Born Edward Alexander, the son of a brewer and Plymouth Brother, Aleister Crowley was a great influence on the development of magic (or ‘magick’) in the twentieth century.
Crowley saw himself as the latest in a line of magicians that included John Dee, Cagliostro, and Eliphas Levi, and he was the head of a number of magical orders.
In 1898, Crowley was initiated into the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn. His aptitude for magic paved his meteoric rise through the Order’s grades of initiation, and after he was expelled from the Order (which he claimed had ceased to interest him), Crowley went on to found the Argenteum Astrum (Order of the Silver Star). Between 1909 and 1913, Crowley published many of the Golden Dawn’s secret rituals in The Equinox, the journal of his Order. In 1912, Crowley joined the Ordo Templi Orientis, a German system of occultism, becoming head of the Order in 1922. Considering himself to be the chosen prophet of a new aeon, the Age of Horus, Crowley founded the Abbey of Thelema at Cefalu in Sicily in 1920, influenced by Frangois Rabelais’ sixteenth-century novels, Gargantua and Pantagruel. He envisioned his Abbey as a magical colony from which to launch the new aeon, but was expelled by Mussolini in 1923.
A prolific writer, two of Crowley’s most important works are The Book of the Law, which he claimed was dictated in 1904 by his Holy Guardian Angel, Aiwass, and Magick in Theory and Practice, self-published in 1929. The former contained his famous Law of Thelema: ‘Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law; Love is the Law, Love under Will’. Crowley also wrote a great deal of poetry, and was an accomplished mountaineer and practitioner of yoga, integrating Eastern philosophies and practices with the Western esoteric and magical theories which formed the foundation of his Thelema.
