The Secret Order Aleister Crowley Created to Challenge Christianity - Ordo Templi Orientis

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[00:00:00]On the 8th of April 1904, in a rented apartment in Cairo, a young Englishman sat down at a desk at exactly noon and began to write. He wrote for 1 hour. He did the same thing on the 9th and again on the 10th. When he was finished, he had in his hands a text of 220 verses dictated, he claimed, by a voice that was not his own. A voice that called itself Iw was, a voice that told him the world he'd been born into was ending, that a new age had begun, and that he, specifically he, had been chosen to announce it. The text was called Libael Velis, the book of the law, and its central commandment was nine words long.

[00:00:50]Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law. The man was 28 years old, the son of a Plymouth Brethren preacher, the heir to a modest brewing fortune, a published poet of no particular reputation, a mountaineer of some genuine ability, and a student of occultism who had already been expelled from the most prestigious magical order in England. His name was Alistister Crowley. His own mother had called him the beast. The number of the beast being 666, which he had recently discovered was also the exhibit number on a 3,000-year-old Egyptian funeral steelely in the Cairo Museum that his wife had led him to in what he described as a trance state 3 days before the dictation began. He took all of this as confirmation. He spent the rest of his life acting on it. Within a decade, the religion he founded on those nine words, thema, the Greek word for will, had attracted rocket scientists, poets, Freemasons, and the attention of British intelligence.

[00:02:01]Within two decades, the rituals he designed were being performed in a Sicilian farmhouse that the Italian government under Mussolini eventually raided and shut down.

[00:02:12]Within four decades, one of the founding engineers of the American space program was conducting themic magical workings in a Pasadena house alongside a man who would go on to found Scientology.

[00:02:27]And within a century, Crowley's name was on the cover of the most famous Beatles album ever made, embedded in the lyrics of Led Zeppelin and cited in declassified documents connected to the CIA's most controversial psychological research program. He died in a boarding house in 1947 with essentially nothing to his name. The ideas outlasted everything else. This is the story of who Alistister Crowley actually was, what the Lima actually taught, what the rituals actually consisted of, and how a man who was dismissed in his own lifetime as a fraud, a degenerate and the wickedest man in the world, managed to plant something into the 20th century that has still not finished growing. The sensational version of this story is everywhere. This is not that version.

[00:03:24]Alistister Crowley was born on the 12th of October 1875 in the English town of Lemington Spa.

[00:03:32]His father, Edward Crowley, was a man of private means who had inherited a fortune from the family brewing business and had used his freedom from financial necessity to become a traveling preacher for a fundamentalist Christian sect called the Plymouth Brethren. The brethren took the Bible with a literalism that most other Christians in Victorian England found excessive.

[00:03:57]Whatever was written was meant exactly as written. No metaphor, no interpretation, no room for doubt. His father died of tongue cancer in 1886 when Alistister was 10 years old, leaving behind an inheritance substantial enough to fund a lifetime of expensive habits, and a mother whose response to her son's increasingly difficult behavior was to call him by the name of the red beast from the book of Revelation. She meant it as a rebuke. He received it as a gift. The schools he passed through did nothing to smooth him out. He was bullied. He bullied in return. He smoked. He drank. He visited prostitutes. He began reading everything the library offered and found that the texts which excited him most were the ones his teachers most wanted him to avoid. He arrived at Cambridge University in 1895 to study English literature, discovered that he had no interest in following the curriculum anyone had prepared for him, and spent the next few years writing poetry, playing chess, and working his way through every mystical text he could find. He left without completing his degree. It did not concern him. He had his father's money and something more urgent than a degree to pursue. The organization that captured him in 1898 was called the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, and it was, by any reasonable standard, the most extraordinary collection of occult talent ever assembled in one place at one time in the history of the English-speaking world. Founded in London in 1887 by three Freemasons who claimed to have found a cipher manuscript outlining an ancient system of initiation.

[00:05:50]The Golden Dawn drew its teachings from every corner of the western esoteric tradition. The Cabala, ceremonial magic, astrology, tarot, alchemy, the inocian system of angelic communication developed by the Elizabeth and mathematician John D in the 1500s.

[00:06:12]It organized this material into a graded system of initiatory degrees and produced from it a comprehensive magical curriculum unlike anything that had existed before. The membership list reads like a directory of the late Victorian imagination at its most restless and most gifted.

[00:06:33]William Butler Yates, already becoming the greatest English language poet of his generation, was a member who found in the Golden Dawn a vocabulary for the mystical and Irish nationalist vision he was trying to put into verse. Arthur Machan, the Welsh novelist whose fiction of supernatural horror drew directly on his Golden Dawn training, was a member.

[00:06:58]The actress Florence Far, the actress Maud Gon, who was both Yates's obsession and the center of Irish revolutionary politics were members. The occultist Samuel Little McGregor Mats, who' done more than anyone to compile the Golden Dawn's ritual system, led the organization with the authority of a man who claimed direct contact with the hidden masters he called the secret chiefs, beings of a higher order who stood behind the visible organization and directed it through him. Crowley was initiated into the outer order in November 1898, taking the motto frata perurabo, meaning I will endure to the end. He made an impression immediately. His knowledge of occult literature was extensive and genuine. He was intelligent, energetic, and possessed of a social confidence that crossed the line into aggression often enough to make him genuinely difficult.

[00:08:02]He rose through the lower grades quickly and then he hit a wall. The initiates responsible for admitting candidates to the second order, the inner order where the real work was supposed to happen, refused him. The reasons were multiple.

