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Aleister Crowley
Life Time
12 October 1875 - 1 December 1947
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12.10.1875 - 1.12.1947
Edward Alexander (Alistair) Crowley
Place of Birth: Lemington, UK
Citizenship: United Kingdom Crowley’s parents belonged to the sect of the Plymouth brothers, and this circumstance may have played an important role in Crowley’s subsequent de facto abdication from Christianity: it is known that the Plymouth brothers profess the doctrine of fundamentalism. At the age of twenty-one, Crowley experienced his first mystical illumination – in his own words, “pain and fear, even
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12.10.1875 - 1.12.1947
Edward Alexander (Alistair) Crowley
Place of Birth: Lemington, UK
Citizenship: United Kingdom
Crowley’s parents belonged to the sect of the Plymouth brothers, and this circumstance may have played an important role in Crowley’s subsequent de facto abdication from Christianity: it is known that the Plymouth brothers profess the doctrine of fundamentalism. At the age of twenty-one, Crowley experienced his first mystical illumination – in his own words, “pain and fear, even a certain extreme horror, and at the same time an indescribable, purest, most sacred delight.” In 1898 he published the mystical poem “Adelaide” and joined the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, which inherited the ideology of the ancient order of knights-templars. A year later, he settled in Scotland, bought himself a house on the shores of the famous Loch Ness; by this time, Crowley had already occupied a position in the hierarchy of the Order, quite high for a beginner. However, in 1900 he left the Old World and embarked on a journey: visited Mexico, the island of Ceylon and India. In 1902, Crowley returned to Europe. In Paris, he met Somerset Maugham, who later brought him under the name Oliver Haddo in his novel Mag. And two years later, an event occurred that completely changed Crowley’s life: in April 1904, Aleister Crowley wrote “under the dictation” of his perhaps main work – “The Book of the Law”, which later became a book equivalent to the Bible for his followers. Meanwhile, a schism was brewing in the Order of the Golden Dawn, partly provoked by Crowley himself; and although in 1909 Crowley was ordained a Master of the Order, two years later his closest associates, George S. Jones, J. Fuller and others, abdicated him. However, a year later, the Master of the American Order of the Templars of the East (OrdoTempli Orientis), Theodore Reuss, knighted Crowley and appointed him head of the British lodge. In 1913, before the First World War, Crowley lived for some time in Moscow, where he wrote the Gnostic Mass. In 1914 he again left Europe and moved to America to return to the Old World only five years later and to establish in Sicily a monastery of the Thelemists - adherents of religious doctrine, the prophet and herald of which Crowley is considered to this day. In 1925, he became the supreme master of the International Order of Templars of the East. Crowley died in December 1947, preparing for publication the third collection of his poems. The authorities of the English city of Brighton, where Crowley was cremated, declared the ceremony of farewell to him "contrary to the Christian spirit": the friends of the supreme master read over his ashes not prayers, but excerpts from the "Gnostic Mass" and "Books of the Law". Aleister Crowley’s life, both social and personal, was turbulent. Four times married and three times divorced; a wealthy man, declared bankrupt in 1935; exiled from Italy and France, but welcome outside Europe; extolled by supporters and trampled into the mud by opponents who branded him from church pulpits and newspaper pages, he was and remains one of the most controversial and enigmatic figures of the twentieth century.