Quiet Lineage: What I Actually Took From Aleister Crowley

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Aleister Crowley has one of those names
that can change the temperature of a room.

The Beast 666.
The wickedest man in the world.
Occultist.
Magician.
Drug addict.
Sex magick.
Rituals.
Demons.
Sacrifice.
Depending on where you encounter him, the story gets dark pretty fast.

And then there is the Crowley I keep encountering through magick.

That is where I get curious.

I hear stories about Crowley that are much darker than anything I have encountered in the work that has actually reached me. I want to be careful with that sentence.

I am an amateur practitioner. My husband has read far more Crowley than I have. I have zero interest in making historical claims about everything Crowley did or didn’t do during his life. I wasn’t there, I haven’t read everything, and this piece is much smaller than that question.

I can tell you about my relationship with his work.

Crowley’s books float around our house because my husband reads them most. Sometimes I pick one up. Sometimes a passage gets read aloud to me. My husband used to read to me all the time, so honestly, this is pretty consistent with how information enters my life. 😂

Then there are the rituals, correspondences, pieces of language, conversations with my husband, and ideas that have slowly become part of my own practice.

And in that material, I keep encountering attention, Will, discipline, meditation, observation, correspondence, language, keeping records, and learning yourself closely enough to recognize what actually belongs to you.

The frightening Crowley I hear about culturally and the Crowley I encounter through his work have yet to line up neatly for me.

That gap is what I want to write about.

The Beast

The longer I practice magick, the less frightening the word Beast becomes to me.

I think about the animal inside myself. Appetite. Fear. Anger. Impulse. Desire. The parts that pull before thought arrives. I think about learning to know that animal well enough that it quits driving the car from the back seat.

Crowley called himself the Beast.

Whatever he meant by every layer of that title, I increasingly hear it through my own practice as something embraced and known rather than hidden. That is my interpretation. I leave Crowley’s interpretation open where I lack enough knowledge to speak for him.

But something about the willingness to call yourself the Beast interests me. Because pretending I have no beast has never made mine disappear.

Knowing her has been considerably more useful.

Justin Is Basically My Breadcrumbs Into Crowley

Half the time, I encounter Crowley because some giant book has migrated onto a counter or my husband suddenly goes, “Listen to this,” and reads me some insane passage. 😂

Justin, my hubby, is basically my breadcrumbs into Crowley.

He reads far more of the actual material than I do. Sometimes I pick up one of his books. Sometimes he reads something aloud and we end up talking about it for an hour. Sometimes he explains a correspondence or gives me context for a piece of language I have encountered somewhere else.

The material has entered my life gradually like that, through marriage, conversation, books lying around the house, ritual, music, my own practice, and questions I keep coming back to.

That distinction matters because I have little interest in pretending I am doing a scholarly crawl through the complete works of Aleister Crowley.

I’m telling you what has actually reached me.

And Justin is part of how it reaches me.

Sometimes I Have No Idea What This Man Is Saying

Crowley can be difficult to read.

There are layers of symbolic language, correspondences, references to systems I barely understand yet, religious language, sexual language, gods, numbers, planets, elements, Hebrew, Qabalah, ritual, poetry, jokes, blinds, and sentences where I get to the end and realize I have retained approximately nothing. 😂

This is another place where having Justin around helps.

One thing he has helped me understand is how slippery a flat literal reading can become with occult writing. A body can also be symbolic. A god can represent several things at once. A sexual act can carry ritual meaning. A ritual image can carry sexual meaning. An element can point toward a direction, a quality, a symbol, a state, or several correspondences layered together. Sometimes language itself is deliberately veiled.

Justin and I were recently talking about the way sexual material had to be written around in earlier periods, and how strange that can look from here. Something written in enormous, dramatic occult language can turn out to be talking about a much more physical subject.

So sometimes I hear something and think, Jesus Christ. What the fuck is happening here?

Then we start unpacking the language.

