Diary of a Drug Fiend

About Aleister Crowley

Aleister Crowley (1875-1947) was an English poet painter occultist magician and mountaineer. Born into wealth he rejected his familys Christian beliefs and developed a passion for Western esotericism. At Trinity College Cambridge Crowley gained a reputation as a poet whose work appeared in such publications as The Granta and Cambridge Magazine. An avid mountaineer he made the first unguided ascent of the Mönch in the Swiss Alps. Around this time he first began identifying as bisexual and carried on relationships with prostitutes which led to his contracting syphilis. In 1897 he briefly dated fellow student Herbert Charles Pollitt whose unease with Crowleys esotericism would lead to their breakup. The following year Crowley joined the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn a secret occult society to which many of the eras leading artists belonged including Bram Stoker W. B. Yeats Arthur Machen and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. Between 1900 and 1903 he traveled to Mexico India Japan and Paris. In these formative years Crowley studied Hinduism wrote the poems that would form The Sword of Song (1904) attempted to climb K2 and became acquainted with such artists as Auguste Rodin and W. Somerset Maugham. A 1904 trip to Egypt inspired him to develop Thelema a philosophical and religious group he would lead for the remainder of his life. He would claim that The Book of the Law (1909) his most important literary work and the central sacred text of Thelema was delivered to him personally in Cairo by the entity Aiwass. During the First World War Crowley allegedly worked as a double agent for the British intelligence services while pretending to support the pro-German movement in the United States. The last decades of his life were spent largely in exile due to persecution in the press and by the states of Britain and Italy for his bohemian lifestyle and open bisexuality.