Aleister Crowley was a mountaineer, chess fanatic and self-proclaimed prophet
Before he became notorious as the occultist who founded Thelema, Crowley climbed in Mexico and joined a 1905 attempt on Kanchenjunga. At Cambridge he practised chess two hours a day and toyed with turning professional. His own mother nicknamed him the Beast, and he loved it.
Edward Alexander Crowley was born on 12 October 1875 in Royal Leamington Spa, Warwickshire. His father had trained as an engineer but retired early on income from the family firm, Crowley's Alton Ales, and both parents were strict evangelical Christians of the Plymouth Brethren. When his father died of tongue cancer in 1887, the eleven-year-old called it a turning point; he inherited a third of the fortune and began rebelling, quizzing teachers about contradictions in the Bible and hating the schools he was sent to.
In 1895 he went up to Trinity College, Cambridge, now calling himself Aleister, and switched from philosophy to English literature with his tutor's blessing. He wrote poetry inspired by Shelley and Richard Francis Burton, presided over the chess club and climbed. Some biographers claim British intelligence recruited him there and that he spied for the rest of his life. A mystical experience in Stockholm in December 1896 has been linked by biographers to his recognising his bisexuality.
In 1898 he joined the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn and trained in ceremonial magic under Samuel Liddell MacGregor Mathers and Allan Bennett. After Kanchenjunga and travels in India and China, he returned to Britain and poured out poems, novels and occult books. With George Cecil Jones he founded the order known as the A.A. in 1907 to spread Thelema, a religion in which he cast himself as prophet of a new age, the Æon of Horus.
In 1912 he entered the German-based Ordo Templi Orientis and later led its British branch, rewriting it along Thelemic lines; through it groups formed in Britain, Australia and North America. His drug use, bisexuality and attacks on conventional morals made him infamous in life. He died on 1 December 1947, yet his influence on Western esotericism and the 1960s counterculture endured, and Thelemites still regard him as their prophet.
Source: Aleister Crowley