[00:08:20]His sexual conduct, his arrogance, his way of treating anyone who disagreed with him as an obstacle to be removed.

[00:08:29]Mathers overruled the London committee and gave Cruy his second order initiation in Paris, which only deepened the existing divisions within the organization.

[00:08:40]A lawsuit followed, a schism followed.

[00:08:44]By 1900, the Golden Dawn had effectively destroyed itself from the inside, splitting into competing factions, each claiming authentic succession, none of them fully functioning. Crowley was expelled. He was not surprised. He was not particularly bothered. He had already decided that whatever he needed was not available inside any existing institution.

[00:09:10]What followed was a decade of extraordinary wandering. He climbed.

[00:09:16]He'd been a serious mountaineer since his Cambridge years and between 1901 and 1902 he joined an expedition to Kangchen Junga in the Himalayas which ended in disaster and controversy when members of the climbing party died on the descent and Crowley refused to help a decision that followed him for the rest of his life. He traveled through Mexico, India, Burma, China, Japan. He studied yoga in Sri Lanka under a teacher named Alan Bennett. One of his few genuine friendships from the Golden Dawn years and found in the practice of pranayyama and meditation something that he recognized as related to but distinct from the ceremonial magic he had been practicing. A technology of consciousness rather than a performance for external forces. He read everything.

[00:10:12]He wrote constantly. He published poetry, essays, and a magical instruction under his own name and under a series of elaborate pseudonyms. He took drugs with the systematic curiosity of an experimentter rather than the desperation of an addict, at least in this early period. Documenting his experiences with hashish, cocaine, opium, and measculine in clinical detail and attempting to understand what altered states of consciousness actually were. what they revealed about the architecture of the mind and how they could be used as tools in magical practice. And then came Cairo and the three days of dictation and the book of the law.

[00:11:00]What exactly happened in that hotel room in April 1904 is a question that admits no clean answer. Crowley's own account is our only source. His wife Rose had no memory of the events once the trance states passed. Crowley himself spent the next several years trying to convince himself that the book was not what it claimed to be, suppressing it, refusing to take it seriously before finally accepting in around 1909 that it was genuine, that the voice of Iwas was real, and that his life's work had been assigned to him whether he wanted it or not. The book itself is not what most people who have heard of it imagine. It is not a straightforward manual of dark practices. It is three chapters of dense, often beautiful, sometimes deliberately obscure verse alternating between the voices of three Egyptian deities. Newit the goddess of infinite space, Hadit, the winged serpent at the heart of all things. and Rahul Kwit, the hawk-headed war god whose age the book announces. The opening lines of the first chapter begin with the goddess of infinite space addressing a human candidate. Every man and woman is a star. The stars move in their own paths.

[00:12:26]The law that governs that movement is love under will. Do what thou wilt. In this reading is not permission for chaos. It is a statement about the nature of the soul. Each person has a true will, a deep authentic purpose that is as much a fixed feature of their being as the trajectory of a star.

[00:12:49]The task of magical and spiritual development is to discover what that will actually is and to align your life with it completely. Removing every obstacle, every distraction, every false desire placed in you by society, religion, family and fear. This is the heart of the lima. The word is Greek for will. The religion builds everything else around that single principle.

[00:13:19]Theimic ethic is not, despite its reputation, an instruction to do whatever you feel like doing at any moment. Crowley was insistent on this point, though he was also aware that the line between true will and appetite was difficult to draw in practice, and that his own life provided not entirely clean evidence on the question.

[00:13:42]The book of the law also contains passages of a very different character.

[00:13:47]Passages of violence, of deliberately shocking transgression, of what reads as genuine contempt for the weak and the slavish.

[00:13:58]The second chapter, voiced by contains lines that have troubled sympathetic readers for more than a hundred years.

[00:14:06]Lines about the strong crushing the weak. lines about the gods of the old religion being as nothing. Lines that celebrate war, death, and transformation with an energy that does not sound like metaphor. Crowley never fully resolved this tension in his own teaching.

[00:14:26]He oscillated between presenting the dark passages as tests of the reader's ability to think symbolically and presenting them as straightforward descriptions of cosmic reality that the squeamish was simply too cowardly to accept. Before any of that though, before the AA and the Otto and the Thoth Tarot and Jack Parsons and everything else, there is the book of the law itself, and it deserves more than the brief summary the opening of this account provided.

[00:14:56]Because the book of the law is the hinge point of everything. If you take it seriously, as Cruy did, and as every Theomite does, then everything that followed was working out the implications of a genuine transmission.

[00:15:12]If you set it aside, then everything that followed was working out the implications of a remarkable man's decision to treat his own ideas as divine revelation, which is a different story with different moral stakes, but not necessarily a less interesting one. The book opens with Nuit, the goddess of infinite space, speaking from above. She describes herself as the continuous sky of stars, the mother of all things, the lady of the starllet heavens. She dresses a human candidate and tells him that every man and woman is a star moving in their own course, burning with their own light. The first chapter establishes the cosmological framework, the universe as infinite space populated by infinite individual points of consciousness, each sovereign, each following its own nature, each holy in its own particularity.

[00:16:15]There is no sin but restriction.

[00:16:19]Whatever prevents a star from following its course is sin. Whatever frees it from false gravity is virtue. The second chapter voiced by Hadit. The winged serpent who dwells at the heart of every individual is darker and more demanding.

