Aleister Crowley
Aleister Crowley, born
Edward Alexander Crowley (
12 October 1875 â€"
1 December 1947) was an
occultist,
Freemason, prolific
writer,
mystic,
hedonist, and
sexual revolutionary.
[Sutin, L. (2000). Do What Thou Wilt.]Other interests and accomplishments were wide-ranging—he was a
chess master,
mountain climber,
poet,
painter,
astrologer,
drug experimenter, and social
critic. He is perhaps best known today for his
occult writings, especially
The Book of the Law, the central sacred text of
Thelema. Crowley was also an influential member in several occult organizations, including the
Golden Dawn, the
A∴A∴, and
Ordo Templi Orientis.
[Crowley, Aleister. Confessions.]Crowley gained much notoriety during his lifetime, and was famously dubbed "The Wickedest Man In the World."
Edward Alexander Crowley was born in
Royal Leamington Spa,
Warwickshire,
England, between 11:00pm and midnight on
12 October 1875[The Magical Diaries of Aleister Crowley (Tunisia 1923) : Edited by Stephen Skinner; page 10].
His father, Edward Crowley, once maintained a lucrative family
brewery business and was retired when Aleister Crowley was born. His mother, Emily Bertha Bishop, drew roots from a
Devon and
Somerset family. Both of his parents were
Darbyites, members of the most extreme wing of the
Protestant sect known as the
Exclusive Brethren[King, Magical World, page 5].
He grew up in a staunch
Plymouth Brethren household. His father, after retiring from his daily duties as a brewer, took up the practice of
preaching at a fanatical pace. Daily Bible studies and private tutoring were mainstays in "Alick's" childhood; however, after his father's death, his mother's efforts at indoctrinating her son in the Christian faith only served to provoke his
skepticism. As a child, his constant rebellious behaviour displeased his devout mother to such an extent she would chastise him by calling him "The Beast" (from the
Book of Revelation), an epithet that Crowley would later happily adopt for himself. He objected to the labelling of what he saw as life's most worthwhile and enjoyable activities as "sinful".
In 1895, he went to
Trinity College, Cambridge and originally had the intention of
reading Moral Sciences (philosophy, psychology, and economics), but with approval from his personal tutor, he switched to English literature, which was not then a part of the curriculum offered
. His three years at Cambridge were happy ones, due in part to coming into the considerable fortune left by his father. Throughout this period, he maintained a vigorous sex life, which was largely conducted with prostitutes and girls he picked up at local pubs and cigar shops, but eventually extended into homosexual activities in which he played a passive role
[Magical World of AC, Francis King, page 5].
In December of 1896, following an event that he describes in veiled terms, Crowley decided to pursue a path in
occultism and
mysticism. By the next year, he began reading books by
alchemists and
mystics, and books on
magic. Biographer Sutin describes the pivotal New Year's event as a homo-erotic experience (Crowley's first) that brought him what he considered "an encounter with an immanent deity"
[Sutin, p. 38]. During the year of 1897, Aleister further came to see worldly pursuits as useless. The
section on chess describes one experience that helped him reach this conclusion. A few months later, in October, a brief illness triggered considerations of mortality and "the futility of all human endeavor", or at least of the diplomatic career that Crowley had previously considered
[Sutin, pp. 37-39].
A year later, he published his first book of poetry (
Aceldama), and left
Cambridge, only to meet
Julian L. Baker (Frater D. A.) who introduced him to
Samuel Liddell MacGregor Mathers and the Golden Dawn
.
Involved as a young adult in the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, he first studied mysticism with and made enemies of
William Butler Yeats and
Arthur Edward Waite. Like many in occult circles of the time, Crowley voiced the view that Waite was a pretentious bore through searing critiques of Waite's writings and editorials of other authors' writings.
His friend and former Golden Dawn associate,
Allan Bennett, introduced him to the ideas of
Buddhism, while
Samuel Liddell MacGregor Mathers, acting leader of the Golden Dawn organization, acted as his early mentor in western magick but would later become his enemy. Several decades after Crowley's participation in the Golden Dawn, Mathers claimed copyright protection over a particular ritual and sued Crowley for infringement after Crowley's public display of the ritual. While the public trial continued, both Mathers and Crowley claimed to call forth armies of demons and angels to fight on behalf of their summoner. Both also developed and carried complex
Seal of Solomon amulets and talismans.
