part of the book series: Palgrave Studies in New Religions and Alternative Spiritualities ((PSNRAS))

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Abstract

Little has been written on the relationship between one of the most prominent personalities of modern Western esotericism, Aleister Crowley (1875(2013)1947), and Islam. Yet, this relationship was important to Crowley and is significant for understanding his views on religions, as well as some particular aspects of the religious tradition he himself initiated, Thelema. Crowley had close contacts with various forms of Islam during his travels in India, Egypt, Algeria, and Tunisia. He often expresses admiration and fascination for Islamic culture, which he compares favorably to other religious traditions, particularly Christianity, but also Hinduism. Some of his opinions mirror ideas that were relatively widespread in Victorian Britain. This chapter starts with a comparison between Thelema and Islam. It shows the extent of the influence that Crowley(2019)s contact(2014)both direct and indirect(2014)with Islam had on the shaping of his own religious movement. It also looks at the broader cultural meaning of Crowley(2019)s views on Islam, with respect to aspects such as politics, gender, and sexuality. Particular attention is given to the influence that the British explorer and orientalist Richard Burton had on Crowley with respect to Islam. Many of the opinions Crowley expressed were clearly modelled on Burton, who had been one of his heroes since his childhood years. This chapter also looks at Crowley(2019)s interest in Sufism and compares it with the similar interest Burton had.

This chapter is a revised, expanded version of an essay originally published in French as “Aleister Crowley et l’islam,” Politica Hermetica 31 (2017): 101–118. I would like to thank William Breeze, Richard Kaczynski, Jerry E. Cornelius, Patrick Bowen, and the editors of the present book for their careful reading of the text and their suggestions for improving it.

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Notes

1.
There is an interest in the subject in some contemporary practitioners of Crowley’s magical and religious system. Their collections of sources and analyses are in some cases very useful for the academic researcher, even when they show a clear religionist bent. The most interesting example is the series of texts published online in 2007 by T Polyphilus and collected under the title “Islamic Roots of Thelema” (see https://paradoxosalpha.livejournal.com/79983.html for the first instalment in the series, accessed 17 April 2020). The series was later the basis for an essay: “The Sharia of the Great Beast”, published in: Notocon VIII: Neither East nor West. Proceedings of the Ninth Biennial National Ordo Templi Orientis Conference (Riverside, CA: United States Grand Lodge Ordo Templi Orientis, 2015), 2-20. “T Polyphilus” is the pseudonym of Dionysius Rogers, also known by the pseudonyms “Dionysos Thriambos” and “Paradoxos Alpha.” He is a prominent member of the Ordo Templi Orientis (OTO), the occultist organization of which Crowley was the international leader for a number of years and to which I will return later.
2.
Edward W. Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage Books, 1978).
3.
See particularly Bryan S. Turner, Orientalism. Postmodernism and Globalism (London: Routledge, 1994); Richard King, Orientalism and Religion: Postcolonial Theory, India and “The Mystic East” (London: Routledge, 1999); Isolde Kurz, Vom Umgang mit dem Anderen: Die Orientalismus-Debatte zwischen Alteritätdiskurs und interkultureller Kommunikation (Würzburg: Ergon, 2000); Alexander L. Macfie, Orientalism: A Reader (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2000); Daniel Martin Varisco, Reading Orientalism: Said and the Unsaid (Seattle: Washington University Press, 2007); Robert Irwin, For Lust of Knowing: The Orientalists and Their Enemies (London: Penguin Books, 2007); and Wael Hallaq, Restating Orientalism: A Critique of Modern Knowledge (New York: Columbia University Press, 2018).
4.
Dane Kennedy, “‘ Captain Burton’s Oriental Muck Heap’: The Book of the Thousand Nights and the Uses of Orientalism,” Journal of British Studies 39, no. 3 (July 2000): 319.
5.
The Book of the Law, also known as Liber AL vel Legis, was first published by Crowley in 1909 (in: Id., ΘΕΛΗΜΑ, vol 3, [London], privately printed, [1909]), and has then been reprinted many times in various editions. I am using here the version published in Aleister Crowley, The Equinox of the Gods (London: Issued by the O.T.O., 1936). The text can also be found online, for example, here: http://lib.oto-usa.org/libri/liber0220.html, accessed April 26, 2020. As it is customary, references to the text will be given by indicating the corresponding chapter and verse.
6.
On this important episode in Crowley’s life, see in particular Alex Owen, “Aleister Crowley in the Desert,” in: Alex Owen, ed., The Place of Enchantment: British Occultism and the Culture of the Modern (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 186–220. On the role of the Enochian system in Crowley’s work, see Marco Pasi and Philippe Rabaté, “Langue angélique, langue magique: l’énochien,” Politica Hermetica 13, (1999): 94–123; and Egil Asprem, Arguing with Angels: Enochian Magic and Modern Occulture (Albany: SUNY Press 2012), 85–102.
7.
