Guido Nerger
Free University of Berlin
Dionysus and the Beast: Aleister Crowley’s Dionysian Ecstasies
and Magical Frenzies
Within modern English literature, just as within the Victorian society at all, the poet Edward Alexander
‘Aleister’ Crowley (1875–1947), with his modernist and therefore overall poetological imagination of
‘magic’ in the name of the ancient Greek god of ecstasy, Dionysus, took on the role of an agent
provocateur. Crowley, who referred to himself as Τὸ Μέγα Θηρίον or “The Great Beast 666”, through
his aggressive agency in the context of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn as an entrepreneur
of transgression and as an antagonist of the Irish writer William Butler Yeats (1865–1939), not only
earned early fame as an rebellious outsider, but by his writings, and not least his excessive lifestyle,
he became one of the most notorious figures of heterodox religious and so-called ‘magical’ aspirations
in the twentieth century. At least by the 1960s, he was to become the role model of the counterculture
in general, of sexual liberation in particular, and of many other imaginable forms of radical
transgressions of moralities par excellence. In Crowley’s ‘magical’ quasi-religious system of θέλημα,
which he developed in his first major work The Book of the Law (1909) and which forms the basis for
the neo-religious movement called Church of Thelema, the god Dionysus occupies a central position.
Referring to Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900), Crowley saw the god Dionysus mutatis mutandis as the
actual Christ, who could be ritually or ‘magically’ invoked by the “method of Dionysus”: With the help
of self-transforming ecstasies and provocations (such as through the use of intoxicants and diverse
sexual practices) the adept of Thelema is to be placed in states that unravel his “higher-self”. The
paper shall emphasize Crowley’s modern ritualized evocation of the god Dionysus (or of Nietzsche’s
“Dionysisches”) by asking how and wherefore Crowley uses the god Dionysus in his imagination of
‘magic’. Therefore, passages will be presented and discussed from The Book of the Law, the Book
Orpheus. A Lyrical Legend (1905) and from the essay “Energized Enthusiasm. A Note on Theurgy”
(1913).
Dionysus and the Beast: Aleister Crowley’s Dionysian Ecstasies and Magical Frenzies
Within modern English literature, just as within the Victorian society at all, the poet Edward Alexander ‘Aleister’ Crowley (1875–1947), with his modernist and therefore overall poetological imagination of ‘magic’ in the name of the ancient Greek god of ecstasy, Dionysus, took on the role of an agent provocateur. Crowley, who referred to himself as Τὸ Μέγα Θηρίον or “The Great Beast 666”, through his aggressive agency in the context of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn as an entrepreneur of transgression and as an antagonist of the Irish writer William Butler Yeats (1865–1939), not only earned early fame as an rebellious outsider, but by his writings, and not least his excessive lifestyle, he became one of the most notorious figures of heterodox religious and so-called ‘magical’ aspirations in the twentieth century. At least by the 1960s, he was to become the role model of the counterculture in general, of sexual liberation in particular, and of many other imaginable forms of radical transgressions of moralities par excellence. In Crowley’s ‘magical’ quasi-religious system of θέλημα, which he developed in his first major work The Book of the Law (1909) and which forms the basis for the neo-religious movement called Church of Thelema, the god Dionysus occupies a central position. Referring to Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900), Crowley saw the god Dionysus mutatis mutandis as the actual Christ, who could be ritually or ‘magically’ invoked by the “method of Dionysus”: With the help of self-transforming ecstasies and provocations (such as through the use of intoxicants and diverse sexual practices) the adept of Thelema is to be placed in states that unravel his “higher-self”. The paper shall emphasize Crowley’s modern ritualized evocation of the god Dionysus (or of Nietzsche’s “Dionysisches”) by asking how and wherefore Crowley uses the god Dionysus in his imagination of ‘magic’. Therefore, passages will be presented and discussed from The Book of the Law, the Book Orpheus. A Lyrical Legend (1905) and from the essay “Energized Enthusiasm. A Note on Theurgy” (1913).