They called him the Beast, and in the small hours of the night, the woman who had taken that name for herself walked out of his life. She was young, barely nineteen, and for months she had followed him across the world, writing articles to keep them fed while he performed his rituals. Now she had had enough. She left him in Portugal, alone, broke, and hollowed out.
Aleister Crowley, the man the newspapers had branded the wickedest man alive, stood at the edge of despair and considered ending his own life. He thought about how to do it. He planned the staging of his own death in a sea cave called the Mouth of Hell. And then, at the last moment, he did something else entirely.
He turned it into a performance. This was the man who had been born Edward Alexander Crowley in 1875, in the genteel county of Warwickshire, into wealth that could buy almost anything except the affections of his family. His parents were Plymouth Brethren, strict evangelical Christians, and his father was a preacher who had made his fortune in the brewery trade. The boy, called Alec by everyone who knew him, grew up on scripture and sermons, and he loved his father deeply.
When he misbehaved, his devout mother did not scold him with ordinary words. She called him the Beast, after the terrible figure in the Book of Revelation. It was a name he would one day embrace with theatrical pride. When Alec was eight, his parents sent him to a strict Christian boarding school.
His days were filled with prayer, hymn-singing, and Bible study, and at first he thrived. He excelled in his lessons, formed close friendships, and dreamed of following his father into the ministry. Then, in the middle of the spring of 1886, when he was just eleven years old, his father was diagnosed with cancer of the tongue. For a man whose entire life had revolved around preaching, it was a cruel blow.
When his father died, Alec lost the anchor of his world. He also inherited a fortune, the modern equivalent of millions of dollars, at an age when most boys were still learning their multiplication tables. His mother collapsed into what Crowley would later call widow’s hysteria, and the model student who had once wanted to become a preacher fell apart. He was sent to a new school, and there he became a permanent visitor to the headmaster’s office.
The punishments were savage: beatings with a cane and solitary confinement on a diet of bread and water. Eventually an uncle intervened and pulled the boy out of the school, but the damage was already done. The abuse had triggered a kidney disease called albuminuria, a condition that could be fatal in the Victorian era. For the wealthy families of the time, the prescribed cure was a long rest cure in a pleasant place, the Victorian equivalent of a dream holiday.
After a bout of whooping cough at fifteen, Crowley was sent to the English Riviera to recover, accompanied by a twenty-five-year-old philosophy tutor named James Douglas. Douglas was supposed to keep the young man out of trouble. Instead, he introduced him to smoking, drinking, card games, and women. And then, on a sunny afternoon in a field, Crowley lost his virginity to a local girl.
After a childhood spent being warned against pleasure, it was a revelation. At university, he remade himself. Alec, the sickly boy who had been forbidden to read anything but the Bible, became Aleister, a handsome young man with a new passion for life. He devoured literature, wrote poetry, and took up mountain climbing.
He bought silk shirts, flamboyant ties, and a wide-brimmed hat, and he pursued women with enthusiasm. If they were not charmed by him, he simply paid them. One of those encounters gave him syphilis. In 1896, on a trip to Stockholm, he carried on a secret affair with a man named Herbert Charles Pollitt, a wealthy fellow artist who performed in drag under the name Diane de Rougy.
It was, at the time, entirely illegal. During a stay in Russia in 1897, when he was twenty-two, an illness sent him into an existential spiral. He began to question the point of becoming a great diplomat or a great poet if everything would eventually be forgotten. Even Shakespeare and Homer, he reasoned, would fade into oblivion.
So he abandoned his promising diplomatic career, left Cambridge, and threw himself into the world of the occult. He traveled the globe climbing mountains, joined a secret society, and moved into a lavish London apartment. He invited another member of that society, a man named Allan Bennett, to live with him as his private tutor in magic. That was when things began to take a stranger turn.
With vast sums of money and no one to refuse him, the young Crowley indulged his every whim. Bennett introduced him to the use of drugs in ritual, and together they experimented with chloroform, morphine, cocaine, opium, and ether. With that pharmacological arsenal, it was perhaps unsurprising that they began to see spirits. Crowley’s London residence was luxurious, set in the heart of the bustling city, and it contained two temple rooms.
The white temple held six enormous mirrors, each covering forty-eight square feet, which were said to repel evil forces. The black temple contained a human skeleton. Both rooms had a magic circle and a pentagram painted on the floor, ready for ceremonies. The secret society Crowley had joined was the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, which claimed its members could communicate with angels and unleash ancient magic.
Crowley may have been brilliant, and he had Bennett’s guidance, but he was thoroughly disliked within the order. The famous poet W. B. Yeats was one of his harshest critics, calling him unspeakably depraved because of his dissolute lifestyle, and Yeats helped persuade the other members to reject Crowley’s initiation.
Crowley responded by going to Paris and convincing the order’s founder, Samuel Liddell MacGregor Mathers, to back him in a power struggle. He returned to London, furious and determined to seize control of the Golden Dawn’s headquarters. The members refused to recognize him. They barricaded themselves inside the house and called the police.
The authorities eventually banned both Crowley and Mathers from the property. Frustrated in London, Crowley entered his era as a Scottish laird, complete with a haunted mansion on the shore of Loch Ness. Even before he bought it, Boleskine House had a dark reputation. Locals believed it was haunted by the severed head of Simon Fraser, who had been executed in 1747.
The house had also been built on the site of a church that had burned down with its congregation inside. It was the perfect isolated place for Crowley to perform complex and demanding rituals. He prepared for six months, in seclusion and discipline, to perform the sacred magic of Abramelin the Sorcerer. Unfortunately, in the middle of the ritual, he had to leave for Paris and London to confront the Golden Dawn.
