ON THIS DAY IN OCCULT HISTORY
October 12
The Beast Turns 150: Happy Birthday, Aleister Crowley!
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On October 12, 1875, at 30 Clarendon
Square in Royal Leamington Spa, a boy was born to a wealthy Plymouth Brethren
family and christened Edward Alexander Crowley. His mother would come to call
him “the Beast,” a name drawn straight from the Book of Revelation, meant as a
condemnation of her rebellious son. He kept it for the rest of his life, and
eventually the whole world learned to use it too, sometimes as an insult,
sometimes as a brand, and eventually, a century on, as something closer to a
founding myth…
Very little about Aleister Crowley
survives in the popular imagination at full resolution. The two episodes that
actually built his reputation, a Himalayan disaster and a death in Sicily, are
both real, both far messier than their shorthand versions, and both worth
getting right, because the actual record is more interesting than the legend it
calcified into.
Start with Cairo, since it’s where
Crowley’s the real work began. In April 1904, honeymooning with his first wife,
Rose, Crowley performed a magical working in their rented apartment that he
said resulted in contact with a discarnate intelligence calling itself Aiwass. Over three consecutive days, one
hour each, beginning at noon, Crowley took dictation for what became Liber AL vel Legis, The Book of the Law,
the foundational scripture of the religion he would call Thelema, Greek for “will.”
Its central line, “Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law,” would
eventually appear on record sleeves, tattoos, and the cover of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts
Club Band, but in 1904 it announced something Crowley took
entirely seriously: the arrival of a New Aeon, the Aeon of Horus, superseding
everything that had come before it. Crowley himself was ambivalent about the
book for years afterward, setting it aside, losing faith in it, coming back to
it. The Ordo Templi Orientis would eventually adopt it as scripture, but that
acceptance came gradually, not all at once in a Cairo hotel room.
The following year took Crowley
somewhere considerably colder. In 1905, having already attempted K2 in 1902
with Oscar Eckenstein,
Crowley led an expedition up Kangchenjunga, the world's third-highest mountain,
alongside the Swiss climber Jules Jacot-Guillarmod,
Charles Reymond,
Alexis Pache, and a support team of porters. The expedition fell apart over
Crowley's leadership well before any avalanche struck, several of the climbers
grew so frustrated with his dictatorial and erratic command that they split off
from his group entirely. It was that breakaway party, descending separately,
that triggered the avalanche, killing Pache and three porters. Crowley, by
every account including his own, remained in his tent and made no attempt to
help. He later wrote, in a line that has followed him ever since, that he was “not
over-anxious under the circumstances to render help.” A reviewer in the Alpine
Club Journal, writing decades later in 1952, still couldn't resist noting
that mountaineering, and perhaps the world at large, would have lost nothing if
Kangchenjunga had simply buried Crowley along with the others. The popular
version of this story tends to flatten the sequence, implying Crowley's own
decisions directly caused the avalanche. The documented version is subtler and,
if anything, less flattering: the men who died had already rejected his
authority, and he let them die anyway, without even the excuse of having caused
the disaster himself.
Crowley never climbed seriously again
after Kangchenjunga, and his reputation among mountaineers never recovered. But
it was neither Cairo nor the Himalayas that actually earned him his most famous
epithet. That came in 1923, in Sicily, where Crowley had established the Abbey of Thelema, a commune in Cefalù
intended as a working laboratory for his new religion. A young follower named
Raoul Loveday died there that February, officially of enteric fever contracted
from drinking from a local spring, though rumors immediately attached themselves
to the death, fueled by lurid accounts his widow, Betty May, gave to the
British press about blood rituals and animal sacrifice. The British tabloid
press seized on the story, and it was in the aftermath of Loveday’s death that
newspapers began fixing Crowley with the title history remembers him by, the
wickedest man in the world. Benito Mussolini's government expelled him from
Italy within weeks. Crowley spent the rest of his life unable to fully outrun
the phrase, and, characteristically, eventually leaned into it rather than
fighting it.
He died broke in a Hastings boarding
house on December 1, 1947, having burned through a considerable inheritance on
travel, publishing, and extravagance. The posthumous rehabilitation took
decades: a spot on the cover of Sgt. Pepper in 1967, Jimmy Page’s
purchase of Crowley's old house Boleskine on the shores of Loch Ness, a steady
drip of scholarly biography that has spent the last fifty years doing exactly
what this post has tried to do in miniature, separating the documented record
from the tabloid legend without pretending the documented record is any less
strange.
