Chapter 120. Do What Thou Wilt: Aleister Crowley, Thelema and the Ordo Templi Orientis

Eliphas Levi rehabilitated Lucifer in theory (Chapter 119). Aleister Crowley (1875-1947) built a religion, a set of initiatory orders and a body of sexual magic around a revelation he said he received in Cairo in 1904. The Deep State Encyclopedia says he “might have had more of an impact on the counterculture movements of the 20th century than anyone else, earning him the titles of ‘Wickedest Man in The World’ and a ‘Master of Darkness'” [The Deep State Encyclopedia, #71726, “Aleister Crowley”]. This chapter sets out Crowley’s own account of Thelema, the history of the Ordo Templi Orientis (OTO) and its American lodge, and the scholarly, initiate and conspiracy readings of his legacy.

From Cambridge to the Golden Dawn and the East

John Michael Greer gives the outline. “In 1895 he matriculated at Trinity College, Cambridge, and briefly pursued chemistry, but left without a degree. Money inherited from his father, who died when Crowley was five, enabled him to pursue the lifestyle of a bohemian poet and self-publish two books of poetry, including a pornographic volume entitled White Stains“. Like many fin-de-siècle writers he was drawn to the occult [Greer, The Element Encyclopedia of Secret Societies, #64911, “Crowley, Aleister”]. Greer gives his Golden Dawn membership as 1898-1900 and says he was “a Mathers loyalist until 1904”; from 1909 he printed the order’s rituals in his magazine The Equinox [ibid., “Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn”].

Crowley’s travels in Mexico, Ceylon and India gave rise to claims that he had learned Tantra. Hugh Urban reports Sutin’s suggestion “that Crowley may have first been introduced to the more radical left-hand (vamachara) form of Tantra in Ceylon as early 1901”. He concludes, however, that “Crowley’s actual knowledge of Tantra was fairly rudimentary and largely colored by the Orientalist biases of his era”, and that “there is little concrete evidence that Crowley had any extensive knowledge of Indian Tantra, apart from the common association of Tantra and sex in the Western imagination”. In Urban’s account, the stronger Tantric reputation came mainly from early biographers such as John Symonds and Kenneth Grant [Urban, Magia Sexualis, #43699, Crowley chapter].

The Cairo revelation in Crowley’s own words

In The Equinox of the Gods Crowley states: “On April 8, 9 and 10, 1904 E.V., this book was dictated to 666 (Aleister Crowley) by Aiwass, a Being whose nature he does not fully understand, but who described himself as ‘the Minister of Hoor-Paar-Kraat’ (the Lord of Silence)”. He gives the times exactly: “Chapter I was written between Noon and 1 p.m. on April 8, 1904. Chapter II between Noon and 1 p.m. on April 9, 1904. Chapter III between Noon and 1 p.m. on April 10, 1904. The writing began exactly on the stroke of the hour, and ended exactly an hour later” [Crowley, The Equinox of the Gods, #75609, “Genesis Libri AL”].

His wife Rose (née Kelly) acted as the first intermediary, and Crowley’s own diary was dismissive of her: “March 16. Tried to shew the Sylphs to Rose. She was in a dazed state, stupid, possibly drunk; possibly hysterical from pregnancy. She could see nothing, but could hear. She was fiercely excited at the messages, and passionately insistent that I should take them seriously. I was annoyed at her irrelevance” [ibid., p. 115]. The book ends with the “Comment”: “Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law. The study of this Book is forbidden. It is wise to destroy this copy after the first reading. Whosoever disregards this does so at his own risk and peril” [ibid.].

The text of Liber AL vel Legis has passages with obvious political meaning: “Let my servants be few & secret: they shall rule the many & the known. These are fools that men adore; both their Gods & their men are fools” (AL I:10-11) [Crowley, The Equinox of the Gods, #75609]. John Carter, writing on the American lodge, explains the central formula (“Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law”) through the Greek words thelema (will) and agape (love), “each have numerical values of 93”. He stresses that the phrases “carry with them a great duty to live deliberately, to find one’s True Will and then do it and nothing else. Outsiders often interpret them as invitations to ‘free love'” [Carter, Sex and Rockets, #64435].