On Crowley’s relationship with Christianity and Victorian culture, see Marco Pasi, “L’anticristianesimo in Aleister Crowley (1875–1947),” in Aleister Crowley. Un mago a Cefal ù, ed. PierLuigi Zoccatelli (Rome: Edizioni Mediterranee, 1998), 41–67. For the more political aspects of this intellectual critique, see Marco Pasi, Aleister Crowley and the Temptation of Politics (Abingdon: Routledge, 2014), 23–64.
8.
The main sources for Crowley’s own narrative of the events are his autobiography, The Confessions of Aleister Crowley: An Autohagiography (London: Arkana, 1989), 382–402; and The Equinox of the Gods (London: O.T.O., 1936).
9.
Caroline Tully, “Walk Like an Egyptian: Egypt as Authority in Aleister Crowley’s Reception of The Book of the Law,” The Pomegranate 12, no. 2 (2010): 20–47.
10.
The textual corpus of the Golden Dawn, including the rituals and teaching material, has been published by various authors at different moments and in various versions. To this day, the single most comprehensive collection remains the one edited by Israel Regardie in the 1930s: Israel Regardie (ed.), The Golden Dawn. An Account of the Teachings, Rites and Ceremonies of the Order of the Golden Dawn, 4 volumes (Chicago: Aries Press, 1937–1940), then reprinted several times. Regardie later reorganized the material and republished it in a different edition: Israel Regardie (ed.), The Complete Golden Dawn System of Magic (Phoenix: Falcon Press, 1984).
11.
Concerning the early history and main textual aspects of the Quran, my main source is Alford T. Welch, Rudi Paret, and James D. Pearson, “al-Ḳurʾān,” in: Encyclopaedia of Islam, 2^nd ed., ed. Peri J. Bearman et al. (Leiden: Brill) first published online: 2012, 10.1163/1573–3912_islam_COM_0543, accessed April 21, 2020.
12.
For the Quran see, for example, XV:9; for the Book of the Law, see I:36; I:54; and II:54.
13.
The notion of the Holy Guardian Angel was derived by Crowley from The Book of the Sacred Magic of Abra-Melin the Mage, As Delivered by Abraham the Jew unto his Son Lamech, A.D. 1458 (London: J. M. Watkins, 1898). This was an important magical text that had been published by Samuel Liddell MacGregor Mathers, one of the leaders of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, around the same time as Crowley became a member of the Order. The book had a profound impact on Crowley. On the complex issue of Crowley’s gradual identification of Aiwass as his own Holy Guardian Angel, see Marco Pasi, “Varieties of Magical Experience: Aleister Crowley’s Views on Occult Practice,” Magic, Ritual, and Witchcraft 6, no. 2 (December 2011): 158–160.
14.
Aleister Crowley, “Liber Resh vel Helios. Sub Figurâ CC,” The Equinox I, no. 6 (September 1911): 29–32.
15.
On this point, see also the comments of two contemporary Thelemite practitioners, both prominent members of the OTO and of the Gnostic Catholic Church: Tau Apiryon (David Scriven), “The Kiblah,” in: Tau Apiryon and Helena (Lynn Scriven), Mystery of Mystery. A Primer of Thelemic Ecclesiastical Gnosticism (Red Flame, 2) (Berkeley: Red Flame, 2001), 83–88, now available online at https://sabazius.oto-usa.org/the-kiblah/, accessed 19 April 2020; and T Polyphilus (Dionysius Rogers), “The Islam of To Mega Therion: Second Pillar,” https://paradoxosalpha.livejournal.com/82993.html, accessed April 19, 2020.
16.
Boleskine, with its villa and the surrounding estate, is located on the southern shore of Loch Ness. Crowley bought it in 1899 and spent long periods there until around 1914. It was there that Crowley attempted to perform the rituals described in the Book of Sacred Magic of Abramelin the Mage, which he believed to be of great importance in his initiatory path (see also n. 14 above). The house was almost completely destroyed by two consecutive fires in December 2015 and July 2019. The estate has now been acquired by the Boleskine House Foundation, which has been created in 2019 with the purpose of restoring it and preserving its cultural heritage. See https://www.boleskinehouse.org/, accessed April 19, 2020.
17.
Aleister Crowley, Magick Without Tears (St. Paul: Llewellyn Publications, 1973), 168.
18.
Aleister Crowley, “Liber V vel Reguli,” in Magick in Theory and Practice (Paris: Published for subscribers only—Lecram Press, 1929 [1930]), 331–344.
19.
A history of the modern neo-Gnostic movement, of which Crowley’s Gnostic Catholic Church is a part, remains largely to be written. The best overviews, if a bit dated now, are Massimo Introvigne, Il ritorno dello gnosticismo (Carnago: SugarCo, 1993); and Ladislaus Toth, “Gnostic Church,” in Dictionary of Gnosis and Western Esotericism, ed. Wouter J. Hanegraaff et al., (Leiden: Brill, 2005), 400–403. See also Hugh B. Urban, “The Knowing of Knowing. Neo-Gnosticism, from the O.T.O. to Scientology,” Gnosis: Journal of Gnostic Studies, 4 (2019): 99–116.
20.
O.T.O. (Aleister Crowley), “Liber XV. Ecclesiae Gnosticae Catholicae Canon Missae,” The Equinox III, no. 1 (March 1919): 247–270. See 249 for the instruction on the altar.
