March 30

“All You Need Is Love (Under Will)…”

On March 30, 1967, Michael Cooper photographed the most famous album cover in history—and Aleister Crowley, expelled from the Golden Dawn sixty-seven years earlier, stared out from the back row

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Yesterday we told the story of how the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn imploded on March 29, 1900 — expelled its own founder, produced a masked intruder in a Highland kilt, and inadvertently seeded the entire modern Western magical tradition. Today, exactly sixty-seven years later, the most famous figure to emerge from that explosion arrived at a photographer's studio in Chelsea and took his place in history.

On March 30, 1967, the Beatles walked into Michael Cooper's studio at 4 Chelsea Manor Studios on Flood Street and posed for what would become the cover of Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band. Among the seventy-odd cardboard cutouts and life-sized photographic figures assembled behind them—Bob Dylan, Marilyn Monroe, Oscar Wilde, Karl Marx, Mae West, William Burroughs, Fred Astaire, Shirley Temple—stood the unmistakable bald-headed, piercing-eyed image of Aleister Crowley. The Great Beast 666. The most notorious occultist of the twentieth century. Staring out from the top-left corner of the most successful album cover ever produced, into the living rooms of approximately every household on Earth.

The signs are always given. The knowledge is always available. And occasionally, it ends up owning the top forty.

The Most Famous Crowd Scene in History

The concept for the cover had originated with “the cute one” himself, Paul McCartney, who imagined a kind of ceremonial group portrait: the Beatles in costume as Sgt. Pepper's fictional band, surrounded by the people they most admired—a gathering of heroes, influences, and fascinating figures as if assembled for a grand concert. Each Beatle was invited to submit a list of ten people they would like to perform in front of.

The execution fell to Peter Blake and his wife Jann Haworth, two of the leading lights of British Pop Art, who spent the better part of a week assembling life-sized cardboard cutouts from photographs and paintings, constructing what Blake called a magical crowd of whoever they wanted. Art dealer Robert Fraser served as art director, bringing his particular taste for the transgressive and the visually arresting. The total cost of the production—nearly three thousand pounds—exceeded any album cover budget in rock history to that point.

On the morning of March 30th, the set was ready. Blake and Haworth had arranged their assembled company behind a floral display spelling out the band's name. Wax figures on loan from Madame Tussaud's represented the earlier, mop-topped incarnation of the band. The four Beatles themselves—resplendent in the brilliantly colored Edwardian military uniforms designed for the occasion—arrived at the studio in the late afternoon. By most accounts, at least two of them arrived considerably elevated. "If you look closely at the album cover," Lennon later said with characteristic deadpan, "you'll see two people who are flying, and two who aren't."

Michael Cooper shot the photographs. The cover—along with its gatefold interior, the first album sleeve to feature printed lyrics, and the extraordinary packet of cutout extras that accompanied it—would be released with the album on June 1, 1967, winning a Grammy for Best Album Cover and becoming one of the most studied, analyzed, and imitated images in the history of recorded music.

A Strange Compromise…

The story of who almost made it onto the Sgt. Pepper cover is, for the readers of Modern Occultist, considerably more interesting than the story of who did.

John Lennon's wish list was, by any measure, the most audacious. He wanted Jesus Christ. He wanted Adolf Hitler. He wanted Mahatma Gandhi. He wanted Aleister Crowley. This was only a few months after Lennon's notorious "more popular than Jesus" comment had caused records to be burned across the American Bible Belt, so his appetite for provocation was clearly undiminished. EMI drew the line at Hitler—Peter Blake later confirmed that a cutout had actually been constructed and positioned behind the band before being moved out of frame. Gandhi was vetoed by EMI boss Sir Joseph Lockwood, who worried that the album would not sell in India. Christ, perhaps unsurprisingly given the recent controversy, was quietly shelved. But Crowley—Crowley stayed.

Jann Haworth recalled the decision with characteristic directness: "John had Hitler down as one of his choices along with Aleister Crowley. We left Crowley and took Hitler out."

