Aleister Crowley, born Edward Alexander Crowley (12 October 1875 - 1 December 1947) was an occultist, mystic, sexual revolutionary, and drug user (especially heroin). Aleister Crowley - Biography. Edward Alexander Crowley was born in Royal Leamington Spa, Warwickshire, England, between 11:00pm and 12 midnight on 12 October 1875. His father, Edward Crowley, once maintained a lucrative family brewery business and was retired at the time of Aleister's birth. His mother, Emily Bertha Bishop, drew ...

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• Aleister Crowley - Science magic and sexuality
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• Aleister Crowley - Miscellany and Rumours
• Aleister Crowley - Crowley in popular culture

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Aleister Crowley, Aleister Crowley - Biography, Aleister Crowley - Chess, Aleister Crowley - Mountaineering, Aleister Crowley - Science magic and sexuality, Aleister Crowley - Women as inspiration, Aleister Crowley - Thelema, Aleister Crowley - Writings, Aleister Crowley - Miscellany and Rumours, Aleister Crowley - Crowley in popular culture

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The religious or mystical system which Crowley founded, into which most of his nonfiction writings fall, he named Thelema. Thelema combines a radical form of philosophical libertarianism, akin in some ways to Nietzsche, with a mystical initiatory system derived in part from the Golden Dawn. Chief among the precepts of Thelema is the sovereignty of the individual will: "Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law." Crowley's idea of will, however, is not simply the individual's desires or wishes, but also incorporates ...

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Aleister Crowley, Aleister Crowley - Biography, Aleister Crowley - Chess, Aleister Crowley - Mountaineering, Aleister Crowley - Science magic and sexuality, Aleister Crowley - Women as inspiration, Aleister Crowley - Thelema, Aleister Crowley - Writings, Aleister Crowley - Miscellany and Rumours, Aleister Crowley - Crowley in popular culture

Read more here: » Aleister Crowley: Encyclopedia II - Aleister Crowley - Thelema

Crowley claimed to use a scientific method to study what people at the time called "spiritual" experiences, making "The Method of Science, the Aim of Religion" the catchphrase of his magazine The Equinox. By this he meant that mystical experiences should not be taken at face value, but critiqued and experimented with in order to arrive at their underlying religious meaning. In this he may be considered to foreshadow Dr. Timothy Leary, who at one point sought to apply the same method to psychedelic drug experiences. Yet like Leary's, Crowley's method has received little "sc ...

See also:

Aleister Crowley, Aleister Crowley - Biography, Aleister Crowley - Chess, Aleister Crowley - Mountaineering, Aleister Crowley - Science, magic, and sexuality, Aleister Crowley - Women as inspiration, Aleister Crowley - Thelema, Aleister Crowley - Writings, Aleister Crowley - Miscellany and Rumours, Aleister Crowley - Crowley in popular culture

Read more here: » Aleister Crowley: Encyclopedia II - Aleister Crowley - Science, magic, and sexuality

Aleister Crowley: Born Edward Alexander Crowley, he was a remarkable poet, writer, mountain climber, and occultist. His strong positions on magick (his spelling) including the use of sexuality in magick have made him highly controversial. He “received” (what today might be called “channelled”) a short text, The Book of the Law, in 1904, and modified the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn’s magical system to fit this revelation. It also became a religious system. Followers of this system all called Thelemites.

Also See: Crowley, Edward Alexander Crowley

(See also: Aleister Crowley, Magic, Shamanism, Paganism, Wicca)

ALEISTER CROWLEY - was a pagan, a poet, a mountaineer, a magician and a poet. The magic he practices or "Magick" as he preferred to call it is Quabalistic Magick (Order of the Golden Dawn). Also known by the Press, as the "The Wickedest man in the World."

(See also: ALEISTER CROWLEY, Wiccan Pagan, Paganism, Pagan Dictionary)

Crowley: Aleister Crowley (1875-1947) was the foremost ceremonial magician of the first half of the 20th century. He was born in Leamington, England, on October 12, 1875, the son of fanatical Plymouth Brethren. His mother called him the Beast of Revelation, whose number is 666, and Crowley embraced this identification. He attended Cambridge and began to study occultism. He was an accomplished chess player, mountain climber, and poet. In 1898, he joined the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn. In 1903, he married Rose Kelly. In 1904, while on an extended honeymoon with Rose in Cairo, he received The Book of the Law from a "praeternatural" entity calling himself Aiwass. This book identified Crowley as the Logos of a New Aeon, and Crowley spent the rest of his life trying to spread the new religion. He died in a rooming house in Hastings December 1, 1947.

