Birthing the Divinity: Augustine, Schuon and Crowley
AS a traditionalist, Frithjof Schuon (1907-1998) offers an interesting perspective on sexuality. Rather than adopt the widespread Augustinian attitude that all children are conceived in sin on account of their parents engaging in the ‘bestial’ act of sexual union, something which must then be compensated by way of the Christian sacrament of baptism, Schuon notes that “the sexual act represents, through its profound and spiritually integral nature, an act that is meritorious” due to its representation of a union with the divine and that
the child that is conceived according to this nature will be hereditarily predisposed to spiritual union, no more and no less than he would be predisposed to sin in the contrary case.
An alternative way of interpreting this process, is for us to consider the child as a gift from the Absolute and not as the mere culmination of the act itself. Whilst Augustine takes a decidedly pessimistic view of human potential, however, at least if we disregard the redeeming potential of the Holy Sacraments, Schuon is far more optimistic.
Curiously, Aleister Crowley believed that it was possible to create a ‘magical child’ that would grow out of the substance of the soul and eventually form a human body. Whilst this act is said to rely on copulation, however, it also involves the capture of a perfect soul (Homunculus) that is in search of a human embryo. In Crowley's own words, the intention is to
produce a man who should not be bound up in his heredity, and should have the environment which they desired for him.
Viewed from this perspective, it appears that Crowley - in theory, at least - was making an attempt to interfere with the conceptual process and thus go beyond each of the notions discussed by Augustine and Schuon. In effect, Crowley himself becomes ‘God’ and assumes full responsibility for the ‘sin’. This action, inevitably, becomes an echo of the Kabbalistic ‘breaking of the vessels’ and the so-called Moonchild resembles a shard of light which is detached from the Sun.
Crowley would not have agreed with my Lurianic analysis, but I believe that his observation about the child not being “bound up in his heredity” relates to the infant's connection with the Absolute. This magical operation therefore derails and co-opts the stratagem of Divine fecundation in the way that Prometheus perhaps stole the sacred fire from Mount Olympus and then ended up paying the price. The legend of the Golum works on a very similar principle and the Jewish rabbi, just like Doctor Frankenstein in popular culture, becomes the initiator of life. A locum, or substitute, for the Divine. Augustine's ‘state of sin’ and Schuon's ‘gift from God,’ therefore, in lieu of the Absolute, are transposed into Crowley's ‘gift of sin’.