From my post on a Wiccan messageboard:
[i]"Hello. I’m a student of philosophy at St. Louis University (fear not: I’m no Jesuit), and I must say that I’m rather disappointed in the recent popularity of Wicca and other white-light, Crowleyan-based faiths.
My point of contention with the religion is this: as any student of religion knows, Wicca was founded by Gerald Gardner, who took most of his dogma from Aleister Crowley. It is my opinion that Crowley is a plagiarist who borrowed heavily from the transcendental idealism of Arthur Schopenhauer, wrapped it in obscurantist, “occult” language, and used it to market himself to the disaffected housewives and unfortunates of Edwardian England.
Insofar as Crowleyanism is essentially Schopenhauerian, it is also refutable by the same means with which Schopenhauer is put to the lie. Friedrich Nietzsche, Schopenhauer’s pupil-turned-posthumous-enemy, almost single-handedly refuted the entireity of the neo-Kantian tradition of which Schopenahuer (and, by extension, Crowley) are part of: what Schopenhauer calls “Will” - and the “True Will” of Crowley’s faith system - is intended to be the cognitive aspects of Kant’s dang an sich, the “thing-in-itself” so called which lay behind the cognition of phenomenon. Unfortunately for this concept of the Will, it is unknowable, and therefore unverifiable. Thus it must be taken on faith, and thus it is indistinguishable from what the Christians call “God”. It is little wonder, therefore, that, as Anton LaVey pointed out (himself a pseudo-philosopher of the worst sort), most adherents to religions descended from Crowley feel fit to use all manner of Christian symbolism and ritual: because the religions are essentially, ideologically and psychologically the same."[/i]
Any takers?