What He Founded, What He Took Over, and What He Was Accused Of

Two persistent errors are worth correcting, both of them flattering to him.

He did not found the Ordo Templi Orientis. It was founded by Carl Kellner and organised by Theodor Reuss around the turn of the century; Crowley was admitted to its lower degrees in 1910 and given authority over Great Britain and Ireland shortly after. He proclaimed himself Outer Head of the Order in 1921, while Reuss was still alive, and was formally elected in 1925. A letter from Reuss naming him successor has been referred to but has never been produced. He did found the A A with George Cecil Jones in 1907, and that one is his.

The other error runs the opposite way. The press of his own day called him the wickedest man in the world and printed, as fact, that he had conducted human sacrifice; that charge is baseless. What is documented is bad enough without it and should not be softened either: sustained heroin and cocaine addiction that he never mastered, a pattern of exploiting the money and health of the people around him, the death of a follower at his Sicilian abbey in 1923, and racial and misogynistic language that his admirers tend to skate past. Kaczynski's biography is the fullest documentary account; the Bogdan and Starr essay collection is the best scholarly treatment of his sources and his reception.

He also lied habitually about his own life in his Confessions, which he subtitled an autohagiography without apparent irony. Nothing in that book should be used as a source for itself.