1

Man, Myth,
and Legend

To write an even mildly passable biography of Aleister Crowley is a monumental task, and a measure I shall not attempt to meet within the scope of this work. Toward that end, Crowley left The Confessions of Aleister Crowley, his own autohagiography, the first sections of which were published in two volumes in 1929, with the full work being issued posthumously in 1969.3 More recent times have seen exceptional research on his life by historians and scholars of Western esotericism that have resulted in several well-crafted biographies, to which reference will be given and the reader can inquire for greater detail.

My intentions are instead to present a brief sketch of Crowley’s life, highlighting the events that will better explain the man and ultimately the philosophy behind Thelema, his spiritual legacy. From a life of privilege as the sole heir of his father’s fortune, to his death in penury after having spent everything and then some in pursuit of his art, Crowley was—and is—an enigmatic, complex, and controversial figure. Much of the legend that has become Crowley’s legacy stems from sensational accounts fabricated to titillate the public—then, as now, eager for the first scent of scandal—but they also arise from many of his own writings. He reveled in his reputation, which he did little to discourage when writing in metaphors that would shock even a modern reader not already informed on the underlying meaning of his analogies.

While both vilified and celebrated in his own lifetime and beyond, one finds in Crowley an exceptional man, yet a man not without his flaws, as one might expect of anyone who dares greatly. Yet this was part of the draw for me: Crowley the man in all his flawed humanity, and Crowley who had also ascended to the heights (and depths) of spiritual attainment. It speaks to the fact that spiritual attainment is not a point-event, a single moment in time where we are forever-after an enlightened being. We must inevitably come crashing back to our earthly egos, though perhaps with a better command and control of it, and fight the many forces that might pervert its best intentions.

And it is with the best of intentions that we begin.

Birth and Early Childhood

By his own account, Aleister Crowley was born on October 12, 1875, to Edward and Emily (Bishop) Crowley at 30 Clarendon Square in Leamington in Warwickshire, England, at about eleven at night. His given name was Edward, after his father and his father’s father, with a middle name of Alexander: hence, in full, Edward Alexander Crowley. As a boy, he went by a shortened form of his middle name, Alick, a household convenience to differentiate him from his father. It would still be some years before he donned the nom de plume—or is it nom de guerre?—of Aleister.

Situated somewhat evenly between London and Birmingham, the bustling town of Leamington Spa was renowned for its saline baths, the purported curative and restorative properties being responsible for the surge in popularity and affluence since its first bathhouse was opened to the public in 1786. At Clarendon Square, the Crowley home was one of the many fine Georgian-era townhouses erected in the necessity of the town’s expansion, the population at that time being approximately 25,000—no small borough for what was not long before simply a “farm on the river Leam,” from whence the town got its name. This bustling resort for England’s elite was young Alick’s home until he was five, at which point the family moved to Redhill, Surrey, a southern suburb of greater London.

Crowley’s father was independently wealthy as a result of a very successful family brewing business in Alton, to the southwest of London. He had foregone this line of work, however, on the religious grounds of abstaining from alcohol, having taken up the faith of the evangelical Exclusive Plymouth Brethren. A sect begun most notably by John Nelson Darby in the early part of the nineteenth century in rejection of the predominant Anglican Church, the Plymouth Brethren believed not only that common people could take communion together, but that scripture was to be interpreted as the ultimate authority: above tradition and certainly above the political expediencies toward which the Anglican Church was inclined in its relationship with the British government.

Crowley notes with no small sense of admiration that his father, in true evangelical style, would often go about town and casually engage people on the topic of what they were planning to do that day, adding continually “ … and then?” until such a point as they arrived at their inevitable death—which of course would prompt the same question: “And then?” There was never a more successful tool of promulgation than the fear of eternal hellfire, a fear that likely bore a heavier weight on the promulgator than his intended convert. Crowley is likely to have taken much from this memory of his father in developing his own spiritual philosophy, far removed as it may have been from the austerity of that religious sect. He commonly declared to friends and strangers alike, “Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law!” upon first greeting.

Despite the Plymouth Brethren being exceedingly close-knit, forbidding even association with individuals external to their religious group, Aleister was afforded all the luxuries of his social class, including private tutors and boarding schools throughout his early education. Given the strong religious leanings of his family, these were also staunchly evangelical, teaching all but exclusively from the Bible. Crowley claims no small happiness in this period, despite being at odds with the man we would come to know. Why would he not? Since he viewed his father as the “wealthy scion of a race of Quakers,” it seemed logical that he would be heir to no less a claim. Yet it was precisely at this point, on the brink of manhood and with all the world before him, that his life fell apart.

Crowley was just eleven when his father was diagnosed with cancer of the tongue. 4 The family ultimately decided on a treatment approach that is now understood as nothing more than medical quackery in lieu of the standard medical practice of the time, limited as it was. The decision ultimately proved fatal, something that Crowley never quite forgave. The death of his father in March of 1887 left him to the care of his mother and her family, an arrangement that he came to despise. While Crowley idealized his father as a kind and rational man of religion, he saw his mother as little more than an unthinking zealot, having been converted to the faith of his father rather than having arrived at it of her own accord. Where the father saw context and adjustment, the mother saw only rules that were to be followed. Darker days were to come.

The family inherited his father’s wealth, and Crowley continued to be educated at private religious boarding schools, but seemingly one worse than the next in its fervor for discipline—a penchant for cruelty well-known in private schools at the time and exacerbated by the stern environment of religious extremism in which he was entrenched. Coupled with Crowley’s emotional lashing-out in the wake of his father’s death, it combined for many years of misery at what can readily be described as the hands of sociopathic sadists armed with the unrelenting authority of a self-righteous religious fervor. It was a misery that he would not soon forget, and equally served to forge the man that came to call himself by a name his frustrated mother bestowed upon him: The Beast.

Early Adulthood

It was a difficult time for Crowley. The death of his father robbed him of his assumed primacy in the familial order, the natural heir to his kingdom. This romantic ideal dashed, it had been replaced with the harsh reality that he was the seemingly unwanted chattel of his maternal family, the Bishops. As such, he was now subject to the discretions of its patriarch, his uncle, Tom Bishop. In his Confessions, there is not a kind word levied toward his uncle, with several paragraphs dedicated to his utter excoriation. Further undermining what stability the young Crowley might have clung to, Tom Bishop convinced his mother to leave the family home in Surrey to be closer to her kin in the nearby suburb of Streatham.

When away at school, things progressively worsened. In an atmosphere where salacious accusation was as good as proof, a gaggle of tattletales hungry to escape the lash is bred, lest they be implicated first. Having visited Crowley at his parent’s home over the holidays, one boy returned to school with a tale that he had witnessed young Alick drunk. This was nonsense, but it didn’t matter to his particularly vicious headmaster, Reverend Champney. Crowley was placed “in Coventry,” a literal ostracism from his teachers and classmates, who were forbidden to interact with him in any way until he confessed the crime and faced the punishment. He refused to do so, being innocent of the crime—ignorant even of the crime for which he had been accused!—and was left in such a state for a term and half, having only bread and water on which to subsist. The result was that the already sickly child developed a severe case of albuminuria, a potentially fatal kidney disease. His family finally intervened and had him removed from the school, which purportedly closed shortly thereafter as the result of complaints from other parents as well.

No small damage had been done: young Alick’s health was in shambles, and his doctors predicted he would not live to see adulthood. To counter this diagnosis, he was pulled from school altogether and placed in the care of private tutors and given to travels across Scotland and Wales in the hopes that he might recover his vitality, a prescription that ultimately served him well. His health gradually returned as he spent summers engaged in outdoor activities such as golf, fishing, and mountain climbing—away from the stifling physical and intellectual confines of the boarding school. His newfound freedom was not a complete victory, however, as his tutors were specifically chosen by his uncle under the auspices of what Crowley termed his “extraordinarily narrow, ignorant and bigoted Evangelicalism … ” 5 He spent most of his time arranging ways to outwit them, often with great success. Crowley notes, “These persons … were not too satisfactory; they were all my Uncle Tom’s nominees; that is, they were of the sawny, anaemic, priggish type, … Of course, I considered it my duty to outwit them in every possible way and hunt up some kind of sin.” 6

A timely savior would come in the guise of Archibald Douglas, after the latest line of tutors had given up on the boy. Not only could Crowley see Douglas as an intellectual equal, but his new tutor would assert to no small relief that the pleasures of the world could be both safely and morally engaged in, provided of course that they did not cross into excess. Douglas’s relative moral leniency provided a much-needed breath of fresh air for a young man just then coming into his adulthood, and the “sin” Crowley was all too quick to hunt up was exactly what you might expect of a young man in his later teens—and from the evangelical point of view the most forbidden of fruits! He quips, “Here was certainly a sin worth sinning and I applied myself with characteristic vigour to its practice.” 7 The discovery that sex, which until this point had been the most abominable and unmentionable of sins, was something that could be enjoyed and was in fact enjoyable was the first of many now seemingly obvious revelations that set the young Crowley on his future path—with the willing assistance of several local girls, of course. Lesser vices such as drinking and smoking quickly fell by the wayside in the wake of his triumph over this greater transgression.

Though it would have a great impact on him, the arrangement with Douglas would be predictably short-lived. As soon as his mother and uncle got wind of Crowley’s suspicious sense of happiness, they arrived on the scene and promptly dismissed Crowley’s latest tutor. Those who followed would suffer the same fate as those who preceded, either dismissed or dismayed at their inability to control a young man who in retrospect seemed only to have wanted to be treated as an equal.