And sometimes the answer is basically: Oh. Sex. 😂

That has made me cautious in both directions. I want to avoid assuming every frightening sentence describes a literal act. I also want to avoid explaining away something simply because a softer interpretation would make me more comfortable.

Sometimes my answer stays:

I don’t know.

I actually like having that answer available. It leaves the book open.

The Dark Stuff I Keep Hearing About

This is where my curiosity keeps returning.

I hear Crowley described through some incredibly dark language. Then I look at what I have personally encountered through his writing, ritual, conversations, and the parts of his work that have reached my life.

Like I said, I keep finding instructions to pay attention, meditate, observe, practice, record, study, learn correspondences, learn yourself, find your Will, and devote yourself to it.

That experience looks dramatically different from the reputation I encountered first.

This piece cannot settle Crowley’s biography. I have neither the knowledge nor the desire to make it do that. Maybe there are pieces of his work I will encounter later that deeply bother me. Maybe I will understand things differently after another year of study.

Good.

I want my understanding to remain capable of changing when new information arrives.

For now, I can only tell you what I have found. And so far, I keep finding a system that asks a person to pay an almost ridiculous amount of attention.

“Do What Thou Wilt”

This is probably the Crowley line most people know:

“Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law.”

It can sound like: Do whatever the hell you want.

That is almost useless to me.

What I have taken from the idea of Will asks much more of me.
What am I actually here to do?
What belongs to me?
What kind of life am I building?
What pulls me toward that life?
What keeps pulling me sideways?
What happens when fear makes the decision?
What happens when appetite makes it?
What happens when I organize my life around what other people expect from me?
What happens when I spend three hours feeding something that I already know leaves me empty?

Finding Will, as I understand it right now, means getting close enough to myself to recognize the difference.

Then comes the harder part.

Living accordingly.

That takes discipline. It takes attention. It takes giving some things less of my life. Sometimes it means doing something difficult while an easier thing sits three feet away looking delicious.

That feels very different from doing whatever I want.

Want can change before lunch. Will, to me, points deeper.

This is also where the Beast becomes interesting again. The Beast wants. The Beast fears. The Beast pulls. The Beast reacts. I can know all of that without letting every impulse become instruction.

My current understanding of magick has far more to do with that relationship than with controlling anything outside myself.

Know what is moving inside. Know what you are serving. Choose deliberately. Then keep practicing.

Attention Is Everywhere

Attention is increasingly becoming one of my favorite words.

My husband and I were talking about it recently after he watched someone online describe attention as a kind of currency. That landed immediately for me.

I think attention is the active ingredient.

Money is currency. Time is currency. Attention might be the sneakiest currency because wherever it goes, energy, emotion, behavior, identity, and habit tend to follow. That applies to social media, marriage, art, fear, ritual, parenting, panic, creativity, all of it.

And this is bigger than Crowley for me. It might be one of the clearest threads running through my whole quiet lineage.

Louise Hay asks me to notice the thought. Abraham Hicks asks me to notice where my attention is going.
Crowley and ceremonial magick give me these elaborate physical structures for directing it. Then my own practice starts pulling all of those threads together.

Thoughts, reactions, words, what my body does, where my eyes go, what I keep feeding, what I avoid, what repeats. Eventually attention stops being a spiritual exercise and becomes how I move through the whole day.

The LBRP fits beautifully here because I am starting to experience ritual as a structure for how to move through life, rather than a special little occult event that happens inside a marked-off box.

I still care about the ritual itself. I will always care care about learning it, performing it, understanding the words, directions, elements, symbols, and correspondences. But lately I am becoming just as interested in what all of that structure is teaching me to do inside myself.

The emotional correspondences matter because they take the ritual out of abstraction. Water becomes something I can feel when panic starts bending perception. Porcupine becomes that defensive bristle when some part of me expects attack. The elements stop being pretty symbols floating on a chart and start becoming things I can recognize while they are happening inside me.

Then attention becomes my hinge.

I catch it. I name it. I decide where my attention goes next.

The more I practice magick, the thinner the distinction between ritual and life seems to become.

