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The Magus and the Monk: Meditation in the Writings of Allan Bennett and his Influence on Aleister Crowley
Malmö University, Faculty of Education and Society (LS), Department of Society, Culture and Identity (SKI).ORCID iD: 0000-0002-7383-9857
2025 (English)Conference paper, Oral presentation with published abstract (Other academic)
Abstract [en]

This paper will consider esotericism as a vehicle for the transmission of Buddhist meditation to Britain in the early twentieth century. While fin-de-siècle esotericism has been identified as essential for the spread of interest in Hinduism and Buddhism to the West, the esoteric sources for Buddhist meditation in Britain have not been fully charted. In this paper, I will focus on the relationship between the British magus Aleister Crowley (1875–1947) and Allan Bennett (Ananda Metteyya, 1872–1923), as a vehicle for this transmission. A high-degree member and Crowley’s teacher within the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, Bennett in 1902 became one of the first British citizens to be ordained as a Buddhist monk. He was essential to Crowley’s study, in Asia, of yoga and meditation, which form central components on Crowley’s influential magical system. In the essay “On the Culture of the Mind” (which Crowley later reprinted), Bennett sought to promote Buddhism to a Western audience, presenting it as a rational, ethical, and scientific philosophy, and emphasised meditation – both seated meditation and conscious awareness in everyday action – above merit-making or other forms of Buddhist practice. In this paper, I will analyse how meditation is presented in Bennett’s writings, indicating parallels between his and Crowley’s thought. In so doing, I will suggest that Bennett’s and Crowley’s relationship was important to linking Buddhist meditation with Western spirituality, paving the ground for the global spread of meditation and mindfulness in the second half of the twentieth century.

Place, publisher, year, edition, pages
2025.
Keywords [en]
meditation, Buddhism, esotericism, occultism, sati, mindfulness
National Category
History of Religions
Identifiers
URN: urn:nbn:se:mau:diva-79224OAI: oai:DiVA.org:mau-79224DiVA, id: diva2:1994401
Conference
IAHR 2025, XXIII International Association for the History of Religions World Congress, Kraków, Poland, August 24–30, 2025
Projects
Malmö University Mindfulness knowledge hubAvailable from: 2025-09-02 Created: 2025-09-02 Last updated: 2025-09-03Bibliographically approved

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Hedenborg White, Manon

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CiteExportLink to record
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Citation style
  • apa
  • ieee
  • modern-language-association-8th-edition
  • vancouver
  • Other style
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Language
  • de-DE
  • en-GB
  • en-US
  • fi-FI
  • nn-NO
  • nn-NB
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More languages
Output format
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