Aleister Crowley: The Beast Himself
My first encounter with Aleister Crowley—self-styled Great Beast 666 and the most famous magician of the twentieth century—happened in 1975. I was nineteen and living in New York City, playing bass guitar in an underground rock band, and sharing a small one-bedroom flat in Little Italy with the lead singer and the guitarist. The guitarist had a kitschy interest in the occult, which manifested mostly in the pentagrams, upside-down crosses, and other satanic bric-a-brac that competed for wall space in the flat with old Velvet Underground posters and photographs of the Ramones. Squashed into a bookcase bursting with creased sci-fi and horror paperbacks were pummelled copies of Crowley’s novels, Moonchild (1929) and Diary of a Drug Fiend (1922). I had already seen a copy of this last work in the window of the old St. Mark’s Bookshop, and as drugs were something I, and practically everyone I knew at the time, was interested in, I looked forward to reading it.
Like tattered copies of the I Ching, Timothy Leary’s High Priest, and The Tibetan Book of the Dead, Crowley’s books were part of the debris left behind by the ’60s generation. The Summer of Love had long since passed, but relics from that time still turned up amidst the fading tinsel of glam and the surfacing of what would in a year or so be christened punk. Certainly my attraction to Crowley at this stage wasn’t unique, and when Chris—the guitarist—saw me turning the pages of the Diary he said something like, “Yeah, that book’s cool. He’s into coke, opium, everything.” No doubt I said “cool” too, and went back to reading. This in itself tells us something about Crowley, which I suspect is still true today. Although he remains the most famous magician of modern times, Crowley’s initial attraction for most people isn’t his idiosyncratic, eclectic reading of the Western esoteric tradition—as intriguing as it is—but his extravagant, excessive lifestyle. Long before McDonald’s, Crowley led a supersized life, running through an enormous amount of drugs, sex, and what we can call, for lack of a better word, “experience.”
Crowley drank experience like champagne, and he never seemed to have enough of it, as a reading of his Confessions of Aleister Crowley (1969) or John Symonds’ The Great Beast (1973)—still the most readable book on Crowley—will tell. He walked across China and climbed a Himalaya or two, learned several languages, and could easily have been a chess champion among other things, having enough adventures along the way to cover dozens of ordinary lives. Yet, after spending some years fascinated with the Great Beast—as he enjoyed being called—and reading practically everything he wrote (including the poetry), and practicing the magical disciplines he devised in order to accomplish the Great Work of the Knowledge and Conversation of the Holy Guardian Angel, I came away wondering if all the experience he absorbed actually did him any good. The virtue of experience is that it affects you in some way and changes who you are, which pretty much is what the Great Work is all about. (You may prefer to call it spiritual transformation, but the essence is the same). But what struck me after reading and rereading Crowley’s work and the reports of his life, either by himself or by less biased hands, is that he never changed at all. For all the enormous helpings of life that he swallowed whole, and all the mystical disciplines he undoubtedly mastered, Crowley seemed the same self-centered, egotistical, and megalomaniacal person at the end of his life as when he started out. The Tao Te Ching observes that “the farther one travels, the less one knows.” Among his many accomplishments, Crowley rendered his own version of this Taoist classic, yet he seems not to have grasped the wisdom of that insight.
I should also point out that the context for my introduction to the Great Beast was again not in any way esoteric. At the time I knew nothing about esotericism, magic, Kabbalah, or any mystical tradition. I was a rock ’n’ roller. If I had heard about the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, it was through the horror writer Arthur Machen by way of H. P. Lovecraft. Not many Manhattan proto-punkers were talking about Rudolf Steiner or Gurdjieff or Madame Blavatsky then. Crowley had been picked up by the last generation of rockers as a counterculture icon because of the wild sex, copious drugs, and general “bad boy” reputation—it had, I think, very little to do with magic—and this street-cred carried over to us. The Goths, death rockers, and heavy-metalers who discover Crowley today, do so, I think, for similar reasons, and it’s a shame that many people get their first look at Western esotericism through his peculiar appropriation of it. Through my own experience, I know it takes an effort to shake that off. Crowley’s philosophy of jettisoning all repression and inhibition and “going large” (he called it discovering your “True Will”) appeals to youth, perennially hemmed in by parental and societal constraints and as yet lacking the power of discrimination and the virtue of self-discipline. But what is for most of us a stage in life we pass through on the way to (with any luck) maturity was for Crowley the “word of the Aeon.” The age he saw inaugurated by his own hand was that of the “crowned and conquering child.” Is it surprising that teenagers would be into it? Or that Crowley himself acted like a spoiled adolescent more times than not?
