CROWLEY, ALEISTER

CROWLEY, ALEISTER (1875–1947), was a British poet, novelist and occultist, infamous throughout England and the United States as "the wickedest man in the world." Reviled as a drug fiend and debauchee and proclaiming himself the "Great Beast, 666," Aleister Crowley was also one of the most important figures in the revival of modern Western occultism in the twentieth century. Although seldom taken seriously by most scholars today, Crowley was not only an accomplished poet and mountain climber, but one of the first Western students of yoga and a major influence on the rise of Neopagan witchcraft in Europe and the United States.

In many ways, Crowley might be said to embody some of the deepest tensions in late Victorian English society as a whole. The son of a preacher in the highly puritanical Plymouth Brethren sect, Crowley would later turn to the most extreme forms of sensual excess, apparently not resting until he had shattered every imaginable social and religious taboo. Born Edward Alexander Crowley, he studied at Trinity College in Cambridge, where he would change his name to Aleister, taken from Percy Bysshe Shelley's poem, "Alastor, or, The Spirit of Solitude" (1816). Having inherited a large sum of money as a young man, Crowley was able to spend much of his time pursuing his two passions, poetry and mountain climbing. During his travels in India and Sri Lanka, Crowley also studied Hinduism and Buddhism, and would publish some of the first English works on Raja Yoga.

Crowley's first initiation into the world of occultism occurred in 1898 when he was introduced to the esoteric group known as the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn. An eclectic blending of Rosicrucianism, Freemasonry, and Qabbalah, the Golden Dawn attracted a number of prominent artists and intellectuals, including W. B. Yeats. In 1904, however, Crowley received his own first great revelation and the knowledge that he was to be the herald of a new age in world history. According to his account, Crowley's guardian angel, Aiwass, spoke through Crowley's wife and dictated to him The Book of the Law (Liber AL vel Legis ). The Book of the Law announces the dawn of a third eon of human civilization: the first was the age of Isis, dominated by matriarchy and worship of the mother-goddess; the second was the age of Osiris, when the patriarchal traditions of Judaism and Christianity were dominant; and the third is the age of the son, Horus, when the individual human will is supreme. The only law in this age is the law of Thelema (derived from the Greek, meaning "will"): "do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law."

Crowley's ritual practices centered first and foremost around the art of magick, which he spelled deliberately with a k in order to distinguish it from popular ideas of magic. In Crowley's definition, magick is the science and art of causing change to occur in conformity with one's will. Influenced in part by Friedrich Nietzsche's "will to power," Crowley saw the will as the most powerful force in creation, which, when properly directed, can accomplish anything the individual desires.

One of the primary reasons for the scandal and titillation that surrounds Crowley is his practice of sexual magick. Rejecting the prudish Victorian morality in which he was raised, Crowley identified sex as the most powerful expression of the will and the most potent source of magickal energy. Taking an apparent delight in violating social taboos, Crowley also employed explicitly transgressive acts, such as masturbation, homosexuality, and bestiality, in his magickal practice. After 1910, Crowley also became involved with the esoteric group known as the Ordo Templi Orientis (OTO). The higher degrees of the OTO employed a variety of sexual rites, influenced in part by a somewhat distorted form of Hindu Tantra, a tradition that also involves sexual and transgressive rituals as a means to spiritual power. Crowley and the OTO, however, would employ sexual rites in ways that no Indian tāntrika would probably have dared to imagine.

The peak of Crowley's magickal career was the period after 1920, when he founded his own spiritual community called the Abbey of Thelema in Sicily. The original inspiration derived from François Rabelais's Gargantua and Pantagruel (1534), which describes an ideal community that would transcend the hypocrisy of Christian monasteries. Crowley took Rabelais's ideal a good deal further, however, by creating a utopian community in which every desire could be expressed through free experimentation in drugs, sex, and physical excess. During this period, he would also publish his infamous Diary of a Drug Fiend, a semiautobiographical novel written at top-speed in order to fuel his own growing drug habit.

By the end of his life, Crowley had exhausted most of his wealth and his own seemingly infinite will to power. Though he continued to believe that his Book of the Law might have a decisive role to play in the unfolding of global events during World War II, he would spent his last years in a small guest house in London, increasingly addicted to heroin, until his death in 1947.

Despite the general neglect of Crowley by most historians of religions today, he has clearly had a formative impact on almost all forms of occultism, magic, and Neopaganism in the West since the mid-twentieth century. Gerald Gardner, the founder of the Neopagan Witchcraft revival in England in the 1950s, was a great admirer of Crowley and borrowed freely from him in his rituals. At the same time, Crowley's version of sexual magic and his rather skewed interpretation of Indian Tantra has had a profound influence on the many contemporary forms of sex magic and "Western Tantra" so popular in the United States and Europe today.

Finally, on a broader historical level, Crowley could be said to embody many of the central trends in modern Europe itself in the first half of the twentieth century. With his emphasis on the power of the individual human will, his ideal of a liberated sexuality, and his hope for a utopian new age beyond all the old gods, Crowley epitomizes what Marshall Berman calls the modern Faustian self. And with Crowley's own decline into drug addiction and poverty in the 1940s, he perhaps reflects the exhaustion of those Faustian ideals and the chaos of modern Europe amidst the disaster of World War II.

See Also

Wicca.

Bibliography

Among the few academic studies of Crowley are Bradford Verter, "Dark Star Rising: The Emergence of Modern Occultism, 1800-", PH.D. Dissertation, Princeton University, 1997; and Hugh B. Urban, "The Beast with Two Backs: Aleister Crowley, Sex Magic and the Exhaustion of Modernity," Nova Religio, 7, no.3 (2004): 7-25. Despite the lack of academic scholarship on Crowley, his vast body of works exist in numerous editions; the most important include The Law is for All: The Authorized Popular Commentary on Liber AL sub figura CCXX, The Book of the Law (Tempe, Ariz, 1996), and Magick in Theory and Practice (Paris, 1929). In addition to his autobiography, The Confessions of Aleister Crowley: An Autohagiography, edited by John Symonds (New York, 1969), there are numerous biographies, the most recent of which is Lawrence Sutin, Do What Thou Wilt: A Life of Aleister Crowley (New York, 2000). Other nonacademic works include Kenneth Grant, The Magickal Revival (New York, 1973), and John Symonds, The Magic of Aleister Crowley (London, 1958). On Crowley's literary works, see Martin Booth, Aleister Crowley: Selected Poems (London, 1986).

Hugh B. Urban (2005)