The remainder of Crowley’s school years fortunately found him in good health. This allowed him to return to boarding school, but this time at the less oppressive schools of Malvern and Tonbridge, though still with the occasional tutor to ensure a proper moral upbringing in the view of the Plymouth Brethren. He held the latter school, Tonbridge, in especial regard, largely in part because he had reached an age and fullness of health that prevented a great deal of the bullying he had endured elsewhere. He continued to fill his leisure time with mountain climbing and other outdoor activities critical to maintaining his health, but it seemed that the dark days of his childhood were finally lifting.

Aleister Arrives

In 1895, Crowley entered Trinity College at Cambridge University at the height of his newfound vitality, and shortly thereafter invested himself with the name by which the world would come to know him: Aleister. The Gaelic derivative of his middle name, he chose it for reasons associated with his literary aspirations, having read that “the most favourable name for becoming famous was one consisting of a dactyl followed by a spondee … ” 8 His cousin assured him (incorrectly) that Aleister was the appropriate spelling, rather than the more common rendering of Alaisdair.

The vast sum of his inheritance was now at his disposal, as well, held in trust until he had attained adulthood, and the freedom of university life seems to have suited young Crowley well. He spent his time engaged in the debate club for a time, and excelling in the chess club, famously beating its club president in their first match. However, these were but idle distractions to Crowley’s aim of repairing the manifold flaws in his religious education. The sparse reading lists of his puritanical upbringing left large gaps in his knowledge, and he was determined to close them. There were entire classes of literature that needed attending to, and he delved headlong into that endeavor. Crowley spent much of his time reading classics instead of attending to his assigned classwork, importing books “by the ton.” 9

Now far from the oversight of his sternly religious household, he could also more freely engage in the sexual freedoms that he had only so recently discovered. He notes in Confessions that “Every woman that I met enabled me to affirm magically that I had defied the tyranny of the Plymouth Brethren.” 10 As any individual might, his early and entirely natural sexual appetite was tinged with the hallmark of his individuation: that of rebellion against the experience of his childhood’s religious oppression. However, despite the burgeoning poet’s own grand gestures toward the concept of romantic idealism, his so-called magical defiance did not appear to result in any lasting relationships. While he would have encounters with several women, it was in fact a man by the name of Jerome Pollitt (1871–1942) 11 who truly awakened his muse.

Crowley the poet

Slightly older than Crowley, Pollitt, the equally well-to-do son of a newspaper publisher, was pursuing his MA at Cambridge, but was locally notorious as a female impersonator and dancer under the stage name Diane de Rougy. 12 Meeting toward the end of the October term in 1897, he introduced Crowley to the writings of Decadent authors such as Beardsley and Wilde, both of whom were friends. Crowley notes that it was the first “intimate friendship” of his life, 13 but it was of course much more than that. In Pollitt, Crowley would find his first love, and they would spend six months together. To Crowley’s eternal regret, it was ultimately his magical aspirations that would cause him to break off the relationship. 14 It was a path that Pollitt simply could not follow, and a path that Crowley was already determined to tread. Ultimately, the severance of the relationship was an unnecessary and rash decision Crowley would regret for the rest of his life. An early volume of Crowley’s forlorn poetry was rediscovered in 2014 dating to just after the breakup and with obvious reference to his ex-lover. 15 He notes having seen him once later in life but not having had the courage to approach him.

It was also in this period that he began writing poetry in earnest, his eyes newly open to the greater scope of literature now available to him for inspiration, as opposed to the staid measure of religious verse. He published regularly in the school’s student publications, 16 and he also published his first book of poetry, entitled Aceldama: A Place to Bury Strangers In. He published this anonymously as “A gentleman of the University of Cambridge” as a nod to one of his more prevalent influences at the time, Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792–1822), who published using a similar phrasing while an undergraduate at Oxford. He would also publish a compendium of erotic poetry, White Stains, under the pen name of George Archibald Bishop in 1898. 17 The last name, Bishop, was certainly a jab at his mother’s family—but also British slang for penis!

Aside from his schoolwork and poetry, Crowley continued to pursue an interest in mountaineering. He was already a skilled climber, having scaled many of Britain’s more difficult peaks, including the chalk cliffs at Beachy Head, once thought unassailable. Time between semesters was now spent climbing more difficult peaks across Europe. Later in life he would make ascents on the Swiss Alps, and even K2, and while he would never make the guarded rolls of the hallowed Alpine Club, it was this passion that led him into contact with men who held connections to another of his interests, and one for which he would ultimately become more famous: magick.

Further Reading

The Collected Works of Aleister Crowley

White Stains

The Dawn of the Magician

Karl von Eckartshausen’s The Cloud upon the Sanctuary, noted in a periodical edited by occult scholar A. E. Waite, particularly caught Crowley’s attention. A work of Christian esoteric philosophy, The Cloud upon the Sanctuary describes a common theme in Western mystical literature: that our current state, based on ego-perception and rationalization (the cloud), blinds us to the greater internal and spiritual perception that is the true source of all wisdom and intellect (the sanctuary). However, its pronouncement of a school of initiates entrusted with the keys to this arcane science is what truly drew the young Crowley in: “ … a more advanced school has always existed to whom this deposition of all science has been confided … ” 18

If there was an invisible school of initiates, Crowley was determined to find it.

The key to Crowley’s connection was Oscar Eckenstein, a man he met while climbing Wasdale Head during Easter of 1898. Shorter and of sturdier build, Eckenstein was twenty years older and significantly more disciplined in his approach to mountaineering, a welcome mentor to improve on Crowley’s self-taught method. Crowley reflected that “His style was invariably clean, orderly and intelligible; mine can hardly be described as human.” 19 Crowley was still a self-taught novice by any standard, despite his accomplishments, and he would need greater training and discipline if he were to successfully tackle some of the more treacherous summits he had in mind. He and Eckenstein spent the summer perfecting alpine climbing techniques on the Schonbuhl glacier on the south side of the Dent Blanche in the Swiss Alps.

While poor weather and Crowley’s ever-precarious health kept them from accomplishing as much as they had hoped, Crowley had brought ample reading material to pass the time. One of these was The Kabbalah Unveiled by S. L. MacGregor Mathers, to which Crowley asserts, “I didn’t understand a word of it, but it fascinated me all the more for that reason, and it was my constant study on the glacier.” 20 Without yet knowing it, he had encountered his future magical mentor by virtue of that work, as Mathers was at this point the sole head of the Golden Dawn, a working magical order based in London. He appealed to the universe to deliver him a master, and he would soon find one.

Crowley eventually descended from the glacier to recuperate, finding himself in a discussion on alchemy with some of the locals and visiting climbers for which the town was a natural base of operations. It was through this conversation that he met Julian Baker, an actual practitioner of alchemy, in contrast to Crowley’s theoretical knowledge of the subject. Alas, no search for a master comes easily, and he found that Baker had left when he arose the next morning, precisely when Crowley hoped to press him on the topic of initiation. Crowley pursued, enduring one near miss after another until he finally caught up with Baker ten miles outside of town. After Crowley confided in Baker of his search for a true initiatory school of magick, Baker promised to meet Crowley back in London where he could introduce him to a much greater magician than he. That man was George Cecil Jones, in whom Crowley would find a friend and mentor for many years. Jones was finally someone Crowley could consider a true magician in every respect, and the man that introduced him to the body of initiates he so desperately sought: The Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn.

Formed as a conjunction of Christian Qabalah, Rosicrucianism, and Freemasonry, and dressed in Egyptian mythology, The Golden Dawn was the principal genius of William Wynn Westcott. 21 Westcott further enlisted his Rosicrucian compatriot, Dr. William Robert Woodman, who had a compatible interest and expertise in Qabalah. However, the strengths of these two men were primarily academic: it was the third individual, S. L. MacGregor Mathers, who would develop this academic knowledge, in concert with his own, into an active initiatory order.

Each of these men were members of the Societas Rosicruciana in Anglia (SRIA), itself a Rosicrucian reconstructionist order as the name indicates. Woodman, Westcott, and Mathers expanded the Rosicrucian mystical teachings of the SRIA into a functional magical order by 1888 with the opening of the Isis-Urania Temple in London. The order’s initiatory system was based on a set of “cipher manuscripts” that alleged to show the skeleton of the ritual frameworks, and gave them charter to open the school from certain continental adepts—a claim that is now generally regarded as having been fabricated in an attempt to derive an air of legitimacy for the fledgling cabal. As members worked through the degrees of the order, they would be presented more information surrounding the practice of Western occultism, augmented somewhat liberally with a syncretic mix of Eastern tattwa symbolism, chakras, and similar practices that were then (as today) of fashionable interest to spiritual seekers. In contrast to the Masonic organizations, including the SRIA, to which the men belonged, this order would be open to both men and women, ultimately counting among its membership such luminaries as occult author and historian A. E. Waite, poet W. B. Yeats, and Arthur Machen, an early writer of occult and supernatural horror. By the time Crowley arrived, Woodman had passed, and Westcott had been forced to withdraw, given his public position and political standing as the official coroner for London; his esoteric pursuits were untenable. Mathers was now the last remaining founder and sole head of the Golden Dawn.

The not-yet-famous Aleister Crowley joined the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn in 1898, undergoing its neophyte initiation ritual in October of that year. One can imagine his excitement upon entering the antechamber of the London temple, finally crossing the threshold of the initiatory brotherhood he had desired to enter for so long. Once arrived, he was instructed to put on the long black robe and red slippers he obtained for the purpose and wait silently. A man dressed in a white robe and holding a scepter would eventually emerge from the western end of the main temple, accompanied by a sentinel in black. Crowley was blindfolded and bound by a rope wrapped three times about his waist before the imposing figure in white knocked once upon the entry door and lead him blindly forward into the adventure he had so fervently sought.

