Abstract

The article investigates the references to the works of Henrik Ibsen that the writer and occultist Aleister Crowley scattered in his writings around the turn of the 20th century, in the early phase of his career as a writer and occultist. Crowley’s reading of Ibsen has a marked a socio-political bent, especially in his interpretation of the work of the Norwegian playwright as an act of rebellion against the bourgeois (and for Crowley, Victorian) system of values. Also, such view is enriched by a spiritual and individualistic interpretation of Ibsen as an “Artist”, i.e., in the light of Crowley’s occult doctrine, Thelema, of an individual who has found his own “Will” and can inspire others to do so. Such social and spiritual interpretations of Ibsen on Crowley’s part found their literary realization in his one-act play The Mother’s Tragedy (1899). The article claims that Crowley’s reading of Ibsen can give some new insight in the mechanisms of reception of the Norwegian playwright, by opening up for a reading of some of his plays within an occult discourse. Also, it is an occasion to treat Crowley – a figure that was constantly present in the European cultural and literary life of the last decade of the 19th century and of the first five decades of the 20th – with a different attitude than the irony and disdain to which he is often exposed.

Highlights

  • The representation of the dying drunkard and the upcoming nemesis balances a fascination for decadence and a sense of impending doom that Crowley inherited from the Plymouth Brethren and never really abandoned (Bogdan, 2012). This may suggest that the poem was written later than what Crowley states in the Collected Works, and possibly after his turbulent years at Trinity College in Cambridge (1895-1898), where he engaged in the abuse of alcohol and sex and started writing poetry in the vein of British Decadence (Kaczynski, 2010, 32-50)

  • The British Ibsen was made an icon of this movement and his critique of the European bourgeoisie was turned into a critique of Victorianism. This is clearly mirrored in Crowley’s writings: just to mention one example, his autobiography The Confessions of Aleister Crowley is littered with references to Ibsen as an ally in his battle against Victorianism (1971, ad indicem)

  • Crowley’s first literary realization of the socio-political as well as spiritual impulses he found in Ibsen, came in a play he wrote in 1899, entitled The Mother’s Tragedy

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Summary

Introduction

This may suggest that the poem was written later than what Crowley states in the Collected Works, and possibly after his turbulent years at Trinity College in Cambridge (1895-1898), where he engaged in the abuse of alcohol and sex and started writing poetry in the vein of British Decadence (Kaczynski, 2010, 32-50). This is clearly mirrored in Crowley’s writings: just to mention one example, his autobiography The Confessions of Aleister Crowley is littered with references to Ibsen as an ally in his battle against Victorianism (1971, ad indicem).

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