[00:16:37]Hadet speaks from the interior of things from the innermost point of consciousness that is both the most individual and the most universal.

[00:16:47]He describes the nature of the magical will in terms that make it sound less like a choice and more like a discovery.

[00:16:55]Something already present but buried under layers of conditioning and fear that have to be stripped away before it can be found. The stripping away is the work. It is never comfortable.

[00:17:10]The second chapter also contains the passages that have made the book of the law controversial among people who want their sacred texts to be morally unambiguous.

[00:17:22]Passages celebrating the warrior and the destroyer. Passages dismissive of the weak and the slavish.

[00:17:30]passages that Crowley himself acknowledged were difficult and that he interpreted as referring not to physical violence but to the magical destruction of everything within the self that is not genuine.

[00:17:44]Whether that interpretation is the right one, whether those passages can be read symbolically without remainder, or whether there is something in them that resists the symbolic reading and means what it appears to mean on the surface, is a question that Themic commentators have been working through for over a century without arriving at a consensus.

[00:18:06]Crowley was not consistent on the point.

[00:18:09]In some of his commentaries, he insists on the symbolic reading. In others he suggests that the symbolic reading is the comfortable one, the one that avoids the genuine challenge of the text. The third chapter voiced by Rahul Kwit, the hawkheaded god of war and strength announces the terms of the new age directly.

[00:18:31]the Aon of Osiris, the age of sacrifice, death, and resurrection that Crowley associated with Christianity, and the preceding 2,000 years of Western religious history is over. The aon of Horus, the crowned and conquering child, the age of force and fire and individual will has begun.

[00:18:55]The spiritual evolution of humanity is moving away from the father God who demands submission and the son God who redeems through suffering toward the child principle that needs neither.

[00:19:08]Because the child does not yet know that it is supposed to submit to anything and is therefore in its innocence and its force closer to the nature of reality than the adult who's been broken to harness.

[00:19:24]This is The Lima's core theological claim. The age we are living in, the age that began at the beginning of the 20th century and whose full unfolding Crowley believed would take centuries, is the age of individual sovereignty.

[00:19:41]It is an age that rewards those who can find and follow their true will and destroys those who cannot. Not out of cruelty, but because the cosmos is structured that way. Because the stars that deviate from their true orbit are consumed by forces they were not designed to resist. In 1907, back in England, Crowley founded his own magical order. He called it the AA which in his system stood for Argentium Astramm the Silver Star. The organization was built on the ruins of the Golden Dawn's grade system but rebuilt according to Crowley's own principles. The most important of these was a principle of strict magical independence.

[00:20:27]Unlike the Golden Dawn, where members worked in group rituals and advanced through collective initiations, the AA required that each member work entirely alone under the supervision of a single more advanced student. You advance by completing a series of practices, documenting your results in a magical diary, and submitting those results for evaluation.

[00:20:53]No collective initiation, no group ritual until you reach the higher grades. Just you, your practice, and the honest record of your results. The curriculum Crowley designed for the AA drew on everything he had studied. yoga, ceremonial magic, cabalistic meditation, the ritual invocation of specific intelligences, the systematic use of drugs as sacraments under controlled conditions, and the practice he called liber, the daily adorations of the sun at its four positions, dawn, noon, sunset, and midnight. He produced for his students an instructional text called Liber Excitum, which remains one of the most practically useful introductions to basic magical, a meditative practice ever written, regardless of whatever one thinks of the metaphysical framework surrounding it. He also launched a periodical he called the Equinox, published twice a year at the spring and autumn equinoxes, which served simultaneously as a literary journal, a magical instructional manual, and a vehicle for Crowley's ongoing theological and philosophical commentary.

[00:22:13]The first issue appeared in 1909, and the series ran until 1913, producing a body of work remarkable enough that Yates, who had every reason to dismiss anything Crowley produced, was forced to admit privately that some of it was genuine.

[00:22:33]During this same period, Crowley encountered the organization that would eventually provide him with a second institutional home and a second long controversy.

[00:22:44]The Order Temple Orientis, the Order of the Temple of the East, was a German magical organization founded in the late 1890s by a Freemason and traveling lecturer named Carl Kelner and developed after his death in 1905 by a theatrical imprario and Freemason named Theodore Reus.

[00:23:07]The Otto, as it is universally known, organized itself along Masonic lines with a series of degrees leading from ordinary initiation up to the highest levels and built its upper degrees around a secret it claimed to possess.

[00:23:23]The one secret that unlocked all other magical secrets that explained the Cabala, the tarot, alchemy, and every other system simultaneously.

[00:23:35]The secret which Roose revealed to Crowley when he accused him in 1912 of having published it without authorization was a specific understanding of the sexual nature of magical force of what happens in the Otto system when the energies of the human body are raised and directed through specific ritual practices.

[00:23:58]Crowley's response to being accused of having revealed the secret was to admit that he had done so accidentally and that he had arrived at the same understanding through his own independent research.

[00:24:10]Roose, apparently satisfied that this was a man of genuine insight rather than a thief, invited him to take charge of the Otto's British section.

[00:24:21]Crowley accepted, renamed it Mysteria Mystica Maxima, and rewrote the organization's ritual system to align it with Theelma.

[00:24:32]From this point forward, the Otto became the institutional vehicle for the practice in the world, a status it retains to the present day.

[00:24:42]The sexual dimension of Crowley's magical teaching is the aspect that has generated the most sensational coverage and the most profound misrepresentation.

[00:24:54]So it deserves careful treatment.

