The heroric story of Crowley:On this days 1947, the bisexual and drug-using novelist.

 The heroric story of Crowley:On this days  1947, the bisexual and drug-using novelist.

On this days  1947, the bisexual and drug-using novelist,mountaineer, poet, artist, occultist, magician, and founder of the esoteric religion of Thelema, Aleister Crowley, died of bronchitis at the age of 72 in Hastings, Sussex.

 A colourful and controversial figure during his lifetime, Crowley believed himself to be a prophet that would lead humanity into a new era and is still considered as such amongst certain Thelemic circles (Crowley pictured in the attire of the Order of the Golden Dawn).

Crowley was born in 1875 in Warwickshire.

 His parents were both devout Evangelical Christians and belonged to the fundamentalist group by the name of the Plymouth Brethren.

 Crowley’s father was especially pious and served as a travelling preacher for the group.

 Though Crowley would ultimately rebel against Christianity, being labelled by his disapproving mother as “The Beast”, the precedent of faithful adherence to spiritual and religious beliefs was founded early on in his home environment.

 After his father died of tongue cancer in 1888, the young Crowley started to divert from the religious path his parents had set for him. 

He openly challenged his religion teachers at school and highlighted the inconsistencies of the Bible.

 As a teenager he flung aside Christian morality altogether by taking up smoking and sleeping with prostitutes. 

Cantankerous and misbehaving as he was, he developed a great interest in chess, poetry, literature and mountaineering – the latter of which he especially took to.  

In 1896 he travelled to Stockholm where he had his first spiritual experience upon discovering his bisexuality. 

The experience ate away at him and after briefly attempting to become a diplomat in Tsarist Russia, he devoted his full attention to his study of the occult and esotericism.

In 1898 he met a chemist in Switzerland who shared his obsession with alchemy. 

Through this connection, Crowley was introduced to the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn in London and was initiated by the Order’s eccentric founder and leader, Samuel Lidell MacGregor Mathers.

 Under the supervision of a tutor, Crowley was schooled in the use of ceremonial magic, ritual drug-use, and the rites of demonology. 

In 1899 he bought himself a house at Loch Ness, named himself the “Laird of Boleskine”, and took to wearing Highland attire as he preached the beliefs of the Golden Dawn.

 At about this time a feud arose between him and other members of the Order, amongst whom was the Irish poet, W.B Yeats, and was refused from entering the inner circle of the Order. Only when Crowley appealed to Mathers himself was he admitted. 

Not long afterwards, a schism arose in the order and Mathers tasked Crowley with seizing the Order’s temple, the so-called ‘Vault of the Adepts” in West Kensington.

Thereafter Crowley went on a world tour, travelling to Mexico, San Francisco, Hawaii, Hong Kong, Japan, Ceylon, and India. 

All through his travels he engaged in numerous romantic affairs and continued to practice his magic. 

In India he took up the practice of Raja Yoga and claimed to have attained the state of Dhyana. In 1902 he attempted to climb the perilous slopes of K2, the second highest mountain in the world.

 After contracting malaria, influenza, and being afflicted with snow blindness too, he was forced to turn back after climbing 20,000 feet. Thereafter he returned to his Scottish home and married a woman by the name of Rose Edith Kelly to save her from an arranged marriage. 

The two of them took off to Egypt in 1904, both of them claiming to be members of European royalty, and indulged in Islamic mysticism. 

During their time there his wife reportedly became delirious and started chanting “they are waiting for you.

” Crowley interpreted this to be the Egyptian god Horus and thereat had his epiphany that he was the prophet chosen to bring humanity into the new Aeon of Horus. 

This served as the foundation of his Thelema belief system and was outlined in his “Book of the Law”.

Upon his return to Scotland he came to believe that his old master from the Golden Dawn, MacGregor Mathers, was using magic against him, and he subsequently broke away from the organisation.

 Thereafter he attempted to climb Kanchenjunga in the Himalayas, his expedition resulting in mutiny against him for his recklessness. Defeated by the mountain, he undertook another tour of India, Burma, and southern China, all the time performing rituals to his guardian angel. 

Upon his return to England he began to rely increasingly on Hashish for his mystical activities and this coupled with all his travelling ate into his finances. 

To earn money he was hired by the Earl of Tankerville to protect him from “witchcraft” only to find out that the Earl’s paranoid fears were simply the result of cold turkey from cocaine addiction.

 Nevertheless he started taking on students who paid for tutelage in magic and occultism. He founded his own mystical order based on the model of the Golden Dawn in 1907.

 In 1909 he travelled to Algeria and engaged in a ceremony of sex magic and blood sacrifice in honour of the demon Choronzon, an experience he believed to have heighted his magical abilities.

Upon his return to Britain, he began to acquire much attention from the press for his esoteric practices and unconventional lifestyle, being labelled in one newspaper as “one of the most blasphemous and cold-blooded villains of modern times". 

About this time he also started making connections with fellow occultists in Germany who conferred upon him the title of “Sovereign Grand Master General of Ireland, Iona, and the Britons.

” Indeed, Crowley proclaimed himself to be of Irish descent and openly supported Irish nationalism and espoused support for Germany against Britain once the First World War broke out. 

By the time the war broke out he had moved to the United States and was writing for the pro-German paper called “The Fatherland” in which he once asserted Kaiser Wilhelm II to be the new Jesus Christ. In 1915 he stood before the Statue of Liberty and declared Irish Independence.

 He later claimed that the purpose of all this was to infiltrate the German espionage network for British intelligence and to make the pro-German lobby look ridiculous.

After the war he consulted with an ancient Chinese divination text to find a location suitable for a commune to be founded for his new Thelemite following. 

The place he chose was Cefalú, Sicily. He established an abbey there with his followers, spending his days garbed in robes worshipping ancient gods, indulging in heroin – which was prescribed to him by a doctor to treat his asthma – and performing acts of sex magic.

 Crowley’s idealistic community swiftly began to fall apart however. With no one assigned to cleaning duties, their ‘Abbey’ became the home of feral cats and dogs and fell into disarray. 

As the occult practices became more extreme moreover, eventually word got out to the real world with horror stories of blood sacrifices and people being forced to cut themselves every time they used the pronoun “I”.

 Newspapers across Europe and America had a field day with this and eventually returned to Italy where Mussolini had the commune shut down and Crowley turfed out. 

Thereafter he drifted between the countries, continuing with his same old habits of drug use and manifold romances.

 When Hitler first rose to power in Germany he hoped that the dictator might convert to the Thelemite fold, though he subsequently branded the tyrant to be a “black magician” when the Nazi’s shut down his organisation in Berlin. 

Though he volunteered for the Royal Navy in 1939, he was rather unsurprisingly turned down given both his reputation and his age.

 The last years of his life were spent struggling with his asthma condition while he designed a tarot card set and published his final works. 

As he neared the end of his life he entrust the Thelema to his German follower Karl Germer in the hope that he would continue the cause and bring about the new Aeon of Horus where paganism would be restored and the old Christian world destroyed. 

While his idealistic aspiration clearly never came to fruition, his legacy lives on as his writings continue to influence people in esoteric circles and the Thelemites continue to be active to the present day.