Aleister Crowley: Life, Magick, Thelema and Legacy Explained

Aleister Crowley (1875–1947) was an English occultist, poet, mountaineer and writer who founded the religion of Thelema after receiving The Book of the Law in Cairo in 1904. Trained in the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, he went on to create the magical order A∴A∴, to lead the Ordo Templi Orientis, and to write some of the most influential works of twentieth-century ceremonial magic, which he spelled "magick." Labelled "the wickedest man in the world" by the British press, he remains a polarising figure whose ideas have had a wide influence on modern esotericism and popular culture.

Early Life and Cambridge§

Edward Alexander Crowley was born on 12 October 1875 in Royal Leamington Spa, Warwickshire. His father, Edward Crowley, had inherited a fortune from the family brewing business and was an itinerant preacher of the Exclusive Brethren, a strict branch of the Plymouth Brethren. After his father's death in 1887 the boy was raised by his mother and an uncle in an atmosphere he later described as oppressive. His rebellion against this upbringing, including his mother's habit of calling him "the Beast," left a lasting mark on his self-image.

Crowley went up to Trinity College, Cambridge, in 1895, where he read moral sciences and then English literature, but left in 1898 without taking a degree. At Cambridge he adopted the name Aleister, published his first volumes of poetry at his own expense, and took up serious mountaineering. He became one of the most daring climbers of his generation, taking part in a 1902 attempt on K2 with Oscar Eckenstein and leading a disastrous 1905 expedition to Kangchenjunga, in which several members of the party died in an avalanche.

The Golden Dawn and Early Magical Training§

Crowley's interest in occultism grew after reading A. E. Waite's The Book of Black Magic and of Pacts and Karl von Eckartshausen's The Cloud upon the Sanctuary. On 18 November 1898 he was initiated as a Neophyte in the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, taking the motto Perdurabo ("I will endure to the end"). He progressed rapidly through the Outer Order, studying with Allan Bennett and George Cecil Jones.

When the London adepts refused him entry to the Second Order, MacGregor Mathers initiated him in Paris in January 1900, and Crowley acted as Mathers' agent in the attempt to seize the order's London premises that April. The failure of that episode, and Crowley's growing disillusion with Mathers, led him to travel widely: to Mexico, where he climbed volcanoes and worked with Enochian magic; to Ceylon and India, where he studied yoga under Bennett and others; and to Paris. In 1903 he married Rose Edith Kelly, sister of the painter Gerald Kelly.

Cairo 1904 and The Book of the Law§

On their honeymoon Crowley and Rose travelled to Cairo. According to Crowley's account, Rose, who had no occult training, began in March 1904 to tell him that the god Horus was waiting for him. She identified Horus in a funerary stele of the Twenty-sixth Dynasty priest Ankh-ef-en-Khonsu, then displayed in the Bulaq Museum under the exhibit number 666, a coincidence that struck Crowley deeply.

On 8, 9 and 10 April 1904, between noon and one o'clock, Crowley wrote down three chapters dictated, he said, by a voice belonging to a being named Aiwass, whom he later described as his Holy Guardian Angel and as a messenger of the gods of the new age. The resulting text, Liber AL vel Legis, or The Book of the Law, proclaimed the end of an old religious era and the beginning of a new "Aeon of Horus," summed up in the principle of Will. Its contents and the religion built upon it are discussed in our article on Thelema and the Book of the Law.

Crowley did not immediately embrace the text. By his own account he ignored or resisted it for several years, misplaced the manuscript, and only gradually accepted his role as its prophet.

The A∴A∴ and the Ordo Templi Orientis§

The A∴A∴§

In 1907 Crowley and George Cecil Jones founded a new magical order, the A∴A∴, often expanded as Argenteum Astrum ("Silver Star"). It reworked the grade structure of the Golden Dawn, extended it to the top of the Tree of Life, and emphasised individual work under a single superior rather than group ritual. To publish its teachings Crowley launched The Equinox in 1909, a lavish biannual periodical that included instructions in yoga and ceremonial magic, Golden Dawn rituals, and poetry. The publication of Golden Dawn material led Mathers to sue unsuccessfully to stop it.

In 1909 Crowley and his disciple the poet Victor Neuburg travelled through Algeria, where they explored the Thirty Aethyrs of the Enochian system; the record was published as The Vision and the Voice. Crowley regarded this period as his crossing of "the Abyss," a crucial stage in his mystical development.

Ordo Templi Orientis§

The Ordo Templi Orientis (OTO) was a German-founded fraternal order associated with Carl Kellner and Theodor Reuss, which drew on irregular Freemasonry and claimed to teach a secret of sexual magic. Reuss admitted Crowley in 1910 or 1912 (accounts differ) and put him in charge of the British section. Crowley rewrote its rituals, introduced the law of Thelema into them, and composed the Gnostic Mass in 1913. After Reuss's death in 1923 Crowley became the order's Outer Head, though not all branches accepted him.

During the First World War Crowley lived in the United States, where he wrote pro-German propaganda for The Fatherland. He later claimed he had been working to discredit the German cause, a claim some historians, notably Richard B. Spence, have taken seriously, though the matter remains debated.

