Aleister Crowley

SAMUEL LIDDELL MACGREGOR MATHERS,  TAUGHT CROWLEY magic, from The Sacred Magic of AbraMelin the Mage, which Mathers had translated. Mathers believed the manuscript was bewitched and inhabited by an entity. The magic prescribed a rigorous six-month program conducted in complete withdrawal from the world, after which the initiate would make talismans that would bring money, great sexual allure, and an army of phantom soldiers to serve at his disposal. Crowley intended to undergo this rite beginning at Easter 1900 at Boleskin Manor, his house in Scotland.

His plans were disrupted by internal fighting in the Golden Dawn. In late 1899, Crowley was refused initiation into the Second Order because of his active homosexuality. Mathers, who was by then living in Paris, was incensed. In January 1900, he invited Crowley to Paris, and initiated him into Adeptus Minor grade of the Second Order in the at the Golden Dawn temple there.

The London temple was not pleased, and when Crowley appeared there to claim his rightful magical manuscripts accorded his new rank, he was dismissed empty-handed.

In April 1900, Crowley again went to Paris at the behest of Mathers, who threatened magical punishment of the London rebels. He authorized Crowley to go back to London as his official representative, install those loyal to Mathers as the new chiefs, and seize the ritual vault. However, Crowley was rebuffed again, and adepts of the temple, marshaled an occult attack on Crowley.

Crowley broke into the temple and seized possession of it, but the rebels gained it back and changed the locks. Crowley reappeared the next day, dressed in full Highland garb and black mask. Yeats called the police and had him taken away.

Soon after this escapade, Crowley suddenly left for New York. The Golden Dawn expelled him. His relationship with Mathers ended badly as well; in 1910, Mathers sued him in court to try to stop him from publishing the secret Golden Dawn rituals in his magazine Equinox. Mathers lost.

Travels to Far East

From 1900 to 1903, Crowley traveled extensively, visiting the Far East and delving deeper into Eastern mysticism.

In 1903, he married Rose Kelly, the first of two wives. Kelly bore him one child, a daughter, Lola Zaza. Their honeymoon lasted several months.

In 1904 they were in Cairo, where Crowley was attempting to conjure sylphs, the elemental s of the air. On March 18, 1904, Rose suddenly began to trance channel, receiving communications from the astral plane that the Egyptian god, Horus, was waiting for Crowley. The communicating entity was a messenger, aiwass. For three days, Aiwass dictated information to Crowley.

The result was Liber Legis, better known as The Book of the Law, Crowley’s most important work. Central to it is the Law of Thelema: “Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law.”

The law has been misinterpreted to mean doing as one pleases. According to Crowley, it means that one does what one must and nothing else. Perfect magic is the complete and total alignment of the will with universal will, or cosmic forces. When one surrenders to that alignment, one becomes a perfect channel for the flow of cosmic forces.

Besides the Law of Thelema, the book holds that every person is sovereign and shall be self-fulfilled in the Aeon. “Every man and every woman is a star,” it states. However, the Aeon of Horus would be preceded by an era of great violence, aggression, and fire.

Aiwass told Crowley that he had been selected by the secret chiefs. Crowley genuinely believed that the Aeon of Horus would spread around the world like a new religion—Crowleyanity—and replace all other religions. The Book of the Law remained a focus of Crowley’s life for the rest of his years.

Crowley insisted that he never understood all of what was dictated. However, the style compares to some of his other writings, suggesting that the material may have originated in his subconscious. The promised self-fulfillment seemed to elude him. Throughout his life Crowley believed that he had the ability to manifest whatever he desired, including large sums of money, but after squandering his inheritance he was never able to do so.

After returning home to Scotland, Crowley informed the Golden Dawn that he was its new head, but he received no reply. He then determined that Mathers had launched a psychic attack against him, and he responded by summoning Beezlebub and his demons to attack back.

Sexuality

Crowley had a prodigious sexual appetite and had numerous mistresses, some of whom he called “scarlet women” and some of whom bore him illegitimate children. He was fond of giving his women “serpent kisses,” using his sharpened teeth to draw blood. He branded some of his women and eventually abandoned all of them to drugs, alcohol, or the streets. Crowley tried unsuccessfully to beget a “magical child.” He fictionalized these efforts in his novel, Moonchild (1929).

Crowley believed he was irresistibly sexually attractive because he doused himself daily with “Ruthvah, the perfume of immortality.” The perfume, a mixture of three parts civet, two parks musk, and one part ambergris, was rubbed into his hair and skin. The scent, he said, would cause others to obey his commands without realizing that they were doing so.

Note – Ambergris (produced in the digestive system of sperm whales) and you can’t obtain this product in most countries.

Rose descended into alcoholism, and in 1909, she divorced Crowley on grounds of adultery. The same year, Crowley began a homosexual relationship with the poet vict or neuberg, who became his assistant in magic.

Choronzon

Their most famous workings together took place in 1909 in the desert south of Algiers, when they performed a harrowing conjuration of the demonic Dweller of the Abyss, choronzon.

Read more about The Demon Choronzon

Crowley was inspired to incorporate sex into the ritual, and he became convinced of the power of sex magic.

Sex Magic Master

By 1910, he was involved with the ordo templi orientis sex magic occult order and in 1912 was invited to head the organization in Britain. He took the magical name baphomet .

From late 1914 to 1919, Crowley lived in the United States, where he was unsuccessful in rousing much interest in the Aeon of Horus. He kept a record of his prodigious sexual activities, which he titled Rex de Arte Regia (“The King of the Royal Art.”) Many of the prostitutes whom he hired had no idea that he was actually involving them in sex magic. He and one scarlet woman of the moment, Rod- die Minor, performed sex magic and drug rituals—by then he was addicted to heroin—for the purpose of communicating with an entity Crowley called the wizard Amalan- trah who existed on the astral plane.

