Aleister Crowley: Life, Works, and Legacy
Aleister Crowley, born Edward Alexander Crowley on 12 October 1875 in Royal Leamington Spa, was an English occultist, mountaineer, poet, and founder of the religion of Thelema. He is the most influential and the most controversial figure of the twentieth-century Western esoteric revival, and his ideas have continued to circulate in popular music, in literary fiction, and in the modern magical revival. The standard biographical literature has improved markedly in the last twenty years: Lawrence Sutin’s Do What Thou Wilt (2000) is the most reliable general biography, and Marco Pasi’s Aleister Crowley and the Temptation of Politics (2014) is the most important recent academic study.
Early Life and the Mountain
Crowley was born into a wealthy family of Plymouth Brethren, the most conservative of the English Protestant traditions, and his upbringing was dominated by his father, a stern evangelical Christian. He rejected his parents’ religion while still a teenager. In November 1898, while an undergraduate at Trinity College, Cambridge, he was received as a Minerval into the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn. He took the Neophyte grade in January 1899 and rose to the Adeptus Minor grade in January 1900, before breaking with Mathers over the question of authority. R. A. Gilbert’s The Golden Dawn Companion (1986) is the standard account, and Frank Kersnowski’s The Early Career of Aleister Crowley (1972) is the most useful account of the Cambridge years.
The mountain was, throughout Crowley’s life, a major preoccupation. His most famous Himalayan campaign, the 1905 Kangchenjunga expedition led by Crowley and Jules Jacot-Guillarmod, reached within a few hundred metres of the summit but stopped short of the actual ascent. The 1902 expedition was to K2 (then called Chogo Ri), not Kangchenjunga. He made a substantial number of serious ascents in the Alps and in the Karakoram, and he was elected to the Alpine Club in 1908. He produced a substantial body of mountaineering writing, including The Winged Beetle (1910) and Climbing Alone (1931). The mountain was, in Crowley’s work, not just a physical pursuit but a central metaphor of the magical life.
The Book of the Law and the Founding of Thelema
In April 1904, in Cairo, Crowley received, through his wife Rose, the text of The Book of the Law (Liber AL vel Legis), the central scripture of the religion of Thelema. The book was dictated, according to Crowley’s later account, by a non-physical intelligence named Aiwass, the “minister” of the Egyptian god Hoor-Paar-Kraat. The book was a brief, dense, and difficult text of 220 verses, and it contained the central dictum of the new religion: “Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law.” The phrase, in Crowley’s reading, did not mean the satisfaction of every appetite, but the discovery and the performance of the individual True Will, the deeper purpose of the person.
The publication of The Book of the Law in 1909 was a turning point in Crowley’s career, and from that point on the religion of Thelema was the central purpose of his work. In 1907, he founded the A∴A∴, a magical order structured around the gradual progression of the student through a curriculum of magical training, with the goal of attaining the “Knowledge and Conversation of the Holy Guardian Angel.” The order continues in operation today, although its historical continuity from 1907 to the present is contested by some scholars.
The O.T.O. and the Abbey of Thelema
In 1910, Crowley became the head of the Ordo Templi Orientis (O.T.O.), a German-derived fraternal and magical order whose origins are conventionally dated to c. 1895. Under Crowley’s leadership, the order was reoriented around the law of Thelema, and the O.T.O. became the principal organisational vehicle of the new religion. The order had a complicated legal history, including numerous disputes in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries over the rights to the various O.T.O. trademarks.
In 1920, Crowley founded the Abbey of Thelema, a community in Cefalù, Sicily. The Abbey, which operated until 1923, was the subject of lurid press reports about the conduct of its members, and the publication of these reports in 1923 led to Crowley’s expulsion from Italy. The historical record of the Abbey is contested, and the more sensational accounts should be read with caution. The Italian press accounts from 1923, and the British tabloid coverage in the wake of them (notably Lord Donegall’s articles in the 1930s), are the immediate sources of the “wickedest man in the world” image.
The Major Works
Crowley was a prolific writer in several genres. The most important of his works are The Book of the Law (dictated April 1904; first full publication in The Equinox vol. I, no. 7, 1909); Magick in Theory and Practice (1929), a textbook synthesis of the Western magical tradition; The Book of Lies (1913), aphorisms and mystical fables; 777 and Other Qabalistic Writings of Aleister Crowley (1909); The Vision and the Voice (Liber 418, dictated 1909-1914, published 1912 and revised 1929); and The Confessions of Aleister Crowley (first published in abridged form in 1969, edited by John Symonds and Kenneth Grant). The Mathers Goetia translation appeared in The Equinox vol. I, no. 1 (1909). Crowley also wrote the novel Moonchild (1917). The Thoth Tarot deck he co-designed with Lady Frieda Harris between 1938 and 1943 is now a working tool for many contemporary readers. He died on 1 December 1947 in Hastings, England; his body was cremated and his ashes were buried in a plot in Hamilton, New Hampshire.
The Personality and the Reputation
Crowley was, by all accounts, a difficult and contradictory figure. He was capable of great kindness and of cruelty, of considerable learning and of self-dramatisation. The popular image of Crowley as a “wickedest man in the world” was largely a creation of the British popular press of the 1930s, and the more serious biographical work since the 1960s has not found the standard tabloid narrative to be a reliable account of his life. Crowley was not, despite the popular image, a Satanist. He treated the Christian devil as a Christian superstition, and the religion of Thelema is, in his formulation, neither theistic nor atheistic in the conventional sense. The popular image of the “wickedest man” has, in the twenty-first century, been displaced by a more serious historical assessment.
The Modern Legacy
The most lasting single phrase of Crowley’s career is “Do what thou wilt,” which has been adopted, sometimes without attribution, in a wide range of cultural contexts, from the Sgt. Pepper sleeve to contemporary self-help literature. The 1960s counterculture absorbed the phrase, often without knowing its source, and the post-1970s chaos magic movement made the phrase one of its foundational slogans. Led Zeppelin drew on Crowley’s Hermetic and magical symbolism, and Crowley’s image and ideas continue to appear in the work of the Swedish band Ghost, the American industrial band Marilyn Manson, and a great many others. The Pharaonic imagery of Crowley’s Thelema has been a continuing influence on the visual culture of the Western magical revival, and the Thoth Tarot is the most enduring single visual product of his career. For the broader context, see the occult in popular culture, and for the larger group of figures whose work shaped the modern revival, see figures who shaped modern occultism.