In a book of fiction, entitled
Moonchild, Crowley later portrayed Mathers as the primary villain, including him as a character named SRMD, using the abbreviation of Mathers' magical name. Arthur Edward Waite also appeared in
Moonchild as a villain named Arthwaite, while Bennett appeared in
Moonchild as the main character's wise mentor,
Simon Iff.
|
Crowley, in magical garb, displaying the "horns of Pan" |
While he did not officially break with Mathers until 1904, Crowley lost faith in this teacher's abilities soon after the 1900 schism in the Golden Dawn (if not before).
[Sutin, pp. 80, 90-91] Later that year, Crowley travelled to Mexico and continued his magical studies in isolation. AC's writings suggest that he discovered the word
Abrahadabra during this time.
In October of 1901, after practising
Raja Yoga for some time, he said he had reached a state he called
dhyana â€" one of many states of unification in thoughts that are described in
Magick (Liber ABA) (See
Crowley on egolessness).
[Sutin, pp. 85, 94] 1902 saw him writing the essay
Berashith (the first word of
Genesis), in which he gave
meditation (or restraint of the mind to a single object) as the means of attaining his goal. The essay describes
ceremonial magick as a means of training the will, and of constantly directing ones thoughts to a given object through ritual. In his 1903 essay,
Science and Matter, Crowley urged an
empirical approach to Buddhist teachings.
He said that a mystical experience in 1904, while on vacation in
Cairo,
Egypt, led to his founding of the
religious philosophy known as
Thelema. Aleister's wife
Rose started to behave in an odd way, and this led him to think that some entity had made contact with her. At her instructions, he performed an invocation of the Egyptian god
Horus on
March 20 with (he wrote) "great success". According to Crowley, the god told him that a new magical
Aeon had begun, and that Crowley would serve as its prophet. Rose continued to give information, telling Crowley in detailed terms to await a further revelation. On
8 April and for the following two days at exactly noon he heard a voice, dictating the words of the text,
Liber AL vel Legis, or
The Book of the Law, which Crowley wrote down. The voice claimed to be that of
Aiwass (or Aiwaz) "the minister of Hoor-paar-kraat," or Horus, the god of force and fire, child of
Isis and Osiris and self-appointed conquering lord of the New Aeon, announced through his chosen scribe "the prince-priest the Beast." (For citations, see main article
The Book of the Law.)
Portions of the book are in numerical
cipher, which Crowley claimed the inability to decode (Setian
Michael Aquino later claimed to be able to decode them). Thelemic dogma (to the extent that Thelema has dogma) explains this by pointing to a warning within the
Book of the Law â€" the speaker supposedly warned that the scribe,
Ankh-af-na-khonsu (Aleister Crowley), was never to attempt to decode the ciphers, for to do so would end only in folly. The later-written
The Law is For All sees Crowley warning everyone not to discuss the writing amongst fellow critics, for fear that a
dogmatic position would arise. While he declared a "new Equinox of the Gods" in early 1904, supposedly passing on the revelation of
March 20 to the occult community, it took years for Crowley to fully accept the writing of the
Book of the Law and follow its doctrine.
[Sutin, pp. 195-196] Only after countless attempts to test its writings did he come to embrace them as the official doctrine of the New Aeon of Horus. The remainder of his professional and personal careers were spent expanding the new frontiers of scientific
illuminism.
|
Crowley posing as the Bodhisvattva Hotei |
Rose and Aleister had a daughter, whom Crowley named Nuit Ma Ahathoor Hecate Sappho Jezebel Lilith Crowley, in July of 1904. This child died in 1906, during the two and a half months when Crowley had left her with Rose (after a family trip through China) and returned home by a different path. They had another daughter, Lola Zaza, in the summer of that year, and Crowley devised a special ritual of thanksgiving for her birth.
[Sutin, pp. 142-143, 171-173]He performed a thanksgiving ritual before his first claimed success in what he called the "Abramelin operation," on
October 9, 1906.
[Sutin, pp. 173-174] This was his implementation of a magical work described in
The Book of the Sacred Magic of Abramelin the Mage. The events of that year gave the Abramelin book a central role in Crowley's system. He described the primary goal of the "
Great Work" using a term from this book: "the Knowledge and Conversation of the
Holy Guardian Angel." An essay in the first number of
The Equinox[The Temple of Solomon the King, pub. The Equinox, Vol. I No. 1 (1909) retrieved June 15, 2006 from http://www.the-equinox.org/vol1/no1/eqi01014.html] gives several reasons for this choice of names:# Because Abramelin's system is so simple and effective.# Because since all theories of the universe are absurd it is better to talk in the language of one which is patently absurd, so as to mortify the metaphysical man.# Because a child can understand it.
