Richard Kaczynski
Author of Perdurabo: The Life of Aleister Crowley
About the Author
Series
Works by Richard Kaczynski
Associated Works
Manifest Thy Glory: Proceedings of the Eighth Biennial National Ordo Templi Orientis Conference (2013) — Editor — 20 copies
Fire of Motion: Proceedings of the Tenth Biennial National Ordo Templi Orientis Conference (2017) — Editor — 9 copies, 1 review
The Holy Year of Thelema: A Guide to the Ritual Calendar of Aleister Crowley's Tradition — Foreword — 2 copies
Tagged
Common Knowledge
- Canonical name
- Kaczynski, Richard
- Legal name
- Kaczynski, Richard
- Gender
- male
- Education
- Wayne State University, Detroit
- Occupations
- professor
musician
cleric - Organizations
- Ordo Templi Oientis
University of Detroit
Yale University
Ecclesia Gnostica Catholica - Short biography
- Richard Kaczynski, Ph.D., is a writer, musician, research scientist and teacher. He is author of "Perdurabo: The Life of Aleister Crowley," "The Weiser Concise Guide to Aleister Crowley," "Perdurabo Outtakes," and "Panic in Detroit: The Magician and the Motor City." He has also co-edited with Hymenaeus Beta "The Revival of Magick and Other Essays," and performed editorial duties for "Beauty and Strength" (the NOTOCON VI proceedings book). He has appeared on television in the documentaries "Secrets of the Occult" and "Aleister Crowley: The Beast 666." Dr. Kaczynski earned his Ph.D. in social psychology, with a minor in measurement and statistics, in 1993 with a dissertation on metaphysical beliefs and experiences among occult practitioners in New Religious Movements. He has been a student of the Western hermetic tradition since 1978, and has lectured internationally on these topics since 1990. Over the years, his writing has appeared in various books ("Aleister Crowley and Western Esotericism: An Anthology of Critical Studies," "A Concordance to the Holy Books of Thelema," "The Golden Dawn Sourcebook," "Rebels and Devils," "People of the Earth") and magazines ("High Times," "The Magical Link," "Neshamah," "Cheth," "Mezlim," "Eidolon," "Different Worlds"). His latest projects include an edited and annotated edition of Aleister Crowley's "Sword of Song" (1904), and a history of sacred sexuality in esoteric societies during the 19th and early 20th centuries. He lives in Maryland with his wife and cats.
- Nationality
- USA
- Places of residence
- Detroit, Michigan, USA
Warren, Michigan, USA
Hartford, Connecticut, USA
Columbia, Maryland, USA
Ellicott City, Maryland, USA - Associated Place (for map)
- USA
Members
Reviews
On the one hand, Aleister Crowley (1875-1947) is such a bombastic and insufferable person, you’d think it would be painful and tiresome to spend so much time with a comprehensive biography of the man. In part, this is true. There is little doubt Crowley was a mythomaniacal narcissist, and the details of his life – and the numerous machinations and schisms within the post-Golden Dawn micro-community of largely British esotericists – can grow quite tedious. On the other hand, Kaczynski show more delivers a humanizing (while still largely unsanitized) portrait, which portrays Crowley as the many other things he also was: an insecure scion descended from a lineage of Quaker schismatics, a gentleman adventurer and risk-addicted mountaineer who deeply idolized Richard Francis Burton, a rabid anti-clerical and aimless dilettante, a relentlessly fractious self-promoter, a cruel (and often extremely funny) polemicist, and a highly manneristic, even stodgy poet split between scatology and sentimentalism. I also can’t escape the sense that Crowley’s magical and spiritual practices end up having a great deal to do with his inability or refusal to mourn a number of grievous personal losses. One might be forgiven for thinking that his fixation on conceiving a magical moonchild with the perfect avatar of primordial femininity, in order to precipitate the dawn of a new Aeon of Horus and renew all that was broken in the world, has something to do with the sudden death of his infant daughter in 1909 and the consequent collapse of Rose into alcoholism and mental instability. (One might also be forgiven for wondering, in passing, whether premature death was a merciful fate compared to living one’s life with the name Crowley and Rose had bestowed upon her: Nuit Ma Ahathoor Hecate Sappho Jezebel Lilith Crowley…) show less
Readers of Richard Kaczynski's Crowley biography Perdurabo will not be surprised to find that his history of the origins of O.T.O. Forgotten Templars is similarly exhaustive. This volume is not for the casual reader: it is intended for institutional libraries (every O.T.O. lodge should have one!) and discriminating collectors. As a material item, it is an impressive hardbound folio with heavy gloss paper and illustrated throughout with black-and-white photographs and document facsimiles.
