Aleister Crowley (12 October 1875 – 1 December 1947)
What is there to say about Aleister Crowley that hasn’t already been written elsewhere on this site? Not much, it's true, but even so
this very short 'biography' will mention just a few extra snippets of information about this extraordinary man.
He was born Edward Alexander Crowley, the first vowel in his surname being pronounced as one pronounces that found in the bird ‘crow’. He
was an English occultist, mystic, hedonist, a devotee of both chess and mountaineering, and a sexual revolutionary, including homosexuality.
Crowley claimed to be a Freemason, but the regularity of his initiations with the United Grand Lodge of England has been not only questioned, but
disputed. In a letter from the Supreme Council of Freemasonry (available on my
CD)
we learn that the title of SOVEREIGN GRAND INSPECTOR GENERAL was conferred upon him by John Yarker (33rd degree) in 1910, but the Grand Lodge
of England's records show that John Yarker was thrown out of the Masonic Fraternity in 1870, some forty years before this.
Crowley was an influential member of several occult organisations, the
'Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn', the 'Astrum Argentum A
A', and 'Ordo Templi Orientis'
(O.T.O.) in particular. Despite the fact that
Florence Farr
had refused to do so, he was advanced into the second order of the Golden Dawn by
Samuel Liddell MacGregor
Mathers in Paris who saw in him an ally, something he desperately needed at the time.
However their allegiance soon became an uneasy one, for Mathers, like Crowley, was a powerful magician and both were extremely competitive. They
quarrelled constantly and engaged in magical warfare. Mathers killed the majority of Crowley's pack of bloodhounds and sent a plague of an unknown species of beetle against Crowley who responded with an army of demons led by none other than Beelzebub.
He travelled extensively, particularly in the East where he studied Eastern Occult systems and 'Tantric Yoga'; he also studied 'Buddhism' and the
'I Ching'. He began to explore levels of the astral plane with his assistant, a poet called Victor Neuberg, using Enochian Magick. Crowley
claimed to have crossed the Abyss (guarded by Choronzon, the Demon of Dispersion) and united his own consciousness with the universal
consciousness.
After being expelled from his Abbey of Thelema in Sicily by Benito Mussolini in 1923, Crowley wandered around for a while visiting such places as
Tunisia and Germany before settling in France for a time. It was here that he engaged the services of another aspiring magician,
Israel Regardie, as his
secretary. In 1946 he was introduced to
Gerald Gardner.
His meetings with Gardner led to controversy over the authenticity of Gardner’s Book of Shadows. It was alleged that Gardner paid
Crowley to write it for him, but this has since been discounted.
Aleister Crowley gained much deserved notoriety during his lifetime, and was (in)famously dubbed The Wickedest Man in the World, a title he certainly did little to refute and possibly encouraged. His experiments with drugs had developed a dependency upon heroin, a habit from which he suffered for the rest of his life. Almost destitute because no publisher would touch his writings, he spent his remaining days in 'Netherwood', a boarding house in Hastings, England, where he died on 1 December 1947 aged 72, shortly after his doctor, William Brown Thomson, had refused to supply the morphine upon which Crowley had become dependent.
Crowley like so many outstanding men who preceded him, was undoubtedly a man before his time. He lived in a society that could neither understand him nor even begin to
appreciate his hidden genius. He did not suffer fools gladly, and his writings so shocked the vast majority of the people of the time that he was probably robbed of
the praise that it deserved – or was he really the wickedest man in the world? Fortunately the world today is a much more enlightened place, and
even more fortunately for those of us still living in it, his publications live on.
I would certainly recommend that you read his autohagiography titled The Confessions of Aleister Crowley. Apart from being a tremendous read,
it may well alter any preconceived impression you have of the man, irrespective of what your thoughts were originally, saint or sinner. The cost of Crowley's publications
has rocketed since his death, so you may well feel that the expense is not worth it. In this case I would suggest you try the Public Library, which is from where I
got my first copy, but remember also that truly rare books can turn out to be a sound investment.
