The Figures

Aleister Crowley

Aleister Crowley (1875-1947) was an English occultist who founded Thelema, a religion based on The Book of the Law, which he said was dictated to him in Cairo in 1904. Born Edward Alexander Crowley in Leamington Spa on 12 October 1875, he died at Hastings on 1 December 1947 (Hedenborg White, 2022). This page dates each step from a record you can open, keeps his own account apart from what others could check, and ends with a five-minute test for a “Crowley quote”.

What happened when? Crowley’s life in dated records

Crowley’s public life runs from the Golden Dawn in 1898 to The Book of Thoth in 1944; each date below has the record behind it, and one rests on his word alone.

What did Crowley do in the Golden Dawn?

Crowley was a junior member of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn for under eighteen months, from November 1898 until he was expelled with its chief, Samuel Liddell MacGregor Mathers, in May 1900; he neither founded nor led it.

London refused him the inner Second Order, so Mathers admitted him in Paris, which the Museum of Freemasonry catalogue says led to “open rebellion”. Mathers then sent him to seize the order’s rooms at 36 Blythe Road, and the London members expelled them both (GBR 1991 GD; day by day on our Golden Dawn page). What he took away mattered more: the first Equinox, in 1909, carried an essay “restored from the Cipher MSS. of the G∴D∴” (p. 2), later numbers printed its rituals, and a lawsuit by Mathers failed to stop him.

Who wrote The Book of the Law, and when was it printed?

The Book of the Law (Liber L vel Legis) is a text of three chapters and 220 verses that Crowley said he took down in Cairo at noon on 8, 9 and 10 April 1904 from a voice he called Aiwass; the earliest printed account is an unsigned one in his own review (1912); his later versions retell it, and we found no account by anyone else present.

In it his wife Rose, “W.” or “the seer”, commands him, on 7 April as the account reckons it, to enter the “temple” “exactly at 12 o’clock noon on three successive days” and write down what he hears; the manuscript runs to 65 pages (The Equinox I/7, p. 386). The same account calls it “a matter of the merest conjecture” whether Aiwass is a spiritual being or a man Crowley knew (pp. 384-385), and the Library of Congress files “Aiwass” among Crowley’s own names (authority record), a cataloguing convention, not a ruling. Who wrote it is a matter of belief; a historian can date only the paper.

Printing came in stages: a private edition in 1909, by the bibliographies (list; we have not seen it), a facsimile in 1912, the text in The Equinox I/10 in September 1913 (scan), and the booklet The Book of the Law in London in 1938 (record).

What does “Do what thou wilt” mean in Thelema?

“Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law” is verse 40 of the first chapter of The Book of the Law, and the verses around it narrow what “will” means; Thelema takes its name from the Greek word for will.

In the 1913 printing (p. 14), verse 39 gives the word of the Law as θελημα; verse 42 adds “thou hast no right but to do thy will”; verse 44 praises will “delivered from the lust of result”; verse 57 (p. 16) reads “Love is the law, love under will.” How Thelemites read “will” today varies; this page does not rule on it.

The words are older than Crowley. In Rabelais’s Gargantua, chapter 57, the Abbey of Thélème has one rule, “Fay ce que vouldras”, because free, well-taught people have a natural instinct towards virtue (text). The teaching passed through two orders: the A∴A∴, whose review was The Equinox, and the Ordo Templi Orientis, which Crowley headed from December 1924 (Hedenborg White).

Why was he called “the wickedest man in the world”?

“The Wickedest Man in the World” was a headline in the London weekly John Bull on 24 March 1923, after Crowley’s young secretary died at his house in Sicily; it is a tabloid label, not a finding of a court or a historian.

The house was the Abbey of Thelema at Cefalù. Raoul Loveday died there in February 1923; Crowley wrote that the cause was enteritis (letter, 1923), and we found no independent record. John Bull’s headlines that spring included “The King of Depravity” (10 March) and “A Cannibal at Large” (7 April) (list). A ministerial order of 13 April 1923 expelled him from Italy; a Palermo police report of 1936 gives the ground as rites “based on obscene and perverse sexual practices” (translation).

