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Aleister Crowley
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Aleister Crowley was a British writer, poet, and occultist who was raised within a strict fundamentalist Christian sect named The Plymouth Brethren. He became interested in the occult while an undergraduate at Trinity College, Cambridge. In 1896, during a trip to Stockholm, he experienced his first mystical experience. In 1898 he joined the order of the Golden Dawn, shortly before it collapsed, and shortly before he left to explore the orient. In 1903 he married Rose Kelly who encouraged his exploration of the occult and his writing of the Book of the Law. They divorced six years later.
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Both idolized and vilified, Aleister Crowley was the most controversial occultist of his time. He was a man of both brilliance and excesses. He considered himself the reincarnation of Edward Kelly, the notorius assistant to John Dee. Crowley was born in Warwarkshire, England. His father was a brewer and a preacher of plymouthism. As a child Crowley participated in the preachings with his parents.
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To say the least, Aleister Crowley has had a lot of “bad press.” Some of it deserved, some slanderous—some orchestrated by Mr. Crowley himself. His writing spoke his truth, but his books were often misunderstood by the critics. He was often referred to as The Wickedest Man on Earth, and seemed to instill fear in the hearts of total strangers by his eccentricities. Crowley did nothing to counter this image; in fact, he enjoyed playing to the crowd. He was notorious for his manner of dress, and loved wearing turbans and Indian caftans whenever possible. He could ... appear, if he so desired, in full formal attire and look much the gentleman.
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It was while spending the winter break in Stockholm Sweden, about midnight December 31, 1896, that Aleister Crowley had a mystical experience resulting in such a profound effect that it determined the course of his life. He referred to this as the first of two events that were to "put me on the road to myself."[46] He described it as "the key to the purest and holiest spiritual ecstasy that exists."[47] This experience was repeated exactly twelve months later. Crowley says:
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The first documentary study of Aleister Crowley's contemporary followers in North America, told through the life of their de facto leader, Wilfred Talbot Smith. Smith met Charles Stansfeld Jones (Frater Achad) and through him, the works of Aleister Crowley. Although Crowley and Smith met only once, their twenty year correspondence proved to be a major link to the few and the faithful attracted to Crowley's work in the US and Canada. Smith's spiritual life centered first on the initiatic structure of the Order of the A.A., complemented by the emerging fraternal and social schemes of the Ordo Templi Orientis (OTO). To promulgate the Crowleyan teachings, in 1934 Smith incorporated his own "Church of Thelema". The following year he initiated OTO activity in Los Angeles which attracted its own cast of occult characters. Smith's life reached a strange conclusion when Crowley sent him off on a retreat to determine which God he was incarnating.
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(MacGregor Mathers, Outer Head of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, and the first occult teacher of such worthies as Aleister Crowley, poet William Butler Yeats and novelist Arthur Machen, once recorded a meeting with the Secret Chiefs. These ambiguous entities, known in several schools of occult training, are variously believed to be discarnate spirits of the great Magi of the past, living Magi who can teleport themselves about as easily as you or I telephone a friend, "angels" in the traditional sense, or merely "beings we cannot understand." In any case, Mathers noted that the meeting, although pleasant, left him feeling as if he'd been "struck by lightning" and he ... suffered chest pains and extreme difficulty in breathing. Dr. Israel Regardie has also noted that Alan Bennett, who was Crowley's chief teacher for many years, developed asthma, a chest disease. Crowley developed asthma himself as his contacts with the Secret Chiefs occurred more often; and Regardie finally "caught" asthma for several years after studying with Crowley, a condition which was only cured when he went through the bioenergetic therapy of Wilhelm Reich.) [As an interesting synchronistic aside here, Brother Whitley Strieber, the alleged Space Alien Abductee and prolific author on such topics, also suffers from quite a touch of asthma. Coincidence...?
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Aleister Crowley