Did Aleister Crowley's magic/k work?

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After reading a book or two on Aleister Crowley and his obvious enthusiasm for the revival and practice of Magic/k.

I had to ask myself the question, if magic/k is supposed to bring the practitioner material rewards in this life and the material world.... And that by reputation, Crowley was considered to be a powerful warlock or sorcerer...

Then why did Crowley die penniless heroin addict, rather than the king of the world or universe?...
Crowley, born to privilege and luxury, died with nothing.

Personally, I thought that magic/k was supposed to work the other way around.
i.e. to make the penniless rich and powerful, rather than the rich and powerful, poor and powerless....

Or is Crowley secretly really successful, but in Hell or something, or perhaps he has the biggest house in smurf land,
and he has smurfette already up the duff and his maid and sex slave, and even pappa smurf, treats him like his guru...

Anyone who's into M@gIc/K, like to explain how that works?....
so i as to convince me that magic/k actually has any power or is simply just a throwback to the dark ages,
and just a human behaviour that some are attracted to which they use as an excuse and licence to hurt people
for prejudice and unjust reasons....

Just out of interest, I am trying to be open minded and give people a chance?...
I am not an expert in these areas, and i am not judging other people
(as i don't think that it is my right to judge people generally).

would be interested in learning how other people see things and why they put their faith into the things they do.
thanks

Edward Alexander Crowley was a self-proclaimed drug abuser and sex-fiend, a mostly self-published author of books on the occult and magick, a poet, a mountaineer, and a leader of a group called Ordo Templi Orientis (OTO).

Files exist that prove that he was once paid by the Germans to write anti-British propaganda.  When WWI came about, Crowley actually sided with the Germans.  He was involved in New York’s pro-German movement and wrote for The Fatherland, a pro-German propaganda paper.

Although an experienced mountaineer, tragedy struck when Crowley and a crew tried to climb Kangchenjunga, the third highest mountain in the world.  An avalanche killed four of the men on the expedition.  He was later quoted as saying, "A mountain 'accident' of this sort is one of the things for which I have no sympathy whatever".  When he passed the site of the avalanche the next day, he didn’t even bother stopping to talk to the survivors.

Crowley claimed to identify himself with the Great Beast 666 (from the Book of Revelation) and enjoyed the appellation of "wickedest man in the world".  Crowley inherited a fortune and worked hard at being strange.  He was especially alluring to dysfunctional women.

Crowley was so into snorting drugs that his nasal passages started to decay.  He underwent several drastic surgical operations to have this solved.  He would go through these procedures routinely for the rest of his life.

He was also a fake, a fraud, and a charlatan.  Crowley declared bankruptcy in 1935 after trying to falsely sue multiple people for libel.  He had significant financial issues due to his drug use and travels, and he wasn’t exactly good with his money.  The courts found that Crowley was actually spending three times his income.

No clue but then again I don't how much he was into that specifically.

I think there's far credible evidence of mysticism working, most of the kabbalistic manipulations (gematria, notoricon, temura) are about hacking your brains own software. I spent a few weeks several years ago reading Gems of the Equinox and I remember Vision and the Voice being one of the more interesting things in there - ie. a pretty lengthy writeup of his encounter with the 30 Enochian Aethers. From what I remember the visions were quite kaleidoscopic, constantly shifting and permutating through each other - very DMT trip in flavor however it's an open question as to whether it was all of the pranayama and other things he was doing that got him there or whether he was adding other substances on top of that.

Crowley really open-sourced the Golden Dawn system more, added more eastern practices and elements, and he tried also to make A.'.A.'. a much more rigorous system, meaning that in the Golden Dawn people could get promoted through the ten grades quite often by just showing up, behaving well, and being liked whereas with A.'.A.'. it was boot camp, you'd have to work your arse off to where the things that you were supposed to be able to do at each sphere of the Tree of Life that the grade level represented had to be something that you could actually demonstrably do. The other thing, A.'.A.'. was very heavily about what's called 'Knowledge and Conversation of the Holy Guardian Angel', which Crowley didn't feel like the Golden Dawn emphasized enough and so he hit that much harder in A.'.A.'.

If you want more details on the above there's a psychologist and magician, Dr. David Shoemaker, who has a Youtube channel called 'Living Thelema' where he gets into the contents, angles, and directions of what A.'.A.'. practice is about.

The other thing about Crowley - the sense that he was a 'Satanist', it's complicated. I've learned myself for example that what's often in the darker cthonic imagery is the more primal or natural. What divides into right hand path and left hand path seems to rarification vs. engaging with the very hard and primal elements. The rarification is giving yourself higher levels of self-governance, think of the kinds of integrity that Manly P Hall was big on people developing, whereas the left hand path is like trying to level up, strengthen, and fortify the animal and to some degree it's the more dangerous path because the goal is actually getting a lot closer to direct manipulation of the kinds of generator functions that your frame is built on.

Either way running at a system hard enough, especially if you're really obstinant about success by any means necessary, can be a great way to pop your cork as far as I can tell. It's a bit like in the life you've lived your own mind is in its own basin of attraction and if you try to climb out of that bowl rather than modifying it peace by peace you can land somewhere else that's more like a herniation or like the baby falling out of the crib and landing on the ground - ie. it's a decidedly worse, less cohesive state.

I think Crowley was one of those people who started off with a lot of anger from the ways his parents religiously abused him, had a lot of fire to want to climb right out of the state of the world that he found himself in, did whatever he could to shock people (think a bit like Andy Kaufmann style pranks but with a more offense and shock-oriented pitch), the system he built was really a different handling of the same ToL that the Golden Dawn were doing but... a good way of saying it... he made it 'angsty', or pretty much he loaded up with all sorts of industrial and punk patches. Putting the Beast and Babalon on the ToL wasn't a way of saying 'this is a Satanic reinvisioning of the ToL', it was more of a complete overhaul of what the Beast and Babalon symbolized - ie. rejiggered their components to make them redemptive figures. The Book of the Law is just loaded with iconoclastic but otherwise kabbalistic number games and metaphors which I think were probably Crowley's subconscious and all the stuff he was loading it up with spitting a brick of reprocessed material at him.

I know I said very little on magic but - I really don't remember reading much about him trying to change the world or 'manifest' things too much more than perhaps whatever fights he had to get and keep Boleskine House. Most of the big magical acts I remember reading about were Jack Parsons and Marjorie Cameron doing their working (with - strange enough - L Ron Hubbard watching in the corner). Crowley was much more of a psychonaut and self-transformation guy who was trying to follow the threads he was grabbing wherever they lead. In a way he was a bit more of a chaos magician in the modern sense even if he was founding his own systems.

Claiming to have magic(k)al powers just proves he wasn't even a very original con-artist.