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Antisymmetric relation | See also | See also
Symmetry in mathematics |
Antisymmetric relation | References | References
nLab antisymmetric relation
Category:Properties of binary relations |
Antisymmetric relation | Table of Content | short description, Examples, Properties, See also, References |
Aleister Crowley | short description | Aleister Crowley ( ; born Edward Alexander Crowley; 12 October 1875 – 1 December 1947) was an English occultist, ceremonial magician, poet, novelist, mountaineer, and painter. He founded the religion of Thelema, identifying himself as the prophet entrusted with guiding humanity into the Æon of Horus in the early 20th century. A prolific writer, he published widely over the course of his life.
Born to a wealthy family in Royal Leamington Spa, Warwickshire, Crowley rejected his parents' fundamentalist Christian Plymouth Brethren faith to pursue an interest in Western esotericism. He was educated at Trinity College at the University of Cambridge, where he focused his attention upon mountaineering and poetry, resulting in several publications. Some biographers allege that here he was recruited into a British intelligence agency, further suggesting that he remained a spy throughout his life. In 1898, he joined the esoteric Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, where he was trained in ceremonial magic by Samuel Liddell MacGregor Mathers and Allan Bennett. He went mountaineering in Mexico with Oscar Eckenstein, before studying Hindu and Buddhist practices in India. In 1904, he married Rose Edith Kelly, and they honeymooned in Cairo, Egypt, where Crowley wrote down The Book of the Law—a sacred text that serves as the basis for Thelema, which he said had been dictated to him by a supernatural entity named Aiwass. The Book announced the start of the Æon of Horus, and declared that its followers should "Do what thou wilt", and seek to align themselves with their True Will via the practice of ceremonial magic.
After the unsuccessful 1905 Kanchenjunga expedition, and a visit to India and China, Crowley returned to Britain, where he attracted attention as a prolific author of poetry, novels, and occult literature. In 1907, he and George Cecil Jones co-founded an esoteric order—the A∴A∴, through which they propagated Thelema. After spending time in Algeria, in 1912 he was initiated into another esoteric order—the German-based Ordo Templi Orientis (O.T.O.), in which he rose to become the leader of its British branch, which he reformulated in accordance with his Thelemite beliefs. Through O.T.O., Thelemite groups were established in Britain, Australia, and North America. Crowley spent the First World War in the United States, where he took up painting, and campaigned for the German war effort against Britain. His biographers later revealed that he had infiltrated the pro-German movement to assist the British intelligence services. In 1920, he established the Abbey of Thelema—a religious commune in Cefalù, Sicily, where he lived with various followers. His libertine lifestyle led to denunciations in the British press, and the Italian government evicted him in 1923. He divided the following two decades between France, Germany, and England, and continued to promote Thelema until his death.
Crowley gained widespread notoriety during his lifetime, being a drug user, a bisexual, and an individualist social critic. Crowley has remained a highly influential figure over western esotericism and the counterculture of the 1960s, and he continues to be considered a prophet in Thelema. He is the subject of various biographies and academic studies. |
Aleister Crowley | Early life | Early life |
Aleister Crowley | Youth | Youth
thumb|alt=2017 photograph of Crowley's birthplace|Aleister Crowley was born Edward Alexander Crowley at 30 Clarendon Square in Royal Leamington Spa, Warwickshire, on 12 October 1875.
Crowley was born Edward Alexander Crowley at 30 Clarendon Square in Royal Leamington Spa, Warwickshire, on 12 October 1875. His father, Edward Crowley (1829–1887), was trained as an engineer, but his share in a lucrative family brewing business, Crowley's Alton Ales, allowed him to retire before his son was born. His mother, Emily Bertha Bishop (1848–1917), came from a Devonshire-Somerset family and had a strained relationship with her son; she described him as "the Beast", a name that he revelled in. The couple had been married at London's Kensington Registry Office in November 1874, and were evangelical Christians. Crowley's father was born a Quaker, but converted to the Exclusive Brethren, a faction of a Christian fundamentalist group known as the Plymouth Brethren; Emily likewise converted upon marriage. Crowley's father was particularly devout, spending his time as a travelling preacher for the sect and reading a chapter from the Bible to his wife and son after breakfast every day. Following the death of their baby daughter in 1880, in 1881 the Crowleys moved to Redhill, Surrey. At the age of 8, Crowley was sent to H. T. Habershon's evangelical Christian boarding school in Hastings, and then to Ebor preparatory school in Cambridge, run by the Reverend Henry d'Arcy Champney, whom Crowley considered a sadist.
In March 1887, when Crowley was eleven years old, his father died of tongue cancer. Crowley described this as a turning point in his life, and he always maintained an admiration of his father, describing him as "my hero and my friend". Inheriting a third of his father's wealth, he began misbehaving at school and was harshly punished by Champney; Crowley's family removed him from the school when he developed albuminuria. He then attended Malvern College and Tonbridge School, both of which he despised and left after a few terms. He became increasingly sceptical of Christianity, pointing out Biblical inconsistencies to his religious teachers, and went against the Christian morality of his upbringing by smoking, masturbating, and having sex with prostitutes from whom he contracted gonorrhea. Sent to live with a Brethren tutor in Eastbourne, he undertook chemistry courses at Eastbourne College. Crowley developed interests in chess, poetry, and mountain climbing, and in 1894 climbed Beachy Head before visiting the Alps and joining the Scottish Mountaineering Club. The following year he returned to the Bernese Alps, climbing the Eiger, Trift, Jungfrau, Mönch, and Wetterhorn. |
Aleister Crowley | Cambridge University: 1895–1898 | Cambridge University: 1895–1898
Having adopted the name of Aleister over Edward, in October 1895 Crowley began a three-year course at Trinity College, Cambridge, where he was entered for the Moral Science Tripos studying philosophy. With approval from his personal tutor, he changed to English literature, which was not then part of the curriculum offered. Crowley spent much of his time at university engaged in his pastimes, becoming president of the chess club and practising the game for two hours a day; he briefly considered a professional career as a chess player. Crowley also embraced his love of literature and poetry, particularly the works of Richard Francis Burton and Percy Bysshe Shelley. Many of his own poems appeared in student publications such as The Granta, Cambridge Magazine, and Cantab. He continued his mountaineering, going on holiday to the Alps to climb every year from 1894 to 1898, often with his friend Oscar Eckenstein, and in 1897 he made the first ascent of the Mönch without a guide. These feats led to his recognition in the Alpine mountaineering community.
Crowley had his first significant mystical experience while on holiday in Stockholm in December 1896. Several biographers, including Lawrence Sutin, Richard Kaczynski, and Tobias Churton, believed that this was the result of Crowley's first same-sex sexual experience, which enabled him to recognize his bisexuality. At Cambridge, Crowley maintained a vigorous sex life with women—largely with female prostitutes, from one of whom he caught syphilis—but eventually he took part in same-sex activities, despite their illegality. In October 1897, Crowley met Herbert Charles Pollitt, president of the Cambridge University Footlights Dramatic Club, and the two entered into a relationship. They broke apart because Pollitt did not share Crowley's increasing interest in Western esotericism, a break-up that Crowley regretted for many years.
In 1897, Crowley travelled to Saint Petersburg in Russia, later saying that he was trying to learn Russian as he was considering a future diplomatic career there. In October 1897, a brief illness triggered considerations of mortality and "the futility of all human endeavour", and Crowley abandoned all thoughts of a diplomatic career in favour of pursuing an interest in the occult.
In March 1898, he obtained A. E. Waite's The Book of Black Magic and of Pacts, and then Karl von Eckartshausen's The Cloud Upon the Sanctuary, furthering his occult interests. That same year, Leonard Smithers, a publisher who Crowley met through Pollitt, published 100 copies of Crowley's poem Aceldama: A Place to Bury Strangers In, but it was not a particular success. That same year, Crowley published a string of other poems, including White Stains, a Decadent collection of erotic poetry that was printed abroad lest its publication be prohibited by the British authorities. In July 1898, he left Cambridge, not having taken any degree at all despite a "first class" showing in his 1897 exams and consistent "second class honours" results before that. |
Aleister Crowley | The Golden Dawn: 1898–1899 | The Golden Dawn: 1898–1899
thumb|right|upright|alt=Crowley wearing the ceremonial garb of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, 1910|Crowley in Golden Dawn garb, 1910
In August 1898, Crowley was in Zermatt, Switzerland, where he met the chemist Julian L. Baker, and the two began discussing their common interest in alchemy. Back in London, Baker introduced Crowley to George Cecil Jones, Baker's brother-in-law and a fellow member of the occult society known as the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, which was founded in 1888. Crowley was initiated into the Outer Order of the Golden Dawn on 18 November 1898 by the group's leader, Samuel Liddell MacGregor Mathers. The ceremony took place in the Golden Dawn's Isis-Urania Temple held at London's Mark Masons Hall, where Crowley took the magical motto and name "Frater Perdurabo", which he interpreted as "Brother I shall endure to the end".
Crowley moved into his own luxury flat at 67–69 Chancery Lane and soon invited a senior Golden Dawn member, Allan Bennett, to live with him as his personal magical tutor. Bennett taught Crowley more about ceremonial magic and the ritual use of drugs, and together they performed the rituals of the Goetia, until Bennett left for South Asia to study Buddhism. In November 1899, Crowley purchased Boleskine House in Foyers on the shore of Loch Ness in Scotland. He developed a love of Scottish culture, describing himself as the "Laird of Boleskine", and took to wearing traditional highland dress, even during visits to London. He continued writing poetry, publishing Jezebel and Other Tragic Poems, Tales of Archais, Songs of the Spirit, Appeal to the American Republic, and Jephthah in 1898–99; most gained mixed reviews from literary critics, although Jephthah was considered a particular critical success.
Crowley soon progressed through the lower grades of the Golden Dawn, and was ready to enter the group's inner Second Order. He was unpopular in the group; his bisexuality and libertine lifestyle gained him a bad reputation, and he developed feuds with some of the members, including W. B. Yeats. When the Golden Dawn's London lodge refused to initiate Crowley into the Second Order, he visited Mathers in Paris, who personally admitted him into the Adeptus Minor Grade. A schism had developed between Mathers and the London members of the Golden Dawn, who were unhappy with his autocratic rule. Acting under Mathers' orders, Crowley—with the help of his mistress and fellow initiate Elaine Simpson—attempted to seize the Vault of the Adepts, a temple space at 36 Blythe Road in West Kensington, from the London lodge members. When the case was taken to court, the judge ruled in favour of the London lodge, as they had paid for the space's rent, leaving both Crowley and Mathers isolated from the group. |
Aleister Crowley | Mexico, India, Paris, and marriage: 1900–1903 | Mexico, India, Paris, and marriage: 1900–1903
In 1900, Crowley travelled to Mexico via the United States, settling in Mexico City and starting a relationship with a local woman. Developing a love of the country, he continued experimenting with ceremonial magic, working with John Dee's Enochian invocations. He later said he had been initiated into Freemasonry while there, and he wrote a play based on Richard Wagner's Tannhäuser as well as a series of poems, published as Oracles (1905). Eckenstein joined him later in 1900, and together they climbed several mountains, including Iztaccihuatl, Popocatepetl, and Colima, the latter of which they had to abandon owing to a volcanic eruption. Leaving Mexico, Crowley headed to San Francisco before sailing for Hawaii aboard the Nippon Maru. On the ship, he had a brief affair with a married woman named Mary Alice Rogers; saying he fell in love with her, he wrote a series of poems about the romance, published as Alice: An Adultery (1903).
thumbnail|alt=Crowley bathing in a spring during the K2 Expedition, 1902|Crowley during the K2 Expedition, 1902
Briefly stopping in Japan and Hong Kong, Crowley reached Ceylon, where he met with Allan Bennett, who was there studying Shaivism. The pair spent some time in Kandy before Bennett decided to become a Buddhist monk in the Theravada tradition, travelling to Burma to do so. Crowley decided to tour India, devoting himself to the Hindu practice of Rāja yoga, by which means he believed he had achieved the spiritual state of dhyana. He spent much of this time studying at the Meenakshi Temple in Madura. At this time he also wrote poetry which was published as The Sword of Song (1904). He contracted malaria, and had to recuperate from the disease in Calcutta and Rangoon. In 1902, he was joined in India by Eckenstein and several other mountaineers: Guy Knowles, H. Pfannl, V. Wesseley, and Jules Jacot-Guillarmod. Together, the Eckenstein-Crowley expedition attempted K2, which was never climbed before. On the journey, Crowley was afflicted with influenza, malaria, and snow blindness, and other expedition members were also struck with illness. They reached an altitude of before turning back.
Having arrived in Paris in November 1902, he socialized with his friend the painter Gerald Kelly, and through him became a fixture of the Parisian arts scene. Whilst there, Crowley wrote a series of poems on the work of an acquaintance, the sculptor Auguste Rodin. These poems were later published as Rodin in Rime (1907). One of those frequenting this milieu was W. Somerset Maugham, who after briefly meeting Crowley later used him as a model for the character of Oliver Haddo in his novel The Magician (1908). He returned to Boleskine in April 1903. In August, Crowley wed Gerald Kelly's sister Rose Edith Kelly in a "marriage of convenience" to prevent her from entering an arranged marriage; the marriage appalled the Kelly family and damaged his friendship with Gerald. Heading on a honeymoon to Paris, Cairo, and then Ceylon, Crowley fell in love with Rose and worked to prove his affections. While on his honeymoon, he wrote her a series of love poems, published as Rosa Mundi and other Love Songs (1906), as well as authoring the religious satire Why Jesus Wept (1904). |
Aleister Crowley | Developing Thelema | Developing Thelema |
Aleister Crowley | Egypt and ''The Book of the Law'': 1904 | Egypt and The Book of the Law: 1904
In February 1904, Crowley and Rose arrived in Cairo. Pretending to be a prince and princess, they rented an apartment in which Crowley set up a temple room and began invoking ancient Egyptian deities, while studying Islamic mysticism and Arabic. According to Crowley's later account, Rose regularly became delirious and informed him "they are waiting for you." On 18 March, she explained that "they" were the god Horus, and on 20 March proclaimed that "the Equinox of the Gods has come". She led him to a nearby museum, where she showed him a seventh-century BCE mortuary stele known as the Stele of Ankh-ef-en-Khonsu; Crowley thought it important that the exhibit's number was 666, the Number of the Beast in Christian belief, and in later years termed the artefact the "Stele of Revealing".
According to Crowley's later statements, on 8 April he heard a disembodied voice identifying itself as that of Aiwass, the messenger of Horus, or Hoor-Paar-Kraat. Crowley said that he wrote down everything the voice told him over the course of the next three days, and titled it Liber AL vel Legis or The Book of the Law. The book proclaimed that humanity was entering a new Aeon, and that Crowley would serve as its prophet. It stated that a supreme moral law was to be introduced in this Aeon, "Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law," and that people should learn to live in tune with their Will. This book, and the philosophy that it espoused, became the cornerstone of Crowley's religion, Thelema. Crowley said that at the time he was unsure what to do with The Book of the Law. Often resenting it, he said that he ignored the instructions which the text commanded him to perform, which included taking the Stele of Revealing from the museum, fortifying his own island, and translating the book into all the world's languages. According to his account, he instead sent typescripts of the work to several occultists he knew, putting the manuscript away and ignoring it. |
Aleister Crowley | Kanchenjunga and China: 1905–1906 | Kanchenjunga and China: 1905–1906
Returning to Boleskine, Crowley came to believe that Mathers was using magic against him, and the relationship between the two broke down. On 28 July 1905, Rose gave birth to Crowley's first child, a daughter named Lilith, and Crowley wrote the pornographic Snowdrops from a Curate's Garden to entertain his recuperating wife. He also founded a publishing company through which to publish his poetry, naming it the Society for the Propagation of Religious Truth in parody of the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge. Among its first publications were Crowley's Collected Works, edited by Ivor Back, an old friend of Crowley's who was both a practicing surgeon and an enthusiast of literature. His poetry often received strong reviews (either positive or negative), but never sold well. In an attempt to gain more publicity, he issued a reward of £100 for the best essay on his work. The winner of this was J. F. C. Fuller, a British Army officer and military historian, whose essay, The Star in the West (1907), heralded Crowley's poetry as some of the greatest ever written.
left|thumb|alt=A photograph of Kangchenjunga|Kanchenjunga, as seen from Darjeeling
Crowley decided to climb Kanchenjunga in the Himalayas of Nepal, widely recognised as the world's most treacherous mountain. The collaboration between Jacot-Guillarmod, Charles Adolphe Reymond, Alexis Pache, and Alcesti C. Rigo de Righi, the expedition was marred by much argument between Crowley and the others, who thought that he was reckless. They eventually mutinied against Crowley's control, with the other climbers heading back down the mountain as nightfall approached despite Crowley's warnings that it was too dangerous. Subsequently, Pache and several porters were killed in an accident, something for which Crowley was widely blamed by the mountaineering community.
