“Do what thou wilt”: as the central principle of a worldview, it may not sound like much, but at least there are always a great many people ready and willing to hear it. So discovered Aleister Crowley, the early twentieth-century Occultist now remembered not just for his unconventional religious practices, but also for his knack for gathering cults around himself. It was in Liber AL vel Legis, or The Book of the Law, the central text of his religion Thelema, that he instructed his followers to act directly on their own desires, ideally with the aid of some ritualistic black magick.
You can learn more about the life and pursuits that eventually got Crowley dubbed “the wickedest man in the world” from the Hochelaga video above. After living most of his childhood under a Biblical-fundamentalist preacher father, who died when Crowley was eleven, he was sent away to various boarding schools, then turned troublemaker. At Cambridge, where he went to study English literature, he fell for the Romantics, then for the occult. After leaving without his degree, but with a considerable inheritance, he enjoyed the freedom to travel the world, climbing mountains and attempting to master the dark arts — not to mention taking drugs and having affairs.
As he went from country to country, Crowley never met an ancient religion he couldn’t adapt to his own ends. But no gods made as much of an impact on him as those of ancient Egypt, specifically Hoor-paar-kraat, or Harpocrates in the Greek; Crowley claimed to have been contacted by the voice of Hoor-paar-kraat’s messenger Aiwass, from whom he took the dictation that became Liber AL vel Legis. Styling himself as an Egyptian prophet, he preached one way for humanity to push through to a post-Christian age: “Whatever you feel like doing, go and do it, regardless of popular opinion or conventional morality.” After all, it seemed to work for Crowley himself, though the work of a notorious occultist certainly isn’t for everybody.
Nor could even the world’s wickedest man keep it up forever: “Eventually all the traveling, drug-taking, and libertinism had caught up with Crowley.” His inheritance dried up, and his addictions worsened. But he didn’t give up on Thelema, even going so far as to establish a commune in Sicily. Alas, the “responsibility-free lifestyle” advocated by the religion soon drove its headquarters to chaotic dilapidation. But just a couple of decades after his death in England in 1947, Crowley’s glowering visage popped up again, on the cover of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. He became the subject of pop-music reference not just by the Beatles, but also David Bowie, Iron Maiden, and the late Ozzy Osbourne. “Genius? Insane? Visionary? Fraud? Freethinker? Cult leader?” We might grant Aleister Crowley all these titles, and that of proto-rock star besides.
Related content:
Aleister Crowley Reads Occult Poetry in the Only Known Recordings of His Voice (1920)
The Thoth Tarot Deck Designed by Famed Occultist Aleister Crowley
The Surreal Paintings of the Occult Magician, Writer & Mountaineer, Aleister Crowley
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.
