Aleister Crowley has to be one of the most interesting humans of the 20th century. His resume includes being a ceremonial magician, poet, novelist, mountaineer, painter, a rumored spy for British Intelligence, and an occultist. He is also a terrible human being with a flagrant disregard for his fellow man and a running streak of debauchery, indulgence, wickedness, and cruelty. His wickedness earned him the name of "The Beast," which both in name and tobacco preferences served as the inspiration behind Cornell & Diehl's Small Batch The Beast, which is based on his rumored personal blend of straight Perique soaked in rum, with C&D's take adding some much-needed complexity and nuance. Today, we're going to take a condensed look at Crowley's eccentric life and see the man behind The Beast.

Crowley's Early Life

Edward Alexander "Aleister" Crowley was born on October 12, 1875, in Royal Leamington Spa, Warwickshire, which led to the remark later in his Confessions: "It has been remarked a strange coincidence that one small county should have given England her two greatest poets — for one must not forget Shakespeare."

His father Edward Crowley was an engineer, though he never practiced his profession, and had shares in his family's lucrative brewing business, Crowley's Alton Ales, which allowed him to retire early and live a life of leisure. His mother Emily Bertha Bishop came from the Devonshire-Somerset family. The couple were evangelical Christians, with his father being born a Quaker before converting to Plymouth Brethren, a faction of extreme Christian fundamentalists known for their belief in the literal truth of the Bible and a sordid view of life. Upon marriage, Emily also converted. The Crowleys began each day by reading aloud a chapter from the Bible, with Aleister's parents incorporating their eager anticipation of the Day of Judgement when everyone but members of the Plymouth Brethren would be purged in hellfire.

Crowley's father was very devout, spending his retirement as a traveling preacher, and he worked as a writer producing pamphlets on the resurrection, "end times," and other topics common to the Plymouth Brethren cause. A young Crowley fully accepted his parents' creed and couldn't imagine why others would be so wicked as to reject their teachings. This led to Crowley believing his father was a hero and a friend, speaking of him as being a "magnificently eloquent" preacher. While Crowley respected and admired his father, his relationship with his mother was more complicated.

For a large part of Crowley's childhood, the Bible was the only book available to him, and he developed a strange fascination with the Book of Revelations, feeling drawn to the Dragon, the False Prophet, the Beast, and the Scarlet Woman; characters that would help inform his philosophy of life in his later years. Revelations also served as the starting point of his self-described masochism, to which he would later admit he had "the fantasy of desiring to be hurt."

Emily was very strict with little sense of humor. While Crowley largely resented her, he was a dutiful son throughout his life. At the ripe age of eight, Crowley was sent to H. T. Habershon's evangelical Christian boarding school in Hastings for a short period. Before being sent to Ebor preparatory in Cambridge, the Reverend Henry d'Arcy Champney, who ran the school, considered Crowley a sadist. On March 5, 1887, his father died of tongue cancer; this would serve as one of the first of what Crowley would call instances of his psychic intuition but also a turning point in the boy's life. "On the night of March 5th, the boy — away at school — dreamed that his father was dead."

It should be noted that Edward's condition was, in some form, treatable at the time but Edward and his fellow Brethren deemed his condition to be God's will and that he should not receive the treatment Sir James Paget, who served as Edward's doctor, advised the man to take. Some historians believe witnessing his father reject potentially life-saving procedures helped to fuel the young Crowley's separation from Christianity.

Until his father's funeral, Crowley, by most accounts, was a normal child but something changed, and something began to turn inside him at the funeral. When Crowley returned to school, he misbehaved. The incident was mostly waved off because of the loss of his father, but Crowley knew he had passed a boundary. The incident was as Crowley would describe, "the first symptom of a complete reversal of his attitude to life."

Crowley's change in attitude didn't mean he rejected the beliefs he grew up with. In his words, he switched sides. Throughout his life, Crowley would invoke Lucifer in certain practices and writing, but he also invoked pretty much everything from ancient Egyptian deities to practicing Buddhism, and even, in some very strange ways, Christianity. That said, Crowley also says both "I simply went over to Satan's side; and to this hour I cannot tell why," and "I was anxious to distinguish myself by committing sin." The best way I can describe Crowley when it comes to the topic of "was he a Satanist or *insert other religion*" is that worshiping something, whether it be God, Satan, or a toaster, implies a certain level of reverence; the only thing Crowley ever felt this toward truly and wholly was himself. Crowley was less focused on the identities of the entities he invoked and more focused on the "Magick" he was practicing.