Spending time in Moharbhanj, where he took part in big-game hunting and wrote the homoerotic work The Scented Garden, Crowley met up with Rose and Lilith in Calcutta before being forced to leave India after non-lethally shooting two men who tried to mug him. Briefly visiting Bennett in Burma, Crowley and his family decided to tour Southern China, hiring porters and a nanny for the purpose. Crowley smoked opium throughout the journey, which took the family from Tengyueh through to Yungchang, Tali, Yunnanfu, and then Hanoi. On the way, he spent much time on spiritual and magical work, reciting the "Bornless Ritual", an invocation to his Holy Guardian Angel, on a daily basis.
While Rose and Lilith returned to Europe, Crowley headed to Shanghai to meet old friend Elaine Simpson, who was fascinated by The Book of the Law; together they performed rituals in an attempt to contact Aiwass. Crowley then sailed to Japan and Canada, before continuing to New York City, where he unsuccessfully solicited support for a second expedition up Kanchenjunga. Upon arrival in Britain, Crowley learned that his daughter Lilith had died of typhoid in Rangoon, something he later blamed on Rose's increasing alcoholism. Under emotional distress, his health began to suffer, and he underwent a series of surgical operations. He began short-lived romances with actress Vera "Lola" Neville (née Snepp) and author Ada Leverson, while Rose gave birth to Crowley's second daughter, Lola Zaza, in February 1907. |
Aleister Crowley | The A∴A∴ and The Holy Books of Thelema: 1907–1909 | The A∴A∴ and The Holy Books of Thelema: 1907–1909
With his old mentor George Cecil Jones, Crowley continued performing the Abramelin rituals at the Ashdown Park Hotel in Coulsdon, Surrey. Crowley believed that in doing so he attained samadhi, or union with Godhead, thereby marking a turning point in his life. Making heavy use of hashish during these rituals, he wrote an essay on "The Psychology of Hashish" (1909) in which he championed the drug as an aid to mysticism. He also said he had been contacted once again by Aiwass in late October and November 1907, adding that Aiwass dictated two further texts to him, "Liber VII" and "Liber Cordis Cincti Serpente", both of which were later classified in the corpus of The Holy Books of Thelema. Crowley wrote down more Thelemic Holy Books during the last two months of the year, including "Liber LXVI", "Liber Arcanorum", "Liber Porta Lucis, Sub Figura X", "Liber Tau", "Liber Trigrammaton" and "Liber DCCCXIII vel Ararita", which he again said he had received from a preternatural source. Crowley stated that in June 1909, when the manuscript of The Book of the Law was rediscovered at Boleskine, he developed the opinion that Thelema represented objective truth.
Crowley's inheritance was running out. Trying to earn money, he was hired by George Montagu Bennett, the Earl of Tankerville, to help protect him from witchcraft; recognising Bennett's paranoia as being based in his cocaine addiction, Crowley took him on holiday to France and Morocco to recuperate. In 1907, he also began taking in paying students, whom he instructed in occult and magical practice. Victor Neuburg, whom Crowley met in February 1907, became his sexual partner and closest disciple; in 1908 the pair toured northern Spain before heading to Tangier, Morocco. The following year Neuburg stayed at Boleskine, where he and Crowley engaged in sadomasochism. Crowley continued to write prolifically, producing such works of poetry as Ambergris, Clouds Without Water, and Konx Om Pax, as well as his first attempt at an autobiography, The World's Tragedy. Recognizing the popularity of short horror stories, Crowley wrote his own, some of which were published, and he also published several articles in Vanity Fair, a magazine edited by his friend Frank Harris. He also wrote Liber 777, a book of magical and Qabalistic correspondences that borrowed from Mathers and Bennett.
In November 1907, Crowley and Jones decided to found an occult order to act as a successor to the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, being aided in doing so by Fuller. The result was the A∴A∴. The group's headquarters and temple were situated at 124 Victoria Street in central London, and their rites borrowed much from those of the Golden Dawn, but with an added Thelemic basis. Its earliest members included solicitor Richard Noel Warren, artist Austin Osman Spare, Horace Sheridan-Bickers, author George Raffalovich, Francis Henry Everard Joseph Feilding, engineer Herbert Edward Inman, Kenneth Ward, and Charles Stansfeld Jones. In March 1909, Crowley began production of a biannual periodical titled The Equinox. He billed this periodical, which was to become the "Official Organ" of the A∴A∴, as "The Review of Scientific Illuminism".
Crowley became increasingly frustrated with Rose's alcoholism, and in November 1909 he divorced her on the grounds of his own adultery. Lola was entrusted to Rose's care; the couple remained friends and Rose continued to live at Boleskine. Her alcoholism worsened, and as a result she was institutionalized in September 1911. |
Aleister Crowley | Algeria and the Rites of Eleusis: 1909–1911 | Algeria and the Rites of Eleusis: 1909–1911
In November 1909, Crowley and Neuburg travelled to Algeria, touring the desert from El Arba to Aumale, Bou Saâda, and then Dā'leh Addin, with Crowley reciting the Quran to fortify himself against growing feelings of awe and dread. During the trip he invoked the thirty aethyrs of Enochian magic, with Neuburg recording the results, later published in The Equinox as The Vision and the Voice. Following a mountaintop sex magic ritual, Crowley also performed an evocation to the demon Choronzon involving blood sacrifice, and considered the results to be a watershed in his magical career. Returning to London in January 1910, Crowley found that Mathers was suing him for publishing Golden Dawn secrets in The Equinox; the court found in favour of Crowley. The case was widely reported in the press, with Crowley gaining wider fame. Crowley enjoyed this, and played up to the sensationalist stereotype of being a Satanist and advocate of human sacrifice, despite being neither.
The publicity attracted new members to the A∴A∴, among them Frank Bennett, James Bayley, Herbert Close, and James Windram. The Australian violinist Leila Waddell soon became Crowley's lover. Deciding to expand his teachings to a wider audience, Crowley developed the Rites of Artemis, a public performance of magic and symbolism featuring A∴A∴ members personifying various deities. It was first performed at the A∴A∴ headquarters, with attendees given a fruit punch containing peyote to enhance their experience. Various members of the press attended, and reported largely positively on it. In October and November 1910, Crowley decided to stage something similar, the Rites of Eleusis, at Caxton Hall, Westminster; this time press reviews were mixed. Crowley came under particular criticism from West de Wend Fenton, editor of The Looking Glass newspaper, who called him "one of the most blasphemous and cold-blooded villains of modern times". Fenton's articles suggested that Crowley and Jones were involved in homosexual activity; Crowley did not mind, but Jones unsuccessfully sued for libel. Fuller broke off his friendship and involvement with Crowley over the scandal, and Crowley and Neuburg returned to Algeria for further magical workings.
The Equinox continued publishing, and various books of literature and poetry were also published under its imprint, like Crowley's Ambergris, The Winged Beetle, and The Scented Garden, as well as Neuburg's The Triumph of Pan and Ethel Archer's The Whirlpool. In 1911, Crowley and Waddell holidayed in Montigny-sur-Loing, where he wrote prolifically, producing poems, short stories, plays, and 19 works on magic and mysticism, including the two final Holy Books of Thelema. In Paris, he met Mary Desti, who became his next "Scarlet Woman", with the two undertaking magical workings in St. Moritz; Crowley believed that one of the Secret Chiefs, Ab-ul-Diz, was speaking through her. Based on Desti's statements when in trance, Crowley wrote the two-volume Book 4 (1912–13) and at the time developed the spelling "magick" in reference to the paranormal phenomenon as a means of distinguishing it from the stage magic of illusionists. |
Aleister Crowley | Ordo Templi Orientis and the Paris Working: 1912–1914 | Ordo Templi Orientis and the Paris Working: 1912–1914
thumb|right|upright|alt=Crowley wearing ceremonial garb|Crowley in ceremonial garb, 1912
In early 1912, Crowley published The Book of Lies, a work of mysticism that biographer Lawrence Sutin described as "his greatest success in merging his talents as poet, scholar, and magus". The German occultist Theodor Reuss later accused him of publishing some of the secrets of his own occult order, Ordo Templi Orientis (O.T.O.), within The Book. Crowley convinced Reuss that the similarities were coincidental, and the two became friends. Reuss appointed Crowley as head of O.T.O's British branch, the Mysteria Mystica Maxima (MMM), and at a ceremony in Berlin Crowley adopted the magical name of Baphomet and was proclaimed "X° Supreme Rex and Sovereign Grand Master General of Ireland, Iona, and all the Britons". With Reuss' permission, Crowley set about advertising the MMM and re-writing many O.T.O. rituals, which were then based largely on Freemasonry; his incorporation of Thelemite elements proved controversial in the group. Fascinated by O.T.O's emphasis on sex magic, Crowley devised a magical working based on anal sex and incorporated it into the syllabus for those O.T.O. members who were initiated into the eleventh degree.
In March 1913, Crowley acted as producer for The Ragged Ragtime Girls, a group of female violinists led by Waddell, as they performed at London's Old Tivoli theatre. They subsequently performed in Moscow for six weeks, where Crowley had a sadomasochistic relationship with the Hungarian Anny Ringler. In Moscow, Crowley continued to write plays and poetry, including "Hymn to Pan", and the Gnostic Mass, a Thelemic ritual that became a key part of O.T.O. liturgy. Churton suggested that Crowley had travelled to Moscow on the orders of British intelligence to spy on revolutionary elements in the city. In January 1914, Crowley and Neuburg settled into an apartment in Paris, where the former was involved in the controversy surrounding Jacob Epstein's new monument to Oscar Wilde. Together Crowley and Neuburg performed the six-week "Paris Working", a period of intense ritual involving strong drug use in which they invoked the gods Mercury and Jupiter. As part of the ritual, the couple performed acts of sex magic together, at times being joined by journalist Walter Duranty. Inspired by the results of the Working, Crowley wrote Liber Agapé, a treatise on sex magic. Following the Paris Working, Neuburg began to distance himself from Crowley, resulting in an argument in which Crowley cursed him. |
Aleister Crowley | United States: 1914–1919 | United States: 1914–1919
By 1914, Crowley was living a hand-to-mouth existence, relying largely on donations from A∴A∴ members and dues payments made to O.T.O. In May, he transferred ownership of Boleskine House to the MMM for financial reasons, and in July he went mountaineering in the Swiss Alps. During this time the First World War broke out.
After recuperating from a bout of phlebitis, Crowley set sail for the United States aboard the RMS Lusitania in October 1914. Arriving in New York City, he moved into a hotel and began earning money writing for the American edition of Vanity Fair and undertaking freelance work for the famed astrologer Evangeline Adams. In the city, he continued experimenting with sex magic, through the use of masturbation, female prostitutes, and male clients of a Turkish bathhouse; all of these encounters were documented in his diaries.
thumb|left|upright|alt=Crowley's painting May Morn|May Morn, one of Crowley's paintings from his time in the US. He explained it thus: "The painting represents the dawning of the day following a witches' celebration as described in Faust. The witch is hanged, as she deserves, and the satyr looks out from behind a tree."
Professing to be of Irish ancestry and a supporter of Irish independence from Great Britain, Crowley began to espouse support for Germany in their war against Britain. He became involved in New York's pro-German movement, and in January 1915 pro-German propagandist George Sylvester Viereck employed him as a writer for his propagandist paper, The Fatherland, which was dedicated to keeping the US neutral in the conflict. In later years, detractors denounced Crowley as a traitor to Britain for this action.
Crowley entered into a relationship with Jeanne Robert Foster, with whom he toured the West Coast. In Vancouver, headquarters of the North American O.T.O., he met with Charles Stansfeld Jones and Wilfred Talbot Smith to discuss the propagation of Thelema on the continent. In Detroit he experimented with Peyote at Parke-Davis, then visited Seattle, San Francisco, Santa Cruz, Los Angeles, San Diego, Tijuana, and the Grand Canyon, before returning to New York. There he befriended Ananda Coomaraswamy and his wife Alice Richardson; Crowley and Richardson performed sex magic in April 1916, following which she became pregnant and then miscarried. Later that year he took a "magical retirement" to a cabin by Lake Pasquaney owned by Evangeline Adams. There, he made heavy use of drugs and undertook a ritual after which he proclaimed himself "Master Therion". He also wrote several short stories based on James George Frazer's The Golden Bough and a work of literary criticism, The Gospel According to Bernard Shaw.
thumb|233x233px|A drawing by Crowley of Lam
In December, he moved to New Orleans, his favourite US city, before spending February 1917 with evangelical Christian relatives in Titusville, Florida. Returning to New York City, he moved in with artist and A∴A∴ member Leon Engers Kennedy in May, learning of his mother's death. After the collapse of The Fatherland, Crowley continued his association with Viereck, who appointed him contributing editor of arts journal The International. Crowley used it to promote Thelema, but it soon ceased publication. He then moved to the studio apartment of Roddie Minor, who became his partner and Scarlet Woman. Through their rituals, which Crowley called "The Amalantrah Workings", he believed that they were contacted by a preternatural entity named Lam. The relationship soon ended.
In 1918, Crowley went on a magical retreat in the wilderness of Esopus Island on the Hudson River. Here, he began an adaptation of the Tao Te Ching, painted Thelemic slogans on the riverside cliffs, and—he later wrote—experienced past life memories of being Ge Xuan, Pope Alexander VI, Alessandro Cagliostro, and Éliphas Lévi. Back in New York City, he moved to Greenwich Village, where he took Leah Hirsig as his lover and next Scarlet Woman. He took up painting as a hobby, exhibiting his work at the Greenwich Village Liberal Club and attracting the attention of The Evening World. With the financial assistance of sympathetic Freemasons, Crowley revived The Equinox with the first issue of volume III, known as The Blue Equinox. He spent mid-1919 on a climbing holiday in Montauk before returning to London in December. |
Aleister Crowley | Abbey of Thelema: 1920–1923 | Abbey of Thelema: 1920–1923
Now destitute and back in London, Crowley came under attack from the tabloid John Bull, which labelled him traitorous "scum" for his work with the German war effort; several friends aware of his intelligence work urged him to sue, but he decided not to. When he was suffering from asthma, a doctor prescribed him heroin, to which he soon became addicted. In January 1920, he moved to Paris, renting a house in Fontainebleau with Leah Hirsig; they were soon joined in a ménage à trois by Ninette Shumway, and also (in living arrangement) by Leah's newborn daughter Anne "Poupée" Leah. Crowley had ideas of forming a community of Thelemites, which he called the Abbey of Thelema after the Abbaye de Thélème in François Rabelais' satire Gargantua and Pantagruel. After consulting the I Ching, he chose Cefalù in Sicily as a location, and after arriving there, began renting the old Villa Santa Barbara as his Abbey on 2 April.
thumb|right|alt=2017 photograph of the ruins of the Abbey of Thelema|The dilapidated Abbey of Thelema in Cefalù, Sicily in 2017
Moving to the commune with Hirsig, Shumway, and their children Hansi, Howard, and Poupée, Crowley described the scenario as "perfectly happy ... my idea of heaven." They wore robes, and performed rituals to the sun god Ra at set times during the day, also occasionally performing the Gnostic Mass; the rest of the day they were left to follow their own interests. Undertaking widespread correspondences, Crowley continued to paint, wrote a commentary on The Book of the Law, and revised the third part of Book 4. He offered a libertine education for the children, allowing them to play all day and witness acts of sex magic. He occasionally travelled to Palermo to visit rent boys and buy supplies, including drugs; his heroin addiction came to dominate his life, and cocaine began to erode his nasal cavity. There was no cleaning rota, and wild dogs and cats wandered throughout the building, which soon became unsanitary. Poupée died in October 1920, and Ninette gave birth to a daughter, Astarte Lulu Panthea, soon afterwards.
New followers continued to arrive at the Abbey to be taught by Crowley. Among them was film star Jane Wolfe, who arrived in July 1920, where she was initiated into the A∴A∴ and became Crowley's secretary. Another was Cecil Frederick Russell, who often argued with Crowley, disliking the same-sex sexual magic that he was required to perform, and left after a year. More conducive was the Australian Thelemite Frank Bennett, who also spent several months at the Abbey. In February 1922, Crowley returned to Paris for a retreat in an unsuccessful attempt to kick his heroin addiction. He then went to London in search of money, where he published articles in The English Review criticising the Dangerous Drugs Act 1920 and wrote a novel, The Diary of a Drug Fiend, completed in July. On publication, it received mixed reviews; he was lambasted by the Sunday Express, which called for its burning and used its influence to prevent further reprints.
