Aleister Crowley - The Best of the Equinox, Sex Magick: Volume III

This edition first published in 2013 by Weiser Books

Red Wheel/Weiser, LLC

With offices at:

665 Third Street, Suite 400

San Francisco, CA 94107

www.redwheelweiser.com

Copyright 2013 Red Wheel/Weiser.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from Red Wheel/Weiser, LLC. Reviewers may quote brief passages.

The right of Aleister Crowley to be identified as the author of this work is asserted.

Aleister Crowley material copyright 1912 Ordo Templi Orientis. All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-1-57863-571-9

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available upon request.

Cover design by Jim Warner

Cover photograph Ordo Templi Orientis. Used by permission.

Interior by Frame25 Productions

Printed in the United States of America

EBM

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information SciencesPermanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials Z39.48-1992 (R1997).

www.redwheelweiser.com

www.redwheelweiser.com/newsletter

For I am divided for love's sake, for the chance of union. This is the creation of the world, that the pain of division is as nothing, and the joy of dissolution all.

Liber AL vel Legis, I, 29 & 30.

Also, take your fill and will of love as ye will, when, where and with whom ye will! But always unto me.

Liber AL vel Legis, I, 51.

When you have proved that God is merely a name for the sex instinct, it appears to me not far to the perception that the sex instinct is God.

Aleister Crowley The Equinox III: 1.

I n June of 1912 a thirty-four-year-old Aleister Crowley received a strange and colorful visitor to his London flat at 124 Victoria Street. The mysterious caller was Herr Theodor Reuss, agent of the Prussian Secret Service, Wagnerian opera singer, newspaper correspondent, high degree Freemason, and head of Ordo Templi Orientis, a German magical society with Rosicrucian and Masonic pretentions. Two years earlier Reuss had presented Crowley with honorary membership in the O.T.O., presumably in hopes it would bolster Crowley's esoteric credentials in a lawsuit that had been filed against him by S. L. MacGregor Mathers, the head of the London-based Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn.

Mathers had sued to prevent Crowley from publishing proprietary initiation rituals and teachings of the G.D. in his publication, The Equinox. In the suit, Mathers was claiming to be the worldwide head of the Rosicrucians, an act of spiritual presumption which outraged Reuss and the leaders of a score of other existing European Hermetic and Rosicrucian societies. In an attempt to dilute Mathers' credentials in the eyes of the court these organizations lavished a host of honorary degrees and titles upon Crowleyso many that he completely lost track of his various memberships, degrees and mystic titles. Crowley eventually won the suit and published The Equinox.

The purpose of the June, 1912 visit from Reuss, however, was not to discuss the lawsuit or Golden Dawn matters, but to take Crowley to task for publishing the O.T.O.'s supreme secret of sexual magick. Crowley protested that he had done no such thing, and that in fact, he didn't even know the secret and was completely unaware that the O.T.O. had anything to do with sex magick.

Reuss stepped to Crowley's own bookshelf and plucked out a copy of Liber CCCXXXIII: The Book of Lies and opened it to chapter 36, The Star Sapphire, a short version of the Hexagram Ritual.

Crowley did not immediately understand exactly how the contents of this tiny chapter could possibly reveal the supreme secret of sexual magick, so Ruess patiently discussed what he had written vis a vis certain theoretical and aspects of magick. He led the discussion in such a way that Crowley experienced an almost instant epiphany. He was stunned. Since childhood he had intuited the importance and the potential power of sex. But here, in the most profound and simple terms, was the key not only to the mythological symbolism of the ancients, of Christianity and Freemasonry, but (theoretically at least) the key to the mysteries of human consciousness and creation itself.

Before the afternoon had passed, Ruess had conferred upon Crowley (and his lover, Leila Waddell) the highest initiatory degree of the O.T.O., the IX, and obligated them to the discretionary terms of its communication. This oath of secrecy is a somewhat paradoxical obligation. Rather than being an oath not to reveal the secret to the world, it is rather more a promise to perpetuate the secret, to assure that it is protected, preserved, and never profaned, diluted, corrupted or lost.

One doesn't learn a true magical secret like one learns a juicy piece of gossip. A true magical secret is a light bulb that goes off over your own head when you finally get something. In other words, the IX initiate of the O.T.O. is not obligated to conceal the secret but on the contrary, obligated to make sure as many worthy individuals as possible discover the secret by discerning it themselves.

Crowley took this obligation very seriously, and his writings on this particular subject (as we will see in this Best of the Equinox volume on Sex Magick) can be very difficult to understand. They are full of strange, sometimes disturbing and confusing symbolic language that Crowley believed clearly revealed everything there was to reveal to anyone ready to have everything revealed to them.

I must confess, this is not easy. But it is a magical labor well worth the effort, because the reward is nothing less than the Holy Grail itself.

After bestowing the IX on Crowley and Leila, Ruess also authorized Crowley to create and head a British chapter of O.T.O. and directed him to expand and develop the organization's rituals of initiation into workable and viable magical ceremonies. From that moment until the end of his life in 1947 sex magick would be the focus of Aleister Crowley's magical work.

Unfortunately, the term, sex magick, has a somewhat lurid ring to it. It brings to mind visions of costumed orgies and pornographic acts of dramatic depravity. Crowley's outrageous and eccentric lifestyle and reputation did little to assuage public perceptions about the naughtiness of anything he might be involved in. It's true, he enjoyed shocking anyone who was easy to shock. To the disappointment of many would-be magicians, however, sex magick is a demanding physical and meditative yogic discipline of the highest order. The underlying theory of the technique is as challenging to the imagination as the postulates of quantum mechanics. Yet the fundamental key to sex magick is breathtakingly simple, and can be summarized in the single word ecstasy the divine consciousness we all experience whenever we temporarily obliterate our sense of separateness from Godhead in timeless moments of orgasm. In that eternal instant the self becomes the All and when we are the All... there is nothing we cannot create.

Modern students of Crowley are further challenged by the terminology he was obliged to use in order to camouflage a direct discussion of the subject. Such obfuscation was necessary not only because of Crowley's O.T.O. obligations, but also because of serious concerns of legality. We must recall that it wasn't so very long ago that one could not legally publish material concerning sexual matters. Even medical journals needed to be very careful about how the subject was approached in print. Ironically, discussions of human/blood sacrifice were not taboo subjects to write about. Crowley was fiendishly delighted to play this game of words with the publishing world and the public. Not to be dissuaded, he simply drew upon his mastery of language and his knowledge of the colorful metaphors of magick to be as shockingly explicit as he wanted. He (sometimes unwisely) assumed any moderately intelligent person would know what he was really saying.