Crowley was notorious in his lifetime â€" a frequent target of attacks in the
tabloid press, which labelled him "The Wickedest Man in the World" to his evident amusement. At one point, he was expelled from
Italy after having established a sort of
commune, the organization of which was based on his personal philosophies, the
Abbey of Thelema, at
Cefalu,
Sicily.
In 1907, Crowley's interest took off once again, with two important events. The first was the creation of the
Silver Star (
A∴A∴), and the second was the composition of the Holy books of Thelema
[Magical World, F.King, page 41].
According to Crowley, in 1912,
Theodor Reuss had called on him to address accusations of publishing
O.T.O. secrets, which Crowley dismisses, for having never attained the grade in which these secrets were given (9th degree). Reuss opened up the Book of Lies and showed Crowley the passage. This sparked a long conversation which led to the opening of the
British section of O.T.O. called
Mysteria Mystica Maxima[King, Magical World, pages 80-81]Crowley, along with
Leah Hirsig, founded the Abbey of Thelema in
Cefalu,
Sicily in 1920.
[Sutin, Do What Thou Wilt, p.279] The name was borrowed from
Rabelais's satire
Gargantua[Nature of the Beast by Colin Wilson; page 73], where the "Abbey of Theleme" is described as a sort of anti-monestary where the lives of the inhabitants were "spent not in laws, statutes, or rules, but according to their own free will and pleasure."
[Rabelais, F. Gargantua and Pantagruel Ch. 1.] This idealistic utopia was to be the model of Crowley's commune, while also being a type of magical school, giving it the designation "Collegium ad Spiritum Sanctum", The College of the Holy Spirit. The general programme was in line with the A∴A∴ course of training, and included daily adorations to the sun, a study of Crowley's writings, regular yogic and ritual practices (which were to be recorded), as well as general domestic labor. The object, naturally, was for students to devote themselves to the
Great Work of discovering and manifesting their
True Wills.
In 1934, Crowley was declared bankrupt after losing a court case in which he sued the artist
Nina Hamnett for calling him a black magician in her 1932 book,
Laughing Torso. In addressing the jury, Mr Justice Swift said:
"I have been over forty years engaged in the administration of the law in one capacity or another. I thought that I knew of every conceivable form of wickedness. I thought that everything which was vicious and bad had been produced at one time or another before me. I have learnt in this case that we can always learn something more if we live long enough. I have never heard such dreadful, horrible, blasphemous and abominable stuff as that which has been produced by the man (Crowley) who describes himself to you as the greatest living poet."
Aleister Crowley died of a respiratory infection in a
Hastings boarding house on
December 1,
1947, at the age of 72. According to some accounts, he died on
December 5,
1947. He was penniless and
addicted to
opium, which had been prescribed for his
asthma and
bronchitis, at the time.
Biographer Lawrence Sutin passes on various stories about Crowley's death and last words. Frieda Harris supposedly reported him saying, "I am perplexed," though she did not see him at the very end. According to John Symonds, a Mr Rowe witnessed Crowley's death along with a nurse, and reported his last words as, "Sometimes I hate myself." Biographer Gerald Suster accepted the version of events he received from a "
Mr W.H." in which Crowley dies pacing in his living-room. Supposedly Mr W.H. heard a crash while polishing furniture on the floor below, and entered Crowley's rooms to find him dead on the floor. Patricia "Deirdre" MacAlpine, the mother of his son, denied all this and reports a sudden gust of wind and peal of thunder at the (otherwise quiet) moment of his death. According to MacAlpine, Crowley remained bedridden for the last few days of his life, but was in light spirits and conversational. Readings at the cremation service in nearby Brighton included one of his own works,
Hymn to Pan, and newspapers referred to the service as a
black mass.
Brighton council subsequently resolved to take all necessary steps to prevent such an incident occurring again.
[Sutin, pp. 417-419]The religious or mystical system which Crowley founded, into which most of his writings fall, he named
Thelema. Thelema combines a radical form of philosophical
libertarianism, akin in some ways to
Nietzsche, with a mystical initiatory system derived in part from the
Golden Dawn.
Chief among the precepts of Thelema is the
sovereignty of the individual will: "Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law." Crowley's idea of
will, however, is not simply the individuals desires or wishes, but also incorporates a sense of the person's destiny or greater purpose: what he termed "
True Will."
