Edward Alexander Crowley was born October 12, 1875 in Leamington Spa, England. His parents were members of the Plymouth Brethren, a strict fundamentalist Christian sect. As a result, Aleister grew up with a thorough biblical education and an equally thorough disdain of Christianity.

He attended Trinity College at Cambridge University, leaving just before completing his degree. Shortly thereafter he was introduced to George Cecil Jones, who was a member of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn. The Golden Dawn was an occult society led by S.L. MacGregor Mathers which taught magick, qabalah, alchemy, tarot, astrology, and other hermetic subjects. It had many notable members (including A. E. Waite, Dion Fortune, and W. B. Yeats), and its influence on the development of modern western occultism was profound.

Crowley was initiated into the Golden Dawn in 1898, and proceeded to climb up rapidly through the grades. But in 1900 the order was shattered by schism, and Crowley left England to travel extensively throughout the East. There he learned and practiced the mental and physical disciplines of yoga, supplementing his knowledge of western-style ritual magick with the methods of Oriental mysticism.

In 1903, Crowley married Rose Kelly, and they went to Egypt on their honeymoon. After returning to Cairo in early 1904, Rose (who until this point had shown no interest or familiarity with the occult) began entering trance states and insisting to her husband that the god Horus was trying to contact him. As a test, Crowley took Rose to the Boulak Museum and asked her to point out Horus to him. She passed several well-known images of the god and led Aleister straight to a painted wooden funerary stele from the 26th dynasty, depicting Horus receiving a sacrifice from the deceased, a priest named Ankh-f-n-khonsu. Crowley was especially impressed by the fact that this piece was numbered 666 by the museum, a number with which he had identified since childhood.

The upshot was that he began to listen to Rose, and at her direction, on three successive days beginning April 8, 1904, he entered his chamber at noon and wrote down what he heard dictated from a shadowy presence behind him. The result was the three chapters of verse known as Liber AL vel Legis, or The Book of the Law. This book heralded the dawning of the new aeon of Horus, which would be governed by the Law of Thelema. "Thelema" is a Greek word meaning "will", and the Law of Thelema is often stated as: "Do what thou wilt". As the prophet of this new aeon, Crowley spent the rest of his life working to develop and establish Thelemic philosophy.

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In 1906 Crowley rejoined George Cecil Jones in England, where they set about the task of creating a magical order to continue where the Golden Dawn had left off. They called this order the A.'. A.'. (Astrum Argentium or Silver Star), and it became the primary vehicle for the transmission of Crowley's mystical and magical training system based on the principles of Thelema.

Then in 1910 Crowley was contacted by Theodore Reuss, the head of an organization based in Germany called the Ordo Templi Orientis (O.T.O.). This group of high-ranking Freemasons claimed to have discovered the supreme secret of practical magick, which was taught in its highest degrees. Apparently Crowley agreed, becoming a member of O.T.O. and eventually taking over as head of the order when Reuss suffered a stroke in 1921. Crowley reformulated the rites of the O.T.O. to conform them to the Law of Thelema, and vested the organization with its main purpose of establishing Thelema in the world. The order also became independent of Freemasonry (although still based on the same patterns) and opened its membership to women and men who were not masons.

Crowley's Personality

By Tim Maroney

Crowley was an unusual and involved individual and his views changed over the course of the more than fifty years of his writing career. It is not unusual for him to contradict himself on the same page. The best way to get acquainted with him as a character is to read biographies of him and his own books. Unfortunately, there is more bad biography of Crowley than good. It would be difficult to deny his many character failings, but the level of vitriolic abuse leveled at him both during and after his lifetime is remarkable, and it only continues to grow as bad writers with low standards of truth and fairness find the sensationalistic aspects of his life -- both real ones and confabulated ones -- useful for the swelling of their coffers. Crowley has not been adopted by the literary mainstream, and so the reader has to rely upon biographers with a religious ax to grind, whether one is reading a sympathetic biography, a critical one, or a hatchet job.

Probably the two best sources are Crowley's own "Confessions" and Israel Regardie's "The Eye in the Triangle". Crowley's failings are disguised, but without success, in his own account of himself; both his vices and his virtues shine through clearly. Regardie gives a critical but sympathetic and engaged account of Crowley's spiritual career, not turning a blind eye to his flaws or his accomplishments.

