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Aleister Crowley, otherwise known as the Beast 666, shared membership of the Golden Dawn with W.B. Yeats, and publishers with D.H. Lawrence. Now in a beyond-the-grave autobiography, he recounts his own vocation, his practice of sex magic, and his bruising encounters with his contemporaries.
The great magus, whose own world-conquering creed, The Book of the Law, was written in Cairo in 1904, was according to him, no murderer, but a prophet and practitioner of all kinds of sexual freedom and new magical systems.
The Wickedest Man in the World? Or Post-Christian Messiah? Read this book and judge for yourself.
Snoo Wilson is a writer and playwright who presented an apologia for Aleister Crowley in the TV series ‘Without Walls’. His previous novels are Spaceache and Inside Babel (Chatto). His play, More Light, about the heretic Giordano Bruno, is published by Mandrake of Oxford.
'. . . really good fun. Its not very kind to old Crow, and the language is a bit more vulgar than required (or than he would have used), but on the other hand. . . it does produce a charming caricature of Ye Great Beast that serves to perpetuate the myth. ...Dear 666 would have felt flatttered... What I liked about the book, part from its jokes and the invaluable occult illustrations, is the contrast between Crowley as a human being (and egomaniac) and the Master Therion, the perfect ego-less adept he would have liked to be . . . Its the difference as between a Thelemite and a follower of Crowleyanity. Symonds Great Beast was almost totally obsessed with the Demon Crowley, Wilson's novel is better balanced , it mixes the ego tripper with the Logos of the Aeon. This produces some confusion, and maybe this confusion is close to the conflicts that the real AC experienced. I suspect that he often got muddles up as to who was who in him and who cares, and put on his Great Magus Hat whenever his ego felt threatened and misunderstood. Considering that so many people are involved in the dull cult of Crowleyanity, and spend their time trying to be like the guru or wasting money collecting the master's underpants, a critical treatment of the person Crowley, such as you dared to inflict on the long-suffering public, is an excellent and much need magickal gesture.' - Jan Fries
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For a short extract stroke the goat
Jonathan Aitken, the disgraced procurer of arms (and more), whose voluntary resignation as a Right Honourable must have created flickers of apprehension in many another dodgy Honourable breast, was said recently to have 'fled' to America. Given that he was attempting to bully the Guardian newspaper, by putting his family into perjury on the witness stand, the hyperbole is understandable. The idea that before being accused, he was removing himself from retribution by fleeing, is irresistable to readers and editors alike. While the plane carrying the hypothetical fugitive may not actually have gone any faster, as sure as honey is made by bees, newspapers need their villains to flee. At any rate, it is now open season against the tall fell fellow in the pinstripe suit whose eyes never stopped flickering, as he laid a rack of pork pies, fresh and steaming from the oven, before us all.
Aitken's forbear, Lord Beaverbrook also thought he knew what the public ought to hear. Beaverbrook, after all put St George with his trusty sword, the very same one Master Jonathon had the brassneck to try to borrow, on the front page of the Daily Express. One of the villains that Beaverbrook took the journalistic scourge to was the poet and self-appointed magician, Aleister Crowley. Aleister Crowley was impaled as the 'The Wickedest Man in The World' by the Beaverbrook sword throughout the 1920's. Accordingly Crowley is now generally recognised, like Beaverbrook's great-nephew, as a social pariah and there has been not much in the way of recovery of his reputation. Beaverbrook himself was a noted bondage enthusiast, but with so many journalists in his employ, was able to keep his penchant for spanking out of the limelight. Not so, the rest of us.
During the first World War, Crowley had scratched a living in New York writing a column for a German newspaper where he humorously gave out the addresses of his aunts' houses in the leafy suburbs of London, urging the Zeppelins to bomb them. Fortunately for Crowley, none of the aunts seem to have been aware of their shaven-headed nephew's tasteless jokes. They even appear to have been fond of him. Truly, there is no accounting for tastes. At the end of the First World War, an influenza epidemic came in and in a matter of months killed more people than had died in the trenches. Crowley's ancient aunts perished in this silent holocaust and he was left three small annuities. He used the money to found a colony where free love and magic were to be celebrated. Naturally this could not be done in England, so he set out for Cefalu, in Sicity. On a hill above the town he lorded it in a squat farm house where his male and female disciples arrived to 'find their own true wills.'
Crowley's vices make glorious reading even for today's jaded palates. He was a lifelong devotee of heroin, which he juggled with cocaine, in unsuccessful efforts to get free of them both. Weird types abounded throughout his life. He tended to attract and be attracted by people on the verge of madness and obsession. He claimed to have receieved through dictation from a higher being, the book that was going to supercede the Bible, 'The Book of the Law'. Crowley was vigorously bisexual, and a compulsive confessor to his diaries.
His growing reputation for unspeakable satanic wickedness swelled with the newspaper reports that some of his 'magical' rituals involved men, goats, and murdering children. As far as I can gather, this last accusation is just not true. The only evidence against Crowley the Child Killer existed is a ponderous joke he made about semen. Crowley wrote with poor biology about 'killing' thousands of children in an operation of the 'ninth degree.' Masturbation has its place in the Crowleyan canon, in opposition to the Christian tradition which prohibits it.
Crowley's own ideas about raising children seem indeed to have been grossly 'liberal' that is, as wanting as Bertrand Russell's, but that on its own, is hardly enough to accuse him of murdering them. But there was more than enough going on, in the farrago of Crowley's bohemian misdeeds, to keep him in the public eye as a monster: in the same way the scale of Aitken's fall enabled several papers to re-run his earlier doings with 'Miss Whiplash', nothing is too bad to say about pariahs. In Cefalu, things went from bad to worse. One of Crowley's disciples was Raoul Loveday, who unwisely partook of some local cat's blood with Crowley, after a messy 'magickal' sacrifice. Those like myself, who feel queasy about these things have to remember that Crowley was imbued through his Exclusive Brethren upbringings with the spirit of the old testament, and Abraham's sacrifice of an animal to god, instead of his own son may not be in the spirit of modern times, but is still a model for contact with the Divine. In Raoul and Crowley's case, the chances of escaping enteritis from uncooked Mediterranean moggy were small. Crowley became very ill, and Raoul died. Naturally, The Beast was accused through the newspapers of killing Raoul, by foul 'magical' means. In fact, the Beast adored Roaul, basking in the younger man's uncritical adulation.
When Mussolini seized power, he banished all secret societies, including Masons. Since Crowley had joined any number of masonic societies, an expulsion order was issued for the Great Beast, though the acolytes were allowed to stay. Beaverbrook, who had had little or nothing to do with the rise of Mussolini, took the credit for the expulsion himself as the pariah slunk back to England. The Wickedest Man in the World was never charged with anything. Supernatural satanic murder is all in the innuendo.
Years later, fighting to recover his reputation, Crowley's further downfall came in an unsuccessful libel case. The production of a book of his early onanistic poetry, 'White Stains' by the defence completely destroyed what little credibility the Great Beast might have had. The trial bankrupted him. Like Mr Aitken, and indeed Oscar Wilde, the reckless pursuit of a libel case had been his undoing. Like Mr Aitken, and Oscar Wilde, Crowley also seems to have been a sleep-walker at some level in the courts of law, somehow colluding with his own demonisation. All very strange.
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