21.
Richard Kaczynski, Perdurabo. The Life of Aleister Crowley (Berkeley: North Atlantic Books, 2010), 319.
22.
Aleister Crowley, “Liber CCC. Khabs am Pekht,” The Equinox III, no.1 (March 1919): 178. For an even more elaborate interpretation of the verse from the perspective of a contemporary Thelemite, in which the “Kaaba” is not mainly understood as a geographical place, but as the body of each individual practitioner, see Jerry Edward Cornelius, “On the Proper Use of the Clerk House,” online at http://www.cornelius93.com/aa-clerk-houses-2016.html, accessed April 19, 2020.
23.
However, it is interesting to note that in Islamic Sufism metaphorical interpretations of the Kaaba have also emerged from time to time, although they were usually treated as heterodox and condemned by religious authorities. We have perhaps the most famous example of this with the Persian Sufi al-Hallaj, who claimed that the pilgrims’ circumambulation of the Kaaba at Mecca could be performed just as effectively, if symbolically, “around a table at home” or “round the Kaʿba of your heart.” It is mainly for this claim that he was eventually executed. See Louis Massignon and Louis Gardet, “al-Ḥallād̲j̲,” Encyclopaedia of Islam; 10.1163/1573–3912_islam_COM_0256, accessed April 21, 2020; and Nile Green, Sufism: A Global History (Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012), 41. As we will see, Crowley was familiar with al-Hallaj’s story.
24.
For an introduction to these aspects of Thelema, cf. Marco Pasi, “Aleister Crowley,” in Dictionary of Gnosis and Western Esotericism, ed. Wouter J. Hanegraaff et al. (Leiden: Brill, 2005), 281–287. For a more extensive analysis, see Ian Drummond, “The Occult Macrohistory of Aleister Crowley” (Honors Diss., University of Sydney, 2003), available online at https://www.academia.edu/3991438/The_occult_macrohistory_of_Aleister_Crowley, accessed May 1, 2020. See also, especially on the eschatological aspects, Henrik Bogdan, “Envisioning the Birth of a New Aeon: Dispensationalism and Millenarianism in the Thelemic Tradition,” in Henrik Bogdan and Martin P. Starr (eds.), Aleister Crowley and Western Esotericism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 89–106. About Corbin’s notion of hierohistory (hiérohistoire) see Jean-Louis Vieillard-Baron, “Temps spirituel et hiéro-histoire selon Henry Corbin: une phénoménologie de la conscience psycho-cosmique,” in: Henry Corbin et le comparatisme spirituel. Colloque tenu à Paris les 5 et 6 juin 1999 (Milan: Archë, 2000), 25–37.
25.
Bogdan, “Envisioning the Birth,” 90.
26.
The doctrine of the “Magi” is presented by Crowley in several texts, with some significant developments over time. Of particular importance is the description given in his Liber Aleph Vel CXI. The Book of Wisdom or Folly, in the Form of an Epistle of 666. The Great Wild Beast to his Son 777 (West Point: Thelema Publishing Company, 1961), 68–75, and The Confessions, 795–796. See also Drummond, “The Occult Macrohistory,” n.p.n. (but 11–15). To the sources discussed by Drummond one should add: Aleister Crowley, “Liber B vel Magi. Su figurâ I,” The Equinox I, no. 7 (March 1912): 5–9. With respect to Schuré, the reference is obviously to Édouard Schuré, Les Grands initiés. Esquisse de l’histoire secrëte des religions (Paris: Perrin, 1889)—English transl.: The Great Initiates. Sketch of the Secret History of Religions (London: William Rider & Son, 1912). About the concept of Prisca Theologia in the long history of Western esotericism, see Wouter J. Hanegraaff, Esotericism and the Academy: Rejected Knowledge in Western Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 7–12, and passim.
27.
Arent Jan Wensinck, “Rasūl,” Encyclopaedia of Islam, 10.1163/1573–3912_islam_COM_0911, accessed April 21, 2020; Toufic Fahd, “Nubuwwa,” Encyclopaedia of Islam, 10.1163/1573–3912_islam_SIM_5964, accessed April 21, 2020; Marilyn Robinson Waldman and Bruce B. Lawrence, “Nubūwah,” in Lindsay Jones (ed.), Encyclopedia of Religion, 2^nd ed., (Farmington Hills: Macmillan Reference USA, 2005), vol. 10, 6733–6739.
28.
We will see later what role has the idea of God in Crowley’s perception of Islam.
29.
Aleister Crowley, The Heart of the Master and Other Papers (New York: Ordo Templi Orientis and New Falcon Publications, 1992), 13–17 and 102. With respect to terminology, the idea of the Great White Brotherhood is ostensibly derived by Crowley from Theosophical literature, while that of the Secret Chiefs played an important role in the teachings of the Golden Dawn. The two concepts overlap with each other in Crowley.
30.
Bogdan, “Envisioning the Birth,” 90.
31.
The structure of the A∴A∴is described by Crowley in his “One Star in Sight,” in Crowley, Magick in Theory and Practice, 229–244.
32.
