Aleister Crowley: How a Brewery Heir Became the "Wickedest Man in the World"

In 1923 the London weekly John Bull gave Aleister Crowley the label he has never shaken. He was, the paper announced, "the wickedest man in the world," and "a man we'd like to hang."

He had been born into brewing money, raised in a strict Christian sect and sent to Cambridge, and he spent the inheritance on mountains, poetry, ritual magic and a religion of his own design. How he got from the one to the other is stranger than the headline suggests.

A Brethren childhood

Crowley was born Edward Alexander Crowley on October 12, 1875, at 30 Clarendon Square in Royal Leamington Spa, Warwickshire. His father was a trained engineer whose share in the family brewing business, Crowley's Alton Ales, let him retire before his son was born.

Both parents belonged to the Exclusive Brethren, a strict faction of the Plymouth Brethren. The father traveled as a preacher for the sect and read a chapter of the Bible to his wife and son after breakfast every day. He died of tongue cancer in March 1887, when the boy was eleven. Crowley remembered him as "my hero and my friend" and inherited a third of his wealth.

His mother called her son "the Beast," and he took to the name. The scholar Manon Hedenborg White, writing in the journal Aries, notes that he rebelled against his upbringing early and identified himself with the Great Beast 666 of Revelation.

Cambridge, mountains and the Golden Dawn

The legacy paid for Trinity College, Cambridge, which he entered in October 1895, by then calling himself Aleister. The finding aid for his papers at the Harry Ransom Center in Austin observes that he rarely attended lectures and left without a degree, but educated himself through omnivorous reading and became a serious chess player. He also climbed, and with Oscar Eckenstein led a 1902 attempt on K2 that turned back at 20,000 feet. A 1905 expedition to Kanchenjunga ended in mutiny. When the others descended at nightfall against his warnings, Alexis Pache and several porters died in an accident, and much of the climbing world blamed Crowley anyway.

His occult career began on November 18, 1898, when Samuel Liddell MacGregor Mathers initiated him into the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn. When the London members refused to promote him, Crowley acted for Mathers in an attempt to seize the order's temple rooms in West Kensington, and the judge ruled for the London lodge. Hedenborg White dates the end of his involvement to 1900, but its grades and curriculum remained one pillar of his system. Yoga learned in India, Burma and Ceylon was the other.

Three days in Cairo

The turning point came on honeymoon. Crowley had married Rose Edith Kelly in 1903, and in February 1904 the couple were living in Cairo. Rose led him to a museum and showed him a seventh century BC funerary stele, the Stele of Ankh-ef-en-Khonsu. Its exhibit number was 666, and he later called it the Stele of Revealing. Over April 8 to 10 he wrote down The Book of the Law, which he said was dictated by a voice calling itself Aiwass, a messenger of Horus.

The sources do not tell the story identically. In Crowley's own later account, he heard a disembodied voice. The Ransom Center's biographical sketch says Rose was possessed by Aiwass. Every version rests on what the Crowleys said afterward, and there is no independent witness to the dictation.

The text proclaims a new age with Crowley as its prophet. Its most quoted line is "Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law," usually answered by "Love is the law, love under will." It sounds like permission to do anything. Crowley meant something narrower and more demanding: each person had a True Will to discover and follow, and magic was the discipline for finding it. "Every man and every woman is a star," the book says.

He claimed he ignored the book for years, but by 1909 he had decided Thelema was objective truth. He founded the A∴A∴ with George Cecil Jones in 1907, launched the periodical The Equinox in 1909, and in 1912 the German occultist Theodor Reuss made him head of the Ordo Templi Orientis in Britain. Around this time he adopted the spelling "magick," to keep his work apart from stage conjuring.

Spending the fortune

The money did not last. By 1907 his inheritance was running out and he was taking paying students. Henrik Bogdan, in a 2024 article titled "Branding the Beast," reads Crowley as an advertiser of the occult whose main tool was irony, rooted in the elite intellectual manner of turn of the century Oxbridge. When a 1910 lawsuit put him in the papers, he played up to charges of Satanism and human sacrifice.

He spent the First World War in the United States writing for The Fatherland, a pro-German paper, which led John Bull to call him traitorous "scum" when he came home. Back in London, a doctor prescribed heroin for his asthma, and he became addicted. The scholar Christopher Partridge argues that drugs, largely because of that addiction, mattered more in his life than scholars had acknowledged. His 1922 novel The Diary of a Drug Fiend drew a call from the Sunday Express for it to be burned.

The Abbey at Cefalù

On April 2, 1920, Crowley rented the Villa Santa Barbara in Cefalù, Sicily, and named it the Abbey of Thelema, after the Abbaye de Thélème in Rabelais. Residents wore robes and performed rituals to the sun god Ra at set times of day. With no cleaning rota and stray dogs and cats wandering through, the house became filthy. Leah Hirsig's infant daughter Poupée died there in October 1920.

In February 1923 Raoul Loveday, a young follower, died of a liver infection after drinking from a polluted stream. His widow, Betty May, went home and told the press that he had been made to drink the blood of a sacrificed cat. John Bull ran its famous line, and the story spread across Europe and North America. Crowley could not afford to sue. That April, Benito Mussolini's government served him with a deportation notice, and without him the abbey closed.

What the label leaves out

Some of the reputation was earned. The historian Richard B. Spence judged him "capable of immense physical and emotional cruelty," and the children of Cefalù, left to play all day in a filthy house, are part of the record. Some of it rests on misreadings. Crowley denied being a Satanist, on the grounds that he did not accept the Christian worldview in which Satan exists, and the scholar Gordan Djurdjevic concluded that he "was emphatically not" one. The charge of human sacrifice leaned on a passage in his Book 4: "A male child of perfect innocence and high intelligence is the most satisfactory victim." He added that he had sacrificed about 150 a year. It was a tongue in cheek reference to ejaculation, and his critics missed the joke.

The fortune ended in bankruptcy in February 1935, after a hearing showed he had spent three times his income for years. He died of chronic bronchitis at the Netherwood boarding house in Hastings on December 1, 1947, aged 72. The tabloids called his funeral a Black Mass. His ashes went to his successor Karl Germer, who buried them in his garden in Hampton, New Jersey.