A look at the initial knowledge lectures of the Golden Dawn shows why Crowley’s enthusiasm was immediately dampened. For a man that had been seeking a true initiation while studying the depth and breadth of occult writings for several years, being handed “secret” documents that discussed trivial curricula such as the four elements, the seven planets, the twelve signs of the zodiac, and the Hebrew alphabet—all readily available information and certainly well-known by him—left the experience somewhat flat after the exhilaration and grandeur of the admittedly remarkable neophyte initiation.

Not all was lost, however. The Golden Dawn proved exceedingly fruitful in developing Crowley’s skill and knowledge in Qabalah, a Jewish mystical tradition that had long since been segregated and evolved separately as part of the development of Christian magical practices during the Renaissance. This practice had been at the philosophical heart of ceremonial magick in Europe for centuries, so it is no surprise to find it at the heart of one of the most successful magical orders to date, though further augmented through the extensive associative and comparative symbology of the Order. It ultimately became the framework and symbol-set through which Crowley would express the sublimities of his philosophies and ideas. It is in fact exceedingly difficult to understand Crowley without understanding the Qabalah, as much of his thought process was built on its manifold connections and analogies. Despite his initial disappointments, and with encouragement from Jones and others, he pressed on and quickly attained each of the degrees of the Golden Dawn’s instructive outer order by May of the following year.

It was also within the Golden Dawn that he met one of his greatest influences, Allan Bennett. After attending a seasonal ritual at the temple, he was approached by the then-unknown-to-him Bennett, who famously declared, “Little brother, you have been meddling with the Goetia!” The Goetia is one of the best-known manuscripts on conjuring evil spirits, and Crowley denied it, prompting Bennett’s response, “Then the Goetia has been meddling with you!” Crowley, of course, had been meddling with the Goetia, and he and Bennett would soon become fast friends. It was equally rumored, with reasonable cause, that they were lovers.

Crowley would rent two rooms, one for himself and the other for the impoverished Bennett, arranged such that the two could study magick together—Bennett being the more experienced of the two. Like Crowley, Bennett was also an asthmatic and cycled through a number of medicines to help him maintain his health. Given that this was turn-of-the-twentieth-century prescription medicine, this meant cocaine and opiates, among others, all of which were commonly available through a physician if not simply purchased over the counter. Thus, along with experiments with more traditional magical practices, they began experimenting with drug-induced states of altered consciousness as well. This was much more than simple drug use: it was true experimentation in the vein of Huxley, methodical and precise, and a systematic study that Crowley pursued throughout his life. Fitting with how they first met, Bennett and Crowley soon used Goetia to speed the ailing Bennett to the warmer climates of Ceylon, now known as Sri Lanka, in order to combat his worsening asthma.

Coincidental with the departure of his friend and mentor, however, he would find that the Order to which he had pledged his hopes was starting to come undone. S. L. MacGregor Mathers recused himself to Paris, leaving the confines of the London temples of the Golden Dawn in order to further establish his relationship with the “Secret Chiefs” and advance the higher degrees of the Order. This left London in the hands of higher adepts that did not look as favorably or leniently on Crowley’s lifestyle, especially the rumors of his homosexuality. It is possible that jealousy of Mathers’s new star pupil had an influence, as well. When Crowley applied to the London office for his due advancement to the inner order of the Golden Dawn, he was denied. No reasons were given. He was simply not the sort of person that the London initiates wanted to be associated with.

Undaunted, Crowley again left for Paris, where upon petition Mathers conferred to him the degree he sought, admitting him to ranks of the Second Order. This was where Crowley had been told the real secrets were kept, the very magical secrets he had pursued since his days at Cambridge. Returning to London, he demanded the papers to which he was now entitled, but was once more rebuffed. The Order was splintering along the lines of Mathers’s authority in London and speculation about the validity of the famed cipher documents that purported to give the Order legitimacy in the first place. A bitter fight would ensue, effectively destroying the Golden Dawn until it was resurrected some decades later, but Crowley was on his way.

Further Reading

The Cloud upon the Sanctuary by Karl von Eckartshausen

The Golden Dawn by Israel Regardie

The Mystical Qabalah by Dion Fortune

The Goetia by Aleister Crowley

Mr. & Mrs. Crowley

Crowley met a young Gerald Kelly at Cambridge in May of 1898 after the latter had picked up a copy of his poem Aceldama and determined to meet the author based on his “Gentleman of the University of Cambridge” homage, being an admirer of Shelley as well. They would strike up a strong friendship that endured for a great many years, but most importantly it was through his new friend that he would meet Kelly’s sister Rose, his future wife.

Crowley’s wife, Rose Kelly

Crowley had returned to his recently purchased highland estate, Boleskine, on the shores of Loch Ness in Scotland after spending some time on the European continent. He received word that Gerald would be visiting nearby, along with his mother, his sister, and her fiancé, and he naturally rushed to meet him. Finding himself alone with Gerald’s sister Rose while the other men played golf, having not brought his clubs, Rose confessed that although she was betrothed, she did not love her fiancé—nor the other man that she had agreed to marry! Moreover, she was in love with yet another man who was already married, but her parents were insisting she marry one of her two suitors. It did not take long for Crowley to determine the obvious course of action: to avoid such a loveless fate, she should marry him! As a marriage of convenience, she would then be free to take up the residence the (married) man she loved had set aside for her without further interference. Gerald, when told, naturally thought their outlandish scheme was a joke.

That same day, Crowley enquired of the local parish priest as to whether they could be married on the spot, a request the clergyman flatly rejected on the feeble grounds that they would not be able to publish the marriage banns—public announcements of the wedding. When Crowley pressed—which is to say, “pressed a shilling into his hand”—the priest admitted that the town constable could make all the arrangements without delay. Rising early the next day, the two made it into town at the break of dawn, only to be told that the sheriff might not be available until ten o’clock or later. This was not going to suffice given the required expediency, and so they were directed to a local lawyer instead. Thus, on August 12, 1903, the two became legally married just before Rose’s brother Gerald broke through the door in a flurry of fists. Her brother, and in fact her whole family, was incensed and tried to have it annulled, but unfortunately for them it was all perfectly legal. The two set out on their “honeymoon” shortly thereafter to a small resort town in Scotland to give everything an air of legitimacy, though neither at that time considered the arrangement anything more than a measure of expediency. However, by the time they returned, both found themselves in love with the other, and if the start of their relationship was surrounded with such drama, things were only going to get more interesting.

Left to right: Rose, Lola (daughter),
and Crowley, circa 1910

The Equinox of the Gods

Now in love, and ever the romantic idealist, Crowley soon designed a honeymoon tour more befitting of their status, one that would take them to Italy and Cairo before continuing to Ceylon (modern Sri Lanka) and China. By late January, they made their way back to Cairo by way of Suez and Port Said, arriving in Cairo on the ninth of February before moving on to the health resorts of Helwan to the south and registering under the assumed names of Choia Khan and Ouarda, meaning “The Great Beast” and “Rose” in Hebrew and Arabic, respectively. 22 He was amused at his obviously fake name, but he was equally interested in studying Islam from within, as Burton 23 had done. He notes, “ … I got a sheikh to teach me Arabic and the practices of ablution, prayer, and so on, so that at some future time I might pass for a Moslem amongst themselves. I had it in mind to repeat Burton’s journey to Mecca sooner or later.” 24

Now almost certain of it, the couple suspected that Rose was pregnant, and Boleskine was cold and dreary in the midst of the Scottish winter. Why not wait a month or two until the weather improved? The fair weather of the highlands would arrive just as the heat of Cairo became unbearable, so the decision to stay seemed obvious. (Despite its reputation for substandard sanitation, Cairo remained recommended for its desert climate and a fashionable place for the European elite to winter, especially those with breathing problems like the asthmatic Crowley.) Leaving Helwan on or about the twelfth of March, they returned north to Cairo proper and rented a furnished ground-floor apartment near the Boulak Museum in a quarter Crowley described as “fashionably European.” 25

Despite being “weary of Mysticism and dissatisfied with Magick,” 26 on March 16, the couple took occasion to visit the pyramids and for Crowley to demonstrate some of the magical practices that he had learned, endeavoring to show his bride the sylphs—elemental spirits of the air—in the King’s Chamber of the Great Pyramid at Giza. To Crowley’s account, the conjuration was a stunning success, illuminating the chamber by the light of his invocation, but it had a very curious aftereffect. Rose could not see the elemental spirits, but she became hysterical, saying, “They are waiting for you!” Crowley had no idea what she meant.

The following day, he repeated the same invocation, and she persisted, saying, “It is all about the child” and “All Osiris.” Half annoyed and half intrigued, he determined to sort out this conundrum by invoking the Egyptian god of knowledge, Thoth, for more insight. This invocation was successful, and he made a note that “Thoth, with great success, indwells us.” 27 However, for his efforts, he seems to have received no further illumination on the matter, nor indication of the purpose of Rose’s continued insistence.

He turned his focus back to Rose the following day, and decided to determine whether her visions were some form of hysteria due to her pregnancy or, alternately, the effects of alcohol. 28 She responded by saying that Crowley had offended the Egyptian god Horus, and that it was this deity attempting to contact him. How could she know this? How could she even know the name Horus, unless she had picked it up somehow at random while in the city? Skeptical, he put a number of very technical questions to her regarding the identity of whom she was in contact with, questions that she could not know given a lack of education in both Egyptology and magical practice, much less the attributions defined by the Golden Dawn on which Crowley was to rely.

Crowley asked first about the god’s nature, “What are his moral qualities?”