In short, though, Crowley was talented, intelligent, capable, arrogant, judgmental, prejudiced, and not afraid to turn politeness aside if it would get in the way of a good insult. His talents extended to ritual and meditative practice, writing, mountain climbing, sexual athletics,attracting followers, and getting publicity. His vices went as far as anti-Semitic blood libel, rabid hostility to Christianity, misogyny, neglect of family, loss of friends through obnoxiousness, and megalomania. There are marked similarities between Crowley, MacGregor Mathers (his mentor in the Golden Dawn), and Helena Petrovna Blavatsky (who founded the Theosophical Society). All three were charming, impressive, well-read, anger-prone, tough-talking international spiritual leaders. The current euphemism "strong ego" does not begin to describe their arrogance. Followers were drawn to them by their magnetism, energy and talent, but frequently did not know what to make of their character flaws. In each case there is cause to suspect mental disorder by the criteria of modern psychology, but now psychology is also beginning to study a possible link between creativity and mood disorder, while Szasz and Laing continue to remind us that inspired wisdom is often socially condemned as insanity.

Simple pathologizing perspectives of such people are necessarily oversimplifications, but they give so much ammunition to character assassination that it is inevitable. Crowley, Mathers and Blavatsky were creators of new religious traditions when traditional belief in Christianity was on the decline because of new knowledge -- knowledge of the scientific world on one hand, and of Eastern and pre-Christian religions on the other.

Whether one could accept a flawed character such as Crowley as a spiritual leader depends on one's model of spirituality. Treating any of the three as moral exemplars would seem incompatible with their biographies. If the purpose of religion is to produce moral exemplars then these religious endeavors have failed. However, if the purpose of religion is to produce spiritual adventurers then they have succeeded. A person might have attained to real spiritual accomplishments yet retain base characteristics of their personality.

Crowley's life was an adventure. When he was not climbing mountains he was being set upon by thieves in dark alleys, getting thrown out of countries for his sexual immorality, recklessly spending away two inherited fortunes, writing fantastic tracts and books claiming to reveal the mysteries of magic, scandalizing a culture that had adapted to Baudelaire, Rimbaud and Swinburne, having torrid affairs, producing theatrical performances, getting reviewed in the popular press, forming new magical orders and taking over or helping to break up others, being reviled in headlines as "the Wickedest Man in the World", and through all this maintaining what most people would consider a rigorous course of spiritual practice, journaling, and interpretive writing. His career is reminiscent of the 19th century adventurer/writer Richard Francis Burton, a man Crowley admired.

In this main text voice I have tried to be cautious and say only those things that I was sure could be defended by the evidence. Biography is a hard subject in which to be objective because it deals with personalities, and your own relationship with Crowley the dead writer and spiritual leader will no doubt be unique. For the last time, your Unreliable Narrator will turn the subject over to the little voices inside his head.

The Literalist might say this, with the formal closing at the end: Crowley was the Prophet of the Silver Star, the chosen human agent of the Secret Chiefs. He was selected because for all his human frailties he was a man of prodigious strength, intelligence and discipline, an occultist of many incarnations who was poised to assume the highest mantle and fit himself for a place in the City of the Pyramids together with the Prophets and Bodhisattvas of other religions. The attacks on Crowley's character by yellow journalists are libelous and fabricated. To understand Crowley you must work his system, attaining through the power of your own True Will the keys to the Great Work, and only then judge Crowley from an Initiated perspective. Any other perspective is unequal to the task of interpreting an Initiate. Love is the law, love under will.

The Chaotic might say this: I'm tired of Crowley. It seems like all the people who are into him are into nothing else. I'm suspicious of his system; way too regimented, way too hierarchical. Yeah, Crowley made a contribution to magic, but other people have made better ones in the last fifty years. We've learned a lot in the 20th century about real freedom and sexual liberation, not this Victorian captain-of-your-own-soul and master-of-the-passions crap. Crowley was a hung-up jerk in a lot of ways and I'd usually rather read something that is more relevant to my life today.

The Skeptic might say this: Crowley studies have not been adopted by academics, with good reason. His work is derivative and like Blavatsky he could be traced to a handful of main sources. He does not give credit where credit is due to previous traditions and he fails to teach the reader about his sources. The intensity of Crowley's sexism and racism is beyond the standards of his day and endorsing him could be tantamount to endorsing those prejudices. Spiritual progress is feeding people, helping those who need it, participating in the social process to make it more just and humane, and Crowley has nothing to contribute to that. (Also almost all of his poetry is terrible; why would anyone want to study it?)

IN THE GREAT PYRAMID OF GHIZEH

(If this poem be repeatedly read through, it falls into a subtly rhymed and metrical form.)

