Aleister Crowley - Fundamentalist

[aish_mlchmh]

During a recent conversation, a friend of mine identified himself unabashedly as a "fundamentalist" and admittedly, there have been occasions when I've been labeled this as well. Not surprisingly, this term has been lobbied about by detractors and has even been embraced in part for this reason. One could always read "fundament" or the ninth

Comments

clumsy comparison

[paradoxosalpha]

I don't think that Crowley (a man whose life is exhaustively documented with historical precision, and whose writings were intended to promote a fairly coherent agenda) and the Bible (a book made up of heterogeneous texts of uncertain provenance with a common cultural heritage) make for neat comparison to one another.

Biblical inerrantists (or "literalists") insist that "divine inspiration" unifies the body of their texts, composed over multiple centuries and different continents by writers of diverse languages. No such hypothesis is required in order to understand the coherence of Crowley's varied writings. There is no god but man.

Biblical inerrantists hold that the Bible provides an infallible set of descriptions and prescriptions. Crowley himself advises aspirants to be wary of many of his descriptions, but offers (nay, insists upon) his prescriptions as the means by which each may arrive at effective descriptions within his or her own work.

Crowley provided elaborate editorial indices and commentaries on his own writings in order to clarify their intent and provenance, which is sometimes quite limited in scope. For example, technical instructions are commonly addressed to a particular grade of attainment, and works of fiction are clearly labeled as such. The Bible affords no such comforts, their lack often being supplied--especially in the case of those "fundamentalists" for whom Biblical texts are supposed to be self-explanatory--by the prejudices, presuppositions, and mental inertia of readers.

Comparing the Bible to the Book of the Law might be more instructive. At least in that case we are looking at sacred scripture v. sacred scripture. But the contrasts will still be vivid.