Eight lectures on YOGA

Written by Aleister Crowley

Narrated by Jesse Weimer

Eight Lectures on Yoga is a book by English occultist and teacher Aleister Crowley about the practice of Yoga. The book is number four of volume three of The Equinox, which was published by the Ordo Templi Orientis. The work is largely a demystified look at Yoga, using little to no jargon or satirical humor. It is divided under two sections into eight parts, which are transcripts of eight one-hour lectures on the subject given by Crowley.

Eight Lectures on Yoga is divided into two sections: "Yoga for Yahoos" and "Yoga for Yellowbellies". In the book, Crowley instructs students on the steps needed to approach mysticism through Yoga, and details the complications that arise along the path. One intent Crowley had in writing the book was to dispel the various myths surrounding Yoga in Europe at the time - most thought it to be an exotic, Eastern ritual of the ancient past.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Surreal
• Release date: Mar 17, 2022
• ISBN: 9781669679141

Aleister Crowley

Aleister Crowley (1875-1947) was an English poet, painter, occultist, magician, and mountaineer. Born into wealth, he rejected his family’s Christian beliefs and developed a passion for Western esotericism. At Trinity College, Cambridge, Crowley gained a reputation as a poet whose work appeared in such publications as The Granta and Cambridge Magazine. An avid mountaineer, he made the first unguided ascent of the Mönch in the Swiss Alps. Around this time, he first began identifying as bisexual and carried on relationships with prostitutes, which led to his contracting syphilis. In 1897, he briefly dated fellow student Herbert Charles Pollitt, whose unease with Crowley’s esotericism would lead to their breakup. The following year, Crowley joined the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, a secret occult society to which many of the era’s leading artists belonged, including Bram Stoker, W. B. Yeats, Arthur Machen, and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. Between 1900 and 1903, he traveled to Mexico, India, Japan, and Paris. In these formative years, Crowley studied Hinduism, wrote the poems that would form The Sword of Song (1904), attempted to climb K2, and became acquainted with such artists as Auguste Rodin and W. Somerset Maugham. A 1904 trip to Egypt inspired him to develop Thelema, a philosophical and religious group he would lead for the remainder of his life. He would claim that The Book of the Law (1909), his most important literary work and the central sacred text of Thelema, was delivered to him personally in Cairo by the entity Aiwass. During the First World War, Crowley allegedly worked as a double agent for the British intelligence services while pretending to support the pro-German movement in the United States. The last decades of his life were spent largely in exile due to persecution in the press and by the states of Britain and Italy for his bohemian lifestyle and open bisexuality.