During this turbulent time in Crowley's life, he became skeptical of Christianity, pointing out his perceived inconsistencies in the Bible to his teachers, and he went against his father's taught morality by smoking and participating in general sexual debauchery. At some point in Crowley's descent into sin, his mother was so scandalized by his behavior that she called him "the Beast 666," a name that he reveled in. After a couple of failed schooling attempts, he was eventually sent to live with a Brethren tutor in Eastbourne, where he would take chemistry courses at Eastbourne College. During his college years, he also developed interests in chess, poetry, and mountain climbing.

Mountain climbing would be particularly important throughout Crowley's life, leading to several expeditions to some of the world's hardest mountain ranges. In 1894, he climbed Beachy Head in East Sussex, England, before journeying to the Alps and joining the Scottish Mountaineering Club. In 1895, he returned to the Bernese Alps, climbing five of its highest peaks.

After his Bernese expedition, he returned home and began attending Cambridge University. At some point, he adopted the name of Aleister over Edward. He originally entered Cambridge for the Moral Science Tripos studying philosophy, but with his tutor's approval, he switched to English Literature, which was not really in the roster of curriculum offered. In true bohemian fashion, Crowley most engaged in his personal pastimes instead of studying. He was president of the chess club, playing for two hours a day at minimum, but Crowley also embraced his passion for the written word. He was fascinated by the works of Percy Shelley and Captain Sir Richard Burton. Crowley developed a passion for writing poetry, appearing in multiple publications like Cambridge Magazine and The Granta.

These interests didn't take away from his time in the mountains. He would holiday to the Alps for climbs every year from 1894 to 1898. Crowley would sometimes be joined by mountaineer Oscar Eckenstein, who started several modern trends in climbing like using shorter ice axes and designing the modern crampon. In 1897, Crowley would make his first ascent of Mönch without a guide. During his 1896 holiday in Stockholm, Crowley had his first self-described mystical experience with his first gay relationship, leading him to recognize and embrace his bisexuality. Crowley was already a serial womanizer but would expand his sphere to include men despite homosexual relationships being illegal at the time.

Despite his pursuit of science and extracurriculars, Eastbourne didn't prove to be the escape the young Crowley hoped for. He soon found himself in a dispute between the Plymouth Brethren family he was staying with and one of their daughters. The daughter was engaged to a young man who was not part of the Brethren. The family demanded he convert or they wouldn't approve of the marriage, but when the young man rejected the idea, there was a big uproar, and the family began to abuse the daughter. At some point in this familial dispute, Crowley voiced his opinion and the abuse shifted to him. Crowley pushed back and eventually left but not before pleading with the daughter to leave her home and go to her fiancé. Despite Crowley's disregard for the status quo, he found her family's destruction of her true love insufferable, a theme that would carry into his poetry but not his actual relationships.

This was the last straw for Crowley's family, and they decided that the best they could do was to let him walk his own path. Crowley would travel around for a while and during a trip to Saint Petersburg, Russia, he was unsure of his role in life. He considered becoming a diplomat or a chess master but grew disillusioned with both. The young Crowley became depressed with no idea what to do with his life. This mental state developed into a nihilistic attitude that stayed with Crowley till death. However, it inspired a rather strange desire to rebel against it at the same time. Crowley would describe it as "I must find a material in which to work which is resistant to the forces of change."

This rebellion marked the point where Crowley would dedicate his life to pursuing the occult.

Aleister Crowley and the Occult

Crowley's occult career truly began with two books in the spring of 1898: A. E. Waite's The Book Of Black Magic and of Pacts (also known as The Book of Ceremonial Magic), and Karl von Eckartshausen's The Cloud Upon the Sanctuary. The Book of Black Magic was Waite's attempt to document multiple grimoires, explain their history, and discuss the theology behind them while synthesizing many of the grimoires into one system. The Cloud Upon the Sanctuary was Eckartshausen's view on Christian mysticism. Eckarshausen was a very unusual mystic of his time; He was a devout Catholic and theosophist in the way of Jacob Boehme, the German Philosopher and Christian mystic. The Cloud Upon the Sanctuary covered his belief in the "interior Church," the mystical body of true believers that is linked by spiritual experience rather than by doctrine. It was Eckartshausen's unique take on the method of regeneration in Christ.

