(2018-08-15) The High Priest And The Great Beast Timothy Learys Belief That He Was Acontinuation Of Aleister Crowley

John Higgs: The High Priest and the Great Beast: Timothy Leary's Belief That He Was a 'Continuation' of Aleister Crowley. In 1972 Dr. Tim Leary picked up a pack of Aleister Crowley-designed tarot cards and asked them the question, “Who am I and what is my destiny?” He then cut the pack and found the Ace of Discs, the card that Crowley believed represented himself

There were many similarities between Timothy Leary and Aleister Crowley, and this had not gone unnoticed at the time. Andy Warhol, for example, had commented on it.

Leary started to think of himself as a ‘continuation’ of Crowley, as opposed to a ‘reincarnation’ as it is normally understood

Leary believed that he was playing out a ‘script’ for a regular transformative current that repeated itself throughout time.

could be detected under LSD. There were moments during a trip, Leary believed, that his awareness outgrew the normal, unstopping, linear flow of time. After all, just as a two-dimensional drawing can only be properly observed from three-dimensions, so time, the fourth dimension, should only really make sense from a fifth dimension or higher.

Leary’s belief that his awareness had gone beyond the linear flow of time is actually not as absurd as it might seem at first glance. There is a growing consensus amongst scientists that, while time itself is real, the perceived onward march of time is an illusion

During this period Leary was writing a book about his jail break called It’s About Time, and he would later end his autobiography with the exact same words. The book was later renamed in a direct homage to Crowley; it was published under the name Confessions of a Hope Fiend, a title chosen to consciously reference Crowley’s Diary of a Drug Fiend and Confessions of Aleister Crowley.

Adapted from “I Have America Surrounded: The Life of Timothy Leary”, by John Higgs.