Aleister Crowley and the Hidden God

by

Kenneth Grant

Aleister Crowley vowed to free man from bondage by showing him how to invoke his latent genius ─ the Hidden God. It is characteristic of Crowley that to this end he utilised the mysterious energies of sex: the most potent, most obsessive of man’s illusions which, if used unintelligently, strengthens the false sense of individual existence that divorces him from the fullness of cosmic consciousness.

Aleister Crowley and the Hidden God is an exhaustive and critical study of Crowley’s system of sexual magick and the strange rites which he practised and advocated for the purpose of promoting the Law of Freedom with its formula of “Love under Will”. The book reveals the occult workings of the Fire Snake or Kundalini-Goddess, the cosmic power in man which, when awakened by magical means, assumes an external form identified by Crowley as the Scarlet Woman, she who influences the secret power-zones in the body of man and invokes the Hidden God.

Here Kenneth Grant also describes a method of dream control involving the use of the Ophidian Current transmitted by Crowley, Spare, Fortune, Grosche, and others. Its object is to establish contact with extra-terrestrial and non-human beings with the ultimate purpose of transcending the limitations of personality and of realising cosmic consciousness, thus fulfilling the magical formula of the New Aeon.

Aleister Crowley and the Hidden God is here republished, available in both hardback and paperback formats. Some of the plates from the first edition are reproduced in colour; there were also some new plates for the second edition, one of which – of Kenneth and Steffi Grant in November 2009 – is here illustrated to the right. A further three new plates are shown below; from left to right, they are: Formula for hastening Transferences from the twin Ego by Austin Osman Spare; projected frontispiece for Monolith by Steffi Grant; and Evocation by Steffi Grant.

The dramatic image to the left here is Invocation of the Fire Snake by Steffi Grant, one of the pieces of artwork rephotographed for this edition. Pen and ink, it was drawn across the front endpapers of a book decades ago, hence the disjuncture in the middle of the image. With time, the endpapers have discoloured, hence the uneven tint to this picture. As with the previous editions, the drawing has been reproduced across two pages.

A review of this edition of Aleister Crowley and the Hidden God appeared in the May 2013 issue of the Australian magazine Living Traditions and can be found here.

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