Personal opinion :Do I believe Aleister Crowley had in fact lived as Cagliostro, or Edward Kelley, or Eliphas Levi ?
It seems to me that any certainty in such regard is only possible with the individual himself. Then, one is bound either to take the man�s word, or not to take it, for the factuality of such representations.
(Secondarily, the accounts of the past lives of different individuals could be, in theory, collated ; this seems possible.)
Whoever A. Crowley was, or was not, it seems certain that the possibility of harm by erring in one's acceptance of such data is practically nil.
(This, it seems, could not be said about the contents of any newspaper under the Sun etc.)
WPT
From Do What Thou Wilt, Lawrence Sutin, 2000
. . . As we have seen, he [A.C.] had already decided upon certain prior incarnations: the ancient Egyptian priest Ankh-an-na-Khonsu, the Grecian sacred prostitute Astarte (relived during the 1914 Paris Working), the Elizabethan scryer Edward Kelly, and the nineteenth-century magus Eliphas Levi. But on Esopus Island [ a small uninhabited isle far up the Hudson River in Dutchess County ], experienced intense meditative visions . . . that revealed a course of highly wayward dramatic existences from over two millennia. . . .Crowley never argued for the truth of these visions, nor did he reject the possibility of their truth. As he later wrote, �I refuse to assert any theory of what this really means. All memory is a re-awakening of ancient impressions. What I was really doing was penetrating to the deeper layers of my unconscious self.�
As Crowley was remembering backwards, the lives he saw will be recounted in that order. Just prior to his own birth he was Levi. Before Levi, he was Count Cagliostro, born Giuseppe Balsamo, a Sicilian peasant who rose to become one of the most controversial figures of the eighteenth century, a self-proclaimed master of magic with rumored ties to radical French Freemasonry, who died in Rome, a prisoner of the Inquisition. Prior to his time as Cagliostro, Crowley passed through a rather squalid series of four incarnation. The first of these is described in his diary entry for August 24, 1918:
The incarnation before Cagliostro is very obscure. It seems to have been the result of some serious magical error connected to the grade of Adeptus Major. [etc]Before this, he was Heinrich von Dorn, an incarnation which Crowley regarded as �very black-magical, in an entirely futile way. [etc] Prior to this he was Father Ivan, a soldier in religious wars before joining a militant order of monks somewhere in southeastern Europe. Father Ivan served nominally as the librarian for these monks; his knowledge of Greek was immense and he wrote books on historical subjects. But his real interests lay elsewhere — in the furthering of unnamed political intrigues and the practice of fearsome magical rites;: �My vices were sinister [etc]� Prior to this, Crowley lived under a name he could not recall. But his character traits remained vivid;
I was really more girl than boy. . . I was rich and well-born; I remember my dark blue velvet breeches and lace cape and feathered hat. [etc]Crowley ultimately plotted out the course of existences that preceded Kelly. During the high Renaissance he was Alexander Borgia, who in 1492 became Pope Alexander VI and thereafter reigned as a supremely decadent pontiff . . .. until . . . 1503. Crowley�s own assessment of his reign as Alexander VI was dismissive. His task had been �to bring oriental wisdom to Europe and to restore paganism in a purer form.� But he deemed himself to have �failed in my task of crowning the Renaissance, through not being wholly purified in my personal character.�
There is a sizable gap between the Borgia pope and a nameless but momentous incarnation just before the birth of Mohammed. In this life, Crowley recalled being �present at a Council of Masters. The critical question was the policy to be adopted in order to help humanity. A small minority, including myself, was hot for positive action; definite movements were to be made; in particular, the mysteries were to be revealed. The majority, especially the Asiatic Masters, refused even to discuss the proposal. They contemptuously refrained from voting, as if to say, �Let the youngsters learn their lesson.�� The result was a series of incarnations in which the activist wing, as it were, was given its chance — with mixed results. Crowley himself was somehow involved in the tragic downfall of the Templars.
There is one more distant incarnation to tell. In the time of Lao Tzu — roughly the sixth century B.C. — Crowley lived as Ko Hsuen, a disciple of the great Chinese Taoist master. The Khing Kang King, known as the Classic of Purity, was the work of Ko Hsuen; fittingly, then, Crowley chose to cast it, from an extant translation, into English verse. The wizard Amalantrah, associated with the Way of the Tao, proved a useful collaborator for a second translation — of the Tao Te Ching — that Crowley completed on Esopus Island. Just how Amalantrah was summoned �in almost daily communion� is unclear. Crowley�s translation, in prose, was based on the well-known version by scholar James Legge; but Crowley possessed the unique advantage of having Amalantrah exhibit to him �a codex of the original, which conveyed to me with absolute certitude the exact significance of the text.�
Comment by what I have seen, however, in an edition available to me the text had not been published until ca. 1940 and had in the meanwhile undergone substantial revisions. I am skeptical about the contributions of Amalantrah. — (WPT)In Crowley�s view, all these past lives formed a sequence that had climaxed with his own birth. Certainly he cannot be accused of having overlooked unflattering prior incarnations. Nor can it be denied that there is a certain affinity between the personages Crowley cites — in particular, Borgia, Kelly, Cagliostro, and Levi — and himself.
New York : St. Martin's Press, 2000, pages 268 ff.