EVERYTHING Aleister Crowley, The Great Beast 666 | Deep Dive

They called him "the wickedest man" in the world. His own mother called him "the beast." Literally, the Antichrist. They said that he summoned demons. He ran a sex magic cult out of a villa in Sicily where strange rituals happened behind closed doors and where a man literally ended up dead. This is the story of Alistair Crowley, a man who climbed some of the highest mounds on Earth. And then in a hotel room in Cairo claimed that he spoke with the voice of God. It became a prophet wrote down a whole book of hidden knowledge and over through 2,000 years of religion. To most of the world, he was a fraud or a madman or a monster, but in the world of the occult of magicians and mystics and secret societies, he became more like an icon, like a god. The single most important figure that modern magic has ever produced. So who was Alistair Crowley really, a Charlotteson playing dress up with a devil or a man who actually found a door to the other side and opened it up? Today we're going to find out and it starts weirdly enough in a strict Christian household. If you're interested in Alistair Crowley or the history of the occult will great news you're in the right place, so sit back, relax, and enjoy this Campfire story. What's up dude and welcome back to the campfire. This is a campfire story. This is the show where we take the episodes that you liked the most, the most interesting topics and we break them down into a short documentary. And today we're talking about Alistair Crowley. Now, if you don't know, the world at this point knows Alistair Crowley as this like big shot occultist wicked wizard guy. They associate him with the great beast bearing the number 666. They know him as a black magician who could allegedly curse enemies and even summon demons. They probably know him for stories of his commune where there were whispers of human sacrifice. That is the Crowley that people think they know, the boogie man. But he wasn't always like that. We're going to start at the beginning before he became the wickedest man in the world, before he was even Alistair at all, back when he was just a rich kid named Edward and a house with a lot of Bibles. Edward Alexander Crowley was born in England in 1875 to a very well-off family. And most notably they belong to the Plymouth Brethren. This is one of the strictest, most uptight fundamentalist Christian sects in the entire country. Crowley's dad even quit engineering to become a full-time traveling preacher. And life inside this house was pretty intense. I mean, daily Bible study, no secular books, no outside friends. So when Edward started pushing back against his faith, his own mother called him the beast. She called him the antichrist. And instead of self-correcting, he kind of leaned into it. And he sort of owned the title, and when he was 20 years old, in 1895, he went to Trinity College, Cambridge, and he built a whole new identity for himself. He basically dropped the Edward and started calling himself Alistair. And he started to write poetry and took up mountaineering. He even attempted some of the deadliest mountain peaks on Earth. But here's where the pattern for Crowley starts to emerge. Everything he did from here on out seems to be a reaction against his strict Bible-thumping childhood. Every rule that he broke was one of their rules. The brethren said no to drugs, no to sex, no to questioning. And he said yes to all of it as soon as he could. But just being a rebellious church kid doesn't make you, like, as bad as the antichrist. So how does he become an actual occultist, like an actual magician? Well, in 1898, when he was about 23 years old, he walked through the door of the hermetic order of the Golden Dawn, which at that time was the most influential occult society in the entire Western world. So the Golden Dawn was a member's only club for people obsessed with the mystical. Think like ceremonial magic, Kabbalah, tarot, astrology, Egyptian symbolism, all that stuff, and they had an entire system of ranks and initiations. And as you climbed from the bottom, you would unlock more secret knowledge as you went. And when young Crowley found this, he loved it. I mean, he just fell in love with the whole group. Remember, he was raised in one of the strictest Christian sex in all of England and was just drowned in scripture and rules and ritual and hierarchy. He rejected the beliefs, but he never rejected the structure. He was likely drawn to the ranks and the ceremony and the sense of, like, climbing towards a hidden truth that the Golden Dawn offered. And he climbed it fast. He was initiated in late 1898. He took the magical name of Perderabo, which is Latin for "I Shall Endure to the End." And he tore through all the lower grades. He got private tutoring and ceremonial magic and the ritual use of drugs. He was learning the machinery of basically all of Western magic up to that point, like how to perform invocations, how to work with symbols and correspondences, and how to use ritual to reshape yourself and supposedly the rest of the world. And then in 1899, about a year in, he bought a place called the Bullseye House, which was a manner on the shores of Loch Ness in Scotland. And he didn't buy the house to live in it, he bought it to perform rituals, specifically a grueling months-long operation from a medieval magic text called "The Book of Ambrilin." And it was a working, meant to end by making contact with what would be called your holy guardian angel. A working is basically just another word for kind of a long ritual in the magic, sort of a cult sense. So you can think of this ritual as kind of like a higher self, a personal divine intelligence, but the ritual had strict requirements, total isolation, a house facing the right direction, and a consecrated space that no outsider could