Legend says he left the working unfinished and that the demons he had summoned remained behind. The strange and tragic events that followed did nothing to dispel that story. The property’s caretaker, Hugh Gillies, lost his ten-year-old daughter when she died suddenly at school. A year later, his fifteen-month-old son died of convulsions.
Decades later, Jimmy Page, the guitarist of Led Zeppelin, bought the house, fascinated by Crowley. A gardener at the Page estate, a man skeptical of the supernatural, described one incident there as the most terrifying night of his life, adding: whatever was in there, it was pure evil. Crowley never did things the ordinary way, and even his marriage in 1903 was unconventional. He proposed to Rose Edith Kelly, the sister of a friend, to save her from an arranged marriage.
The marriage eventually became a real love, and then something far stranger. He took his new bride on a honeymoon that included stops in Italy, Egypt, India, and China. In Egypt, he arranged a private dinner in the King’s Chamber of the Great Pyramid at Giza. After dismissing the servants, he lit candles, opened an ancient book of spells, and began to summon spirits.
Later, he and Rose, who was by then pregnant, rented an apartment in Cairo. That was when Rose began behaving very oddly. One evening she suddenly began muttering: they are waiting for you. Staring blankly, she began naming specific Egyptian gods, despite having no knowledge of Egyptian mythology whatsoever.
Over the next three days, Crowley recorded everything Rose said while in her trance. The result was The Book of the Law, the foundation of the religion Crowley called Thelema. He was as extreme in his hobbies as in everything else. He was a world-class mountaineer, but his ego got the better of him during an expedition to Kangchenjunga in 1905, with disastrous consequences.
After four of his team members were buried in an avalanche, following an argument with Crowley, he refused to leave his tent to dig them out, even though he could hear them screaming from his camp. He claimed afterward that the expedition had been a moral and physical triumph. Crowley called himself a proud father, but he was not about to let parenthood interfere with his life of occultism, climbing, and global travel. While his infant daughter fought typhoid fever in Burma, Crowley was occupied with his own affairs in America.
The child did not survive. Both Rose and Crowley were devastated, but they grieved in very different ways. Rose turned to heavy drinking, even during her pregnancy with their second child. Crowley immersed himself once again in magic and worked on establishing his own religion.
After their second daughter, Lola, was born, Crowley committed Rose to a psychiatric institution, her mind destroyed by alcoholism. He believed she had failed her spiritual mission. Even with his inheritance running out, Crowley never lacked charisma or audacity. He managed to take control of the German secret society, the Ordo Templi Orientis, and replaced its Masonic rituals with his own Thelemite practices.
Some of those involved cakes made from bodily fluids, including menstrual blood, or, if that was not available, the blood of a child, a priest, or a goat. In 1914, he took his increasingly extreme experiments to Paris with the poet Victor Neuburg. What happened during those six weeks was so intense that it drove Neuburg into a nervous breakdown. In Paris, Crowley’s bedroom was where the real miracles took place.
There, he and Neuburg used the act of love as a launching point for their body-wrecking rituals. For six weeks they engaged in what was called sex magic, heavily intoxicated, chanting in Latin in an attempt to invoke the Egyptian gods. A few months later, the First World War broke out, and for Crowley this was no coincidence. He sailed to New York, staged a strange declaration of Irish independence near the Statue of Liberty, and began writing provocatively pro-German propaganda.
His next chapter seemed, at first, like an idyll. He rented a farmhouse in Sicily, where he wrote, painted, and lived a communal life with a small group of devoted Thelemites under the Italian sun. He brought his new lover, Leah Hirsig, and their new baby, a boy called Poupée. The Abbey of Thelema quickly deteriorated.
Crowley’s daughter was already sick when she arrived, and the unsanitary conditions, and most likely the goat’s milk they fed her, did not help. Leah took the child to the hospital and returned to the abbey alone. One might think an Oxford graduate would know better than to join Crowley’s cult, but Raoul Loveday and his wife Betty May soon discovered that Thelema’s spiritual enlightenment carried real risks. Despite Crowley’s warnings about drinking river water, Loveday, who had been sickly all his life, drank from a polluted stream, contracted a liver infection, and died in 1923.
When Betty May returned to London and revealed the appalling conditions at the abbey, the tabloids crowned Crowley the wickedest man in the world. The dictator Benito Mussolini was so disgusted that he ordered Crowley expelled from Italy. By 1930, the fifty-five-year-old Crowley and his nineteen-year-old mistress, whom he had named the Beast, were traveling the world on a tight budget. She wrote articles to earn money.
When she grew tired of his strange bedroom rituals, she left him in Portugal. He was in such despair that he contemplated suicide. Eventually, he staged his own death in a sea cave called the Mouth of Hell. The tabloids buzzed with the news of his demise.
Then he suddenly appeared in Berlin at his own art exhibition. In the course of his life, Crowley had an uncanny knack for crossing paths with some of the most famous figures in history. He feuded with the poet W. B.
Yeats, mixed with Bram Stoker, the author of Dracula, sat for the sculptor Auguste Rodin, was expelled by Mussolini, influenced L. Ron Hubbard, and eventually ended up on the cover of an album by the Beatles. On the first of December 1947, Crowley died of degeneration of the heart muscle, aggravated by chronic bronchitis and his lifelong addictions.
When his doctor also died less than twenty-four hours later, the press was flooded with rumors that Crowley had delivered one final curse from beyond the grave.