In 1916, Crowley initiated himself into the rank of Magus in a bizarre black magic rite involving a frog. The hapless creature was offered gold, frankincense, and myrrh, then was baptized as Jesus, and was worshiped as God incarnate. After a day of this, Crowley arrested the frog and charged it with blasphemy and sedition, sentencing it to crucifixion. The sentence was carried out. While the frog suffered, Crowley declared that its elemental spirit would enter his service as a guardian of his work, so that—incredibly—“men may speak of my piety and my gentleness and of all the virtues and bring to me love and service and all material things so ever where I may stand in need.” He then stabbed the frog to death, cooked it, and ate its legs as a sacrament. The remainder of the frog was burned to ashes.

In 1918, Crowley met Leah Hirsig, a New York school teacher. They were instantly attracted to one another, and Hirsig became his most famous scarlet woman. He called her “the Ape of Thoth.” They decided to found an Abbey of Thelema, a monastic community of men and women who would promulgate The Book of the Law, perform magic, and be sexually free.

In 1920, while driving through Italy, he had a vision of a hillside villa. He found the place in Cefalu, Sicily, took it over, and renamed it the Sacred Abbey of the Thelemic Mysteries. It served as the site for numerous sexual orgies and magical rites, many attended by his illegitimate children. Leah bore a daughter, Anne Leah, who died in childhood.

In 1921, Crowley decided that he attained the magical rank of Ipsissimus, equal to God.

He went to France in 1922 to try to end his heroin addiction but was only partially successful. He and Hirsig went to England, where Crowley earned money writing articles and books. His novel Diary of a Drug Fiend (1922) drew heavily upon his own experiences.

He discovered a 23-year-old Oxford student, Raoul Loveday and named him his magical heir. He took Loveday and his wife, Betty May, to Thelema where Loveday engaged in Crowley’s practices of drugs, orgiastic sex, and self-mutilation. Betty May despised Crowley.

Loveday’s health declined, and he fell ill after drinking cat’s blood in a ritual. Crowley attempted to cure him magically, with- out success. On February 15, 1923, he told Loveday that he would die the following day. Loveday did. The official cause was enteritis, but Crowley believed Loveday had brought about his own demise by leaving a magic circle during a ritual, thus exposing himself to evil forces.

The Loveday episode created a scandal, and in May 1923, Benito Mussolini expelled Crowley from Italy, forcing him to abandon the abbey. By the end of the year, Crowley and Hirsig parted ways.

In 1929, Crowley married his second wife, Maria Ferrari de Miramar, in Leipzig. Her reputed magical powers led him to name her the High Priestess of Voodoo. They separated in less than a year when Crowley took up with a 19-year-old girl. Maria entered a mental institution, enabling Crowley to divorce her.

Crowley’s later years were plagued by poor health, drug addiction, and financial trouble. He kept himself barely afloat by publishing nonfiction and fiction writings. In 1934, desperate for money, Crowley sued sculptress Nina Hammett for libel. Hammett had stated in her biography,

Laughing Torso (1932), that Crowley practiced black magic and indulged in human sacrifice. The English judge, jury, spectators, and press were repulsed by the testimony that came out in the trial. The judge stated he had “never heard such dreadful, horrible, blasphemous and abominable stuff. . . .” The jury stopped the trial and found in favor of Hammett.

In 1945, Crowley moved to Netherwood, a boarding house in Hastings, where he lived the last two years of his life, asthmatic, dissipated, and bored, consuming amounts of heroin every day that would kill some addicts. During these last years, he met gerald b. gardner, an English Witch, and shared ritual material with him. He was involved with jack parsons, criticizing his attempts to create a “Moonchild”.

In 1946, Cambridge professor E. M. Butler visited Crowley to interview him for her book The Myth of the Magus. She was repulsed by his sickly appearance and pretentious demeanor, and his squalid surroundings, the walls of which were covered with his grotesque drawings. Crowley spoke of himself in reverent terms and offered to prove his magical ability by making himself instantly invisible, but he was unable to do so. According to Butler:

Yet there he sat, a wreck among ruins, living or rather dying in penury on the charity of friends, speaking of himself in all seriousness as an “instrument of Higher Beings who control human destiny.”

Butler barely mentioned him in her book and in Ritual Magic (1949) dismissed him as a “failed Satanist.”

Death

Crowley died of cardiac degeneration and severe bronchitis on December 1, 1947. He was cremated in Brighton.

At his funeral, a Gnostic Mass was performed and his “Hymn to Pan” was read. His ashes were sent to followers in the United States.

Numerous editions and collections of Crowley’s writings have been published. Besides The Book of the Law, his other most notable work is Magick in Theory and Practice (1929), considered by many occultists to be a superb work on ceremonial magic. The Equinox of the Gods (1937) reflects back on The Book of the Law. The Book of Lies features 91 sermons and commentaries on each. The Book of Thoth (1944) presents his interpretation of the t a r o t . The Thoth Tarot deck, inspired by Crowley, is one of the more popular decks in modern use.

Crowley’s work continues to inspire people, and Thelemic organizations exist around the world. He has inspired artists of all kinds. Posthumously, Crowley has perhaps gained more fame and credibility than he had during his life. He remains controversial to the extreme, vilified as a “satanic occultist” and praised as a brilliant magician.

Source:
Crowley, Aleister. The Holy Books of Thelema. York Beach, Maine: Samuel Weiser, 1983.

Famous Quotes of Aleister Crowley