“Do
What Thy Wilt Shall Be the Whole of the Law. Love is the Law, Love Under Will.”
Occult Reads Presents: A Full Shelf For The Beast’s Birthday
In honor of the man this entire
magazine owes so much to, we're doing something different today: instead of a
single pick, here's a full shelf, one recommendation from as many of our
affiliate publishers as we could manage, each one a genuine, considered match
rather than a token gesture.
The Holy Year of Thelema: A Guide to the Ritual Calendar of Aleister Crowley's Tradition
By
Maevius Lynn | Llewellyn, 2026
Long-time readers will recognize this
one; we gave it a full review back in Issue Three, and it's worth mentioning
again today. Our good friend, Maevius Lynn brilliantly takes Thelema’s actual
ritual calendar, the Equinox of the Gods, the Three Days of the Writing of the
Book of the Law, the solstices, and builds out a genuinely practical year-long
guide for working with it, with real attention paid to the Scarlet Women of
Thelema’s history, Rose Edith Kelly, Roddie Minor, Marie Rohling, and Leah
Hirsig, whose contributions have historically gotten far less ink than Crowley’s
own. Richard Kaczynski, whose own work appears twice more on this list, wrote
the foreword.
Young Aleister Crowley And The Magicians’ Revolt: A Novel
By
Lon Milo DuQuette and James M. Bratkowsky | Weiser Books, 2026
Occult legend DuQuette has spent over
fifty years as a member of Crowley's own order, and here he turns novelist,
imagining a young Crowley caught in the middle of the real 1900 revolt against
Mathers that splintered the Golden Dawn. Richard Kaczynski himself blurbed it
as exactly the kind of reimagining only a lifelong adept could pull off, a
sentiment this magazine shares. If you want the documented history of that
schism, we covered the real Mathers side of this story in our October 4th post.
The Weiser Concise Guide To Aleister Crowley
By
Richard Kaczynski | Weiser Books
Kaczynski's full biography, Perdurabo,
remains the single most authoritative life of Crowley in print, but it runs
over seven hundred pages. This concise guide, from the same scholar, distills
decades of that research into a genuinely accessible entry point, exactly the
kind of grounded, source-checked introduction this column always wants to point
readers toward before the wilder secondary literature. Reads this first, then
devour Kaczynski’s definitive biography.
The Way Of The Will: Thelema in Action
By
David Shoemaker | Weiser Books, 2024
Shoemaker is a practicing clinical
psychologist as well as the Chancellor of the Temple of the Silver Star, and
his work has always sat at the genuinely rare intersection of rigorous Thelemic
practice and real psychological insight. The Way of the Will extends his
earlier (and equally excellent) Living Thelema into fresh territory,
using Qabalistic psychology and the Tree of Life as tools for ordinary
psychological and spiritual growth, grounded throughout in his own decades of
walking the path he's teaching.
The Baptist’s Head Compendium: Magick as a Path to Enlightenment
By
Alan Chapman and Duncan Barford | Aeon Books, 2024
Originally published as a
hard-to-find trilogy, now gathered into one volume, this is the genuinely
unusual record of two working magicians documenting their own Crowley-descended
practice in real time, mistakes, breakthroughs, and all. Chapman and Barford
write with a candor and humor you don’t often get from occult memoir, and the
result reads less like a teaching text than an honest field report from inside
the Great Work itself.
By
Peter Grey | Scarlet Imprint, 2025
Grey's ongoing project traces the
afterlife of Thelema through the twentieth century, Jack Parsons, Marjorie
Cameron, Kenneth Anger, Grady McMurtry, and Kenneth and Steffi Grant among the
figures in his sights, the same lineage this column followed in our October 2nd
post on Parsons. This is Thelema's history written by a committed practitioner
rather than a detached academic, and it shows in every page.
Aleister Crowley In England: The Return of the Great Beast
By
Tobias Churton | Inner Traditions, 2022
Churton, who also gave us the Occult
Paris book we recommended on October 6th, turns his attention here to
Crowley's final fifteen years, the least glamorous and most under-examined
stretch of his life, spent back in England after decades of travel and
self-invention. It's a genuinely useful corrective to biographies that rush
through Crowley's old age to get back to the more sensational early decades.
(Every day, Modern Occultist News will present "This Day in Occult History" and your "Daily Occult Review" 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.)
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