The second precept of Thelema is "Love is the law, love under will" â€" and Crowley's meaning of "Love" is as complex as that of "Will". It is frequently sexual: Crowley's system, like elements of the Golden Dawn before him, sees the dichotomy and tension between the male and female as fundamental to existence, and sexual "magick" and metaphor form a significant part of Thelemic ritual. However, Love is also discussed as the Union of Opposites, which Crowley thought was the key to
enlightenment.
Crowley maintained that he learned
chess from books by the age of six, and first competed on the Eastbourne College chess team (where he was taking classes in 1892). He says that he showed immediate competence, beating the handicapped local champion and later editing a chess column for the local newspaper, the Eastbourne Gazette,
[ p. 33] through which he criticised the Eastbourne team.
He later joined the university chess club at
Cambridge, where, he says, he beat the president in his freshman year and practised two hours a day towards becoming a champion â€" "My one serious worldly ambition had been to become the champion of the world at chess".
[(Confessions, p. 140)] His writings make it clear that he and his supporters thought he would achieve this goal:
I had snatched a game from Blackburne in simultaneous play some years before. I was being beaten in the Sicilian defence. The only chance was the sacrifice of a rook. I remember the grand old master coming round to my board and cocking his alcoholized eye cunningly at me. 'Hullo,' said he. 'Morphy come to town again!' I am not coxcomb enough to think that he could not have won the game, even after my brilliancy. I believe that his colossal generosity let me win to encourage a promising youngster.
I had frequently beaten Bird at Simpson's and when I got to Cambridge I made a savagely intense study of the game. In my second year I was president of the university and had beaten such first-rate amateurs as Gunston and Cole. Outside the master class, Atkins was my only acknowledged superior. I made mincemeat of the man who was champion of Scotland a few years later, even after I had given up the game. I spent over two hours a day in study and more than that in practice. I was assured on all hands that another year would see me a master myself.[(Confessions, p. 140).]
However, he explained that he gave up his chess aspirations in 1897 at the age of 22, when attending a chess conference in Berlin:
But I had hardly entered the room where the masters were playing when I was seized with what may justly be described as a mystical experience. I seemed to be looking on at the tournament from outside myself. I saw the masters â€" one, shabby, snuffy and blear-eyed; another, in badly fitting would-be respectable shoddy; a third, a mere parody of humanity, and so on for the rest. These were the people to whose ranks I was seeking admission. "There, but for the grace of God, goes Aleister Crowley," I exclaimed to myself with disgust, and there and then I registered a vow never to play another serious game of chess. I perceived with preternatural lucidity that I had not alighted on this planet with the object of playing chess.[(Confessions, p. 140).]
Crowley was obsessed with mountain climbing. He taught himself by 'scrambling' up Cumberland fells and Beachy Head, after which, he started spending every holiday by switching between the Alps and Bernese Oberland
[Nature of the Beast, by Colin Wilson, page 41].
In march of 1902,
Oscar Eckenstein and Crowley undertook the first attempt to scale
Chogo Ri (known in the west as K2), located in
Pakistan, and Eckenstein had set out to teach Crowley about the techniques of climbing
. The Eckenstein-Crowley Expedition consisted of Eckenstein, Crowley,
Guy Knowles, H. Pfannl, V. Wesseley, and Dr
Jules Jacot-Guillarmod. They ascended June 8, and after eight days, weather conditions were taking its toll. Two months in, they found themselves back down on the plain, which made this Crowley's first recorded defeat
[Wilson, pages 60-61].
In May 1905, he was approached by Dr
Jules Jacot-Guillarmod (1868 - 1925) to accompany him on the first expedition to
Kangchenjunga in
Nepal, the third largest mountain in the world. Guillarmod was left to organize the personnel while Crowley left to get things ready in
Darjeeling. On
July 31 Guillarmod joined Crowley in Darjeeling, bringing with him two countrymen, Charles-Adolphe Reymond and Alexis Pache. Meanwhile, Crowley had recruited a local man, Alcesti C. Rigo de Righi, to act as Transport Manager. The team left Darjeeling on
August 8,
1905, and used the
Singalila Ridge approach to Kangchenjunga. At
Chabanjong they ran into the rear of the 135
coolies who had been sent ahead on
July 24 and
July 25, who were carrying food rations for the team. The trek was led by Aleister Crowley, but four members of that party were killed in an avalanche. Some claims say they reached around 21,300 feet before turning back, however Crowley's autobiography claims they reached about 25,000 feet.
Crowley was sometimes famously scathing about other climbers, in particular
O. G. Jones, whom he considered a risk-taking self-publicist, and his 'two photographers' (
George and Ashley Abraham).
