Aleister Crowley

Aleister Crowley      (Occultist, Poet, Novelist, Mountaineer)
Born	Edward Alexander Crowley 1875-10-12 Royal Leamington Spa, Warwickshire, England, United Kingdom
Died	1947-12-01 (Age 72) Hastings, East Sussex, England, United Kingdom
Nationality	British
Alma mater	Eastbourne College, Trinity College (Cambridge)
Religion	Satanism
Children	5
Spouse	Rose Edith Kelly
Interests	Occultism
Interest of	William Ramsey
Well known British occultist with wide reaching, but little known about cultural influence.

Aleister Crowley was an occultist and a friend of R. H. Bruce Lockhart‎. He worked in some capacity for MI5 and/or MI6 during WW2.

Activities

Mountaineering

The following is reported about his expeditions:

Crowley attempted another 8,000-meter peak, Kanchenjunga, in 1905, via the southwest face over the Yalung Glacier. He led a team consisting of Jacot-Guillarmod, Alexis Pache, Charles-Adolphe Reymond, and Alcesti Rigo de Righi.

This expedition, too, went poorly. Crowley was immensely arrogant as a leader, earning the ire of his fellow climbers, and behaved abominably toward the porters, beating them on several occasions, which caused him to come to odds with Jacot-Guillarmod in particular. After being caught in an avalanche at what Reymond reported to be 21,300 feet (though, as noted, Crowley claimed to have reached much higher), Jacot-Guillarmod and De Righi led an unsuccessful coup against Crowley, arguing for him to be removed from leadership.

Then the duo, along with Pache, retreated from Camp V (20,300 feet) along with four porters, though Crowley advised against descending at night. The rope team was soon struck by an avalanche that killed three of the porters and Pache, but although Reymond, the last remaining team member, immediately descended from Camp V to help, Crowley stubbornly stayed in his tent, ignoring the cries of the survivors.

He later penned a letter to an Indian newspaper evincing his scorn for his companions, writing that “a mountain, “accident of this sort is one of the things for which I have no sympathy.” The following day, on his descent, he passed the site without stopping to help in body recovery efforts or speaking to any of the survivors. He went on to abscond with the remains of the expedition’s funds in Darjeeling.

Satanism

In Anthony Masters book: "The Man Who Was M: The Real-Life Spymaster Who Inspired Ian Fleming", the following incident is reported about Crowley:

"Crowley had come to dinner with the Wheatleys many times and provided Dennis with occult information for his books. Wheatley’s first opinion had been that Crowley was interesting but harmless. Driberg, however, warned him that Crowley had been responsible for running a community in Northern Sicily where a number of children had been rumored to have disappeared in connection with Satanic masses. He also told Wheatley that there had been another alarming episode, this time in Paris, which was better documented. In an attempt to raise the pagan god Pan, Crowley had spent a night in an empty hotel room on the Left Bank, in company with one of his followers, a man named MacAleister. In the morning they were both found naked. MacAleister was dead and Crowley was crouched howling in a corner, from where he was taken to an asylum. Four months later he was released, but the cause of MacAleister’s death was never discovered. This, anyway, was Driberg’s story and it fascinated both the Wheatleys and Knight, although Crowley in the flesh remained a disappointment."

 

Related Document

Title	Type	Publication date	Author(s)	Description
Aleister Crowley and Adolf Hitler - The Ideology of Evil	Article	21 December 2010	William Ramsey

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