What's actually worth keeping from Crowley's practical system and what should be discarded outright?

[agloval]

Genuine question, hoping for a real discussion rather than a flame war.
Crowley left behind an enormous body of practical material rituals, tables of correspondence, initiatory grade work, sex magick, drug experimentation, the Aethyrs work, Liber Resh, Liber Astarté, the pentagram/hexagram rituals, the Book of the Law framework, the A∴A∴ curriculum, Thelema as a whole. Some of it is arguably foundational to modern Western esotericism. Some of it is questionable at best, either because it was self-aggrandizing performance, because it was superseded by later thinking, or because it was harmful (to himself, to others, or both).
I'd like to hear what practitioners here actually think, from experience rather than reputation.
Two questions:

1. What do you consider the most valuable and worth preserving in Crowley's practical system, the pieces you'd defend to a serious student today?
2. What do you think should be discarded outright, either because it doesn't work, because it's misleading, because it's ethically indefensible, or because better tools exist now?

A few points to (hopefully) keep the thread useful:

• I'm not asking whether Crowley was a good person. That conversation has been had.
• I'm interested in the practical magical system, not the biography though obviously the two overlap where his personal conduct became part of the teaching.
• Non-Thelemites welcome. Ex-Thelemites especially welcome.

Curious to hear.

 

[forestbear69]

As a Golden Dawn guy, my bias is against Crowley in general. But I had someone once say to me, “Crowley is important because he literally tried everything… you can’t dismiss him because he’s the laboratory research for us all.”

A prime example for me is the Headless/Bornless Rite. The Betz translation supplanted Crowley for a lot of people (myself included) when it first became available. Betz appears to simply transliterate what’s there. But there’s a missing piece in this sort of study: the Greek-speakers who wrote the rite were garbling their Egyptian, somewhat like the Japanese version of the Kuji mantras which hardly resembles the original Sanskrit, the Greeks misspelled and mispronounced everything and what letters remained were worn off further by the sands of time. They were attempting to translate a pictorial language into a phonetic script during a time when oral traditions reigned supreme for mystics of all types.

Crowley was an Egyptologist living in Egypt during a time when everyone was obsessed with Egypt. He knew enough Egyptian to figure out the context of parts of the rite and start to piece back some of the likely original text. And a lot of scholars now agree on his version of Ossoronophris, Asar-Un-Nefer, being correct. Betz himself makes such logical jumps, such as when the text reads, “Paphro” and Betz says they must have meant “Pharoah”. Crowley crossed out “Paphro” in his copy too.

Please note that I would dismiss Liber Samekh itself as nothing more than his usual psychosis, alongside all of his Left Hand style double-speak (I know that he said he was trying to balance the opposites, I see it as psychologically unstable for 90% of us or more regardless). However, if you want to ensure the barbarous words are true to their intended meaning, Crowley’s preliminary version (which Regardie himself used operatively) is worth comparing against Betz and determining the why of. I myself have done very little editing to Crowley’s reworking, placing Crowley, Betz, and the original Greek side by side.

This website has a nice comparison of Betz and Crowley’s versions, including the preliminary invocation I was just discussing

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I would say not to follow Crowley’s instructions verbatim almost ever, but to study him. Study why he said what he said, what he was doing, and heavily fall back on his source texts (the PGM, a gleaning of Golden Dawn, the grimoires, and of course, Agrippa and Eliphas Levi are the kings in understanding where Crowley was coming from).