disturb. So Crowley went looking for a property that fit these instructions. And this remote house on the lake checked every box. He even started calling himself the "Laird of Bullseye." But by Crowley's own account, he never finished the ritual, the chaos of his falling out with the golden dawn, pulled him away before he completed it, and Crowley later claimed that breaking off the operation halfway had let something loose in the house. Now whatever you make of that, Bullseye wound up with a dark haunted reputation that still sticks with it to this day. Now Crowley's word for what he was doing was magic, spelt with CK at the end. So basically, he tried to set it apart from like stage magic and card tricks and illusions. To him, magic meant causing change in the world through your will. Through focused ritual and ceremony, in his mind, he was kind of like an explorer, using ritual meditation drugs and invocation to contact higher intelligences, to summon spirits and angels and forces, and above all to discover his true will, like his real purpose and bend reality to match it. He thought that he was doing something closer to spiritual science than devilship, charting the invisible world and learning how to command it, but it didn't last. Because as fast as he rose, he went to war within his own order. When Crowley pushed to be initiated into the Golden Dawn's elite inner circle, the London leadership refused him. They were reportedly put off by his arrogance and his libertine reputation, so to speak. So he went over their heads straight to the order's founder, McGregor Mathers, who initiated him anyway. And that blew this entire thing wide open. The London members revolted, and the order split into feuding factions, and Crowley himself ended up tangled in all of this wreckage, eventually breaking with Mathers too. The very mentor who built the whole thing and let him in. So the Golden Dawn, his new tribe, his new family, fractured around him because of him in just a couple of years. But losing his order didn't slump down. If anything, it kind of set him loose, because what happened next didn't need structure or a mentor or a rank at all. He was done being a student in someone else's order. I came next, he claimed, came from a higher source than any human teacher. Because in 1904, Alistair Crowley went to Egypt, as an occultist and came back as a prophet. So in 1904, Alistair Crowley was honeymooning with his wife Rose Kelly in Cairo, Egypt, and something strange started to happen to Rose. Now she's not into any of Crowley's stuff, like she's not really into the occult stuff, but she keeps slipping into these translike states, telling Crowley that God is trying to talk to him and directing him to a specific place and a specific time. And then three days in a row, April 8th, 9th, and 10th in 1904, Crowley sat in a room, and from one hour each day, he claimed that a voice spoke to him. Its name was Awas, a messenger of the Egyptian God Horus. Now Crowley wrote down every word, and what he ended up with was a short, strange book called the Book of the Law. In it, it says that humanity has entered a brand new age, the "Eon of Horus," and that the old rules, the old religions, and the old order are all finished, and that the prophet of this new age is already here, and it's him. And the text has one central law, maybe the most misunderstood and famous line to come from Crowley's story, the line is this, "Do what thou wilt, shall be the whole of the law." Now, to most people on the outside, it sounds like it basically is saying, "Hey, do whatever you want, anything goes," but that's not really what it meant, at least that's not how Crowley interpret it. Do what thou wilt means discover your true will. He would say, "Your deepest, truest purpose and align your whole life with it. It's closer to find your calling and follow it without any compromise." So the whole system, the new age, the new prophet, this new book of teachings, is called "Thelma." And this is the moment that Alistair Crowley became a prophet with his own working scripture. But what does a prophet without followers? Well, that's what happened. happens next, Crowley started to build an empire. Around 1907, he founded his own secret order to start spreading his teachings. Later, he took over another German-readed order called the OTO and filled it with Thelma and what he called sex magic. These were rituals using sexual energy as a spiritual force. But then 13 years later, in 1920, Crowley moved to Kepfelou in the island of Sicily and he founded a commune called the Abbey of Thelma. Think of it almost as like an anti-monster. It's full of followers living by his law do what thou wilt. And there are daily rituals and drugs and complete sexual freedom and walls covered in his own explicit murals. And for a few years, the Abbey of Thelma is the heart, the center of his growing movement. And then in 1923, things went too far. Someone died. A young follower named Raoul Love Day, a bright Oxford grad, got sick at the Abbey. It's possible he drank from a contaminated stream and caught a fatal infection, but his wife, Betty May, went to London newspapers and told them everything about what her husband had been a part of, the rituals, the drugs, even the claim that he was made to drink the blood of a sacrificed cat. Now, of course, the British press went crazy. A tabloid called Crowley, the wickedest man in the world. I mean, the scandal got so big that even Mussolini's fascist government kicked Crowley out of Italy altogether. This is Crowley at the peak of his fame, but it also became the beginning of the end. Because after Sicily, everything went mostly downhill. Crowley spent the next two decades kind of a drift, wandering between France and Germany and England, dragged down by two things. First, addiction. You see, Crowley was addicted to