Thelema (Crowley)

Aleister Crowley is the figure through whom the Golden Dawn escaped into the twentieth century, and he changed it as it passed through him.

He was born Edward Alexander Crowley in 1875 into the Plymouth Brethren, a sect so strict that his mother called him the Beast from Revelation and he decided to agree with her. Cambridge, mountaineering and a private fortune followed, and in 1898 he joined the Golden Dawn. He rose fast, sided with Mathers in the schism of 1900, and was refused the inner order by the London adepts, who thought him unfit; Mathers initiated him in Paris anyway. He learned the system thoroughly, and in 1909 published its correspondence tables, taken from his teacher Allan Bennett's notes, as 777, the book from which most modern occultists have learned the Tree.

Then Cairo. In April 1904, over three days, Crowley wrote down The Book of the Law, dictated, he said, by a being called Aiwass through the mediumship of his wife Rose. Its message was that the age of the dying god was over and the Aeon of Horus had begun, with a new law: Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law. Love is the law, love under will. Thelema, Greek for will, is the name of that religion. Its practice is the discovery of one's True Will and the attainment of the knowledge and conversation of the Holy Guardian Angel, which Crowley took straight from the Abramelin grimoire and made the centre of his system.

He built the institutions himself. The A∴A∴ in 1907 reorganised the Golden Dawn grades around Thelema and the Abramelin operation. The Equinox, from 1909, printed the Golden Dawn rituals and his own. In 1912 he took over the British section of the Ordo Templi Orientis, a German Masonic-Rosicrucian body, and rewrote its degrees around sexual magic and the Gnostic Mass, which is still celebrated by the OTO today. Magick in Theory and Practice (1929) is the handbook. The Book of Thoth, painted by Frieda Harris and published in 1944, is the Tarot. He died in Hastings in 1947, poor, addicted and still writing.

On the question this map turns on, Crowley kept the Golden Dawn's planetary attributions unchanged. The Book of the Law told him only that Tzaddi is not the Star, and he swapped the Star and the Emperor between Heh and Tzaddi. The seven doubles stayed as Mathers left them, and the Thoth deck carries them to this day, now to a far wider public than the Golden Dawn ever reached.

His descendants are everywhere. Gerald Gardner met him in 1947 and built passages of Thelemic ritual into the first Wiccan Book of Shadows. The Fraternitas Saturni in Germany accepted the Law of Thelema in its own form in 1928. Jack Parsons, the rocket engineer, ran the Babalon Working in 1946 with L. Ron Hubbard as his scribe. Kenneth Grant's Typhonian orders, Austin Spare's sigils and through him the whole of chaos magic, the OTO's revival in the 1970s, and a great deal of rock music all descend from him. The Beatles put him on the cover of Sgt Pepper.

You can recognise this branch by its claim. Wherever a system says that the individual will is the highest law, that a new aeon has begun, that the Holy Guardian Angel is the goal of the work, or that sex and ritual belong together, it is Thelemic. Crowley was the Golden Dawn's most capable student and its most disobedient. He inherited its map entire, planets and all, and added a religion on top of it that has outlived every temple that expelled him.