- MagTalk Discussion Audio
- The Man Who Would Be The Beast
- The Making of a Magus: From Pious Youth to Golden Dawn
- “Do What Thou Wilt”: The Birth of Thelema
- The Beast in Practice: Rituals, Raids, and Reputation
- The Immortal Legacy: How Crowley Haunts the 21st Century
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MagTalk Discussion Audio
The MagTalk Discussion deep dive audio episode is not a mere reading of the article, but a lively discussion of it, so even if you decide to read the article, you may want to listen to this episode as well.
The Man Who Would Be The Beast
There are names that come pre-loaded with a certain baggage, a weight of reputation that precedes them. Dracula. Frankenstein. And in the annals of real-life bogeymen, few names carry the same dark, theatrical thunder as Aleister Crowley. Dubbed “The Wickedest Man in the World” by the salivating tabloid press of his day, Crowley cultivated an image of such profound moral and spiritual rebellion that he has achieved a peculiar kind of immortality. He was a poet, a world-class mountaineer, a painter, a novelist, a ceremonial magician, a drug enthusiast, a spy (perhaps), and a spiritual prophet. To his acolytes, he was the Great Beast 666, the herald of a new age of human consciousness. To his detractors, he was a depraved charlatan, a black magician who presided over drug-fueled orgies and left a trail of ruined lives in his wake.
He died in a humble boarding house in 1947, reportedly with the final words, “I am perplexed.” But his influence, his mythos, and his central philosophy did not die with him. If anything, his death was a fantastic career move. In the decades since, his specter has haunted the fringes of Western culture, his face famously appearing on the cover of The Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, his ethos of radical self-determination absorbed by the rock gods of the 60s and 70s, and his esoteric writings forming the bedrock for countless modern spiritual and occult movements. To understand Crowley is to understand a quintessential iconoclast, a figure who kicked so violently against the stuffy, sanctimonious backdrop of Victorian England that the echo of his rebellion still reverberates today. So, let’s pull back the velvet curtain on the man who courted infamy as a lover and, in doing so, ensured his name would never be forgotten.
The Making of a Magus: From Pious Youth to Golden Dawn
To understand the rebel, you must first understand the world he was rebelling against. Edward Alexander Crowley was born in 1875 into a wealthy, upper-class English family who were devout members of the Plymouth Brethren, a fundamentalist and notoriously strict Christian sect. His childhood was a pressure cooker of biblical literalism and suffocating moral piety. Young Aleister, a precocious and fiercely intelligent boy, reacted to this environment not with submission, but with total, theatrical defiance. It was his own mother who first gave him his famous moniker, “The Beast,” a title he would gleefully adopt and embellish for the rest of his life. He saw the hypocrisy and repression of his religious upbringing as a cage, and he would dedicate his existence to smashing it to pieces.
A Poet, a Mountaineer, and a Spy? The Many Hats of a Young Crowley
Before he was the Great Beast, Crowley was a student at Trinity College, Cambridge, where he excelled in poetry (he would publish his own works throughout his life) and chess. He also discovered a passion for mountaineering, becoming a highly respected and fearless climber who took part in early expeditions to treacherous peaks like K2 and Kanchenjunga. This wasn’t just a hobby; it was a core part of his psyche. The act of pitting his will against the raw, unforgiving power of a mountain was a physical manifestation of his life’s philosophy.
During these years, his life was already becoming a tapestry of apocryphal tales. It has been long rumored that he was recruited into the British intelligence services, using his international travels and his knack for infiltrating esoteric circles as a cover for espionage. While concrete proof is elusive, the idea of Crowley as a kind of occult James Bond—a “Patriot for the Devil’s Party”—adds another layer to his already labyrinthine persona.
The Golden Dawn: A School for Scandal and Sorcery
Upon coming into his family inheritance, Crowley was free to pursue his true passion: the occult. He found his way to the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, the most influential magical society of its time. This was no coven of teenage goths; its members included Nobel laureates like W.B. Yeats, authors like Arthur Machen, and a host of London’s cultural elite. Here, Crowley found a structured system of ceremonial magic, Qabalah, and esoteric philosophy that gave language and method to his burgeoning spiritual ambitions.
However, Crowley’s ego and ambition were too massive to be contained. He clashed spectacularly with other members, including Yeats and the Order’s leader, Samuel Liddell MacGregor Mathers. The conflicts were a mixture of high-minded magical disputes and petty, pompous squabbling, culminating in Crowley attempting a “magical attack” to take over the Order’s London branch. He was ultimately expelled, but he had taken what he needed: a foundational knowledge of Western magic that he would now remold into something entirely his own.
“Do What Thou Wilt”: The Birth of Thelema
If the Golden Dawn was Crowley’s undergraduate education in magic, then a trip to Cairo in 1904 was his doctoral thesis, delivered by a messenger from another dimension. It was here, with his first wife Rose, that the central, defining event of his life occurred. Rose, who had previously shown no interest in the occult, began entering trance states and telling him that the Egyptian god Horus was trying to contact him. Though initially skeptical, Crowley followed her instructions and, over three days—April 8th, 9th, and 10th—he performed a ritual in his hotel room during which he transcribed a text dictated to him by a discarnate entity named Aiwass.
