Aleister Crowley

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Aleister Crowley (1875–1947) was an English magician, poet, mountaineer, and the prophet of Thelema — the religion founded on a short book he said was dictated to him in a Cairo apartment over three days in April 1904. He passed through the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn and carried its synthesis further than anyone else who trained there, rebuilding ceremonial magic as “Magick,” a graded, examined discipline he called scientific illuminism, set out in the strangest technical literature of modern occultism. He was also, by deliberate self-construction and tabloid amplification, “the wickedest man in the world” — two reputations scholarship has spent two decades prying apart.

The Brethren’s son

Edward Alexander Crowley was born on 12 October 1875 at 30 Clarendon Square, Royal Leamington Spa, Warwickshire, into money made in brewing and a household of Exclusive Plymouth Brethren, the strictest wing of a strict evangelical sect. His father, a retired brewer turned traveling preacher, died of tongue cancer in 1887; the death broke whatever held the eleven-year-old to the faith. With his mother, Emily Bertha Bishop, the relationship soured into legend: by Crowley’s own telling she took to calling her rebellious child “the Beast,” after the Book of Revelation, and he embraced the identification for life. Evangelical boarding schools, Malvern, and Tonbridge followed, then in October 1895 Trinity College, Cambridge, where he published poetry at his own expense, climbed in the Alps every long vacation, and left in 1898 without a degree. Henrik Bogdan reads the structure of Crowley’s later revelation — an old aeon closed, a new one proclaimed — as the Brethren’s millenarian architecture transposed into another key.

Through the Golden Dawn

On 18 November 1898 Crowley was initiated into the Golden Dawn’s Isis-Urania temple in London, taking the motto Frater Perdurabo — “I shall endure to the end.” The order gave him his grammar: the Tree of Life and correspondence tables of Hermetic Qabalah, the tarot keyed to Hebrew letters, and the angelic Enochian system rebuilt from the papers of John Dee. Allan Bennett, the order’s most gifted adept, lived in Crowley’s Chancery Lane flat as his first sustained teacher; in 1899 Crowley bought Boleskine House on Loch Ness. He rose fast and was distrusted faster — his bisexuality and libertine reputation made enemies, W. B. Yeats among them — and when the London adepts refused him initiation into the inner Second Order, he received the grade from S. L. MacGregor Mathers in Paris in January 1900. In the revolt that split the order that spring he acted as Mathers’s enforcer, seizing the Second Order’s rooms at 36 Blythe Road before the courts returned them to the London lodge. The order’s history — charter, forgery, schism, successors — is its own story; Crowley walked out of the wreck with the whole curriculum in his head.

The climber

For several years magic shared him with mountains. With Oscar Eckenstein he climbed in Mexico in 1900–01 and, in 1902, joined the first serious expedition to K2, which turned back, sick and storm-bound, at roughly 20,000 feet. In Ceylon in 1901 he sat under Bennett again, this time for yoga: breath, posture, and concentration logged like laboratory work — the start of a lifelong graft of Indian method onto Western ritual, and of his reading in Buddhism. In August 1903 he married Rose Edith Kelly, sister of the painter Gerald Kelly. He went back to the Himalaya once more, in 1905, leading his own expedition to Kanchenjunga; the party mutinied and descended against his warnings as night came on, an avalanche killed Alexis Pache and several porters, and the blame — he had stayed in camp — ended his climbing career.

Three days in Cairo

The honeymoon journey brought Rose and Crowley to Cairo, and to the event from which Thelema dates itself. The account the tradition holds — Crowley published it in full in The Equinox of the Gods (1936) — is precise in its frame. In March 1904 Rose — no occultist — began slipping into trance insisting that “they” were waiting for her husband; on 18 March she named the god Horus, and on 20 March announced that “the Equinox of the Gods has come.” In the Cairo museum she led him to a painted funerary stele of the seventh century BCE, made for the Theban priest Ankh-ef-en-Khonsu; its exhibit number was 666, and Crowley came to call it the Stele of Revealing. Then, in their apartment, at noon on 8 April, a voice spoke from over his left shoulder — a being who named himself Aiwass, minister of Hoor-paar-kraat. For an hour that day and at the same hour on 9 and 10 April, Crowley wrote what the voice spoke. The result was Liber AL vel Legis, the Book of the Law: three chapters in the voices of the stele’s divinities — Nuit, Hadit, Ra-Hoor-Khuit — proclaiming the end of the aeon of the dying god, the opening of the Aeon of Horus, and the law of the new aeon: “Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law.” Thelema — the Greek θέλημα, “will” — holds that sentence as a charge rather than a license: each life has one true Will, and the work of a life is to find it and do it; Crowley’s commentaries labored to keep Will distinct from appetite. Thelema’s calendar counts from those three days. By his own account he resented the book for years, ignored its instructions, and put the manuscript away; it was printed privately in 1909, in facsimile in 1912, and in type for general circulation in 1913.

