From a Brethren household to Cairo
Born Edward Alexander Crowley in Leamington Spa in 1875, he grew up in a Plymouth Brethren household. At Cambridge he used the name Aleister and pursued poetry and climbing. In London in 1898 he joined the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, where instruction in ceremonial magic brought him into contact with an established, and soon divided, esoteric society.
In Cairo in 1904, while travelling with his wife Rose, Crowley recorded the text he called The Book of the Law. He attributed it to a voice named Aiwass. Later he used his periodical The Equinox and organisations including the A∴A∴ to circulate his interpretations and teach students. The papers collected by Gerald Yorke preserve evidence of the correspondence and editorial work behind those public claims.
An experiment in the novel
The Diary of a Drug Fiend appeared from Collins in 1922. Peter Pendragon narrates the couple’s early exhilaration. Lou Laleham’s diary takes over as their dependency deepens, before Peter returns to tell the final part. Its resolution belongs to his religious fiction. Other books here take very different forms: The Argonauts is a verse drama, while Magick Without Tears grew out of letters of instruction.