[00:24:57]What Crowley described as sexual magic, which he called in his published system, the ninth degree working of the Otto, was built on a principle that the sexual act generates a form of energy, a force that can be concentrated and directed toward a specific magical objective if the participants are properly trained and properly focused.

[00:25:22]This is not a principle Crowley invented. versions of it appear in Hindu tantric traditions in certain currents of medieval alchemy and in scattered references throughout the western esoteric literature.

[00:25:38]What Crowley did was attempt to systematize it to document his own experimental results and to teach it as a component of a broader magical curriculum rather than as an end in itself.

[00:25:52]The problem was that Crowley's actual practice of sexual magic bore only a partial relationship to his theoretical account of it. His private magical diaries, which were not published in full until decades after his death, reveal a man whose sexual practice range from the genuinely ritual to what reads more honestly as the opportunistic use of magical framing to justify behavior that his partners, some of whom suffered serious psychological damage from the relationship, might have assessed differently.

[00:26:28]He called his sexual partners scarlet women, taking the title from the book of Revelation, and he moved through several of them in the course of his life, each relationship following a pattern recognizable enough to call a template.

[00:26:44]intense mutual initiation.

[00:26:48]The woman's gradual destabilization as Crowley pushed her toward psychological extremes in the name of magical development, eventual breakdown, departure, and Crowley's subsequent claim that the breakdown was the result of the woman's own spiritual inadequacy rather than anything he had done. His first wife, Rose Kelly, who had been his guide in Cairo and who gave birth to a daughter he named Nuitt Maather Hecate Safo, Jezebel Lilith, because Crowley, in matters of nomomenclature, had no sense of proportion, developed severe alcoholism during their marriage. He divorced her in 1909 on grounds of adultery. She was eventually committed to an institution. Their daughter died of typhoid fever in Burma in 1906 while Crowley was away on a magical journey.

[00:27:45]He recorded the death in his diary and continued the journey. The pattern of damage around him is too consistent to be dismissed. Rose Leah Hersig, the woman who served as his primary partner and magical collaboratrix through most of the 1920s, who gave birth to a child called Poe, who died in infancy at the Abbey of Thelma, and whose own mental health collapsed under the pressures of life with Crowley.

[00:28:16]Ninetta Shamway, another of the abbey residents whose life after the commune ended was not documented in ways that suggest happiness. The men who became his students, some of whom went on to become significant figures in 20th century occultism and some of whom ended their association with him in states of his psychological fragmentation that took years to recover from. The Abbey of The Limmer itself, the commune Crowley established in 1920 in a small house in Kealu on the northern coast of Sicily, deserves extended examination, because it is simultaneously the most serious attempt Crowley ever made to put his theories into actual practice, and the most damning evidence against him as anything other than a theorist, of remarkable ability, and a catastrophic limitation. as a human being. The house was small. The walls were painted by Crowley himself with fresco of a character that the Italian authorities, who eventually seized the property, described in terms indicating they were unlike anything previously encountered in civilian housing. The daily life followed the principles in theory. The magical adorations of the sun, the keeping of magical diaries, the practice of a discipline Crowley called not doing, a concept borrowed from toist philosophy involving the suspension of habitual automatic behavior in order to become aware of one's actual will beneath the surface of conditioned response. In practice, the abbey was a place where several adults and their children lived in conditions of increasing squalor, chronic drug shortage, and the particular social pressure generated when a charismatic leader defines reality for everyone around him. And those who question the definition are told the problem is their own spiritual inadequacy.

[00:30:24]The drugs were a serious problem by this point. Crowley had been using heroin to treat asthma since at least 1913, prescribed by a doctor who apparently did not follow the consequences of the prescription very far into the future.

[00:30:41]By the early 1920s, the dependency was severe enough to shape his daily functioning in ways that would be recognizable to anyone who has spent time around serious addiction. In February 1923, a young Oxford graduate named Ral Love Day, who had come to the abbey seeking magical initiation, died.

[00:31:04]The official cause was entitis, likely from drinking contaminated water from a local spring. His wife, Betty May, who survived, returned to England and sold her account to a tabloid, which ran it under headlines that established the vocabulary of Crowley's public reputation for the rest of his life.

[00:31:25]Human sacrifice, sexual depravity, the wickedest man in the world. The Italian government under Mussolini, which had its own reasons for disliking foreign communes of eccentric behavior on Italian soil, expelled Crowley from the country in the same year. He was never allowed to return.

[00:31:46]Alistister Crowley spent the next two and a half decades as a man without a stable address and without a stable income, moving between France, Germany, Portugal, England, and the United States, writing constantly, teaching, occasionally, attempting to keep the Otto functioning as an institution, failing at almost every practical endeavor, and producing in the spaces between the practical failures a body of magical and philosophical writing whose quality is genuinely uneven, but whose best passages represent the clearest and most intellectually serious attempt to articulate a non-theistic western spiritual system that the 20th century produced. He wrote a novel called Moonchild, a thinly disguised account of the magical and personal rivalries of the Golden Dawn period. He wrote the Confessions, an autobiography of such eccentric thoroughess that it runs to nearly 900 pages in its complete form and manages to be simultaneously self arandizing, genuinely self-critical, brilliantly funny, and almost totally unreliable as a factual account.