Subsequently, a young Thelemite named Raoul Loveday moved to the Abbey with his wife Betty May; while Loveday was devoted to Crowley, May detested him and life at the commune. She later said that Loveday was made to drink the blood of a sacrificed cat, and that they were required to cut themselves with razors every time they used the pronoun "I". Loveday drank from a local polluted stream, soon developing a liver infection resulting in his death in February 1923. Returning to London, May told her story to the press. John Bull proclaimed Crowley "the wickedest man in the world" and "a man we'd like to hang", and although Crowley deemed many of their accusations against him to be slanderous, he was unable to afford the legal fees to sue them. As a result, John Bull continued its attack, with its stories being repeated in newspapers throughout Europe and in North America. The Fascist government of Benito Mussolini learned of Crowley's activities, and in April 1923 he was given a deportation notice forcing him to leave Italy; without him, the Abbey closed. |
Aleister Crowley | Later life | Later life |
Aleister Crowley | Tunisia, Paris, and London: 1923–1929 | Tunisia, Paris, and London: 1923–1929
Crowley and Hirsig went to Tunis, where, dogged by continuing poor health, he unsuccessfully tried again to give up heroin, and began writing what he termed his "autohagiography", The Confessions of Aleister Crowley. They were joined in Tunis by the Thelemite Norman Mudd, who became Crowley's public relations consultant. Employing a local boy, Mohammad ben Brahim, as his servant, Crowley went with him on a retreat to Nefta, where they performed sex magic together. In January 1924, Crowley travelled to Nice, France, where he met with Frank Harris, underwent a series of nasal operations, and visited the Institute for the Harmonious Development of Man and had a positive opinion of its founder, George Gurdjieff. Destitute, he took on a wealthy student, Alexander Zu Zolar, before taking on another American follower, Dorothy Olsen. Crowley took Olsen back to Tunisia for a magical retreat in Nefta, where he also wrote To Man (1924), a declaration of his own status as a prophet entrusted with bringing Thelema to humanity. After spending the winter in Paris, in early 1925 Crowley and Olsen returned to Tunis, where he wrote The Heart of the Master (1938) as an account of a vision he experienced in a trance. In March Olsen became pregnant, and Hirsig was called to take care of her; she miscarried, following which Crowley took Olsen back to France. Hirsig later distanced herself from Crowley, who then denounced her.
According to Crowley, Reuss named him head of O.T.O. upon his death, but this was challenged by a leader of the German O.T.O., . Tränker called the Hohenleuben Conference in Thuringia, Germany, which Crowley attended. There, prominent members like Karl Germer and Martha Küntzel championed Crowley's leadership, but other key figures like Albin Grau, Oskar Hopfer, and Henri Birven backed Tränker by opposing it, resulting in a split in O.T.O. Moving to Paris, where he broke with Olsen in 1926, Crowley went through a large number of lovers over the following years, with whom he experimented in sex magic. Throughout, he was dogged by poor health, largely caused by his heroin and cocaine addictions. In 1928, Crowley was introduced to Israel Regardie, a young Englishman, who embraced Thelema and became Crowley's secretary for the next three years. That year, Crowley also met Gerald Yorke, who began organising Crowley's finances but never became a Thelemite. He also befriended the journalist Tom Driberg; Driberg did not accept Thelema either. It was here that Crowley also published one of his most significant works, Magick in Theory and Practice, which received little attention at the time.
In December 1928 Crowley met the Nicaraguan Maria Teresa Sanchez (Maria Teresa Ferrari de Miramar). Crowley was deported from France by the authorities, who disliked his reputation and feared that he was a German agent. So that she could join him in Britain, Crowley married Sanchez in August 1929. Now based in London, Mandrake Press agreed to publish his autobiography in a limited edition six-volume set, also publishing his novel Moonchild and book of short stories The Stratagem. Mandrake went into liquidation in November 1930, before the entirety of Crowley's Confessions could be published. Mandrake's owner P. R. Stephensen meanwhile wrote The Legend of Aleister Crowley, an analysis of the media coverage surrounding him. |
Aleister Crowley | Berlin and London: 1930–1938 | Berlin and London: 1930–1938
In April 1930, Crowley moved to Berlin, where he took Hanni Jaegar as his magical partner; the relationship was troubled. In September he went to Lisbon in Portugal to meet the poet Fernando Pessoa. There, he decided to fake his own death, doing so with Pessoa's help at the Boca do Inferno rock formation. He then returned to Berlin, where he reappeared three weeks later at the opening of his art exhibition at the Gallery Neumann-Nierendorf. Crowley's paintings fitted with the fashion for German Expressionism; few of them sold, but the press reports were largely favourable. In August 1931, he took Bertha Busch as his new lover; they had a violent relationship, and often physically assaulted one another. He continued to have affairs with both men and women while in the city, and met with famous people like Aldous Huxley and Alfred Adler. After befriending him, in January 1932 he took the communist Gerald Hamilton as a lodger, through whom he was introduced to many figures within the Berlin far left; it is possible that he was operating as a spy for British intelligence at this time, monitoring the communist movement.
Crowley left Busch and returned to London, where he took Pearl Brooksmith as his new Scarlet Woman. Undergoing further nasal surgery, it was here in 1932 that he was invited to be guest of honour at Foyles' Literary Luncheon, also being invited by Harry Price to speak at the National Laboratory of Psychical Research. In need of money, he launched a series of court cases against people whom he believed to have libelled him, some of which proved successful. He gained much publicity for his lawsuit against Constable and Co for publishing Nina Hamnett's Laughing Torso (1932)—a book he alleged libelled him by referring to his occult practice as black magic—but lost the case. The court case added to Crowley's financial problems, and in February 1935 he was declared bankrupt. During the hearing, it was revealed that Crowley was spending three times his income for several years.
Crowley developed a friendship with Deidre Patricia Doherty; she offered to bear his child, who was born in May 1937. Named Randall Gair, Crowley nicknamed him Aleister Atatürk. He died in a car accident in 2002 at the age of 65. Crowley continued to socialize with friends, holding curry parties in which he cooked particularly spicy food for them. In 1936, he published his first book in six years, The Equinox of the Gods, which contained a facsimile of The Book of the Law and was considered to be volume III, number 3, of The Equinox periodical. The work sold well, resulting in a second print run. In 1937, he gave a series of public lectures on yoga in Soho. Crowley was now living largely off contributions supplied by O.T.O.'s Agape Lodge in California, led by rocket scientist Jack Parsons. Crowley was intrigued by the rise of Nazism in Germany, and influenced by his friend Martha Küntzel believed that Adolf Hitler might convert to Thelema; when the Nazis abolished the German O.T.O. and imprisoned Germer, who fled to the US, Crowley then lambasted Hitler as a black magician. |
Aleister Crowley | Second World War and death: 1939–1947 | Second World War and death: 1939–1947
thumb|right|upright|alt= 1941 photograph of Grady Louis McMurtry|Crowley specified that Grady McMurtry succeed his chosen successor as Head of O.T.O., Karl Germer.
When the Second World War broke out, Crowley wrote to the Naval Intelligence Division offering his services, but they declined. He associated with a variety of figures in Britain's intelligence community at the time, including Dennis Wheatley, Roald Dahl, Ian Fleming, and Maxwell Knight, and wrote that he originated the "V for Victory" sign first used by the BBC; this has never been proven.
In 1940, his asthma worsened, and with his German-produced medication unavailable, he returned to using heroin, once again becoming addicted. As the Blitz hit London, Crowley relocated to Torquay, where he was briefly admitted to hospital with asthma, and entertained himself with visits to the local chess club. Tiring of Torquay, he returned to London, where he was visited by American Thelemite Grady McMurtry, to whom Crowley awarded the title of "Hymenaeus Alpha". He stipulated that though Germer would be his immediate successor, McMurty should succeed Germer as head of O.T.O. after the latter's death. With O.T.O. initiate Lady Frieda Harris, Crowley developed plans to produce a tarot card set, designed by him and painted by Harris. Accompanying this was a book, published in a limited edition as The Book of Thoth by Chiswick Press in 1944. To aid the war effort, he wrote a proclamation on the rights of humanity, "Liber OZ", and a poem for the liberation of France, Le Gauloise. Crowley's final publication during his lifetime was a book of poetry, Olla: An Anthology of Sixty Years of Song. Another of his projects, Aleister Explains Everything, was posthumously published as Magick Without Tears.
In April 1944 Crowley briefly moved to Aston Clinton in Buckinghamshire, where he was visited by the poet Nancy Cunard, before relocating to Hastings in Sussex, where he took up residence at the Netherwood boarding house. He took a young man named Kenneth Grant as his secretary, paying him in magical teaching rather than wages. He was also introduced to John Symonds, whom he appointed to be his literary executor; Symonds thought little of Crowley, later publishing unfavorable biographies of him. Corresponding with the illusionist Arnold Crowther, it was through him that Crowley was introduced to Gerald Gardner, the future founder of Gardnerian Wicca. They became friends, with Crowley authorising Gardner to revive Britain's ailing O.T.O. Another visitor was Eliza Marian Butler, who interviewed Crowley for her book The Myth of the Magus. Other friends and family also spent time with him, among them Doherty and Crowley's son Aleister Atatürk.
On 1 December 1947, Crowley died at Netherwood of chronic bronchitis aggravated by pleurisy and myocardial degeneration, aged 72. His funeral was held at a Brighton crematorium on 5 December; about a dozen people attended, and Louis Wilkinson read excerpts from the Gnostic Mass, The Book of the Law, and "Hymn to Pan". The funeral generated press controversy, and was labelled a Black Mass by the tabloids. Crowley's body was cremated; his ashes were sent to Karl Germer in the US, who buried them in his garden in Hampton, New Jersey. |
Aleister Crowley | Beliefs and thought | Beliefs and thought
upright|thumb|alt=The symbol of Thelema|Aleister Crowley's rendition of the Unicursal Hexagram, the symbol of Thelema
Crowley's belief system, Thelema, has been described by scholars as a religion, and more specifically as both a new religious movement, and as a "magico-religious doctrine". Although holding The Book of the Law—which was composed in 1904—as its central text, Thelema took shape as a complete system in the years after 1904.
In his autobiography, Crowley wrote that his purpose in life was to "bring oriental wisdom to Europe and to restore paganism in a purer form", although what he meant by "paganism" was unclear. Crowley also wrote in the 4th Book of Magick about a great pagan Umbral fleet ruled by Ottovius that would be handed down to the great Spartan. The esoteric nature of this was also unclear. Crowley's thought was not always cohesive, and was influenced by a variety of sources, ranging from eastern religious movements and practices like Hindu yoga and Buddhism, scientific naturalism, and various currents within Western esotericism, among them ceremonial magic, alchemy, astrology, Rosicrucianism, Kabbalah, and the Tarot. He was steeped in the esoteric teachings he had learned from the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, although pushed further with his own interpretations and strategies than the Golden Dawn had done. Crowley incorporated concepts and terminology from South Asian religious traditions like yoga and Tantra into his Thelemic system, believing that there was a fundamental underlying resemblance between Western and Eastern spiritual systems. The historian Alex Owen noted that Crowley adhered to the "modus operandi" of the Decadent movement throughout his life.
Crowley believed that the twentieth century marked humanity's entry to the Aeon of Horus, a new era in which humans would take increasing control of their destiny. He believed that this Aeon follows on from the Aeon of Osiris, in which paternalistic religions like Christianity, Islam, and Buddhism dominated the world, and that this in turn had followed the Aeon of Isis, which was maternalistic and dominated by goddess worship. He believed that Thelema was the proper religion of the Aeon of Horus, and also deemed himself to be the prophet of this new Aeon. Thelema revolves around the idea that human beings each have their own True Will that they should discover and pursue, and that this exists in harmony with the Cosmic Will that pervades the universe. Crowley referred to this process of searching and discovery of one's True Will to be "the Great Work" or the attaining of the "knowledge and conversation of the Holy Guardian Angel". His favoured method of doing so was through the performance of the Abramelin operation, a ceremonial magic ritual obtained from a 17th-century grimoire. The moral code of "Do What Thou Wilt" is believed by Thelemites to be the religion's ethical law, although the historian of religion Marco Pasi noted that this was not anarchistic or libertarian in structure, as Crowley saw individuals as part of a wider societal organism. |
Aleister Crowley | Magick and theology | Magick and theology
Crowley believed in the objective existence of magic, which he chose to spell as "Magick", which is an archaic spelling of the word. He provided various different definitions of this term over his career. In his book Magick in Theory and Practice, Crowley defined Magick as "the Science and Art of causing change to occur in conformity with Will". He also told his disciple Karl Germer that "Magick is getting into communication with individuals who exist on a higher plane than ours. Mysticism is the raising of oneself to their level." Crowley saw Magick as a third way between religion and science, giving The Equinox the subtitle of The Method of Science; the Aim of Religion. Within that journal, he expressed positive sentiments toward science and the scientific method, and urged magicians to keep detailed records of their magical experiments, having said: "The more scientific the record is, the better." His understanding of magic was also influenced by the work of the anthropologist James Frazer, in particular the belief that magic was a precursor to science in a cultural evolutionary framework. Unlike Frazer, however, Crowley did not see magic as a survival from the past that required eradication, but rather he believed that magic had to be adapted to suit the new age of science. In Crowley's alternative schema, old systems of magic had to decline (per Frazer's framework) so that science and magic could synthesize into magick, which would simultaneously accept the existence of the supernatural and an experimental method. Crowley deliberately adopted an exceptionally broad definition of magick that included almost all forms of technology as magick, adopting an instrumentalist definition of magic, science, and technology.
Sexuality played an important role in Crowley's ideas about magick and his practice of it, and has been described as being central to Thelema. He outlined three forms of sex magick—the autoerotic, homosexual, and heterosexual—and argued that such acts could be used to focus the magician's will onto a specific goal such as financial gain or personal creative success. For Crowley, sex was treated as a sacrament, with the consumption of sexual fluids interpreted as a Eucharist. This was often manifested as the Cakes of Light, a biscuit containing either menstrual blood or a mixture of semen and vaginal fluids. The Gnostic Mass is the central religious ceremony within Thelema.
Crowley's theological beliefs were not clear. The historian Ronald Hutton noted that some of Crowley's writings could be used to argue that he was an atheist, while some support the idea that he was a polytheist, and others would bolster the idea that he was a mystical monotheist. On the basis of the teachings in The Book of the Law, Crowley described a pantheon of three deities taken from the ancient Egyptian pantheon: Nuit, Hadit, and Ra-Hoor-Khuit. In 1928, he wrote that all true deities were derived from this trinity. Jason Josephson Storm has argued that Crowley built on 19th-century attempts to link early Christianity to pre-Christian religions, such as Frazer's Golden Bough, to synthesize Christian theology and Neopaganism while remaining critical of institutional and traditional Christianity.
Both during his life and after it, Crowley has been widely described as a Satanist, usually by detractors. Crowley stated he did not consider himself a Satanist, nor did he worship Satan, as he did not accept the Christian world view in which Satan was believed to exist. He nevertheless used Satanic imagery, for instance by describing himself as "the Beast 666" and referring to the Whore of Babylon in his work, while in later life he sent "Antichristmas cards" to his friends. In his writings, Crowley occasionally identified Aiwass as Satan and designated him as "Our Lord God the Devil" at one occasion. The scholar of religion Gordan Djurdjevic stated that Crowley "was emphatically not" a Satanist, "if for no other reason than simply because he did not identify himself as such". Crowley nevertheless expressed strong anti-Christian sentiment, stating that he hated Christianity "as Socialists hate soap", an animosity probably stemming from his experiences among the Plymouth Brethren. He was nevertheless influenced by the King James Bible, especially the Book of Revelation, the impact of which can be seen in his writings. He was also accused of advocating human sacrifice, largely because of a passage in Book 4 in which he stated that "A male child of perfect innocence and high intelligence is the most satisfactory victim" and added that he had sacrificed about 150 every year. This was a tongue-in-cheek reference to ejaculation, something not realized by his critics. |
Aleister Crowley | Image and opinions | Image and opinions
Crowley considered himself to be one of the outstanding figures of his time. The historian Ronald Hutton stated that in Crowley's youth, he was "a self-indulgent and flamboyant young man" who "set about a deliberate flouting and provocation of social and religious norms", while being shielded from an "outraged public opinion" by his inherited wealth. Hutton also described Crowley as having both an "unappeasable desire" to take control of any organisation that he belonged to, and "a tendency to quarrel savagely" with those who challenged him. Crowley biographer Martin Booth asserted that Crowley was "self-confident, brash, eccentric, egotistic, highly intelligent, arrogant, witty, wealthy, and, when it suited him, cruel". Similarly, Richard B. Spence noted that Crowley was "capable of immense physical and emotional cruelty". Biographer Lawrence Sutin noted that Crowley exhibited "courage, skill, dauntless energy, and remarkable focus of will" while at the same time showing a "blind arrogance, petty fits of bile, [and] contempt for the abilities of his fellow men". The Thelemite Lon Milo DuQuette noted that Crowley "was by no means perfect" and "often alienated those who loved him dearest." |
Aleister Crowley | Political opinions | Political opinions
Crowley enjoyed being outrageous and flouting conventional morality, with John Symonds noting that he "was in revolt against the moral and religious values of his time". Crowley's political thought was studied by the academic Marco Pasi, who noted that for Crowley, socio-political concerns were subordinate to metaphysical and spiritual ones. He was neither on the political left nor right but perhaps best categorized as a "conservative revolutionary" despite not being affiliated with the German-based movement of the same name. Pasi described Crowley's fascination with the extreme ideologies of Nazism and Marxism–Leninism, which aimed to violently overturn society: "What Crowley liked about Nazism and communism, or at least what made him curious about them, was the anti-Christian position and the revolutionary and socially subversive implications of these two movements. In their subversive powers, he saw the possibility of an annihilation of old religious traditions, and the creation of a void that Thelema, subsequently, would be able to fill." Crowley described democracy as an "imbecile and nauseating cult of weakness", and commented that The Book of the Law proclaimed that "there is the master and there is the slave; the noble and the serf; the 'lone wolf' and the herd". In this attitude, he was influenced by Social Darwinism and the work of Friedrich Nietzsche. Although he had contempt for most of the British aristocracy, he regarded himself as an aristocrat and styled himself as Laird Boleskine, once describing his ideology as "aristocratic communism". |
Aleister Crowley | Opinions on race and gender | Opinions on race and gender
Crowley was bisexual, but exhibited a preference for women, with his relationships with men being fewer and mostly in the early part of his life. In particular he was attracted to "exotic women", and said he had fallen in love on multiple occasions; Kaczynski stated that "when he loved, he did so with his whole being, but the passion was typically short-lived". Even in later life, Crowley was able to attract young bohemian women to be his lovers, largely due to his charisma. He applied the term "Scarlet Woman" to various female lovers whom he believed played an important role in his magical work. During homosexual acts, he usually played 'the passive role', which Booth believed "appealed to his masochistic side". An underlying theme in many of his writings is that spiritual enlightenment arises through transgressing socio-sexual norms.
