Crowley and Thelema

Aleister Crowley received The Book of the Law in Cairo in April 1904 under the circumstances described in the tradition entry on Thelema. The text's central verses include "Every man and every woman is a star" (I:3), "Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law" (I:40), and "Love is the law, love under will" (I:57). The doctrinal upshot for Crowley was the rejection of the Christian sexual ethic that had underwritten nineteenth-century marriage law and public morals.

Crowley elaborated the sexual and gender doctrines of Thelema through his subsequent published corpus. The concept of the Scarlet Woman — the female counterpart of the Beast, holding an equal and complementary position in the operative work of Thelema — was, on its own doctrinal terms, an assertion of female sexual and spiritual sovereignty against the Victorian double standard. Crowley in his personal life was a serial exploiter of the women who took up the Scarlet Woman role in his working, and the biographical record documents this at length; the doctrinal position and the biographical practice diverged sharply.

The doctrinal position, taken on its own terms, contributed a specific and vocal rejection of Christian sexual restriction to the twentieth-century Western esoteric current. Crowley's Magick in Theory and Practice (1929), The Confessions of Aleister Crowley (1929), and The Book of Thoth (1944) restated the position in successively broader form. The Ordo Templi Orientis, from Crowley's reorganisation of it onward, took the Thelemic position as its doctrinal framework.

Whether Crowley claimed authorship of feminism specifically is a narrower question. Crowley claimed authorship of the coming aeon in its entirety — the Aeon of Horus, in Thelemic cosmology, is the historical epoch inaugurated by the 1904 reception of the Book of the Law and characterised by the dissolution of the received sexual and gender restrictions the twentieth-century women's movement pursued. Crowley did not distinguish the claim by movement; on the Thelemic reading the entire epochal transition was his announcement to make. The final sub-page of this tract returns to how far this Thelemic claim can, on the primary-source record, be extended to feminism specifically.