[00:33:03]He wrote the four volumes of magic in theory and practice and its later expanded form which constitute the most systematic account of his magical system and which remain in print and in use among practitioners of ceremonial magic to the present day. He designed the Thoth Tarot. The Thoth Tarot deserves its own discussion because it is probably the most lasting and most widely used of everything Crowley produced and because it illustrates something important about what he was actually trying to do in his magical work that the sensational accounts of his life consistently obscure.

[00:33:45]He began work on the deck in 1938 in collaboration with the painter Lady Freda Harris, an elderly theosophist who had no prior interest in Crowley or in Thelma, but who became over the 5 years of the project his most productive and most patient collaborator.

[00:34:04]Harris painted 78 cards. She painted them using a system of projective geometry she'd been studying independently, which produced images with the distinctive structural quality.

[00:34:18]Shapes that appear to be folding through three-dimensional space, surfaces that recede into depths that conventional flat painting cannot achieve. The visual effect is immediately distinctive. You know a Thoth card when you see it, but the visual distinctiveness is secondary to the conceptual ambition. Crowley redesigned the standard tarot symbology from the ground up, drawing on his knowledge of the Cabala, astrology, alchemy, and the accumulated Western esoteric tradition to produce a deck in which every card carries multiple simultaneous levels of meaning.

[00:35:00]The 22 trump cards, which Crowley renamed Artus of Tahuti after the Egyptian god of wisdom, are each assigned a Hebrew letter, a path on the cabalistic tree of life, a planetary or zodiacal attribution, and a series of magical correspondences connecting them to specific states of consciousness, specific divine names, and specific stages in what Crowley's system describes as the great work, the systematic transformation of the individual from what they are by default into what they are by will.

[00:35:38]The deck is, as one of Crowley's own commentators described it, an alchemical instruction manual. You could spend years with it and continue to find things you had not seen before. He also between 1914 and 1915 conducted what he called the Paris working, a series of magical operations performed with a fellow Otto member named Victor Newberg in a Paris hotel room over a period of several weeks. The rituals were explicitly sexual and explicitly directed toward the invocation of specific planetary intelligences.

[00:36:19]Jupiter for wealth and Mercury for communication and intellectual power being the primary targets.

[00:36:28]The magical diary from this period is one of the more extraordinary documents in the history of western esotericism.

[00:36:35]Less because it demonstrates anything about the objective reality of the magical forces invoked and more because it demonstrates the thoroughess and the psychological intensity of Crowley's approach to the work. He and Newberg recorded every detail. The conditions, the states of consciousness entered, the visions obtained, the results in the subsequent days and weeks that they attributed to the working. The methodology was genuinely empirical in the sense that Crowley intended the results to be testable against observation. Whether the results actually confirm the working or whether they were subject to the same confirmation bias that afflicts all self-reported mystical and magical experience is a question the diary cannot answer for you.

[00:37:27]What the Paris working also reveals is the quality of Crowley's relationship with Newberg, which was one of the more complex and more damaging in a long series of complex and damaging relationships.

[00:37:40]Newberg was a young poet of genuine talent who'd been drawn into Crowley's orbit through the AA and who served as his primary magical partner and in some periods his primary companion for several years.

[00:37:55]The relationship combined genuine intellectual and spiritual collaboration with dynamics of power and submission that were at minimum not conducive to Newberg's independent development.

[00:38:07]Newberg eventually broke with Crowley completely after a ritual that Crowley described in his diary with apparent satisfaction and that Newberg described in terms suggesting a very different experience.

[00:38:21]He went on to become a literary editor and poet. He rarely spoke about Crowley in later life. The crossing of the abyss is another component of Crowley's system that requires explanation because it is central to understanding the higher grades of the AA and because it is of all the concepts in the Limma the one that most clearly distinguishes what Crowley was building from any ordinary magical fraternity.

[00:38:51]In the cabalistic tree of life, the abyss is the gap between the upper three Sepharoth, the divine triad of Ketha, Chmama, and Beina, and the lower seven, the Sepharoth of created existence. In Crowley's system, the abyss corresponds to a specific grade in the AA, the grade of Magister Templey, and crossing it requires a specific magical operation, whose nature Crowley was deliberately obscure about in his published writing, but more explicit about in his private correspondence, and in documents circulated only to advanced initiates.

[00:39:31]The crossing of the abyss in Crowley's account requires the complete dissolution of the individual ego, the total surrender of everything that the magician has constructed as their identity, their achievements, their relationships, their understanding of themselves and the world into what Crowley called the city of the pyramids, a plane of consciousness on the far side of the ordinary self where the individual joins what he called the assembly of saints, the order of those who have crossed the abyss before them.

[00:40:08]The guardian of the abyss is a figure called Coronzon, a demon of dispersion, who Crowley identified with the formless and destructive force that consumes whatever ego remains. In a ritual conducted in the Algerian desert in 1909 with Newberg again as his assistant, Crowley described invoking Chaenzon into his own body and then recording what happened as the demon spoke through him.

[00:40:35]Whether this was a genuine magical experience, a deliberately performed theater of initiation, or a dissociative psychological episode that Crowley interpreted through his magical framework, is exactly the kind of question that the available evidence will not answer cleanly.

[00:40:55]What the abyss represents in practical terms stripped of its theatrical framing is the psychological crisis that serious transformative work tends to produce at a certain depth. The moment when the structures of identity that have served the person up to that point are no longer adequate to what they have discovered. When the old self has to die before the new self can fully form. When there is a period of genuine groundlessness between the two that can be experienced as madness or as grace depending on the tradition doing the naming and the individual doing the experiencing.