(See also: Crowley, Magic, Shamanism, Paganism, Wicca)

PARSONS, JOHN WHITESIDE

I hight Don Quixote, I live on peyote,

marijuana, morphine and  cocaine,

I never know sadness but only a madness

that burns at the  heart and the brain

I see each charwoman, ecstatic inhuman,

angelic,  demonic, divine.

Each wagon a dragon, each beer mug a flagon

that  brims with ambrosial wine.

So goes a poem written by magician Jack Parsons, head of the California lodge of the O.T.O. (1944-52), as privately printed in a 1943 issue of The Oriflamme. This was, synchronistically enough, as Robert Anton Wilson has pointed out, but a few weeks before the discovery of LSD.

All of Crowley's disciples struggled valiantly to "discover the identity of the hidden God" within them, their "True (Thelemic) Will" and to find a way to implement their knowledge. Their endings were mostly dismal. Those who claimed success in the Great Work ceased all further activity and led lives thereafter of total obscurity. One of them, Frater 210, Jack Parsons, claimed success, only to go up in flames shortly thereafter.

Jack Parsons was a co-founder of The California Institute of Technology. His contributions to the aerospace industry and nuclear research were so considerable that he has the unique distinction of being the only North American sorcerer in the 20th Century to have had a mountain on the moon named after him. He was also one of Aleister Crowley's more bizarre disciples.

He was born on October 2, 1914, in Los Angeles, California. The only offspring of divorced parents, he spent a solitary and uneventful childhood. He devoted himself, as solitary children do, to reading and daydreaming. He also harbored a grudge against authority and interference and nursed a rebellious spirit. His studies led him into aerospace technology, but by temperament he was apparently not a scientist and his life did not truly begin until 1939, when an acquaintance, Wilfred T. Smith, introduced him to Aleister Crowley's writings and invited him to join his Agap‚ Lodge of the Ordo Templi Orientis.

Wilfred T. Smith, or Frater 132, had ostensibly been a special protege of Crowley's, who had decided for astrological reasons that Smith was a god imprisoned in human flesh. This seems curious to us now, because Smith's behavior was totally psychopathic. The truth is that Smith had fallen into disfavor with Crowley, who had decided the man was turning the O.T.O.'s California Lodge into a cheap love cult, which Crowley considered a "slimy abomination." As soon as Parsons came into the order, Smith grabbed Parson's wife, Helen, as his very own familiar and had a child by her. Thereupon Parsons abandoned her and took her younger sister, Betty, as his mistress and magickal partner. This arrangement appeared to work well enough for him and he soon advanced into the inner circles of the lodge. Meanwhile, Crowley very cleverly gave Smith a specific formula for his apotheosis and ordered him to resign in order to identify this God within. This was the easiest way of getting Smith out of the Lodge so that Parsons could be put in charge. Immediately, Smith's star began to fall. He conceived a hatred for Parsons and "attacked him astrally." Kenneth Grant in his Magical Revival recounts a curious hallucination or dream that Parsons underwent with a black-caped figure whom he transfixed with knives and eventually drove away.

But now Parsons, determined to repeat his initial disasters, brought in a mysterious "Frater X" as his secretary and who seemed a promising candidate for the lodge which Parsons had now taken over. His new friend, however, also proved to be a rogue and quickly wormed out of Parsons the top-secret psycho-sexual and magical techniques of the Agape Lodge. Soon thereafter, Frater X got him to enter a business venture with him, with Parson's money as the lion's share of the investment. Next Frater X persuaded him to sell the property that was the headquarters of the Lodge. Then he and Betty went on a yachting cruise around the world. Now that Frater X had reduced him to poverty, Parsons had to earn his living in an "aircraft company." What it is about the occult that could possibly interest dreary U.S. government agents defies the imagination, but Parsons was, after all, working for the government. So by now the O.T.O. was swarming with U.S. intelligence agents posing as members!

Since his mistress had also been stolen from him, Parsons set about, by evocation (and ritual masturbation supervised by Frater X), to obtain an Elemental Spirit to take the place of Betty. And in 1946 he wrote to Crowley that he had actually found such an elemental -- a woman named Marjorie Cameron. She soon became his second wife. Crowley wrote to warn him to avoid excessive devotion to an elemental, but his warning had little effect... Now Parsons contacted an "Intelligence" who spoke to him, directly at first. It was not long, however, before he began speaking through Fr. X, who, it seems, had returned and been forgiven! This time Frater X informed Parsons that he was "overshadowed by an Angel with flaming hair." Parsons now set about to make a Moonchild -- a procedure that must take place at a time when the moon is "void of course" or without earth influence. This endeavor annoyed the dying Crowley very much. In fact, by now, Crowley was thoroughly disgusted with Parsons and the Californians. At this point Parsons took the "Oath of the Abyss" and the magical name of "Belarion Armilus All Dajjal Anti-Christ." In 1948 he took the oath of the Antichrist and in 1949 penned his autobiographies. Finally he took up the "Black Pilgrimage," a terrible path forcing him to chose between suicide, madness and the Oath of the Abyss. In this endeavor he would open himself up to the influence of the demon, Choronzon.

