Aleister Crowley was born into a religious cult, The Plymouth Brethren, that he despised. The groups strict rules and anti-sex attitude drove Crowley to search out secret societies that dealt with magick. He found the Golden Dawn, with a membership that included Bram Stoker (the author of DRACULA). In magick circles at the time the idea was there were forces outside our reality that could occupy our bodies and cause mayhem until they were removed.
In Black Magick the idea was to summon these forces, but with great care.
Crowley had decided to use both Black and White magick, and had no fear of the forces summoned.
He would shatter the Dawn, and embark on his Great Work. He bought a home in the Loc Ness to do the most difficult summoning ritual (that took 6 months to do!), but would later abandon the work after meeting a woman he would marry a day later (!) and would take to Egypt.
In Egypt he would summon an Egyptian God whom would stay with him from that point on. He traveled to Spain to create his own abbey and religion and set out to destroy egos, and "clear" people of outside forces that were negative in their lives. He merged sex with religion, realizing that in the sex act a portal was created - a short cut- to the energies of the universe.
Crowley would predict an age when youth would reign supreme. Sexual barriers would be abolished, man would choose the laws they would follow. He predicted that drugs would fuel this revolution.
So in the mid 1960's as a sexual and political underground took hold- his ideas suddenly seemed very prophetic. The Beatles would put him on the cover of SGT. PEPPER. The Rolling Stones would do the song SYMPATHY FOR THE DEVIL about Kenneth Anger and his awareness of Crowley, an awareness he had spread throughout the UK in the Swinging 60's. Even the slogan of the day, Do your own thing, was based on Crowley's slogan, DO WHAT THOU WILL. Timothy Leary was preaching about LSD and sex on LSD.
For the first time in America, people began living together out of wedlock, taking drugs that were illegal. Homosexuality became ho hum instead of an illness to be cured by lobotomies and therapy. Women were no longer considered fallen if they had sex outside marriage. The collapse of the hippie era led to the disco era- when all the people who hated hippies began living together, taking drugs like cocaine and Quaaludes, and "coming out" of the morality of the day.
A process many argue is still going on.
Crowley died before the hippies came around. But before he did, he wrote and corresponded with a follower who was also Del's therapist.
A man by the name of L. Ron Hubbard.
