Leave Aleister alone!
I'm sorry, conspiracy theorists. He's just not the boogeyman that you think he is.
I listen to a bunch of conspiracy podcasts. I’m a paranoid dude and an enthusiast of secret histories. Most of the time, conspiracy is fun to speculate on but in recent years, it has taken on a nasty character thanks to Alex Jones and the Q phenomenon. When I first landed on the internet in the mid-90’s, there weren’t any search engines to speak of, really. So getting around meant knowing where you wanted to go and that meant finding URLs where you could. If you used usenet, an ancient message board technology with its own protocols separate from the web, you could sometimes find them in discussion threads there. Sometimes you’d find them left in messages on Bulletin Board Services. But, for most of us, we did it the old fashion way: print. I was a regular reader of weirdo magazines like Mondo 2000, Hypno, and The Net, three mags which made technology and weirdo culture their bread and butter. As a result, most of my early internet experience came from browsing the grubbiest corners of the internet: Dan’s Gallery of the Grotesque, a sort of forerunner to the coming apocalypse of real-gore websites. sites about weird science and Forteana, and digests of rambling conspiracy theory. I was already an X-Files nut and a UFO guy. I loved the pulpy adventures of World War 2 weird science and wunderwaffen. And I came to learn about truly crazy shit like The Montauk Project, which has, like, every conspiracy theory ever tied to it in order to plug all the holes that skeptics and enthusiasts, alike, poked in it while exploring.
But then, fiends like Alex Jones found a way to amplify their con with the internet and some real bummer theories from other ends memed their way to mainstream visibility. Joe Rogan, the most listened to man on the internet, established his character brand of stoner guru who’s “only asking questions, man”. Conspiracy on the internet became a real bummer. Now, everyone knows someone within a single degree of separation who very seriously won’t get vaccinated because they think that Bill Gates will microchip them. They frantically post and send email after email to their friends and families about how if you get the shot(s), the government will be able to track you 24/7. And they post this from their always-on, even when you think it’s not, Apple or Samsung surveillance device. The one with a microphone that hears you talking and suddenly starts serving you ads on websites relevant to those conversations that you thought you were having in private.
Anyway, they chipped you long ago. You worry about the vaccines, but what are you doing about all those prescribed medications you take? Ever had surgery?
The one thing that bugs me more than anything about conspiracy theory, okay, maybe the second-most important conspiracy item that bugs me. The first is that no matter what you’re looking up, you’re never more than two clicks away from a site that’s going to lay it all out how IT’S ALL THE FAULT OF THE JEWS! What I want to address is the ongoing, undying conspiracy theorist obsession with Aleister Crowley.
I was listening to a recent episode of Subliminal Jihad, one of my favorites, when they had fellow theorist, Jim Opperman, from the Opperman Report, on. At one point, when the discussion veers toward the shores of sex researcher, Alfred Kinsey, they brought up his obsession with Crowley and how he and Kenneth Anger used to be bros. This is likely true. Plenty of folks in areas of scientific research were into Crowley and the occult. The hardline materialist fetish of modern science, made popular by personalities such as Bill Nye, Neil DeGrasse Tyson, and Carl Sagan, is only a recent cultural development likely meant to steer minds heading toward a career in research away from the forbidden realms of black science. I was enjoying this discussion when all of a sudden, Opperman uttered the phrase “one of Crowley’s palaces”.
One of Crowley’s palaces.
Khalid clarifies that they mean the Abbey of Thelema. Let’s take a look at this temple of opulence, shall we?
This photo was obviously taken closer to the time of this writing than when Crowley and his fellow Thelemites occupied it, doing what they wilt, getting wasted and eating poo, but that’s it, right there. Even when Crowley lived there, it was considered squalid and ill-suited for his designs.
