DEMONOLOGY "ALEISTER CROWLEY"

Crowley, Aleister (1875–1947) 

English magician and

occultist. Aleister Crowley was adept at dealing with

spirits, including powerful DEMONs. Flamboyant and

controversial, he practiced outrageous magic of sex,

drugs, and sacrifi ce, yet made signifi cant contributions

to magic.

Life

He was born Edward Alexander Crowley on October 12,

1875, in Leamington Spa, Warwickshire. His father was

a wealthy brewer and a “Darbyite” preacher, a member

of a fundamentalist sect known as the Plymouth Brethren

or Exclusive Brethren. Crowley’s parents raised him

in an atmosphere of repression and religious bigotry. He

rebelled to such an extent that his mother called him

“the Beast” after the Antichrist, a name he delighted

in using later in life, calling himself “the Beast of the

Apocalypse.”

Crowley was drawn to the occult and was fascinated

by BLOOD, torture, and sexual degradation; he liked to

fantasize being degraded by a “Scarlet Woman.” He combined

these interests in a lifestyle that shocked others and

reveled in the attention he drew. He was in his teens when

he adopted the name Aleister.

In 1887, Crowley’s father died and he was sent to a

Darbyite school in Cambridge. His unhappy experiences

there at the hands of a cruel headmaster made him hate

the Darbyites.

Crowley studied for three years at Trinity College at

Cambridge but never earned a degree. He wrote poetry,

engaged in an active bisexual sex life, and pursued his

occult studies—the Great Work—the latter of which was

inspired by The Book of Black Magic and of Pacts by ARTHUR

EDWARD WAITE and The Cloud upon the Sanctuary

by Carl von Eckartshausen. In his fi rst volume of poetry,

published in 1898, Crowley foreshadowed his occult excesses

with his statement that God and Satan had fought

many hours over his soul. He wrote, “God conquered—

now I have only one doubt left—which of the twain was

God?”

Crowley was in his third year at Trinity when he

formally dedicated himself to magick, which he spelled

with a k to “distinguish the science of the Magi from

all its counterfeits.” He also pledged to “rehabilitate” it.

He saw magic as the way of life, a path of self-mastery

achieved with rigorous discipline of the will illumined by

imagination.

After leaving Trinity, Crowley took a fl at in Chancery

Lane, London. He named himself Count Vladimir and

pursued his occult activities full-time. Stories of bizarre

incidents circulated, perhaps fueled in part by Crowley’s

mesmerizing eyes and aura of supernatural power. A

ghostly light reportedly surrounded him, which he said

was his astral spirit. One of his fl at neighbors claimed

to be hurled downstairs by a malevolent force, and visitors

said they experienced dizzy spells while climbing the

stairs or felt an overwhelming evil presence.

In 1898, Crowley went to Zermatt, Switzerland, for

mountain climbing. He met Julian Baker, an English occultist,

who in turn introduced Crowley back in London

to George Cecil Jones, a member of the Hermetic Order

of the Golden Dawn. At Jones’ invitation, Crowley was

initiated into the order on November 18, 1898. He took

the magical motto Frater Perdurabo (I will persevere). He

used other names, among them Mega Therion (the Great

Wild Beast), which he used when he later attained the

rank of Magus.

Crowley was already skilled in magic when he joined

the Golden Dawn, and its First Order bored him. He received

instruction from Allan Bennett, whom he met in

1899, and Samuel Liddell Macgregor Mathers, one of the

founders of the Golden Dawn. Mathers taught Crowley

Abremalin magic from an old manuscript, The Sacred

Magic of Abra-Melin the Mage, which Mathers had trans-

lated. Mathers believed the manuscript was bewitched

and inhabited by an entity. The magic prescribed a rigorous

six-month program conducted in complete withdrawal

from the world, after which the initiate would

make talismans that would draw money, great sexual allure,

and an army of phantom soldiers to serve at his disposal.

Crowley intended to undergo this rite beginning at

Easter 1900 at Boleskin Manor, his house in Scotland.

His plans were disrupted by internal fi ghting in the

Golden Dawn that led to Crowley’s expulsion from the

order in 1900. He retaliated by publishing secret ritual

material.

From 1900 to 1903, Crowley traveled extensively,

visiting the Far East and delving deeper into Eastern

mysticism.

In 1903, he married Rose Kelly, the fi rst of his two

wives. Kelly bore him one child, a daughter, Lola Zaza.

Their honeymoon lasted several months. In 1904, they

were in Cairo, where Crowley was attempting to conjure

sylphs, the elementals of the air. While in Egypt, Crowley

engaged in his most signifi cant entity contact, with Aiwass,

described later. The contact infl uenced his life and

work, to usher in the Aeon of Horus.