But although my first taste of Crowleyanity (as Crowley first thought of calling the religion he would unleash upon the world, before he opted for Thelema) was through the attraction of a good read about drugs, the result was something I hadn’t expected. Not long afterward, we moved into one floor of a huge, illegal loft space on the Bowery, and one of the other denizens was a wild, flaming artist who was a devotee of Crowley’s Thoth Tarot Deck, copies of which were rare at the time. He painted canvases based on the cards’ images, and often he would do a reading for inspiration. By this time I had raced through Moonchild, Crowley’s venomous roman à clef about the other members of the Golden Dawn, and had discovered Colin Wilson’s The Occult, which had a long chapter on Crowley. The artist had other books too, like Israel Regardie’s The Tree of Life. I read this and several others on “magick,” as Crowley spelled it, and found that I was hooked. There was a kind of revival of occult literature at the time, and many cheap editions of occult classics by A. E. Waite, S. L. MacGregor Mathers, and others found their way to the remainder tables. The old Samuel Weiser occult bookshop was still around, and it had complete sets of reprints of Crowley’s famous magical journal, The Equinox, going for practically nothing. I bought those and anything else that I could get my hands on having to do with magic(k), the occult, and specifically Crowley. I had read a great deal of Nietzsche by then, and his ideas about the Übermensch (“superman”) seemed to chime with what Crowley was saying about the True Will. But Nietzsche, although a more profound thinker, had had a wretched life, got syphilis the one time he had sex, and didn’t really talk about drugs. Crowley seemed a more promising role model. And, I had to admit, he looked pretty impressive in those photographs, with his black robe and hood, with the shining eye in the pyramid, performing the Banishing Ritual of the Pentagram, or as a turbaned Arab, enjoying his pipe of rum-soaked perique tobacco.
But my real plunge into the land of Do What Thou Wilt didn’t happen until I moved to California. By the autumn of 1977 I had left the group and with my girlfriend had moved to Los Angeles, where I started my own band. Along with other sites that catered to occult tastes, here I haunted Gilbert’s Bookshop on Hollywood Boulevard—sadly, long gone—which had been a favorite of Jimmy Page and David Bowie. One day I noticed a sign advertising a Crowley group. I answered it and a few weeks later was initiated into two of Crowley’s magical societies. The Ordo Templi Orientis (Order of the Eastern Temple, or OTO) had been around since 1900, starting up in Germany in the early years of rising Aryan consciousness; Crowley became the head of an English branch in 1913. The Argenteum Astrum (Order of the Silver Star or A∴A∴) emerged in 1907 after Crowley had fallen out with both the Golden Dawn and its head, MacGregor Mathers, and decided to start his own secret society. Although both groups had a Masonic, Rosicrucian flavor, the real core of the teaching was Crowley’s inspired sacred text, The Book of the Law (1904), to which we owe his notorious call and response: “Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law. Love is the law, love under will.”
Dictated to Crowley in 1904 in a Cairo hotel by the extrahuman intelligence Aiwass, The Book of the Law was, Crowley claimed, a sign that “the equinox of the gods had come, and that a new epoch in human history had begun.” Crowley was convinced that the Secret Chiefs had chosen him as the new Messiah, and, although he balked at first, he soon took to the job with relish.
For several months I did what I wilt with zeal, upsetting my girlfriend by following the rituals Crowley provided at the back of his impenetrable 1929 work, Magick in Theory and Practice. (In New York Rocker: My Life in the Blank Generation, a memoir of my years as a musician, I give a fuller account of this time in my life.)
