Ozzy Osbourne Has Forever Ruined My Pronunciation of Crowley’s Name

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When I first heard Black Sabbath’s “Mr. Crowley,” I was probably too distracted by Randy Rhoads’s guitar solos to worry too much who or what the song was about. Actually, I can say that was pretty much the case for everything they wrote.

The song’s two opening words are “Mr. Crowley,” but here’s the problem: Ozzy says “Crowley” with an “ow” like “ow, my head, turn down that music!” The name is only repeated four times throughout, but it’s enough to make an impact. There are some words you end up reading way more often than speaking or hearing. Inner monologues always seem to develop their own pronunciation guides. In this case, Black Sabbath was one of my only sources for hearing Crowley’s name audibly.

Despite being the song’s namesake, Aleister Crowley was not someone I’d have an interest in until several years later. By then, I had probably heard the song hundreds of times, so naturally I unwittingly imitated Ozzy’s pronunciation in my own conversations.

Why did Black Sabbath write a song about Aleister Crowley anyway? Simple. He was controversial. He’s still controversial today, but this was much more pronounced at the time of the song’s release in 1980. If you take a look around the classic rock realm, you can see they weren’t the only musicians suffering from Crowleymania.

Davis Bowie’s song Quicksand opens with the line “I’m closer to the Golden Dawn, Immersed in Crowley’s uniform of imagery.” Bowie was pretty open in interviews about his occult interests. His entire Blackstar album was occult-inspired.

Led Zeppelin III came with “Do What Thou Wilt” stamped into the vinyl. Vinylom wrote an article about it and you can see pictures. I have a modern reproduction of the album, but unfortunately it doesn’t come with the stamp. If you didn’t know, “do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law” is one of the core concepts of Crowley’s Thelema, along with the phrase “Love is the law. Love under will.” Jimmy Page was pretty obsessed with all of this, to the point of buying Crowley’s old house.

The Beatles even put Crowley’s face on the cover of Sgt Peppers Lonely Hearts Club. If you take a look at the artwork, he’s second from the left in the back row.

Flash forward to today. It’s difficult to look into any real history of modern witchcraft or occultism without coming across Crowley’s name. He was notorious, yes, but he was also incredibly influential to all of western occult practice. You can try to ignore him if you want (and granted, a lot of people do), but the inarguable fact is that he wrote a ton of books.

Now that we’ve established a bit of who Crowley was and why he was important, we can return to our discussion of saying his name correctly. When it comes to proper pronunciation, there are at least two sources that I trust more implicitly than Ozzy. Among them are Robert Hutton and Donald Michael Kraig.

You can hear Robert Hutton say Crowley’s name a few times in this fascinating documentary on the history of witchcraft. He’s a historian that specializes, among other things, in folklore and paganism, so I’m at least reasonably sure he’s done his research.

Donald Michael Kraig is an author of several books, including Modern Magick: Twelve Lessons in the High Magickal Arts. When discussing Aleister Crowley, he has the following to say:

Well, that’s a good bit of trivia and a helpful reminder on the correct pronunciation.

If you find him holy, you call him CR-OE-LEE.

If you find him fowly, you call him CR-OW-LEE.

Or something like that.

If you have too much trouble with this, perhaps you’d just like to use one of his other names…

• Frater Perdurabo
• The Beast 666
• The Wickedest Man in the World
• Master Therion