Aleister Crowley Read Online Free PDF

imagines he has become the particular god he wants to invoke by visualizing his form enveloping his own. Mathers’s habit of photographing himself in fancy dress can be seen as a less magical version of this, as Crowley’s early playacting can be seen as a preparation for it.
    It would be easy to dismiss Mathers as a deluded fantasist, but like Crowley, Mathers had some natural talent for magic. Yeats recountshow Mathers handed him cards with Hindu
tattwa
symbols on them, representing the five elements—fire, water, air, earth, and spirit—used in Golden Dawn training, and told him to press them against his forehead. When Yeats did, images came to him involuntarily, each one appropriate for each symbol. The fire symbol, a red triangle, raised a vision of a black giant rising up out of ruins in a desert. Mathers told him it was a being of the order of salamanders, whose element is fire. Yeats later wondered if telepathy might account for this, but ruled this out when he discovered that if he gave someone the wrong card—say water, a silver crescent, instead of air, a blue circle—they nevertheless received the correct vision for that card. The symbols themselves seem to possess some power, and in his essay “The Trembling of the Veil,” Yeats wrote that it was through Mathers that he was convinced that “images well up before the mind’s eyes from a deeper source than conscious or subconscious memory,” a remarkable anticipation of Jung’s notion of the “collective unconscious.” At a session with Mathers and Moina, Yeats discovered that he would visualize what Moina would describe even before she began to describe it. Somehow they had entered a kind of group or shared mind or, more magically, a section of the astral plane.
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    C ROWLEY , TOO , felt like a walking flame at times, or at least wanted to. As in the case of Eckenstein, he saw in Mathers another father figure. There were strong similarities between them. Aside from being fantasists, they both had athletic physiques. Yeats tells the story of how a boxing partner of Mathers’s was surprised that he could knock him down, even though Mathers was the larger man; he later discovered that Mathers, perpetually in poverty, was starvingat the time. Both were unwilling or unable to brook any criticism. Both sought power and control. Both had paranoid suspicions about the people around them and often bit the hand that fed—indeed, they often made a banquet of it. In Paris, around the time of Crowley’s initiation, Mathers had begun performing public rituals of Egyptian Masses celebrating Isis that he had discovered in his researches. Moina acted as the high priestess and the performances were a success, at least according to the
L’Écho du merveilleux
, which reviewed them. In 1910, Crowley, we shall see, did the same in London.
    The Golden Dawn membership was arranged hierarchically, with ten levels in all, grouped in three sections. This arrangement paralleled that of the Kabbalistic Tree of Life. Although it was called a hermetic order, and included many Egyptian and Rosicrucian motifs, much of the Golden Dawn’s teaching related to Kabbalah, the ancient Jewish mystical tradition. Crowley’s own metaphysical system is Egyptian through and through, but Crowley’s own thinking was well suited to the meticulous classifications peculiar to Kabbalah. This can be seen in his early Kabbalistic work
777
, a kind of Linnean filing system of magic, mapping out the correspondences between numbers, the Hebrew alphabet, the Tree of Life, gods, colors, perfumes, stones, planets, astrological signs, demons, and much else. In Kabbalah, existence is arranged in a descending scale, from the purest spiritual manifestation to the rock-solid earth. This scale is depicted as a kind of metaphysical tree, and its branches contain “vessels,” or
sephiroth
, designed to hold the spiritual energies at work in creation. Starting out from a nonmanifest source, the
Ain Soph