“Force and fire,” she replied, correctly.

“What conditions are caused by his presence?”

“A deep blue light,” she said. Again, correct, but equally plausible for a number of others.

Crowley had yet to reveal that he had determined the god to be Horus, so he wrote that name amidst a number of others chosen at random. “Pick a name.”

She pointed to Horus, the same god that had been indicated to Crowley.

“Who is his enemy?”

She answered, “The forces of the water … of the Nile.”

Remarkable. Set, the brother and murderer of his brother Osiris, was the Nile god who was ultimately avenged by Horus!

Still, more technical questions were offered. He asked about his lineal figure and color, and she responded correctly, a probability of eighty-four to one. She answered his place in the temple of the Golden Dawn. She picked the magical weapon with which he was associated from a list of six, his planetary nature from a list of the seven ancient planets, his principal number (one through ten), and from a number of arbitrary symbols. In total, absent the open-ended questions where the odds were impossible to calculate, roughly half of them, she had answered each perfectly, with Crowley estimating the odds at no less than twenty-one million to one against. He was forced to take notice.

As a final test, Crowley ventured to take Rose to the museum, where she had yet to visit, so that she could show him an image of the god she claimed to see. Still skeptical, Crowley found himself amused when she walked past several depictions of Horus, and began their journey to the second floor of the museum. In the distance was a glass case, which she pointed to. “There! There he is!” Rushing forward, as the contents were too far away to see with any clarity, he was dumbfounded when in the case stood an image of Horus in the form of Ra-Hoor-Khuit, an amalgamation of that god and the principal solar god Ra, on a wooden funeral stele 29 of the Twenty-sixth Dynasty for the priest Ankh-af-na-Khonsu—in an exhibit numbered six hundred and sixty-six, no less! One would think that The Beast had found his calling, but his Confessions depicts otherwise, noting that he “dismissed it as an obvious coincidence.” 30 This new calling was at odds, after all, with his stubborn and professed disillusionment with magick.

Nonetheless, on March 19, he prepared an invocation and recited it under instructions from Rose, instructions that went against every ounce of magical training he had ever encountered. Wearing a white robe and opening the windows of his ground-floor apartment at half past noon into the streets of the bustling city, he proceeded to shout his invocation of the god Horus into the bustling throngs of people making their way through the crowds of mid-day Cairo. The invocation was met with little success, but he was now less resistant to the idea than before. Perhaps being understandably self-conscious, he asked whether he might manage the invocation at night, which was begrudgingly accepted by Rose and the ethereal voice that guided her. On March 20, at midnight, he began anew, and this time his invocation was a success, with Crowley learning that the “Equinox of the Gods” had begun—a time of massive cultural transition from the paternal age of Osiris, characterized by the major religious themes of the preceding two thousand years, to that of the individualistic Crowned and Conquering Child, and son of Osiris, Horus. As the ritual concluded on the spring equinox and start of the astrological new year, Crowley found himself with a monumental task: “I am to formulate a new link of an Order with the Solar Force.” 31 But how? What did that mean?

In the following weeks, Crowley had the verses of the stele translated into French by the assistant curator at the museum, a translation he would later interpret into English poetic verse. He would also work through various Qabalistic analyses of the information he had gathered so far. Finally, on April 7, Rose told Crowley to enter the room they had been using as a temple for the next three successive days and write down what he would hear. No longer permitted to be the skeptic given the events of the last three weeks, Crowley did as he was told. He notes: “I went into the ‘temple’ a minute early, so as to shut the door and sit down on the stroke of Noon. On my table were my pen—a Swan Fountain—and supplies of Quarto typewriting paper, 8" × 10". I never looked round in the room at any time.” 32

At the stroke of noon, he heard the voice of Aiwass, the “praeternatural entity” that Rose had indicated, who then dictated The Book of the Law. The voice came from behind his left shoulder and possessed a “deep timbre, musical and expressive, its tones solemn, voluptuous, tender, fierce or aught else as suited to the moods of the message. Not bass—perhaps a rich tenor or baritone.” 33 It began, as Crowley rushed to keep pen to paper, “Had! The manifestation of Nuit. The unveiling of the company of Heaven. Every man and every woman is a star … ” 34 The pace was hurried, as evidenced by the writing and volume inscribed within the span of a single hour, and so it would be over the course of the three days.

The result of his efforts would be The Book of the Law, 35 a three-chapter text spanning sixty-five handwritten pages that Crowley (and many others) claimed were much more than simple automatic writing. The myriad complexities of the work are too great to enter into here, or arguably anywhere, but at heart it presented a new spiritual law for humanity. An inversion of the prior age, where suffering and deprivation were the key to spiritual attainment, this law was markedly individualist. Its central tenet was “Do what thou wilt,” which was not a call to hedonism, but rather a call to personal accountability in the establishment of—and adherence to—one’s own moral code. Coupled with intricate esoteric puzzles in support of its authenticity, this book would come to dominate the remainder of Crowley’s life and spiritual teachings … after a spell.

With all of the events leading up to the reception of The Book of the Law, as well as the circumstances in its actual reception, one would think that Crowley might have taken a stronger and more immediate interest in its study and exegesis. However, Crowley was still quite stubbornly done with magick, having only a passing interest in the practice of raja yoga. While he spent some initial effort in the thought of announcing the work, after his ultimate disappointment in Mathers and the Golden Dawn to deliver the initiatory experience he so desperately sought, he was burned out. His plans were to travel, climb mountains, and otherwise spend his days at Boleskine as a man of leisure, and his mind was set to it. It would be some time yet before Crowley stumbled across the manuscript again while retrieving a pair of skis from his attic, but this time his curiosity would hold—and his adventure would begin in earnest.

Further Reading

The Book of the Law

The Equinox of the Gods

The Magus and the Equinox

Now back at Boleskine, the Crowleys’ only work, aside from the arrangement of some publishing matters, was to await the birth of their child, and so it was that on July 28, 1904, a baby girl by the name Nuit Ma Ahathoor Hecate Sappho Jezebel Lilith Crowley was born. She would go by Lilith for short, and Crowley would find himself truly at home in the Scottish Highlands of Boleskine. The Cairo experience set aside, he notes, “I was bitterly opposed to the principles of The Book [of the Law] on almost every point of morality. The third chapter seemed to me gratuitously atrocious.” 36

His other publishing efforts went into full swing, however, taking back his stock from what he believed was the underperforming sales of his present bookseller into his own hands and new imprint: The Society for the Propagation of Religious Truth. “My responsibility to the gods was to write as I was inspired; my responsibility to mankind was to publish what I wrote.” 37 It was through this new label that he would release some of his most compelling early works, including among others his well received The Sword of Song, his Collected Works of poetry to date (in three volumes!), and his edition of the infamous grimoire Goetia, which he had collected from the offices of the Golden Dawn some years ago during that dramatic period. 38

Though he counted these days as extremely happy, the arrival of one of his former climbing associates as a guest of the house brought back a reverie of the misfortunes of his failed attempt on K2. Crowley would be convinced to join an expedition to summit the third highest mountain in the world, Kangchenjunga, high in the Himalayas and as yet unconquered. (His friend and mentor Oscar Eckenstein declined to join the party.) It was already April, however, which meant the assault would need to come together quickly, if not immediately. Crowley departed for the excursion on May 6, just two weeks after his friend’s visit, leaving wife and child behind with the family and attendant nurses.

While the preparations came together as well as might be expected given the expediency, the expedition up the mountain proved disastrous—and for an unlucky few, deadly. Striking out from the local village at the base of the mountains in late August, Crowley led their ascent across the treacherous glacial terrain, but by their fourth base camp at nearly twenty thousand feet, the porters were already deserting—another falling to his death as he chose to go off by himself. The party itself appears to have been composed of too many inexperienced climbers for the sort of ascent they were attempting, with logistical difficulties throughout their climb as well, which can prove the untimely end of a climbing party in and of itself.

Crowley (center) and company on the ill-fated expedition

On the first of September, disaster struck in the form of a small avalanche, not uncommon on the mountain, and something they had already encountered. However, this time, the loose and fast-moving snow took with it a principal member of their party, Alexis Pache, as well as three of their porters. Two other members of the team, Tartarin and de Righi, were also injured in the accident, and it was clear that they could not, or would not, go on. Though surpassing twenty-two thousand vertical feet of the total twenty-eight thousand, the deadly slopes of Kangchenjunga would have their way, and Crowley and his expedition never set foot upon its peak. The expedition was broken, and they had little recourse but to descend the mountain. A cairn, known even today as “Pache’s grave,” was erected at the base camp on the Yulong glacier in memoriam. The mountain would not be bested for another fifty years.

Dejected, Crowley departed the shadow of the mountain for Rangoon, in what is now Myanmar, and then on to travels across South Asia, where Rose and young Lilith joined him through the end of the winter. While the travel was often rough and inhospitable compared to travels in Europe, the three appear to have traveled quite well, eventually making their way to the port of Hai Phong on the Gulf of Tonkin, some forty miles east of Hanoi, Vietnam. There, after a brief stay, they boarded a ship for Hong Kong, where they decided to travel homeward by different routes: Rose, now pregnant once more, through India to pick up some of their belongings, and Crowley across the Pacific and through North America, sailing on April 21, 1906. Landing in Vancouver, British Columbia, some twelve days later, he remarked at the time that it presented “ … no interest to the casual visitor.” 39 He traveled across lower Canada through Calgary and Toronto, then crossed into the United States at Niagara to see the Falls and New York City. Ten days in the great metropolis was plenty, and so he set sail for England, arriving in Bournemouth where his mail awaited with devastating news: his daughter Lilith was dead, having caught typhoid fever during the return trip with Rose. 40 Crowley suffered further misfortunes with his health for the remainder of the year, including several operations of varying success. He remained bedridden for much of the last part of the year, which in its own way rekindled his interest in magick: he put down the set of correspondences he had learned in the Golden Dawn, greatly expanding it with his own researches, resulting in his classic Liber 777, though that work would not be released for another two years’ time.

