Aleister Crowley

A serious systematiser of magical technique, a genuinely accomplished mountaineer, and a man who was cruel to people and wrote things that cannot be excused by their period.

Who they were

Edward Alexander Crowley (1875–1947), who called himself Aleister, was the most influential occultist of the twentieth century and one of the most persistently misrepresented — by his detractors, by his admirers, and energetically by himself.

Where they came from

Born in Leamington Spa to a wealthy family in the Plymouth Brethren, an austere evangelical sect. His father, a preacher, died when he was eleven, and Crowley's lifelong hostility to Christianity is not incidental to his work — much of Thelema is legible as an inversion of what he was raised in, and his mother's description of him as the Beast of Revelation was a name he adopted with enthusiasm.

He inherited money at twenty-one and went to Trinity College, Cambridge, where he wrote poetry, played chess to a high standard, and left without a degree.

He was a genuinely serious mountaineer, which is routinely omitted. He was on the 1902 expedition to K2, reaching around 6,500 metres — the highest anyone had then been on the mountain — and led the 1905 attempt on Kangchenjunga, which ended in disaster when part of the party rebelled, descended, and four men died in an avalanche. Crowley's conduct that day, remaining in his tent while the search proceeded below, is defensible on mountaineering grounds and remains the most damaging single episode in accounts of his character.

He joined the Golden Dawn in 1898, sided with Mathers in the 1900 schism, and helped bring the order down.

In 1904 in Cairo came The Book of the Law. He founded the A∴A∴ in 1907, took over the Ordo Templi Orientis in the following decade, and ran the Abbey of Thelema at Cefalù from 1920 until Mussolini expelled him in 1923.

He was addicted to heroin, originally prescribed for asthma, for much of his later life. He died in Hastings in 1947, largely forgotten and in reduced circumstances.

What they taught

Magick with a k — his spelling, to distinguish the discipline from stage conjuring — defined as the science and art of causing change to occur in conformity with will. The definition is broad by design: on his account any deliberate act aimed at a chosen end is magick, and the discipline is the alignment of act with True Will.

Rigour and record-keeping. This is his most durable contribution and the least dramatic. He insisted practitioners keep a magical diary, record results including failures, distinguish what was experienced from what was inferred, and treat their own claims sceptically. Whatever one makes of the enterprise, the methodological instruction is sound and is more than most of his contemporaries offered.

Scholarship. 777 is a systematic table of correspondences that remains a working reference. The Book of Thoth and the Thoth tarot, painted over five years by Lady Frieda Harris, are a major achievement — and Harris, like Pamela Colman Smith before her, is under-credited for a deck that carries a man's name.

What we can and cannot say

We can say his technical writing is good and his influence is vast — on modern magic, on Wicca (Gardner knew him and borrowed from him), on chaos magic, and on twentieth-century counterculture, where he appears on the Sgt. Pepper cover and Jimmy Page bought his house.

We can say the "wickedest man in the world" tabloid persona was substantially self-manufactured and should not be mistaken for an account of him. Much of what scandalised his contemporaries — drug use, bisexuality in an era that criminalised it, sexual frankness, contempt for respectable religion — is not what a modern reader would object to.

And we can say what a modern reader should object to, without softening it. His writings contain antisemitic and racist passages that were common in his class and period and are not excused by that. He was frequently cruel to the people closest to him, particularly women and particularly those who became dependent on him — several of his partners ended in serious mental distress or destitution. He spent other people's money and destroyed other people's lives with considerable indifference. His daughter Lilith died of typhoid at two in Rangoon in circumstances involving real parental negligence.

The honest reckoning is that his ideas and his conduct are separable in principle and were not separable in practice for the people around him — which is exactly the difficulty set out in the guru problem, and he is one of its clearest instances.

We cannot say whether he believed his own claims, and he was deliberately elusive about it. He described Aiwass at different times as an independent intelligence and as his own higher self, and never resolved it publicly, which may be evasion or may be the most honest thing he did.

Who they were

Where they came from

What they taught

What we can and cannot say

Further reading