Gnostic poet, painter, writer, and magician Aleister Crowley arrived in Berlin on April 18, 1930. As prophet of his syncretic religion "Thelema," he wanted to be among the leaders of art and thought, and Berlin, the liberated future-gazing metropolis, wanted him. There he would live, until his hurried departure on June 22, 1932, as Hitler was rapidly rising to power and the black curtain of intolerance came down upon the city. Known to his friends affectionately as "The Beast," Crowley saw the closing lights of Berlin's artistic renaissance of the Weimar period when Berlin played host to many of the world's most outstanding artists, writers, filmmakers, performers, composers, architects, philosophers, and scientists, including Albert Einstein, Bertolt Brecht, Ethel Mannin, Otto Dix, Aldous Huxley, Jean Ross, Christopher Isherwood, and many other luminaries of a glittering world soon to be trampled into the mud by the global bloodbath of World War II.
Drawing on previously unpublished letters and diary material by Crowley, Tobias Churton examines Crowley's years in Berlin and his intense focus on his art, his work as a spy for British Intelligence, his colorful love life and sex magick exploits, and his contacts with German Theosophy, Freemasonry, and magical orders. He recounts the fates of Crowley's colleagues under the Nazis as well as what happened to Crowley's lost art exhibition--six crates of paintings left behind in Germany as the Gestapo was closing in. Revealing the real Crowley long hidden from the historical record, Churton presents "the Beast" anew in all his ambiguous and, for some, terrifying glory, at a blazing, seminal moment in the history of the world.
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Discover the esoteric writings of occultist and poet William Butler Yeats, in a new collection of his lesser-known magical essays W. B. Yeats is celebrated globally for his contributions to poetry and Irish nationalism. However, his engagement with the occult circles of
the late 19th and early 20th centuries have passed largely unappreciated. A member of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, and later drafting his own system for a Celtic magical order, Yeats wrote prolifically on magical philosophy, mystical symbolism, and the
occult experience.
In this new anthology, John Michael Greer presents six of Yeats’ occult writings that have the most to offer the operative mage. From an analysis of the Golden Dawn System, to an investigation of the relationship between folklore and the paranormal experience to occult
philosophy, to an outline of Yeats’ own proposed magical order (The Castle of Heroes) that draws on the symbolism of nature, this collection is a much-needed addition to the occult canon. It concludes with Yeats’ most famous work of esoteric writing, the complete text of the original 1925 edition of A Vision. Written in a series of automatic writing sessions with his wife, Georgie Hyde-Lees, this revolutionary essay delves into innovative system that explores human personality, occult philosophy, cycles of history, the afterlife, and the symbolic structures from which all four arise and interleaf.
Other essays included are Magic; Witches and Wizards and Irish Folk- Lore; Swedenborg, Mediums, and the Desolate Places; Per Amica Silenta Lunae; and Hodos Camelionis.
Edited and annotated, and complete with a new introduction by John Michael Greer, The Magical Writings of W.B. Yeats preserves vital knowledge from the esoteric tradition, and offers the modern magician fresh guidance and perspective from one of the most important occultists of the last century.