Not long after that, in June of 1952, Parsons began a dangerous invocation in a last ditch effort to release his Will. He called upon an Aethyr who had already brought disaster to a fellow magus (Kelley), backed up by a sexual magick of his own. In his further rituals with the woman of the flaming hair and the invocation of the Lady of Babalon (not to be confused with "Babylon") there are constant calls to fire and flame, "Flame is out Lady, flame is her hair. I am flame" (In this case, "fire" refers to its opposite, "blood.") Suddenly, while working in his lab in Pasadena, he dropped a phial of fulminate of mercury and burst up in a terrible explosion -- ordinary fire being the opposite and balancing complement of blood.

Twenty years after his fiery death, official maps depicting the dark side of the moon prominently honored his many aerospace contributions with "Parson's Crater." Perhaps this act was fully intended as a deliberate pyrrhic mockery, suggesting mythic figures of old who were translated to the skies as immortal stars. Parsons is not the only mortal to have achieved celestial recognition without apotheosis, but he's the only one who deliberately tried, failed and then made it by default.

What makes Parsons so intriguing, no doubt, is that he appears in so many footnotes by so many different authors and yet hardly anything is known about him. Moreover, trying to cut a path through his zigzagging life is extremely frustrating for the biographer. Most lives, whether dull or interesting, tend to tell us something about the person, but Parsons' life seems almost deliberately labyrinthine. His writings are not easily unearthed and jealously guarded. The reason for that isn't hard to discern. Parsons was a social and intellectual rebel during an era of rigid conformity. He was not only the author of the two-volume book about the Anti- Christ: The Black Pilgrimage and The Manifesto of the Anti-Christ (which eponym he conferred on himself) but also claimed, says Colin Wilson, that he had been advised by a Higher Power "to declare war on all authority that is not based on courage and manhood... the authority of lying priests, conniving judges, blackmailing police and to call an end to restriction and inhibition, conscription, compulsion, regimentation and the tyranny of the laws."

The "Higher Power," it turned out, was an even more elusive character: our old friend, the sinister Frater X.

Until quite recently the Identity of Frater X remained unknown. Rumor had it that he had lived to a very old age in fame and luxury from the misuses of the magickal secrets that he had stolen. His identity remained a mystery until the late 1980's when it was revealed in several places at once that Frater X was none other than L. Ron Hubbard, father of Dianetics and Scientology.

Even initiates may not always recognize the daring, inspired and cosmic scope of Parson's effort. How much Hubbard was involved is uncertain, but that extraterrestrial contact of some kind was made through Parsons' rift in the wall between worlds was revealed, according to Kenneth Grant, by the Babalon working. He and Achad began this only a year before Crowley's death in 1947 and that year coincided with the first wave of ufo "invasions." "Parsons opened a door and something flew in" says Grant. Whatever that may be, something more than Babalon and channeled writings, we now realize, erupted into our world and continues to pour in, moving at weird and mocking variance to our sublunary science and reality systems. Crowley's and Achad's initiations, says Grant in his Outside the Circles of Time, led up to the "40's framed by AL. III. 46, the number of Mu, Cry of the Vulture of Maat and key of the mysteries" and that in turn finally "fulminated in Hiroshima of 1945." Grant wrote those words in 1980, before AIDS and the greenhouse effect, quoting from Crowley: "Now the 80's cower before me and are abased."

Ego and Initiation run the same hurdles. Ego interferes with the natural course of apotheosis. And for Grant, psychiatry is out of the question. It exposes the sensitive, personal and private talismans and techniques needed for reshaping social progress to the killing glare of mindless immediacy and expediency. Initiation, says Parsons himself, must proceed as best it can through and past the barriers... "until the misty bastions of infantile Trawenfells change into the rocks and crags of eternity; the garden of Klingsor into the City of God."

The Xtian idea of a God descending to become a man is the exact reverse of Magick. If Crowley's goal was to release the God hidden inside every human being, Jack Parsons dared to go a step further. His intention was to raise Hell to earth's level, to elevate our hellworld a step closer to Heaven! Since he was by nature a quiet and humble man, such a fusilary and hubristic ambition proved so powerful a charge for him that it burst out of the astral plane and destroyed him on the physical plane.