I’m saying something a little different from every mundane action secretly being an occult ritual. What I am noticing is that ritual concentrates something life asks of me constantly:

Where am I?
What is happening in me?
What am I feeding with my attention?
What am I choosing to do with it?

The ritual gives me a deliberate place to practice those questions. Then I leave the ritual.
And the questions come with me.

Because increasingly, it all feels connected.

Pay attention to the thought.
Pay attention to the body.
Pay attention to the reaction.
Pay attention to what keeps pulling your eyes back.
Pay attention to what you keep feeding.
Pay attention to what grows.

Maybe that is one of the simplest things all these wildly different teachers and practices have been teaching me all along.

Pay attention to everything.

The Work Entered My Music Before I Could Explain It

This is part of why Crowley appears on my website in the first place.

My artist name is Loui Crow. My real name is Joy.

Loui comes from Louise Hay. Crow comes from Crowley.

Those names hold two very different kinds of influence in my life.

Louise Hay gave me language for the way I speak to myself, anger, self-relationship, and the mind-body connection I experience. Crowley led me toward another kind of language: Will, ritual, correspondence, attention, symbol, discipline, and the strange possibility that several things can be communicating the same idea through completely different forms.

Crowley’s language also started appearing in my music.

When I made BYRDS, pieces of The Book of the Law came to mind while I was writing particular songs. Language from Louise Hay and Abraham Hicks appeared too. I wrote ten songs in four days. Three others already existed. Then the album started showing me what it was.

That order matters to me.

I rarely sit down and decide that I am going to make art demonstrating a spiritual idea. Usually I make something, then I look at it, then I start finding things.

That has continued since BYRDS.

I’m rewriting this blog piece now after finishing another album called ANYMALS, and once again I made the art first and started recognizing structures afterward. That album began with animals and conversations with the little one inside me. Then I started noticing pieces of ritual architecture underneath what I had made, so I followed it.

I’m still working out what I think about that. I’m writing a whole separate series about it because apparently I enjoy giving myself homework. 😂

But this pattern keeps teaching me something about my relationship with magick.

I pay attention differently now. I make something. I turn around. I look again.

Sometimes there are breadcrumbs.

Lon Milo DuQuette and the Human Translator Problem

There is another person who belongs in this part of my lineage.

Lon Milo DuQuette.

I am deeply grateful for people who can take complicated symbolic material and talk about it like an actual human being lives inside the book.

DuQuette does that for me. I appreciate his humor. His willingness to make ceremonial magick feel approachable matters to me. The Chicken Qabalah has been one of those books that reminds me that complexity and seriousness can live beside laughter.

That helps me learn.

Because sometimes Crowley gives me a sentence that feels like it requires three dictionaries, a Qabalistic reference table, an Egyptologist, and a tylenol.

Then somebody like DuQuette comes along and gives me a handle.

I appreciate the handle.

I’m still climbing the stairs myself.

I Also Picture Crowley Being Incredibly Boring

This is probably unfair.

It is also permanently stuck in my head. 😂

When people talk about Crowley, the stories are enormous. The Beast. Sex. Drugs. Magick. Scandal. Mountains. Secret rituals. The whole thing sounds like this man woke up every morning inside a thunderstorm.

But then I think about how much he wrote.

Seriously. How many hours did this man spend sitting down?

Because writing takes forever.

I know how long my own projects take, and I have a computer. I have the internet. I have digital books. I have search engines. I have an AI tool that can help me organize twelve thoughts I somehow managed to have simultaneously.

And projects still eat entire days, weeks, and months.

Crowley had paper, books, libraries, pens, typewriters, snail mail, actual physical objects that had to be carried from one location to another. If he needed information from a book, he needed access to the actual book.

Then he traveled. He climbed. He studied. He practiced. He meditated. He kept records. He corresponded with people.

And he wrote.

And wrote.

And wrote.

Whatever else was happening in Crowley’s life, the amount of material he produced represents an enormous pile of boring hours.