The Aeon of Horus and the A∴A∴

On Crowley’s reading the revelation opened a new age, the Aeon of Horus, replacing the Aeon of Osiris. Greer writes that the A∴A∴ “(Latin for ‘silver star’) was created by Crowley in 1908 following the instructions of the Book of the Law, the revelation Crowley believed he had received in 1904”. The Book “instructed him to salvage what he could from the rituals of the previous Aeon of Osiris; in Crowley’s view, these included those of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn” [Greer, #64911, “A∴A∴”]. Jason Newcomb describes how the three bodies fitted together: “the Astrum Argentinum was a training order in Magick, the O.T.O. taught a religious system of Sexual Sorcery and the Gnostic Catholic Church was a religious application of the teachings of both” [Newcomb, Sexual Sorcery, #49284].

The OTO: Kellner, Reuss and Crowley

Newcomb dates the OTO’s origin: “The Order of the Temple of the East was formed in 1902 c.e. by Karl Kellner, it was based on the Tantrick arcanum as outlined in the works of Randolph Paschal”. It had a ten-degree system in which “the first six were Masonic, with sexual teachings only being revealed in the last four grades and even then, primarily in theoretical form” [Newcomb, Sexual Sorcery, #49284, “Aleister Crowley and the O.T.O.”]. The sources give different dates for Crowley’s entry. Greer: “1910 Crowley was accepted into Reuss’s Ordo Templi Orientis (OTO) and Yarker’s Rite of Memphis and Misraim” [Greer, #64911]. Carter: “1912 Reuss conferred the 9th degree of the Ordo Templi Orientis upon Aleister Crowley, claiming that Crowley already knew the occult secret of that degree”, after Crowley had published The Book of Lies; Reuss “later appointed Crowley his successor as Outer Head” [Carter, Sex and Rockets, #64435].

Leo Lyon Zagami, who presents himself as a former insider of Masonic and occult orders, writes that “Crowley was the head of an esoteric Order, the Ordo Templi Orientis, which had, and has, a series of rituals involving sex-magic and a theology based upon Crowley’s Book of the Law” [Zagami, Confessions of an Illuminati, #367409]. Zagami presents this on the strength of his own claimed experience inside such orders.

Magick and the Levi connection

Crowley defined his art in Magick in Theory and Practice: “MAGICK is the Science and Art of causing Change to occur in conformity with Will” [Crowley, Magick in Theory and Practice, #38069]. He wrote himself into a line of succession from Levi. Writing of himself in the third person, he notes that “the formula which Aleister Crowley supposed to be his original idea is mentioned by Levi”, and that “Eliphas Levi had a striking personal resemblance to Aleister Crowley’s father” [ibid.]. The wider claim that Crowley was Levi’s reincarnation, often repeated about him, rests on statements of this kind.

Urban places Crowley at the centre of modern sexual magic: “Crowley in many ways represents the culmination of this (con)fusion of Tantra and sexual magic”, and the OTO’s “secret of sexual magic” was presented as “the sexual-religion of the future” [Urban, Magia Sexualis, #43699].

America: Agape Lodge, Parsons and the Babalon Working

Carter reconstructs the American branch. Wilfred T. Smith met Crowley in 1915; “in 1930, Crowley sent Smith to Los Angeles with the express intent of opening another lodge, also to be called Agape Lodge. The lodge was incorporated April 4, 1934, and its first meeting was held on September 21, 1935 in Hollywood”. Smith became “Head” for the United States with the X° name “Ramaka”. In 1941 Grady McMurtry (1918-1985) “was first initiated into the OTO by Wilfred Smith at Agape Lodge No. 2” [Carter, Sex and Rockets, #64435]. The lodge later centred on the rocket scientist Jack Parsons’s house at 1003 S. Orange Grove in Pasadena. McMurtry inspected it there in January 1946 on Crowley’s behalf “to see if there was any way to fix the mess he had been hearing about” [ibid.].

The “Babalon Working” of early 1946 was Parsons’s operation with L. Ron Hubbard. On 2 March Hubbard returned with “a vision he had that evening of a savage and beautiful woman riding naked on a great cat-like beast”. Parsons reported to Crowley: “First instructions were received direct, further through Ron acting as seer. I have followed them to the letter. There was a desire for incarnation. I was the agency chosen to assist the birth, which is now accomplished” [Carter, Sex and Rockets, #64435, ch. 6]. Carter argues that the purpose of the Working “has been underemphasized”: it was “a preparation for what was to come: a thelemic messiah”, a female one [ibid.].