[00:41:36]Every serious spiritual tradition has a name for this territory. The mystics call it the dark night of the soul. The psychologists call it ego dissolution.

[00:41:49]Crowley called it the crossing of the abyss and he built a ritual framework around it that was partly designed to help the person going through it understand what was happening and partly designed in the way all ritual framing operates to give a form to an experience that would otherwise be formless and therefore unmanageable.

[00:42:12]He wrote a set of instructions for the Babylon working. To understand the Babylon working, you need to understand what Crowley meant by Babylon. a figure who appears in the book of the law and in his subsequent magical writing as the scarlet woman of the book of revelation reinterpreted through the as a goddess of liberation the feminine principle of unconditional love and absolute transgression the consort of the beast which is the role cruy assigned to himself in his theological system in his later writing he described a specific magical operation designed to invoke Babylon, to call her into physical manifestation through a series of ritual workings involving a specially prepared magical partner, a kind of magical vessel he called the scarlet woman in her highest form. The objective was the physical birth of what he called a moonchild, a being whose soul came from a higher plane and whose incarnation would advance themic age. In 1945, in a house in Pasadena, California, a man named Jack Parsons decided to attempt this working. the fact that Jack Parsons was one of the founding engineers of the American Rocket Program, a co-founder of what would become the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, one of the men most directly responsible for the scientific foundations that eventually put human beings on the moon, is one of those facts that sits in the historical record with an air of total unreality.

[00:43:51]like finding a classified document about advanced aerodynamics in the drawer of a medieval alchemist.

[00:43:58]Parsons had discovered the in the late 1930s and had become the most significant American figure in the Otto leading the Agape Lodge in Pasadena with an energy and commitment that Crowley then in his final years in England regarded as genuinely impressive.

[00:44:18]Parsons was brilliant, charismatic, genuinely committed to Thelma as a spiritual system, and possessed of a combination of intellectual fearlessness and personal recklessness that in a different configuration might have destroyed him before the Babylon working got the chance to try. His partner in the Babylon working, the woman he identified as the scarlet woman the ritual required, was a young painter and witch named Marjgerie Cameron, known universally as Cameron, who appeared at his house in January 1946, just as the first phase of the working concluded, which Parsons took as confirmation that the magical operation had succeeded in calling her across space.

[00:45:07]The second phase of the working was conducted over 11 days with Parsons performing the rituals while his new housemate, a young man named Elron Hubbed, acted as scribe recording the automatic writing and visionary communications that Parsons produced. Elron Hubard, who had within the following decade found Scientology, was at this point a science fiction writer and a failed naval officer who had moved in with Parsons in Pasadena under circumstances that remain disputed. He had been involved with the Otto briefly and shallowly, which is a generous description. His function in the Babylon working appears to have been partly practical, serving as a witness and recorder, and partly what Parsons described in his magical diary as the assistance of an elemental.

[00:46:03]Within months of the workings conclusion, Hubard had left Pasadena, taken a substantial portion of Parsons's money, and sailed away on a boat Parsons had partly funded.

[00:46:16]Parson's response to this was a further magical working intended to retrieve the situation, which is documented in his diary in terms suggesting that the magical response was considerably more emotionally coherent than the legal one would have been. Crowley's response when he learned what Parsons and Hubard had been doing, conveyed through letters to the Otto's American representative, was one of the more genuine expressions of alarm in his correspondence.

[00:46:46]He described Parsons as being in the hands of a confidence man, and suggested that the whole enterprise had been conducted with a recklessness that genuine magical training was designed to prevent.

[00:46:59]This from a man whose own record on the question of recklessness was not without blemish. Jack Parsons died in June 1952 when an explosion destroyed his home laboratory in Pasadena. He was 37 years old. The cause was apparently the accidental dropping of fulminate of mercury in a confined space. Whether it was an accident has been questioned intermittently in the 60 years since.

[00:47:28]The connection between Crowley's ideas and what eventually became Scientology is a question that requires more careful treatment than it usually receives.

[00:47:39]The structural parallels between the lima and Scientology are real. The graded initiation system, the premium placed on esoteric knowledge available only to advanced members, the central importance of a foundational text whose full meaning is revealed only after extensive preparation. The therapeutic dimension of the lower levels leading toward what both systems describe in different vocabularies as the liberation of the true self from false conditioning.

[00:48:11]Whether Hubard deliberately borrowed these structures from his brief exposure to the Otto and Parsons or arrived at similar structures independently through the logic of what a new spiritual movement needs in order to function and to survive is genuinely impossible to establish from the available evidence.

[00:48:32]What can be established is that the tradition Crowley represented, the western esoteric tradition of graded initiation and systematic magical practice, produced ideas and institutional structures in the early 20th century, whose echoes can be found in places very far removed from the small world of self-identified occultists who are the tradition's natural home. the Central Intelligence Agency's interest in altered states of consciousness in the possibility of chemically or psychologically inducing extraordinary states in human subjects for intelligence purposes. The program that eventually became known as MK Ultra did not draw directly on Crowley's writing. The connection is looser than that and it requires a moment of careful tracing to follow.

[00:49:25]The OSS, the wartime intelligence organization that became the CIA, had experimented with measculine and then with LSD as truth serums and as tools for the disruption of enemy psychological stability, influenced by intelligence reports from Germany, where similar research had been conducted under the Nazi program at Dhau. The interest in LSD specifically came through a Swiss pharmaceutical company and through the psychiatrist who first synthesized it in 1943.

