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... ling and women. Exactly how such a man came to be entrusted by Tom Bishop with the care of his nephew is unclear. Aleister would later suppose that Douglas got the job under false pretenses: he was an Oxford graduate, with gentlemanly manners and an impressive accent, who had traveled in Persia for the Bible society Like any Oxford graduate, Douglas probably needed the cash. (Hutchinson, 39) At about this time in his life, Crowley discovered mountaineering, which he became reasonably famous for. For all his athletic shortcomings, he was an excellent, skilled, and daring mountaineer. Crowley loved the fame it achieved him.
This might have given him a taste for the recognition he would always crave. One of his climbing associates was a celebrated chemist by the name of Morris Travers. Travers was, at the time, twenty-four years old and teaching at University College, London. For many reasons, Crowley greatly admired Travers. The chemist was popular with the female students, for one thing. As well as this, he had immense strength and courage.
During one incident, Travers used his own body to form a human bridge across a crevasse and allowed Crowley to stand with crampons on his shoulders for a full forty minutes, while cutting out fresh handholds. The two might have moved on to greater things together had Travers not discovered krypton, neon, and xenon. His career, of course, skyrocketed. Another influential figure was Oscar Eckenstein. This man took Crowley as a protg. He actually seemed to shape Crowley into the daring man he turned out to be.
Eckenstein himself was a successful mountaineer who would have made an important member of the Alpine Club had he not called it a retreat for self-advertising quacks who could barely climb a ladder without a guide. (Hutchinson, 55) Eckenstein took Crowley under his wing, and as he gained Aleister's everlasting admiration as a mountaineer, he also influenced him about speaking his mind no matter who got offended. This is a trait that Crowley carried for the rest of his life. Probably the most prominent of inspirations to Crowley was a man by the name of Julian L. Baker. Like Travers, Baker was a chemist and mountaineer. He had also acquired for himself a name in the practice of (of all things) alchemy.
This sparked the interest of twenty-three-year-old Crowley. He approached Baker to ask about the feasibility of alchemy and discovered from the man something much more interesting than that. Julian Baker was a member of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn. In 1898, Crowley was initiated into the Order, and proceeded to climb up rapidly through the grades. With his newfound status in the Order, Crowley claimed certain strange powers, such as horses bolting at the sight of him, and his rubber mackintosh catching fire. A schism broke up the Order in 1900, and Crowley traveled throughout the East.
There he learned and practiced the mental and physical disciplines of yoga, as well as his western style of ritual magick and Oriental mysticism. He was on his way to gaining a name for himself in the occult, and soon came up with his Law of Thelema. In 1903, Crowley married Rose Kelly. It was actually a business arrangement, but Crowley claims to have later fallen in love with her for a short time, at least. They went to Egypt on their honeymoon. After returning to Cairo in 1904, Rose (who until this point had shown no interest or familiarity with the occult) began entering trance states and insisting to her husband that the god Horus was trying to contact him.
She passed several well-known images of the god and led Aleister straight to a painted wooden funerary stele from the 26 th Dynasty, depicting Horus receiving a sacrifice from the deceased, a priest names Ankh-f-n-khans. Crowley was especially impressed with the fact that this piece was numbered 666 by the museum, a number with which he had identified since childhood. (Aleister Crowley, In 1906, Crowley joined George Cecil Jones in England, where they set off to recreate the Golden Dawn, under the new name of Asylum Argentum, meaning Silver Star. This was the starting point of the life Aleister Crowley was known for. He came to be very influential to later member of the occult. In her autobiography, the famous witch, Sybil Leek, recalls Crowley having paid visits to her family home when she was growing up. When he talked about occultism, he mesmerized his audience, and then when he had almost exhausted his listeners with the magic of his voice and his use of the English language, he would suddenly change into a deep, black mood.
In the innocence of youth, I overlooked the dark moods. I remember that he always had time to talk to the child. (Leek, 28 - 29) Aleister Crowley was a man of many talents and great intellect, but he was not born to be the Antichrist. He was called the most evil man in the world, but it was more people and events that inspired him to lead that life that he did. His natural fascination with the opponents of heaven in the Book of Revelations was nothing more than the fascination of a young boy with something scary. He grew up and met many famous (and infamous) people who shaped his ideals, but he rarely formed them on his own. He was captivating and a strong leader, which is why he was so successful in convincing many people that he was the ultimate adversary of God.
In reality, he craved the attention, and he would do anything to get it. Crowley was an unusual and involved individual and his view changed over the course of the more than 50 years of his writing career. It was not unusual to contradict himself on the same page. (Crowley's Personality, par. 1) It seemed that his belief in his own wickedness may not have been so firmly grounded. Crowley got what he wanted out of life, but he was not the man he made himself out to be. As Christopher Isherwood put it, the truly awful thing about Crowley is that one suspects he didnt really believe in anything. Even his wickedness.
Perhaps the only thing that wasnt fake was his addiction to heroin and cocaine. (Hutchinson) Bibliography: WORKS CITED Aleister Crowley. web Crowley, Aleister. The Confessions of Aleister Crowley. London: Penguin Book, 1969. Crowley's Personality. Intro to Crowley Studies web Fact Sheet on Crowley.
web Hutchinson, Roger. The Beast Demystified. Edinburgh: Mainstream Publishing Company, 1999. Leek, Sybil. Diary of a Witch. New York: Signet, Signet Classics, Signet, Mentor, and Plume Books, 1968.
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Research essay sample on Aleister Crowley In The Occult