Crowley advocated complete sexual freedom for both men and women. He argued that homosexual and bisexual people should not suppress their sexual orientation, commenting that a person "must not be ashamed or afraid of being homosexual if he happens to be so at heart; he must not attempt to violate his own true nature because of public opinion, or medieval morality, or religious prejudice which would wish he were otherwise." On other issues he adopted a more conservative attitude; he opposed abortion on moral grounds, believing that no woman following her True Will would ever desire one.
Biographer Lawrence Sutin stated that "blatant bigotry is a persistent minor element in Crowley's writings". Sutin thought Crowley "a spoiled scion of a wealthy Victorian family who embodied many of the worst John Bull racial and social prejudices of his upper-class contemporaries", noting that he "embodied the contradiction that writhed within many Western intellectuals of the time: deeply held racist viewpoints courtesy of society, coupled with a fascination with people of colour". Crowley is said to have insulted his close Jewish friend Victor Neuburg, using antisemitic slurs, and he had mixed opinions about Jewish people as a group. Although he praised their "sublime" poetry and stated that they exhibited "imagination, romance, loyalty, probity and humanity", he also thought that centuries of persecution had led some Jewish people to exhibit "avarice, servility, falseness, cunning and the rest". He was also known to praise various ethnic and cultural groups, for instance he thought that the Chinese people exhibited a "spiritual superiority" to the English, and praised Muslims for exhibiting "manliness, straightforwardness, subtlety, and self-respect".
Both critics of Crowley and adherents of Thelema have accused Crowley of sexism. Booth described Crowley as exhibiting a "general misogyny", something the biographer believed arose from Crowley's bad relationship with his mother. Sutin noted that Crowley "largely accepted the notion, implicitly embodied in Victorian sexology, of women as secondary social beings in terms of intellect and sensibility". The scholar of religion Manon Hedenborg White noted that some of Crowley's statements are "undoubtedly misogynist by contemporary standards", but characterized Crowley's attitude toward women as complex and multi-faceted. Crowley's comments on women's role varied dramatically within his written work, even that produced in similar periods. Crowley described women as "moral inferiors" who had to be treated with "firmness, kindness and justice", while also arguing that Thelema was essential to women's emancipation. |
Aleister Crowley | Possible links to intelligence | Possible links to intelligence
Biographers Richard B. Spence and Tobias Churton have suggested that Crowley was a spy for the British secret services and that among other things he joined the Golden Dawn under their command to monitor the activities of Mathers, who was known to be a Carlist. Spence suggested that the conflict between Mathers and the London lodge for the temple was part of an intelligence operation to undermine Mathers' authority. Spence has suggested that the purpose of Crowley's trip to Mexico might have been to explore Mexican oil prospects for British intelligence. Spence has suggested that his trip to China was orchestrated as part of a British intelligence scheme to monitor the region's opium trade. Churton suggested that Crowley had travelled to Moscow on the orders of British intelligence to spy on revolutionary elements in the city.
Spence and Sutin both wrote that Crowley's pro-German work in the United States during World War I was actually a cover for him being a double agent for Britain, citing his hyperbolic articles in The Fatherland to make the German lobby appear ridiculous in the eyes of the American public. Spence also wrote that Crowley encouraged the German Navy to destroy the Lusitania, informing them that it would ensure the US stayed out of the war, while in reality hoping that it would bring the US into the war on Britain's side. However, there is exactly no evidence other that these biographers suppositions to suggest that this actually happened. |
Aleister Crowley | Legacy and influence | Legacy and influence
Crowley has remained an influential figure, both amongst occultists and in popular culture, particularly that of Britain, but also of other parts of the world. In 2002, a BBC poll placed Crowley number 73 in a list of the 100 Greatest Britons. Richard Cavendish has written of him that "In native talent, penetrating intelligence and determination, Aleister Crowley was the best-equipped magician to emerge since the seventeenth century." The scholar of esotericism Egil Asprem described him as "one of the most well-known figures in modern occultism". The scholar of esotericism Wouter Hanegraaff asserted that Crowley was an extreme representation of "the dark side of the occult", adding that he was "the most notorious occultist magician of the twentieth century". The philosopher John Moore opined that Crowley stood out as a "Modern Master" when compared with other prominent occult figures like George Gurdjieff, P. D. Ouspensky, Rudolf Steiner, or Helena Blavatsky, also describing him as a "living embodiment" of Oswald Spengler's "Faustian Man". Biographer Tobias Churton considered Crowley "a pioneer of consciousness research". Hutton noted that Crowley had "an important place in the history of modern Western responses to Oriental spiritual traditions", while Sutin thought that he had made "distinctly original contributions" to the study of yoga in the West.
Thelema continued to develop and spread following Crowley's death. In 1969, O.T.O. was reactivated in California under the leadership of Grady Louis McMurtry; in 1985 its right to the title was unsuccessfully challenged in court by a rival group, the Society Ordo Templi Orientis, led by Brazilian Thelemite Marcelo Ramos Motta. Another American Thelemite is the filmmaker Kenneth Anger, who was influenced by Crowley's writings from a young age. In the United Kingdom, Kenneth Grant propagated a tradition known as Typhonian Thelema through his organisation, the Typhonian O.T.O., later renamed the Typhonian Order. Also in Britain, an occultist known as Amado Crowley claimed to be Crowley's son; this has been refuted by academic investigation. Amado argued that Thelema was a false religion created by Crowley to hide his true esoteric teachings, which Amado said he was propagating.
Several Western esoteric traditions other than Thelema were also influenced by Crowley, with Djurdjevic observing that "Crowley's influence on twentieth-century and contemporary esotericism has been enormous". Gerald Gardner, the founder of Gardnerian Wicca, used much of Crowley's published material when composing the Gardnerian ritual liturgy, and the Australian witch Rosaleen Norton was also heavily influenced by Crowley's ideas. More widely, Crowley became "a dominant figure" in the modern Pagan community. L. Ron Hubbard, the American founder of Scientology, was involved in Thelema in the early 1940s (with Jack Parsons), and it has been argued that Crowley's ideas influenced some of Hubbard's work. The scholars of religion Asbjørn Dyrendel, James R. Lewis, and Jesper Petersen noted that despite the fact that Crowley was not a Satanist, he "in many ways embodies the pre-Satanist esoteric discourse on Satan and Satanism through his lifestyle and his philosophy", with his "image and ought" becoming an "important influence" on the later development of religious Satanism. For instance, two prominent figures in religious Satanism, Anton LaVey and Michael Aquino, were influenced by Crowley's work. |
Aleister Crowley | In popular culture | In popular culture
Crowley also had a wider influence in British popular culture. After his time in Cefalù, which brought him to public attention in Britain, various "literary Crowleys" appeared: characters in fiction based upon him. One of the earliest was the character of the poet Shelley Arabin in John Buchan's 1926 novel The Dancing Floor. In his novel The Devil Rides Out, the writer Dennis Wheatley used Crowley as a partial basis for the character of Damien Mocata, a portly bald defrocked priest who engages in black magic. The occultist Dion Fortune used Crowley as a basis for characters in her books The Secrets of Doctor Taverner (1926) and The Winged Bull (1935). He was included as one of the figures on the cover art of The Beatles' album Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band (1967), and his motto of "Do What Thou Wilt" was inscribed on the vinyl of Led Zeppelin's album Led Zeppelin III (1970). Led Zeppelin co-founder Jimmy Page bought Boleskine in 1971, and part of the band's film The Song Remains the Same was filmed in the grounds. He sold it in 1992. Though David Bowie makes but a fleeting reference to Crowley in the lyrics of his song "Quicksand" (1971), it has been suggested that the lyrics of Bowie's No. 1 hit single "Let's Dance" (1983) may substantially paraphrase Crowley's 1923 poem "Lyric of Love to Leah". Ozzy Osbourne and his lyricist Bob Daisley wrote a song titled "Mr. Crowley" (1980). A prophetic quote about the coming of the New Aeon borrowed from Crowley's work Magick in Theory and Practice (1911) has been featured as the opening introduction to the video game Blood Omen: Legacy of Kain (1996). Crowley began to receive scholarly attention from academics in the late 1990s. |
Aleister Crowley | Bibliography | Bibliography |
Aleister Crowley | Notes and references | Notes and references |
Aleister Crowley | Explanatory notes | Explanatory notes |
Aleister Crowley | Citations | Citations |
Aleister Crowley | Works cited | Works cited
|
Aleister Crowley | Further reading | Further reading
|
Aleister Crowley | External links | External links
Aleister Crowley Collection at the Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas
"Aleister Crowley and the Abbey of Thelema in Cefalù" at WondersOfSicily.com, with photos
Perdurabo (Where is Aleister Crowley?) – film on the Abbey of Thelema by Carlos Atanes
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Aleister Crowley | Table of Content | short description, Early life, Youth, Cambridge University: 1895–1898, The Golden Dawn: 1898–1899, Mexico, India, Paris, and marriage: 1900–1903, Developing Thelema, Egypt and ''The Book of the Law'': 1904, Kanchenjunga and China: 1905–1906, The A∴A∴ and The Holy Books of Thelema: 1907–1909, Algeria and the Rites of Eleusis: 1909–1911, Ordo Templi Orientis and the Paris Working: 1912–1914, United States: 1914–1919, Abbey of Thelema: 1920–1923, Later life, Tunisia, Paris, and London: 1923–1929, Berlin and London: 1930–1938, Second World War and death: 1939–1947, Beliefs and thought, Magick and theology, Image and opinions, Political opinions, Opinions on race and gender, Possible links to intelligence, Legacy and influence, In popular culture, Bibliography, Notes and references, Explanatory notes, Citations, Works cited, Further reading, External links |
Afterlife | Short description | thumb|A depiction of Idris visiting Heaven and Hell from a Persian illuminated manuscript version of the Islamic text Stories of the Prophets (1577)
The afterlife or life after death is a purported existence in which the essential part of an individual's stream of consciousness or identity continues to exist after the death of their physical body. The surviving essential aspect varies between belief systems; it may be some partial element, or the entire soul or spirit, which carries with it one's personal identity.
In some views, this continued existence takes place in a spiritual realm, while in others, the individual may be reborn into this world and begin the life cycle over again in a process referred to as reincarnation, likely with no memory of what they have done in the past. In this latter view, such rebirths and deaths may take place over and over again continuously until the individual gains entry to a spiritual realm or otherworld. Major views on the afterlife derive from religion, esotericism, and metaphysics.
Some belief systems, such as those in the Abrahamic tradition, hold that the dead go to a specific place (e.g., paradise or hell) after death, as determined by their god, based on their actions and beliefs during life. In contrast, in systems of reincarnation, such as those of the Indian religions, the nature of the continued existence is determined directly by the actions of the individual in the ended life. |
Afterlife | Different metaphysical models | Different metaphysical models
Theist immortalists generally believe some afterlife awaits people when they die. Members of some generally non-theistic religions believe in an afterlife without reference to a deity.
Religions, such as Christianity, Islam, and various pagan belief systems, believe in the soul's existence in another world, while others, like many forms of Hinduism and Buddhism, believe in reincarnation. In both cases, these religions hold that one's status in the afterlife is determined by their conduct during life. |
Afterlife | Reincarnation | Reincarnation
Reincarnation is the philosophical or religious concept that an aspect of a living being starts a new life in a different physical body or form after each death. This concept is also known as rebirth or transmigration and is part of the Saṃsāra/karma doctrine of cyclic existence. Samsara refers to the process in which souls (jivas) go through a sequence of human and animal forms. Traditional Hinduism teaches that each life helps the soul (jivas) learn until the soul becomes purified to the point of liberation. All major Indian religions, namely Buddhism, Hinduism, Jainism, and Sikhism have their own interpretations of the idea of reincarnation. The human idea of reincarnation is found in many diverse ancient cultures, and a belief in rebirth/metempsychosis was held by historic Greek figures, such as Pythagoras and Plato.see Charles Taliaferro, Paul Draper, Philip L. Quinn, A Companion to Philosophy of Religion. John Wiley and Sons, 2010, p. 640, Google Books
For Plato, see Kamtekar 2016 and Campbell 2022.
Kamtekar, Rachana. "The Soul's (After-) Life," Ancient Philosophy 36 (2016): 1–18.
Campbell, Douglas R. "Plato's Theory of Reincarnation: Eschatology and Natural Philosophy," Review of Metaphysics 75 4 (2022): 643–665. It is a common belief of various ancient and modern religions, such as Spiritism, theosophy, and Eckankar. It is found as well in many tribal societies around the world, in places such as Australia, East Asia, Siberia, and South America.Gananath Obeyesekere, Imagining Karma: Ethical Transformation in Amerindian, Buddhist, and Greek Rebirth. University of California Press, 2002, p. 15.
thumb|alt=This Bhavachakra mural depicts the six realms of existence for reincarnation in Buddhism, with Yama holding the Wheel of Life.|The twelve nidanas in Buddhist artwork
thumb|alt=Aztec wooden mask|Aztec mask depicting transformation and rebirth
Although the majority of denominations within the Abrahamic religions of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam do not believe that individuals reincarnate, particular groups within these religions do refer to reincarnation; these groups include the mainstream historical and contemporary followers of Kabbalah, the Cathars, Alawites, the Druze,Hitti, Philip K (2007) [1924]. Origins of the Druze People and Religion, with Extracts from their Sacred Writings (New Edition). Columbia University Oriental Studies. 28. London: Saqi. pp. 13–14. and the Rosicrucians.Heindel, Max (1985) [1939, 1908] The Rosicrucian Christianity Lectures (Collected Works): The Riddle of Life and Death . Oceanside, California. 4th edition. The historical relations between these sects and the beliefs about reincarnation that were characteristic of neoplatonism, Orphism, Hermeticism, Manicheanism, and Gnosticism of the Roman era as well as the Indian religions have been the subject of scholarly research.An important recent work discussing the mutual influence of ancient Greek and Indian philosophy regarding these matters is The Shape of Ancient Thought by Thomas McEvilley. Unity Church and its founder Charles Fillmore teach reincarnation.
Rosicrucians speak of a life review period occurring immediately after death and before entering the afterlife's planes of existence (before the silver cord is broken), followed by a judgment, more akin to a final review or end report over one's life.Max Heindel, Death and Life in Purgatory —Life and Activity in Heaven |
Afterlife | Heaven and Hell | Heaven and Hell
thumb|Georgin François, The 3 Roads to Eternity, 1825
Heaven, the heavens, Seven Heavens, pure lands, Tian, Jannah, Valhalla, or the Summerland, is a common religious, cosmological, or transcendent place where beings such as gods, angels, jinn, saints, or venerated ancestors are said to originate, be enthroned, or live. According to the beliefs of some religions, heavenly beings can descend to earth or incarnate, and earthly beings can ascend to heaven in the afterlife, or in exceptional cases, enter heaven alive.
