ABSTRACT
Aleister Crowley, known variously as the Laird of Boleskine, The Great Beast 666 and ‘the wickedest man who ever lived’, is probably one of the most unjustly maligned figures in the history of the occult. From the beginning Crowley’s life was full of contrasts. Crowley was initiated as a Neophyte in the Golden Dawn on 18 November 1898. On the 14 March 1904 in his room near the Boulak Museum in Cairo, Crowley performed a magical ceremony invoking the Egyptian deity Thoth, god of Wisdom. Crowley realized that an event of the magnitude of his cosmic initiation only occurred every 2000 years, and constituted a new phase in the evolution of mankind. He also inspired a series of sexual magic societies in the USA, namely the Choronzon Club; Louis T. Culling’s Great Brotherhood of God; the Californian OTO; and the Fellowship of Ma Ion, a blend of Catholicism and Crowley. Crowley died a confused man in December 1947.
