Aleister Crowley

The son of a devout Christian couple, Edward Alexander Crowley was born in Leamington Spa in 1875. After Malvern School and Tonbridge College, he read Natural Sciences at Trinity College, Cambridge. On a visit to Sweden, he experienced a life-changing vision which persuaded him of his spiritual vocation, a calling which he marked by changing his name to Aleister. Crowley’s interests combined the erotic and the esoteric. He published poetry, including a volume of verse described by one critic as ‘the most disgusting piece of erotica in the English language.’ He also became involved in secretive groups like the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn. Gradually he evolved his own set of beliefs which drew on Oriental, ancient Egyptian, and an assortment of other traditions. His sexual preoccupations were equally various. He took many lovers – both male and female – and practised a form of sex magic. In 1920, he moved to Sicily, where he established the Abbey of Thelema as the headquarters for his new religion. Here he pursued spiritual enlightenment, declaring himself Ipssissimus – beyond the Gods – in 1921. He also experimented with sex and drugs. In 1923 an Englishman died in mysterious circumstances after a ritual during which he was said to have consumed the blood of a cat. The British press and the Italian fascist government were equally appalled. Crowley was expelled from Sicily, the Abbey closed, and the group dispersed. Crowley was a regular visitor to Tredegar House, home of Evan Morgan, the last Viscount Tredegar. In addition to Crowley, Morgan boasted a wide network of notable contacts including Lloyd George, Queen Mary, GK Chesterton, Augustus John and Aldous Huxley. Although impoverished, disgraced, and a near-skeletal heroin addict, Crowley never lacked followers. He fathered several children, most of them illegitimately, and was still in demand as a medium and a magus to the end, designing a new sequence of tarot cards and commentating on it at some length in his Book of Thoth of 1944. He died, in Hastings, in 1947.