Let that sentence sit for a moment. In the editorial calculus of the most commercially successful band in the history of recorded music, working with one of the world's major record labels, in 1967: Hitler was too controversial. Crowley was fine. The man who had been called the wickedest man in the world. The self-styled Great Beast 666. The prophet of Thelema. The architect of Do what thou wilt. The expelled Chief Adept-adjacent figure whose twenty-four-year-old self had arrived at a London occult temple in a black mask and Highland regalia fifty-seven years earlier. That man — photographed from sometime in the Edwardian era, staring with characteristic intensity from beneath his bald pate — was deemed acceptable company for the Beatles, Bob Dylan, Marilyn Monroe, and Shirley Temple.

He made the cut.

But Why Crowley?

Most accounts credit Paul McCartney with the specific choice of Crowley, though the decision was likely informed by the prevailing cultural atmosphere of 1967 London as much as any deep personal investment in Thelemic philosophy. The Summer of Love was weeks away. Psychedelia had arrived. The counterculture was voraciously consuming anything that challenged the established order—and Crowley, dead since 1947, had spent his entire life doing precisely that. The revival of interest in Crowley among British youth in the mid-1960s was real and documented. Jimmy Page, who would purchase Crowley's former home at Boleskine House on the shores of Loch Ness, was already collecting Crowley's paintings and manuscripts. David Bowie would later cite Crowley as a significant influence. Ozzy Osbourne would write a song about him. The esoteric tradition Crowley had done so much to shape — through his post-Golden Dawn work, through the O.T.O., through the publication of his magical writings in The Equinox — was quietly infiltrating the consciousness of the rock generation.

In 1967, putting Crowley on the album cover was a cultural signal as much as a personal statement. It said: we are not your parents' entertainment. We are part of a different tradition — one that runs through Blake and through the occult underground and through the rejection of every moral and spiritual authority that the Establishment holds dear. Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law. Even if, in practice, what thou wilt is mostly to write extraordinary pop songs and sell records to teenagers.

There is also a remarkable numerological footnote that Crowley himself—a man who believed passionately in the hidden significance of numbers—would have savored. Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band was released on June 1, 1967. Its opening lyrics: "It was twenty years ago today, Sgt. Pepper taught the band to play." Crowley had died on December 1, 1947. The album appeared on the twentieth anniversary of his death, give or take six months. Whether this was deliberate or coincidental, it was the kind of synchronicity that Crowley spent his career insisting the universe was full of.

The Afterlife of an Appearance

Crowley's place on the Sgt. Pepper cover matters beyond the anecdote because of what it represents in the longer arc of occult history we have been tracing all week.

Consider the journey. He was born in 1875 into a Plymouth Brethren household of crushing evangelical piety. He joined the Golden Dawn in 1898, was expelled alongside Mathers in 1900—having arrived at the London temple in a black mask to seize it by force. He went on to receive The Book of the Law in Cairo in 1904, founded Thelema, established the A∴A∴ and later headed the O.T.O., published decades of magical instruction in The Equinox, and died broke and largely forgotten in a Hastings boarding house in 1947. His death merited no significant obituary in the mainstream press.

Twenty years later, he was on the most famous album cover in history. Twenty years after that, his influence had permeated every corner of the Western countercultural world—music, art, literature, the emerging Neopagan and Wiccan movements, the entire ceremonial magic revival that continues to this day. The system he had helped build, drawing directly on what Mathers had synthesized in the Golden Dawn, had become the invisible architecture of modern Western esotericism.

The occult always survives its own suppressions. We have seen this all week: Gabriel's feast day abolished by committee and yet the angel persists. Dante's Gnostic vision domesticated into a patriotic hymn and yet the fire remains. The Murder Act's inadvertent contribution to gothic literature. The pagan Wends given a century's reprieve by a saint's political calculation. Blake's Jerusalem stripped of its radical pronoun and yet still burning. The Golden Dawn's spectacular collapse producing the very tradition it was supposed to guard.

And now Crowley—thrown out of his own order, outlived by everyone, dying in obscurity—staring calmly from the top corner of an object that entered more homes than any other cultural artifact of the twentieth century. The Beast would have been delighted. Twenty years after his death, the Great Beast made the cover. The Great Work, it turns out, has excellent timing.

(Every day, Modern Occultist News will present "This Day in Occult History" and will dive into the birthdays, rituals, breakthroughs, and crucial moments that shaped today's many esoteric traditions. From the Hermetic revival to Witchcraft, from Crowley to cyberspace, we'll bring the best stories and latest trends to today's own modern occultists everywhere.)

Modern Occultist