Heaven is often described as a "higher place", the holiest place, a paradise, in contrast to hell or the underworld or the "low places", and universally or conditionally accessible by earthly beings according to various standards of divinity, goodness, piety, faith or other virtues or right beliefs or the will of God. Some believe in the possibility of a heaven on Earth in a world to come.
In Hinduism, heaven is termed Svarga loka. There are seven positive regions and seven negative regions to which the soul can go after death. After completing its stay in the respective region, the soul is subjected to rebirth in different living forms according to its karma. This cycle can be broken after a soul achieves Moksha or Nirvana. Any place of existence, either of humans, souls or deities, outside the tangible world (heaven, hell, or other) is referred to as otherworld.
Hell, in many religious and folkloric traditions, is a place of torment and punishment in the afterlife. Religions with a linear divine history often depict hell as an eternal destination, while religions with a cyclic history often depict a hell as an intermediary period between incarnations. Typically, these traditions locate hell in another dimension or under the Earth's surface and often include entrances to hell from the land of the living. Other afterlife destinations include purgatory and limbo.
Traditions that do not conceive of the afterlife as a place of punishment or reward merely describe hell as an abode of the dead, the grave, a neutral place (for example, Sheol or Hades) located under the surface of Earth. |
Afterlife | Ancient religions | Ancient religions |
Afterlife | Ancient Egyptian religion | Ancient Egyptian religion
thumb|Judgment of the Dead in Duat
thumb|This detail scene based from the Papyrus of ani shows a heart being weighed on the scale of Maat against the feather of truth, by the jackal-headed Anubis. The ibis-headed Thoth, scribe of the gods, records the result. If the heart is lighter than the feather, a persion is allowed to pass into the afterlife. If not, they are eaten by the waiting Ammit. Vignettes such as these were a common illustration in Egyptian books of the dead.
The afterlife played an important role in Ancient Egyptian religion, and its belief system is one of the earliest known in recorded history. When the body died, parts of its soul known as ka (body double) and the ba (personality) would go to the afterlife, which is known to Egyptians as the "Kingdom of the Dead". To sustain the ka, the living provided offerings of food and drink, which were believed to nourish the ka's spiritual needs.
The ka would reunite with the deceased's spirit and enjoy eternal life in the Fields of Aaru, a paradise reserved for the righteous. However, Osiris demands work as restitution for the protection he provides. Statues were placed in the tombs to serve as substitutes for the deceased.Richard P. Taylor, Death and the afterlife: A Cultural Encyclopedia, ABC-CLIO, 2000,
Arriving at one's reward in afterlife was a demanding ordeal, requiring a sin-free heart and the ability to recite the spells, passwords, and formulae of the Book of the Dead. In the Hall of Two Truths, the deceased's heart was weighed against the Shu feather of truth and justice taken from the headdress of the goddess Ma'at. If the heart was lighter than the feather, they could pass on, but if it were heavier they would be devoured by the demon Ammit.Kathryn Demeritt, Ptah's Travels: Kingdoms of Ancient Egypt, 2005, p. 82
Egyptians also believed that being mummified and put in a sarcophagus (an ancient Egyptian "coffin" carved with complex symbols and designs, as well as pictures and hieroglyphs) was the only way to have an afterlife. What are referred to as the Coffin Texts, are inscribed on a coffin and serve as a guide for the challenges in the afterlife. The Coffin texts are more or less a duplication of the Pyramid Texts, which would serve as a guide for Egyptian pharaohs or queens in the afterlife. Only if the corpse had been properly embalmed and entombed in a mastaba, could the dead live again in the Fields of Yalu and accompany the Sun on its daily ride. Due to the dangers the afterlife posed, the Book of the Dead was placed in the tomb with the body as well as food, jewelry, and 'curses'. They also used the "opening of the mouth".Glennys Howarth, Oliver Leaman, Encyclopedia of death and dying, 2001, p. 238Natalie Lunis, Tut's Deadly Tomb, 2010, p. 11
Ancient Egyptian civilization was based on religion. The belief in the rebirth after death became the driving force behind funeral practices; for them, death was a temporary interruption rather than complete cessation of life. Eternal life could be ensured by means like piety to the gods, preservation of the physical form through mummification, and the provision of statuary and other funerary equipment. Each human consisted of the physical body, the ka, the ba, and the akh. The Name and Shadow were also living entities. To enjoy the afterlife, all these elements had to be sustained and protected from harm.Fergus Fleming, Alan Lothian, Ancient Egypt's Myths and Beliefs, 2011, p. 96
On 30 March 2010, a spokesman for the Egyptian Culture Ministry claimed it had unearthed a large red granite door in Luxor with inscriptions by User, a powerful adviser to the 18th Dynasty Queen Hatshepsut who ruled between 1479 BC and 1458 BC, the longest of any woman. It believes the false door is a 'door to the Afterlife'. According to the archaeologists, the door was reused in a structure in Roman Egypt. |
Afterlife | Ancient Greek and Roman religions | Ancient Greek and Roman religions
The Greek god Hades is known in Greek mythology as the king of the underworld, a place where souls live after death.F. P. Retief and L. Cilliers, "Burial customs, the afterlife and the pollution of death in ancient Greece", Acta Theologica 26(2), 2006, p. 45 (PDF ). The Greek god Hermes, the messenger of the gods, would take the dead soul of a person to the underworld (sometimes called Hades or the House of Hades). Hermes would leave the soul on the banks of the River Styx, the river between life and death.Social Studies School Service, Ancient Greece, 2003, pp. 49–51
Charon, also known as the ferryman, would take the soul across the river to Hades, if the soul had gold: upon burial, the family of the dead soul would put coins under the deceased's tongue. Once crossed, the soul would be judged by Aeacus, Rhadamanthus and King Minos. The soul would be sent to Elysium, Tartarus, or Asphodel Fields. The Elysian Fields were for the ones that lived pure lives. It consisted of green fields, valleys and mountains, everyone there was peaceful and contented, and the Sun always shone there. Tartarus was for the people that blasphemed against the gods or were rebellious and consciously evil.Perry L. Westmoreland, Ancient Greek Beliefs, 2007, pp. 68–70 In Tartarus, the soul would be punished by being burned in lava or stretched on racks. The Asphodel Fields were for a varied selection of human souls including those whose sins equaled their goodness, those who were indecisive in their lives, and those who were not judged.
Some heroes of Greek legend are allowed to visit the underworld. The Romans had a similar belief system about the afterlife, with Hades becoming known as Pluto. In the ancient Greek myth about the Labours of Heracles, the hero Heracles had to travel to the underworld to capture Cerberus, the three-headed guard dog, as one of his tasks.
In Dream of Scipio, Cicero describes what seems to be an out of body experience, of the soul traveling high above the Earth, looking down at the small planet, from far away.N. Sabir, Heaven Hell Or, 2010, p. 147
In Book VI of Virgil's Aeneid, the hero, Aeneas, travels to the underworld to see his father. By the River Styx, he sees the souls of those not given a proper burial, forced to wait by the river until someone buries them. While down there, along with the dead, he is shown the place where the wrongly convicted reside, the fields of sorrow where those who committed suicide and now regret it reside, including Aeneas' former lover, the warriors and shades, Tartarus (where the titans and powerful non-mortal enemies of the Olympians reside) where he can hear the groans of the imprisoned, the palace of Pluto, and the fields of Elysium where the descendants of the divine and bravest heroes reside. He sees the river of forgetfulness, Lethe, which the dead must drink to forget their life and begin anew. Lastly, his father shows him all of the future heroes of Rome who will live if Aeneas fulfills his destiny in founding the city.
Other eschatological views populate the ancient-Greek worldview. For instance, Plato argued for reincarnation in several dialogues, including the Timaeus.See Timaeus 90–92. For a recent scholarly treatment, see Douglas R. Campbell, "Plato's Theory of Reincarnation: Eschatology and Natural Philosophy," Review of Metaphysics 75 (4): 643–665. 2022. |
Afterlife | Norse religion | Norse religion
The Poetic and Prose Eddas, the oldest sources for information on the Norse concept of the afterlife, vary in their description of the several realms that are described as falling under this topic. The most well-known are:
Valhalla: (lit. "Hall of the Slain" i.e. "the Chosen Ones") Half the warriors who die in battle join the god Odin who rules over a majestic hall called Valhalla in Asgard.
Fólkvangr: () The other half join the goddess Freyja in a great meadow known as Fólkvangr.
Niflhel: (lit. "The Dark" or "Misty Hel"). Niflhel is believed to be a place of punishment, where the oathbreakers and other wicked people go.
Hel: (). Hel was the daughter of god Loki and her kingdom was located in downward and northward. Snorri Sturluson's Gylfaginning tells of evil men going to Niflhel via Hel. |
Afterlife | Abrahamic religions | Abrahamic religions |
Afterlife | Judaism | Judaism |
Afterlife | Sheol | Sheol
Sheol, in the Hebrew Bible, is a place of darkness (Job 10:21–22) to which all the dead go—both the righteous and the unrighteous—regardless of the moral choices made in life (Genesis 35:37; Book of Ezekiel 32; Isaiah 16; Job 30:23), a place of stillness (Psalm 88:13, 94:17; Ecclesiastes 9:10), at the longest possible distance from Heaven (Job 11:8; Amos 9:2; Psalm 139:8).
The inhabitants of Sheol were the "shades" (rephaim), entities without personality or strength. Under some circumstances, they were thought to be able to be contacted by the living (as the Witch of Endor contacts the shade of Samuel for Saul), but such practices were forbidden (Deuteronomy 18:10).
Whereas the Hebrew Bible appears to describe Sheol as the permanent place of the dead, in the Second Temple period (roughly 500 BC – 70 AD), a more diverse set of ideas developed. In some texts, Sheol is considered to be the home of both the righteous and the wicked, separated into respective compartments; in others, it was considered a place of punishment, meant for the wicked dead alone. When the Hebrew scriptures were translated into Greek in ancient Alexandria around 200 BC, the word "Hades" (the Greek underworld) was substituted for Sheol. This is reflected in the New Testament where Hades is both the underworld of the dead and the personification of the evil it represents. |
Afterlife | World to Come | World to Come
The Talmud offers several thoughts relating to the afterlife. After death, the soul is brought for judgment. Those who have led pristine lives immediately enter the Olam Haba or world to come. Most do not enter the world to come immediately but experience a period of reflection on their earthly actions and are made aware of what they have done wrong. Some view this period as "re-schooling", with the soul gaining wisdom as one's errors are reviewed. Others view this period as spiritual discomfort caused by past wrongs. At the end of this period, not longer than one year, the soul then takes its place in the world to come. Although discomforts are made part of certain Jewish conceptions of the afterlife, the concept of eternal damnation is not a tenet of the Jewish afterlife. According to the Talmud, extinction of the soul is reserved for a far smaller group of malicious and evil leaders whose very evil deeds go way beyond norms or who lead large groups of people to utmost evil. This is also part of Maimonides' 13 principles of faith.Maimonides' Introduction to Perek Helek, publ. and transl. by Maimonides Heritage Center, p. 22-23.
Maimonides describes the Olam Haba in spiritual terms, relegating the prophesied physical resurrection to the status of a future miracle unrelated to the afterlife or the Messianic era. According to Maimonides, an afterlife continues for the soul of every human being: soul now separated from the body in which it was "housed" during its earthly existence.
The Zohar describes Gehenna not as a place of punishment for the wicked but as a place of spiritual purification for souls. |
Afterlife | Reincarnation in Jewish tradition | Reincarnation in Jewish tradition
Although there is no reference to reincarnation in the Talmud or any prior writings,Saadia Gaon in Emunoth ve-Deoth Section vi according to rabbis such as Avraham Arieh Trugman, reincarnation is recognized as being part and parcel of Jewish tradition. Trugman explains that it is through oral tradition that the meanings of the Torah, its commandments, and stories are known and understood. The classic work of Jewish mysticism, the Zohar, is quoted liberally in all Jewish learning; in the Zohar, the idea of reincarnation is mentioned repeatedly. Trugman states that in the last five centuries, the concept of reincarnation, which until then had been a much-hidden tradition within Judaism, was given open exposure.
Shraga Simmons commented that within the Bible itself, the idea [of reincarnation] is intimated in Deut. 25:5–10, Deut. 33:6 and Isaiah 22:14, 65:6.
Yirmiyahu Ullman wrote that reincarnation is an "ancient, mainstream belief in Judaism". The Zohar makes frequent and lengthy references to reincarnation. Onkelos, a righteous convert and authoritative commentator of the same period, explained the verse, "Let Reuben live and not die ..." (Deuteronomy 33:6) to mean that Reuben should merit the World to Come directly and not have to die again as a result of being reincarnated. Torah scholar, commentator and kabbalist, Nachmanides (Ramban 1195–1270), attributed Job's suffering to reincarnation, as hinted in Job's saying "God does all these things twice or three times with a man, to bring back his soul from the pit to... the light of the living' (Job 33:29–30)."
Reincarnation, called gilgul, became popular in folk belief and is found in much Yiddish literature among Ashkenazi Jews. Among a few kabbalists, it was posited that some human souls could end up being reincarnated into non-human bodies. These ideas were found in several Kabbalistic works from the 13th century and among many mystics in the late 16th century. Martin Buber's early collection of stories of the Baal Shem Tov's life includes several that refer to people reincarnating in successive lives.Martin Buber, "Legende des Baalschem" in Die Chassidischen Bücher, Hellerau 1928, especially Die niedergestiegene Seele
Among well-known (generally non-kabbalist or anti-kabbalist) rabbis who rejected the idea of reincarnation are Saadia Gaon, David Kimhi, Hasdai Crescas, Yedayah Bedershi (early 14th century), Joseph Albo, Abraham ibn Daud, the Rosh and Leon de Modena. Saadia Gaon, in Emunoth ve-Deoth (Hebrew: "beliefs and opinions"), concludes Section VI with a refutation of the doctrine of metempsychosis (reincarnation). While rebutting reincarnation, Saadia Gaon further states that Jews who hold to reincarnation have adopted non-Jewish beliefs. By no means do all Jews today believe in reincarnation, but belief in reincarnation is not uncommon among many Jews, including Orthodox.
Other well-known rabbis who are reincarnationists include Yonassan Gershom, Abraham Isaac Kook, Talmud scholar Adin Steinsaltz, DovBer Pinson, David M. Wexelman, Zalman Schachter, and many others. Reincarnation is cited by authoritative Biblical commentators, including Ramban (Nachmanides), Menachem Recanti, and Rabbenu Bachya.
Among the many volumes of Yitzchak Luria, most of which come down from the pen of his primary disciple, Chaim Vital, are insights explaining issues related to reincarnation. His Shaar HaGilgulim ("The Gates of Reincarnation") is a book devoted exclusively to the subject of reincarnation in Judaism.
Rabbi Naftali Silberberg of The Rohr Jewish Learning Institute notes that "Many ideas that originate in other religions and belief systems have been popularized in the media and are taken for granted by unassuming Jews." |
Afterlife | Christianity | Christianity
Mainstream Christianity professes belief in the Nicene Creed, and English versions of the Nicene Creed in current use include the phrase: "We look for the resurrection of the dead, and the life of the world to come."
When questioned by the Sadducees about the resurrection of the dead (in a context relating to who one's spouse would be if one had been married several times in life), Jesus said that marriage would be irrelevant after the resurrection as the resurrected will be like the angels in Heaven.
Jesus also maintained that the time would come when the dead would hear the voice of the Son of God, and all who were in the tombs would come out; those who have heard his "[commandments] and believes in the one who sent [Him]" to the "resurrection of life", but those who do not to the "resurrection of condemnation".John 5:24
The Book of Enoch describes Sheol as divided into four compartments for four types of the dead: the faithful saints who await resurrection in Paradise, the merely virtuous who await their reward, the wicked who await punishment, and the wicked who have already been punished and will not be resurrected on Judgment Day.Fosdick, Harry Emerson. A guide to understanding the Bible. New York: Harper & Brothers. 1956. p. 276. The Book of Enoch is considered apocryphal by most denominations of Christianity and all of Judaism.
The book of 2 Maccabees clearly describes the dead waiting for future resurrection and judgment, along with prayers and offerings for the deceased to alleviate their sins.
right|thumb|Domenico Beccafumi's Inferno: a Christian vision of hell
The author of the Gospel of Luke recounts the story of Lazarus and the rich man, which shows people in Hades awaiting the resurrection either in comfort or torment. The author of the Book of Revelation writes about God and the angels versus Satan and demons in an epic battle at the end of times when all souls are judged. There is mention of ghostly bodies of the prophets and the transfiguration.
The non-canonical Acts of Paul and Thecla speak of the efficacy of prayer for the dead so that they might be "translated to a state of happiness".Acts of Paul and Thecla 8:5
Hippolytus of Rome pictures the underworld (Hades) as a place where the righteous dead, waiting in the bosom of Abraham for their resurrection, rejoice at their future prospect; the unrighteous are tormented at the sight of the "lake of unquenchable fire" into which they are destined to be cast.
