Impressive People: Stories of Remarkable Lives - Sykalo Eugen 2025

Aleister Crowley – Occultist, mountaineer, poet, and provocateur who inspired both The Beatles and Satanists

By the time the Beatles slipped Aleister Crowley’s face onto the cover of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, next to Edgar Allan Poe and Bob Dylan, the man himself had been dead for two decades. His ashes, allegedly, were smuggled into America in a brass urn disguised as a tobacco tin. A fitting end for someone who spent his life in theatrical defiance of decorum, God, and gravity.

He was born Edward Alexander Crowley in 1875 in the sleepy town of Royal Leamington Spa, England — not the place you'd expect to breed a future occultist who would scandalize Europe and influence generations of rock stars, magicians, and misfits. His parents were strict members of the Plymouth Brethren, a Christian fundamentalist sect so austere they made the Puritans look like Burning Man attendees. Crowley grew up in a house where even board games were considered sinful. His mother called him “The Beast.” He embraced it like a prophecy.

By 11, he was writing poems about murder. By 20, he was seducing men and women alike, studying alchemy, and scaling the Alps without ropes — because of course he was. By 23, he had renamed himself Aleister, quoting Baudelaire and practicing ritual sex magic in a London flat thick with incense and mirrors.

Theater of the Damned

Crowley didn’t just dabble in the occult — he performed it like opera. He believed in Magick (with a "k") — not parlor tricks, but the spiritual science of causing change in accordance with will. His rituals included robes, candles, blood, semen, chanting in dead languages. Think Broadway, but with Latin invocations to Babalon. He founded the religious philosophy Thelema, whose central commandment — Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law — would eventually be tattooed on punk arms and whispered in dorm rooms for decades to come.

But he was no guru in saffron. He was chaos. He smoked hash like it was holy sacrament, feuded with fellow magicians, and once declared himself the Antichrist in Cairo after communing with a being called Aiwass who dictated to him The Book of the Law.

And yet. The man could write. His poetry was lush, archaic, often insufferable, occasionally brilliant. He was a mountaineer of language as much as cliffs — and yes, he nearly died multiple times in the Himalayas, refusing to turn back during fatal storms. He left behind trails of lost lovers, broken disciples, and an Everest basecamp of personal myth.

High Priest of Provocation

He was called “the wickedest man in the world” by the British tabloids. They were delighted by him, really. Crowley knew how to bait the press — whether it was his heroin use, his sex rituals, or his scathing essays about Christianity, all delivered in a voice that was part Oscar Wilde, part demon on absinthe.

In Italy, he opened the Abbey of Thelema, a sort of satanic Montessori school where artists, anarchists, and thrill-seekers came to unlearn civilization. There were murals of horned gods, rituals involving bodily fluids, and absolutely no rules except one: obey your will. It ended badly, of course. A young man died from drinking contaminated water, Mussolini got spooked, and Crowley was deported. But the myth grew teeth.

By the 1930s, broke and bloated, he was selling horoscopes to survive, living in cheap London hotels and scribbling in notebooks like a man still convinced the gods owed him something. When World War II broke out, rumors swirled that Crowley had been recruited by British intelligence to plant occult disinformation in Nazi circles. There’s no proof — but it sounds exactly like something he would’ve done.

Legacy in Flames and Vinyl

Aleister Crowley didn’t live to see the 1960s counterculture adopt him as a patron saint. But his fingerprints were everywhere. Jimmy Page of Led Zeppelin bought Crowley’s former home on Loch Ness. David Bowie flirted with Crowleyan symbols in his early albums. And of course, Sgt. Pepper — the album that changed pop music forever — paid homage by pasting his face among its gallery of heroes.

Even modern Satanists — though Crowley wasn’t one in any official sense — revere him for his rejection of moral authority and his belief in radical selfhood. In the language of search engines: occultism, sex magick, spiritual rebellion, countercultural icons — he ranks near the top.

But Crowley himself defies all these labels. Was he a prophet or a narcissist? A poet or a fraud? A mystic or a deeply lonely man who couldn’t stop performing?

The Beast in the Mirror

The most tragic thing about Crowley is also the most human: he wanted to be taken seriously. Not just as a provocateur or a magician, but as a thinker. He saw himself in the lineage of Blake and Nietzsche, shaking civilization by its collar. And in quieter moments, he craved intimacy — scribbled love poems, mourned dead friends, wrote letters full of tenderness to disciples who had abandoned him.

He burned so hot he singed everyone around him. But the flame, even in its ruin, was real.

When he died in 1947, only a few people attended his funeral. A journalist later called it a “black mass.” That was probably exaggerated. But then again, Crowley would have loved the headline.

He once wrote: “I was not content to believe in a personal devil and serve him, in the ordinary sense of the word. I wanted to get hold of him personally and become his chief of staff.”

He didn’t become the devil’s general, not really. But he did become something maybe stranger: a myth that wrote itself into the DNA of rebellion. Part poet, part prankster, part prophet of the human id.

And if you squint — behind the LSD-soaked rock lyrics, the TikTok tarot readers, the resurgence of ritual and astrology and “main character energy” — his silhouette still lingers.

In robes. Grinning.

Calling.