Walk Like an Egyptian

My article, Walk Like An Egyptian: Egypt as Authority in Aleister Crowley's Reception of The Book of the Law, has been accepted by The Pomegranate: International Journal of Pagan Studies and is currently in press and due out very soon. The reference is The Pomegranate 12.2 (2010) pp. 20-47. I will link to the journal issue as soon as it appears on the web and if you want to access the article you'll need either a subscription to the journal, to pay for access to the article, or academic library access or a friend with academic library access (which means it'll be free). Meanwhile I'll post the abstract here: This article investigates the story of Aleister Crowley's reception of The Book of the Law in Cairo, Egypt, in 1904, focusing on the question of why it occurred in Egypt. The article contends that Crowley created this foundation narrative, which involved specifically incorporating an Egyptian antiquity from a museum, the 'Stele of Revealing', in Egypt because he was working within a conceptual structure that privileged Egypt as a source of Hermetic authority. Crowley synthesized the romantic and scholarly constructions of Egypt, inherited from the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, as well as the uses that two prominent members of the order made of Egyptological collections within museums. The article concludes that these provided Crowley with both a conceptual structure within which to legitimise his reformation of Golden Dawn ritual and cosmology, and a model of how to do so.