Gregory of Nyssa discusses the long-before-believed possibility of purification of souls after death.He wrote that a person "may afterward in a quite different manner be very much interested in what is better, when, after his departure out of the body, he gains knowledge of the difference between virtue and vice and finds that he is not able to partake of divinity until he has been purged of the filthy contagion in his soul by the purifying fire" (emphasis added)—Sermon on the Dead, AD 382, quoted in The Roots of Purgatory
Pope Gregory I repeats the concept, articulated over a century earlier by Gregory of Nyssa, that the saved suffer purification after death. In connection with this, he wrote of "purgatorial flames."
The noun "purgatorium" (Latin: place of cleansing"purgatory" . The Columbia Electronic Encyclopedia, Sixth Edition. Columbia University Press., 2003. Answers.com 6 June 2007.) is used for the first time to describe a state of painful purification of the saved afterlife. The same word in adjectival form (purgatorius -a -um, cleansing), which appears also in non-religious writing, was already used by Christians such as Augustine of Hippo and Pope Gregory I to refer to an after-death cleansing.
Theologians and philosophers presented various philosophies and beliefs during the Age of Enlightenment. A notable example is Emanuel Swedenborg who wrote some 18 theological works which describe in detail the nature of the afterlife according to his claimed spiritual experiences, the most famous of which is Heaven and Hell. His report of life there covers a wide range of topics, such as marriage in heaven (where all angels are married), children in heaven (where they are raised by angel parents), time and space in heaven (there are none), the after-death awakening process in the World of Spirits (a place halfway between Heaven and Hell and where people first wake up after death), the allowance of a free will choice between Heaven or Hell (as opposed to being sent to either one by God), the eternity of Hell (one could leave but would never want to), and that all angels or devils were once people on earth. |
Afterlife | The Catholic Church | The Catholic Church
The Catholic conception of the afterlife teaches that after the body dies, the soul is judged, the righteous and free of sin enter Heaven. However, those who die in unrepented mortal sin go to hell. In the 1990s, the Catechism of the Catholic Church defined hell not as punishment imposed on the sinner but rather as the sinner's self-exclusion from God. Unlike other Christian groups, the Catholic Church teaches that those who die in a state of grace but still carry venial sin go to a place called Purgatory, where they undergo purification to enter Heaven. |
Afterlife | Limbo | Limbo
Despite popular opinion, Limbo, which was elaborated upon by theologians beginning in the Middle Ages, was never recognized as a dogma of the Catholic Church, yet, at times, it has been a very popular theological theory within the Church. Limbo is a theory that unbaptized but innocent souls, such as those of infants or virtuous individuals who lived before Jesus Christ was born, exist in neither Heaven nor Hell proper. Therefore, these souls neither merit the beatific vision nor are subjected to any punishment because they are not guilty of any personal sin although they have not received baptism, so they still bear original sin. So, they are generally seen as existing in a state of natural, but not supernatural, happiness until the end of time.
In other Christian denominations, it has been described as an intermediate place or state of confinement in oblivion and neglect. |
Afterlife | Purgatory | Purgatory
The notion of purgatory is associated mainly with the Catholic Church. In the Catholic Church, all those who die in God's grace and friendship but are still imperfectly purified are indeed assured of their eternal salvation. Still, after death, they undergo purification to achieve the holiness necessary to enter the joy of heaven or the final purification of the elect, which is entirely different from the punishment of the damned. The tradition of the church, by reference to specific texts of scripture, speaks of a "cleansing fire", but it is not always called purgatory.
Anglicans of the Anglo-Catholic tradition generally also hold to the belief. John Wesley, the founder of Methodism, believed in an intermediate state between death and the resurrection of the dead and in the possibility of "continuing to grow in holiness there", but Methodism does not officially affirm this belief and denies the possibility of helping by prayer any who may be in that state.Ted Campbell, Methodist Doctrine: The Essentials (Abingdon 1999), quoted in Feature article by United Methodist Reporter Managing Editor Robin Russell and in FAQ Belief: What happens immediately after a person dies? |
Afterlife | Orthodox Christianity | Orthodox Christianity
The Orthodox Church is intentionally reticent about the afterlife, as it acknowledges the mystery, especially of things that have not yet occurred. Beyond the second coming of Jesus, bodily resurrection, and final judgment, all of which are affirmed in the Nicene Creed (325 AD), Orthodoxy does not teach much else in any definitive manner. Unlike Western forms of Christianity, however, Orthodoxy is traditionally non-dualist and does not teach that there are two separate literal locations of heaven and hell, but instead acknowledges that "the 'location' of one's final destiny—heaven or hell—as being figurative."
Instead, Orthodoxy teaches that the final judgment is one's uniform encounter with divine love and mercy, but this encounter is experienced multifariously depending on the extent to which one has been transformed, partaken of divinity, and is therefore compatible or incompatible with God. "The monadic, immutable, and ceaseless object of eschatological encounter is therefore the love and mercy of God, his glory which infuses the heavenly temple, and it is the subjective human reaction which engenders multiplicity or any division of experience." For instance, St. Isaac the Syrian observes in his Ascetical Homilies that "those who are punished in Gehenna, are scourged by the scourge of love. ... The power of love works in two ways: it torments sinners ... [as] bitter regret. But love inebriates the souls of the sons of Heaven by its delectability."St. Isaac the Syrian, "Homily 28," In The Ascetical Homilies of Saint Isaac the Syrian, trans. Dana Miller (Brookline, MA: Holy Transfiguration Monastery Press, 1984), 141. In this sense, the divine action is always, immutably, and uniformly love, and if one experiences this love negatively, the experience is then one of self-condemnation because of free will rather than condemnation by God.
Orthodoxy therefore uses the description of Jesus' judgment in John 3:19–21 as their model: "19 And this is the judgment: the light has come into the world, and people loved the darkness rather than the light because their works were evil. 20 For everyone who does wicked things hates the light and does not come to the light, lest his works should be exposed. 21 But whoever does what is true comes to the light, so that it may be clearly seen that his works have been carried out in God." As a characteristically Orthodox understanding, then, Fr. Thomas Hopko writes, "[I]t is precisely the presence of God's mercy and love which cause the torment of the wicked. God does not punish; he forgives... In a word, God has mercy on all, whether all like it or not. If we like it, it is paradise; if we do not, it is hell. Every knee will bend before the Lord. Everything will be subject to Him. God in Christ will indeed be 'all and in all,' with boundless mercy and unconditional pardon. But not all will rejoice in God's gift of forgiveness, and that choice will be judgment, the self-inflicted source of their sorrow and pain."Fr. Thomas Hopko, "Foreword," in The Orthodox Church, Sergius Bulgakov (Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir's Seminary Press, 1988), xiii.
Moreover, Orthodoxy includes a prevalent tradition of apokatastasis, or the restoration of all things in the end. This has been taught most notably by Origen, but also many other Church fathers and Saints, including Gregory of Nyssa. The Second Council of Constantinople (553 AD) affirmed the orthodoxy of Gregory of Nyssa while simultaneously condemning Origen's brand of universalism because it taught the restoration back to our pre-existent state, which Orthodoxy does not teach. It is also a teaching of such eminent Orthodox theologians as Olivier Clément, Metropolitan Kallistos Ware, and Bishop Hilarion Alfeyev. Although apokatastasis is not a dogma of the church but instead a theologoumenon, it is no less a teaching of the Orthodox Church than its rejection. As Met. Kallistos Ware explains, "It is heretical to say that all must be saved, for this is to deny free will; but, it is legitimate to hope that all may be saved,"Kallistos Ware, The Orthodox Church (New York: Penguin, 1997), 262. as insisting on torment without end also denies free will. |
Afterlife | The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints | The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints
framed|Plan of Salvation in LDS Religion
Joseph F. Smith of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints presents an elaborate vision of the afterlife. It is revealed as the scene of an extensive missionary effort by righteous spirits in paradise to redeem those still in darkness—a spirit prison or "hell" where the souls of the dead remain until judgment. It is divided into two parts: Spirit Prison and Paradise. These are also known as the Spirit World (also Abraham's Bosom; see Luke 16:19–25). They believe that Christ visited the spirit prison (1 Peter 3:18–20) and opened the gate for those who repent to cross over to Paradise. This is similar to the Harrowing of Hell doctrine of some mainstream Christian faiths. Both Spirit Prison and Paradise are temporary according to Latter-day Saint beliefs. After the resurrection, spirits are assigned "permanently" to three degrees of heavenly glory, determined by how they lived – Celestial, Terrestrial, and Telestial. (1 Cor 15:44–42; Doctrine and Covenants, Section 76) Sons of Perdition, or those who have known and seen God and deny it, will be sent to the realm of Satan, which is called Outer Darkness, where they shall live in misery and agony forever. However, according to the beliefs of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, most persons lack the amount of knowledge to commit the Eternal sin and are therefore incapable of becoming sons of perdition.Spencer W. Kimball: The Miracle of Forgiveness, p. 123.
The Celestial Kingdom is believed to be where the righteous can live eternally with their families. Progression does not end once one has entered the Celestial Kingdom but extends eternally. According to "True to the Faith" (a handbook on doctrines in the LDS faith), "The celestial kingdom is the place prepared for those who have "received the testimony of Jesus" and been "made perfect through Jesus the mediator of the new covenant, who wrought out this perfect atonement through the shedding of his own blood" (Doctrine and Covenants, 76:51, 69). To inherit this gift, we must receive the ordinances of salvation, keep the commandments, and repent of our sins." |
Afterlife | Jehovah's Witnesses | Jehovah's Witnesses
Jehovah's Witnesses occasionally use terms such as "afterlife" to refer to any hope for the dead, but they understand Ecclesiastes 9:5 to preclude belief in an immortal soul. Individuals judged by God to be wicked, such as in the Great Flood or at Armageddon, are given no hope of an afterlife. However, they believe that after Armageddon, there will be a bodily resurrection of "both righteous and unrighteous" dead (but not the "wicked"). Survivors of Armageddon and those who are resurrected are then to restore the Earth to a paradise gradually. After Armageddon, unrepentant sinners are punished with eternal death (non-existence). |
Afterlife | Seventh-day Adventists | Seventh-day Adventists
thumb|Creation and Death Equation
The Seventh-day Adventist Church's beliefs regarding the afterlife differ from those of other Christian churches. Rather than ascend to Heaven or descend to Hell, Adventists believe the dead "remain unconscious until the return of Christ in judgement". The concept that the dead remain dead until resurrection is one of the fundamental beliefs of Seventh-day Adventism. Adventists believe that death is an unconscious state (a "sleep"). This is based on Matt. 9:24; Mark 5:39; John 11:11–14; 1 Cor. 15:51, 52; 1 Thess. 4:13–17; 2 Peter 3:4; Eccl. 9:5, 6, 10. At death, all consciousness ends. The dead person does not know anything and does not do anything. They believe that death is a decreation, or an undoing of what was created. This is described in Ecclesiastes 12:7: "When a person dies, the body turns to dust again, and the spirit goes back to God, who gave it." The spirit of every person who dies—whether saved or unsaved—returns to God at death. The spirit that returns to God at death is the breath of life. |
Afterlife | Islam | Islam
thumb|upright=1.3| 15th century Persian depiction of Muhammad, Buraq, and Gabriel visiting Hell, where "shameless women" are burning for inciting lust in men by exposing their hair in public.
The Quran (the holy book of Islam) emphasizes the insignificance of worldly life (ḥayāt ad-dunyā usually translated as "this world") vis-à-vis the hereafter.
A central doctrine of Islamic faith is the Judgement Day (al-yawm al-ākhir, also known by other names), on which the world will come to an end and God will raise all mankind (as well as the jinn) from the dead and evaluate their worldly actions. The resurrected will be judged according to their deeds, records of which are kept on two books compiled for every human being—one for their good deeds and one for their evil ones.
Having been judged, the resurrected will cross the bridge of As-Sirāt over the pit of hell; when the condemned attempt to cross, they will be made to fall off into hellfire below, while the righteous will have no trouble and continue on to their eternal abode of heaven.
Afterlife in Islam actually begins before the Last Day. After death, humans will be questioned about their faith by two angels, Munkar and Nakīr. Those who die as martyrs go immediately to paradise. Others who have died and been buried will receive a taste of their eternal reward from the al-qabr or "the grave" (compare the Jewish concept of Sheol). Those bound for hell will suffer "Punishment of the Grave", while those bound for heaven will find the grave "peaceful and blessed".J. A. C. Brown, Misquoting Muhammad, 2014: p. 46
Islamic scripture—the Quran and hadith (reports of the words and deeds of the Islamic Prophet Muhammad who is believed to have visited heaven and hell during his Isra and Mi'raj journey) – give vivid descriptions of the pleasures of paradise (Jannah) and sufferings of hell (Jahannam). The gardens of Jannah have cool shade, adorned couchs and cushions, rich carpets spread out, cups full of wine, and every meat and fruit. Men will be provided with perpetually youthful, beautiful ḥūr, "untouched beforehand by man or jinn", with large, beautiful eyes. (In recent years some have argued that the term ḥūr refers both to pure men and pure women, and/or that Quranic references to "immortal boys" (, ) or "young men" () (ghilmān, wildān, and suqāh) who serve wine and meals to the blessed, are the male equivalents of hur.)
In contrast, those in Jahannam will dwell in a land infested with thousands of serpents and scorpions;Ghazālī, Iḥyāʾ, v.157, trans. Winter p.221-2; quoted in be "burnt" by "scorching fire" and when "their skins are roasted through, We shall change them for fresh skins" to repeat the process forever ; they will have nothing to drink but "boiling water and running sores"; their cries of remorse and pleading for forgiveness will be in vain.,
Traditionally, Jannah and Jahannam are thought to have different levels. Eight gates and eight levels in Jannah, where the higher the level the better it is and the happier you are. Jahannam possess seven layers. Each layer more horrible than the one above.
The Quran teaches that the purpose of Man's creation is to worship God and God alone. Those it describes as being punished in hell are "most typically" unbelievers, including those who worship others besides Allah, those who deny the divine origin of the Quran , or the coming of Judgement Day.
Straightforward crimes/sins against other people are also grounds for going to hell: the murder of a believer, usury (Q.2:275), devouring the property of an orphan , and slander , particularly of a chaste woman.Thomassen, "Islamic Hell", Numen, 56, 2009: p.405 However, it is a common belief among Muslims that whatever crimes/sins Muslims may have committed, their punishment in hell will be temporary. Only unbelievers will reside in hell permanently.A F Klein Religion Of Islam Routledge 2013 page 92 Thus Jahannam combines both the concept of an eternal hell (for unbelievers), and what is known in Christian Catholicism as purgatory (for believers eventually destined for heaven after punishment for their sins).John Renard The Handy Islam Answer Book Visible Ink Press 2015
The common belief holds that Jahannam coexists with the temporal world. Mainstream Islam teaches the continued existence of the soul and a transformed physical existence after death. The resurrection that will take place on the Last Day is physical, and is explained by suggesting that God will recreate the decayed body ("Have they not realized that Allah, Who created the heavens and the earth, can ˹easily˺ re-create them?" ). |
Afterlife | Ahmadiyya | Ahmadiyya
Ahmadi Muslims believe that the afterlife is not material but of a spiritual nature. According to Mirza Ghulam Ahmad, founder of the Ahmadiyya, the soul will give birth to another rarer entity and will resemble the life on this earth in the sense that this entity will bear a similar relationship to the soul as the soul bears relationship with the human existence on earth. On earth, if a person leads a righteous life and submits to the will of God, his or her tastes become attuned to enjoying spiritual pleasures as opposed to carnal desires. With this, an "embryonic soul" begins to take shape. Different tastes are said to be born which a person given to carnal passions finds no enjoyment. For example, sacrifice of one's own rights over that of others becomes enjoyable, or that forgiveness becomes second nature. In such a state a person finds contentment and peace at heart and at this stage, according to Ahmadiyya beliefs, it can be said that a soul within the soul has begun to take shape. |
Afterlife | Sufism | Sufism
The Sufi Muslim scholar Ibn 'Arabi defined Barzakh as the intermediate realm or "isthmus". It is between the world of corporeal bodies and the world of spirits, and is a means of contact between the two worlds. Without it, there would be no contact between the two and both would cease to exist. He described it as simple and luminous, like the world of spirits, but also able to take on many different forms just like the world of corporeal bodies can. In broader terms Barzakh, "is anything that separates two things". It has been called the dream world in which the dreamer is in both life and death. |
Afterlife | Baháʼí Faith | Baháʼí Faith
The teachings of the Baháʼí Faith state that the nature of the afterlife is beyond the understanding of those living, just as an unborn fetus cannot understand the nature of the world outside of the womb. The Baháʼí writings state that the soul is immortal and after death it will continue to progress until it finally attains God's presence.Baháʼu'lláh, Gleanings from the Writings of Baháʼu'lláh, ed. by US Baháʼí Publishing Trust, 1990, pp. 155–156. In Baháʼí belief, souls in the afterlife will continue to retain their individuality and consciousness and will be able to recognize and communicate spiritually with other souls whom they have made deep profound friendships with, such as their spouses.