If you’re unfamiliar, The Abbey of Thelema was a small piece of property that Crowley came into possession of in Sicily in the 20’s. His plan was to host a sort of magical commune there where everyone could hang out, do yoga, do what thou wilt, and have lots and lots of sex. But the entire enterprise was a failure characteristic of most of Crowley’s undertakings of the time. By all accounts it was a fetid dump and was the period in Crowley’s life when he came closest to being a cult leader of the American variety where everyone ends up dying at the end. But before things could go that far, the Abbey had accumulated a rotten reputation and the Thelemites were expelled from Italy by Mussolini.
Before we go any further, I want to make something clear: I am not a Crowley fanatic. I am not a Thelemite. The Crowley cult of personality is a sad affair composed of predators and prey. It’s a cult of penis worshippers peopled by edgy folks that think that Victorian blue comedy is still quite scandalous. This video below is what Thelema looks like. It’s all phallic symbols and beating off on Enochian tables.
The body of Thelema, writ large, is currently engaged in, and has been for quite some time, a schism around the philosophy of Thelema, its central tenet, and Daddy’s place in all of it. Crowley was a thoroughly repellent individual who was very likely a sociopath but he was also gifted, for some fucking reason, with being the individual chosen by the agents of the new aeon to deliver the news of their arrival and most of his written philosophy and thoughts on magic are 100% on the money.
That said: Cut the shit, you guys. You give him way, way too much credit.
Every one of these podcasts mentions his name at least once every episode and it is irritating every time I hear it. Not the name, but the suggestion of what it means. In the world of conspiranoia, Crowley sits firmly on the throne of greatest evil. He’s a nefarious mastermind of unmatched intellect, directing a globe-spanning conspiracy for… some reason …from beyond the grave. He’s one part Fantomas, one part Satan, himself. His sinister mission was central to putting men on the moon, by Richard Hoagland’s account. SK Bain writes of Crowley in his book, hyperbolically titled The Most Dangerous Book in the World: 9/11 as Mass Ritual:
Crowley’s vision of a New Aeon coincide’s with the Illuminati’s age-old plan for a secular world order ruled by an enlightened elite. The wording might be different, but the hermetic philosophical background is the same. Crowley and the Establishment see eye-to-eye on the subject — and this eye is the Eye of Horus.
Oh boy. Where do I even begin with that one? Bain indicts the dreaded establishment as the invisible hand that will one day doom the world’s peasantry but Bain was also balls-deep in the establishment media machine for years as part of the Project for the New American Century, Weekly Standard, and other neocon mouthpieces. Being that he’s coming from a place of pre-Trump conservatism, when Republicans were still interested in hiding their love of Nazism, he likely doesn’t give a fuck about the little people of the world. He’s mostly just offended by the dreaded elite’s dedication to Satanism. To insist that the forces of Satan, acting by the ritual scripts put forth by Aleister Crowley resulting in the horrific ordeal of September 11, 2001 in order to usher in the supremacy of a secular age, it boggles the mind. Bain and all the Loose Change theorists that buy into this Satanic Government theory are basically taking a square peg and dropping it through a round hole because the round hole’s diameter happens to be wide enough to accommodate it. The fallacy lies in the similarities Bain finds in Crowley’s writing and his understanding of the shadowy New World Order’s mission. The NWO has been a target of easily frightened Christians since the establishment of the John Birch Society but in the absence of communism, they’ve struggled to sharpen its teeth. He’s taking one end of the NWO panic and joining it to the poorly understood philosophy of Crowley, who was 100% not a secular dude. He had a real rage-boner for organized Christianity and his magical philosophy is ostensibly the flashpoint for Western left-hand path traditions but it’s still rooted firmly in spirituality.