During his travels across Asia following the climbing expedition, he re-engaged with magical practice and made consistent progress. He also became impressed with the idea that his spate of misfortunes resulted from ignoring the task of delivering on the promise of The Book of the Law and for not taking up the task that the gods had set before him. He therefore set before himself the task of undertaking the Abramelin Operation once more, repeating his oath before his old friend George Cecil Jones to attain the Knowledge and Conversation of his Holy Guardian Angel, culminating in mid-October of that year.

While the latter half of 1906 was difficult for Crowley, Rose had gone from bad to worse. Likely spurned by the loss of her child, and doubtless aided by her husband’s consistent absences, she took to drinking heavily. Their second child, another girl whom they named Lola Zaza, was born premature as a result and barely moved for the first few days of her life, despite the care of their doctors. Crowley notes that he learned his wife purchased 150 bottles of whiskey in just five months—and that was just from one of the grocers. She agreed to counseling, but it did not stick, and she was back to heavy drinking within a fortnight, making their relationship impossible. They ultimately divorced in 1909, though they remained in contact, even being photographed together shortly after the final divorce decree. Crowley could no longer be responsible for her self-destruction, and unabated, she was committed to an asylum in 1911. They would not reunite before her death in 1932.

The marriage now passed, Crowley understood that his reception of The Book of the Law placed him in a unique position to reformulate magick on the grounds of a New Aeon, but he had much work to do in order to lay a legitimate claim. To advance his work, he had to complete the task for which Mathers had left England: to make contact with the “Secret Chiefs,” the invisible adepts he believed had forever guided humanity toward enlightenment. His prior work had prepared him well, and he had begun taking in students.

The dissolution of the Golden Dawn had left a vacuum for those seekers interested in the initiatory systems of magick and mysticism that Crowley had become so intimately acquainted with, and Crowley found himself with a renewed vigor to carry out the work that he had so long set himself to. As a vehicle for those teachings, he determined to create the magical order that he had sought in joining the Golden Dawn, expressed so captivatingly in Eckartshausen’s The Cloud upon the Sanctuary. This order would be called the Argenteum Astrum (A A ), Latin for Silver Star.

The A A was announced through a new subscription-based periodical of Crowley’s own design, entitled The Equinox. It was offered on the equinoxes of each year and contained a number of articles, short stories, and allegorical poems. Its initial release in the spring of 1909 also contained all the previously unpublished Golden Dawn rituals in Crowley’s possession, his way of cementing the demise of that organization and his former mentor, Mathers, by removing the veils of its secrecy. The publication of these rituals ultimately lead to a very public lawsuit between the two men in which Crowley emerged victorious. The Equinox continued with increased publicity from news coverage of the trial, with the tenth and final number in the first volume being issued in the fall of 1913.

Despite the tragedies he endured, this was an exceptionally fertile period for Crowley, writing not only the bulk of Equinox, but many inspired works that would be issued later as the three volumes of Thelema, now commonly referenced as The Holy Books of Thelema. Written between 1907 and 1911 while in a state of ecstatic trance, these works were intended to transmit the Logos of the Aeon, the essential spiritual concepts of Thelema. While The Book of the Law holds an especial place within the scope of these works, the remaining holy books may be considered equally enlightening, and he included them as required reading in his curriculum for the A A . Crowley especially favored Liber Cordis Cincti Serpente and Liber Liberi vel Lapidis Lazuli, assigning them as required reading in two of the earliest grades in his fledgling order.

Further Reading

The Holy Books of Thelema

The Equinox, Volume 1, Numbers 1–10

The Temple of the East

While the publicity from the trial against Mathers over The Equinox brought him into contact with several esoteric groups claiming (or seeking) authority in such matters, he claims to have turned them all away. The initial surge of those interested would soon ebb to a predictable trickle of new membership. However, Crowley had established a set of London offices for the publication, and thereby the Order, through which he met his next “Scarlet Woman,” a term he adopted for his sex magick partners to compliment his identification as The Beast. This was Australian violinist Leila Waddell, to whom he referred as Laylah, meaning “night” in both Arabic and Hebrew.

Arguably one of Crowley’s most profound works, The Book of Lies was published in 1912, containing ninety-three short mystical aphorisms—the first chapter consisting merely of a question mark and an exclamation point. The book was so named because that which could be communicated was in and of itself subject to both the bias of the communicator and the bias of the communicant with respect to their relative, subjective experiences. Hence, anything he could write on such mystical subjects was inherently corrupted by the limitations of language and its inability to adequately communicate meaning. The text stated the only thing that could be believed of The Book of Lies was its imprint date, which of course was deliberately incorrect, stating 1913 rather than 1912.

The individual chapters vary greatly in both content and length, but nothing longer than a page or two. Chapters 25 and 36 show Crowley’s early revisions of the Golden Dawn pentagram and hexagram rituals as the Star Ruby and Star Sapphire, respectively, those chapter numbers being the squares of five and six. Chapter 69, “The Way to Succeed—and the Way to Suck Eggs!” requires a note that it can only be deciphered by experts in English puns, where the entire chapter alludes outwardly to oral sex and yet still inwardly to a profound note on the practice of sex magick. Chapter 77, bearing the same number as the Hebrew word for goat, OZ, contains nothing but the word “Laylah,” also enumerating to 77, and a picture of Leila Waddell, nude from the waist up, with her long black hair covering her breasts—all of which may be connected with the idea of the Sabbatic Goat of witches’ lore. He notes in his Confessions that The Book of Lies represented a “compendium of the contents of my consciousness,” 41 and those contents would bring an interesting knock on Crowley’s door not soon after publication.

“You have published the secret!” declared the native German from under his thick mustache. The man at the door was none other than Theodor Reuss, the head of the Ordo Templi Orientis, a Masonic order whose higher degree rituals encoded specific instructions on sexual magick. 42 Crowley was incredulous, or so he claims, and declared he had done no such thing. Undaunted, Reuss pulled out a copy of The Book of Lies and rifled through its pages until he found chapter 36, titled “The Star Sapphire.” Confronted with its overtly sexual symbolism, which speaks in veiled allegory about a sexual act in describing “the real and perfect Ritual of the Hexagram,” 43 Crowley was taken aback. He was not surprised by the sexuality, which was quite intentional, but the idea that it spoke to the underlying symbolism of all Masonry had not occurred to him. “It instantly flashed upon me. The entire symbolism, not only of freemasonry but of many other traditions, blazed upon my spiritual vision. From that moment, the O.T.O. assumed its proper importance in my mind.” 44

Thus began Crowley’s involvement in Ordo Templi Orientis. Originally envisioned as an initiatory school for high-ranking Masons, its teachings regarding the secrets of sexual magick became a practice with which Crowley became nearly synonymous. His discussions with Reuss lead Crowley to join the Order and eventually preside over all English-speaking countries during Reuss’s lifetime. Crowley soon set himself to work in reforming the rituals of the O.T.O. along Thelemic lines, producing what is considered by many initiates of that order to be Crowley’s true masterwork and legacy. He assumed full responsibility for the Order after Reuss’s death in 1923.

Along with the O.T.O., Reuss also had authority in L’Église Catholique Gnostique, the Gnostic Catholic Church. Founded in France in 1907 as an offshoot of an earlier incarnation founded by Jules Doinel, the church was established by Jean Bricaud, Louis-Sophrone Fugairon, and Gérard Encausse, the latter of whom wrote a number of esoteric works more famously under the name Papus. At a 1908 conference for Spiritualist Masonic orders organized by Encausse, he and Reuss would exchange rights for Reuss to operate within L’Église Catholique Gnostique and Encausse to have authority in Reuss’s Masonic Rites of Memphis and Mizraim. Reuss collected this religious organization into the catalogue of his own O.T.O.

Unsurprisingly, the underlying theological foundation of L’Église Catholique Gnostique was decidedly Christian, which of course would not do for Crowley. With authority over the church by virtue of his position in O.T.O., Crowley first wrote and then installed his own Gnostic Mass as “the central public and private ritual of the O.T.O.” and renamed the church after the Latin equivalent: Ecclesia Gnostica Catholica (E.G.C.).

Crowley in Masonic regalia

Written in 1913 while in Moscow, the Gnostic Mass provides a symbolic representation in ritual form of the O.T.O.’s innermost secret in Thelemic symbolism, the same secret that brought Reuss knocking on Crowley’s door a year earlier following the publication of The Book of Lies. The Gnostic Mass is now performed under the auspices of the E.G.C. by O.T.O. bodies around the world.