[00:49:59]None of this had anything to do with Crowley, but the wider cultural assumption that the human mind could be systematically altered through the right combination of chemical, sensory, and ritual intervention. that the ordinary boundaries of individual consciousness were not fixed but permeable, that these boundaries could be crossed with the right techniques, and that whatever was found on the other side of those boundaries was potentially useful, whether spiritually, therapeutically, or for purposes of state power. This assumption had been building in the underground of western culture since at least the late 19th century, and Crowley was one of the people who had built it.

[00:50:44]His decade of systematic drug experimentation combined with magical practice documented in his diaries with the thoroughess that was remarkable for its time was part of the same current that eventually produced both the genuine research and the grotesque abuses of MK Ultra. The current was long. He was not the only tributary, but he was a significant one. The influence on popular music is better documented, if not better understood. Jimmy Page, the guitarist and founder of Led Zeppelin, was a collector of Crowley manuscripts, books, and memorabilia, whose personal collection was extensive enough to have been considered significant even by academic standards.

[00:51:32]He bought Crowley's former house on the shore of Loch Ness Bolskin House and maintained it for years.

[00:51:40]He commissioned an artist named Jimmy Paige to paint the inside of his guitar bow, creating the famous sequence of symbols that appeared at the beginning of the film, the song remains the same.

[00:51:54]Whether Paige's interest in Crowley was primarily aesthetic, genuinely magical, or some combination of the two that resist that distinction is not something he has been forthcoming about.

[00:52:07]Oussie Osborne recorded a song called Mr. Crowley in 1980, a relatively straightforward biographical tribute.

[00:52:15]David Bow's references were more oblique but more pervasive, running through a significant portion of his 1970s work and reflecting a genuine engagement with the western esoteric tradition.

[00:52:30]The Beatles included Crowley in the assembled crowd on the cover of Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band in 1967, which he shares with Carl Young, Aldis Huxley, Edgar Allan Poe, and about 60 other figures placed there by John Lennon with the instruction to include some of the people we admire. The placement tells you something about where Crowley stood in the cultural imagination of the 1960s counterculture, which is to say that it tells you he was somewhere interesting without telling you exactly where. The countercultures embrace of Crowley was selective and largely superficial in ways that would have annoyed him if he had lived to see it. The famous phrase attributed to him, "Do what thou wilt," arrived in the 1960s stripped of every qualification he had attached to it, including the most important one, the insistence that the will referred to was not the ordinary appetitive will of daily desire, but the deep authentic purpose of the individual soul. What the counterculture heard was permission. What Crowley had written was something considerably more demanding than permission. The discovery of what your actual will is in his system requires a program of sustained self-examination, meditative practice, and magical work that makes serious demands on time, attention, and the willingness to face what you actually are underneath the layers of social conditioning.

[00:54:08]It is the opposite of doing whatever you feel like. The version of Crowley that entered popular culture in the 1960s and has persisted there ever since is a simplified and in some respects inverted image of the actual figure. He has been flattened into a symbol of transgression which he was but stripped of the serious intellectual content that gave the transgression its purpose and its coherence.

[00:54:37]The result is a cultural icon whose name is universally recognized and whose actual work is almost universally unread by the people who invoke him. The genuine legacy, the one that operates below the level of cultural iconography, is more interesting and more consequential.

[00:54:56]Thema as a functional religious and magical system has not died. The Otto operates globally today with lodges in dozens of countries and a membership that while not large by the standards of major world religions is active, literate, and serious.

[00:55:15]The AA continues in several lineages that trace their initiatory succession back to Crowley through different routes and dispute each other's claims to legitimate succession with the specific intensity that only organizations whose legitimacy depends on succession ever achieve.

[00:55:36]Crowley's books remain in print and continue to sell to a readership extending well beyond the self-identified occult community into psychology, philosophy, comparative religion, and the broader territory occupied by people who find the mainstream religious and therapeutic options insufficient. The Thoth Tarot, as I mentioned, is the deck most frequently preferred by serious practitioners over the riderweight system that dominates the popular market. The reason, if you actually compare them, is not difficult to understand.

[00:56:15]The riderweight deck commissioned by the Golden Dawn member Arthur Edward Weight in 1909 and painted by the Golden Dawn artist Pamela Coleman Smith is accessible, warm and relatively shallow in its symbology. It tells stories. The Thoth deck does not tell stories. It presents states, forces, principles, the raw energy of the cabalistic paths presented through Harris's geometrically charged painting with an intensity that either communicates or does not, depending on whether the person looking has developed the conceptual vocabulary to receive it. For those who have, it is a map of the human interior of remarkable precision. I want to be honest with you about something because I think this video would be incomplete without it. While I was putting this together, I spent a lot of time with Crowley's actual writing rather than the accounts of his writing. And there is a real difficulty at the center of it that most accounts of his life either overstate or understate without quite hitting the thing itself. The difficulty is this. The ideas are often genuinely impressive. the magical psychology of the a system. The attempt to develop a scientific approach to the investigation of consciousness. The critique of conventional morality as a mechanism of social control that operates independently of actual ethics. The insistence that each individual's authentic development requires the clearing away of everything imposed from outside. These are ideas that survive the stripping away of the theic theological framework around them.

[00:58:02]Versions of them appear in Carl Young's work on individuation, in Abraham Maslo's work on self-actualization, in the secular psychotherapy traditions that developed through the 20th century an explicit ignorance of Cruy, but that arrived at structurally similar conclusions through entirely different roots.

