a horus line
Or, Part One of a two-part investigation of Aleister Crowley, a real piece of work if we're being honest.
Hi friends!
This week’s newsletter is a reader suggestion! It’s someone I always intended to get around to writing about someday, but then
reached out to me providing a few key details I wasn’t aware of, which rocketed this jagoff all the way to the top of the list.Then, when I was about halfway through writing the post, Black Sabbath frontman Ozzy Osbourne passed away, which sounds unrelated until I tell you I was almost certainly Waverly Middle School Class of 2006’s number-one listener to We Sold Our Soul for Rock ‘N’ Roll and I first heard about this dirtbag from the Ozzy song of the same name.
Finally, I finished writing this post and realized it was fully 4,000 words long and I was exhausted. Usually in a story like this there’s a few decades of nothing particularly scandalous going on, but NOT IN THIS CASE. I’ve split the story into two parts so I don’t crash your inboxes and because after this I need a rest from writing.
So with that context in place, please put on the Blizzard of Oz album, kick back, and enjoy the batshit1 stylings of:
Aleister Crowley, the Most Fucked-Up 20th-Century Wizard You’ve Ever Heard Of: Part One!
Aleister Crowley was born Edward Alexander Crowley in 1875, in the catastrophically British-sounding town of Royal Leamington Spa. His parents were wealthy evangelical Christians, though his father died of cancer when Crowley was 11. He was raised by his mother, who didn’t like him and referred to him as “the Beast.” This puts Mrs. Crowley right next to Mrs. Rimbaud and Mrs. Hemingway in the pantheon of “moms who hated their kids and were right to do so.”
Crowley grew up the way many children of very religious parents do, by which I mean his youthful rebellion took the general form of this dril tweet:
He got kicked out of at least three different schools for loudly blaspheming, cutting class, and smoking on school grounds. He contracted gonorrhea from local prostitutes. He became an English major and read the gothest poets he could find. He got extremely into mountain climbing. I’m aware that one feels a little out of left field, but I imagine he was muttering “hail Satan” under his breath once a minute upon leaving basecamp to maintain the vibe.
In his junior year of college, Crowley discovered mortality. This seems weirdly late for a teenager whose dad died when he was 11, but we all cope in our own ways, I guess. For Crowley, his way of addressing this sudden terror of death was to give up his attempts to secure a diplomatic career as the ambassador to Russia (don’t ask) in favor of a deep study of BLACK MAGICK AND THE OCCULT.
Listen, guys. I would love to not spell it “magick” as much as the next person. Crowley is a pretentious dickhead and he was very insistent.
We’ve Got a Big Ness on Our Hands
Crowley dropped out of college about two weeks before he was supposed to get his degree and went on a spiritual journey to Switzerland, where in 1898 he met George Cecil Jones, a leading member of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn.
Maybe you’ve heard of the H.O. of the G.D. before. Before researching this story, I was aware of it only because my friend Lana once threatened to write a YA novel about it. In case you’re unfamiliar, here are five things you need to know about this wacky group of people:
The Golden Dawn is a society of occult magicians who follow the teachings of Hermes Trismegistus, a figure who functions like Santa Claus if Santa Claus were a mashup of the Greek god Hermes and the Egyptian god Thoth.2
These guys are where the phrase “as above, so below” comes from: big “divine energy, check out my crystals” folks.
The three main magickal activities of the Golden Dawn were alchemy, astrology, and theurgy, AKA directly contacting the divine in order to improve your soul.
Shit-tons of famous late-19th-early-20th-century people were members of the Golden Dawn, including W.B. Yeats, Maud Gonne, and Edith Nesbit the children’s writer.
They loved costumes and regalia and lived for the drama.
As a member of the Golden Dawn, Crowley bought himself a luxury apartment and moved in with his own personal magickal tutor, doing a lot of drugs and having sex with a variety of people and genders in the name of transcendence. He also bought a summer house on Loch Ness specifically to conduct dark rituals, including—and I swear to God I did not make this up—summoning a pack of 12 Princes and Dukes of Hell to serve as his own personal guardian angels.
Now, if you’ve looked into demon summoning the way I have, you know the number-one most important part of the process is a real good protection circle. But Crowley was not interested in protection, and I mean that both demonically and as an innuendo. He failed to dismiss his demons and then fucked off back to mainland Europe, at which point one of the demons allegedly shrugged its shoulders, belly-flopped into the loch, and said “this is fine I live here now.”
That’s right, friends: Aleister Crowley summoned the motherfucking Loch Ness Monster straight from hell.
Crowley would maintain this house for a while, which allows me to quote directly from one of the most wonderful Scottish news articles I have ever read:
It was also said that while staying at the house he had masturbated over the oldest parts of the graveyard as an offering of sacrifice, and locals claimed he threw a sacrificial sheep into the loch every Sunday for his “pet” Nessie.
OK. Sorry for the protracted Loch Ness Monster tangent.3 We’re moving on with the story.
