Aleister Crowley

The founding event of Thelema is unusually well dated because Crowley recorded it obsessively. In Cairo in March 1904 his wife Rose Kelly, who had no occult interest and no reason to perform, began producing communications; on 18 March she identified a particular funerary stele in the Bulaq museum, the object Thelemites call the Stele of Revealing, and on 20 March Crowley performed an invocation of Horus at her direction. On 8, 9 and 10 April 1904 he sat for one hour each day beginning at noon and wrote out the three chapters of Liber AL vel Legis, the Book of the Law, which he attributed to a discarnate intelligence named Aiwass.

What Crowley claimed about that text is a claim of dictation from a praeterhuman source. What is documented is that he wrote it, in those hours, in that room. Both statements are true and only the second is checkable, and the honest way to read him is to hold them apart.

The interesting part of the story is what he did next, which was nothing. He mislaid the manuscript, lost interest, and did not accept the book's authority for several years, behaviour hard to reconcile with the fabrication of a revelation, and one of the better arguments that whatever happened in Cairo, he was not simply lying about it. He spent the rest of his life on its consequences, defining magick as the science and art of causing change to occur in conformity with will, and building a corpus of ritual, poetry, commentary and instruction that no subsequent Western magical current has escaped.

Two persistent errors are worth correcting, both of them flattering to him.

He did not found the Ordo Templi Orientis. It was founded by Carl Kellner and organised by Theodor Reuss around the turn of the century; Crowley was admitted to its lower degrees in 1910 and given authority over Great Britain and Ireland shortly after. He proclaimed himself Outer Head of the Order in 1921, while Reuss was still alive, and was formally elected in 1925. A letter from Reuss naming him successor has been referred to but has never been produced. He did found the A A with George Cecil Jones in 1907, and that one is his.

The other error runs the opposite way. The press of his own day called him the wickedest man in the world and printed, as fact, that he had conducted human sacrifice; that charge is baseless. What is documented is bad enough without it and should not be softened either: sustained heroin and cocaine addiction that he never mastered, a pattern of exploiting the money and health of the people around him, the death of a follower at his Sicilian abbey in 1923, and racial and misogynistic language that his admirers tend to skate past. Kaczynski's biography is the fullest documentary account; the Bogdan and Starr essay collection is the best scholarly treatment of his sources and his reception.

He also lied habitually about his own life in his Confessions, which he subtitled an autohagiography without apparent irony. Nothing in that book should be used as a source for itself.