The Testament of Magdalen Blair: Controversial occultist Crowley writes an intriguing tale of love beyond the grave

Written by Aleister Crowley

Narrated by Lisa Bowerman

Edward Alexander Crowley was born on 12th October 1875 to wealthy parents in Royal Leamington Spa in Warwickshire.

He was educated at Malvern College, Tonbridge School, Eastbourne College and finally Trinity College, Cambridge where he focused on his passions of mountaineering and poetry and published several volumes.

Life for Crowley was to abandon his parents’ Christian faith and instead to inject himself into Western esotericism. In 1898, he joined the esoteric Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn and was trained in ceremonial magic before studying both Hindu and Buddhist practices in India.

On his Egyptian honeymoon in 1904 he claimed contact with an entity―Aiwass―who gave him the sacred Book of the Law which served as the basis for the Thelema religion where he identified as its prophet. During the Great War, which he spent in the United States, he claimed to be working for British Intelligence but by the 1920s he had decamped to pursue a libertine lifestyle in Sicily, and in the ensuing scandals was evicted by the Italian Government.

He divided the following two decades between France, Germany, and England, and the continuing promotion of Thelema.

During his life he gained widespread notoriety for his drug use, his bisexuality, and his alarming views on society. In short, polite society frowned on his ways, his thoughts and his influence but to many others his stance had much of value. Even after death he was a darling for the 60’s counterculture but his influence has since waned.

His literary works were both prolific and covered many topics. In the early part of his career he published many poetry books, even plays, before his darker and more forceful works came to dominate his output.

Aleister Crowley died on 1st December 1947 at Hastings in England. He was 72.

• Language: English
• Publisher: The Copyright Group
• Release date: Jan 1, 2023
• ISBN: 9781803548623

Aleister Crowley

Aleister Crowley (1875-1947) was an English poet, painter, occultist, magician, and mountaineer. Born into wealth, he rejected his family’s Christian beliefs and developed a passion for Western esotericism. At Trinity College, Cambridge, Crowley gained a reputation as a poet whose work appeared in such publications as The Granta and Cambridge Magazine. An avid mountaineer, he made the first unguided ascent of the Mönch in the Swiss Alps. Around this time, he first began identifying as bisexual and carried on relationships with prostitutes, which led to his contracting syphilis. In 1897, he briefly dated fellow student Herbert Charles Pollitt, whose unease with Crowley’s esotericism would lead to their breakup. The following year, Crowley joined the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, a secret occult society to which many of the era’s leading artists belonged, including Bram Stoker, W. B. Yeats, Arthur Machen, and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. Between 1900 and 1903, he traveled to Mexico, India, Japan, and Paris. In these formative years, Crowley studied Hinduism, wrote the poems that would form The Sword of Song (1904), attempted to climb K2, and became acquainted with such artists as Auguste Rodin and W. Somerset Maugham. A 1904 trip to Egypt inspired him to develop Thelema, a philosophical and religious group he would lead for the remainder of his life. He would claim that The Book of the Law (1909), his most important literary work and the central sacred text of Thelema, was delivered to him personally in Cairo by the entity Aiwass. During the First World War, Crowley allegedly worked as a double agent for the British intelligence services while pretending to support the pro-German movement in the United States. The last decades of his life were spent largely in exile due to persecution in the press and by the states of Britain and Italy for his bohemian lifestyle and open bisexuality.