The show more start of the book is slow going, with a large section dedicated to the biographical backgrounds of the four principal founders prior to their collaboration. In particular, the two chapters on Henry Klein, the most obscure of the four, are likely to merit skimming for readers who don't share the author's special enthusiasm for the history of music publishing and Victorian musical automation. Two appendices even provide a full musical bibliography of Klein's work as a composer and a publisher. Most readers will doubtless enjoy the details supplied on the three Oriental sages who informed Order founder Carl Kellner's inquiries: Bheema Sena Pratapa, Soliman ben Aissa, and Agamya Paramahamsa. The last of these was especially outrageous, in no way exaggerated by the unfriendly portrait painted in Aleister Crowley's Equinox ("Half-hours with Famous Mahatmas"). I was surprised and intrigued to discover that the Moroccan Sufi Soliman was supposed to have been a hereditary sheikh of the Aissawa tariqa, the same school of initiation as that professed by Crowley's Muslim instructor in Cairo in 1904.
Things start to warm up with the next set of chapters, concerned to address the cultural and institutional background to the formation of the Order, with discussions of German Freemasonry, Lebensreform, Theosophy, the Cerneauist Scottish Rite and other freemasonic hauts grades, and the intellectual career of John Yarker. But it's not until the middle of the book that the account reaches the actual organization of the nascent O.T.O., and it's only in the final pages that the organization takes on that name.
Needless to say, there was a good amount of detail that was new to me in this book. Still, the broad outlines were the ones I had been able to discern through the variety of sources I had already studied on this topic. I was especially grateful for the wealth of particulars and analysis regarding the 1906-7 scandals plaguing the rites governed by Theodor Reuss and his associates. I found it strange, though, that while the appendices include the full text of the hostile 1905 article "The Manifesto of the Grand Orient of the Scottish, Memphis and Mizraim Rite" by Robert Fischer, they don't supply a translation of the brief actual 1903 manifesto by Kellner and Reuss (published in the Oriflamme in 1904) of which the article was a criticism.
As the book progresses, it increasingly focuses on the questions that loom largest to students of the topic. Where did the founders of O.T.O. get their "supreme secret"? What was the relationship of O.T.O. to the H.B. of L.? Did the hauts grades that Reuss had organized persist in any way outside of O.T.O.? Kaczynski offers a frank discussion regarding the possibilities involved with Crowley's alleged accidental exposure of the chief O.T.O. secret in The Book of Lies. He does not touch on the peculiar and enigmatic timeline regarding the publication of the book and Reuss' prior visit to induct Crowley into the O.T.O. Sovereign Sanctuary (see Magick Without Tears, chapter 25). My own longstanding view of this conundrum is that Reuss had access to a pre-publication copy, either directly from Crowley as an "application for the X°" or though Yarker's agency. The study concludes with Crowley's reform of the O.T.O. rite in Mysteria Mystica Maxima, preserving its integrity and concentrating its effects, while distancing it from its Masonic origins.
I strongly recommend this book to serious readers interested in the real history behind the establishment of one of the most provocative of modern initiatory societies. show less
The show more start of the book is slow going, with a large section dedicated to the biographical backgrounds of the four principal founders prior to their collaboration. In particular, the two chapters on Henry Klein, the most obscure of the four, are likely to merit skimming for readers who don't share the author's special enthusiasm for the history of music publishing and Victorian musical automation. Two appendices even provide a full musical bibliography of Klein's work as a composer and a publisher. Most readers will doubtless enjoy the details supplied on the three Oriental sages who informed Order founder Carl Kellner's inquiries: Bheema Sena Pratapa, Soliman ben Aissa, and Agamya Paramahamsa. The last of these was especially outrageous, in no way exaggerated by the unfriendly portrait painted in Aleister Crowley's Equinox ("Half-hours with Famous Mahatmas"). I was surprised and intrigued to discover that the Moroccan Sufi Soliman was supposed to have been a hereditary sheikh of the Aissawa tariqa, the same school of initiation as that professed by Crowley's Muslim instructor in Cairo in 1904.
