Aleister Crowley and Thelema: The Great Beast, the Book of the Law, and the Magic of True Will

Aleister Crowley (1875-1947), c. 1910-1913 -- poet, mountaineer, chess champion, occultist, and founder of Thelema, whose influence on twentieth-century esotericism, art, and popular culture remains unmatched

He called himself the Great Beast 666. The tabloids of his era called him "the wickedest man in the world." His students called him the Master Therion. He called himself a poet, a mountaineer, a magician, a prophet. None of these descriptions is wrong. None is complete.

Aleister Crowley (1875-1947) is the most controversial figure in the history of Western esotericism -- which is, given the competition, saying something. He was a genuine polymath: published poet, skilled chess player, accomplished mountaineer (he led early expeditions to K2 and Kanchenjunga), and an occultist whose systematic reconstruction of the Western magical tradition shaped virtually everything that followed him, including modern Wicca, chaos magic, and vast swaths of popular music and visual culture.

He was also, by any measure, a difficult human being: vain, cruel to his collaborators, financially irresponsible, addicted to heroin in his later years, and possessed of a gift for self-promotion that he combined with a genuine gift for provocation. He understood that the most effective way to ensure that people would take him seriously as a religious innovator was to make himself as scandalous as possible -- and he was right. More than seventy-five years after his death, people are still reading his books and arguing about what he meant.

The teaching he founded is called Thelema (from the Greek word for "will"), and its central text -- received, he claimed, from a praeterhuman intelligence in a Cairo hotel room in 1904 -- remains one of the strangest and most debated documents in the history of Western mysticism.

The Making of the Magus: Golden Dawn and the Early Years

Edward Alexander Crowley was born on October 12, 1875, in Leamington Spa, England, into a family of wealthy Plymouth Brethren -- a strict fundamentalist Protestant sect that took the Book of Revelation with aggressive literal seriousness. His mother, in a moment of frustration, called him "the Beast" -- a reference to the Antichrist of Revelation -- and the label stuck with him his entire life, worn with relish.

His father died when Crowley was eleven. Released from the family's religious constraints by his inheritance, he went to Cambridge (Trinity College, 1895-1898), where he studied philosophy, wrote poetry, and discovered his vocation in the hidden spaces between chess tournaments and mountaineering expeditions.

In 1898, he joined the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn -- the most prestigious and intellectually sophisticated magical organization in Victorian Britain, whose membership included William Butler Yeats, Arthur Machen, Florence Farr, and Algernon Blackwood. The Golden Dawn synthesized Kabbalah, Hermeticism, Enochian magic (derived from John Dee's communications with angels), Tarot, astrology, and Egyptian religion into a graded system of initiation and magical practice.

Aleister Crowley in the ritual robes of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, c. 1899-1900. His brief membership in the Order shaped the entire structure of his subsequent magical system.

Crowley's relationship with the Golden Dawn was predictably explosive. He advanced rapidly but was blocked from higher grades by senior members, including Yeats, who found him personally intolerable. He allied himself with Samuel Liddell MacGregor Mathers (the Order's chief, who was feuding with the London lodge) and was eventually expelled in 1900. He took with him a comprehensive knowledge of the Golden Dawn's ritual system -- and a determination to surpass it.

The following years were marked by travel: Mexico, Ceylon (now Sri Lanka), India, Egypt. In Ceylon, he studied Raja Yoga under the scholar Allan Bennett. He climbed in the Himalayas. He married Rose Kelly, the sister of a friend. And in Cairo in the spring of 1904, everything changed.

The Cairo Working: The Book of the Law

In April 1904, Crowley and Rose were living in Cairo when Rose began receiving what she described as communications: a presence was trying to reach her husband. She led him to the Stele of Revealing -- a 26th-dynasty Egyptian funerary stele in the Boulaq Museum, numbered 666 in the catalog, depicting the priest Ankh-af-na-Khonsu before the hawk-headed deity Ra-Hoor-Khuit.

For three days, April 8, 9, and 10, between noon and one o'clock, Crowley sat in a specially prepared room and took dictation from what identified itself as Aiwass -- described as "the minister of Hoor-paar-kraat" (Harpocrates, the god of silence), a praeterhuman intelligence distinct from any human consciousness. The result was Liber AL vel Legis, the Book of the Law: three chapters of compressed, highly charged verse addressed to three Egyptian deities.

The three chapters are attributed to Nuit (the goddess of infinite space and the night sky, "continuous one of Heaven"), Hadit (the winged serpent, the point of view, the flame within every heart -- Nuit's complement, the infinitely small), and Ra-Hoor-Khuit (the hawk-headed warrior, the conquering child who is the synthesis of the other two).

The Book's central proclamation is a philosophical formula that has been misunderstood, deliberately distorted, and used to justify every possible behavior since it was written: "Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law. Love is the law, love under will." These two sentences are inseparable. Crowley was not announcing license. He was announcing the most demanding possible spiritual obligation: to discover one's True Will -- the deepest purpose of one's existence -- and to act in accordance with it, with love as the motivating force.

Thelema: The Philosophy of Will

The word Thelema appears in the New Testament (specifically in the Lord's Prayer: "Thy will be done") and was used by Rabelais in the sixteenth century to name a fictional utopian abbey whose only rule was "Do what you will" -- a passage Crowley knew well and drew on consciously.