Further Reading

The Book of Lies

The Gnostic Mass

The Great War and the Great Work

“ … I cannot but conclude that at least for a long period anarchy will triumph in Europe.” 45

When Archduke Ferdinand was assassinated on June 28, 1914, it sparked a domino effect of treaty alliances drawn up for and against one country and another that would ultimately lead to the advent of the Great War, embroiling nearly every developed nation into a conflict that resulted in over thirty-eight million casualties, including seventeen million deaths. Crowley was disgusted, later referring to it as “the culmination of [Europe’s] many centuries of corruption by Christianity,” 46 and citing cheap newspapers as having turned his countrymen into a hysterical mob. His native England was of course deeply involved, and despite his distaste for the circumstances that brought it about, Crowley was determined to help. To his mind, he was, first and foremost, an English gentleman, bound by honor to king and country. He made several attempts to contact the British government with offers of his service, none of which bore fruit. His reputation as both an eccentric magician and all the resultant salacious press surrounding his earlier court trials (and likely his suspect homosexuality) preceded him, and an attack of phlebitis—inflammation of the veins caused by blood clots—made impossible any more strenuous duties for the man now approaching forty. He would lament that “My leg and my Sunday School record alike” would conspire to keep him out of the war effort directly. 47

That desire dashed, Crowley instead set his sails for America on an invitation to New York, sailing on the Lusitania, the same ship sunk by German U-boats in May of the following year, which served as an initial catalyst for America’s eventual entry into the Great War. He hoped to sell some of his publications to a wealthy collector, but when there was a delay in receiving his shipped works, he found himself with a little time to spare. While on a bus traveling through New York’s glitzy Fifth Avenue in early 1915, described as “a sort of ditch lined with diamonds and over-rouged stenographers,” 48 he was approached by a man enquiring of his views on Germany and Austria. Not wanting to tip his hand either way, he replied in relative sympathy, and was given a card that led to the offices of The Fatherland, a German propaganda paper run by George Viereck.

Seeing an opportunity to serve his country after all, Crowley played the sympathizer to the German cause with the angle of an Irish rebel and began writing for The Fatherland. The Sinn Fein movement had formed in opposition to Britain and provided the perfect cover of Irish nationalism under which Crowley could operate, tracing his own name back to Irish ancestry from O’Crowley and de Quérouaille. True to form, he made a show of it, burning an envelope purported to contain his British passport before the Statue of Liberty, thereafter hoisting the Irish flag while a violinist played “The Wearing of the Green.” The spectacle would end up in The New York Times, along with the expected coverage in The Fatherland.

Crowley would begin writing ostensibly pro-German propaganda, but while his initial offerings were somewhat staid, his prose gradually gave way to the most lurid fanaticism designed to make the cause look patently absurd. While it would be an exceptional hyperbole to suggest that Crowley was the cause of America’s entering the war, natural alliances and German use of unrestricted submarine warfare serving well enough to sway the public, it is interesting to note he had a part in hampering the German propaganda efforts in New York, one of the largest German population centers in America. While not officially sanctioned, he did have a friend in British Naval Intelligence who was aware of his work, and he would find his eventual repatriation curiously unobstructed.

While in New York, he also met popular astrologer Evangeline Adams, a distant relative of the former US presidents of the same name, who had made her own name through a very lucrative mail-order astrology business. Defending her practice in a number of court cases against accusations of fraudulent practice, she was successful in all of them, paving the way for much of modern-day popular astrology—even to the publication of daily horoscopes in the papers. Among the nation’s elite, she would count among her clientele such notable persons as financier J. P. Morgan. There was only one trouble: as far as Crowley could tell, she had no idea how astrology worked at all.

Crowley agreed to ghostwrite a work on astrology for Adams, with his own idea to set astrology on a firm and rational scientific basis firmly in mind. He was still writing false propaganda pieces for The Fatherland as well as lighter articles and poetry for Vanity Fair, but as time passed he’d made less progress than he had hoped on Adams’s work. When the attractions of the city were found to be too distracting to make significant progress, at least from Adams’s perspective, she offered Crowley the use of her cabin on the secluded shores of Newfound Lake in Bristol, New Hampshire. 49 Traveling by train from New York, he arrived in mid-July of 1916, bringing with him a canoe and small axe “to remind him of George Washington,” 50 and a small amount of both ether and mescaline—readily and legally available from the right chemist at the time.

Crowley stayed in the small cottage by the lake through the summer and into the fall when much of the resort town shuttered, as is common for the off-season period. Sitting at the base of what is now the White Mountain National Forest, and fed therefrom, the lake is quite cold even in the summer! To Crowley, however, it was a much needed respite and “magical retirement.” Ironically, upon reaching the shores of the wooded resort town, he recognized that the Adams work was a distraction from those very personal aims he had dedicated himself to, and he would all but abandon the project. Despite their eventual split over the finances, Evangeline Adams ultimately published two books based on Crowley’s input, Astrology: Your Place in the Sun (1927) and Astrology: Your Place Among the Stars (1930). An earlier manuscript of Crowley’s work has since been published under the title The General Principles of Astrology (2002).

More importantly, Crowley was working through a deeply personal initiatory phase in his life, begun in New York, which he dubbed “Chokmah Days” after a sphere on the Qabalistic Tree of Life, meaning “wisdom.” Chokmah is the sphere related to the attainment of the Grade of the Magus, where the individual becomes inexorably identified with the utterance of his logos, a Greek term meaning “word,” and in this context implying a spiritual truth. (To the Buddha, that logos was Anatta, or without-soul, which upended its theological predecessors, for example.) While Crowley had worked hard to accept The Book of the Law and his position in having received it, to completely give himself over to its exposition and promulgation was another step altogether. More than simply giving his ego over to the pursuit of this cause, he now sought to become the personification of the logos, of Thelema. We can only speculate whether Crowley reflected on his religious upbringing in Christ’s utterance and identification with “the way and the life,” as well, though he did think to mock-crucify a frog before serving it up as frog’s legs for dinner! It was his way of banishing the preceding aeon’s slavish adherence to the formula of the dying god, now abrogated. By the time he arrived in San Francisco later that year, Crowley had attained this goal and began introducing himself with the phrase with which the world would associate him, “Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law.” And so he would until the end of his days.

Leaving New Hampshire as the autumn leaves fell, he spent time in New York City, New Orleans, and Detroit, to name but a few, as well as making a tour of the West Coast from Vancouver, British Columbia, to San Francisco, California. In some places, such as in Detroit, his visits brought the same sort of salacious press coverage he had come to expect at home, but in others he remained just another—albeit somewhat eccentric—British expatriate. By late 1919, the war in Europe now having ended, Crowley was ready to go home.

Further Reading

The General Principles of Astrology by Crowley and Adams

The Abbey

While he had made great spiritual progress during his time in America, Crowley’s return to England following the war was less a triumphant homecoming than a resounding defeat on nearly all fronts. His work for The Fatherland may have been tolerated and even understood by the British government as the act of sabotage it was, but the British populace was naturally unaware of the activities of British Intelligence, much less a saboteur working under no official guidance. They saw only his published work and viewed him as a traitor. In retaliation, police had raided the London offices of the O.T.O., and the Order had been forced to sell off Boleskine for funds, Crowley having invested the property in the Order prior to his departure as a means of attracting new membership with its many amenities. He returned penniless and homeless, the material manifestations of his magical work in tatters.

Undeterred, and given his newfound (albeit compelled) lack of attachments, he considered his identification with the Law of Thelema and struck upon the idea that he should create a community along Thelemic lines where aspirants from across the world could gather and pursue their own spiritual enlightenment. Consulting the I Ching, as he often did in times such as this, the oracle pointed to a small town on the Sicilian coast: Cefalu. Yet, these were troubling times on the continent, and Crowley found himself arriving in Rome on the very day of the fascist Mussolini’s coup d’état and consolidation of his power as Il Duce. The fullness of that terrible history having yet to be written, he moved on by train from the events in the capital city to the coast, and across the blue waters of the Mediterranean to the island of Sicily. The town of Cefalu itself lay in the center of the northern coast of that island, known in ancient times as Cephaloedium, its rustic villas nestled amongst the jagged rock formations that soar out of the beautiful ocean waters below. Thought to have once been a fortress, one considers the location’s resemblance to the opening stanzas of the third chapter of The Book of the Law, “Choose ye an island! Fortify it! Dung it about with enginery of war!” 51

Crowley did not arrive alone, however. He had brought with him Swiss-born Leah Hirsig, whom he had met in New York while she worked as an elementary school music teacher. They had met through her sister, both of whom were interested in occultism. Crowley and Leah’s attraction to each other was immediate and ferocious, and Crowley ultimately consecrated her as his new Scarlet Woman—after several others failed to uphold the task. While he had left the United States without her, his decision to create a communal temple in Cefalu prompted him to send a telegram asking her to join him in Paris, where he had paused in his journey. This she did, pregnant with Crowley’s child, and bringing her young son from a previous marriage. Crowley’s third child, Anna Leah, affectionately nicknamed “Poupée” after the French word for doll (puppet), was born in Paris in late January 1920.

Crowley then sent Leah and Anna to stay with family in England and arrange some of Crowley’s financial matters, as well as to allow for better care of their newborn child. He and their newly acquired nanny, Ninette Shumway, along with her own young son, Howard, moved on to Sicily, where they sought a suitable residence to bring to fruition the ideal Thelemic community. Soon finding a villa to rent near the seashore with the help of the local hotelier, the travel-weary crew settled in and began their work. Leah and Anna joined them in mid-April in the small complex, flush with funds from a small inheritance Crowley had come into. Crowley himself had set up a temple and consecrated the grounds as the Abbey of Thelema.

Each day at the Abbey would begin with the phrase “Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law!” Meals were prefaced with a saying of Will, a form of grace that reaffirmed each participant’s investment in the accomplishment of the Great Work. Sex and sex magick were naturally par for the course, as was experimentation with drugs designed to introduce ecstatic states, but equally meditation work along more traditional lines. This location, basking in the Mediterranean sun, brought adherents and aspirants alike to the villa to study with Crowley.