The Baháʼí scriptures also state there are distinctions between souls in the afterlife, and that souls will recognize the worth of their own deeds and understand the consequences of their actions. It is explained that those souls that have turned toward God will experience gladness, while those who have lived in error will become aware of the opportunities they have lost. Also, in the Baháʼí view, souls will be able to recognize the accomplishments of the souls that have reached the same level as themselves, but not those that have achieved a rank higher than them. |
Afterlife | Indian religions | Indian religions
Early Indian religions were characterized by the belief in an afterlife, Ancestor worship, and related rites. These concepts started to significantly change after the period of the Upanishads. |
Afterlife | Buddhism | Buddhism
Afterlife in Buddhism consists of intermediated spirit realm that's beyond spatial means, which includes the six realms of existence, the 31 planes of existence, Naraka, Tengoku and the pure land after achieving enlightenment. Ancestor worship, and links to one's ancestors, was once an important component of early Buddhism, but became less relevant already before the formation of the different Buddhist streams. The concepts and importance of afterlife vary among modern Buddhist teachings.Dying, Death and the Afterlife in Dharma Traditions and Western Religions (pp.29–44) Deepak Heritage Books, January 2006
Buddhists maintain that rebirth takes place without an unchanging self or soul passing from one form to another. The type of rebirth will be conditioned by the moral tone of the person's actions (kamma or karma). For example, if a person has committed harmful actions by body, speech and mind based on greed, hate and delusion, would have his/her rebirth in a lower realm, i.e. an animal, a hungry ghost or a hell realm, is to be expected. On the other hand, where a person has performed skillful actions based on generosity, loving-kindness (metta), compassion and wisdom, rebirth in a happy realm, i.e. human or one of the many heavenly realms, can be expected.
However, the mechanism of rebirth with Kamma is not deterministic. It depends on various levels of kamma. The most important moment that determines where a person is reborn into is the last thought moment. At that moment, heavy kamma would ripen if there were performed. If not, near death kamma would ripen, and if not death kamma, then habitual kamma would ripen. Finally if none of the above happened, then residual kamma from previous actions can ripen. According to Theravada Buddhism, there are 31 realms of existence that one can be reborn into. According to these, 31 existences comprise 20 existences of supreme deities (Brahmas); 6 existences of deities (Devas); the human existence (Manussa); and, lastly, 4 existences of deprivation or unhappiness (Apaya).
Pure Land Buddhism of Mahayana believes in a special place apart from the 31 planes of existence called Pure Land. It is believed that each Buddha has their own pure land, created out of their merits for the sake of sentient beings who recall them mindfully to be able to be reborn in their pure land and train to become a Buddha there. Thus the main practice of pure land Buddhism is to chant a Buddha's name.
In Tibetan Buddhism the Tibetan Book of the Dead explains the intermediate state of humans between death and reincarnation. The deceased will find the bright light of wisdom, which shows a straightforward path to move upward and leave the cycle of reincarnation. There are various reasons why the deceased do not follow that light. Some had no briefing about the intermediate state in the former life. Others only used to follow their basic instincts like animals. And some have fear, which results from foul deeds in the former life or from insistent haughtiness. In the intermediate state the awareness is very flexible, so it is important to be virtuous, adopt a positive attitude, and avoid negative ideas. Ideas which are rising from subconsciousness can cause extreme tempers and cowing visions. In this situation they have to understand, that these manifestations are just reflections of the inner thoughts. No one can really hurt them, because they have no more material body. The deceased get help from different Buddhas who show them the path to the bright light. The ones who do not follow the path after all will get hints for a better reincarnation. They have to release the things and beings on which or whom they still hang from the life before. It is recommended to choose a family where the parents trust in the Dharma and to reincarnate with the will to care for the welfare of all beings. |
Afterlife | Hinduism | Hinduism
There are two major views of an afterlife in Hinduism: mythical and philosophical. The philosophies of Hinduism consider each individual consists of three bodies: physical body compose of water and biomatter (sthūla śarīra), an energetic/psychic/mental/subtle body (sūkṣma-śarīra) and a causal body (kāraṇa śarīra) comprising subliminal stuff i.e. mental impressions etc.
The individual is a stream of consciousness (Ātman), which flows through all the physical changes of the body and at the death of the physical body, flows on into another physical body. The two components that transmigrate are the subtle body and the causal body.
The thought that occupies the mind at the time of death determines the quality of our rebirth (antim smaraṇa), hence Hinduism advises to be mindful of one's thoughts and cultivate positive wholesome thoughts – mantra chanting (japa) is commonly practiced for this.
The mythical includes the philosophical but adds heaven and hell myths.
When one leaves the physical body at death he appears in the court of Yama, the God of Death, for an exit interview. The panel consists of Yama and Chitragupta – the cosmic accountant, he has a book which consists the history of the dead persons according to his/her mistakes the Yama decides the punishment is and Varuna, the cosmic intelligence officer. He is counseled about his life, achievements and failures and is shown a mirror in which his entire life is reflected. Philosophically, these three men are projections of one's mind. Yama sends him to a heavenly realm (Svarga) if he has been exceptionally benevolent and beneficent for a period of rest and recreation. His period is limited in time by the weight of his good deeds. If he has been exceptionally malevolent and caused immense suffering to other beings, then he is sent to a hell realm (Naraka) for his sins. After one has exhausted his karma, he takes birth again to continue his spiritual evolution. However, the belief in rebirth was not a part of early Vedic religions and texts. It was later developed by rishis (sages) who challenged the idea of one's life as being simplistic.
Rebirth can take place as a god (deva), a human (manuṣya) an animal (tiryak)—but it is generally taught that the spiritual evolution takes place from lower to higher species. In certain cases of traumatic death a person can take the form of a preta or hungry ghost – and remains in an earth-bound state interminably – until certain ceremonies are done to liberate them. This mythological part is extensively elaborated in the Puranas, especially in the Garuda Purana.
The Upanishads are the first scriptures in Hinduism which explicitly mention the afterlife."When the body becomes weak and goes into oblivion as it were, the Atman departs, and following it, the vital breath departs ... he becomes a pure consciousness, and with this consciousness, he proceeds. His past learning and deeds as well subtle memory accompany him. Just as a worm upon reaching the tip of a blade of grass, reaches out towards another blade of grass by way of support, so also does this Jiva end this body, becomes imperceptible, and then obtains another body by way of support, and pulls itself together."
– Brhadaranyaka Upanishad 4.4 The Bhagavad Gita, a famous Hindu scripture, says that just as a man discards his old clothes and wears new ones; similarly the Atman discards the old body and takes on a new one. In Hinduism, the belief is that the body is nothing but a shell, the consciousness inside is immutable and indestructible and takes on different lives in a cycle of birth and death. The end of this cycle is called mukti () and staying finally with the ultimate reality forever is moksha () or liberation.
The (diverse) views of modern Hinduism in part differ significantly from the Historical Vedic religion. |
Afterlife | Jainism | Jainism
Jainism also believes in the afterlife. They believe that the soul takes on a body form based on previous karmas or actions performed by that soul through eternity. Jains believe the soul is eternal and that the freedom from the cycle of reincarnation is the means to attain eternal bliss. |
Afterlife | Sikhism | Sikhism
The essential doctrine of Sikhism is to experience the divine through simple living, meditation, and contemplation while being alive. Sikhism also has the belief of being in union with God while living. Accounts of afterlife are considered to be aimed at the popular prevailing views of the time so as to provide a referential framework without necessarily establishing a belief in the afterlife. Thus while it is also acknowledged that living the life of a householder is above the metaphysical truth, Sikhism can be considered agnostic to the question of an afterlife. Some scholars also interpret the mention of reincarnation to be naturalistic akin to the biogeochemical cycles.
But if one analyses the Sikh Scriptures carefully, one may find that on many occasions the afterlife and the existence of heaven and hell are mentioned and criticised in Guru Granth Sahib and in Dasam Granth as non-true man made ideas, so from that it can be concluded that Sikhism does not believe in the existence of heaven and hell; however, heaven and hell are created to temporarily reward and punish, and one will then take birth again until one merges in God. According to the Sikh scriptures, the human form is the closet form to God if the Guru is read and understood,see God in Sikhism and the best opportunity for a human being to attain salvation and merge back with God and fully understand Him. Sikh Gurus said that nothing dies, nothing is born, everything is ever present, and it just changes forms. Like standing in front of a wardrobe, you pick up a dress and wear it and then you discard it. You wear another one. Thus, in the view of Sikhism, your soul is never born and never dies. Your soul is a part of God and hence lives forever. |
Afterlife | Others | Others |
Afterlife | Confucianism | Confucianism
Confucius did not directly discuss the afterlife. Nonetheless, Chinese folk religion has had a strong influence on Confucianism, so adherents believe that their ancestors become deified spirits after death. Ancestor veneration in China is widespread. |
Afterlife | Gnosticism | Gnosticism
In Gnostic teachings humans contain a divine spark within them said to have been trapped in their bodies by the creator of the material universe known as the Demiurge. It was believed that this spark could be released from the material world and enter into the heavenly spiritual world beyond it if special knowledge or gnosis was attained. The Cathars, for example, viewed reincarnation as a trap made by Satan, who tricked angels from the heavenly realm into entering the physical bodies of humans. They viewed the purpose of life as a way to escape the constant cycle of spiritual incarnations by letting go of worldly attachments. |
Afterlife | Shinto | Shinto
It is common for families to participate in ceremonies for children at a shrine, yet have a Buddhist funeral at the time of death. In old Japanese legends, it is often claimed that the dead go to a place called yomi (黄泉), a gloomy underground realm with a river separating the living from the dead mentioned in the legend of Izanami and Izanagi. This yomi very closely resembles the Greek Hades; however, later myths include notions of resurrection and even Elysium-like descriptions such as in the legend of Ōkuninushi and Susanoo. Shinto tends to hold negative views on death and corpses as a source of pollution called kegare. However, death is also viewed as a path towards apotheosis in Shintoism as can be evidenced by how legendary individuals become enshrined after death. Perhaps the most famous would be Emperor Ōjin who was enshrined as Hachiman the God of War after his death. |
Afterlife | Spiritualism | Spiritualism
The spirit world, according to spiritualism, is the world or realm inhabited by spirits, both good or evil of various spiritual manifestations. This spirit world is regarded as an external environment for spirits. The Spiritualism religious movement in the nineteenth century espoused a belief in an afterlife where individual's awareness persists beyond death. |
Afterlife | Taoism | Taoism
Taoism views life as an illusion and death as a transformation into immortality. Taoists believe that immortality of the soul can be achieved by living a virtuous life in harmony with the Tao. They are taught not to fear death, as it is simply part of nature. |
Afterlife | Traditional African religions | Traditional African religions
Traditional African religions are diverse in their beliefs in an afterlife. Hunter-gatherer societies such as the Hadza have no particular belief in an afterlife, and the death of an individual is a straightforward end to their existence. Ancestor cults are found throughout Sub-Saharan Africa, including cultures like the Yombe, Beng, Yoruba and Ewe, "[T]he belief that the dead come back into life and are reborn into their families is given concrete expression in the personal names that are given to children....What is reincarnated are some of the dominant characteristics of the ancestor and not his soul. For each soul remains distinct and each birth represents a new soul." The Yoruba, Dogon and LoDagoa have eschatological ideas similar to Abrahamic religions, "but in most African societies, there is a marked absence of such clear-cut notions of heaven and hell, although there are notions of God judging the soul after death." In some societies like the Mende, multiple beliefs coexist. The Mende believe that people die twice: once during the process of joining the secret society, and again during biological death after which they become ancestors. However, some Mende also believe that after people are created by God they live ten consecutive lives, each in progressively descending worlds. One cross-cultural theme is that the ancestors are part of the world of the living, interacting with it regularly. |
Afterlife | Unitarian Universalism | Unitarian Universalism
Some Unitarian Universalists believe in universalism: that all souls will ultimately be saved and that there are no torments of hell. Unitarian Universalists differ widely in their theology hence there is no exact same stance on the issue.Mark W. Harris (2009). The A to Z of Unitarian Universalism. p. 147 Although Unitarians historically believed in a literal hell, and Universalists historically believed that everyone goes to heaven, modern Unitarian Universalists can be categorized into those believing in a heaven, reincarnation and oblivion. Most Unitarian Universalists believe that heaven and hell are symbolic places of consciousness and the faith is largely focused on the worldly life rather than any possible afterlife.Robyn E. Lebron (2012). Searching for Spiritual Unity ... Can There Be Common Ground? p. 582, |
Afterlife | Wicca | Wicca
The Wiccan afterlife is most commonly described as The Summerland. Here, souls rest, recuperate from life, and reflect on the experiences they had during their lives. After a period of rest, the souls are reincarnated, and the memory of their previous lives is erased. Many Wiccans see The Summerland as a place to reflect on their life actions. It is not a place of reward, but rather the end of a life journey at an end point of incarnations.Solitary Wicca For Life: Complete Guide to Mastering the Craft on Your Own p. 162, Arin Murphy-Hiscock (2005) |
Afterlife | Zoroastrianism | Zoroastrianism
Zoroastrianism states that the urvan, the disembodied spirit, lingers on earth for three days before departing downward to the kingdom of the dead that is ruled by Yima. For the three days that it rests on Earth, righteous souls sit at the head of their body, chanting the Ustavaiti Gathas with joy, while a wicked person sits at the feet of the corpse, wails and recites the Yasna. Zoroastrianism states that for the righteous souls, a beautiful maiden, which is the personification of the soul's good thoughts, words and deeds, appears. For a wicked person, a very old, ugly, naked hag appears. After three nights, the soul of the wicked is taken by the demon Vizaresa (Vīzarəša), to Chinvat bridge, and is made to go to darkness (hell).
Yima is believed to have been the first king on earth to rule, as well as the first man to die. Inside of Yima's realm, the spirits live a shadowy existence, and are dependent on their own descendants which are still living on Earth. Their descendants are to satisfy their hunger and clothe them, through rituals done on earth.
Rituals which are done on the first three days are vital and important, as they protect the soul from evil powers and give it strength to reach the underworld. After three days, the soul crosses Chinvat bridge which is the Final Judgment of the soul. Rashnu and Sraosha are present at the final judgment. The list is expanded sometimes, and include Vahman and Ormazd. Rashnu is the yazata who holds the scales of justice. If the good deeds of the person outweigh the bad, the soul is worthy of paradise. If the bad deeds outweigh the good, the bridge narrows down to the width of a blade-edge, and a horrid hag pulls the soul in her arms, and takes it down to hell with her.
Misvan Gatu is the "place of the mixed ones" where the souls lead a gray existence, lacking both joy and sorrow. A soul goes here if his/her good deeds and bad deeds are equal, and Rashnu's scale is equal. |
Afterlife | Parapsychology | Parapsychology
The Society for Psychical Research was founded in 1882 with the express intention of investigating phenomena relating to Spiritualism and the afterlife. Its members continue to conduct scientific research on the paranormal to this day. Some of the earliest attempts to apply scientific methods to the study of phenomena relating to an afterlife were conducted by this organization. Its earliest members included noted scientists like William Crookes, and philosophers such as Henry Sidgwick and William James.
Parapsychological investigation of the afterlife includes the study of haunting, apparitions of the deceased, instrumental trans-communication, electronic voice phenomena, and mediumship.David Fontana (2005): Is there an afterlife. A comprehensive overview of the evidence.
A study conducted in 1901 by physician Duncan MacDougall sought to measure the weight lost by a human when the soul "departed the body" upon death. MacDougall weighed dying patients in an attempt to prove that the soul was material, tangible and thus measurable. Although MacDougall's results varied considerably from "21 grams", for some people this figure has become synonymous with the measure of a soul's mass.Urban Legends – Reference Page (Soul man). The title of the 2003 movie 21 Grams is a reference to MacDougall's findings. His results have never been reproduced, and are generally regarded either as meaningless or considered to have had little if any scientific merit.
Frank Tipler has argued that physics can explain immortality, although such arguments are not falsifiable and, in Karl Popper's views, they do not qualify as science.