I’ll give him this: Crowley’s vision for Thelemites was, in fact, a sort of elitism but it was an elitism in the Nietzschean sense of the word. People who lived up to their fullest potential, in accordance with their True Will, were just inherently better than everyone else by the word of Thelema. It’s one of the reasons that fascism has always been a compatible political approach to the Western Esoteric Tradition. The esoteric Thule Society in Germany directed the Nazi party from the shadows, after all. There’s order, and rules, and grades of initiation that give people power over the rest. . So, yes. Wicked orders of the occult do operate in government circles but it’s not at all a one size fits all situation. The Final Solution had no documented ritual significance to the SS and the Germans documented everything back then. It’s the ugly underbelly of the occult world that no one but maybe Allen Greenfield and Michael Bertiaux have truly reckoned with. Crowley also had fascist sympathies and wrote of his Thelemic elite rising above the rabble and being served by slaves of lower caste. Like I said, the dude fucking sucked as a human being. But he was also on drugs, like, all the time and his work sometimes had parallels to Stephen King during his crazy coke-binge years in that Crowley was just as prolific and his writing was also just as fucking terrible. To counter The Left’s assumption that all magical practice is inherently fascist, Jack Parsons and his associate, Grady McMurtry wrote at length about the parallels between magic and Marxism. And Parsons didn’t lose his security clearances because he was the head of a wild sex cult. He lost them because of his association with Marxist groups in California.
Let’s be clear here. Crowley didn’t have palaces. Throughout most of his life he had roommates. At one time he owned Boleskine House on the banks of Loch Ness, which was a pretty nice pad, but he also quickly burned through what fortune his parents had afforded him by self-publishing all of his own work in expensive volumes that went mostly-unsold until after his death. By the time he was in his 40’s he was writing short stories for pulp magazines to pay his bills and buy dope. In his final days of living he seemed to receive a certain clarity that the vast bulk of his life, though interesting, was a sad failure that left him with nothing.
Ah! But Pera, you say. He called himself The Great Beast 666, didn’t he? Doesn’t this imply that he was a satanist? It does if you’re an uninformed rube.
Symbolism is the secret sauce of magic. You can pack a lot of punch into a single symbol by layering. At the outermost layer of that name, Crowley derived a great deal of power from shocking people. He also saw himself as a libertine and cultivated this reputation by embodying indulgence of earthly pleasures. He was a beast that took what he wanted, the horned fertility god that inspired wild lust in all around him. He was Pan. He was the Great Beast of Revelation, whose number is 666, and is ridden by its consort, Babalon. By taking that name, Crowley aimed to embody the hermetic principle of maleness through the lens of Thelema. Not being one for subtlety, he really leaned into the aspects which gave the people of the early 20th century the vapors.
John of Patmos likely wrote the Book of Revelation as an expression of fear during the reign of Nero (666 was meant to represent Nero), ostensibly the worst period of Roman overindulgence and Christian persecution and this vision was his nightmare, a world of evil and rank materialism that spit in the face of God. But what Crowley saw in this was the end of an age and the beginning of a new one. Babalon and The Beast symbolically ushered in his Aeon of Horus. Yes, on the surface, Crowley’s embrace of The Great Beast 666 looks like a bold declaration of Satanism… if your understanding on satanism is informed entirely by Slayer.
When it comes to Crowley and Satanism, you have to make the distinction between Satanism and Luciferianism. Twitchy conspiracy theorists and fundamentalist christians use the terms interchangeably. Crowley is arguably Luciferian in his philosophy. Luciferianism lies at the heart of the left hand path but it’s only tangentially Satanic in the sense that the Satan archetype is often associated with Lucifer because of Lucifer’s fallen status but they’re not the same thing. Alex Jones yelling and screaming about those satanic, luciferian illuminati scumbags isn’t going to give a shit about this distinction and neither will his viewers.
I will concede that there are a lot of strange qualities out there related to Crowley in America. The Agape Lodge, one of the first and probably the best-known OTO lodges in America, was located in California and operated as early as the 1930s. Among its membership was a broad range of actors, scientists, and political operators. The aforementioned Jack Parsons is well-known for having been one of the founding members of the Jet Propulsion Laboratories. L Ron Hubbard founded a little-known religious outfit called The Church of Scientology. Dennis Hopper and Dean Stockwell were rumored to have been members as well. Agape was officially shuttered in the 60’s by the greater body of the OTO but as we all know, that definitively means that Grady McMurtry, the lodge’s head at the time, shut the whole thing down and called it quits. He officially resurrected it in the 70’s, by the way. Because he definitely wasn’t leading masses and ritual in the intervening years.