The Abbey of Thelema at Cefalù§

In 1920 Crowley established a commune at Cefalù in Sicily, which he called the Abbey of Thelema, after the utopian abbey in Rabelais's Gargantua. He lived there with his companions Leah Hirsig and Ninette Shumway, their children, and a changing group of students. The rented villa was decorated with Crowley's murals, and residents followed a regime of meditation, yoga, magical ritual and study. Crowley also wrote extensively there.

The community was beset by poverty, illness and drug use; Crowley had developed a heroin dependency after being prescribed the drug for asthma, and he wrote about addiction in his novel The Diary of a Drug Fiend (1922). In 1923 a young Oxford graduate, Raoul Loveday, died at the abbey, most probably from an infection contracted from drinking contaminated water. His widow, Betty May, gave sensational accounts to the British press, which ran a campaign against Crowley. Shortly afterwards Mussolini's government expelled him from Italy.

Writings and Literary Output§

Crowley was enormously prolific. His major magical works include:

• Book 4 (1912–1913), an introduction to yoga and magic.
• Magick in Theory and Practice (1929), his systematic treatise, in which he defined magick as the science and art of causing change in conformity with will.
• 777 (1909), a set of tables of Kabbalistic correspondences building on Golden Dawn material.
• The Confessions of Aleister Crowley (1929), an autobiography he called an "autohagiography."
• The Book of Thoth (1944), a study of the tarot written to accompany the deck painted to his specifications by Lady Frieda Harris between 1938 and 1943.
• Magick Without Tears, a collection of letters published posthumously in 1954.

He also wrote poetry, plays, novels such as Moonchild (1929), and short stories, and he translated Éliphas Lévi, whom he believed to be his own previous incarnation. Much of his work blends serious scholarship, mystical insight, deliberate provocation and private humour, which makes it difficult to read at face value.

Reputation, Controversies and Later Life§

Crowley's reputation has always been contested. The British tabloid press, especially John Bull and the Sunday Express in the 1920s, portrayed him as a monster; in 1934 he lost a libel action against the sculptor Nina Hamnett, in which the judge expressed strong disgust at his writings. Critics have pointed to his treatment of the women in his life, several of whom suffered severe hardship; to his drug use; to his frequently cruel personal conduct; and to passages in his writings that express racist, antisemitic and misogynistic attitudes common in his time and class but sometimes extreme even by those standards. Rumours of human sacrifice, often repeated, rest on a misreading of a deliberately provocative passage in Magick in Theory and Practice that Crowley himself explained as a metaphor for sexual magic.

At the same time, historians such as Lawrence Sutin and Richard Kaczynski have presented a more rounded figure: a serious student of comparative religion and yoga, a gifted if uneven poet, a mountaineer of real distinction, and an original religious thinker who sought to reconcile spiritual practice with modern ideas of individual freedom. Scholars of esotericism, including Marco Pasi and Henrik Bogdan, have treated his work as a significant episode in modern religious history rather than as mere scandal.

Crowley's final years were spent in relative poverty in England. He died at Netherwood, a boarding house in Hastings, on 1 December 1947. His funeral in Brighton included readings of his poetry and the Hymn to Pan, prompting further press complaints.

Legacy§

Crowley's posthumous influence has far outstripped his reputation in life. The OTO survived, and after a period of near-extinction was revived under Grady McMurtry from the late 1960s. Gerald Gardner, the founder of modern Wicca, met Crowley in 1947, received an OTO charter and incorporated passages from Crowley's writings into early Wiccan rituals. The Beatles placed Crowley's face on the cover of Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band (1967), and Jimmy Page of Led Zeppelin bought his former house at Boleskine on Loch Ness. Later movements, including chaos magick, drew on his techniques while rejecting his system of belief. The Thoth tarot remains one of the most widely used decks in the world.

Frequently asked questions§

Why did Aleister Crowley spell magic as "magick"?§

Crowley used the archaic spelling "magick" to distinguish his practice, which he described as the science and art of causing change in conformity with will, from stage conjuring. The spelling has since been adopted by many practitioners who are not Thelemites.

Was Aleister Crowley a Satanist?§

Crowley did not identify as a Satanist and did not worship Satan. He enjoyed provocative self-descriptions such as "the Beast 666," which he adopted from his mother's insult and from the Book of Revelation, and he used Christian demonic imagery to shock. His religion, Thelema, centres on the gods of The Book of the Law and the doctrine of True Will.

What is the A∴A∴?§

The A∴A∴ is the magical and mystical order Crowley founded with George Cecil Jones in 1907. It uses a grade system based on the Tree of Life and emphasises personal training under a superior, rather than lodge ritual.

When and where did Aleister Crowley die?§

He died on 1 December 1947 in Hastings, England, at the age of seventy-two. He was cremated in Brighton.

Sources and further reading§

• The Confessions of Aleister Crowley — Aleister Crowley, 1929 (ed. John Symonds and Kenneth Grant, 1969)
• Magick: Liber ABA, Book Four — Aleister Crowley, ed. Hymenaeus Beta, 1994
• Do What Thou Wilt: A Life of Aleister Crowley — Lawrence Sutin, 2000
• Perdurabo: The Life of Aleister Crowley — Richard Kaczynski, 2002 (revised 2010)
• Aleister Crowley and Western Esotericism — Henrik Bogdan and Martin P. Starr (eds.), 2012
• Aleister Crowley: The Biography — Tobias Churton, 2011
• Secret Agent 666: Aleister Crowley, British Intelligence and the Occult — Richard B. Spence, 2008