Of the two, Crowley greatly disliked Waite's work and would vilify him at every opportunity, with Crowley calling Waite "not only the most ponderously platitudinous and priggishly prosaic of pretentiously pompous pork butchers of the language, but the most voluminously voluble." However, Waite's work suggests the existence of a Hidden Church, and this intrigued the young Crowley. Crowley would write to Waite, who suggested that he read the The Cloud Upon the Sanctuary. This began his obsession with getting into this church with his opportunity coming in the summer of 1898. Crowley was on holiday in the Alps, with unfortunately bad weather that made climbing impossible. With climbing out of the picture, Crowley left the camp for Zermatt where he went to a beer hall and pondered the mysteries of alchemy, a subject he was greatly underqualified to discuss. An English chemist named Julian Baker was in attendance that night and spoke to Crowley after, explaining that he was a practicing alchemist and that he had prepared "fixed mercury," which was quite the achievement for an alchemist.

The young occultist determined that Baker would be his ticket into the Hidden Church and decided to speak to him again the next morning. By the morning, Baker had vamoosed, and Crowley would telegraph all over the valley for word on his movements. Eventually, he caught up with the alchemist on the road toward Brique and told him of his search for the Hidden Church. Baker told him of a group in London who Crowley should get in touch with, as well as someone in London who was more of a magician than the alchemist. Upon returning to London, Baker would introduce Crowley to George Cecil Jones, Baker's in-law and fellow member of the order. The Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn was a secret society devoted to the study and practice of occult Hermeticism and metaphysics and was widely influential in many modern-day concepts of ritual and magic. They were one of the single largest influences on 20th-century Western occultism.

A few short months later in November, Crowley would be initiated into the Outer Order of the Golden Dawn by their leader Samuel Liddell MacGregor Mathers. During this ceremony, Crowley took the magical motto and name "Frater Perdurabo" which he interpreted as "Brother I shall endure to the end."

Crowley moved into a luxury flat on Chancery Lane and would invite senior Golden Dawn member, Allan Bennett, who later became a prominent English Buddhist of the Theravāda tradition and would be a major driving influence in Buddhism's introduction to England, to serve as his personal magical tutor. Bennett taught Crowley mostly ceremonial magic and the use of drugs and narcotics to reach higher consciousness and would lead to Crowley's many drug dependencies over the years. This is where Crowley's infamous personal blend of 100% straight Perique soaked in rum came into play. Crowley believed that higher concentrations of nicotine could help elevate him to higher levels of consciousness. Eventually, Bennett would leave Crowley to journey to Asia in pursuit of continuing his own studies.

Crowley quickly rose up the ranks of the Golden Dawn and was about to be welcomed into the group's Second Order. However, he was unpopular with many members due to his open bisexuality and vocal libertine lifestyle. To round out his reputation, he developed several feuds with prominent group members like the famed Irish writer William Butler Yeats, one of the driving forces behind the Irish Literary Revival, and one of the founders of the Abbey Theatre. The group would deny his initiation into the Second Order; however, he visited Samuel Liddell MacGregor Mathers in Paris, who personally let him into the Adeptus Minor Grade.

This affiliation led to a schism within the Gold Dawn, who opposed Mathers' autocratic rule within the order. Crowley and his mistress Elaine Simpson were ordered by Mathers to seize the Vault of the Adepts, a temple within the Dawn, from the London lodge members. The case would be taken before the courts, and a judge would rule in favor of the London lodge as they had paid the rent. This decision left Crowley, Simpson, and Mathers removed from the group. Mathers and Crowley would stay in touch but slowly turn against each other, slinging curses and paranoid conspiracies against one another. Eventually, Mathers would sue Crowley for revealing Golden Dawn secrets in some of his publications.

Throughout Crowley's life, he would perform countless rituals and religious customs to practice magick, as he stylized it. His most famous examples were the practice of sex magic, where the use of sex and narcotics could invoke deities or states of mind.

Crowley and Thelema

Crowley kept an eccentric crowd around him. In 1902, he arrived in Paris and joined his friend and famed painter Gerald Kelly. Through Kelly, Crowley would become an active member of the Parisian arts scene, with Crowley penning a number of poems including a series based on sculptor Auguste Rodin's work. The series was called Rodin in Rime. W. Somerset Maugham briefly met Crowley and used him as a model for the character Oliver Haddo in the novel The Magician. In April 1903, Crowley returned to Boleskin, and in August, he wed Kelly's sister Rose Edith Kelly so she could prevent entering an arranged marriage.