Part of the notoriety was his own: his scripture calls its prophet “the Beast” (I.15), he signed books as the Master Therion, and he wrote openly about drugs. In 1934 he sued over a passage in Nina Hamnett’s memoir Laughing Torso saying he had practised “Black Magic”, and the jury found against him (The Times, 14 April 1934). It was not his only case: in May 1933 a London bookseller, Arthur Gordon Gray, was ordered to pay him £50 for a shop notice about his novel (West London Observer, 12 May 1933), and in July 1934 a jury at the Central Criminal Court found him guilty of receiving letters stolen from a witness in the Hamnett case; he was bound over for two years (The Times, 26 July 1934).

What is the Book of Thoth, and what does it have to do with Hermes?

The Book of Thoth is Crowley’s 1944 guide to the 78-card tarot he designed and Frieda Harris painted, printed in 200 numbered copies; its title borrows a label from 1781, not an Egyptian book.

The Library of Congress copy is “No. 50 of 200 copies”, with Harris as “artist executant” (record). She painted the cards in 1938-1943, and they came out as a pack only after both had died, Crowley in 1947 and Harris in 1962 (Simpson, 2025; about 1971, says our tarot page). An essay printed in 1781 in Court de Gébelin’s Le Monde primitif had called the tarot the Book of Thoth, after the Egyptian god the Greeks identified with Hermes (see Thoth). The deck also follows his scripture: The Book of the Law says the letter tzaddi “is not the Star” (I.57), so the Star and the Emperor swap their Hebrew letters (see Hermetic Qabalah). Thoth was in his practice long before the cards: a Cairo notebook entry of March 1904 reads “Thoth, invoked with great success, indwells us” (The Equinox I/7, p. 365).

Was Crowley a Hermeticist?

Crowley was a Hermeticist only in the Golden Dawn sense of the word, a programme of Qabalah, tarot and ritual; on the line this site traces from the Greek Hermetica to modern systems, he stands at the stage of the occult orders.

Each tool has an older, datable layer. The tables of 777 (1909) descend from Agrippa (1533) and the Golden Dawn (see correspondences). The trumps-and-letters scheme comes from Éliphas Lévi, whose Key of the Mysteries Crowley translated for The Equinox in 1913 (contents); the “angelic” system abstracted in The Equinox I/7 (1912) is John Dee’s, received through Edward Kelley. After him came Israel Regardie, his secretary in 1928-1929, and chaos magic, begun in 1978, which drew on Crowley and Austin Osman Spare (Duggan, 2012; see chaos magic). The old texts are where his questions came from, not proof of his answers (see Modern systems).

How can you check a “Crowley quote” in five minutes?

Before you repeat a line credited to Crowley, find its first printing, its year and page, and who speaks in it; if you cannot, call it “attributed”.

1. Copy the exact words and where you met them.
2. Find the first printing. Search the words in quotation marks, then open a scan, not a quote site; most early texts are in The Equinox I (1909-1913), scanned on the Aleister Crowley Timeline.
3. Read three lines on each side.
4. Ask who speaks: the gods of The Book of the Law, a character in a novel, Crowley himself, or a journalist about him.
5. Write one line with source, year, page, speaker and a label: verified, cut, misattributed or not found.

Example.
Seen: “Do what thou wilt. - Aleister Crowley”, on a T-shirt.
Found: Liber L I.40, The Equinox I/10 (1913), p. 14.
Full line: “Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law.”
Around it: I.42, “no right but to do thy will”.
Speaker: the voice of the 1904 text, not Crowley in his own name.
Label: real words, cut short.

Why it works. Quotations travel without their sources; the first printing fixes the words, date and speaker. It works on lines an AI assistant puts in his mouth too (see Does AI make things up?). Where it stops. It shows what he printed, not whether it is true; “not found” does not prove a fake. More: Ask for the date.

What does this page not do?

This page dates Crowley’s life and texts; it does not teach his rituals, judge Thelema, or settle where the voice of 1904 came from.