The orders and the books

The inheritance was then organized. In late 1907 Crowley and George Cecil Jones founded the A∴A∴, an order carrying a graded curriculum of magic and meditation; that autumn, by his account, further Holy Books were received as the Cairo text had been. From March 1909 to September 1913 he issued ten thick numbers of The Equinox, the A∴A∴‘s journal, under the motto “The Method of Science, the Aim of Religion” — the great primary source of his system, carrying the instructional Libers, the Holy Books, and the Book of the Law. 777 (1909), published anonymously, condensed the Golden Dawn’s correspondence tables into his school’s standing reference grid; Mathers sued in 1910 to stop The Equinox from printing the order’s rituals, lost, and the coverage made Crowley a public name. In November 1909 he crossed the Algerian desert with his student and lover Victor Neuburg, working through the thirty Aethyrs of the Enochian system — Dee’s angelic cosmology reread as a ladder of visionary ascent — and published the record as The Vision and the Voice. He also reached back a generation: Crowley claimed to be the reincarnation of Éliphas Lévi, who had died some four and a half months before his birth, argued the claim in print with eight points of evidence, and translated Lévi’s La Clef des grands mystères for The Equinox in 1913. Around 1910 he entered the orbit of Ordo Templi Orientis, Theodor Reuss’s German initiatic order raised on fringe Freemasonry; in 1912 Reuss set Crowley at the head of its British branch — by the standard account after confronting him over a chapter of The Book of Lies (title-page 1913, in circulation by 1912) that Reuss read as one of the order’s innermost secrets, and which Crowley maintained he had printed unknowingly. For its church he wrote, in Moscow in 1913, the Gnostic Mass, a full eucharistic liturgy that became the order’s central public rite. In the same years he began Book Four, the treatise that grew into Liber ABA, and fixed the spelling “magick” — an archaic k to cut his subject loose from stage conjuring.

The abbey and the headlines

The war years he passed in the United States (1914–19), writing pro-German propaganda for George Sylvester Viereck’s The Fatherland — work he later claimed, without proof, as cover for British intelligence; Marco Pasi accepts episodic intelligence contacts and rejects the spy romance. Around 1919 a doctor treating his asthma prescribed heroin; the addiction that followed was medical in origin and lifelong in consequence. In 1920, with Leah Hirsig, he rented the Villa Santa Barbara at Cefalù in Sicily and named it the Abbey of Thelema, after the abbey of “do what thou wilt” in Rabelais. For three years it ran as a ragged experimental commune — ritual by the sun’s hours, painting, magical training, squalor — while his heroin deepened; Hirsig’s infant daughter died there in 1920. In February 1923 Raoul Loveday, a young Oxford Thelemite, died at the abbey of acute enteric fever after drinking from a contaminated spring. His widow Betty May brought home a story of cat’s blood and razor cuts, and the London press was primed: the Sunday Express had called The Diary of a Drug Fiend “a book for burning” in 1922. On 24 March 1923 Horatio Bottomley’s John Bull crowned its campaign with the headline that followed Crowley to the grave — “the wickedest man in the world.” In April 1923 Mussolini’s government served him a deportation notice — Pasi reads the expulsion as a product of the newspaper campaign, not of fascist doctrine — and the abbey closed behind him.

