Tobias Churton

Aleister Crowley in America (eBook, ePUB)

Art, Espionage, and Sex Magick in the New World

• Format: ePub

Produktbeschreibung

An exploration of Crowley's relationship with the United States • Details Crowley's travels, passions, literary and artistic endeavors, sex magick, and psychedelic experimentation • Investigates Crowley's undercover intelligence adventures that actively promoted U.S. involvement in WWI • Includes an abundance of previously unpublished letters and diaries Occultist, magician, poet, painter, and writer Aleister Crowley's three sojourns in America sealed both his notoriety and his lasting influence. Using previously unpublished diaries and letters, Tobias Churton traces Crowley's extensive travels through America and his quest to implant a new magical and spiritual consciousness in the United States, while working to undermine Germany's propaganda campaign to keep the United States out of World War I. Masterfully recreating turn-of-the-century America in all its startling strangeness, Churton explains how Crowley arrived in New York amid dramatic circumstances in 1900. After other travels, in 1914 Crowley returned to the U.S. and stayed for five years: turbulent years that changed him, the world, and the face of occultism forever. Diving deeply into Crowley's 5-year stay, we meet artists, writers, spies, and government agents as we uncover Crowley's complex work for British and U.S. intelligence agencies. Exploring Crowley's involvement with the birth of the Greenwich Village radical art scene, we discover his relations with writers Sinclair Lewis and Theodore Dreiser and artists John Butler Yeats, Leon Engers Kennedy, and Robert Winthrop Chanler while living and lecturing on now-vanished "Genius Row." We experience his love affairs and share Crowley's hard times in New Orleans and his return to health, magical dynamism, and the most colorful sex life in America. We examine his controversial political stunts, his role in the sinking of the passenger ship Lusitania, his making of the "Elixir of Life" in 1915, his psychedelic experimentation, his prolific literary achievements, and his run-in with Detroit Freemasonry. We also witness Crowley's influence on Scientology founder L. Ron Hubbard and rocket fuel genius Jack Parsons. We learn why J. Edgar Hoover wouldn't let Crowley back in the country and why the FBI raided Crowley's organization in LA. Offering a 20th-century history of the occult movement in the United States, Churton shows how Crowley's U.S. visits laid the groundwork for the establishment of his syncretic "religion" of Thelema and the now flourishing OTO, as well as how Crowley's final wish was to have his ashes scattered in the Hamptons.

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Produktdetails

• Verlag: Simon + Schuster LLC
• Seitenzahl: 768
• Erscheinungstermin: 5. Dezember 2017
• Englisch
• ISBN-13: 9781620556313
• Artikelnr.: 50246373

Autorenporträt

Tobias Churton is Britain's leading scholar of Western Esotericism, a world authority on Gnosticism, Hermeticism, and Rosicrucianism. He is a filmmaker and the founding editor of the magazine Freemasonry Today. An Honorary Fellow of Exeter University, where he is faculty lecturer in Rosicrucianism and Freemasonry, he holds a master's degree in Theology from Brasenose College, Oxford, and created the award-winning documentary series and accompanying book The Gnostics, as well as several other films on Christian doctrine, mysticism, and magical folklore. The author of many books, including Gnostic Philosophy, The Invisible History of the Rosicrucians, and Aleister Crowley: The Beast in Berlin, he lives in England.

Inhaltsangabe

Preface and Acknowledgments
PART ONE
The Adventure
ONE
A Special Relationship
1898: A Diplomat Manqué
Recruited at Cambridge?
Crowley and the Carlists
Crowley and “MacGregor” Mathers
TWO
The Song of the Sea
THREE
Out of the Frying Pan, into New York
FOUR
The Eagle and the Snake: Mexico City The Two Republics
FIVE
Chevalier O’Rourke and The Mexican Herald
SIX
The Mother’s Tragedy Post Script: The Last Laugh
SEVEN
Return to New York 1906
EIGHT
Art in America John Quinn
PART TWO
The Furnace
NINE
1914
TEN
The Sinews of War Germans Come Shopping Meanwhile in London . . . Cap in
Hand, to the Savages for Cowries
ELEVEN
My Egg Was Addled What the Papers Said
TWELVE
Lower into the Water
THIRTEEN
The Magick of a New York Christmas: World War I Style John O’Hara Cosgrave,
Evangeline Adams, and Frank Crowninshield
FOURTEEN
Toward the Fatherland Into the Dark Lair Getting In with the Germans
Münsterberg
FIFTEEN
Getting Hotter Philadelphia: City of Brotherly Love The Lusitania
SIXTEEN
Jeanne The Statue of Liberty Stunt Normal Service Resumes
SEVENTEEN
The Wrong Thing at the Right Time
EIGHTEEN
The Way West Vancouver
NINETEEN
California Welcomes the World San Francisco Create in Me a Clean Beast, O
God
TWENTY
Replacement Therapy The Spying Game
TWENTY-ONE
The Owl and the Monkey Went to Sea Philadelphia The Elixir of Life
TWENTY-TWO
Aleister Crowley’s Psychedelic Summer Dr. Crowley the Night-Tripper Another
Crowley, Another Place The Book T The Ball of Fire Stauros Batrachou
TWENTY-THREE
Crowley on Christ Shaw Takes a Pasting
TWENTY-FOUR
Nothingness with Twinkles The Star Sponge Vision
TWENTY-FIVE
New Orleans--and Bust
TWENTY-SIX
The Butterfly Net
TWENTY-SEVEN
Suffer the Little Children The Affidavit
TWENTY-EIGHT
The International Secret Service Interview
TWENTY-NINE
Enter the Camel
THIRTY
It’s All in the Egg Amalantrah Enter Samuel Aiwaz Jacobs
THIRTY-ONE
Unholy Holiness at 64a West Ninth Street Meeting Leah Hirsig Eva Tanguay
THIRTY-TWO
Island The Redhead Strikes Visions The Blue Equinox
PART THREE
Escape
THIRTY-THREE
Genius Row Thelema in Detroit
THIRTY-FOUR
Summer in Montauk-- and a Thousand Years Ago
THIRTY-FIVE
End Game
THIRTY-SIX
Legacy
The O.T.O. in America
The Church of Thelema
Jack Parsons: Rocket Man
L. Ron Hubbard
Whatever Happened to the Beast in America?
EK-STASIS
APPENDIX ONE (Simeon) Leon Engers (Kennedy)
(1891–1970) by Frank van Lamoen, Assistant Curator, Stedelijk Museum,
Amsterdam
APPENDIX TWO Sale Catalog from the Auction of the John Quinn Collection
A Note by John Quinn
Aleister Crowley
Notes
Bibliography
Index