An Interview into the Mind of Alistair Crowley

Like him, hate him, who is he.

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I learned so many new things about Crowley in this interview! :astonished: For example, I didn’t know that he was very fluid with his gender and would go by Alice and she/her pronouns sometimes. Thanks for sharing this, Tracy!

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Wow… Ivy came up a great interview. She has skills. I didn’t know much about Crowly and I learned a lot from just the interview. Dr. Kaczynski was a terrific interviewee. Thanks for linking it.

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@MeganB @dan3 My pleasure :grin:

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So… not knowing much about Alistair (aka Alice) Crowley, I looked just a bit more. The Wiki page for him is quite big and goes over the highlights of his publishing and physical life. I was doing mental double takes while reading it. The article wasn’t overtly critical but wow…

I was left with more questions. He is considered a forerunner of Chaos and his books and beliefs are often cited. However, what he did was almost sociopathic and maybe hedonistic in so many ways - yet he had a charismatic gift that persuaded many to follow him.

When I introduce myself, I say I am using Chaos as an umbrella for studying belief systems… and that meshes with many things Alistair did in a wildly more advanced way than me. However, I am used to looking back at forerunners of a field as big personalities that I want to use as a basis for my own thoughts… “standing on the shoulders of giants” is very descriptive for me. That is hard to do with Alistair. By the end of his life, he seemed to have more failures than successes.

I know many identify with Chaos… identify more than I do at this stage. How do those people weave Crowly into their beliefs? (I hope that isn’t too nebulous… looking at it after I wrote it seems to make it so)

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I personally don’t refer to Crowley at all. I work chaos Magick because I work with a chaos deity/energy so it’s the energy that I live in, work in and am surrounded by - it’s what it is to be a Lokean. That doesn’t mean my life’s an utter wreck ( although others may think so :rofl:), it just means I embrace change as normal, free and intuitive magic, not using correspondences or moon cycles and then sometimes, in true chaos tradition, breaking all of the above and following formats, being organised, using correspondences etc :crazy_face:

As far as Crowley is concerned, I respect his role in progressing the craft but I don’t resonate with him, and I don’t think he resonates with the Norse practice as a whole. Chaos in the Norse practice is linked with the deities of chaos not so much the principles of chaos Magick per se.

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