Yet, as I made my way through the rest of Crowley’s oeuvre and became familiar with other works on magic and the Western spiritual tradition, my appreciation of the Master Therion (as he also styled himself, therion being Greek for “beast”) began to shift. The people I had met through the Crowley group seemed to equate doing what they wilt with doing what they liked, which meant indulging in whatever appetites they cared to, along with a general lack of consideration for others. This led me, after a year or so, to drop out, although to this day I’m not quite sure how my membership stands. Initially I admired Crowley’s enormous self-obsession (which makes his Confessions his most readable book; he is a great raconteur, especially about himself). But eventually it began to pall, and a kind of claustrophobia began to accompany reading his work. While he talked about philosophy, literature, and other pursuits that interested me, the punch line was always himself. This same inability to lose himself shows through in “visionary” works like The Vision and the Voice (1910) that, for all its angels and demons, still has Crowley’s ego smack at the center, and it also colors The Book of the Law, which, for all its inspiration, reads like a combination of Oscar Wilde, Nietzsche, and the Marquis de Sade, with some Egyptian motifs thrown in. Crowley famously equated himself with Shakespeare, and although he is capable of insight, generally his remarks about other thinkers are made in order to justify his own colossal self-regard. Once, when disappointed by W. B. Yeats’s lack of enthusiasm for his poetry, Crowley explained that Yeats simply couldn’t admit that he, Crowley, was the better poet. A brief comparison of the two argues against this. Although works like the “Hymn to Pan” do have a strong incantatory power, most of Crowley’s poetry is pretty insipid, even the pornographic works, which reveal a childish fascination with being “naughty,” as do his slightly sick paintings on similar themes.
I also began to tire of Crowley’s inexorable self-justifications, whether it was rationalizing his sadistic, slow murder of a cat when he was fourteen (in order, he said, to observe whether or not it really did have nine lives) or his (for any decent human being) inexcusable conduct during his ill-fated attempt to climb Kangchenjunga, the world’s third-highest mountain. Crowley fell out with the other members of the expedition, and he refused to help when they met with an accident. His attitude was “serves them right,” and several men died. He then withdrew all of the expedition’s funds from the bank and justified himself in a spate of newspaper articles. Similar episodes crowd his turbulent and depressing life. Interestingly, it was only while mountaineering that Crowley experienced anything like a release from his ego and his constant itch to shock the bourgeoisie. He confessed that his “happiest moments were when I was alone on the mountains” and that “the moment the pressure was relieved, every touch of the abnormal was shed off instantly.” He didn’t even feel the need to write poetry, and the experience had nothing to do with magick.
But Crowley never outgrew his petulant spitefulness, a product, no doubt, of his childhood under fanatical Christian fundamentalist parents. But what was the point of discovering his True Will if it basically meant condoning these and other sociopathic acts? Did he really need the gods to OK his acting unforgivably? Crowley was incapable of recognizing that his actions affected other people and that he was accountable for them; in a way this suggests a kind of autism. His philosophy was a nihilistic Buddhism. “Let there be no difference made among you between any one thing & and any other thing,” The Book of the Law declares. “The word of Sin is Restriction.” Crowley recognized no restrictions, and if, as The Book of the Law revealed, there was no difference between one thing and another thing, what difference did it make if he did one thing or another? Which meant, of course, that he might as well do whatever he liked, as the universe condoned it anyway. A handy ethic, no doubt, but not one suited for any kind of spiritual growth. And in case any lingering sense of human sympathy managed to intrude, The Book of the Law was always there. “These are dead, these fellows; they feel not.” “We have nothing with the outcast and the unfit; let them die in their misery.” “Compassion is the vice of kings: stamp down the wretched & the weak.” Much heavy weather has been made about Crowley’s possible Nazi sympathies, and most of it is probably rubbish, but it isn’t difficult to see the similarities between this kind of sensibility and the one that would have Europe in flames a few decades later.
