6. A Weird Occultist
English occultist and writer Aleister Crowley (1875 – 1947) claimed to be a magician. Not the stage tricks kind of magician, but the warlock, spells and sorcery type. An L. Ron Hubbard type before there was an L. Ron Hubbard, Crowley also founded a religion in the early twentieth century, Thelema. He named himself its prophet, and declared that the faith’s goal was to guide mankind to a new age. A fundamental principal of Thelema was that the twentieth century would usher in the “Aeon of Horus”, which would overthrow all current codes of morality and ethics. In the new age, people’s “True Will”, which they would discover via magic, would be all that matters. Crowley summarized the Horus era’s ethics as: “Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law“. Crowley’s magic religion included lots of nooky with his followers.
He called it “Sexual Magic”, whereby orgasms and bodily secretions were used as components of magic spells. A main precept of such magic was that all adherents should be completely open and uninhibited about intercourse, without social limitations or restraints. Followers should also expose their children to intercourse from infancy, and accustom them to witness all kinds of explicit activity. In 1920, Crowley and his followers established a religious commune in Sicily, the Abbey of Thelema. It was not long before the perverse and weird goings-on there led to controversy, scandals, and denunciations, that became regular fodder for the British and Italian press. In response to the outcry, the Italian government finally shut down the commune and evicted everybody in 1923. Crowley then hit the road, and split the final two decades of his life in travels between Britain, France, and Germany, to promote his religion.
