Matthew Fletcher

The year is 1923, the place, Paris. The English magician Aleister Crowley has concocted a money-making scheme involving ceremonial magic, a spirit conjured from the seventeenth-century grimoire, The Lesser Key of Solomon, and what appears to be a two-way radio set up. The focal point of the ritual is to be a brazen head into which Crowley has previously conjured a goetic spirit, with the purpose of having the head speak oracular wisdom to supplicants, facilitated by the latest in wireless technology – once the latter have made the necessary oblations and (monetary) offerings.

As a microcosm of Crowley’s engagement with science, the above ritual – an almost modernist take on the classic story of Roger Bacon and the Brazen Head – captures several broad themes in Crowley’s approach to ritual magic, including the importance of taxonomy, the re-conceptualizing of the process of initiation, and the re-envisioning of ceremonial magic ritual as experimental.

I examine Crowley’s engagement with Victorian science in constructing the modernising system of Scientific Illuminism, as encapsulated in his Golden Dawn successor order, the A.A. Building on recent scholarship, I argue that Crowley’s approach was emphatically not a simple usage of scientific terminology as a legitimatizing strategy but rather a genuine attempt to incorporate scientific methodology into occultist practice. However, I also problematize Crowley’s engagement with science, examining how the uneasy alliance he struck between empiricism and revelation led to the construction of innovative ritual forms, notably incorporating significant inversions of ‘traditional’ practice. In so doing, I also contest certain normative judgements that have leached into scholarship with regard to Crowley’s approach to ritual magic.

Matthew Fletcher is a doctoral student at the University of Bristol, currently working towards a PhD in History under Ronald Hutton. His thesis explores developments in ritual magic in England post Golden Dawn. He is a graduate of the University of St Andrews, with a first class honours degree in English Literature and German. He has published in Aries (‘The Cardinal Importance of Names: Aleister Crowley and the Creation of a Tarot for the New Aeon’/2020) and in Magic, Ritual, and Witchcraft (‘Inventing a Modern Ritual Magic Text: Assembling and (Dis)Assembling Liber Israfel’/2022). His essay ‘Reviving Ancient Ritual: Florence Farr’s Egyptianising Rites and the Invention of a New Type of Magic’ is forthcoming in Pomegranate.