Rogues' Gallery: Aleister Crowley

Ozzy Osbourne wrote songs about him. Jimmy Page lived in his house and supposedly practiced Satanic rituals there. He’s on the cover of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Heart’s Club Band (1967) right next to Mae West and Lenny Bruce. He’s influenced writers such as Neil Gaiman, Grant Morrison, and Alan Moore, to say nothing of bands like Black Sabbath, The Doors, and David Bowie. He’s also influenced movie directors like Rob Zombie and Kenneth Anger, and even showed up in a Batman spinoff. He’s Aleister Crowley — poet, occultist, mountaineer, and the subject of today’s spoo-ooky Rogues' Gallery.

Born on October 12, 1875, to fundamentalist Christian parents, Edward Alexander Crowley spent his early life in relative affluence. His father was a preacher of the Plymouth Brethren sect, and Aleister attended Trinity College at Cambridge, where he began to show an interest in esoteric religion, in defiance of his parent’s orthodoxy. He was initiated into the Order of the Golden Dawn, an Eastern esoteric religious sect, and began studying magic in 1898. He later founded several other such societies, and eventually started his own religion, Thelema.

Crowley was an outspoken social critic of the early 20th century, with an alarmingly bohemian lifestyle and outlook. He was openly bi (though he preferred “exotic women”), used drugs recreationally, and loudly spoke out in favor of Germany during World War I. Crowley claimed that his support for Germany was actually done at the behest of British Intelligence, who had supposedly recruited him at Cambridge and used him to infiltrate German military enclaves.

Crowley was an early member of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, an occult society with celebrity members including W.B. Yeats. He was expelled for his bisexuality, which led him to form his own religious order, which he called Thelema. It had various rituals for initiates at different levels, including homosexual acts. In 2014, a notebook containing heartbroken poems written for the first great love of his life, a Cambridge undergraduate named Herbert Pollitt, was discovered and auctioned off for over 12,000 pounds. Politt was a known female impersonator, and the notebook is the earliest Crowley manuscript — and the only one that made clear his love for other men. He destroyed all his other journals and notebooks because they put his role as the head priest of Thelema in jeopardy.

After the war, Crowley founded the Abbey of Thelema in Sicily, where he lived with several of his followers, preaching a doctrine of “Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law”, and practicing what he preached. He and his followers believed that the 20th century marked the beginning of the “Age of Horus”, and that it was his job as a prophet to lead humanity into its greatness during this age through a purer form of paganism. Crowley was known to be a deeply cruel man, but one who nonetheless inspired deep love and devotion in those he met.

He was a firm believer in “Magick” (his more archaic spelling) and believed that “Magick is the getting into communication with beings who exist on a higher level than ours, and mysticism is a means of raising oneself to their level.” He had many affairs with what he referred to as “Scarlet Women”, along with several men, frequently taking the passive role, befitting his love of masochism. He faked his own death, reappeared three weeks later at a gallery showing of his paintings, and fathered five children. Several of his affairs were physically and emotionally violent, and he was eventually deported by the Italian government and forced to return to England.

At the outbreak of World War II, Crowley offered his services as a spy to the British government, who politely declined. He spent his declining years in England, visited by friends and poets, and befriended the future founder of a popular branch of Wicca. He eventually died in 1947 of acute bronchitis and pleurisy. His funeral, which was sparsely attended and featured readings from his own books and other esoteric texts, was denounced in the press as a “Black Mass”.

Over the years, several rock bands adopted Crowley’s individualist freedom doctrine. Jimmy Page bought Crowley’s house in Scotland, where he shot parts of Led Zeppelin’s film, The Song Remains the Same (1976). David Bowie included a song all about Crowley in his 1971 record, Hunky Dory, called “Quicksand”, which doesn’t advocate for “The Wickedest Man in the World”, as Crowley came to be known, but questions his critics. The first lines are: “I’m closer to the Golden Dawn / clothed in Crowley’s uniform of imagery.” Situated as it is between a lullaby for his newborn son Zowie and a goofy cover of a Biff Rose song, it’s a fascinating swerve for Bowie’s zany pop culture-heavy album. John Lennon defended Crowley’s inclusion on the Sgt. Pepper’s cover, claiming “The Beatles philosophy has always been, do what thou wilt, as long as it doesn’t hurt anybody.”

As an advocate for personal freedom and individual rights and a denouncer of dogma and theological tyranny, few figures were more divisive, fascinating, and multifaceted than Crowley, the fundamentalist-turned-Satanist. He was the most influential religious iconoclast of the late 20th century, a time he didn’t even live to see. People running the gamut from hippie weirdos to artists, writers, metalheads, and film directors like Rob Zombie (whose Lords of Salem (2012) has a strong Crowleyan influence) and Roman Polanski have felt the reverberations of Crowley’s anti-theology in one way or another. Whatever thou wilt think of him, boogeyman or genius, he was one of the most fascinating thinkers of the 20th century, and his influence is still felt today.