Aleister Crowley lived in the midst of society-wide searching for metaphysical truths. In part this was a reaction against Materialism and the Mechanistic vision of reality promoted by Josephin Peladan and the people associated with his Rose + Croix Order, but also early studies in cultural anthropology that included a look at the living occult traditions being encountered in colonial territories in the Middle East and India which led to the realization that similar traditions had survived throughout Europe. This led to a spiritual syncretism that helped inspire the foundation of the Theosophical society as well as much of the study of Solar Phallicism and the ceremonial magick works composed by the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn. Much of the theology Crowley would construct as well as the rituals he scripted partook of multiple religio-cultural materials, blended together in attempt to reconstruct an ultimate central truth that had supposedly existed and then dis-integrated as disparate civilizations developed in NOrthern Africa, Mesopotamia, India, the Mediterranean basin and Eastern Europe.
The October 20 issue of the New Yorker includes an interesting piece about this period and the search for an ur-mythology, starting off with a look at George Eliot’s novel Middlemarch and its central character, Reverend Edward Casaubon (perhaps a reference to Meric Casaubon who published John Dee’s accounts of dealings with Enochian spirits back in the 17th century). An excerpt reads:
In the Victorian era, scholars like Max Müller and, later, James Frazer tried to systematize the world’s myths. Frazer’s “The Golden Bough” (1890), a sprawling, scandalous synthesis, plotted cultures on a trajectory from magic to religion and then to science, and argued that many myths and rites—including the pillars of Christianity—were the residue of primitive fertility cults and sacrificial kingship. It left its mark on everyone from William Butler Yeats to Jim Morrison, though its absence of rigor has not aged well. Decades later, Robert Graves’s “The White Goddess” (1948) enchanted a generation of poets and novelists with its vision of mythic unity; Joseph Campbell’s “The Hero with a Thousand Faces” (1949), a meandering treatise on the universality of the hero’s journey, inspired “Star Wars.” Meanwhile, Freudians and evolutionary psychologists trawled folktales for evidence to shore up their theories. “Stereotypical stories stay at home, archetypal stories travel,” Robert McKee declares in “Story” (1997), his classic screenwriting guide, keeping alive the hope that mythic comparison can be commercially, as well as intellectually, rewarding.
Read the whole piece:
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2025/10/20/review-the-roots-of-ancient-mythology-books
