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Liber XXXII · Thelema

Liber XXXII · Thelema · Chapter I: Aleister Crowley

Was Aleister Crowley a Satanist? Evidence and Scholarly Views

Was Aleister Crowley a Satanist? What he wrote about Satan and the Devil, his Beast 666 persona, the press scandals and how historians of Satanism judge him.

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Aleister Crowley was not a Satanist in the sense of someone who worshipped Satan or founded a religion devoted to him. He was the prophet of Thelema, a religion centred on the True Will and the Egyptian-styled deities of The Book of the Law, and he never called himself a Satanist. He did, however, deliberately use Satanic and Antichrist imagery, sometimes wrote sympathetically of Satan as a symbol, and became a major influence on the Satanist movements that arose after his death, which is why the question keeps being asked.

The Short Answer and Why the Question Persists§

The word "Satanist" has meant very different things. For centuries it was an accusation made by Christians against heretics, witches and political enemies, as the history of the Satanic panic shows. Since 1966, when Anton LaVey founded the Church of Satan, it has also named organised religious movements whose members choose the label for themselves. The overview What Is Satanism? distinguishes these meanings.

By the second, self-chosen definition, Crowley was not a Satanist: he founded a different religion and described his gods in quite different terms. By the first, polemical definition, he was called one constantly, partly because he courted the accusation. The question persists because both things are true at once: Crowley built nothing around Satan, yet he played with Satanic symbols more boldly than almost any other public figure of his time, and later Satanists claimed part of his legacy.

Crowley's Christian Upbringing and the Beast 666§

Crowley was born in 1875 into a family of the Plymouth Brethren, a strict evangelical sect whose members read the Bible literally and expected the imminent return of Christ. His father was a lay preacher. After his father's death in 1887 the boy rebelled violently against his religious upbringing, and according to his own later account his mother, exasperated, called him "the Beast," after the beast of the Book of Revelation whose number is 666.

Crowley embraced the name. As an adult he signed himself To Mega Therion, Greek for "the Great Beast," and treated 666 as his number, later finding it confirmed in the museum number of the Stele of Revealing. For him the Beast was not the servant of Satan but the herald of a new age that would replace the Christianity of his childhood. Biographers such as Lawrence Sutin and Richard Kaczynski see in this a lifelong argument with the evangelical faith of his parents: Crowley turned its apocalyptic vocabulary inside out, so that the villains of Revelation, the Beast and the Scarlet Woman, became the heroes of his own scripture.

What Crowley Wrote About Satan and the Devil§

Crowley's writings contain no theology of Satan as a god to be worshipped. The deities of The Book of the Law are Nuit, Hadit and Ra-Hoor-Khuit, drawn from Egyptian imagery, and its central principle is the discovery of the True Will (see Thelema and The Book of the Law). Satan appears in his work mainly as a symbol, used in three ways.

First, Crowley often argued that the Devil is a name given to the gods of other people or to forces that religious authorities wished to suppress, an argument that echoed nineteenth-century anthropology and the Romantic Satanism of Blake, Shelley and Byron. Second, in a few passages, notably in Magick in Theory and Practice (1929), he presented the serpent of Eden under the name Satan as the bringer of knowledge who made humans godlike, rather than as their enemy. In some writings he also linked his guardian intelligence Aiwass with the Egyptian god Set and with the Arabic name Shaitan, a thread that his student Kenneth Grant later developed. Third, in his tarot, the Thoth card XV, The Devil, is depicted as Pan, a goat-god of creative and generative energy rather than a figure of evil.

Provocation as method§

Crowley enjoyed shocking his readers and often wrote in deliberately ambiguous or coded language. The most notorious example is a passage in Magick in Theory and Practice on "bloody sacrifice," which recommends a male child as the most suitable victim and was quoted for decades as proof of murderous Satanism. Crowley's own hints and nearly all later commentators read the passage as a veiled reference to sexual magic, and there is no evidence that he ever harmed a child. The episode shows how his taste for provocation fed the accusations made against him.

