Aleister Crowley

Aleister Crowley (born October 12, 1875, Royal Leamington Spa, England—died December 1, 1947, Hastings) was a British occultist, writer, and mountaineer, who was a practitioner of “magick” (as he spelled it) and called himself the Beast 666, drawing on the number of the beast mentioned in the Book of Revelation. He was denounced in his own time for his decadent lifestyle and had few followers, but he became a cult figure after his death.

Crowley’s father was an heir to a brewing fortune who became an evangelist for the Plymouth Brethren, a Nonconformist religious denomination. The younger Crowley, however, formed an aversion to Christianity early in life. As a student at Trinity College, University of Cambridge, he began to use the name Aleister and gained a reputation for skill at chess. In 1898 he left the university without taking a degree. His own inheritance left him free to travel widely and to arrange for the publication of his writings. His first book of poetry appeared in 1898, and numerous books followed.

As a mountaineer, Crowley honed his skills on cliffs in Great Britain before taking part in pioneering attempts to climb Earth’s second- and third-highest mountains, K2 and Kanchenjunga. The K2 expedition of 1902 reached an elevation of 18,600 feet (5,670 metres), while the Kanchenjunga expedition three years later was marred by tragedy when four of Crowley’s fellow climbers were killed in an avalanche. It was said that Crowley, who had advised them against taking the fatal route, ignored cries for help from the survivors of the accident.

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Like many other religious skeptics of the 19th century, Crowley became interested in occultism. In 1898 he joined the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, an organization derived from the Rosicrucians. One of Crowley’s rivals within the London Golden Dawn group was the poet William Butler Yeats. On a visit to Egypt in 1904, Crowley reported mystical experiences and wrote The Book of the Law, a prose poem which he claimed had been dictated to him by a discarnate being called Aiwass. In it he formulated his most famous teaching: “Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law.” The sentiment was not new—the French author François Rabelais had expressed it more than 300 years earlier in Gargantua and Pantagruel—but Crowley made it the basis of a new religion he called Thelema, thelēma being the Greek word for “will.” The Book of the Law was accepted as scripture by the Ordo Templi Orientis, a mystical group of German origin. In about 1907 Crowley founded his own order, A∴A∴, using initials that stood for the Latin words for “silver star.” Starting in 1909 he disseminated his teachings in the periodical The Equinox. His assistant in the early years of this endeavor was J.F.C. Fuller, later a well-known military strategist and historian.

During World War I Crowley resided in the United States, where he contributed to the pro-German newspaper The Fatherland. After the war he moved to Cefalù, on the Italian island of Sicily, where he converted a house into a sanctuary he called the Abbey of Thelema. During this time he wrote The Diary of a Drug Fiend (1922), which was published as a novel but was said to have been based on personal experience. The death of a young follower in Sicily, allegedly after participating in sacrilegious rituals, led to denunciations of Crowley in the British popular press as the “wickedest man in the world” and to his expulsion from Italy in 1923. Having exhausted his inheritance on travel and extravagances, Crowley moved back to England in the early 1930s. His last notable achievement was the publication of The Book of Thoth (1944), in which he interpreted a new tarot card deck, called the Thoth, that he had designed in collaboration with the artist Frieda Harris.

Crowley died in poverty and obscurity in an English rooming house in 1947, but after his death he became a figure of fascination in popular culture. The Beatles put his picture on the Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band album cover. Led Zeppelin guitarist Jimmy Page purchased a house previously owned by Crowley near Loch Ness in Scotland.