Description
Aleister Crowley
Thelema Publications, California, 1974. Hardcover. Facsimile of 1914 original. Absolutely beautiful Fine copy sure to delight any collector. Comes with mylar protective sleeve.
“As the new century unfolded, Crowley began to combine the conceptual lexicon of magic with insights gleaned from developments in the study of the mind. It seems likely that he had discovered Freud by the time he wrote “The Soul of the Desert” in 1914, in which he refers, as we have seenm to the unmasking of the “Ego”. Although this is not conclusive evidence that he understood “Ego” in the strictly Freudian sense – the term was adopted in translations of Freud but had been used for almost a century to connote the conscious subject and was common currency among occultists – it is the case that by 1914 Freud’s ideas had been circulating in England for several years. At any rate, in “The Soul of the Desert”, Crowley clearly conceptualizes the Ego as the “I” (Freud’s original “das Ich”), which speaks in the name of Aleister Crowley and suggests that this “I” is the tip of the iceberg. By the 1920s, Crowley was using key psychoanalytic concepts and acknowledging that Freudian theory offers confirmation of some of the critical insights of magical practice. Psychoanalysis in no way undermined the credibility of magical practice for Crowley or other similarly minded magicians. It merely presents a different narrative….” – The Place of Enchantment: British Occultism and the Culture of the Modern, by Alex Owen