morphine. He got a morphine prescription for his asthma and it spiraled into a full-blown heroin addiction and it never let go. Secondly, it was money. He was chronically and desperately broke. And in 1934, he lost a libel case in court and it bankrupted him even further. But before he faded, some of the strangest chapters of his life were still being written. So go back to 1918. In New York, Crowley runs a series of rituals that he called the Amalantro working. And doing it, he claims to make contact with an entity from outside our world. He even draws its portrait. It's a being with a kind of a swollen, hairless head and a small chin and these huge black, almond eyes. And he says that the entity's name is Lam. Now, look at that drawing today. It looks almost identical to the gray alien that people talk about in pop culture and UFOology. It is the exact image that wouldn't flood pop culture until decades later. The image of the alien grays really only came into popular consciousness after Roswell and into the alien abduction era. But Crowley sketched the face of a modern alien years before anyone else did. Was it a coincidence? Was it just a lucky doodle where they drawing on the same source material? Or as some believers insist, did he open a door and draw what came through it? No one can prove a thing, of course. And that's exactly why the image still is so unnerving to people. Now here's a twist that most people never see coming. Some historians believe that Alistair Crowley spent parts of his life as a spy. The theory goes that he worked for British intelligence that his notorious pro-German propaganda during World War I was actually a cover. It was a sophisticated siop designed to discredit the German cause from the inside. Now, it's debated, and the records are murky, but it means that the wickedest man in the world may have also been quietly working for the Allies. And then, of course, the end. December 1, 1947, Alistair Crowley dies in a boarding house in Hastings on the English coast. 72 years old, a heroin addict broke, and largely forgotten. The great beast goes out quietly in just a rented room. And that should be the end of the story, but it is not. Because his afterlife turned out to be far bigger than his actual life. Fast forward to the 1960s, and the counter-culture movement is just exploding in America. Rejecting authority, rejecting the old order, and, of course, chasing sex, drugs, and rock and roll. And one of Crowley's most central teachings is uncovered. Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law. And suddenly, decades after his death, Crowley has handed an anthem to an entire new generation. The exact rebellion that he staged against his strict Christian upbringing as a boy was now happening worldwide. And as a result, Crowley became iconic to the entire movement. I mean, the Beatles put his face on the cover of Sergeant Peppers. Led Zeppelin's Jimmy Page got so obsessed with Crowley that he actually collected Crowley's manuscripts, and he even bought the Bullseye House, where Crowley performed one of his first major workings. And then, in the 1980s, Ozzy Osborne released a song literally called Mr. Crowley, introducing the name officially to an entire generation of metal kids. Ironically, it is Ozzy Osborne who pronounced it Crowley, which is why so many people to this day mispronounced his name. But the music is honestly just the shallow end of his influence, because Crowley's influence on modern religion runs deep, like his own religion, Thelma, still has followers to this day. In the 1940s, he helped shape the early rituals of Gerald Gardner, the man who was credited with founding Wicca. He is a foundational figure in chaos magic. And one of Crowley's most devoted American followers was a man named Jack Parsons. He's literally one of the fathers of American rocketry. If you'd ever heard of him, Parsons ran a notorious ritual in 1946 called The Babylon Working, which was meant to summon a goddess into the world. And his partner in that ritual was a struggling science fiction writer, and his name was El Ron Hubbard, the founder of Scientology. So think about that. Crowley became one of the most influential occultists who ever lived, but he wasn't just a cult celebrity or a boogeyman on rock album covers. Serious scholars consider him one of the single most important guys in the entire history of Western esotericism. In other words, one of the most important guys shaping how the world thinks about ritual magic. That is magic with a K. So what do we make of this, right? This Alistair Crowley guy. He's an influential occultist and a writer and to some a prophet. He's the founder of a religion that is still ongoing as we speak. He's a brilliant, reckless, drug addicted provocateur who caused real disaster and chased real scandal. And is perhaps one of the most influential and imitated occultists who ever lived. And in doing so, he kind of made himself immortal, haunting every corner and myth and legend, a man whose own mother basically called him Satan, basically spent every day of his life proving her right. And that, ladies and gentlemen, is a brief synopsis on the life of the occultist Alistair Crowley. Now, if you are interested in episodes of the occult or even diving deeper into Alistair Crowley's life, well, great news. We've done entire episodes multiple hours long on this one specific topic. And if you are interested in diving deeper or learning more about who Alistair Crowley was or other elements of ritual magic, well, great news. We have an entire playlist right here on the screen dedicated to this topic. From an unbiased perspective, just trying to understand what is really happening and why are people so obsessed with this man and with this type of craft. Well, thank you so much for tuning in to another campfire story. I'll see you next time.