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"The Eyes of Goats and of Women": Femininity and the Post-Thelemic Witchcraft of Jack Parsons and Kenneth Grant
Södertörns högskola, Religionsvetenskap.ORCID iD: 0000-0002-7383-9857
2019 (English)In: Magic and Witchery in the Modern West: Celebrating the Twentieth Anniversary of “The Triumph of the Moon" / [ed] Shai Feraro & Ethan Doyle White, Palgrave Macmillan, 2019, p. 175-196Chapter in book (Refereed)
Abstract [en]

While Aleister Crowley’s religion of Thelema deals with notions of witchcraft peripherally, in the 1950s Crowley’s disciple John Whiteside Parsons sought to establish a duotheistic witchcraft tradition which focused on the veneration of Lucifer and the Thelemic goddess Babalon. Kenneth Grant, briefly Crowley’s secretary, instead melded Thelema and Tantra with notions of witchcraft in his perennialist concept of a “Typhonian Tradition”. In different ways, Parsons and Grant both link witchcraft to a primordial magical tradition in which women acted as leaders and initiators, and female sexuality was sacralised. This chapter will analyse and compare Parsons’s and Grant’s interpretations of witchcraft, focusing especially on their gendered aspects. I suggest, firstly, that these authors’ engagement with concepts of witchcraft can be read as part of an endeavour to position femininity as central to magic, and, secondly, that the intersection of second-wave feminism and Paganism exerted a stronger influence on Grant’s writings than previously recognised.

Place, publisher, year, edition, pages
Palgrave Macmillan, 2019. p. 175-196
Series
Palgrave Historical Studies in Witchcraft and Magic, ISSN 2731-5630
National Category
History of Religions
Identifiers
URN: urn:nbn:se:mau:diva-51728DOI: 10.1007/978-3-030-15549-0_9ISBN: 9783030155490 (electronic)OAI: oai:DiVA.org:mau-51728DiVA, id: diva2:1661777
Available from: 2022-05-30 Created: 2022-05-30 Last updated: 2024-04-18Bibliographically approved

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Hedenborg White, Manon

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CiteExportLink to record
Permanent link

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Citation style
  • apa
  • ieee
  • modern-language-association-8th-edition
  • vancouver
  • Other style
More styles
Language
  • de-DE
  • en-GB
  • en-US
  • fi-FI
  • nn-NO
  • nn-NB
  • sv-SE
  • Other locale
More languages
Output format
  • html
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  • asciidoc
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