Crowley had a prodigious sexual appetite and had

numerous mistresses, some of whom he called “Scarlet

Women” and some of whom bore him illegitimate children.

He was fond of giving his women “Serpent Kisses,”

using his sharpened teeth to draw blood. He branded

some of his women and eventually abandoned all of them

to drugs, alcohol, or the streets. Crowley tried unsuccessfully

to beget a “magical child.” He fi ctionalized these efforts

in his novel Moonchild (1929).

Rose descended into alcoholism, and in 1909 she divorced

Crowley on grounds of adultery. From late 1914

to 1919, Crowley lived in the United States, where he

was unsuccessful in rousing much interest in his message

about the Aeon of Horus. He kept a record of his

sexual activities, which he titled Rex de Arte Regia (The

King of the Royal Art). Many of the prostitutes he hired

had no idea that he was actually involving them in sex

magic. He and his Scarlet Woman of the moment, Roddie

Minor, performed sex magic and drug rituals—by then

he was addicted to heroin—for the purpose of communicating

with an entity, perhaps a demon, whom Crowley

called “the wizard Amalantrah,” who existed on the astral

plane.

In 1916, Crowley initiated himself into the rank of

Magus in a bizarre black magic rite in which he crucifi ed

a frog.

In 1918, Crowley met Leah Hirsig, a New York schoolteacher,

who became his most famous Scarlet Woman. He

called her “the Ape of Thoth.” They decided to found the

Abbey of Thelema, a monastic community of men and

women who would promulgate The Book of the Law, perform

magic, and be sexually free.

In 1920, Crowley found an old abbey in Cefalu, Sicily,

which he took over and renamed the Sacred Abbey

of the Thelemic Mysteries. It served as the site for numerous

sexual orgies and magical rites, many attended

by his illegitimate children. Leah bore a daughter, Anne

Leah, who died in childhood. In 1921, Crowley decided

that he had attained the magical rank of Ipsissimus,

equal to God. But in 1923, he was forced out of the abbey

after a scandal involving the death of a follower, Raoul

Loveday.

In 1929, Crowley married his second wife, Maria Ferrari

de Miramar, in Leipzig. Her reputed magical powers

led him to name her the “High Priestess of Voodoo.” They

separated in less than a year when Crowley took up with

a 19-year-old woman. Maria entered a mental institution,

enabling Crowley to divorce her.

Crowley’s later years were plagued by poor health,

drug addiction, and fi nancial trouble. He kept himself

barely afl oat by publishing nonfi ction and fi ction writings.

In 1934, desperate for money, Crowley sued the

sculptress Nina Hammett for libel. Hammett had stated in

her biography, Laughing Torso (1932), that Crowley practiced

black magic and indulged in human sacrifi ce. The

English judge, jury, spectators and press were repulsed by

the testimony in the trial. The judge stated he had “never

heard such dreadful, horrible, blasphemous and abominable

stuff.” The jury stopped the trial and found in favor

of Hammett.

AIWASS

In 1945, Crowley moved to Netherwood, a boarding

house in Hastings, where he lived the last two years of his

life, asthmatic, dissipated, and bored, consuming large

amounts of heroin. He died of cardiac degeneration and

severe bronchitis on December 1, 1947. He was cremated

in Brighton. At his funeral, a Gnostic Mass was performed

and his “Hymn to Pan” was read. His ashes were sent to

followers in the United States.

Numerous editions and collections of Crowley’s writings

have been published. Besides The Book of the Law,

his other most notable work is Magick in Theory and Practice

(1929), considered by many occultists to be a superb

work on ceremonial magic. The Equinox of the Gods (1937)

refl ects The Book of the Law. The Book of Lies features 91

sermons and commentaries on each. The Book of Thoth

(1944) presents his interpretation of the Tarot. The Thoth

Tarot deck, inspired by Crowley, is one of the more popular

decks in modern use.

Crowley’s work continues to inspire people, and Thelemic

organizations exist around the world. He has inspired

artists in various fi elds. Posthumously, Crowley

has perhaps gained more fame and credibility than he

had during his life. He remains controversial to the extreme,

vilifi ed as a “satanic occultist” and praised as a

brilliant magician.

Entity Contacts

Aiwass On March 18, 1904, Rose suddenly began trance

channeling, receiving communications from the astral

plane that the Egyptian god Horus was waiting for Crowley.

The communicating messenger, Aiwass, was an imposing

entity described by Rose as an emissary for the

Egyptian trinity of Horus, Osiris, and Isis.

