Aleister Crowley

Novelist, Founding Figure

1875 – 1947

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Who was Aleister Crowley?

Aleister Crowley, born Edward Alexander Crowley was a British occultist, writer and mystic. He is perhaps best known today for his occult writings, especially The Book of the Law, the central sacred text of Thelema. Crowley was also an influential member in several occult organizations, including the Golden Dawn, the Argenteum Astrum, and Ordo Templi Orientis (O.T.O.). Other interests and accomplishments were wide-ranging—he was a chess player, mountain climber, poet, painter, astrologer, and social critic.

Famous Quotes:

  • The supreme satisfaction is to be able to despise one's neighbor and this fact goes far to account for religious intolerance. It is evidently consoling to reflect that the people next door are headed for hell.
  • If one had to worry about one's actions in respect of other people's ideas, one might as well be buried alive in an antheap or married to an ambitious violinist. Whether that man is the prime minister, modifying his opinions to catch votes, or a bourgeois in terror lest some harmless act should be misunderstood and outrage some petty convention, that man is an inferior man and I do not want to have anything to do with him any more than I want to eat canned salmon.
  • The joy of life consists in the exercise of one's energies, continual growth, constant change, the enjoyment of every new experience. To stop means simply to die. The eternal mistake of mankind is to set up an attainable ideal.
  • The pious pretence that evil does not exist only makes it vague, enormous and menacing.
  • Indubitably, Magic is one of the subtlest and most difficult of the sciences and arts. There is more opportunity for errors of comprehension, judgment and practice than in any other branch of physics.
  • Intolerance is evidence of impotence.
  • Men and women are not free to love decently until they have analyzed themselves completely and swept away every mystery from sex; and this means the acquisition of a profound philosophical theory based on wide reading of anthropology and enlightened practice.
  • It sometimes strikes me that the whole of science is a piece of impudence; that nature can afford to ignore our impertinent interference. If our monkey mischief should ever reach the point of blowing up the earth by decomposing an atom, and even annihilated the sun himself, I cannot really suppose that the universe would turn a hair.
  • I was asked to memorize what I did not understand; and, my memory being so good, it refused to be insulted in that manner.
  • Modern morality and manners suppress all natural instincts, keep people ignorant of the facts of nature and make them fighting drunk on bogey tales.

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Born
Oct 12, 1875
Leamington Spa
Also known as
  • Crowley, Aleister
  • Edward Alexander Crowley
Parents
Spouses
Children
Nationality
  • England
Profession
Education
  • Trinity College, Cambridge
  • Eastbourne College
  • Malvern College
Lived in
  • Leamington Spa
Died
Dec 1, 1947
Hastings

Submitted
on July 23, 2013

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