Duel or Die
When he wasn’t summoning aquatic demons, Crowley was working his way up through the ranks of the Golden Dawn, to the point that he was ready to enter its even-more-secret Second Order.
Well, to be fair, he thought he was ready. The Second Order was not remotely on board, because everybody fucking hated Crowley. You can sort of understand why, I think. Imagine you’re trying to run a secret society in which you think about alchemy and wear nice robes and then this absolute weirdo comes crashing in like the Kool-Aid Man yelling about how many graves he’s jizzed on.
W.B. Yeats was particularly fed up with Crowley’s bullshit, which Crowley knew. So ahead of one meeting in 1900, Crowley met with some of his remaining friends to come up with an arsenal of spells he could use to win over the other members to his cause. He then came to a meeting of the Golden Dawn, where Yeats was blocking the top of the stairs and refused to let him enter. So Crowley and Yeats got into a Literal Wizard Duel, shouting spells at each other at top volume from the length of a staircase away.
The intended impact was something like this:
But of course none of their silly little spells did anything whatsofuckingever, so after a bit Yeats got fed up and simply kicked Crowley down the full flight of stairs.
Crowley slunk out of the meeting and did what every former rich kid turned occult dirtbag would do: he ran off to Paris to find the leader of the Golden Dawn and say “Samuel Mathers, all the other wizards are being mean to me.” Crowley and Mathers then tried to stage a hostile coup and physically occupy the Golden Dawn headquarters in London like a Civil Rights-era sit-in if instead of principles they had demons. No one appreciated this, and in 1900 Crowley fucked off to Mexico to avoid more lawsuits.
Yes, you read those dates right. All of the stuff we’ve talked about so far happened over the course of two years.
THIS MAN LIVED TO AGE 72. He’s 25 right now. You see why we are doing this in two parts.
Are You There, Horus? It’s Me, Aleister Crowley.
Because we simply need to move the story along, I’m going to provide a summary of Crowley’s activities between 1900 and 1903 as a bulleted list. This should be fine because you genuinely do not need any context to appreciate how funny some of this shit is.
He climbed at least four mountains in Mexico, at least one of which he had to abandon midway through because it turns out it wasn’t just a mountain, it was a CURRENTLY ERUPTING VOLCANO.
He read the occult diaries of Original Dirtbags Through the Ages Star John Dee and learned how to speak to angels.
He had an affair with a woman and then wrote a book of bad poetry about it, which he titled Alice: An Adultery because he sucks.
He tried to climb K2 but caught both influenza and malaria simultaneously and had to back out.
He got married to Rose Edith Kelly mostly as a bit but then found out after the fact he actually loved her, at least for now.
OK, now it’s 1904 and we need to slow down a bit, because this part is really something.
Crowley and Rose’s whirlwind world tour of speaking to angels and climbing on top of tall things eventually brought them to Egypt, where in true all-star dirtbag fashion they pretended to be a prince and princess and built themselves their own temple in a rented apartment. While hanging out here, Rose reportedly slipped into transcendent visions where the Egyptian god Horus told her he had important things to say to Crowley. Seems like an inefficient way of sharing information, but I guess I’m not Horus.
Shortly after Rose’s prophetic vision, Crowley was visited by a spirit named Aiwass, a servant to Horus. Aiwass dictated to him a full book that was later known as The Book of the Law. The gist of this book was essentially:
The end times are coming
Aleister Crowley is a prophet
Go nuts and do whatever you want
The actual quote is “Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law,” which. All right.
The Book of the Law became the cornerstone of the religion Crowley invented, called Thelema. I don’t know if “whatever, have fun, man” is really much of a doctrine in the technical religious sense, but he made it work. He sent the book to various occultists and tried to get it published all around the world, with what I would describe as medium success.
As a religion, Thelema seems to have petered out a bit since Crowley’s death. There have been people practicing it as late as 2018, however, so that’s some staying power. I guess people throughout history have always liked the advice “do whatever you want and have a nice time.”
OK, friends, Substack is warning me we’re hitting our length limit and there’s still so much nonsense to get through, so I’m going to break it here for now. Join me back in about two weeks for the conclusion of the Aleister Crowley Saga, when—spoiler—there is a secret society name that’s punctuated so irritatingly I almost gave up on this story altogether.
Until then, be well, and if you summon any Dukes of Hell in the immediate future I implore you to CLOSE THE PORTAL I CANNOT EMPHASIZE THIS ENOUGH,
-Allison
This pun genuinely wasn’t intended but I stand by it, RIP to that bat.
Me, under my breath, to nobody at all: you better not pout I’m telling you why, Santa Thoth is comin’ to town
I’m not sorry even a little bit, and you all knew that.
You’re telling us Crowley got yeated down the stairs?
I am blessed (cursed?) with the same last name as him, and still have people come up to me and say, "Mister Croooowleyyyy!! Hey, do you know where that comes from?!?" I feign ignorance so they have to explain. Nimrods.