Crowley, “One Star in Sight,” 234.
33.
See Ian Richard Netton, Muslim Neoplatonists. An Introduction to the Thought of the Brethren of Purity (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1991), 36.
34.
Crowley, Liber Aleph, 68–75. Jesus was included in an earlier list of Magi in “The Vision and the Voice,” the account of Crowley’s visionary experiences in the Algerian Sahara in 1909, but the name was later taken out. See Aleister Crowley, “The Vision and the Voice,” The Equinox I, no. 5 (March 1911): 126; and Drummond, “The Occult Macrohistory,” n.p.n. (but 12–13). This is not so surprising, as Crowley came to doubt the actual historical existence of Jesus, or, more precisely, believed that “Jesus” was the syncretic aggregation of several historical persons and divinities, having merged into a single mythical figure. Features and episodes were attributed to Jesus based on the model of the “dying god” as described by James Frazer in his famous Golden Bough. See Crowley, The Confessions, 237, 795, and 808–809. Crowley expands on these ideas, and more generally on his interpretation of the Gospels, in his The Gospel according to St. Bernard Shaw, published posthumously in a first limited edition in 1953 (Barstow: Thelema Publishing Company, 1953), and then as Crowley on Christ, ed. Francis King (London: The C.W. Daniel Company, 1974). About Crowley’s attitudes toward Christianity, see Pasi, “L’anticristianesimo.” All the “Magi” listed by Crowley are considered by him also as “Saints” of his Gnostic Catholic Church.
35.
Crowley, Liber Aleph, 75.
36.
Crowley, Liber Aleph, 68.
37.
Crowley, Liber Aleph, 74. “ALLH” is obviously an alternative transliteration of “Allāh,” the Arabic word for “God.”
38.
Crowley, Liber Aleph, 74.
39.
Crowley, Liber Aleph, 74.
40.
Crowley, Liber Aleph, 74.
41.
Crowley, Liber Aleph, 74.
42.
Incidentally, it should be noted that the first part of the shahāda (“no god”) is actually lā ʾilāha, where the word for “god” is with one “l,” not with two as in “la allh.”
43.
The “Liber Oz” is a one-page pamphlet that was printed and distributed by Crowley during the Second World War: Aleister Crowley, Liber LXXVII. Oz (Rainbow Valley: OTO, 1941). Interestingly enough, the text was probably written by Crowley around 1918/1919 (the same period in which he was writing the Liber Aleph) and included in the revised ritual for the II degree of the OTO, to which we will return. See Theodor Reuss and Aleister Crowley, O.T.O. Rituals and Sex Magick (Thame: I-H-O Books, 1999), 202. As we will see, the setting of the ritual is in the Egyptian desert, where the Sultan Saladin has set his camp. By implication, one would have to assume that the core political and social values of Thelema are perfectly consonant to an Islamic context, as opposed to a Christian one.
44.
Aleister Crowley, “Liber Legis. The Comment,” The Equinox I no.7 (March 1912): 400.
45.
On Crowley and Nietzsche, see Pasi, “L’anticristianesimo,” 62–64.
46.
Muhammad Iqbal, Javid-Nama (London: Routledge, 2011).
47.
Annemarie Schimmel, Gabriel’s Wing: A Study into the Religious Ideas of Sir Muhammad Iqbal (Leiden: Brill, 1963), 89–90.
48.
Iqbal, Javid-Nama, 112, vv. 2738–2739.
49.
Iqbal, Javid-Nama, 113, vv. 2743–2744.
50.
Iqbal, Javid-Nama, 112, vv. 2708–2709, and 2719. See also Suleyman Bachir Diagne, Comment philosopher en Islam? (Paris: Philippe Rey—Jimsaan, 2014), 135; and Massimo Campanini, I giorni di Dio. Il viaggio e il tempo tra Occidente e Islam (Milan: Mimesis, 2019), 138–142.
51.
III: 52.
52.
Aleister Crowley, The Law Is For All, An Extended Commentary on the Book of the Law, ed. Israel Regardie (Phoenix: New Falcon Publications, 1993), 301–302.
53.
See Jan Assmann, Religio Duplex: How the Enlightenment Reinvented Egyptian Religion (Hoboken: John Wiley & Sons, 2014).
54.
Mark Sedgwick, Western Sufism. From the Abbasids to the New Age (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017), 98–101. See also John V. Tolan, Faces of Muhammad. Western Perceptions of the Prophet of Islam from the Middle Ages to Today (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2019), 150–154; and Humberto Garcia, Islam and the English Enlightenment, 1670–1840 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2012), 51–58.
55.
For an overview of the history of the OTO, see Marco Pasi, “Ordo Templi Orientis,” in: Wouter J. Hanegraaff et al. (eds.), Dictionary of Gnosis and Western Esotericism (Leiden: Brill, 2005), 898–906. For a more comprehensive study, focusing especially on the origins and early period, see Richard Kaczynski, Forgotten Templars: The Untold Origins of Ordo Templi Orientis (n.p., Printed for the author, 2012). Also useful, if often chaotic and biased in its treatment, is the vast amount of material on the history of the OTO published by Peter-R. König, whose most recent systematization can be found in Der O.T.O. Phänomen Reload, 3 vv. (Munich: Arbeitsgemeinschaft für Religions- und Weltanschauungsfragen, 2011).