Crowley considered Aiwass to be his Holy Guardian Angel,

or divine Higher Self, acting as intermediary for higher

beings such as the Secret Chiefs, superhuman adepts of the

Golden Dawn. Occultists have debated whether Aiwass was

an entity in its own right, or part of Crowley himself. For

Crowley, the Holy Guardian Angel was a discrete entity and

not a dissociated part of his own personality. Crowley originally

spelled the entity’s name Aiwaz, then later changed

the spelling to Aiwass for numerological reasons.

Crowley envisioned Aiwass as a male entity, and one

distinctly different and more unfathomable than other

entities he had encountered. Answers to questions posed

by Crowley indicated that Aiwass was

. . . a Being whose mind was so different from mine that

we failed to converse. All my wife obtained from Him

was to command me to do things magically absurd. He

would not play my game: I must play His.

On April 7, 1904, Aiwass commanded that the drawing

room of the Cairo apartment leased by the Crowleys

had to be turned into a temple. Aiwass ordered Crowley

to enter the temple precisely at noon on the next three

days, and to write down exactly what he heard for precisely

one hour.

THELEMA

Crowley followed the instructions. Inside the “temple,”

he sat alone at a table facing the southern wall. From

behind him he heard the voice of Aiwass, which Crowley

described as “a rich tenor or baritone . . . deep timbre,

musical and expressive, its tones solemn, voluptuous,

tender, fi erce, or aught else as suited the moods of the

message.” The voice was “the Speech in the Silence,” he

said. Later he called Aiwass “the minister of Hoor-Paar-

Kraat,” or “the Lord of Silence,” an aspect of Horus that

was the equivalent of the Greek Harpocrates.

During the dictation, Crowley did not see a visual apparition

of Aiwass, though he did have a mental impression

of the entity. Aiwass had

. . . a body of “fi ne matter” or astral matter, transparent

as a veil of gauze or a cloud of incense-smoke. He

seemed to be a tall, dark man in his thirties, well-knit,

active and strong, with the face of a savage king, and

eyes veiled lest their gaze should destroy what they saw.

Further, Aiwass seemed dressed in the garb of an Assyrian

or Persian.

Crowley took Aiwass’ dictation for three hours on

April 8–10, scribbling in longhand to keep pace with the

voice. The sessions lasted exactly one hour each. The 65

pages of handwritten material composed the Liber Legis,

or The Book of the Law, which Crowley saw as the herald

of the New Aeon or a new religion. Each chapter carried

the voice of an Egyptian deity: Nut, the goddess of the

heavens, and two aspects of Horus, Ha-Kadit, a solar aspect,

and Ra-Hoor-Kuit, or “Horus of the Two Horizons.”

For years, Crowley remained in awe of Aiwass. In The

Equinox of the Gods, he acknowledged that he never fully

understood the nature of Aiwass. He alternately called

the entity “a God or Demon or Devil,” a praeterhuman

intelligence, a minister or messenger of other gods, his

own Guardian Angel, and his own subconscious (the last

he rejected in favor of the Holy Guardian Angel). Crowley

also said he was permitted from time to time to see Aiwass

in a physical appearance, inhabiting a human body,

as much a material man as Crowley was himself.

C. S. Jones, who ran the Vancouver, British Columbia,

lodge of the Ordo Templi Orientis, said he underwent

a series of magical initiations that revealed to him

that Aiwass was in truth an evil demon and the enemy

of humanity. Others considered Jones to have become

mad.

The Book of the Law became Crowley’s most important

work. Central to it is the Law of Thelema: “Do what thou

wilt shall be the whole of the Law.” The law has been misinterpreted

to mean doing as one pleases. According to

Crowley, it means that one does what one must and nothing

else. Perfect magic is the complete and total alignment

of the will with universal will, or cosmic forces. When

one surrenders to that alignment, one becomes a perfect

channel for the fl ow of cosmic forces.

Besides the Law of Thelema, the book holds that every

person is sovereign and shall be self-fulfi lled in the Aeon.

“Every man and every woman is a star,” it states. However,

the Aeon of Horus would be preceded by an era of

great violence, aggression, and fi re.

Aiwass told Crowley that he had been selected by the

“Secret Chiefs,” the master adepts behind the Golden

Dawn, to be the prophet for the coming Aeon of Horus,

the third great age of humanity. Crowley genuinely believed

that the Aeon of Horus would spread around the

world as a new religion—Crowleyanity—and replace all

other religions. The Book of the Law remained a focus of

Crowley’s life for the rest of his years.