Crowley claimed to use a
scientific method to study what people at the time called "spiritual" experiences, making "The Method of Science, the Aim of Religion" the catchphrase of his magazine
The Equinox. By this he meant that mystical experiences should not be taken at
face value, but critiqued and experimented with in order to arrive at their underlying religious or neurological meaning. In this he may be considered to foreshadow Dr.
Timothy Leary, who at one point sought to apply the same method to
psychedelic drug experiences. Yet like Leary's, Crowley's method has received little "scientific" attention outside the circle of Thelema's practitioners.
Crowley's magical and initiatory system has amongst its innermost reaches a set of teachings on sex "magick." He frequently expressed views about sex that were radical for his time, and published numerous poems and tracts combining pagan religious themes with sexual imagery both heterosexual and homosexual, as well as pederastic. One of his most notorious poetry collections, entitled
White Stains (1898), was published in
Amsterdam in 1898 and dealt specifically with sexually explicit subject matter. However, most of the hundred copies printed for the initial release were later seized and destroyed by British customs. [
1]
Sex Magick is the use of the sex actâ€"or the energies, passions or arousal states it evokesâ€"as a point upon which to focus the will or magical desire for effects in the non-sexual world. In this, Crowley was inspired by
Paschal Beverly Randolph, an American
Abolitionist,
Spiritualist medium, and author of the mid-19th century, who wrote (in
Eulis!, 1874) of using the "nuptive moment" (orgasm) as the time to make a "prayer" for events to occur.
Crowley often introduced new terminology for spiritual and magical practices and theory. For example, he termed
theurgy "high magick" and
thaumaturgy "low magick". In
The Book of the Law and
The Vision and the Voice, the old Jewish magical formula
Abracadabra was changed to
Abrahadabra, which he called the new formula of the
Aeon. He also famously spelled
magic in the archaic manner, as
magick, to differentiate "the true science of the Magi from all its counterfeits."
[(Crowley, Magick, Book 4, p.47)]He urged his students to learn to control their own mental and behavioral habits, to the point of switching political views and personalities at will. For control of speech (symbolized as the unicorn): he recommended to choose a commonly-used word, letter, or pronouns and adjectives of the first person, and instructed them to cut themselves with a blade to serve as warning or reminder. Later the student could move on to the "Horse" of action and the "Ox" of thought.
[ Liber III vel Jugorum] (These symbols derive from the cabala of Crowley's book
777.)
Robert Anton Wilson records a similar course of self-experimentation, but says he used a less drastic form of
what Skinner later (writing after Crowley)
called "negative reinforcement"[...]I bit my thumb, hard, at each slip.[Cosmic Trigger: The Final Secret of the Illuminati, p. 62]Crowley was a highly prolific writer, not only on the topic of Thelema and magick, but on philosophy, politics, and culture. He was also a published poet and playwright and left behind a countless number of personal letters and daily journal entries. He self-published many of his books, expending the majority of his inheritance to disseminate his views.
Within the subject of occultism Crowley wrote widely, penning commentaries on
magick, the
Tarot,
Yoga, the
Kabbalah,
astrology, and numerous other subjects. He also wrote a Thelemic interpolation of the
Tao Te Ching, based on earlier English translations since he knew little or no Chinese. Like the Golden Dawn mystics before him, Crowley evidently sought to comprehend the entire human religious and mystical experience in a single philosophy.
Some of his most influential books include:
The Book of the LawMagick (Book 4)The Book of LiesThe Vision and the Voice777 and Other Qabalistic WritingsThe Confessions of Aleister CrowleyMagick Without TearsLittle Essays Toward TruthThe Goetia: The Lesser Key of Solomon the KingHe also edited and produced a series of publications in book form called
The Equinox (subtitled "The Review of Scientific Illuminism"), which served as the voice of his magical order, the
A∴A∴. Although the entire set is influential and remains one of the definitive works on
occultism, some of the more notable issues include:
*III:1
"The Blue Equinox" (largely regarding the structure of
OTO)
*III:3,
The Equinox of the Gods (covering the events leading up to the writing of Liber Legis)
*III:4,
Eight Lectures on Yoga*III:5,
The Book of Thoth (a full treatise on his
Thoth Tarot)
*III:6,
Liber Aleph (An extended and elaborate commentary on Liber Legis in the form of short letters)
*III:9,
The Holy Books of Thelema (the "received" works of Crowley)
Crowley also wrote fiction and plays, most of which have not received significant notice outside of occult circles. Some of his fictional/theatrical works include:
Diary of a Drug Fiend MoonchildThe Rites of EleusisThe ShipThe Testament of Magdalen BlairCrowley also had a peculiar sense of humour. He wrote a
polemic arguing against
George Bernard Shaw's interpretation of the
Gospels in his preface to
Androcles and the Lion, which was edited by
Francis King and published as
Crowley on Christ, and shows him at his erudite and witty best. In his
Magick, Book 4 he includes a chapter purporting to illuminate the Qabalistic significance of
Mother Goose nursery rhymes.