56.
See Kaczynski, Forgotten Templars, 271–276.
57.
Kaczynski, Forgotten Templars, 119–172. On the history of the Egyptian rites, see Gérard Galtier, Maçonnerie Égyptienne Rose Croix et Néo-Chevalerie. Les Fils de Cagliostro (Monaco: Éditions du Rocher, 1989); and Serge Caillet, La franc-maçonnerie égyptienne de Memphis-Misraïm (Paris: Dervy, 2003).
58.
Kaczynski, Forgotten Templars, 271–272. See also Richard Kaczynski, “Continuing Knowledge from Generation unto Generation: The Social and Literary Background of Aleister Crowley’s Magick,” in Aleister Crowley, ed. Bogdan and Starr, 148–150.
59.
Crowley, The Confessions, 656.
60.
Crowley, The Confessions, 656.
61.
Kaczynski, “Continuing Knowledge,”152–156.
62.
For the text of the rituals, see Reuss and Crowley, O.T.O. Rituals; and Francis King, ed., The Secret Rituals of the O.T.O. (London: The C.W. Daniel Company, 1973). See also above, n. 44.
63.
On the neo-Templar tradition in Freemasonry and occultism, see René Le Forestier, La Franc-Maçonnerie templiëre et occultiste aux XVIIIe et XIXe siëcles, 2 vv. (Paris: La Table d’Émeraude 1987); Peter Partner, The Murdered Magicians: The Templars and their Myth (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982), 87–180; and Pierre Mollier, “Neo-Templar Traditions,” in Wouter J. Hanegraaff et al. (eds.), Dictionary of Gnosis and Western Esotericism (Leiden: Brill, 2005), 849–853.
64.
Partner, The Murdered Magicians, 34–35, 68, and 77–78.
65.
Partner, The Murdered Magicians. See also Zrinka Stahuljak, Pornographic Archaeology. Medicine, Medievalism, and the Invention of the French Nation (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013), 71–80.
66.
Aleister Crowley, “The Scorpion,” The Equinox I, no. 6 (September 1911): 67–107. See also Crowley, The Confessions, 656.
67.
Crowley, “The Scorpion,” 107.
68.
See also above n. 44. On the Hiramic legend, see Henrik Bogdan, “Freemasonry and Western Esotericism,” in Handbook of Freemasonry, ed. Henrik Bogdan and Jan A.M. Snoek (Leiden: Brill, 2014), 296–301; and Jan A.M. Snoek, “The Evolution of the Hiramic Legend in England and France,” Heredom 11 (2003): 11–53. Interestingly enough, the influential twentieth-century Sufi Idries Shah (1924–1996) also mentions an analogy between al-Hallaj and Hiram Abif, while discussing possible historical connections between Sufis, Templars, and Freemasons. See Idries Shah, The Sufis (London: The Octagon Press, 1999), 399. Shah may have been familiar with Crowley’s OTO rituals through his acquaintance with Gerald Gardner (1884–1964), the founder of Wicca (see Sedgwick, Western Sufism, 210). Gardner had met Crowley and had joined the OTO in the 1940s.
69.
See Patrick D. Bowen, “Abdullah Quilliam and the Rise of International Esoteric-Masonic Islamophilia,” in Jamie Gilham and Ron Geaves (eds), Victorian Muslim. Abdullah Quilliam and Islam in the West (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), 25–39. See also Patrick D. Bowen, A History of Conversion to Islamin the United States, Volume 1. White American Muslims before 1975 (Leiden: Brill, 2015), 115–138.
70.
Bowen, “Abdullah Quilliam and the Rise,” 27. See also Angel Millar, The Crescent and the Compass: Islam, Freemasonry, Esotericism, and Revolution in the Modern Age (n.p.: Numen Books, 2015), 65–76. Sedgwick, in his Western Sufism, does not mention Quilliam at all, which seems to confirm his irrelevance for the history of Sufism in the West.
71.
Bowen, “Abdullah Quilliam and the Rise,” 36–37. See also Crowley’s account of the events in [Aleister Crowley], “In memoriam—John Yarker,” The Equinox I, no. 10 (September 1913): xix–xxix.
72.
Bowen, “Abdullah Quilliam and the Rise,” 36.
73.
For an overview of OTO’s history after Crowley, see Marco Pasi, “Ordo Templi Orientis,” in Dictionary of Gnosis and Western Esotericism, ed. Wouter J. Hanegraaff et al., 905–906. On Crowley’s letters to McMurtry concerning the Caliphate, see “The Grady McMurtry Project,” https://blazingstar-oto.org/gradymcmurtry/letters/aleister-crowley-mcmurtry-correspondence/, accessed December 4, 2020. See also J. Edward Cornelius, “Letter Files,” http://www.cornelius93.com/Grady-LetterFiles-MainPage.html, accessed May 28, 2020.
74.
