The major part of this site is concerned with the great legacy of the magician Aleister Crowley (1875-1947).
Magician and mountaineer, poet and prophet, Crowley was one of the most remarkable and enigmatic characters in British history, and the first person to formulate coherent and practical modern Magick on solid theoretical foundations. 
Born into a prosperous and zealously religious family in 1875, he rebelled against authority at an early age. His parents were members of an extreme Christian sect, The Plymouth Brethren, and were obsessed with hellfire, damnation, and the sins of the flesh. 
These over-zealous martinets dispatched their rebellious young son to boarding school at the age of eight, where he suffered the inevitable consequences of his aggressive anti-authoritarianism; a predisposition that caused him much difficulty throughout his life. It was during this early period that he became aware of his psychic gifts, and accurately foretold the deaths of his parents. 
Later on, at Eastbourne College, young Crowley discovered his powerful aptitudes for chess and mathematics. In later years he would play multiple opponents whilst blindfolded, almost invariably winning, and thereby gaining recognition as one of the best players of the period. This is of considerable importance, as the capacity to visualize is a key requirement for successful magical practice. 
But Aleister Crowley rarely pursued any such activity with persistence. Driven by a sense of his own genius, yet devoid of purpose, his early life was marked by eclecticism, and the pursuit of adventures. He became an accomplished mountaineer and a prolific poet and writer, all the while indulging in an odyssey of sexual liaisons. 
Crowley himself says, "I acquired most of the world's records as a mountaineer -  that lets me out," and, "I begin to be recognized as the one poet in England; good, I say to myself, I needn't bother any more." Here was a man strongly convinced of the fruitlessness of any endeavour that lacked a supreme, supernormal goal.

At the age of 20, Crowley attended Cambridge University, where he continued to indulge a penchant for unbridled lust. It was at this time that he made his observation that sex should be delivered with the milk, and that the normal human practice of courtship represented a waste of precious time. This reveals to us that Crowley divorced the pleasures of sex from the obligations of human relationships at a very early age. This was of enormous utility when he finally discovered the great power of sex in magical ritual.
During long breaks from university, he began a peregrination of journeys through Europe, South America, and Russia. On these trips he continued to climb the world's most daunting peaks whilst seeking the essential meaning and purpose of his life.
In 1896 he was 21 years of age. He still knew little of Magick or its sexual aspects, but had begun to experiment with homosexuality in an almost dispassionate manner. Again, this is of interest due to his later manipulation of magical forces through sexual acts: to confine himself to heterosexual roles would in essence have restricted him as a magician.
In 1897 Crowley purchased The Book of Black Magic and Pacts by A.E. Waite, a member of  .The Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn This was a turning point in Crowley's life; he had at last found his mission and purpose, and he wrote to Waite forthwith. Waite directed him to the work of German mystic Karl von Eckhartshausen, where he found reference to a covert religious order governed by 'secret masters.' In the meantime, he continued climbing in the Alps and Bernese Oberland and produced a barrage of self-published works. He became familiar with the Qabalah and read Knorr von Rosenroth.

In 1898, George_Cecil_Jones formally introduced Crowley to the Golden Dawn; founded ten years previously by S.L. MacGregor Mathers. This institution has remained an important influence on Western occultism to this day. The young Crowley attended his first meeting in 1898 and used his innate skills and intellectual abilities to fly through the mystical ranks at an unprecedented rate.
Residing in a flat in Chancery Lane, he began practicing the Magick of Abra-Melin the Mage, an almost forgotten branch of meditative invocation, which resulted in a series of unprompted materializations and much poltergeist activity. Encouraged by this success, he rented Boleskine House on the shores of Loch Ness in 1899 and continued with the Abra-Melin Magick in an attempt to contact his own 'Holy Guardian Angel,' or higher genius. Soon, Boleskine was permeated with a pattern of shifting shadows that even daylight did not diminish. It became necessary to use artificial light in the house even on the brightest days, and the local populace increasingly shunned the place.
During the next few years Crowley practiced Magick assiduously, traveling to Mexico, the United States, Hawaii, the Middle East, and India, where he studied the arcane arts of many disparate schools. In India he studied yoga under the tutelage of middle-eastern masters, and began formulating his own unique brand of Sex Magick. By this time, he had learned to use sex as a means of rapidly transiting mental states, accelerating the magical process. He believed that the highest mental states could be used to produce genius at will, and that such genius resided in measure within every human being.
By this stage of his life he was a minor public figure, and Somerset Maugham modelled the central character of his book The Magician on him; he was also invited by Rodin to write poetic interpretations of his masterpieces, which resulted in the work Rodin in Rhyme.

1904 found Crowley in Cairo on one of his many magical retreats. It was during this trip that his magical career reached its apex with the delivery of The Book of the Law to mankind. He had recently married Rose Edith Kelly, the sister of his friend Gerald Kelly. The newly-weds travelled through Paris and on to Cairo, where they spent a night in the King's Chamber of the Great Pyramid. Here, to impress his new wife, Crowley performed a magical ceremony that flooded the chamber with astral light.
The couple rented a flat in Cairo, within which he attempted to summon sylphs (spirits of the air). This operation caused his wife to sink into a trance and repeatedly intone the words "You have offended Horus". When she recovered, she insisted that Crowley invoke the Egyptian deity Horus by methods he thought to be arbitrary nonsense. This irritated him, as Rose Edith knew almost nothing of Egyptian mythology or Magick. She persisted however, and convinced him to make the invocation. This he did at midday on March 19th 1904. The operation failed and Crowley felt a fool, having conducted the operation "in robes at an open window on the street."
His wife urged him to repeat the attempt, which he did at midnight - this time with startling success. On that fateful night in 1904, Aiwazz, Crowley's Holy Guardian Angel, informed him that a new epoch in human history was dawning, and that he was to be its progenitor and prophet.