In re Humpty Dumpty, for instance, he recommends the occult authority "Ludovicus Carolus" -- better known as
Lewis Carroll. In a footnote to the chapter he admits that he had invented the alleged meanings, to show that one can find occult "Truth" in everything. In
The Book of Lies, the title to chapter 69 is given as "The Way to Succeed - and the Way to Suck Eggs!" a pun, as the chapter concerns the
69 sex position as a mystical act.
Crowley was also a published, if minor, poet. He wrote the 1929
Hymn to Pan [
2], perhaps his most widely read and anthologized poem. Three pieces by Crowley, "The Quest [
3]", "The Neophyte [
4]", and "The Rose and the Cross [
5]", appear in the 1917 collection
The Oxford Book of English Mystical Verse. Crowley's unusual sense of humour is on display in
White Stains [
6], an 1898 collection of
pornographic verse pretended to be "the literary remains of George Archibald Bishop, a neuropath of the Second Empire;" the volume is prefaced with a notice that says that " The Editor hopes that Mental Pathologists, for whose eyes alone this treatise is destined, will spare no precaution to prevent it falling into other hands."
Some of his published poetry includes:
*
Clouds Without Water. (1974).
*
White Stains. (1973).
*
The Star and the Garter. (1974).
*
Snowdrops From a Curate's Garden. (1986).
*
Golden Twigs. (1988).
*
The Scented Garden of Abdullah the Satirist of Shiraz. (1991).
*
The Winged Beetle. (1992).
Drugs
Crowley was a habitual drug user and also maintained a meticulous record of his drug-induced experiences with
laudanum,
opium,
cocaine,
hashish,
alcohol,
ether, and
heroin.
[["The Confessions of Aleister Crowley: An Autohagiography" by Aleister Crowley (Arkana, 1989); "Do What Thou Wilt: A Life of Aleister Crowley" by Lawrence Sutin. (St. Martin's Press, 2000); "The Magical Diaries of Aleister Crowley" edited by Stephen Skinner (Weiser, 2003)]] Allan Bennett, Crowley's mentor, was said to have "instructed Crowley in the magical use of drugs."
While in Paris during the 1920s, Crowley also experimented with psychedelic substances, specifically
Anhalonium Lewinii, an obsolete scientific name for the
mescaline-bearing cactus
peyote.
[Confessions, pp. 386 & 768.] In October of 1930, Crowley dined with
Aldous Huxley in Berlin, and to this day rumors persist that he introduced Huxley to peyote on that occasion.
[Cornelius, 2001.]Crowley first developed a drug addiction after a London doctor prescribed heroin for his asthma and bronchitis.
["Do What Thou Wilt: A Life of Aleister Crowley" by Lawrence Sutin. (St. Martin's Press, 2000) ch. 7, p. 277] His life as an addict influenced his 1922 novel,
Diary of a Drug Fiend, but the fiction presented a hopeful outcome of rehabilitation and recovery by means of Magickal techniques and the exercise of True Will. At the time of his death he was addicted to opium, his narcotic of choice.
[["Do What Thou Wilt: A Life of Aleister Crowley" by Lawrence Sutin. (St. Martin's Press, 2000)] p. 416]Racism
Biographer Lawrence Sutin stated that "blatant bigotry is a persistent minor element in Crowley's writings."
[Sutin, Lawrence. Do What Thou Wilt", p. 223-224] The book's introduction calls Crowley "a spoiled scion of a wealthy Victorian family who embodied many of the worst
John Bull racial and social prejudices of his upper-class contemporaries,"
[Sutin, Lawrence. Do What Thou Wilt", p. 2.] Sutin also writes, "Crowley embodied the contradiction that writhed within many Western intellectuals of the time: deeply held racist viewpoints courtesy of their culture, coupled with a fascination with people of color."
[Ibid., ch. 10, p. 366]Crowley defended the use of violence against the
Chinese, specifically the lower classes.
[(Crowley Confessions pp. 471-4) "One cannot fraternize with the Chinese of the lower classes; one must treat them with the utmost contempt and callousness."] He applied the term "
nigger" to Italians (in
Diary of a Drug Fiend Book I, Chapter 9) and Indians,
[(Crowley Confessions pp. 473)] and called the Indian
Theosophist,
Jiddu Krishnamurti, "negroid."