After 25 years of parapsychological research Susan Blackmore came to the conclusion that, according to her experiences, there is not enough empirical evidence for many of these cases. |
Afterlife | Mediumship | Mediumship
Mediums purportedly act as a vessel for communications from spirits in other realms. Mediumship is not specific to one culture or religion; it can be identified in several belief systems, most notably Spiritualism. While the practice gained popularity in Europe and North America in the 19th century, evidence of mediumship dates back thousands of years in Asia.David Marks. (2000). The Psychology of the Psychic. Prometheus Books. Nicola Holt, Christine Simmonds-Moore, David Luke, Christopher French. (2012). Anomalistic Psychology (Palgrave Insights in Psychology). Palgrave Macmillan. Millais Culpin. (1920). Spiritualism and the New Psychology, an Explanation of Spiritualist Phenomena and Beliefs in Terms of Modern Knowledge. Kennelly Press. Mediums who claim to have contact with deceased people include Tyler Henry and Pascal Voggenhuber. |
Afterlife | Near death research | Near death research
Research also includes the study of the near death experience. Scientists who have worked in this area include Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, Raymond Moody, Sam Parnia, Michael Sabom, Bruce Greyson, Peter Fenwick, Jeffrey Long, Susan Blackmore, Charles Tart, William James, Ian Stevenson, Michael Persinger, Pim van Lommel, Penny Sartori, Walter van Laack among others. |
Afterlife | Past life regression | Past life regression
Past life regression is a method that uses hypnosis to recover what practitioners believe are memories of past lives or incarnations. The technique used during past-life regression involves the subject answering a series of questions while hypnotized to reveal identity and events of alleged past lives, a method similar to that used in recovered memory therapy and one that, similarly, often misrepresents memory as a faithful recording of previous events rather than a constructed set of recollections.
However, medical experts and practitioners do not agree that the past life memories gained from past life regressions are truly from past lives; experts generally regard claims of recovered memories of past lives as fantasies or delusions or a type of confabulation, because the use of hypnosis and suggestive questions can tend to leave the subject particularly likely to hold distorted or false memories. |
Afterlife | Philosophy | Philosophy |
Afterlife | Modern philosophy | Modern philosophy
There is a view based on the philosophical question of personal identity, termed open individualism by Daniel Kolak, that concludes that individual conscious experience is illusory, and because consciousness continues after death in all conscious beings, you do not die. This position has allegedly been supported by physicists such as Erwin Schrödinger and Freeman Dyson.
Certain problems arise with the idea of a particular person continuing after death. Peter van Inwagen, in his argument regarding resurrection, notes that the materialist must have some sort of physical continuity. John Hick also raises questions regarding personal identity in his book, Death and Eternal Life, using an example of a person ceasing to exist in one place while an exact replica appears in another. If the replica had all the same experiences, traits, and physical appearances of the first person, we would all attribute the same identity to the second, according to Hick. |
Afterlife | Process philosophy | Process philosophy
In the panentheistic model of process philosophy and theology the writers Alfred North Whitehead and Charles Hartshorne rejected the idea that the universe was made of substance, instead saying reality is composed of living experiences (occasions of experience). According to Hartshorne people do not experience subjective (or personal) immortality in the afterlife, but they do have objective immortality because their experiences live on forever in God, who contains all that was. However other process philosophers such as David Ray Griffin have written that people may have subjective experience after death.Charles Hartshorne, Omnipotence and Other Theological Mistakes (Albany: State University of New York, 1984) p. 32–36David Griffin, "The Possibility of Subjective Immortality in Whitehead's Philosophy," in The Modern Schoolman, LIII, November. 1975, pp. 39–51.What Is Process Theology? by Robert B. Mellert A Whiteheadian Conception of Immortality by Forrest Wood, Jr. |
Afterlife | Science | Science
Psychological proposals for the origin of a belief in an afterlife include cognitive disposition, cultural learning, and as an intuitive religious idea. Fear of death or death anxiety is hypothesized to be a primary motivator for afterlife beliefs. Jamin Halberstadt finds that one function of religion is to alleviate death anxiety via afterlife beliefs. There also is research about afterlife beliefs from an evolutionary perspective, i.e. in the context of group selection. |
Afterlife | Near-death experiences | Near-death experiences
In 2008, a large-scale study conducted by the University of Southampton involving 2,060 patients from 15 hospitals in the United Kingdom, United States and Austria was launched. The AWARE (AWAreness during REsuscitation) study examined the broad range of mental experiences in relation to death. In a large study, researchers also tested the validity of conscious experiences for the first time using objective markers, to determine whether claims of awareness compatible with out-of-body experiences correspond with real or hallucinatory events. The results revealed that 40% of those who survived a cardiac arrest were aware during the time that they were clinically dead and before their hearts were restarted. One patient also had a verified out-of-body experience (over 80% of patients did not survive their cardiac arrest or were too sick to be interviewed), but his cardiac arrest occurred in a room without markers. Dr. Parnia in the interview stated, "The evidence thus far suggests that in the first few minutes after death, consciousness is not annihilated." The AWARE study drew the following primary conclusions:
In some cases of cardiac arrest, memories of visual awareness compatible with so called out-of-body experiences may correspond with actual events.
A number of NDErs may have vivid death experiences, but do not recall them due to the effects of brain injury or sedative drugs on memory circuits.
The recalled experience surrounding death merits a genuine investigation without prejudice.AWARE STUDY INITIAL RESULTS ARE PUBLISHED! , Retrieved 8 July 2022
Studies have also been done on the widely reported phenomenon of near-death experiences (NDE). Experiencers commonly report being transported to a different "realm" or "plane of existence" and they have been shown to display a lasting positive aftereffect on most experiencers. |
Afterlife | See also | See also
Allegory of the long spoons
Astral plane
Bardo
Brig of Dread (Bridge of Dread)
Empiricism
Epistemology
Eternal oblivion
Exaltation (Mormonism)
Fate of the unlearned
Heaven
Hell
Immortality
Mictlan
Mind uploading
Nirvana
Omega Point
Paradise
Phowa
Pre-existence
Purgatory
Rebirth
Reincarnation
Soul
Soul flight
Soul retrieval
Spiritism
Suspended animation
Spirit World
Undead
Underworld |
Afterlife | References | References |
Afterlife | Explanatory notes | Explanatory notes |
Afterlife | Citations | Citations |
Afterlife | Bibliography | Bibliography
Philip C Almond, Afterlife: A History of Life after Death, London and Ithaca NY: I.B. Tauris and Cornell University Press, 2015.
Campbell, Douglas R. "Plato's Theory of Reincarnation: Eschatology and Natural Philosophy," Review of Metaphysics 75 (4): 643–665. 2022.
Dan Cohn-Sherbok and Christopher Lewis, (eds.), Beyond Death: Theological and Philosophical Reflections on Life after Death, Pelgrave-MacMillan, 1995.
David Fontana, Is there an afterlife: a comprehensive overview of the evidence, O Books 2005.
Jane Idelman Smith and Yazbeck Haddad, The Islamic Understanding of Death and Resurrection. Oxford UP, 2002.
Michael Martin and Keith Augustine (eds.), The Myth of an Afterlife: The Case against Life After Death, Rowman & Littlefield, 2015. .
John J. McGraw, Brain & Belief: An Exploration of the Human Soul, Aegis Press, 2004.
Mark Mirabello, A Traveler's Guide to the Afterlife: Traditions and Beliefs on Death, Dying, and What Lies Beyond, Inner Traditions. 2016.
Christopher M. Moreman, Beyond the Threshold: Afterlife Beliefs and Experiences in World Religions, Rowman & Littlefield, 2008.
Robert A. Morey, Death and the Afterlife, Minneapolis, Minn.: Bethany House Publishers, 1984. 315 p.
Hiroshi Obayashi (ed.), Death and Afterlife: Perspectives of World Religions, Praeger, 1991.
Alan F. Segal, Life After Death: A History of the Afterlife in Western Religion, Doubleday, 2004. |
Afterlife | Further reading | Further reading
(Extensive 1878 text by William Rounseville Alger)
|
Afterlife | External links | External links
Vatican.va: Catechism of the Catholic Church
Islamic Guide: Life After Death
Judaism 101: Olam Ha-Ba: The Afterlife
Stewart Salmond, Christian Doctrine of Immortality
Online searchable edition of Swedenborg's Heaven and Hell (Swedenborg Foundation 2000)
Collection: Heaven, Hell, and Afterlives from the University of Michigan Museum of Art
Category:Philosophy of religion
Category:Religious belief and doctrine |
Afterlife | Table of Content | Short description, Different metaphysical models, Reincarnation, Heaven and Hell, Ancient religions, Ancient Egyptian religion, Ancient Greek and Roman religions, Norse religion, Abrahamic religions, Judaism, Sheol, World to Come, Reincarnation in Jewish tradition, Christianity, The Catholic Church, Limbo, Purgatory, Orthodox Christianity, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, Jehovah's Witnesses, Seventh-day Adventists, Islam, Ahmadiyya, Sufism, Baháʼí Faith, Indian religions, Buddhism, Hinduism, Jainism, Sikhism, Others, Confucianism, Gnosticism, Shinto, Spiritualism, Taoism, Traditional African religions, Unitarian Universalism, Wicca, Zoroastrianism, Parapsychology, Mediumship, Near death research, Past life regression, Philosophy, Modern philosophy, Process philosophy, Science, Near-death experiences, See also, References, Explanatory notes, Citations, Bibliography, Further reading, External links |
Astrometry | short description | thumb|right|300px|Illustration of the use of interferometry in the optical wavelength range to determine precise positions of stars. Courtesy NASA/JPL-Caltech
Astrometry is a branch of astronomy that involves precise measurements of the positions and movements of stars and other celestial bodies. It provides the kinematics and physical origin of the Solar System and this galaxy, the Milky Way. |
Astrometry | History | History
thumb|Concept art for the TAU spacecraft, a 1980s era study which would have used an interstellar precursor probe to expand the baseline for calculating stellar parallax in support of Astrometry.
The history of astrometry is linked to the history of star catalogues, which gave astronomers reference points for objects in the sky so they could track their movements. This can be dated back to the ancient Greek astronomer Hipparchus, who around 190 BC used the catalogue of his predecessors Timocharis and Aristillus to discover Earth's precession. In doing so, he also developed the brightness scale still in use today. Hipparchus compiled a catalogue with at least 850 stars and their positions. Hipparchus's successor, Ptolemy, included a catalogue of 1,022 stars in his work the Almagest, giving their location, coordinates, and brightness.p. 110, Kanas 2007.
In the 10th century, the Iranian astronomer Abd al-Rahman al-Sufi carried out observations on the stars and described their positions, magnitudes and star color; furthermore, he provided drawings for each constellation, which are depicted in his Book of Fixed Stars. Egyptian mathematician Ibn Yunus observed more than 10,000 entries for the Sun's position for many years using a large astrolabe with a diameter of nearly 1.4 metres. His observations on eclipses were still used centuries later in Canadian–American astronomer Simon Newcomb's investigations on the motion of the Moon, while his other observations of the motions of the planets Jupiter and Saturn inspired French scholar Laplace's Obliquity of the Ecliptic and Inequalities of Jupiter and Saturn. In the 15th century, the Timurid astronomer Ulugh Beg compiled the Zij-i-Sultani, in which he catalogued 1,019 stars. Like the earlier catalogs of Hipparchus and Ptolemy, Ulugh Beg's catalogue is estimated to have been precise to within approximately 20 minutes of arc.
In the 16th century, Danish astronomer Tycho Brahe used improved instruments, including large mural instruments, to measure star positions more accurately than previously, with a precision of 15–35 arcsec. Ottoman scholar Taqi al-Din measured the right ascension of the stars at the Constantinople Observatory of Taqi ad-Din using the "observational clock" he invented. When telescopes became commonplace, setting circles sped measurements
English astronomer James Bradley first tried to measure stellar parallaxes in 1729. The stellar movement proved too insignificant for his telescope, but he instead discovered the aberration of light and the nutation of the Earth's axis. His cataloguing of 3222 stars was refined in 1807 by German astronomer Friedrich Bessel, the father of modern astrometry. He made the first measurement of stellar parallax: 0.3 arcsec for the binary star 61 Cygni. In 1872, British astronomer William Huggins used spectroscopy to measure the radial velocity of several prominent stars, including Sirius.
Being very difficult to measure, only about 60 stellar parallaxes had been obtained by the end of the 19th century, mostly by use of the filar micrometer. Astrographs using astronomical photographic plates sped the process in the early 20th century. Automated plate-measuring machinesCERN paper on plate measuring machine USNO StarScan and more sophisticated computer technology of the 1960s allowed more efficient compilation of star catalogues. Started in the late 19th century, the project Carte du Ciel to improve star mapping could not be finished but made photography a common technique for astrometry.H.H. Turner, 1912 The Great Star Map, Being a Brief General Account of the International Project Known as the Astrographic Chart (John Murray) In the 1980s, charge-coupled devices (CCDs) replaced photographic plates and reduced optical uncertainties to one milliarcsecond. This technology made astrometry less expensive, opening the field to an amateur audience.
In 1989, the European Space Agency's Hipparcos satellite took astrometry into orbit, where it could be less affected by mechanical forces of the Earth and optical distortions from its atmosphere. Operated from 1989 to 1993, Hipparcos measured large and small angles on the sky with much greater precision than any previous optical telescopes. During its 4-year run, the positions, parallaxes, and proper motions of 118,218 stars were determined with an unprecedented degree of accuracy. A new "Tycho catalog" drew together a database of 1,058,332 stars to within 20-30 mas (milliarcseconds). Additional catalogues were compiled for the 23,882 double and multiple stars and 11,597 variable stars also analyzed during the Hipparcos mission.
In 2013, the Gaia satellite was launched and improved the accuracy of Hipparcos.
The precision was improved by a factor of 100 and enabled the mapping of a billion stars.
Today, the catalogue most often used is USNO-B1.0, an all-sky catalogue that tracks proper motions, positions, magnitudes and other characteristics for over one billion stellar objects. During the past 50 years, 7,435 Schmidt camera plates were used to complete several sky surveys that make the data in USNO-B1.0 accurate to within 0.2 arcsec. |
Astrometry | Applications | Applications
thumb|right|200px|Diagram showing how a smaller object (such as an extrasolar planet) orbiting a larger object (such as a star) could produce changes in position and velocity of the latter as they orbit their common center of mass (red cross).
thumb|right|200px|Motion of barycenter of solar system relative to the Sun
Apart from the fundamental function of providing astronomers with a reference frame to report their observations in, astrometry is also fundamental for fields like celestial mechanics, stellar dynamics and galactic astronomy. In observational astronomy, astrometric techniques help identify stellar objects by their unique motions. It is instrumental for keeping time, in that UTC is essentially the atomic time synchronized to Earth's rotation by means of exact astronomical observations. Astrometry is an important step in the cosmic distance ladder because it establishes parallax distance estimates for stars in the Milky Way.
Astrometry has also been used to support claims of extrasolar planet detection by measuring the displacement the proposed planets cause in their parent star's apparent position on the sky, due to their mutual orbit around the center of mass of the system. Astrometry is more accurate in space missions that are not affected by the distorting effects of the Earth's atmosphere.Nature 462, 705 (2009) 8 December 2009 NASA's planned Space Interferometry Mission (SIM PlanetQuest) (now cancelled) was to utilize astrometric techniques to detect terrestrial planets orbiting 200 or so of the nearest solar-type stars. The European Space Agency's Gaia Mission, launched in 2013, applies astrometric techniques in its stellar census. In addition to the detection of exoplanets, it can also be used to determine their mass.
Astrometric measurements are used by astrophysicists to constrain certain models in celestial mechanics. By measuring the velocities of pulsars, it is possible to put a limit on the asymmetry of supernova explosions. Also, astrometric results are used to determine the distribution of dark matter in the galaxy.
Astronomers use astrometric techniques for the tracking of near-Earth objects. Astrometry is responsible for the detection of many record-breaking Solar System objects. To find such objects astrometrically, astronomers use telescopes to survey the sky and large-area cameras to take pictures at various determined intervals. By studying these images, they can detect Solar System objects by their movements relative to the background stars, which remain fixed. Once a movement per unit time is observed, astronomers compensate for the parallax caused by Earth's motion during this time and the heliocentric distance to this object is calculated. Using this distance and other photographs, more information about the object, including its orbital elements, can be obtained. Asteroid impact avoidance is among the purposes.
Quaoar and Sedna are two trans-Neptunian dwarf planets discovered in this way by Michael E. Brown and others at Caltech using the Palomar Observatory's Samuel Oschin telescope of and the Palomar-Quest large-area CCD camera. The ability of astronomers to track the positions and movements of such celestial bodies is crucial to the understanding of the Solar System and its interrelated past, present, and future with others in the Universe. |
Astrometry | Statistics | Statistics
A fundamental aspect of astrometry is error correction. Various factors introduce errors into the measurement of stellar positions, including atmospheric conditions, imperfections in the instruments and errors by the observer or the measuring instruments. Many of these errors can be reduced by various techniques, such as through instrument improvements and compensations to the data. The results are then analyzed using statistical methods to compute data estimates and error ranges. |
Astrometry | Computer programs | Computer programs
XParallax viu (Free application for Windows)
Astrometrica (Application for Windows)
Astrometry.net (Online blind astrometry) |
Astrometry | See also | See also |
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