Somebody had to sit there and make all those words exist.

So somewhere behind the Beast 666 mythology, I always picture this slightly tired old white man surrounded by paper.

Probably high.

Definitely writing.

Still fucking writing. 😂

That image interests me because mythology can flatten a human being just as easily as admiration can.

The boring hours belong to the person too.

My Ethics Are Mine

There is one thing I still want to state clearly when I talk publicly about magick.

Consent matters deeply to me. Autonomy matters deeply to me. The effect my choices have on other living beings matters deeply to me.

My practice centers my own attention, behavior, choices, reactions, inner life, and Will. I leave other people’s Will in their own hands.

Those ethics come from my life. They come from what I have lived through, what I have learned, the way I want to parent, the way I want to love my husband, the way I want to treat animals, and the kind of person I want to be when nobody is watching.

Crowley carries neither the responsibility nor the credit for them.

That distinction gives me room to study him honestly.

I can learn something from a person without adopting the entire person. I can find value in a piece of writing while leaving another piece on the table. I can encounter something uncomfortable and investigate it. I can say, I don’t know. I can change my mind later. I can keep my own hands on the work.

So What Have I Actually Taken From Crowley?

I think this is the question I was trying to answer the first time I wrote this piece.

I just had so much nervousness around his reputation that I spent a lot of time explaining the perimeter.

I understand why.

But I have more experience now.

So what have I actually taken from Crowley?

Take your life seriously enough to find your Will.
Pay attention.
Learn yourself.
Practice.
Meditate.
Observe.
Record what happens.
Learn the languages.
Look for relationships.
Stay curious about what you find.
Keep going.

That is what has reached me so far.

Maybe another person reads Crowley and carries away something completely different. My own hubby, would write an entirely different essay.

Actually, Justin would probably hand me a giant book, point to six passages, and tell me I missed something. A lot of somethings. 😂 And that’s okay.

These are just my breadcrumbs.

The pieces that reached me. The things I understood enough to carry. The ideas that got into my practice, my music, my conversations, and the way I move through my life. There are probably breadcrumbs all over the damn floor that I haven’t picked up yet.

I know there are.

I’m still an amateur. I’m still learning. I’m still changing my mind about things as I understand them better.

So this is where Crowley has led me so far.

I’m curious where the trail goes next.

Quiet Lineage

That is what I mean when I call Crowley part of my quiet lineage.

Influence rather than allegiance.

His work reached people. Some of those people wrote about it. Some practiced it. Some translated it into language I could understand. One of them became my husband.

Years later there are still Crowley books migrating around our home. There are rituals in our lives. There are conversations over passages. There are correspondences scribbled into notes. There are pieces of The Book of the Law inside songs. There is a woman named Joy making albums and occasionally realizing afterward that the thing she was studying has somehow gotten fingerprints all over the thing she made.

That is how lineage feels to me now.

Much quieter than I expected.

Less like somebody handing me a doctrine.

More like:

“Hey, listen to this.”

And then Justin starts reading. 😂

About Quiet Lineage

Quiet Lineage is where I write about some of the people and bodies of work that have left fingerprints on mine.

Louise Hay gave me language for how I speak to myself and helped shape my relationship with anger, healing, and the body. Abraham Hicks influenced the way I work with attention and direction. Aleister Crowley led me toward Will, correspondence, ritual, symbolic language, and questions I am still learning how to ask.

I am interested in what becomes useful when it reaches my actual life.

I take what feeds me. I examine what catches. I leave the rest for the birds.

I am still an amateur practitioner. Still learning. Still asking Justin what the hell something means. Still occasionally opening one of his books because it migrated onto the counter again.

And still curious about the enormous distance between the frightening Crowley I heard about and the work I have actually encountered.

I can only tell you what I have found.

So far, I keep finding reasons to look closer.

🪶

May the thing with the frightening name become ordinary enough to examine. May your own hands decide what you carry forward.

A little crow’s on the wire, keeping watch over you.