Aleister Crowley: The Man the Press Actually Nicknamed “The Wickedest Man in the World”

Most people, called the wickedest man in the world by an actual newspaper, might try to clear their name. Crowley just shrugged and kept going. He’d been calling himself “The Great Beast 666” for years already. By the time the press caught up to him, he’d basically already written their headline for them.

He Was Raised to Hate Fun, So He Overcorrected

Crowley started life as Edward Alexander Crowley in 1875, born into money and into the Plymouth Brethren, a religious sect so strict it treated joy itself with suspicion. He hated it. By his teens he’d renamed himself Aleister, and honestly, once you know that detail, nothing else about him is surprising. This was a man who was going to be dramatic about something, and his family had just handed him a very specific thing to rebel against.

He went to Cambridge. He traveled Europe. On top of that, he took up mountaineering, which sounds normal until you remember what he eventually does with it.

He Founded a Religion With Himself as the Main Character

In 1898, Crowley joined the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, a secret society built around ceremonial magic. He didn’t last. He fell out with its leadership and, naturally, started his own thing instead. He called it Thelema. Its holy text, The Book of the Law, was supposedly dictated to him by an actual supernatural entity in 1904. That’s a genuinely bold claim to put on the cover of your new religion.

The whole philosophy boiled down to one line: “Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law.” Ripped out of context, that reads like permission to do literally whatever you want. Most people read it that way anyway. So did Crowley.

Calling Himself the Beast Wasn’t Even His Idea First

Here’s a detail that changes the whole story a little. “The Great Beast 666” wasn’t something Crowley invented to sound cool. His own mother called him that first, and not as a compliment. Most people would find that devastating. Crowley took it, framed it, and wore it like a medal for the rest of his life. When the tabloids eventually arrived with their own version of the insult, he’d already had decades of practice not caring.

Then He Actually Did Something to Deserve the Headline

The nickname itself came from a British tabloid called John Bull, in the 1920s, after Crowley set up something called the Abbey of Thelema in Cefalù, Sicily. Picture a commune built around drugs, unconventional sex, and rituals dramatic enough to alarm the neighbors. Italian authorities eventually declared the place a public health hazard and threw him out of the country in 1923. The British press ran with it immediately. Evil. Egotistical. At one point, literally branded a traitor to his own country.

A Warning He Gave That Turned Out to Be Completely Right

Here’s the part of his life that has nothing to do with magic and is somehow the most disturbing. During an expedition up Kanchenjunga, one of the deadliest mountains on Earth, Crowley got into a genuine feud with his own climbing team. They decided to turn back without him. He warned them, specifically, that turning back partway down would be more dangerous than pushing forward. They turned back anyway. Every single one of them died. Crowley, the guy everyone was furious at, walked away fine.

The Rest of the Résumé Is Exactly What You’d Expect

Drugs, constantly. Open advocacy for sexual liberation, including his own writing on tantric sex magic. Accusations of black magic and satanic ritual, which he denied without much apparent concern either way. Genuinely alarming political sympathies too, flirting with both Nazism and Marxist-Leninism at different points. Documented racism and misogyny don’t get a pass just because the rest of his life reads like a novel. Some accounts even claim he secretly worked as a spy for the British government, which is a strange thing to hear about a man the same government’s press called a traitor.

He Also Vacationed in New Hampshire, Somehow

Of all places, Crowley spent four months in 1916 holed up in a small cottage in Hebron, New Hampshire, borrowed from astrologer Evangeline Adams, running what he called his “magick retirement.” The cottage is still there today. Still private. Sitting quietly on a lake, about as far removed from Sicilian scandal as a person could get.

He was, by most accounts, genuinely funny about his own legend too, in the way only someone that committed to a bit can be. He predicted, in writing, that a thousand years from now the world would be living in what he called “the sunset of Crowlianity.” Nobody talks like that unless they’re either completely unhinged or in on the joke, and with Crowley it was usually hard to tell which. Some modern countercultural circles have compared his ongoing cult status to Che Guevara’s, less a serious historical figure at that point than a face people put on a T-shirt.

The Insult Turned Into the Legacy

He was also, quietly, a genuinely serious mountaineer, poet, and chess player. Any one of those could have made him locally famous on its own. He attempted actual Himalayan peaks at a time when that was still borderline suicidal, and he published poetry that critics took seriously independent of his reputation for summoning demons on weekends. None of that made it into the headlines, because “accomplished chess player” doesn’t sell papers the way “wickedest man alive” does.

Crowley died in 1947, broke, propped up by whatever followers he had left. But the insult meant to bury him did the opposite. Modern occultism, Wicca, Theosophy, half of what people think of as “witchy aesthetic” today, all of it traces back through Crowley somewhere. The press handed him a nickname meant to end him. Instead, it’s the reason people are still saying his name, nearly eighty years after he died, exactly like he probably wanted.