A ego - proclaimed wolf , a dad acculturation touchstone , the " wickedest homo in the world , " a devoted practitioner of theoccultand " magick " — we ’ll get to that " KB " in a fleck — the recent Aleister Crowley was , first and last , a sharp drone in the eye of the schematic and dogmatic .
Back at the turn of the twentieth century , Crowley was a by choice out - there fellow , someone who so delighted in shocking his contemporaries and flip his nose at high - necked society that he eventually became , to some , a counterculture ikon . days after his death , he magnificently appeared on the psychedelic natural covering of Sgt . Pepper ’s Lonely Hearts Club Band , the Beatles ' 1967 album . Ozzy Osbournesang a songabout him . ( Mister Crowley / What went down in your head?/Oh , Mister Crowley / Did you blab out to the dead ? ) A buffet - religious belief , Thelema , ricochet from his writings .
Yet Crowley remains , to many , more than the leftover newspaper headline . To them , he is a reliable prophet , a man of especial intelligence and vision . To others , he never was anything more than a misogynistic , drug - muddle , sex - maniac , ego - involved , self - further pig .
That dazzling dichotomy might be just how Crowley favour things .
" He run to be very polarizing , " says Western New York state resident Norman Fleck , who has count himself among the followers of Crowley ’s instruction for decennary . " He did n’t process people very well . He threw masses under the autobus all the time . And unfortunately , that ’s what a lot of people focus on .
" Our outlook is on his magical full treatment , primarily and not his repellent behavior . I can assure you aright now , if I met Crowley on the street , I probably would n’t care him . But in term of the magical humans , there ’s nobody in the same conference that he is . "
The Start of an Enigma
Aleister Crowley was born into riches in 1875 , in England , and died poor , in England , in 1947 . In between … well , in between he was a very busy man who acquire a very different path through life .
The boy to the inheritor of a brewing fate , Crowley was well - civilize as a young man but quickly rise up against his founder ’s hard-and-fast Christian outlook . At Cambridge University , he became ( among his many compulsion ) a nearly otherworldly chess player , a print poet and a skilled mountain climber . He also traveled extensively . He became voraciously sexually active ( and , biographer say , had his first homosexual family relationship ) . He may have , some say , been recruited into being a spy for the British governance .
And — this is the big one — Crowley dove deeply into the occult .
By the time he was 25 , Crowley had become a extremity of a occult beau monde recognise as the Golden Dawn , where he practise ceremonial legerdemain , the ritual use of drug , and what was known as sexual magick . Often . That did n’t please a quite a little of multitude , even those — sometimes especially those — that he sleep with .
" A lot of what he did was design to be scandalous . specially the intimate license that he shoot , " Phil Stevens , a culturalanthropologistat the University at Buffalo , says . " Crowley knew very well that he was riling hoi polloi . He did that intentionally . He was intentionally amoral .
" He was take a lot of risks with his sexual variations . But it was all part of his ego . "
The drugging and sexing and confidential charming ceremony , Stevens remind us , were undertaken at a time when all of that was disgraceful in almost all of the world and outright illegal in many contribution . That did n’t give up Crowley . It may have emboldened him .
" I always feel that Crowley could have done well had he not engaged in some of those action , " Fleck says . " But that ’s my ruling . "
Birth of a Religion
For thousands of hoi polloi today , Crowley is best known as the father ofThelema , whose manoeuvre political theory — some turn over Thelema as much philosophical system as religion — is condense into a unsubdivided phrasal idiom :
" Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law . " It ’s often shortened to " Do What Thou Wilt . " The phrase that play along it is , " Love is the legal philosophy , dear under will . "
If that sound a slew like the 1960s mantra of " do your own thing , " or an entreaty to ascertain your purpose in life and follow up on it , that ’s probably not far off .
The approximation — which stockpile an conditional relation that you may do your own thingas long as it harms no one else — came to Crowley in the former 1900s while on a head trip to Egypt with his married woman , Rose . There , he reported , he heard a vocalism that dictated to him , over the grade of three days , what would become perhaps his most famous pen work , on which Thelema is establish : The Book of the Law . ( An excerpt : " This leger explains the Universe . " )
Crowley became involved in other religious organizations , too , notably an ancient ordering cognize asOrdo Templi Orientis(OTO ) , which he eventually injected with the philosophy of Thelema ( and whichOrdo Templi Orientis still follow today ) .
Still , more than the religion he founded , Crowley probably is well known forhowhe practiced Thelema and other anti - mainstream doctrines that he paddle in throughout his biography .
That is , through all that sex and magic .
Crowley’s ‘Magick’
" I have state that the word magic is one of the most semantically loaded terms in the English language . Witchcraftis almost as complex , " Stevens articulate . " These are complicated word . "
When Stevens and others speak of magic in the context of these impression systems , strike David Copperfield from your mind . This is something else solely .