Some scholars have given attention to Crowley’s interest in Burton’s works and fascination for his persona. Some have done it while having Burton as the focus of their research, such as Colette Colligan; some others while focusing on Crowley, such as Alex Owen, Richard Kaczynski, and Massimo Introvigne. See Colligan, “‘ A Race of Born Pederasts:’ Sir Richard Burton, Homosexuality, and the Arabs,” Nineteenth-Century Contexts. 25, no. 1 (2003): 11–13; Ead., The Traffic in Obscenity from Byron to Beardsley: Sexuality and Exoticism in Nineteenth-Century Print Culture (Basingstoke: Springer, 2006): 85–86; Owen, The Place of Enchantment,189–190, and 203–206; Kaczynski, “Continuing Knowledge,” 152–156; and Introvigne, “The Beast and the Prophet. Aleister Crowley’s Fascination with Joseph Smith,” in Bogdan and Starr (eds.), Aleister Crowley, 267–268.
75.
Richard F. Burton, (ed.), The Kama Sutra of Vatsyayana (Benares: Kama Shastra Society, 1883); Richard F. Burton, ed., The Book of Thousand Nights and a Night (Benares: Printed by the Burton Club for Private Subscribers Only, 1885–1888, 16 vol).
76.
The critical bibliography on Burton, which includes at least a dozen biographies, is now very extensive. For my purpose here, I have particularly taken into account Dane Kennedy’s important study, The Highly Civilized Man: Richard Burton and the Victorian World (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2005); and Jean-François Gournay, “L’appel du Proche Orient. Richard Francis Burton et son temps 1821–1890” (PhD diss., Université de Paris IV, Lille, 1983). Both interpret Burton against the broad cultural and social context of his time.
77.
Just a couple of quotations from Crowley’s autobiography: “Burton was always my hero,” and “I went toward China … I was (after all) treading, though reverently and afar off, in the footsteps of my boyhood’s hero, Richard Francis Burton” (Crowley, The Confessions, 327 and 460). Under the pseudonym “Reverend P.D. Carey” Crowley wrote an essay on Burton, in which he expressed all his admiration for him. The text was apparently never published during Crowley’s lifetime and appeared for the first time in 2014: see Reverend P.D. Carey (Aleister Crowley), “Sir Richard Francis Burton,” in Mystery of Mystery: A Primer of Thelemic Ecclesiastical Gnosticism (Maple Grove: Ordo Templi Orientis USA, 2014), 252–258. The text is not dated, but was probably written in the period of the First World War, which Crowley spent in the United States. It is no coincidence that Reverend Carey is also one of the pseudonyms used by Crowley in his pornographic book The Scented Garden of Abdullah the Satirist of Shiraz (1910), strongly inspired by Burton and to which I will return.
78.
On Eckenstein, see Thomas S. Blakeney and D. F. O. Dangar, “Oscar Eckenstein, 1859–1921,” The Alpine Journal, 65 no. 300 (May 1960): 62–79; and John Gill, The Origins of Bouldering: An Informal Survey of Sport from the Late 1800s to the 1960s and Beyond (n.p.: J. Gill-Blurb, 2008), 9–28. Another indirect, but significant, connection between Crowley and Burton should be mentioned: Leonard Smithers, the publisher with whom Burton collaborated for his translations of a series of Latin erotic texts, the so-called Priapeia. Smithers later became the main publisher of the British Decadent movement and a close associate of figures such as Aubrey Beardsley and Arthur Symons. It is not surprising that Crowley, also close to the Decadent movement in his student years at Cambridge, turned to Smithers in order to have some of his poetical works published. See D. Kennedy, “Oriental Muck Heap,” 321; and James G. Nelson, Publisher to the Decadents: Leonard Smithers in the Careers of Beardsley, Wilde, and Dowson (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2000), passim.
79.
This is the Sir William Martin Conway’s Karakoram expedition of 1892. See Blakeney and Dangar, “Oscar Eckenstein, 1859–1921,” 64–65.
80.
See Nancy Charley, “Oscar Eckenstein and Richard Burton,” 29 July 2016. Text available online from the SAR website: http://royalasiaticsociety.org/oscar-eckenstein-and-richard-burton, accessed October 3, 2016.
81.
In the dedication, Burton is defined as “the perfect pioneer of spiritual and physical adventures” (Crowley, The Confessions, 27). Apart from Burton, Eckenstein, and Bennett, grouped together and referred to as “Three Immortal Memories,” the dedication also includes “Three Friends”: the mathematician J.W.N. Sullivan, the painter Augustus John, and the publisher P.R. Stephensen. Of these six, Burton is the only one Crowley never met personally. Also noteworthy is a passage in the Confessions where Crowley says that, when he left Cambridge University in 1898, “Sir Richard Burton was my hero and Eckenstein his modern representative” (ibid., 166).
82.
See O.T.O. (Aleister Crowley), “Liber XV,” 261.
83.
I draw attention to this aspect of Crowley’s work and personality in Pasi, Aleister Crowley, 24–25.
84.
