Aleister Crowley's Real Name: Edward Alexander Crowley

Quick answer: Aleister Crowley's documented birth name is Edward Alexander Crowley. Encyclopedia of World Biography, reprinted at Encyclopedia.com, records that form and gives his birth date as October 12, 1875, in Leamington, Warwickshire, England. Encyclopaedia Britannica gives the same date at Royal Leamington Spa, England, and says that as a student at Trinity College, Cambridge, he began to use the name Aleister (Encyclopedia.com; Encyclopaedia Britannica).

Real name and early life

Encyclopedia.com lists Edward Alexander Crowley and places the birth in Leamington, Warwickshire; Britannica specifies Royal Leamington Spa, the same town's formal name. His father was an heir to a brewing fortune and an evangelist for the Plymouth Brethren, Britannica says. Encyclopedia.com records that his mother called him "the Beast 666" after he rejected the family's faith, a title he later used himself. He attended Trinity College, Cambridge, left without a degree in 1898, and, with an inheritance, traveled and published poetry, Britannica records.

Career highlights

Britannica treats him as a writer, occultist, and mountaineer. He honed his climbing in Britain and took part in early attempts on K2 (1902) and Kangchenjunga. In 1898 he joined the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn. On a visit to Egypt in 1904, he reported mystical experiences and wrote The Book of the Law, a prose poem which he claimed had been dictated to him by a discarnate being called Aiwass. From that text he drew the teaching "Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law" and made it the basis of a religion he called Thelema. He later founded an order he abbreviated A∴A∴, issued the periodical The Equinox, and wrote books including the novel The Diary of a Drug Fiend (1922) and The Book of Thoth (1944). After the death of a young follower at a house in Sicily that he called the Abbey of Thelema, British papers denounced him as the "wickedest man in the world," Britannica says, and he was expelled from Italy in 1923. He later lived in England in reduced circumstances.

Death

He died on December 1, 1947, in Hastings, England, a date and place both sources record. Britannica says he died in poverty and obscurity in an English rooming house.

Name notes for searchers

Edward Alexander Crowley is the documented birth name; he began using Aleister as a student and is known professionally and in print as Aleister Crowley. Searchers looking for the author of The Book of the Law, or for the public figure sometimes called the Beast 666, are usually aiming at the same person.