The Cairo Working and The Book of the Law
This text, comprising three short chapters, would become known as Liber AL vel Legis, or The Book of the Law. It was the foundational scripture of Crowley’s new spiritual philosophy, which he named Thelema (the Greek word for “Will”). The book is a strange, potent cocktail of poetry, prophecy, and philosophical declarations, written in a tone that is at once majestic, violent, and ecstatic. Its message was a radical break from the “slave-god” religions of the past, which Crowley believed were defined by sin and guilt. The era of the “dying god” (like Osiris or Christ) was over, he declared. The Aeon of Horus, the crowned and conquering child, had begun.
Deconstructing the Will: Not Just “Do Whatever You Want”
The most famous, and most wildly misunderstood, phrase from The Book of the Law is its central tenet: “Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law.” On the surface, this sounds like a simple call to hedonism, a teenager’s fantasy of consequence-free indulgence. This misinterpretation became the cornerstone of Crowley’s public notoriety. The tabloid press painted a picture of a man who advocated for giving in to every dark and selfish impulse.
However, for Crowley and for Thelemites, the meaning is far more profound and demanding. “Do what thou wilt” does not mean “do whatever you want.” It refers to discovering and carrying out one’s “True Will”—a person’s unique, divine purpose or destiny in life. It’s the highest calling that is in perfect alignment with the flow of the universe. To discover your True Will is the ultimate spiritual quest, requiring intense self-examination, discipline, and the stripping away of all the false desires, social conditioning, and habits that obscure it. A second phrase completes the law: “Love is the law, love under will.” This implies that the expression of one’s will should be an act of love, a union with the universe. In this framework, actions like rape or murder are not expressions of True Will, but profound deviations from it.
The Beast in Practice: Rituals, Raids, and Reputation
Armed with his new prophetic text, Crowley set about living and promoting Thelema with his characteristic blend of serious magical work and outrageous publicity stunts. He founded his own magical orders, the A∴A∴ and the Ordo Templi Orientis (O.T.O.), the latter of which he remade into the primary vehicle for spreading Thelema to the world.
The Abbey of Thelema: A Utopian Experiment or a Destructive Cult?
Perhaps the most infamous chapter in Crowley’s life was his establishment of the Abbey of Thelema in Cefalù, Sicily, in 1920. This was meant to be a spiritual commune, a “college of magic” where a small group of followers could live according to Thelemic principles and practice intensive rituals. The reality, however, was a far cry from a spiritual utopia. The Abbey was a place of extreme drug use (heroin and cocaine were staples), ritualized sexuality, and intense psychological training that pushed its members to their limits.
The experiment came to a crashing halt when a beloved disciple, Raoul Loveday, died at the Abbey, likely from drinking contaminated water. Loveday’s wife, Betty May, returned to London and sold a sensationalized, lurid tale to the newspapers. The press had a field day, painting the Abbey as a den of black magic, human sacrifice, and unspeakable debauchery. Crowley, “The Wickedest Man in the World,” was born. The scandal led to Mussolini’s fascist government expelling him from Italy in 1923, and the Abbey fell into ruin.
Magick with a “K”: What Was He Actually Doing?
So what was the “Magick” Crowley was practicing? He famously added the “k” to the word to differentiate his practice from stage magic and illusion. For him, Magick was “the Science and Art of causing Change to occur in conformity with Will.” This is a broad definition. At its heart, Crowleyan Magick is a system of spiritual psychology. The elaborate rituals, with their robes, daggers, and incantations, were not about summoning literal demons to do one’s bidding. They were psychodramas designed to explore the depths of the subconscious, confront personal limitations (or “demons”), and ultimately unite the individual consciousness with the divine. It was a pragmatic, if unorthodox, path to self-knowledge and spiritual enlightenment, drawing on Eastern yoga, Western ceremonial magic, and modern scientific principles.
The Immortal Legacy: How Crowley Haunts the 21st Century
Crowley died in relative obscurity and poverty, but his posthumous career has been spectacular. His ideas, too radical for his own time, found fertile ground in the rebellious soil of the mid-20th century.
The Counter-Culture Prophet
The 1960s counter-culture, with its rejection of mainstream authority and its exploration of altered states of consciousness through drugs and Eastern mysticism, was essentially a mainstream manifestation of the ideals Crowley had championed fifty years earlier. “Do what thou wilt” became the unofficial mantra of a generation. Rock and roll, in particular, became a conduit for his influence. Led Zeppelin guitarist Jimmy Page was a serious collector of Crowleyana and even bought his former home on the shores of Loch Ness. David Bowie referenced him. And Ozzy Osbourne, in his own tongue-in-cheek way, penned the tribute “Mr. Crowley.” He became a dark icon of artistic and personal freedom, a symbol of rebellion against the establishment.
Man, Myth, or Monster?: The Final Verdict
So who was Aleister Crowley? The truth is, he was all the things his reputation suggests, and more. He was undoubtedly a brilliant poet and a philosopher of considerable depth. He was also a narcissist of monumental proportions, a pompous and often cruel man whose treatment of his “Scarlet Women” and disciples was frequently appalling. He was a spiritual seeker who dedicated his life to a profound quest for enlightenment, and he was a self-promoting charlatan who knew the value of a good headline.
He is not a figure to be easily lionized or dismissed. He is a paradox. And perhaps that is the source of his immortality. Aleister Crowley created a system that forces the individual to find their own path, their own truth, their own “will.” He refused to provide easy answers, and in his life and work, he embodies the messy, contradictory, and often dangerous business of being truly, radically free. He remains the Great Beast, not because he was purely evil, but because he represents the untamed wilderness of the human spirit that Victorian society—and perhaps our own—tries so hard to pave over. He is the eternal shadow, the question mark, the wicked man who will not die.
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