The marriage was not received well by the Kelly family nor with Gerald, greatly damaging their friendship. Directly after finishing the ceremony and becoming husband and wife, her brother Gerald then barged into the room and attempted to punch Crowley. The marriage was supposed to be non-existent, simply a union to avoid the arrangement but during their honeymoon, Crowley fell in love with Rose and penned her love poems, which he published as Rose Mundi and Other Love Songs.

In February 1904, Crowley and the now-pregnant Rose arrived in Cairo, Egypt. The duo decided that the best course of action was to pretend they were Prince and Princess and rent an apartment. Crowley set up a temple room and began invoking ancient Egyptian deities while also studying Islamic mysticism and Arabic. According to the very reliable source of Crowley himself, the following happened: Rose regularly became delirious and informed him "they are waiting for you." On March 18, 1904, she explained that "they" was the god Horus, and two days later proclaimed the "Equinox of the Gods has come." From here, she led him to a museum where she showed him the Stele of Ankh-ef-en-Knhnosu, which Crowley would later dub "Stele of Revealing." Crowley also noted that the exhibit's number was 666, the Number of the Beast in Christian theology.

Weeks later, on April 8, Crowley heard a voice identifying itself as Aiwass, the messenger of Horus. For the next three days, Crowley wrote down everything the voice told him and titled the work The Book of the Law. This book, and the philosophy behind it, became the founding book of Crowley's religion, Thelema.

The actual philosophy behind Thelema was that a supreme moral law would be introduced within the eon, and "Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of Law," and that members should live in tune with their own will. Crowley's religion wasn't something he really went around preaching early on. He claims he was "unsure" of what to do with the book. He somewhat resented it and ignored the text's desires for him to steal the Stele of Revealing, building a fortified island with followers, and translating the book into every known language. In Crowley's recollection, he typed up some manuscripts of the work to several class occultists he knew and put the Book of Law away and ignored it.

Years later, in November 1907, Crowley said he was once again contacted by Aiwass who instructed him to write more texts to add to the The Book of Law: Liber VII and Liber Cordis Cincti Serpente, both of which would be added to the Holy Books of Thelema. During the next two months, he would also write seven more texts he claimed from various supernatural sources. Around this same time, Crowley and Jones decided to found an occult order known as A∴A∴. The organization was located at 124 Victoria Street in London, and "borrowed" largely the rites from the Golden Dawn, but with Thelemic influences.

Crowley was sued by his former master Mathers in January 1920 for publishing Golden Dawn secrets in the A∴A∴ publication, The Equinox. The court ruled in favor of Crowley, and the case was widely reported in the press. Crowley enjoyed the spotlight and played up the Satanist stereotype, as well as advocating for human sacrifice despite believing in neither.

The publicity also helped A∴A∴ grow in numbers, and soon Crowley developed the Rites of Artemis, a public performance of magic featuring the group's members personifying various gods and entities. The first public performance of it included giving the audience a fruit punch laced with psychoactive peyote to"'enhance" their experience. Reviewers rated it positively. In the fall of 1910, Crowley would attempt a similar act with the Rites of Eleusis at Caxton Hall in Westminster to much more mixed reviews.

Crowley would publish various occult publications and serve as the producer for The Ragged Ragtime Girls, a touring group of female violinists from 1912 to 1914. January 1914 was particularly noteworthy as Victor Neuburg and Crowley settled into an apartment where the two would spend six weeks performing "Paris Working," which involved heavy drug use to invoke the gods of Mercury and Jupiter and a lot of debaucherous acts. Following the six weeks, Neuburg would begin to distance himself from Crowley.

1914 also marked Crowley's economic downturn. His inheritance had run out and he was living off donations from A∴A∴ and due payments from another organization. He moved to New York City and lived out of a hotel. Crowley's religion would never truly thrive but be enough to pay his bills to some extent for the remainder of his days. When the Nazis were rising to power in Germany, and through the influence of his friend Martha Küntzel, Crowley briefly believed that Hitler might convert to Thelema, but when the Nazis abolished the German Ordo Templi Orientis and tried to imprison Karl Germer, Crowley ditched the idea.

