ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I am above all grateful to William Breeze, Hymenaeus Beta of Ordo Templi Orientis, for his gracious permission to quote unpublished Crowley diaries and other OTO copyright material, and for his great kindness in making the OTO archives available to me in digital form; I am also grateful for the pleasure of contributing a little input, mainly on London and London people, to the ongoing Crowley diaries and biographies project. I must also especially thank Mark Watson for his sleuthing wizardry with genealogical sources and other records, digging out addresses and back stories, particularly of forgotten women.

A host of other excellent people have helped in various ways, small and large, including Richard Bancroft, Michael Bracewell, Alastair Brotchie, Stefan Dickers, Geoffrey Elborn, Jake Fior, Clive Harper, Mike Jay, Chris Josiffe, Gary Lachman, Darcy Moore, Peter Parker, Jim Pennington, Mark Pilkington, Stephen Pochin, Robert Rickard, Sandy Robertson, Suzy Robinson, Anthony Sillem, Timothy d’Arch Smith, Tom Symonds and Viktor Wynd.

I wrote this book largely during the covid lockdown – a good time for walking through deserted streets – and used libraries far less than usual. The London Library, sterling as ever, sent books by post. But working largely without libraries I became more aware of a handful of exceptional websites and their masters, notably Steve Brachel's Crowley project at 100thmonkeypress.com, a thing of bibliographical excellence and extremely useful; Keith Richmond at Weiser Antiquarian (weiserantiquarian.com), whose originally researched catalogue entries are more impressive than several of the Crowley biographies; and the Aleister Crowley Society's website LAShTAL (lashtal.com), brainchild of Paul Feazey, which manifests the continuing vitality of Crowley's legacy.

I should also acknowledge certain things about the book. It is essentially a book about London ‘then’, not primarily a visiting guide to London now. A number of sites have disappeared (the Chancery Lane address has been completely redeveloped, for example, as has Langham Buildings and All Souls Place) so please check before visiting anything. Much of central London is nevertheless intact in terms of buildings, but businesses have often changed. Pubs frequently remain, but restaurants tend to go.

Further, it is not a study of Crowley as the prophet of a revealed religion. It will be clear that I do not believe in Crowley in that sense, any more than I believe in Christ or Mohammed, because I don't believe in ‘revealed’ religion on the Middle Eastern model. Nor is it about Thelema, and what at its heart was a sincere vision of untrammeled freedom and individual excellence, and it is only very glancingly about the significance of his rationalised or even secularised approach to spiritual experience (“We place no reliance / On Virgin or Pigeon; / Our method is science / Our aim is religion”). For better or worse it is about Crowley the man, within the culture that produced him; an Englishman of a certain class and generation, rooted in the rich matrix of a particular time and place.