This was the moment for which Aleister Crowley had been preparing all his life - the apotheosis of his assiduous magical practice, and the affirmation of his deepest intuitions of his own uniqueness in history. It was also the conclusion of his long practice of the Magick of Abra-Melin, continued over many long years of searching for his own super-consciousness.
He was instructed to retire to his hotel room at precisely noon on the three successive days of April 8th, 9th, and 10th, where he was to write down all he heard, stopping at exactly one o'clock on each occasion. Crowley obeyed these instructions and within the course of these three hours, the new scripture for the Age of Aquarius, Liber Al vel Legis or The Book of the Law, was delivered to him by Aiwazz.
This remarkable document stated that a new two-thousand year era was at its inception, and that Aleister Crowley was to form the link between the solar forces of the new Aquarian Age and humankind. In a typically egotistical outburst, Crowley says, "the last event in the world's history of importance even approaching it, was Mohammed's revelation..."
Having said this, he tells us that after circulating a letter to a few friends, he "dropped the whole business." Part of the reason he says, was that "I resented the Book of the Law with my whole soul... I was bitterly opposed to the principles of the book on almost every point of morality." He goes on to express his concern at being chosen to reveal the new scripture at all: "I was too well aware of my incapacity and indolence."

Nevertheless, Crowley found that The Book of the Law could not be left alone - that it would not leave him alone. He returned to Boleskine where he "resumed Magical work, in a desultory way."
As if to reaffirm the instability that the Book of the Law was creating around his person, he discovered a grotesque beetle within Boleskine, which he sent to London for analysis, only to be told that the specimen could not be identified. For a fortnight thereafter Boleskine suffered from a plague of these creatures, which are described as being "an inch and a half long, with a single horn nearly as long as the body and bearing a small sphere that looked like an eye".
Crowley recognized this as a tangible piece of Magick, and probably a message from the secret chiefs who had dispatched Aiwazz with the Book of the Law; yet he still did nothing to propagate the work, choosing instead to depart and climb Kanchenjunga.
By mid 1906, in the wake of a series of personal bereavements and disasters, he was still "entirely off The Book of the Law," and says, "I resented intensely being told that I was the Chosen One. It is such an obvious mantrap; it is the commonest delusion of the maniac and, in one form or another, the essence of all delusion."
For the next two years he continued to be dogged by personal difficulties, not least of which was Rose Edith's burgeoning alcoholism. In the meantime, he had lost or misplaced the original manuscript altogether and only re-discovered it by chance in 1909. Again in his words, "I understood that the disaster and misery of the last three years were due to my attempt to evade my duty "instantly my burden fell back."
To the end of his life, Crowley never again wavered in his belief in the total veracity of The Book of the Law as the true spiritual text of the new age, supplanting all other religions. He devoted the rest of his life to propagating the new doctrine.
In 1907, he founded the Order of the Silver Star, the Argenteum Astrum (AA), as a consequence of his belief that the Golden Dawn had become obsolete and corrupt. He wished to return Magick to its purest form, devoid of superstition, scientific in nature, and reborn around the doctrines of The Book of the Law.
The popular press had a field day with Crowley, painting him as a debauched, satanic and depraved monster. In particular, The Looking Glass and John Bull painted lurid and fantastic pictures of his life, dubbing him "The Man We'd Like To Hang," and, "The Wickedest Man In The World." These attacks were severely damaging, and impacted heavily on his writing career and his capacity to recruit students for the serious and scientific study of Magick.
Despite these setbacks, he established the Abbey of Thelema in Cefalu Italy in 1920. Here he lived a monastic life, daily practising Sex Magick, instructing his few disciples, and writing his masterpiece Magick - Book 4, into which he poured his lifelong experience of the mystical arts.

In 1923, as a direct consequence of vituperative and hysterical reporting by the British popular press, Mussolini expelled Crowley and his entourage from Italy, destroying the stable base he had worked so hard to achieve. Despite his misfortunes, he continued to publish poetry and works on magical theory. However, each time commercial success appeared likely, the press would again denounce him, and potential publishers of his works rapidly withdrew.
In his remaining years, he was much involved with various magical orders and in 1939 he delivered a set of lectures on Yoga in London, demonstrating again just how far ahead of his time he was in the western world.
Crowley's final published work, The Book of Thoth, wherein he restores the Tarot, is generally considered to be a masterpiece; it was completed in 1944.  On this site you will find we are developing a modern day analysis of Crowley's Thoth Tarot Deck. We also have a  Thelemic Tarot Forum to which you are warmly invited to contribute.

Aleister Crowley  died in 1947, but his magical legacy remains and grows, as his work finds increasing recognition.  To studyhis life is to encounter a mass of contradictions. While he was capable of acts of great magnanimity, he also displayed great vindictiveness to those he perceived to be his enemies. In his introduction to Crowley's 777 and Other Qabalistic Writings, Israel Regardie, a student of both Crowley and Jung, speaks of the revulsion and respect that Crowley simultaneously arouses in him.
But to dwell on the abundant defects in Crowley's character is to miss the entire point of his life, which was the emancipation of humans from repressive constraint, particularly through the laws of Thelema as proclaimed in the Book of the Law. These laws have four main precepts:

1.Every man and woman is a star.
2.Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law.
3.Thou has no right but to do thy will.
4.Love is the law, love under will.

I will not enlarge on, or otherwise explain this doctrine, other than to state categorically that the doctrine of Thelema is not a licence to abandon discipline, compassion, and decency. The reader is urged to investigate these deeper matters for him or herself through this and other sites.