Crowley: Traitor or Secret Service?

During the economic downturn of Crowley's life, he had gigs as a writer for Vanity Fair and undertook freelance work for Evangeline Adams. The Great War had just begun and Crowley began to support Germany in their war against Britain. In January 1915, pro-German propagandist George Sylvester Viereck employed Crowley as a writer for the propagandist paper, The Fatherland. Crowley in later years was branded a traitor to Britain for this activity.

Despite this turn of events, biographers Richard B. Spence and Tobias Churton have suggested that Crowley was actually involved in British secret services. They suggest that Crowley joined the Golden Dawn to monitor Mathers, who was a known Carlist. They also suggest that the coup attempt was to undermine Mather's. Other ideas they've suggested were that a trip to Mexico Crowley took was to explore oil prospects and that his trip to China was to monitor opium trade. Most infamously, they both claim that Crowley's pro-German work during the Great War was actually him being a double agent for Britain and that his writing was to make the Germans look ridiculous in the eyes of the American public. The evidence, in my opinion, is sorely lacking for these claims.

Crowley the Mountaineer

As mentioned before, Crowley was a lifelong mountaineer, even leading some expeditions in his time. The two most famous examples were in 1902, when Crowley would be joined in India by his loyal friend Oscar Eckenstein and several other mountaineers to begin the Eckenstein-Crowley expedition to conquer K2, the second-highest mountain on Earth. The expedition was filled with illness and unfortunate circumstances, with Crowley contracting influenza snow blindness and other members falling ill too. They reached an altitude of 20,000 feet before turning back.

For the second most infamous example, Crowley decided to climb Kanchenjunga, a notoriously treacherous mountain, with four other mountaineers: Jacot-Guillarmod, Charles Adolphe Reymond, Alexis Pache, and Alcesti C. Rigo de Righi. The expedition was a disaster. The group fought constantly, mostly over the fact that they considered Crowley dangerous and reckless. Eventually, the four men mutinied against Crowley and headed back down the mountain just as night approached. Crowley, allegedly, insisted they stay because it would be far too dangerous. They ignored him and Pache, along with several porters, was killed in an accident that same evening. Crowley was widely blamed for their deaths. Shortly after, he would try to get funding and support for a second expedition up Kanchenjunga before giving up and returning to Britain.

Crowley the Poet

Crowley was a lifelong writer, following in the footsteps of his father. He considered himself among the greatest poets to ever live, but his work never fared very well. Most of his poem collections were erotic or about love in some way. His collection White Stains, a decadent collection of erotic poetry, was only published abroad to avoid Britain's decency laws.

His most successful work, besides later-life occult and Thelema texts, were his self-published republishings of his poetry, Crowley's Collected Works, which received strong reviews, both good and negative, but never was commercially successful. To drum up publicity, he issued an essay contest with a 100-pound reward for the best essay on his work. The winner was J.F.C. Fuller, a former British Army Officer and historian, who proclaimed in his essay The Star in the West that Crowley's poetry was some of the greatest ever written.

There were times he would try his hand at writing short stories, but his fiction was mildly received and hardly stands the test of time. Of course, there were his political pieces which as mentioned before lended themselves to Fascism and other less-than-favorable ideologies.

Crowley the Bastard

Crowley, for all his doings, was largely a bastard. He was a spoiled upper-class brat who carried strong racial and social prejudices against his fellow man. In one famous example, Crowley beat Victor Neuburg with stinging nettles while verbally abusing and berating him for being Jewish. He also beat his wife and various partners over his lifetime to prove his dominance over them. During the Kanchenjunga expedition, several porters complained to Guillarmod that they were tired of Crowley beating them, with many of the porters leaving because of it. Crowley only admitted to beating one for "his own good and that of the expedition."

Crowley was also notorious for holding grudges and would take any opportunity to disparage anyone who he perceived as wronging him. Biographer Gary Lachman shared an example of this in his book Aleister Crowley: Magick, Rock and Roll, and the Wickedest Man in the World, "Remembering the ill-treatment he had received at Ebor School in Cambridge nearly a half-century earlier, he wrote in his Confessions that soon after he left, the headmaster, Rev. H. d'Arcy Champney went insane and the school closed down. Neither recollection was accurate, but Crowley enjoyed vilifying his enemies; pages of his Confessions are dedicated to this type of revenge."