(See also: PARSONS, JOHN WHITESIDE, Magick, Mysticism, Mysticism Dictionary, Body Mind and Soul, )

Edward Alexander Crowley was born in Royal Leamington Spa, Warwickshire, England, between 11:00pm and 12 midnight on 12 October 1875. His father, Edward Crowley, once maintained a lucrative family brewery business and was retired at the time of Aleister's birth. His mother, Emily Bertha Bishop, drew roots from a Devon and Somerset family. Aleister grew up in a staunch Plymouth Brethren household. His father, after retiring from his daily duties as a brewer, took up the practice of preaching at a fanatical pace. Daily Bible stud ...

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Aleister Crowley, Aleister Crowley - Biography, Aleister Crowley - Chess, Aleister Crowley - Mountaineering, Aleister Crowley - Science magic and sexuality, Aleister Crowley - Women as inspiration, Aleister Crowley - Thelema, Aleister Crowley - Writings, Aleister Crowley - Miscellany and Rumours, Aleister Crowley - Crowley in popular culture

Read more here: » Aleister Crowley: Encyclopedia II - Aleister Crowley - Biography

Within the subject of occultism Crowley wrote widely, penning commentaries on the Tarot (The Book of Thoth), yoga (Book Four), the Kabbalah (Sepher Sephiroth), astrology (The General Principles of Astrology), and numerous other subjects. He also wrote a Thelemic "translation" of the Tao Te Ching, based on earlier English translations since he knew little or no Chinese. Like the Golden Dawn mystics before him, Crowley evidently sought to comprehend the entire human religious and mystical experience in a sing ...

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Aleister Crowley, Aleister Crowley - Biography, Aleister Crowley - Chess, Aleister Crowley - Mountaineering, Aleister Crowley - Science magic and sexuality, Aleister Crowley - Women as inspiration, Aleister Crowley - Thelema, Aleister Crowley - Writings, Aleister Crowley - Miscellany and Rumours, Aleister Crowley - Crowley in popular culture

Read more here: » Aleister Crowley: Encyclopedia II - Aleister Crowley - Writings

The religious or mystical system which Crowley founded, into which most of his writings fall, he named Thelema. Thelema combines a radical form of philosophical libertarianism, akin in some ways to Nietzsche, with a mystical initiatory system derived in part from the Golden Dawn. Chief among the precepts of Thelema is the sovereignty of the individual will: "Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law." Crowley's idea of will, however, is not simply the individual's desires or wishes, but also incorporates a sense of ...

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Aleister Crowley, Aleister Crowley - Biography, Aleister Crowley - Chess, Aleister Crowley - Mountaineering, Aleister Crowley - Science magic and sexuality, Aleister Crowley - Women as inspiration, Aleister Crowley - Thelema, Aleister Crowley - Writings, Aleister Crowley - Miscellany and Rumours, Aleister Crowley - Crowley in popular culture

Read more here: » Aleister Crowley: Encyclopedia II - Aleister Crowley - Thelema

Crowley claimed to use a scientific method to study what people at the time called "spiritual" experiences, making "The Method of Science, the Aim of Religion" the catchphrase of his magazine The Equinox. By this he meant that mystical experiences should not be taken at face value, but critiqued and experimented with in order to arrive at their underlying religious meaning. In this he may be considered to foreshadow Dr. Timothy Leary, who at one point sought to apply the same method to psychedelic drug experiences. Yet like Leary's, Crowley's method has received little "scie ...

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Aleister Crowley, Aleister Crowley - Biography, Aleister Crowley - Chess, Aleister Crowley - Mountaineering, Aleister Crowley - Science magic and sexuality, Aleister Crowley - Women as inspiration, Aleister Crowley - Thelema, Aleister Crowley - Writings, Aleister Crowley - Miscellany and Rumours, Aleister Crowley - Crowley in popular culture

Read more here: » Aleister Crowley: Encyclopedia II - Aleister Crowley - Science magic and sexuality

Crowley learned to play chess at the age of six and first competed on the Eastbourne College chess team (where he was taking classes in 1892). He showed immediate competence, beating the adult champion in town and even editing a chess column for the local newspaper, the Eastbourne Gazette (Sutin, p.33), which he often used to criticize the Eastbourne team. He later joined the university chess club at Cambridge, where he beat the president in his freshman year and practiced two hours a day towards becoming a champion — "My one serious worldly ambition had been to become the champion of ...

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Aleister Crowley, Aleister Crowley - Biography, Aleister Crowley - Chess, Aleister Crowley - Mountaineering, Aleister Crowley - Science magic and sexuality, Aleister Crowley - Women as inspiration, Aleister Crowley - Thelema, Aleister Crowley - Writings, Aleister Crowley - Miscellany and Rumours, Aleister Crowley - Crowley in popular culture

Read more here: » Aleister Crowley: Encyclopedia II - Aleister Crowley - Chess