Crowley, according to his biographer, Lawrence Sutin, used racial ephithets to bully his Jewish homosexual lover
Victor Neuburg: "Crowley leveled numerous brutal verbal attacks on Neuburg's family and Jewish ancestry...".
[(Sutin, Lawrence. "Do What Thou Wilt", p. . 197)]Crowley's published expressions of
anti-Semitism were disturbing enough to later editors of his works that one of them,
Israel Regardie, attempted to suppress them. In
777 and Other Qabalistic Writings of Aleister Crowley (Samuel Weiser, 1975), Regardie, a Jew, explained his complete excision of Crowley's anti-Semitic commentary on the
Kabbalah in the 6th unnumbered page of his editorial introduction:
"I am ... omitting Crowley's Preface to the book. It is a nasty, malicious piece of writing, and does not do justice to the system with which he is dealing."[777 and Other Qabalistic Writings of Aleister Crowley edited by Israel Regardie, (Samuel Weiser, 1975), 6th unnumbered page of the editorial introduction)]
What Regardie had removed was Crowley's "Preface to Sepher Sephiroth", originally published in
Equinox 1:8. Written in 1911,
[777 and Other Qabalistic Writings of Aleister Crowley edited by Israel Regardie, (Samuel Weiser, 1975)] at the same time that
Menahem Mendel Beilis was accused of ritual cannibalism in
Kiev,
Russia, it contained a clear statement of Crowley's belief in the
blood libel against the Jews[Equinox 1:8]:
"Human sacrifices are today still practised by the Jews of Eastern Europe, as is set forth at length by the late Sir Richard Burton in the MS. which the wealthy Jews of England have compassed heaven and earth to suppress,[(Equinox 1:8 -- The MS Crowley referred to in this passage was "Human Sacrifice among the Sephardine or Eastern Jews" by Sir Richard Francis Burton; it was thought so inflammatory and damaging to the author's reputation that it was never published, and in her will Burton's widow Isabel asked for it to be destroyed to protect her husband's name. [7] and [8])] and evidenced by the ever-recurring Pogroms against which so senseless an outcry is made by those who live among those degenerate Jews who are at least not cannibals."[Equinox 1:8]
After defending the then-current anti-Semitic pogroms in
Kishinev Russia, on the grounds that the deaths of thousands of Jews was a rational response to what he saw as the danger of Jewish ritual cannibalism, Crowley rhetorically asked how a system of value such as Qabala could come from "an entirely barbarous race, devoid of any spiritual pursuit."
[Equinox 1:8] Crowley repeated his false claim that Jews in Eastern Europe practice ritual child-murder in at least one later work as well, namely the section on mysticism in
Book Four or
Magick.
Crowley studied and promoted the mystical and magical teachings of some of the same ethnic groups he attacked, in particular Indian
yoga, Jewish
Kabbalah and
goetia, and the Chinese
I Ching. Also, in
Confessions Chapter 86[
9], as well as a private diary which Lawrence Sutin quotes in
Do What Thou Wilt chapter 7, Crowley recorded a memory of a "past life" as the Chinese Taoist writer Ko Hsuan. In another remembered life, Crowley said, he took part in a "Council of Masters" that included many from Asia. He has this to say about the virtues of "Eurasians" and then Jews:
I do not believe that their universally admitted baseness is due to a mixture of blood or the presumable peculiarity of their parents; but that they are forced into vileness by the attitude of both their white and coloured neighbours. A similar case is presented by the Jew, who really does only too often possess the bad qualities for which he is disliked; but they are not proper to his race. No people can show finer specimens of humanity. The Hebrew poets and prophets are sublime. The Jewish soldier is courageous, the Jewish rich man generous. The race possesses imagination, romance, loyalty, probity and humanity in an exceptional degree.
But the Jew has been persecuted so relentlessly that his survival has depended on the development of his worst qualities; avarice, servility, falseness, cunning and the rest. Even the highest-class Eurasians such as Ananda Koomaraswamy suffer acutely from the shame of being considered outcast. The irrationality and injustice of their neighbours heightens the feeling and it breeds the very abominations which the snobbish inhumanity of their fellow-men expects of them.
Sexism
Biographer Lawrence Sutin stated that Crowley "largely accepted the notion, implicitly embodied in Victorian sexology, of women as secondary social beings in tems of intellect and sensibility."