Many, including adherents, have criticized Thelema for sexism and described Crowley's work as being misogynistic. Martin Booth believes that this misogyny arose from Crowley's mother issues and their bad relationship. Crowley has been quoted as saying women are "moral inferiors" who had to be treated with "firmness, kindness, and justice."

Crowley the Addict

As mentioned before, Crowley spent much of his life using narcotics to enhance his magick, often to his own detriment. When the Crowley family traveled to Southern China for a tour, Crowley decided the best course of action was to smoke as much Opium as he could while practicing the "Bornless Ritual," an invocation to his Holy Guardian Angel. Around 1920, a doctor prescribed him heroin, and he became hopelessly addicted, which would plague him for the rest of his life.

At one point in his life, Crowley would reconnect with his friend and mentor George Jones, and together they would perform the Abramelin rituals at Ashdown Park Hotel. Crowley believed that these rituals helped him attain Samadahi, a term in various Indian religions that roughly means a meditative state of consciousness, which would mark, in his words, a turning point in his life. He was also smoking an alarming amount of hashish during these rituals and even penned an essay entitled The Psychology of Hashish, which he proclaimed an important aid to his mysticism.

Crowley would also try countless psychedelics throughout his life and would become addicted to cocaine. Crowley's most normal of substances was his rum-soaked straight Perique that he smoked out of a pipe. There is evidence that Crowley smoked other blends from local tobacconists, but none are as famous as the Perique.

Crowley's Legacy

Despite Crowley's many pitfalls, he is an influential figure in both the occult and in popular culture. In 2002, despite his traitor's past, Crowley was ranked 73 in a list of the 100 Greatest Britons. Thelema continues to be a small but passionate religion in esoteric groups, but even outside of it, several traditions have been inspired by it like Gardnerian Wicca. Of course, many academics have written about Crowley's life with various interpretations and opinions.

In popular culture, he's inspired a slew of characters in fiction. In the novel, The Devil Rides Out by Dennis Wheatley, Crowley is half the inspiration for the character Damien Mocata. He was depicted on the cover of Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band by The Beatles. His motto, "Do What Thou Wilt" was inscribed in the vinyl of Led Zeppelin's Led Zeppelin III. Ozzy Osbourne, David Bowie, and others have made references to Crowley's writing, and his life has inspired lyrics or songs by them. The famous video game Blood Omen: Legacy of Kain uses a quote from Magick in Theory and Practice during its opening.

He's also the inspiration behind returning fan-favorite, Cornell & Diehl's Small Batch: The Beast. The Beast takes Crowley's infamous rum-soaked straight Perique and turns it into something with nuance and grace. C&D's Director and Head Blender Jeremy Reeves expertly crafted a blend of 51% genuine St. James Parish Perique as well as a supporting cast of C&D's proprietary Red Virginia Cavendish and a whisper of Dark-Fired Kentucky to add complexity and balance before the mixture was steeped in rum for seven days to deepen the flavors. It offers complex umami notes with elements of sweet stone fruits, mesquite wood, and freshly cracked black pepper.

"A little Perique adds spiciness and stewed-plum flavor to a blend. The more Perique you add, the more complex flavors it begins to offer, like mushroom and soy sauce, along with a more pronounced stone-fruit character," shared Jeremy Reeves.

The Beast lurks within the shadows, primed and ready to pounce — but you have the opportunity to strike first and capture it for your own collection when it arrives on-site on April 1 at 6:00 p.m. ET.

Bibliography

• Booth, M. (2001). A magick life: A biography of aleister crowley. Coronet Books.
• Lachman, G. (2014).Aleister Crowley: Magick, Rock and Roll, and the wickedest man in the world. Jeremy P. Tarcher/Penguin, a member of Penguin Group (USA).
• Readdy, K. (2019). One truth and one spirit: Aleister Crowley's spiritual legacy. Ibis Press.
• Symonds, J. (1997). Beast 666 - life of Aleister Crowley. Pindar Press.
• Moore, J. S. (2009). Aleister Crowley: A modern master. Mandrake.
• Spence, R. B. (2008). Secret agent 666: Aleister Crowley, British Intelligence and the occult. Feral House; Turnaround distributor.
• Churton, T. (2014). Aleister Crowley: The biography: Spiritual revolutionary, romantic explorer, Occult Master and spy. Watkins Publishing.