Thomas Horn gives the conspiracy reading. Parsons and Hubbard devised “the infamous ‘Babalon Working’ that allegedly opened a gate that fueled the modern UFO era and maybe played a role in the birth of Hillary Clinton. I say this with a strong emphasis on maybe”. He writes that “the Working explicitly stated the goal of transforming traditional values”, aiming at “incarnating the archetypal divine feminine and changing culture through her influence”. He ties it to modern feminism and to the “spirit cooking” events in the same chapter, “The Deep Occultism of the Deep State” [Horn, Saboteurs, #72784, ch. 6].

Thelema, Satanism and the later reception

Crowley himself rejected the label “Satanist”. Rob Skiba, writing from an evangelical Christian standpoint, quotes him: “The Devil does not exist. It is a false name invented by the Black Brothers to imply a Unity in their ignorant muddle of dispersions… ‘The Devil’ is, historically, the God of any people that one personally dislikes… This serpent, SATAN, is not the enemy of Man, but He who made Gods of our race, knowing Good and Evil; He bade ‘Know Thyself!'” [Skiba, Babylon Rising, #76360]. The passage reads Satan as the Gnostic serpent, the bringer of knowledge, as in Chapter 119. The introduction to Carter’s book likewise states: “I do not regard Parsons and Crowley as Black Magicians or Satanists”, and treats magick as “a dramatized system of ‘psychology'” for breaking out of “the cage of the socially conditioned ego” [Carter, Sex and Rockets, #64435, introduction].

Robert Anton Wilson, writing as a sympathetic commentator, warns against the Crowley legend: of one well-known story he notes that “Crowley never even had a son named MacAleister”, and he says he “could regale you with a hundred similar Crowley stories” that have made him “the most infamous sorcerer of the twentieth century” [Wilson, Lion of Light, #70341]. Gary Lachman traces Crowley’s political afterlife through his spelling. Chaos magick “adopts the spelling favored by Aleister Crowley, the most famous magician of the twentieth century”, and “the ‘magic’ end of meme magic comes from its link to what is known as ‘chaos magick'” in the politics of the Trump era [Lachman, Dark Star Rising, #63636]. Urban documents the influence on Wicca: Gardner “had great admiration for Crowley and drew freely from his poetry and rituals”. His Book of Shadows “bears strong influences from Crowley, the OTO, Golden Dawn, Freemasonry”, and Hutton notes that its consecration of the wine was “probably modeled upon the sixth degree initiation of the OTO itself” [Urban, Magia Sexualis, #43699]. Crowley’s influence on LaVey is treated in Chapter 121.

Key points

• In Greer’s account, Crowley studied at Trinity College, Cambridge (1895) without taking a degree, lived on inherited money, published White Stains and joined the Golden Dawn (1898-1900).
• Crowley’s own account dates the dictation of Liber AL by Aiwass to noon-1 p.m. on 8, 9 and 10 April 1904 in Cairo; his diary disparaged Rose’s state as “possibly drunk; possibly hysterical from pregnancy”.
• Greer says Crowley founded the A∴A∴ in 1908 on the Book of the Law’s instruction to salvage Golden Dawn ritual from the old Aeon of Osiris.
• Newcomb dates the OTO to Kellner, 1902, “based on the Tantrick arcanum”. Greer dates Crowley’s entry to 1910; Carter dates the IX° conferred by Reuss to 1912.
• Urban judges Crowley’s Tantra “fairly rudimentary” and places him at the culmination of Western sexual magic.
• Carter documents Agape Lodge (incorporated 4 April 1934; first meeting 21 September 1935) and Parsons’s Babalon Working with “Ron acting as seer”; Horn reads it as Deep State occultism.
• Crowley denied the Devil’s existence and recast Satan as the serpent of self-knowledge. Wilson disputes many of the Crowley legends, while Lachman and Urban trace his influence on chaos magick, “meme magic” and Wicca.