• Not a guide to practice or to joining an order.
• Not a verdict on faith. We neither endorse nor mock Thelemites.
• Short quotations only. Ours come from printings of 1909-1913, public domain in the US as works published before 1931 (Duke, 2026); the UK term is 70 years after death (GOV.UK), and he died in 1947. In the US, books he published from 1931 on, and Harris’s paintings, may still be protected.

Key facts

Born	12 October 1875, Leamington Spa
Died	1 December 1947, Hastings
Golden Dawn	November 1898 to May 1900
Founded	Thelema, on Liber L (Cairo, 1904)
Orders	A∴A∴; head of the O.T.O. from 1924
Key works	The Equinox (1909-1913); The Book of Thoth (1944)
Italy	Cefalù 1920; expelled 13 April 1923
Checked	13 November 2026

Fair questions

Who was Aleister Crowley?

An English occultist and poet (1875-1947), born Edward Alexander Crowley. He was in the Golden Dawn from 1898 to 1900, founded Thelema on The Book of the Law (Cairo, 1904, by his account), headed the Ordo Templi Orientis from 1924 and designed the Thoth tarot with Frieda Harris.

Was Aleister Crowley a member of the Golden Dawn?

Yes, for under eighteen months: initiated on 18 November 1898, admitted by Mathers to the Second Order in Paris against London’s wishes, and expelled with Mathers in May 1900. He later printed the order’s rituals in The Equinox.

What does “Do what thou wilt” mean?

It is half of verse I.40 of The Book of the Law: “Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law.” Nearby verses speak of “no right but to do thy will” and of will “delivered from the lust of result”. Rabelais gave his Abbey of Thélème a similar rule in Gargantua.

What is the Book of Thoth by Crowley?

His guide to the Thoth tarot, printed in 1944 as The Equinox III/5 in 200 numbered copies, with cards painted by Frieda Harris; the pack came out only after both had died. The title reuses a label first printed in 1781.

Why was Crowley called the wickedest man in the world?

The London weekly John Bull ran that headline on 24 March 1923, after his secretary Raoul Loveday died at Cefalù. Italy expelled Crowley by an order of 13 April 1923. The phrase is a tabloid label, not a court’s finding.

Sources & further reading

• The Equinox I/1 (London, 21 March 1909), Editorial, pp. 1-3: scan; I/7 (March 1912), “The Temple of Solomon the King”, pp. 365, 384-386 and MS facsimile facing p. 386: issue and scan.
• “Liber L. vel Legis”, The Equinox I/10 (London: Wieland, September 1913), pp. 11-33: scan; contents; 1938 booklet: record.
• Library of Congress: The Book of Thoth ([London]: O.T.O., 1944), LCCN 45017396; name authority for Crowley, with variant names.
• Manon Hedenborg White, “Ordo Templi Orientis”, World Religions and Spirituality Project, 10 April 2022: wrldrels.org.
• Museum of Freemasonry, London, Golden Dawn collection, GBR 1991 GD: AIM25 description.
• Cefalù papers, transcribed without scans: Crowley to the British consul in Tunis, 25 August 1923; Palermo police, 6 June 1936; Abbey of Thelema.
• John Bull (London), articles on Crowley 1910-1930: dated list, transcriptions only.
• The Times (London), 14 April 1934, “‘Black Magic’ Libel Action Fails”: transcription; 26 July 1934, “Mr. Aleister Crowley Bound Over”: transcription; West London Observer, 12 May 1933: transcription.
• Veronica Simpson, review of Tarot: Origins & Afterlives, Warburg Institute, Studio International, 4 March 2025: studiointernational.com.
• Rabelais, Gargantua, ch. 57, ed. Marty-Laveaux (Paris, 1868): Wikisource.
• Colin Duggan, “Perennialism and Iconoclasm: Chaos Magick”, in Asprem and Granholm (eds), Contemporary Esotericism (2012), pp. 91-112: abstract.
• Wikipedia, “Aleister Crowley bibliography”, for the 1909 printing.
• Copyright: Duke, Public Domain Day 2026; GOV.UK, how long copyright lasts.