The long exile

He drifted to Tunis, where he began his Confessions — subtitled, with open irony, an “autohagiography” — then to Paris, which expelled him in 1929. That year London’s Mandrake Press issued the first two volumes of the Confessions and the novel Moonchild, and in Paris he published his summa, Magick in Theory and Practice (imprint 1929, completed 1930). In Lisbon in 1930, with the poet Fernando Pessoa, he staged his own disappearance at the Boca do Inferno and surfaced three weeks later at a Berlin gallery opening. He kept suing to control the persona: in 1934 he lost a libel action against the publishers of Nina Hamnett’s Laughing Torso, which had tied his Cefalù years to black magic, and the costs bankrupted him in 1935. The Equinox of the Gods followed in 1936. From 1938 to 1943 he designed the Thoth tarot, painted by Lady Frieda Harris — the deck’s story belongs with the history of the cards — and the companion Book of Thoth appeared in 1944. In 1945 he moved to Netherwood, a boarding house in Hastings, where young Kenneth Grant served as his secretary, paid in magical instruction, and where in 1947 Gerald Gardner, the future founder of Wicca, left authorized to revive the English O.T.O. Crowley died at Netherwood on 1 December 1947, of chronic bronchitis, aged seventy-two. At the funeral in Brighton on 5 December a friend read from the Gnostic Mass, the Book of the Law, and the “Hymn to Pan”; the tabloids called it a Black Mass. His ashes went to his American successor Karl Germer, who buried them in his garden in New Jersey.

The architecture of Magick

Magick in Theory and Practice opens with the definition that organizes everything else he taught: magick is “the Science and Art of causing change to occur in conformity with Will.” What the system asks of its student is a double training. One half is inheritance: the Kabbalistic Tree and its correspondences from the Golden Dawn, filed in 777; yogic breath and concentration from Bennett’s Ceylon; Enochian vision-work rebuilt from Dee; the Egyptian frame of the stele, read through E. A. Wallis Budge. The other half is method: the aspirant keeps a written record, treats every result as data, and is bound to the skeptical motto of The Equinox. At the center stands the operation the tradition calls the Knowledge and Conversation of the Holy Guardian Angel, theurgy in a modern register, and beyond it the crossing of the Abyss, the ordeal at the heart of his Algerian working. Scholars have mapped the strata: Egil Asprem shows the ascent through the Aethyrs to be Crowley’s invention rather than Dee’s; Gordan Djurdjevic finds the yogic vocabulary reasonably exact, and the “Tantra” Crowley equated with his sexual ritual largely Crowley’s own construction.

Inheritors and readers

The afterlife ran through both temple and concert hall. Grant built the Typhonian current out of his Netherwood apprenticeship; Gardner wove phrases of the Book of the Law and the Gnostic Mass into the earliest Wiccan liturgies, a debt Ronald Hutton has traced line by line; the 1960s put Crowley’s face on the cover of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band (1967) and his law into the runout groove of Led Zeppelin III, and Jimmy Page bought Boleskine. The scholarly recovery came later. Richard Kaczynski’s Perdurabo (rev. ed. 2010) is the documentary biography; Alex Owen’s The Place of Enchantment (2004) set the Edwardian magician inside the culture of modernity; Marco Pasi’s Aleister Crowley and the Temptation of Politics (2014) cut both the hero and the villain down to size; and the Oxford volume Aleister Crowley and Western Esotericism (2012), edited by Henrik Bogdan and Martin P. Starr, marked the moment the academic study of Western esotericism accepted him as a subject on the order of Helena Blavatsky and the Theosophical Society. Within that volume, Hutton’s “Crowley and Wicca” documents the transmission into modern Paganism, and Asprem’s Arguing with Angels (2012) fixes his place in the Enochian line. The same literature keeps the documented record in view — the racism and antisemitism in his writings, the disciples used up and discarded, the addictions — stated bluntest by Lawrence Sutin, weighed most analytically by Pasi. The Beast was his mother’s word and Bottomley’s headline. Perdurabo — “I shall endure to the end” — was his own, chosen at the threshold of the Golden Dawn, and of the two names it is the motto, not the headline, that has set the terms on which he is now read.

→ In the library: Crowley — Liber AL vel Legis (1913) · Crowley — The Book of Lies (1913) · Mathers — The Kabbalah Unveiled (1887) · Budge — Egyptian Magic (1899)

→ Related: Golden Dawn Lineage · Hermetic Qabalah · Eliphas Levi Alphonse Louis Constant · Tarot Cartomancy · Enochian Magic · Ceremonial Magic