Rituals, Scandals and the "Wickedest Man in the World"§

Crowley did not celebrate Black Masses, the inverted Catholic rites that writers such as J.-K. Huysmans had made famous in the 1890s. His main public ritual, the Gnostic Mass written in 1913, is a celebration of life, love and the union of male and female principles modelled loosely on Christian liturgy, not a parody of it. He did adapt ancient invocations, such as the Graeco-Egyptian rite of the "Headless One" that he reworked as Liber Samekh, and he practised sexual magic, which many contemporaries regarded as diabolical.

His public image as a Satanist was fixed mainly by journalism. After the death of a young follower at his commune in Sicily in 1923, the British popular press, led by the weekly John Bull, ran a campaign describing him as "the wickedest man in the world" and accusing him of every kind of depravity. The label stuck. Later sensational writers, and a libel trial in 1934 in which lurid stories of his magic were aired in court, kept the image alive. Crowley sometimes encouraged it, but he also complained that it misrepresented his work.

Crowley and Later Satanism: LaVey and the Temple of Set§

Crowley's influence on organised Satanism is real but indirect. Anton LaVey, who founded the Church of Satan in San Francisco in 1966, drew on a wide range of earlier sources, including Crowley's books and the ceremonial magic of the Golden Dawn tradition; the Enochian Keys printed in The Satanic Bible (1969) come from the angelic language that Crowley had popularised. LaVey's philosophy, however, was atheistic and materialist, and he treated Crowley's mysticism with some scepticism.

The Temple of Set, founded by Michael Aquino in 1975 after a split from the Church of Satan, has a closer relationship. Aquino's Book of Coming Forth by Night, which he presented as a communication from Set, explicitly positioned itself as a successor to The Book of the Law, recognising Crowley as a magus of an earlier aeon while proclaiming a new Aeon of Set. Kenneth Grant's Typhonian Thelema also emphasised the Set and Shaitan elements of Crowley's thought, and some later currents of the left-hand path treat Crowley as an ancestor.

How Scholars Classify Crowley Today§

Historians of Satanism have tried to separate the long history of accusations from the much shorter history of people who called themselves Satanists. Ruben van Luijk, in Children of Lucifer, places the origins of modern religious Satanism in Romantic literature and nineteenth-century occultism, and treats Crowley as a key transitional figure who made Satanic symbolism available to later movements without himself founding one. The collected studies in The Devil's Party and The Invention of Satanism reach a similar conclusion: Crowley is best described as a prophet of his own religion who borrowed Satanic imagery for provocation and symbolism.

Thelemites themselves generally reject the label. They point out that Thelema has its own scriptures, gods, ethics and rituals, and that equating Crowley with Satanism reproduces the Christian polemic he rebelled against. Some admit that his Antichrist persona invited the confusion. The fairest answer is therefore historical: Crowley was not a Satanist, but he stands at the crossroads where Romantic Satanism, ceremonial magic and new religious movements met, and modern Satanism would look very different without him. His life is surveyed in Aleister Crowley.

Frequently asked questions§

Did Aleister Crowley worship Satan?§

No. Crowley's religion, Thelema, centres on the deities of The Book of the Law and on the True Will, not on Satan. He occasionally used Satan as a positive symbol of knowledge or energy, but he never established any worship of him.

Why did Crowley call himself the Beast 666?§

The name came from the Book of Revelation and, according to Crowley, from his mother, who called him "the Beast" during his rebellious adolescence. He adopted it as a deliberate inversion of his evangelical upbringing and as the title of the prophet of a new age.

Did Anton LaVey get his ideas from Crowley?§

LaVey drew on many sources, among them Crowley and the Golden Dawn tradition, and the Enochian Keys in The Satanic Bible reflect that background. But LaVey's atheistic Satanism differs fundamentally from Crowley's mystical religion.

Who called Crowley the wickedest man in the world?§

The phrase was popularised by the British weekly John Bull and other newspapers in the early 1920s, after scandal surrounding his commune at Cefalù in Sicily. It became a lasting part of his public image.

Sources and further reading§