The winds of fortune, good and bad, blew heavily on the Sicilian coast. While the initial summer went well, having the energy and excitement of the villa’s conversion to a Thelemic temple at their backs, and several of Crowley’s followers joining them over the coming months, conditions at the Abbey began to deteriorate as quickly as the initial inheritance money dwindled. The lush accommodations of the villa ultimately gave way to squalor and sickness given the general lack of sanitary conditions in the small fishing village; but worst of all, Crowley’s infant daughter Anna was sick, having arrived from England literally wasting away. The declining conditions at the Abbey could not have helped her recovery. In early October, Leah and the baby went to the nearest hospital for assistance, only to find that it was too late. Crowley was once again devastated by the loss of a young child. A month and a half later, Ninette bore Crowley another child—another girl—Astarte Lulu Panthea.

The British tabloids began to publish sensational articles on the purported debauchery and acts of black magick occurring at the Abbey, and the death of a promising young man from Oxford named Raoul Loveday from typhoid while visiting the Abbey only heightened the furor. While this was no direct cause of the inhabitants, it was unwelcome publicity, and it added insult to the injury of their already tenuous situation: while many of Crowley’s supporters sent the occasional donation, it was insufficient means to pay the rent, or even feed them.

Crowley retreated to Paris once again in early 1922, where he had once set off in such high spirits for the foundation of his Abbey of Thelema, now on the brink of collapse. He was also severely addicted to heroin, which was commonly used at the Abbey, and sought to wean himself by magical means from the powerful drug. Bringing his literary talents to bear, he managed to turn the romanticized tale of his addiction and salvation into a pitch for a novel and secured a much-needed advance, resulting in Diary of a Drug Fiend. Featuring a romanticized characterization of himself as the spiritual guide of the antagonist, Crowley lays his tale of drug excess, addiction, and eventual recovery against the backdrop of Britain’s newly adopted drug laws, which at the time of writing had just been passed. The realism of the novel is of course due to his own experiences, and this ultimately brings the setting back to the Abbey of Thelema as the location of the main characters’ cure.

While their misfortunes mounted, it was political interference that ultimately did them in. Mussolini, the same man who had seized power when Crowley was in Rome and was made prime minister of Italy in 1922, ultimately expelled Crowley from the country in late April 1923, though the remaining members were allowed to stay. They carried on for several years after, but the master of the Abbey was now elsewhere, greatly diminishing its intent. Leah’s departure from Cefalu, and from The Beast, effectively dissolved the commune in 1927.

Cast to the winds after his expulsion from Italy, Crowley was now forced to live a more or less transient life for the next few years, the relative luxury of his accommodations varying according to the contents of his purse. Nevertheless, he was still focused on advancing Thelema through any means at his disposal, and his dedication never wavered. His fortunes would be blissfully bolstered by a new acquaintance in the guise of Karl Germer, whom he met at a conference in 1925 and who ultimately became Crowley’s successor as head of the O.T.O. under the name Saturnus. 52

Further Reading

Magick (Book 4)

I Ching

Diary of a Drug Fiend

Little Essays Toward Truth

Late Masterpieces: Thoth and Tears

As the late 1920s gave way to the 1930s, we find Crowley traveling frequently across much of Western Europe and attempting to keep up with a growing O.T.O. presence that he managed to foster in the United States—California, specifically—some of whose leadership had studied with him at the Abbey of Thelema in Cefalu. In the early 1930s, he became deeply enmeshed in the burgeoning art scene in Berlin, being a painter himself endeared to the German expressionists of that time; little came of it financially given the postwar economy and Germany’s fabled “reparations,” which would ultimately pave the way for a second World War.

Returning to England, he managed to release The Equinox of the Gods in 1936, itself a brilliant edition of The Book of the Law, replete with the circumstances of its reception and a packet of loose-leaf sheets of the handwritten manuscript reproduced in the back. This handsome edition, coupled with a rededication, sold reasonably well, all things considered, and emboldened Crowley to continue his work in other areas despite boasting a name that had been dragged through the mud by the popular press and the loss of a libel suit in 1935 that strained his already dire financial situation.

The one positive note out of his legal misfortunes was that he met Patricia Doherty, who had come to view the trial, sensationalized by the press. Significantly younger than Crowley, Doherty and Crowley became casual acquaintances and thereafter friends. On the heels of yet another failed relationship, and Crowley now sixty years old, he asked her quite out of the blue if she would be willing to bear his child. 53 Perhaps surprisingly, she said yes, and on May 2, 1937, she gave birth to a son, Randall Gair Doherty, though Crowley dubbed him Aleister Ataturk. It was his first boy, and would be his last child.

The 1940s arrived with war on its heels, with Adolf Hitler invading Poland in 1939. The second world war began in earnest, including the blitz on Britain. Though he had retained his contacts in British Intelligence from his days in the first world war, he was in his midsixties and well past the age of any active military service. However, hearing of the occult inclinations of the Third Reich, he did lay claim to the proposition of the “V for Victory!” hand sign that Churchill used throughout the war, allegedly passing it on through his contacts. 54 For Crowley, “V” stood for the destructive power of the Egyptian deity Apophis, leveraged as a counter to the use of the Nazi swastika. If the Nazi high command were as esoterically inclined as was believed, they could not help but understand his intent—or so he surmised.

Crowley had taken up residence at 93 Jermyn Street in London, and despite the constant bombardment throughout the blitz, the wartime rationing, and his ever-precarious health issues, Crowley was active as he could manage in his projects, not least of which was the ambitious Book of Thoth, a reimagining of the tarot in the light of his decades of study in alignment with Thelemic philosophy. Detailing each card with intense precision, his vision would be patiently—and sometimes not so patiently—manifested by Lady Frieda Harris, a painter whose style of projective geometry has become the signature style of the deck.
The Thoth Tarot deck is imbued with peculiarities not just in its imagery, however. Reverting a change made by Mathers and the Golden Dawn, Crowley returned the Strength card to its original position at number eleven and Justice to its position at eight. Not content to stop there, he then renamed the Justice card “Adjustment” to remove the worldly and subjective concept of justice, which he did not believe to be a natural law. He equally renamed Strength as “Lust” to engender the idea of “ … the joy of strength exercised.” 55 In his view, the card intended to show more than mere brutish force, and conceptualize the ecstatic experience of exercising a willed intent. Crowley also renamed Temperance as “Art,” noting the subtle balance of forces in the alchemical art depicted therein. The World was also expanded in scope to “the Universe,” and Judgment to “the Aeon,” which represents a transition from one age to the next rather than the rapturous (or disastrous!) conclusion associated with the Christian Last Judgment.

Most famously, Crowley attempted to solve a problem proposed in The Book of the Law: “All these old letters of my Book are aright; but [tzaddi] is not the Star.” 56 The eighteenth letter of the Hebrew alphabet, tzaddi, is related to the Star in the tarot by traditional association. Crowley took this statement to imply that the card was misaligned. As a helical pivot on his re-inversion of Strength (Lust) and Justice (Adjustment) cards, he swapped the letters associated with the Emperor and the Star, so that the Star was now attributed to the fifth Hebrew letter, heh, a letter attributed to feminine concepts in traditional Qabalah. This fit the image of the sky goddess Nuit on the card. The Emperor was thereafter associated with tzaddi, where Crowley notes the association with the root term for leaders such a Tsar, Caesar, and so on, with which tzaddi is phonetically sympathetic. The cards retained their positions in the deck, however.

The result was arguably one of the most fascinating tarot decks ever created, a masterpiece integrating Harris’s finely executed paintings and Crowley’s expertise in detailing the esoteric intricacies of each with the framework of their alchemical roots. A showing of the paintings would also come to pass, with the originals now restored and kept in the Warburg Institute in London.

It was during this time as well that Crowley met a young US Army Captain by the name of Grady Louis McMurtry (1918–1985), who was stationed in Europe during the war and took leave in late 1943 to visit the aging master magician. McMurtry, previously initiated into the O.T.O. while in his home state of California, helped Crowley with some of his publication efforts, but more importantly he eventually became head of the O.T.O. as Hymenaeus Alpha in the late sixties, resurrecting the Order from the obscurity into which it had fallen after the death of Crowley’s immediate successor, Karl Germer, in 1962. McMurtry’s work ultimately led to the establishment of the O.T.O. as it exists today.

Yet another work came out of Crowley’s latter days that sought to capture the knowledge he acquired over his lifetime. A book of magick with essays spanning a broad range of topics, Aleister Explains Everything was eventually renamed Magick Without Tears, a play on the schoolboy primer Reading Without Tears. After all, he thought, why shouldn’t everyone be taught the proper fundamentals of magick! The basics of magical ritual—pentagrams, hexagrams, circles, and the like—are not to be found here, but instead a litany of essays on aspects of magick and Thelema less touched upon elsewhere.

This book is especially useful to beginners, since it was written through a set of letters between Crowley and an aspirant seeking to learn about magick with little or no background. Thus, we find Crowley being exceptionally lucid about very difficult topics and avoiding the use of terms that might confuse the reader, as so often was the case in his other works, often of necessity.

Even in his introduction, we find the following advice for the beginning student in dedicating themselves to the practice of magick:

1. Perform Liber Resh vel Helios.
2. Say Will before meals.
3. Keep a Magical Diary.

I equally recommend these practices, which are each further detailed in the later chapters.

Further Reading

The Book of Thoth

Magick Without Tears

A Greater Feast

Crowley’s final years found him at the Netherwood boarding house in Hastings, England, a city southeast of London on the coast. He arrived in January of 1945, and accounts of his time there note that he had lost none of his wit, and even then introduced himself with the energetic declaration, “Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law.” He painted, responded to letters, and visited with friends, old and new alike. He even had one last opportunity to see his young son, who at the time was approaching ten.