Things start to warm up with the next set of chapters, concerned to address the cultural and institutional background to the formation of the Order, with discussions of German Freemasonry, Lebensreform, Theosophy, the Cerneauist Scottish Rite and other freemasonic hauts grades, and the intellectual career of John Yarker. But it's not until the middle of the book that the account reaches the actual organization of the nascent O.T.O., and it's only in the final pages that the organization takes on that name.
Needless to say, there was a good amount of detail that was new to me in this book. Still, the broad outlines were the ones I had been able to discern through the variety of sources I had already studied on this topic. I was especially grateful for the wealth of particulars and analysis regarding the 1906-7 scandals plaguing the rites governed by Theodor Reuss and his associates. I found it strange, though, that while the appendices include the full text of the hostile 1905 article "The Manifesto of the Grand Orient of the Scottish, Memphis and Mizraim Rite" by Robert Fischer, they don't supply a translation of the brief actual 1903 manifesto by Kellner and Reuss (published in the Oriflamme in 1904) of which the article was a criticism.
As the book progresses, it increasingly focuses on the questions that loom largest to students of the topic. Where did the founders of O.T.O. get their "supreme secret"? What was the relationship of O.T.O. to the H.B. of L.? Did the hauts grades that Reuss had organized persist in any way outside of O.T.O.? Kaczynski offers a frank discussion regarding the possibilities involved with Crowley's alleged accidental exposure of the chief O.T.O. secret in The Book of Lies. He does not touch on the peculiar and enigmatic timeline regarding the publication of the book and Reuss' prior visit to induct Crowley into the O.T.O. Sovereign Sanctuary (see Magick Without Tears, chapter 25). My own longstanding view of this conundrum is that Reuss had access to a pre-publication copy, either directly from Crowley as an "application for the X°" or though Yarker's agency. The study concludes with Crowley's reform of the O.T.O. rite in Mysteria Mystica Maxima, preserving its integrity and concentrating its effects, while distancing it from its Masonic origins.
I strongly recommend this book to serious readers interested in the real history behind the establishment of one of the most provocative of modern initiatory societies. show less
Of the five biographies of Crowley I have read, this is my favorite. This book is information rich, densely packed with meticulously cited details. Nowhere else have I seen so many references to passenger manifests and census records; deeply researched indeed. Another good feature is the numerous photos, the great majority of which I had not seen previously. This book is more profusely illustrated than most books which contain photos. To give an example of the level of detail, the author show more provides four distinct illustrations of advertisements by C. F. Russell for his “Choronzon Club” as well as listing the text and dates for all of Russell’s ads in the Occult Review. This is more than worth the money, in my opinion. show less
Biography of Crowley, aka The Great Beast, among other things – including Perdurabo, "I will endure".
While perhaps overly sympathetic, this biography has the great grace to be readable – which so many things are not. It is also well supported by evidence – the notes are complete and the bibliography impressive.
Presenting more the man than the beast, it might well do to be balanced against with a less sympathetic tome. It is, however, a good introduction to this incredibly influential show more figure, taking in not only his magic(k) but his relationships, mountain climbing, publishing and art work. show less
While perhaps overly sympathetic, this biography has the great grace to be readable – which so many things are not. It is also well supported by evidence – the notes are complete and the bibliography impressive.
Presenting more the man than the beast, it might well do to be balanced against with a less sympathetic tome. It is, however, a good introduction to this incredibly influential show more figure, taking in not only his magic(k) but his relationships, mountain climbing, publishing and art work. show less
Lists
You May Also Like
Associated Authors
Statistics
- Works
- 10
- Also by
- 6
- Members
- 647
- Popularity
- #39,005
- Rating
- 3.9
- Reviews
- 9
- ISBNs
- 11
- Favorited
- 3