[00:58:25]But the man who developed these ideas also caused serious damage to the people closest to him. And the damage is documented too thoroughly to be reframed as anything other than what it was. The question of whether great ideas can excuse personal harm is one that each person has to answer for themselves.

[00:58:45]Crowley answered it with complete consistency in the affirmative. He had developed a theological system that located the true will at the center of ethics. And he identified his own will with the advancement of the lima. And that identification allowed him to do almost anything in his own name and describe it as magical necessity.

[00:59:09]This is the oldest trap in the history of religious leadership. The revelation comes. The revelation is genuine or genuine enough that the person who receives it cannot doubt it. The revelation is then used to justify the behavior of the person who received it in ways that benefit that person at the expense of everyone around them. Whether the revelation itself was real becomes impossible to assess separately from the uses to which it was put.

[00:59:44]Crowley died in a boarding house in Hastings on the 1st of December 1947.

[00:59:50]He was 72 years old, suffering from chronic bronchitis, dependent on heroin, and possessed of essentially nothing material beyond the books he had written and the magical diaries he had kept. His estate was valued at a few hundred.

[01:00:08]His doctor, refusing to continue prescribing the heroin that had kept him functional for decades, died the day after Crowley, which Crowley had apparently predicted, and which his followers received as the last magical act of a man who had spent his life insisting that will and reality were not as separate as ordinary people believed.

[01:00:30]The last published work was the book of Thoth, the extended commentary on the tarot deck, which appeared in 1944 in a limited edition of 200 copies at the price of five guineies. It is still in print. It is still read. It is still argued about. The verdict on Alistister Crowley depends almost entirely on what question you are asking. If you ask what he was as a human being in his relationships and his responsibilities to the people who depended on him, the record is genuinely troubling.

[01:01:07]The pattern of damaged women, the children he barely acknowledged, the students whose psychological equilibrium he treated as raw material, the debts unpaid and promises broken across 40 years of adult life. These are not things that can be explained away by the requirements of magical development.

[01:01:29]However generously you read that concept. If you ask what he contributed to the intellectual and spiritual inheritance of western culture, the answer is more complicated and in some respects more positive than the first answer allows. He synthesized the western esoteric tradition. the entire body of cabalistic, alchemical, astrological, and ceremonial magical knowledge that had accumulated over five centuries into a coherent practical system more complete than anything produced before him. He insisted with a rigor that his own life sometimes contradicted that magical practice had to be empirical, documented, reproducible, and subject to honest self assessment.

[01:02:18]He thought harder about what consciousness actually was, and how its ordinary limits could be systematically extended than almost anyone else of his generation. And he thought about it in ways that anticipated questions. the mainstream intellectual culture would not begin to take seriously until decades after his death. If you ask whether the lima as a religious philosophy has anything to offer a serious person in the 21st century, I think the answer is that it has some things to offer. that those things are most accessible when separated from Crowley's more extravagant personal mythology and that the central question of the lima what do you actually will when you strip away everything that was put into you by sources other than your own deepest nature is a genuine question that does not become less genuine because the person who formulated it was also by most available evidence not a good man. These two things are both true. The question is serious. The man was not always. The tradition continues regardless. What I find most striking honestly, and I have been thinking about this since I started making this video, is the way that the mythology around Crowley has become self- sustaining in a way that serves interest very different from the understanding of what he actually did and believed.

[01:03:51]The sensational version keeps people at a safe distance from the ideas. If Crowley is simply the wickedest man in the world, a tabloid villain who held sex rituals in a Sicilian farmhouse and corrupted everyone around him, then you never have to engage with the actual substance of what he wrote, which is demanding in a way that the sensational version never is. The sensational version is a closed story with a clear moral. The actual record is an open one, and open records require more from the person reading them. The occult tradition that Crowley inherited, and that he passed on in transformed form to the 20th century is not a tradition that wants things to be simple. Its entire premise is that ordinary consciousness is partial. That the reality available to the untrained and unexamined mind is a fraction of what is actually there.

[01:04:49]And that the expansion of consciousness toward a fuller picture is the central human task.

[01:04:56]Whether you accept any of the specific metaphysical claims embedded in that premise or not, the underlying demand to look more carefully, to think more rigorously, to be honest about what you actually find when you examine your own assumptions, is not a bad demand to have made of you. Crowley made it badly, often selfishly, sometimes cruy, always with the particular combination of brilliance and grandiosity that made it impossible to simply dismiss him, even when he was at his worst. He was in the end exactly what the evidence makes him.

[01:05:35]Not the devil, not a saint, not the secret architect of modern culture, not a fraud, though he was capable of fraudulence.

[01:05:47]Something smaller and stranger and more human than any of those categories. A man who found something real in the dark and spent his life mishandling it, and whose mishandling of it left us with enough to work with that the argument about what he was and what he meant has not stopped, and probably will not stop, which he would have found deeply satisfying, being the kind of man who preferred any argument to silence.

[01:06:14]Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law. Love is the law, love under will.

[01:06:22]Whatever you make of the man who wrote those lines, the lines themselves are still there. They have been there for over 120 years. And people who have never heard of the Abbey of Thelma or the Babylon working or the Thoth Tarot are still in their own way and without knowing it working through the question those lines are asking. What do you actually will? Not what you were told to want. Not what would make other people comfortable. Not what habit and fear and the accumulated weight of other people's expectations have left sitting in the place where your actual desires should be. What do you will? It is not an easy question. It was not meant to