Tuesday, December 14, 2010

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.

7 comments:

  1. Oh please tell me this will be published before August! I have no idea how well-connected the University library I'm moving to will be.

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  2. It's December now! Yes, it's coming out at any minute now, any minute! I know, I can't wait either. It's at the printers apparently. I'm excited because it's my first peer reviewed academic article and it was *really difficult* to [re]write it according to the suggestions of the peer reviewers. It also helped me get to a harmonious place between my academic and practitioner selves. I'd been uncomfortable in that place before.

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  3. and they wonder why crowley arts are talk and no action...

    you will find that crowley stole, madeup, and created stories to try and get the occult, only to be a herion dealing slob in the end and get killed by the beast he created...

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  4. http://schoolofmastery.spruz.com

    if you care to see what he wish he knew...

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  5. Or, you could just read my article when it comes out and see what conclusions I come to about A.C.

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  6. Check this news piece out http://www.dailytelegraph.com.au/giants-carved-into-the-old-egyptian-mysteries/story-fn6ccwsa-1225975176378 ... I haven't a clue how to insert HTML code into the posts here, so am just providing the whole link.

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  7. Well... I just received the hard copy journal with my Crowley article in it, but the electronic version doesn't seem to be up yet. Plus there's a review of 'Ten Years of Triumph of the Moon' in there, and I have a chapter on Macgregor Mathers in that, although the reivewer didn't mention my chapter... does that mean he hates it? Oh, I'm so thin-skinned! Well, at least he didn't actually criticise it...I guess that's good....

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