Agape Lodge was wrapped up in a lot of the strange machinery of politics and power of the time. It sat adjacent to all the wheels turning to keep the American war machine moving. Conspiracy theorists typically fall into a trap of identifying people guilty of heinous crimes purely by their association with other people that are actually guilty of heinous crimes and this tends to put Crowley squarely in their crosshairs because he cultivated a sinister persona and organizations associated with him, such as the Agape Lodge of his own broader body of OTO charters, were likely up to their eyeballs in bad news. California, from San Francisco to San Diego, was packed to the rafters with Nazi spies and OSS agents doing everything they could to recruit anyone with deep pockets into their cause. Universities on that coast were directly involved in research for wartime applications. Hollywood is evil as fuck! Everybody knows this.
But how, exactly, does this implicate Aleister Crowley as the supreme puppet master? By the time Agape Lodge was chartered, he was in the twilight of his life and fully impotent. He was hooked on dope and barely making ends meet in a filthy apartment in England by way of Lodge dues and member patronage. Crowley’s last years on earth were sad and he was a shadow of his former self, a former self that wasn’t all that successful to begin with. And all that wickedest man in the world business came from a single writer of a single ultraconservative tabloid publication, John Bull. Los Angeles in 1936 may as well have been on the other side of the world. Crowley, maybe having been a spy in the past — a spy for Germany — now offered his services to The Crown but was turned out by the official record. It’s not unreasonable to think that he may have been spying on the sly for England as many of his associates in America were in positions that British Intelligence would have found strategically significant but he also held fascist sympathies at a time when this was profoundly unpopular in England. If anything, MI5 had an open file on him, keeping tabs on any known associates of Nazi Germany and their contact with Crowley.
The bottom line, though, is that Thelema is fundamentally incompatible with any occult movements at work within the governments of the world. And I do believe that there are groups of such magicians at work around the world. It’s possible that these groups co-opted some of Crowley’s magical techniques. Even I do that. Magicians tend to work with the technology that works best for them. But Crowley is definitely not at the center of these cults. Michael “Them Eyebrows” Aquino plays a central role in the American Mind War program and also founded the Temple of Set after a likely (but entirely made up in my mind) decision that The Church of Satan involved not nearly enough child abuse and murder for his taste. Aquino’s reputation and “spiritual practice” bears nothing in common with Thelema but has all the marks of actually evil Ba’al/Saturn cults that we occasionally catch glimpses of by way of photos of the Bohemian Grove and Jeffrey Epstein’s Lolita Island temple — among many, many other sinister bits and pieces dropped over the years.
9/11 absolutely ushered in a new age. You can’t argue with that. We had ten post Cold War years where the Bush administration floundered in its attempts to make a new Hitler out of Saddam Hussein and the Clinton Administration flailed in its attempts to get some shit started in Bosnia. Without the lurking specter of communism or a face, like Hitler, that singularly embodies evil in the cultural psychology of the west, the United States couldn’t seem to feed the military industrial monster with sufficient fuel. If the Pentagon was going to continue to appropriate hundreds of billions in SAP black budgets, they were going to need an ongoing and continuous threat and 9/11 absolutely shifted American consciousness back into the same state of unending terror that it was in back in the Cold War. We simultaneously had a singularly evil character in Osama Bin Laden and a new ideological enemy to cower before in the form of radical Islam. But there was no magic in that. No ritual required. A single act of death and destruction is all that it took. Maybe the deaths were instrumental in that shifting of consciousness in a ritual sense but again, there is nothing in Crowley’s writing that suggests that death is important to magic beyond its symbolic qualities of the creative principle.
Conspiracy theorists, look elsewhere.