For Burton as a “cultural crossdresser,” see Colette Colligan, “‘ Esoteric Pornography’: Sir Richard Burton’s Arabian Nights and the Origins of Pornography,” Victorian Review 28, no. 2 (2002): 53. In Crowley’s Confessions we find other anecdotes of cultural crossdressing with explicit reference to Burton, and also in relation to other religious contexts, such as Hinduism. See for instance the famous episode in which Crowley sat with only “a loincloth and a begging bowl” close to the famous temples of Madurai, in South India, in order to have access to their inner parts, normally forbidden to Europeans. He was eventually “allowed to enter some of the secret shrines,” where he sacrificed a goat to the goddess Bhavani (The Confessions, 254–255).
85.
Crowley, The Confessions, 388.
86.
Richard F. Burton, Personal Narrative of a Pilgrimage to Al-Madinah and Meccah (London: Tylston and Edwards, 1893), 5–6. See also Kennedy, The Highly Civilized Man, 70–72.
87.
Edward Lane, An Account of the Manners and Customs of the Modern Egyptians (London: C. Knight and Co., 1836). Lane is also the author, like Burton, of an English translation of the Arabian Nights.
88.
Another famous example of a “cultural crossdresser” in an Arab context, this time contemporary to Crowley, is that of T.E. Lawrence. This example is also mentioned by Owen, The Place of Enchantment, 204.
89.
See Said, Orientalism, 160–161.
90.
Crowley, The Confessions, 387. The talwar is a curved sword typical of the Indian Subcontinent.
91.
Crowley, The Confessions, 388.
92.
Crowley, The Confessions, 625–626. Significantly, Crowley mentions Burton a few lines before as an inspiration for his behavior on this occasion.
93.
Richard F. Burton (ed.), The Perfumed Garden of the Sheikh Nefzaoui. A Manual of Arabian Erotology (XVI. Century) (Benares: Kama Shastra Society, 1886); Burton, The Kama Sutra.
94.
See Hugh B. Urban, Magia Sexualis: Sex, Magic, and Liberation in Modern Western Esotericism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006).
95.
On this point, see also Marco Pasi, “But What Does Esotericism Have To Do With Sex?,” in Hermes Explains: Thirty Questions about Western Esotericism, ed. Wouter J. Hanegraaff, Peter J. Forshaw, and Marco Pasi (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2019), 207–215; Hendrik Bogdan, “Challenging the Morals of Western Society: The Use of Ritualized Sex in Contemporary Occultism,” The Pomegranate 8, no. 2 (2006): 211–246; and Hugh B. Urban, “The Beast with Two Backs. Aleister Crowley, Sex Magic and the Exhaustion of Modernity,” Nova Religio. The Journal of Alternative and Emergent Religions 7, no. 3 (2004): 7–25.
96.
See John Patrick Deveney, Paschal Beverly Randolph: A Nineteenth-Century Black American Spiritualist, Rosicrucian, and Sex Magician (Albany: University of New York Press, 1996), in particular ch. X, “The Coming of the Nusa’iri.”
97.
Ari Adut, “A Theory of Scandal: Victorians, Homosexuality, and the Fall of Oscar Wilde,” American Journal of Sociology 111, no. 1 (July 2005): 213–248.
98.
See Colligan, “A Race of Born Pederasts,” 85–86.
99.
It should be noted that the distinction between the Arab world and Islam is not always clear or reflected in this context.
100.
See Lawrence Sutin, Do What Thou Wilt: A Life of Aleister Crowley (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2000), 42–43, 128 and 183. See also Marco Pasi, “The Neverendingly Told Story: Recent Biographies of Aleister Crowley,” Aries. Journal for the Study of Western Esotericism 3, no. 2 (2003): 233.
101.
[Aleister Crowley], The Scented Garden of Abdullah the Satirist of Shiraz. Translated from a rare Indian Ms. by the Late Major Lutiy (London: Privately Printed, 1910). See the interesting analysis in Joseph Allen Boone, The Homoerotics of Orientalism (New York: Columbia University Press, 2014), 279–286. Crowley usually refers to this book with the title Bagh-i-Muattar, which is the transliteration of the Persian inscription appearing on the frontispiece. It has been reprinted in 1991 by Teitan Press (Chicago) with an introduction by Martin P. Starr.
102.
[Burton], The Perfumed Garden.
103.
It should be noted that this point, although quite obvious, has escaped some researchers, who have thought that Crowley’s book is a real translation of an original Persian text. See for instance Colligan, “A Race of Born Pederasts,” 11–12.
104.
See Kennedy, The Highly Civilized Man, 71. Burton continued to use the name as a pseudonym also after his trip to Mecca, for instance when writing letters to friends. In 1875 he would also organize weekly smoking parties in London known as “Haji Abdullah’s Divan” (ibid., 197). As we will see, Burton also uses a similar pseudonym, “Hājī Abdū El-Yezdi,” in his poem The Kasīdah (1880).
105.
See Dane Kennedy and Burke E. Casari, “Burnt Offerings: Isabel Burton and ‘The Scented Garden’ manuscript,” Journal of Victorian Culture 2, no. 2 (1997): 229–244.
106.
