Religion as Aesthetic Creation: Ritual and Belief in William Butler Yeats and Aleister Crowley

William Butler Yeats and Aleister Crowley created literary works intending them to comprise religious systems, thus negotiating the often-conflicting roles of religion and modern art and literature. Both men credited Percy Bysshe Shelley as a major influence, and Shelley\u27s ideas of art as religion may have shaped their pursuit to create working religions from their art. This study analyzes the beliefs, prophetic practices, myths, rituals, and invocations found in their literature, focusing particularly on Yeats\u27s Supernatural Songs, Celtic Mysteries, and Island of Statues, and Crowley\u27s Philosopher\u27s Progress, Garden of Janus, Rites of Eleusis, and Hymn to Pan. While anthropological definitions generally distinguish art from religion, Crowley\u27s religion, Thelema, satisfies requirements for both categories, as Yeats\u27s Celtic Mysteries may have done had he completed the project