Crowley insisted that he never understood all of what

was dictated. However, the style is comparable to that of

some of his other writings, suggesting that the material

may have originated in his subconscious. The promised

self-fulfi llment seemed to elude him. Throughout his life,

Crowley believed he had the ability to manifest whatever

he desired, including large sums of money, but after

squandering his inheritance he was never able to do so.

Vampire demons After returning home to Scotland,

Crowley informed the Golden Dawn that he was its new

head, but he received no reply. He then determined that

Mathers had launched a psychic attack against him, and

he responded by summoning BEELZEBUB and his demons

to attack in retaliation.

Mathers had prepared himself for six months with

magical procedures and rites in order to create a vampiric

thought-form demon by channeling the power of Mars,

the planet of war and aggression. Mathers entered a trance

state and concentrated his will into the psychic vampire,

which rose up from his solar plexus. He ordered it to attack

Crowley. However, he committed a grievous error

in doing the sending himself. In magic, apprentices are

often used to do the sending, for if anything goes amiss

and the magic boomerangs back, it will be the apprentice

who suffers and not the master magician.

Crowley, who was of superior magical skill, took the

thought-form, made it nastier, and sent it back to attack

Mathers. This warfare supposedly went on for years and

was chronicled by journalists around the world.

Mathers’ health declined as the attacks continued.

When Mathers died in 1918, his widow, Moina, blamed

his death on Crowley’s psychic vampirism.

Prior to his death, Mathers once described the awful

nature of the thought-form vampire demon:

Only the upper portions of its body were visible when it

would appear. Obviously female, it had narrow breasts

protruding through some kind of dark raiment. Below

the waist nothing existed. The curious eyes were deepsocketed,

and glowed faintly with an intense coralcolored

luminosity. The head was fl at, set low between

white, blubbery shoulders, as though it were cut off just

below those fearful “eyes.” Like tiny useless fl ippers, the

arms seemed almost vestigial. They were like unformed

limbs, still in the foetal stage.

But the thing didn’t need arms. Its terrifying weapon

was an extraordinarily long, coated gray tongue. Tubelike

and hollow, it bore a small orbicular hole at its tip,

and that lascivious tongue kept darting snake-like in

and out of a circular, lipless mouth. Always trying to

catch me off guard it would suddenly strike at me, like a

greedy missile, attempting to suck out my auric vitality.

Perhaps the being’s most terrifying feature was

its absolutely loathsome habit of trying to cuddle up

like a purring cat, rubbing its half-materialized form

against me, all the while alert, hoping to fi nd a gap in

my defenses. And when it was sometimes successful—I

was not always prepared nor strong enough to maintain

the magical barriers—it would pierce my aura with that

wicked tongue right down to my naked skin, causing

a most painful sensation. This was followed by a total

enervation of my body and spirit for a week or more. A

listless, dread experience.

Individuals who knew Crowley believed him to be

quite capable of creating such a demon.

Choronzon In 1909, after his divorce from Rose, Crowley

began a homosexual relationship with the poet Victor

Neuberg, who became his assistant in magic. Their

most famous workings together took place in 1909 in

the desert south of Algiers, when they performed a harrowing

conjuration of the demonic Dweller of the Abyss,

CHORONZON. Crowley was inspired to incorporate sex

into the ritual, and he became convinced of the power of

sex magic. By 1912, he was involved with the Ordo Templi

Orientis sex magic occult order, and in 1922 he was

invited to head the organization in Britain. He took the

magical name BAPHOMET.

Lam In 1918, the same year that Mathers died, Crowley

conducted a sex magic ritual called the Almalantrah,

with Roddie Minor, known as Soror Ahitha. The working

created a portal in the spaces between stars, through

which the entity Lam was able to enter the known physical

universe. Since then, other entities are believed to

enter through this widening portal, and to be the basis

for numerous contact experiences with UFOs and

extraterrestrials.

One of the revelations of the working was the symbolism

of the egg. Crowley and Soror Ahitha were told, “It’s

all in the egg.”

Crowley believed Lam to be the soul of a dead Tibetan

lama from Leng, between China and Tibet. Lam is Tibetan

for “Way” or “Path,” which Crowley said had the numerical

value of 71, or “No Thing,” a gateway to the Void and

a link between the star systems of Sirius and Andromeda.

Lam was to fulfi ll the work initiated by Aiwass.

Crowley drew a portrait of Lam and said that gazing

on the portrait enables one to make contact with the entity.

Some consider Lam to be a demon and the portal to

be one accessed by other demons.

See BLACK MASS; SIX-SIX-SIX.