Aleister Crowley

The Great Beast. Poet, mountaineer, magician — and, the files hint, British intelligence.

The newspapers called him 'the wickedest man in the world.' He called himself 'the Great Beast 666.' And here's the thing you have to understand about Aleister Crowley: almost everything shocking you have heard about him, he wanted you to hear. He was, among many things, a master of his own publicity. So here's who he actually was. Edward Alexander Crowley was born in 1875 in Leamington, England, into a wealthy family of Plymouth Brethren — a strict fundamentalist Christian sect. His father was a preacher. And it was Crowley's own devout mother who first called him 'the Beast' from the Book of Revelation, a name he gleefully adopted for life. Fueled by a large inheritance, he never needed a real job. He went to Cambridge, then poured his fortune into two passions: mountaineering and the occult. And the mountaineering part is real and remarkable. Crowley was, for his era, a genuinely serious climber. He took part in early attempts on K2 in 1902 and Kangchenjunga in 1905 — two of the highest and deadliest mountains on Earth — decades before they were ever summited. This was not a fraud in a robe. This was a physically fearless, formidably intelligent, deeply strange man. But here's where it gets strange in the other direction. In 1898 he joined the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, alongside the poet W.B. Yeats, and rose quickly — before his arrogance and the order's internal feuds blew the whole thing apart. Then, in 1904, on a honeymoon in Cairo, Crowley claimed a discarnate voice named Aiwass dictated to him a text called 'The Book of the Law.' From it he built his own religion, Thelema, with its famous law: 'Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law.' Now, to stay documented and fair: Crowley was a prolific writer, a chess player, a poet, and a relentless self-mythologizer. He also lived a life of drug addiction — he was an open heroin user by the end — and left a trail of scandal, broken relationships, and financial ruin. He founded a commune in Sicily, the Abbey of Thelema, which Mussolini's government expelled him from in 1923 amid lurid rumors. Much of the 'wickedest man' reputation was tabloid invention that Crowley happily amplified; the harder truth is a brilliant, self-destructive man who burned through everyone around him. His influence, though, is undeniable and factual. He led the occult order the O.T.O. and reshaped it around Thelema. Across the Atlantic, the American rocket scientist Jack Parsons — a genuine co-founder of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory — became a devoted follower. And Crowley reported contact with a strange, big-headed entity he sketched and named 'Lam,' an image that would later fascinate UFO subcultures. He died in 1947 in a Hastings boarding house, nearly broke. On the map, Crowley is the hub where the dark threads converge — reaching to Thelema, to the O.T.O., to the rocketeer Jack Parsons, and to the enigmatic entity called Lam.