In Crowley's system, the True Will is not personal desire or whim. It is the fundamental purpose of each individual being, the unique axis along which each life is meant to move -- what one might call, in the language of other traditions, the soul's deepest calling or one's dharma. Finding the True Will requires sustained self-knowledge and the dissolution of the false personality that obscures it. Living the True Will requires courage, clarity, and the constant testing of oneself against resistance.

"Every man and every woman is a star," the Book of the Law declares -- each consciousness a unique expression of infinite light, with its own orbit, its own nature, its own purpose in the cosmic order. The Thelemic universe is not hierarchical in the conventional religious sense. There is no God commanding obedience from above. There is the Law of Liberty: each star moving in its own orbit, each will expressing its own nature, with love as the universal principle that holds the constellation together.

Crowley described the current historical moment as the Aeon of Horus -- the age of the crowned and conquering child, successor to the Aeon of Osiris (the age of the dying and resurrected god, associated with Christianity) and before it the Aeon of Isis (the age of the great mother goddess). The Aeon of Horus is characterized by the sovereignty of the individual will -- not the obedience of the devotee to an external authority.

Magick: The Science and Art of Will

Crowley's definition of Magick (the archaic spelling with a final 'k' to distinguish it from stage magic) became the standard definition in Western occultism: "the science and art of causing change to occur in conformity with will."

This definition is deliberately broad. Everything a person does that changes the world in accordance with their will is magick. The specific techniques of ceremonial magic -- ritual, invocation, evocation, visualization, banishing -- are tools for training and focusing the will, not means of gaining supernatural power over external reality.

His major practical works include: Magick in Theory and Practice (1929), his systematic treatment of ritual magic; 777 (1909), a set of comprehensive tables correlating every element of the Kabbalistic, astrological, Tarot, and other systems; The Book of Lies (1913), a set of 91 paradoxical chapters; and the Thoth Tarot (designed with the mathematician and artist Frieda Harris, published 1942-1944), arguably the most sophisticated Tarot deck ever created.

Crowley also articulated the concept of the Knowledge and Conversation of the Holy Guardian Angel -- the supreme magical operation of his system, equivalent to the concept of union with one's higher self or awakening to one's True Will. This operation, derived from the medieval grimoire known as The Book of the Sacred Magic of Abramelin the Mage, became the central goal of his A:.A:. (Astrum Argenteum, the Silver Star), the order he founded in 1907 to replace the Golden Dawn.

The Entity and the Abyss

In 1917, during a period of work in New York, Crowley produced a portrait of an entity he called Lam -- depicted as a large-headed, small-featured being with almond-shaped eyes, strangely anticipating the "grey alien" imagery that would not become culturally ubiquitous until the post-war UFO era. Whether Lam was a product of Crowley's imagination, a projection from his unconscious, or something encountered in a genuinely non-ordinary state of consciousness is a question that the Thelemic tradition continues to debate.

Crowley's portrait of "Lam," a praeterhuman entity he reportedly contacted in 1917. The striking resemblance to modern depictions of extraterrestrial beings has made this image one of the most discussed in the history of occultism.

The question is emblematic of the larger question that Crowley's entire career poses: where does the genuinely numinous end and the theatrical self-construction begin? Crowley was aware of this question and, characteristically, refused to answer it in a way that would let the observer off the hook. His stated epistemology -- scientific illuminism: "the method of science; the aim of religion" -- demanded that spiritual experience be tested, recorded, and verified as rigorously as any other kind of experience. Whether he lived up to this standard is another question entirely.

The Legacy: From Wicca to Rock and Roll

Crowley's influence on subsequent culture is pervasive and often unacknowledged.

Gerald Gardner, the founder of modern Wicca, borrowed heavily from Crowley's ritual system in constructing Gardnerian Wicca's Book of Shadows -- including specific passages from Crowley's Gnostic Mass and his ritual poetry. Wicca's framing of magic as the art of directing will and the "Rede" ("an it harm none, do what ye will") is clearly Thelemic in ancestry.

Jack Parsons, the brilliant rocket scientist and co-founder of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), was a devoted member of the Thelemic OTO (Ordo Templi Orientis) and conducted a series of magical workings in Pasadena in 1946 -- the Babalon Working -- designed to invoke the Thelemic goddess Babalon into material incarnation. His subsequent partner in these workings was a young science fiction writer named L. Ron Hubbard, who went on to found Scientology.

In popular music, the Thelemic aesthetic shaped the work of Jimmy Page (who owned Crowley's former home, Boleskine House, and collected his manuscripts and paintings), David Bowie, and the entire trajectory of heavy metal occultism. The Beatles included Crowley's image on the cover of Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band (1967). Jay-Z has been photographed wearing Thelemic-branded clothing.

The Inner Meaning: Every Star in Its Orbit

The aspect of Crowley's teaching that endures beyond his personal notoriety is its core philosophical insight: that spiritual practice is not about conforming to an external ideal -- of God, of morality, of tradition -- but about discovering and living one's authentic nature, which is itself divine.

"Do what thou wilt" is not easy. It requires knowing what you will -- genuinely, at the deepest level, before the noise of conditioning and fear and social performance. It requires honesty that most people spend their lives avoiding. It requires the willingness to disappoint others, to refuse the roles assigned to you, to find out who you actually are beneath the person you have been told to be.

Every man and every woman is a star. Each unique. Each moving in its own orbit. Each expressing something that has never existed before and will never exist again in the same form.

That is not a license for selfishness. It is a demand for authenticity. The universe did not go to all this trouble to produce you so that you could spend your life being someone else.

- Lux Esoterica