Richard F. Burton, “D. Pederasty,” in The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night 10 (Benares: Printed by the Kama-Shastra Society for Private Subscribers Only, 1885), 205–254. Note that the term “homosexuality” at the time had not gained wide currency yet, and that “pederasty” was a much more common term.
107.
See Stephen O. Murray, “Some Nineteenth-Century Reports of Islamic Homosexualities,” in Islamic Homosexualities. Culture, History, and Literature, ed. Stephen O. Murray and Will Roscoe (New York: New York University Press, 1997), 211–217.
108.
Crowley, The Confessions, 451–452. See also Boone, The Homoerotics of Orientalism, 283; and Millar, The Crescent and the Compass, 45–47.
109.
See Mandakini Dubey, “Esotericism and Orientalism: Nineteenth-Century Narrative Initiations” (PhD Diss. Duke University, 2003), 127–140. See 131 for the idea of a “sodomystical language” of Persian Sufi poetry that Western readers struggled to interpret and come to terms to.
110.
Kennedy, The Highly Civilized Man, 206–208.
111.
Peter van der Veer, Imperial Encounters. Religion and Modernity in India and Britain (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001), 83–96.
112.
Jeng-Guo S. Chen, “Gendering India: Effeminacy and the Scottish Enlightenment’s Debates over Virtue and Luxury,” The Eighteenth Century 51, no. 1–2 (Spring-Summer 2010): 193–201.
113.
Crowley, The Confessions, 540.
114.
Richard F. Burton, “Notes on Waitz’s Anthropology,” The Anthropological Review 2, no. 7 (November 1864): 248. See also Kennedy, The Highly Civilized Man, 80.
115.
Crowley, The Confessions, 388.
116.
On the Aissawa, see Mehdi Nabti, Les Aïssawa: Soufisme, musique et rituels de transe au Maroc (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2011).
117.
Crowley, The Confessions, 550–552.
118.
Crowley, The Confessions, 552.
119.
Crowley, The Confessions, 445.
120.
Crowley, The Confessions, 451.
121.
Richard F. Burton, The Kasīdah (couplets) of Hājī Abdū Al-Yazdi. A Lay of the Higher Law. Translated and Annotated by His Friend and Pupil, F. B. (London: H.J. Cook, 1900 or. ed.: 1880).
122.
On Burton’s use of the trope of the “pseudo-translator” of a literary work (while being the actual author), and with observations that could be easily applied also to Crowley’s Scented Garden, see Glyn Pursglove, “Fakery, Serious Fun, and Cultural Change: Some Motives of the Pseudo-Translator,” Herme¯neus. Revista de Traducción e Interpretación, 13 (2011): 1–16. See also Dubey, “Esotericism and Orientalism,” 109–113.
123.
For Crowley’s appreciation of The Kasīdah see Crowley, “Sir Richard Francis Burton.” It should be noted that Crowley also recommends its reading to aspirants of his occult order, the A∴A∴. See the “Curriculum of the A∴A∴” in: Crowley, Magick in Theory and Practice, 213.
124.
See Sedgwick, Western Sufism, 121–125.
125.
It should be noted that Burton claimed to have been initiated to Sufism and to have become a “Master-Sufi.” About this claim and more generally about his interest in Islam and Sufism, see Mary S. Lovell A Rage to Live. A Biography of Richard and Isabel Burton (London: Abacus, 2004), 84–86; and Kennedy, The Highly Civilized Man, 80–83.
126.
On the philosophical ideas expressed in The Kasīdah, see Kennedy, The Highly Civilized Man, 195–205; Dubey, “Esotericism and Orientalism,” 98–127; and Gournay, “L’appel du Proche Orient,” 407–447.
127.
Burton, The Kasīdah, 3.
128.
Burton, The Kasīdah, 8.
129.
Kennedy, The Highly Civilized Man, 200.
130.
Crowley, The Scented Garden, 13.
131.
Crowley, The Scented Garden, 13.
132.
Crowley, Magick Without Tears, 81.
133.
Burton, The Kasīdah, 18–19. This is also noted by Burton’s wife, Isabel, in her preface to the 1900 edition: “It is a poem of extraordinary power, on the Nature and Destiny of Man, anti-Christian and Pantheistic” (Isabel Burton, “Preface,” in The Kasīdah, ed. Burton, 4).
134.
See Sedgwick, Western Sufism, for examples of the Sufis being perceived as freethinkers (p. 111), pantheists (p. 131), and sodomites (p. 131). Sedgwick does not mention either Crowley or Burton in the book. Their ideas however clearly belong to the history of Western esoteric perceptions of Sufism.
135.
On Crowley and Guénon (and more generally Guénonian traditionalism), see Pasi, Aleister Crowley, 129–136.
136.
Mark Sedgwick, Against the Modern World. Traditionalism and the Secret Intellectual History of the Twentieth Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 74–80.
137.
Sedgwick, Western Sufism.
138.
Millar, The Crescent and the Compass.

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Marco Pasi

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Pasi, M. (2021). Aleister Crowley and Islam. In: Sedgwick, M., Piraino, F. (eds) Esoteric Transfers and Constructions. Palgrave Studies in New Religions and Alternative Spiritualities. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-61788-2_8

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