Aleister Crowley and the Temptation of Politics by Marco Pasi (review)

Aleister Crowley and the Temptation of Politics, as its author Marco Pasi clarifies in the “Foreword,” is the third incarnation of a book originally published in Italian (1999), and subsequently translated into German (2006). It was then, as it still is, a pioneering work in that it set out to provide a scholarly account of Aleister Crowley “not as an eccentric adventurer or even a malicious fraud, but as an intellectual and ideologist, who belonged to a particular cultural climate and had to be understood on the basis of the education he received, the ideas that influenced him, and the persons he frequented during his life” (ix). Thus, while deciding to focus on Crowley’s intellectual legacy, Pasi rooted his methodology in a sound historical scholarship, which, among other things, is intended to demonstrate that Crowley remains a figure that “can be adequately understood only when placed within the historical context in which his intellectual education took place, and in which his proposed religion [of Thelema] was developed” (140).

Pasi succeeds admirably in his task, precisely because he manages to explore and elucidate in a well-documented and detailed manner the ideas, events, and interpersonal relationships that influenced Crowley’s political thinking. To a certain degree, it is not immediately clear why the book focuses on the issue of politics, since Crowley is principally known as a writer on esoteric subjects and as the instigator of a new religious movement, Thelema. Here again, Pasi’s insistence on the importance of the historical context provides an elucidation for his choice of theme: Crowley lived and wrote during some of the most significant political events of the twentieth century, including the Russian communist revolution and the emergence of fascist and Nazi ideologies and regimes in Europe. In addition, his acquaintances, colleagues, and in some cases disciples also played prominent roles in the political and social upheavals of the time; Pasi devotes significant space to the discussion of Crowley’s liaisons with Major-General J. F. C. Fuller, Tom Driberg, Walter Duranty, Gerald Hamilton, and Maxwell Knight. Crowley’s relationship with the Portuguese poet Fernando Pesoa, who was intimately involved in the exploration of both esoteric and political subjects, is given an entire, and arguably the most interesting, chapter of the book. Given the scope and focus of the study, Aleister Crowley and the Temptation of Politics is of great importance not only to those interested in Crowley’s life and ideas but equally to all who want better to understand the interpenetration of esoteric theories and social issues in the first half of the twentieth century.

Pasi characterizes Crowley’s personal evolution as divided into two major phases: “If in the first phase he conceived his interest in politics in an essentially romantic fashion, in the second phase he became a pragmatist, ready to sympathize with any political movement that might, in his view, help him to propagate the religion of Thelema” (27). The latter attitude suggests that Crowley’s “temptations” and flirtations with various political factions and movements do not necessarily reflect his personal convictions, as his principal interest was in spreading the message of Thelema, and he understood any means of doing so as justified by that goal. This implies that Crowley was essentially a religious pioneer who was experimenting with various possibilities for implementing his spiritual vision. This experimental attitude, understandably enough, often led to contradictory positions, perhaps best exemplified by his interest in developing a relationship with both communist Russia and prewar Nazi Germany—among others—and by his depiction of Thelema as “aristocratic communism” (50). But Pasi is careful enough to observe that while on the one hand, “Crowley lived the contradictions of his time to the fullest” (24), implying the lack of coherence in his political convictions, on the other, there was also a deeper ideological reason for this attitude. Crowley believed that one needed to transcend...