Farewell to the Abbey: Crowley, Thelema, and Failed Enlightenment

In a subtle aside, Sam Quill from the Times Literary Supplement hints that, under different stars, Crowley might have remained cloistered in his own eccentric cosmos rather than bidding farewell to his Sicilian Abbey of Thelema—a moment that reads like a Platonic metaphor for failed enlightenment:

The Lady and the Beast sets Crowley and his pseudo-system in conversation with a brilliant contemporary. He relied on such people all his life. He is neither a great enough mind nor a sufficiently talented artist to warrant much posthumous attention in isolation. In doing justice to Harris, Whithouse gives us Crowley, too, as we should know him: a brilliant pervert, drawing lewd, irresistible sigils in an oil slick as the figurative boat carrying his style of Edwardian bohemian founders in the Strait of Messina, waving goodbye to his Sicilian Abbey of Thelema.

If The Lady and the Beast reads a bit too much like the PhD thesis from which it is explicitly derived, Whitehouse’s scholarship is nonetheless its great virtue. Harris emerges as the “magical pupil” of a strange, broken man; under different stars, she might have eclipsed him. Whitehouse is a profoundly knowledgeable scholar of the occult, and guides her initiates, with neither pretension nor condescension, through its manifold and viperish complexities.

Quill, Sam. “Magick, Art and Tarot.” The Times Literary Supplement, May 31, 2024. https://www.the-tls.co.uk/religion/religious-culture/the-lady-and-the-beast-deja-whitehouse-book-review-sam-quill.