Aleister Crowley

Aleister (Alexander Edward) Crowley was born on the 12th of October 1875 in Leamington Spa, England, into a family of Plymouth Brethren, a strict Christian sect. The Bible was the only book Crowley was permitted to read .The Plymouth Brethren were a sect that believed even Christians of other denominations were going to hell. Hmmmmm, not too much unlike the many denominations around now. Anyway, his father was the only person that kept Aleister from being abused completely by his mother, who called him the Beast, and his uncle. He was enrolled in many schools that were run by men in the Plymouth Brethren, they would find every reason they could to "discipline" Crowley as well as the other students.In time, the young Crowley rebelled against the bigoted atmosphere in his home. His first gesture of defiance was to masturbate, a grave sin for Christians in Victorian times.In 1895, Crowley went up to Trinity College, Cambridge, and a year later, at the age of 21, came into a substantial inheritance left in trust by his father. His private means enabled him to indulge his lifelong passions for chess, reading, travel, mountaineering and sex. He was bisexual and misogynistic: his contempt for his mother extended to women in general. Though he was capable of romantic attachments, he saw sex as 'a degradation and damnation'.He began to write poetry and fiction, most of his poetry was about his homoeroticism and was only seen by select people.While in Stockholm during a university vacation, Crowley decided to devote his life to the forces of evil: 'The forces of good were those which had constantly oppressed me. I saw them daily destroying the happiness of my fellow men. Since, therefore, it was my business to explore the spiritual world, my first step must be to get into personal communication with the devil.'In London, Crowley got in touch with the most influential of the occult societies operating in Britain at the time, the Hermetic Order Of The Golden Dawn which, like other masonic orders, claimed to possess arcane truths handed down from ancient Egypt via the Cathars, the Knights Templar and the Rosic-rucians.He worked his way through the degrees of the Golden Dawn very quickly. But in 1900 the order was shattered by schism, when the members of the English branch of the Golden Dawn separated from the leader of the order Samuel Liddell "MacGregor" Mathers. Since the new leaders of the British Lodge did not like Crowley he was soon evicted from the group, so Crowley left England to travel extensively throughout the East. There he learned and practiced the mental and physical disciplines of yoga, supplementing his knowledge of western-style ritual magick with the methods of Oriental mysticism.In 1903, Crowley married Rose Kelly, and they went to Egypt on their honeymoon. After returning to Cairo in early 1904, Rose (who until this point had shown no interest or familiarity with the occult) began entering trance states and insisting to her husband that the god Horus was trying to contact him. As a test, Crowley took Rose to the Boulak Museum and asked her to point out Horus to him. She passed several well-known images of the god and led Aleister straight to a painted wooden funerary stele from the 26th dynasty, depicting Horus receiving a sacrifice from the deceased, a priest named Ankh-af-na-khonsu. Crowley was especially impressed by the fact that this piece was numbered 666 by the museum, a number with which he had identified since childhood.In 1906 Crowley joined George Cecil Jones in England, where they set about the task of creating a magical order to continue where the Golden Dawn had left off. They called this order the A.'. A.'. (Astron Argon or Silver Star), and it became the primary vehicle for the transmission of Crowley's mystical and magical training system based on the principles of Thelema. "Thelema" is a Greek word meaning "will", and the Law of Thelema is often stated as: "Do what thou wilt". Crowley believed himself to be a prophet of a new aeon governed by Thelema and spent the rest of his life working to develop and establish Thelemic philosophy.Then in 1910 Crowley was contacted by Theodore Reuss, head of an organization based in Germany called the Ordo Templi Orientis (O.T.O.). Which was orginally founded by Carl Kellner but it was nothing more than a Yoga group until Theodor Reuss came along. Under Reuss's authority, the concept of the O.T.O. was definitely structured within ten degrees, of which the VIII° and IX°, diverging from Masonic lines, practiced sexual magic. The X° represented the administrative leader of the country. This group of high-ranking Freemasons claimed to have discovered the supreme secret of practical magic, which was taught in its highest degrees.Aleister Crowley agreed to becoming a member of O.T.O. and was given a charter for England and Ireland alone in the later years of his membership. His branches incurred at least one distinctive feature, according to which the different O.T.O. groupings can be classified; the acceptance of the "Law of Thelema" in the rituals. One of the main issues under dispute in the O.T.O. phenomenon is the question of which of the many current O.T.O.s are genuine. The O.T.O. initiation rituals rewritten by Crowley between 1917 and 1942 were NEVER used by Theodor Reuss. All other Reuss lodges at that time developed their own rituals.There is reason to believe that even Reuss did not intend his O.T.O. to be a vehicle for Thelema [see "Ein Leben fuer die Rose"]. Despite that, Crowley was already writing in his diary on 27 November 1921, after a dispute with Reuss: "I have proclaimed myself OHO" (Outer Head of the Order)In Germany, in 1922, Heinrich Traenker and his secretary Karl Germer established the "Pansophia", already published in 1921 by Traenker and his wife but now financially supported by the businessman Germer.Reuss died 1923 without naming a successor. Most probably, he intended has his heir the Swiss businessman Hans Rudolf Hilfiker (1882-1955), who was Grand Master of the lodge "Libertas et Fraternitas", founded in 1917 in Zuerich. But this serious freemason held it incomunicado in view of Reuss' and Crowley's bad reputation. As Crowley admitted in a letter of 1924 to Heinrich Traenker, Reuss never chose him as his successor. Reuss got rid of Crowley in 1921 and tied in with Spencer Lewis' A.M.O.R.C. and Arnoldo Krumm-Heller's F.R.A.When Reuss died, his O.T.O. died with him; and Crowley's O.T.O., a split from Reuss' Order, had little in common apart from the use of the same name.In his penultimate year 1946, a mutual friend 'Arnold Crowther' introduced Crowley to 'Gerald B. Gardner'. Gardner took an interest in the O.T.O and became a member. Crowley gave Gardner a charter to start his own O.T.O. but before Gardner could start it, he had travelled to the US where he became very ill. While he recovered from his illness Crowley died of a respiratory infection in Hastings, England on December 2, 1947. He was penniless and addicted to opium, which had been prescribed for his asthma and bronchitis, at the time.Gardner claimed that Crowley had named him the successor of his O.T.O. but in fact Crowley had already given that title to KarlGermer, but Germer repeatedly denied in his correspondence that he was OHO, did not recruit any members in the USA, collect subscriptions or perform initiations. Later, although his authority to do so was dubious, Germer did manage to expel Kenneth Grant (the head of the only remaining active Crowley-O.T.O. lodge in England), formally closed the last Crowley-lodge in the USA and then claimed the US to be a "spiritual desert". So, by this time, the Swiss O.T.O. might even be regarded as the only O.T.O. then active in the world. Furthermore, Metzger was able to produce reasons to believe that his O.T.O. was of Reussian origin, a fact that gave him authority over every offshoot of Crowley's O.T.O.