Awful Aleister Crowley
Awful Aleister Crowley
Aleister Crowley (1875-1947) was a person of wealth who pursued demonic greatness. Most notably, he claimed to be the “Great Beast 666.”
Aleister Crowley (1875-1947) was a person of wealth who pursued demonic greatness. Most notably, he claimed to be the “Great Beast 666,” and he was the leader of a very obscure German cult called the Ordo Templi Orientis (OTO).1 Crowley owed his fortunes to being born into a religious and wealthy family in England.
Crowley was born in England and named Edward Alexander Crowley. However, he despised and rebelled against his family, and he renamed himself “Aleister” because his father had the same first name. Aleister was beyond the typical shenanigans of the boys during that era. For example, he almost killed himself making homemade fireworks, and at 17 years of age, he contracted gonorrhea from a prostitute.
Crowley attended Cambridge University, where some writings suggest that he had copious sex flings with men and women despite his crude behavior. At age 23, he joined the secret society known as the “Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn.” That group expelled Crowley in just two years, as the order did not approve of his magical methods.
In 1904, while in Egypt, Crowley reported that he had the most important experience of his life. While trying to contact his “guardian angel,” Crowley finally encountered an entity he claimed to be known as “Aiwass.” 1907 he formed the “Order of the Silver Star,” a magical organization.
In 1909 Crowley divorced his first wife because he claimed she was an alcoholic. That made it easy for him to indulge in his passion for drugs, magic, and women. At this point, Crowley claimed to be the reincarnation of some of the more notorious occultists from the past. In 1910, OTO contacted Crowley, and after some initial disagreement with the “order,” he joined. In 1912 he became the head of the English-speaking branch.
Crowley came to the United States sometime between 1912 and 1916 and took residence near Bristol, New Hampshire. Here, he promoted himself to the OTO rank of “Magus.” Crowley came to the United States to avoid the First World War, and it was here that he wrote Anti-British propaganda. In 1920 he went to Sicily to set up the “Thelema Abbey.” It was here that he also fathered a daughter named “Poupée.” 2
The Abbey was unsanitary, and drug addiction raged out of control. That was the setting for Crowley’s novel “Diary of a Drug Fiend.” Poupée died in 1920, and then one of Crowley’s “students” perished from drinking impure water. That sealed the Abbey’s fate. The student’s wife returned to England and sold her story, which told the fate of the notorious Abbey. Reports like this came during the same time as the rise of the Mussolini regime, and in 1923, Sicily expelled Crowley. In 1925 the OTO chose Crowley to be their “World Head.” In 1929 he published his major work, “Magick: In Theory and in Practice.” Today, reprints of this book are extremely popular.
After expulsion from Italy, Crowley became known as “The Wickedest Man in the World” and could not find a reliable publisher. He also failed to find a place of residence for apparent reasons and spent the rest of his life as a wanderer. The following tidbits about Crowley send shivers down the spine of cogent non-woke people:
Crowley’s two wives went insane, and five mistresses committed suicide.
One of Crowley’s more significant contributions (for lack of a better word) is the notion of putting backward messages into musical recordings. The occultist guitarist for Led Zeppelin, Jimmy Page, owns an enormous collection of Crowley memorabilia and bought Crowley’s mansion, Boleskine House, near Foyers, Scotland. Supposedly, Page placed backward-satanic messages into recordings such as “Stairway to Heaven.”
Crowley’s face is on the Beatles’ “Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band album cover.”
Crowley was named “Prophet of a New Aeon” which would end the “Age of Osiris” and usher in the “Age of Horus” (a new era had begun for humanity and the old religions were to be swept aside).
Many writings suggest that Crowley joined many different “Masonic” lodges and rose to high-ranking levels. However, these lodges were Masonic in name only and not a part of the society. As such, the true Masonic orders did not and did not recognize Crowley’s membership.
Although impoverished, disgraced, and a near-skeletal heroin addict, Crowley never lacked followers. He fathered several children, most of them illegitimately. He was still in demand as a medium and a magus, designing a new sequence of tarot cards and commenting on it at some length in his Book of Thoth of 1944. He died, in Hastings, in 1947. 3 The video “Aleister Crowley - The Great Beast 666” provides additional details about him.
Primary printed source for this blog, Hope of the Wicked by Ted Flynn, 2000
Cogent Author and Publisher, Frederick R. Smith
Cogent Editor, Sean Tinney
The letters O. T. O. stand for Ordo Templi Orientis, the Order of the Oriental Templars, or the Order of the Temple of the East. The O. T. O. claims to be “in sympathy with the traditional ideals of Freemasonry.”
Poupée in French usually means doll.
The Great Beast 666: who was Aleister Crowley? | National Trust