Crowley — who stuck the " k " on the end of the Good Book to distinguish it from the three - card monte and disappear elephant kind of thaumaturgy — define magick , inMagick : Book 4 , as " the Science and Art of make Change to hap in conformity with Will . "
Magick often is performed in a ritual grouping setting — think flighty Hollywood here — but it can be done alone . Fleck explains further :
" I do a stately magic ceremonial for about 45 minute a day , based on some of my work , based on some of Crowley ’s study . It ’s done mainly through what we call anastral jutting … I close my eye and sit in a manner that allows [ me ] to focus [ my ] inner energy on a specific goal . It ’s very much like an Eastern speculation , done by Thelonious Monk . They ’re set themselves into a different country of knowingness .
" It ’s a focus of psychic DOE , " says Fleck , who has been at this some 50 days . " you may look at that any room you desire . Your skeptic would say , ' Those multitude are delude themselves . ' Having been there and having done it for many , many years … I do n’t believe that I ’m deluding myself . It ’s all in the piece of work . We ’re not trying to attract rabbits out of a hat . Magick with a ' k ' is not sleight of hired hand . Magick with a ' k ' is directing vitality fit in with a person ’s will . "
Crowley … and Sex
Some of Crowley ’s magick gender rituals contain — this is where Crowley lose a fate of people and gain the reputation for being one out - there fellow — the ritual digestion of , hem , intimate fluids .
That drill , of course , made Crowley a pariah among the schematic spiritual slew and led to wild charges that he give and even ate children . ( The OTO refutes and explicate those rumour here . ) For that reason , and others , Crowley was dub " the pixilated valet in the worldly concern " by the English press . The British weekly John Bull titled a 1923 piece , " A Man We ’d Like to Hang . "
Crowley was said to be a devil worshipper , too , and aSatanist , which is kind of true but pretermit the larger exposure . Again , from the OTO :
" Aleister Crowley was a systematic and scientific explorer of religious praxis , techniques and doctrines . As such , he performed devotional utilisation to Satan as well as to Jesus Christ and the Virgin Mary , to various divinity from the Egyptian and Hindu pantheon , to Jehovah as well as to Allah , and to the divine personifications that are unique to the organization of Thelema . "
It sure enough did n’t help oneself Crowley ’s reputation that , on a personal stage , he sometimes tended toward scurrilous . say one of Crowley ’s biographer , Lawrence Sutin : " Whatever one think of Crowley ’s sexual morés — and Crowley could be libidinous and gross and , at time , even savage toward his partners — gender as a substance to gnosis [ delimit as a knowledge of spiritual mystery ] became , from the middle decades of his life , a conduct realism for him . "
Crowley Today
Throughout his life , Crowley maintained his ravening appetite for not only sex , illusion and the search for phantasmal knowledge , but also for drug , admit heroin , hasheesh , cocain and many others . He often wrote of his experiences with mind - neuter marrow . His first put out novel was " The Diary of a Drug Fiend . "
Crowley go at years 72 , in 1947 — many consider drug dependence was as a contributing component — but his writing and his atrociously against - the - grain lifestyle continue to inspire rebels and trigger wild rumor . One totally unfounded trace that ’s popped up within the last few years is that Crowley , during one of his sexual activity rituals , fathered a future first ladyof the United States .
A 13th century Scottish acres that he stayed in for some clip , the Boleskine House , is being furbish up and promises to become a pilgrimage of kind for Thelemites and other Crowley faithful . The lieu was own at one time by Led Zeppelin guitar player Jimmy Page , too . ( pageboy is a Crowley rooter . The first press of Led Zeppelin III , the band ’s 1970 studio album , reportedly had engravings that let in , " Do what yard Wilt . " )
Like the man himself , Crowley ’s legacy is complicated . Among those that Crowley influenced in one mode or another , Stevens says , areGerald Gardner , who ’s responsible for bringing the Pagan religion known as Wicca into mod bump ; AmericanAnton LaVey , who founded the Church of Satan ; andScientologyfounder L. Ron Hubbard .
Other than the occasional unearthly tie - in ( like the rumor concerning the first lady ) , we have n’t heard much of Crowley late , though there are said to be a few thousand Thelemites around the globe , people like Fleck who continue to practice .
Still , the Beast — Crowley ’s clapper - in - brass name for himself , and one that several biographers say was first stupefy on him by his exasperated female parent — is never far from the headlines .
" I have a spirit that a new undulation of occultism will rise again . There ’s always an occult arts fringe , a unearthly bang … they will move into the mainstream from time to fourth dimension . Various bits of Crowley ’s wisdom will re - emerge , " Stevens says . " He ’s not all in . He will emerge again . "
