Open Veils · Answer
Was alister crowly a free mason?
Crowley was verifiably a Freemason, though his tenure was brief and institutionally marginal. He was initiated Entered Apprentice on 8 October 1904, passed to Fellowcraft, and raised to Master Mason on 17 December 1904 in the Anglo-Saxon Lodge No. 343 of the Grande Loge de France in Paris — recorded under GLDF registry number 41210, lodge roll number 54, profession listed as 'poète.' His Masonic career, however, was a launching pad, not a destination: he rapidly absorbed and then discarded the institution in favour of his own synthetic systems.
Evidence
- Beyond Craft Masonry, Crowley accumulated high degrees through the Rite of Memphis-Misraïm, a fringe body the United Grand Lodge of England never recognised.
- According to verified lodge records of the Grande Loge de France, Crowley completed all three degrees of Craft Masonry in approximately ten weeks at the Anglo-Saxon Lodge No. 343, an anglophone expatriate lodge in Paris practicing the Emulation Rite — the first lodge in France to do so.
- His candidature was sponsored by the Reverend James Lynn Bowley, lodge secretary and former member of Oxford's Apollo University Lodge No. 357.
- This detail matters: Bowley lent Crowley a veneer of legitimate British Masonic lineage.
- The O.T.O. itself severed its formal Masonic linkages between the 1910s and 1920s.