Crowley’s attitude to women is also notorious, but not surprising. When they were Scarlet Women, available for his sex magick, they were useful. Otherwise he had no time for them, and tragically, most of those who entered his life came to a bad end. Crowley abandoned Rose Kelly, his first wife, who helped him receive The Book of the Law, and their daughter, Lilith, in the middle of Asia; Lilith died soon after, and Rose later spent time in a mental asylum. Leah Hirsig, his most compatible Scarlet Woman, once allowed a goat to penetrate her during one of Crowley’s rituals. The animal’s throat was cut at the same time, and she also had the Beast eat her shit. She became a drug addict with Crowley and a prostitute after he dumped her. At least two other Scarlet Women went insane and one other committed suicide. Possibly the only creature Crowley ever loved was the daughter he had with Leah; sadly, she too died at his infamous Abbey of Thelema in Mussolini’s Sicily.
“Intellectually…they did not exist,” was Crowley’s assessment of women, and “it was highly convenient that one’s sexual relations should be with an animal.” (Doubly convenient, then, for Leah and the goat.) Although such remarks, while objectionable, aren’t rare even today, Crowley’s lack of any real friendship even with his male followers again suggests a kind of autism. Once, when his most intelligent disciple, Israel Regardie, complained about some criticism Crowley made of his work, Crowley circulated a letter in which he accused Regardie of suffering from an inferiority complex, chronic constipation, and excessive masturbation, which was only relieved when he caught gonorrhea from a prostitute. Regardie recognized “the nasty, petty, vicious louse” that Crowley was on “the level of practical human relations,” but his admiration for Crowley as a mystic enabled him to separate the man from the magus, an act of fission that Crowley apologists still perform today. But how to forgive the Beast for abandoning the mathematician and devout Thelemite Norman Mudd, who, shattered by Crowley’s betrayal, filled his pockets with stones and drowned himself off the Isle of Guernsey? Or for the death of Raoul Loveday, at Crowley’s Abbey, after drinking the blood of a sacrificed cat? Or for his sadistic treatment of the poet Victor Neuberg, with whom Crowley carried out an evocation of the demon Choronzon in North Africa, which included himself being sodomized? Or for the dozens of friends he left holding the bag or picking up the bill when he was faced with some difficulty or had dined at the most expensive place in town?
It’s tempting to say that all these individuals were weak, neurotic personalities to begin with and that it isn’t Crowley’s fault that they were unsuccessful at life. But then why did he waste his time with them? Surely a man who once announced he had “crossed the Abyss” and become a god—which Crowley apparently did when he claimed he reached the magical grade of Ipsissimus in 1921—would find better things to do? The answer is that Crowley liked having neurotic people around him, because they were susceptible to his domineering personality. The relationships were dysfunctional: he enjoyed impressing his will on other people, and they enjoyed basking in the glow of his dominance and in having someone provide a purpose for their life, however dubious. It’s instructive that Crowley had regard only for people he couldn’t bully, like the mountaineer Oscar Eckenstein and the Buddhist Allan Bennett. And on one occasion when he encountered a personality stronger than his own—during his alleged visit to Gurdjieff’s Fontainebleau Prieuré—the Beast apparently got a bit rattled.
One also has to admit that Crowley’s last days, spent down-at-heel in a somber boardinghouse in Hastings, near the English Channel, were not encouraging. By the time he died at the age of seventy-two in 1947, Crowley was taking enough heroin each day to kill a roomful of nonusers. He had spent the better part of a lifetime doing what he willed, but his final years were full of boredom and regret and pitted with the pains of poverty and ill health.
The drugs were understandable and, if excessive, were not unusual. The sex, too, was obsessive, and we all know people who take advantage of the weak-willed on occasion. And I do owe Crowley a debt of gratitude for introducing me to a canon of literature—the Western esoteric tradition—the study of which has become for me a lifelong pursuit. I hasten to emphasize here that I haven’t once made a criticism of magic or the occult, but of Crowley the man. I almost want to say, “If only he had used his powers for good instead of evil.” But that would be wrong. Crowley wasn’t really evil, just insensitive, selfish, and oblivious to anything except his own raging ego, and getting over that strikes me as the first hurdle in any initiation. I think he was a serious student of magick and really did have some insights into tapping the little-known powers of the will. But that’s no excuse, and I’ve no doubt that, more times than not, he really was a beast.