[Sutin, ch. 1, p. 28] Occult scholar Tim Maroney compares him to other figures and movements of the time and suggests that some others might have shown more respect for women.
[Facts and Phallacies by Tim Maroney (1998) (Originally published in The Scarlet Letter, Volume V, Number 2). Retrieved from [10], June 8, 2006] Crowley stated that women, except "a few rare individuals," care most about having children and will conspire against their husbands if they lack children to whom to devote themselves.
[(Crowley Magick Without Tears p. 254); ] In
Confessions, Crowley says he learned this from his first marriage.
[(Crowley Confessions p.415); Gender Bias: "There is yet a further point. My marriage taught me many lessons, and this not the least: when women are not devoted to children - they take a morbid pleasure in conspiring against a husband, especially if he be a father. They take advantage of his preoccupation with his work in the world to conceive and execute every kind of criminally cunning abomination. The belief in witchcraft was not all superstition; its psychological roots were sound. Women who are thwarted in their natural instincts turn inevitably to all kinds of malignant mischief, from slander to domestic destruction." -- Chapter 50] He claimed that their intentions were to force a man to abandon his life's work for their interests. He only found women "tolerable", he wrote, when they served the role of solely helping a man in his life's work. However, he said that they were incapable of actually understanding the work. He also claimed that women did not have individuality and were solely guided by their habits or
impulses.
[(Crowley Confessions pp. 96-7)]Nevertheless, when he sought what he called the supreme magical-mystical attainment, Crowley asked
Leah Hirsig to direct his ordeals, marking the first time since the schism in the Golden Dawn that another person verifiably took charge of his initiation.
[(Sutin Do What Thou Wilt pp. 282-290)]Crowley has exerted a significant and enduring influence in popular culture, from mentions in
Ernest Hemingway novels, to tributes from rock musicians such as
Bruce Dickinson,
David Bowie,
Danny Carey,
Jimmy Page,
Ozzy Osbourne,
Cradle of Filth and
The Beatles (his face appeared on their album, Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band)
[Magical Diaries of Aleister Crowley, page IX], to incorporation into
L. Ron Hubbard's occult religions. He was also used as a character in the comic book
Hellblazer, who allegedly helped to train the hero John Constantine in occultism, He crops up as a schoolboy, morbidly curious about the Whitechapel Murders, in Alan Moore's graphic novel
From Hell, and appears as an overly emotional psuedo-vampire in
D.Gray-man. Some appearances are "important," i.e., meaningful and widely promulgated. Others are simple homages or only locally known. Crowley remains a popular icon of libertines and those interested in the theory and practice of magick.
*
List of Thelemites*
List of Occultists*
Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn*
Thelemapedia
* Bull, John. "The Wickedest Man in the World".
Sunday Express, 24 Mar. 1923. Unverified that this is the article: [
11] Verification that the Sunday Express did make article: [
12]
* Carroll, Robert Todd (2004). "
Aleister Crowley (1875-1947)". The Skeptic's Dictionary. Retrieved
30 December 2004.
*Cornelius, J. Edward (2001).
The Friends & Acquaintances of Aleister Crowley in
Red Flame: A Thelemic Research Journal no. 3.
* Crowley, Aleister(1990) "
The Tao Teh King, Liber CLVII: THE EQUINOX Vol. III. No. VIII. ASCII VERSION". Retrieved
30 December 2004.
*
Free Encyclopedia of Thelema (2005).
The Equinox. Retrieved
24 March 2005.
* Sutin, Lawrence (2000).
Do What Thou Wilt. ISBN 0312288972
* Wilson, Robert Anton (1977).
Cosmic Trigger: The Final Secret of the Illuminati. Pocket Books, New York.
*
LAShTAL.COM: Home of The Aleister Crowley Society*
Free ebook of Aleister Crowley at
Project Gutenberg*
The most complete resource for books of Crowley in PDF format*
Crowley Controversy FAQ*
Aleister Crowley: A Legacy of Racism and Nationalism*
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Entry for Aleister Crowley at the GLBTQ encyclopedia{{Persondata
NAME=Crowley, Aleister | ALTERNATIVE NAMES=Crowley, Edward Alexander (birth); Perdurabo (motto); Therion, Master (pen) | SHORT DESCRIPTION=poet, mountaineer, occultist | DATE OF BIRTH=October 12, 1875 | PLACE OF BIRTH=Clarendon Square, Leamington Spa, Warwickshire, England | DATE OF DEATH=December 1, 1947 | PLACE OF DEATH=Netherwood, Hastings, East Sussex, England
|