I saw in a trance or a vision the web of the ages unfurled, flung wide with a scream of derision, a mockery mute of the world. As it spread over sky I mapped it fair on a sheet of blue air with a hurricane pen. I copy it here for men. First on the ghostly adytum of pale mist that was the abyss of time and space (the stars all blotted out, poor faded nenuphars on the storm-sea of the infinite:) I wist a shapeless figure arise and cover all, its cloak an ancient pall, vaster and older than the skies of night, and blacker than all broken years -- aye! but it grew and held me in its grasp so that I felt its flesh, not clean sweet flesh of man but leprous white, and crawling with innumerable tears like worms, and pains like a sword-severed asp, twitching, and loathlier than all mesh of hates and lusts, defiling; nor any voice it had, nor any motion, it was infinite in its own world of horror, irredeemably bad as everywhere sunlit, being this world, forget not! being this world, this universe, the sum of all existence; so that opposing fierce resistance to the all-law, stood loves and joys, delicate girls, and beautiful strong boys, and bearded men like gods, and golden things, and bright desires with wings, all beauties, and all truths of life poets have ever prized. So showed the microscope, this aged strife between all forms; but seen afar, seen well drawn in a focus, synthesised, the whole was sorrow and despair; agony biting through the fair; meanness, contemptibility, enthroned; all proposeless, all unatoned; all putrid of an hope, all vacant of a soul. I called upon its master, as who should call on God. Instead, arose a shining form, sweet as a whisper of soft air kissing the brows of a great storm; his face with light was molten, musical with waves of his delight moving across: his countenance utterly fair! then was my philosophic vision shamed: conjecture at a loss; and my whole mind revolted; then I blamed the vision as a lie; yet bid that vision speak how he was named, being so wonderfully desirable. Whereat he smiled upon me merrily, answering that whoso named him well, being a poet, called him Love; or else being a lover of wisdom, called him Force; or being a cynic, called him Lust; or being a pietist, called him God. The last -- thou seest! -- (he said), a lie of Hell's, and all a partial course of the great circle of whirling dust (stirred by the iron rod of thought) that men call wisdom. So I looked deep in his beauty, and beheld its truth. The life of that fair youth was a a whiz of violent little whirls, helical coils of emptiness, grey curls of misty and impalpable stuff, torn, crooked, all ways and none at once, but ever pressed in idiot circles; and one thing he lacked, now I looked from afar again, was rest. Thence I withdrew my sight, the eyeballs cracked with stain of my endeavour, and my will struck up with subtler skill than any man's that in fair Crete tracked through the labyrinth of Minos, and awoke the cry to call his master; grew a monster whirlwind of revolving smoke and then, mere nothing. But in me arose a peace profounder than Himalayan snows cooped in their crystalline ravines. I saw the ultimation of the one wise law. I stood in the King's Chamber, by the tomb of slain Osiris, in the Pyramid and looked down the Great Gallery, deep, deep into the hollow of earth; grand gloom burned royally therein; I was well hid in the shadow; here I realised myself to be in that sepulchral sleep wherein were mirrored all these things of mystery. So the long passage steeply sliding ever up to my feet where I stood in the emptiness; at last a sure abiding only in absolute ceasing of all sense, and all perceived or understood or knowable; thus, purple and intense, I beheld the past that leads to peace, from royal heights of mastery to sleep, from self-control imperial to an end, therefore I shaped the seven tiers of the ascending corridor into seven strokes of wisdom, seven harvests fair to reap from seven bitter sowings.(Compare the Noble Eightfold Path, as described in "Science and Buddhism." "infra.") Here ascend the armies of life's universal war chasing the pious pilgrim. First, his sight grew adamant, sun-bright, so that he saw aright. Second, his heart was noble, that he would live ever unto good. Third, in his speech stood tokens of this will, so pitiful and pure he spake, nor ever from him brake woe-winged words, nor slaver of the snake. Fourth, in each noble act of life he taught crystalline vigour of thought, so in each deed he was aright; well-wrought all the man's work; and fifth, this hero strife grew one with his whole life, so harmonised to the one after-end his every conscious and unconscious strain, his peace and pleasure and pain, his reflex life, his deepest-seated deed of mere brute muscle and nerve! Thence, by great Will new-freed, the ardent life leaps, sixth, to Effort's tower, invoking the occult, the secret power, found in the void when all but Will is lost; so, seventh, he bends it from its bodily station into the great abyss of Meditation, whence the firm level is at last his own and Rapture's royal throne is more than throne, sarcophagus! an end! an end! Resounds the echo in the stone, incalculable myriads of tons poised in gigantic balance overhead, about, beneath. O blend your voices, angels of the awful earth! dogs! demons leaping into hideous birth from the imprisoned deserts of the Nile! And thou, O habitant most dread, disastrous crocodile, hear thou the Law, and live, and win to peace!