One of the individuals he met in his later years at Hastings would come to have as nearly a profound effect on magical practice across the globe as he did: Gerald Gardner (1884–1964), one of the founders of modern witchcraft. Visiting Crowley in 1947, Crowley admitted him into the O.T.O. with the magical motto Scire, Latin meaning “To Know.” While Gardner never acted on his charter to help reestablish the O.T.O. in England, it was clear that Crowley was a profound influence on him, as many of the rites and rituals of modern witchcraft echo aspects of Crowley’s writings and practices. Even the Wiccan Rede is quite familiar, in “An it harm none, do what thou will,” among similar variants.57

As the summer of 1947 came and went, Crowley’s overall health was deteriorating due to both heart and respiratory problems, the latter of which he had suffered throughout his life. (The dangers of smoking were not widely known at the time, though he did have to quit for a time on doctor’s orders, to alleviate other conditions.) The oncoming chill of the English winter could not have helped matters, and he furthermore became severely dependent on heroin, used to promote sleep when his asthma otherwise prevented it. Wartime rationing of other medicines forced him to return to the highly addictive drug for a time, and once again, unfortunately, he became addicted.

Aleister Crowley passed away in the late morning of December 1, 1947, at the age of seventy-two, having spent his fortune and his life in support of his art. There are many fantastical stories about his supposed last words, most commonly cited as “I am perplexed,” but none of these can be confirmed with any real sense of validity. It is most likely that he passed quietly in his bed, given that he had been confined to it for much of the winter months on doctor’s orders.

Crowley in his later days at Netherwood, Hastings

His funeral was held four days later in the cold gray weather one might expect of a December 5th in the south of England. Arranged by his good friend Louis Wilkinson, it was a private affair held on public grounds, with readings from Crowley’s works, including his Hymn to Pan and selections from both The Book of the Law and The Gnostic Mass.

Of his long friendship with Crowley, Wilkinson recollects, “Some years more will have to pass before this man can be seen as a whole in true perspective. Such a view is always especially hard to take of anyone of whom admiration and vilification have both been carried to extremes. The difficulty is increased in Crowley’s case because of the variety and the contradictoriness of the elements in his composition. I do not profess to be able to solve the enigma of his character and his actions. I was glad that he was himself and that I knew him.” 58

Legacy

Crowley’s legacy found him fading into relative obscurity apart from a small group of his contemporaries. It was not until the cultural revolution of the 1960s that he began to be recognized for the pioneer that he was. Emerging from the repressive social climate of the United States and elsewhere in the 1950s, the 1960s introduced mainstream society to many of the same things that Crowley was advocating throughout his life: the use of drugs in the pursuit of spiritual awakening, sexual freedom, and (yes) magick, to name but a few.

To give credit where credit is due, the inclusion of Crowley’s glowering image on the cover of the Beatles iconic Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band album is most frequently cited as the spark that rekindled interest in the departed magus. Included on the suggestion of John Lennon, Crowley appears second from the left in the top row of historical figures presented behind the band.

Given the popularity of the Beatles at the time, and the groundbreaking album that it was, fans naturally wanted to know everything about the people adorning the cover—and there was Aleister Crowley, the countercultural icon in waiting.

Crowley’s depiction as the “evil” magician and early rock-and-roll’s fascination with the occult, born of its musical roots in American blues and that genre’s own relationship with tales of the devil, equally advanced the mythos of Crowley after his death. Perhaps no greater association can be found than Led Zeppelin guitarist Jimmy Page, who was a fan of Crowley and brought his life and work into the cultural spotlight as well. Many magical elements were included in Page’s “dream sequence” in their concert film The Song Remains the Same, and the signature phrase “Do what thou wilt” was inscribed in the wax of some pressings of their third album. Page purchased Crowley’s Boleskine estate in 1970, though it appears he rarely spent time there. He is reported to have collected a number of Crowley’s works. Other musicians have picked up on this current as well, including David Bowie, who had a keen interest in occultism in general, and the Golden Dawn and Crowley in particular. Ozzy Osbourne released the song Mr. Crowley in 1980, continuing a musical fascination with the “wickedest man in the world.”

The influence of Crowley is no longer relegated to counterculture references, however. A 2002 poll by the BBC of the hundred greatest Britons listed none other than Crowley among its ranks, at a respectable number seventy-three. Aside from his own autohagiography, several scholars in recent years have picked up the mantle of producing a compelling biography, not least among which are Perdurabo: The Life of Aleister Crowley by Richard Kaczynski, Aleister Crowley: The Biography by Tobias Churton, and Do What Thou Wilt: A Life of Aleister Crowley by Lawrence Sutin. I highly recommend any or all of them for a greater understanding of his life.

Crowley is just now beginning to have his day in the sun.

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3 An autohagiography is the autobiography of a saint, a tongue-in-cheek wordplay of the sort Crowley reveled in.

4 It is tempting to consider that Edward Sr. might have contracted cancer from smoking, the dangers of which were certainly less known at the time, but Crowley notes in Confessions (p. 71) that his father never suffered such a vice.

5 Crowley, Confessions, 54.

6 Ibid., 71.

7 Ibid., 71.

8 Crowley, Confessions, 140. (A dactyl is a long syllable followed by two short syllables, while a spondee consists of two long syllables; hence, Ale-is-ter Crow-ley. Crowley, as they say, rhymes with holy, the first syllable sounding like the bird of the same name.)

9 Ibid., 115.

10 Ibid., 142.

11 His full name was Herbert Charles Pollitt; he assumed the name Jerome, much the same as Crowley had assumed Aleister.

12 The name was a play on Liane de Pougy, born Anne Marie Chassaigne (1869–1950), a contemporary bisexual French performer and courtesan.

13 Crowley, Confessions, 142.

14 It is also fair to state that they had little in common beyond mutual attraction, which set an upper limit on the duration of the relationship. It likely would have ended irrespective of Crowley’s growing interest in occultism.

15 Maev Kennedy, “Black Magician Aleister Crowley’s Early Gay Verse Comes to Light,” 2014.

16 Kaczynski, Perdurabo, 35.

17 The title alludes to exactly what you think it does. He would also publish the purposely vulgar and comic collection of erotic verse Snowdrops from a Curate’s Garden in 1904.

18 Karl von Eckartshausen’s, The Cloud upon the Sanctuary, 32.

19 Crowley, Confessions, 154.

20 Ibid., 164.

21 The introduction to Israel Regardie’s The Golden Dawn notes that a Robert Wentworth Little was the original head of the order and passed it to Woodman as early as 1878 (p. 17). However, the organization as it came to be known is generally attributed to the three men described herein.

22 Choia is Hebrew for “beast.” The title of khan is an honorific that can mean anything from “leader” to “king,” so it was likely this term to which he turned in approximating “great”—i.e., exalted, etc., though he never mentions so directly.

23 Sir Richard Francis Burton, the British explorer (1821–1890).

24 Crowley, Confessions, 388.

25 Crowley, The Equinox of the Gods, 109.

26 Ibid., 109–110.

27 Crowley, The Equinox of the Gods, 70.

28 The effects of fetal alcohol syndrome were not yet known, so it was relatively common for women at the time to drink throughout their pregnancies.

29 In archeology, a stele or stela is a commemorative funerary plaque, column, or block much like a gravestone is used today.

30 Crowley, Confessions, 394.

31 Crowley, The Equinox of the Gods, 76.

32 Crowley, The Equinox of the Gods, 117.

33 Ibid.

34 Crowley, The Book of the Law, 1:1–3.

35 Originally titled “Liber L vel Legis sub figura CCXX as delivered by LXXVII to DCLXVI.” He would later change the title to Liber AL vel Legis.

36 Crowley, Confessions, 403.

37 Crowley, Confessions, 406.

38 While known as a treatise on conjuring evil spirits, Crowley found in it an exceptionally versatile method of invocation for spirits of any type.

39 Crowley, Confessions, 502.

40 One of his acquaintances callously quipped that she died of “acute nomenclature”—too many names.

41 Crowley, Confessions, 687.

42 Some accounts have Crowley initially joining the O.T.O. in 1910, shortly after his legal battle with Mathers over publishing the Golden Dawn materials, only being elevated to the IX˚ after the publication of The Book of Lies. The exact timelines are unclear, and perhaps deliberately so, but Crowley does note he was acquainted with Reuss by late 1910.

43 Crowley, The Book of Lies, 83. Due to publication restrictions by the British government concerning sexually explicit material, Crowley had to avoid any direct mention of sex in any of his work, typically hiding it under the guise of being “for initiates” or through purposely absurd analogies.

44 Crowley, Confessions, 710.

45 Crowley, Confessions, 727.

46 Crowley, Confessions, 726.

47 Crowley, Confessions, 744.

48 Crowley, Confessions, 746.

49 Crowley referred to the lake as “Lake Pasquaney,” which stems from a popular attempt among locals to rename the lake after what they understood as its original Native American name. It never took root, however, and it remains Newfound Lake to this day.

50 Crowley, “The Elixer of Life: Our Magical Medicine,” Amrita, 12.

51 Crowley, The Book of the Law, 3:4–6.

52 While never stated, it is possible that this name was chosen because the Roman god Saturn “ate his children,” an allusion to the formula of sexual magick associated with the O.T.O.!

53 Some accounts have it the other way around, with her asking to bear his child.

54 Crowley had a mutual friend in British Intelligence with author Ian Fleming, of James Bond fame. It is rumored that the original villain in Casino Royale, Le Chiffre, was modeled after Crowley!

55 Crowley, The Book of Thoth, 92.

56 Crowley, The Book of the Law, 1:57.

57 Despite often fervent objections, the rede does not predate the modern restoration of witchcraft in the middle half of the twentieth century.

58 Louis Wilkinson, Seven Friends, 63.