Of the many so-called occult philosophers, the man born Edward
Alexander Crowley on October 12, 1875, in the same hillside county
which produced Shakespeare, is undoubtedly the most notorious
of them all.
His father had made a small fortune in the production of a family
ale, and subsequently retired from business to devote himself
to the pious preaching of Protestant doctrine. His mother was
equally puritanical, and it was no time at all that this diabolically
spirited lad was spitting in the face of all that his parents
and prevalent society held dear.
While remaining hopelessly undisciplined, even immature in scope,
he lived life on the instinctive edge, driven by an unquenchable
thirst for adventure, iconoclasm, and sexual deviancy. He was
gripped by an urgency and a wanderlust that could be satisfied
only by exerting power over others, especially women. He also
outlasted others of normal vigor by indulging in great quantities
his weakness for hard drugs, and energetically thrashing about
in an endless pursuit of fame.
There is speculation that his future magical powers may have
been refined after hand-crafted fireworks blew up in his face,
rendering him unconscious for ninety-six hours when he was only
sixteen. Again, it seems here almost axiomatic to associate an
early strong shock to the immune system with the emergence of
an intensified personal power, as in the case of other charismatic
occultists, including Casanova.
His roaring animal instincts and abrasive sexual appetites no
doubt contributed to raising within Crowley the understanding
that the practice of magic was somehow linked to the human will,
that is to say, the "true will" without which, man is
merely a dead leaf floating whichever way the breeze happens to
blow.
Throughout his life this inner urge to know all and control all
compelled him in near desperation to explore the outer reaches
of reality as if there were no yesterday and no tomorrow. His
unprecedented selfishness and icy autonomy became trademarks of
his chilling personality. These traits, which were found repugnant
by generally all those who heard of or met him, had the curious
effect of attracting many adoring followers, who inevitably would
suffer bouts of mental and physical exhaustion as a result of
their close association with the psychic master.
These followers, rather than being hostile to the man calling
himself the Beast of the Book of Revelation, fell immediately
under his spell and became more than willing devotees, completely
taken in by his bad boy persona.
Still a youth when he discovered rock climbing, he remained an
avid rock and mountain scaler throughout his life. When he was
nearly thirty, he headed a small expedition up Mount Kanchenjunga.
After reaching a summit of 20,400 feet on the face of the glacier
just below the main peak, the party convened to formally oust
Crowley from his leadership role because of his sadistic cruelty
to the porters and the rest of the crew. Of course Crowley refused
to accept this demotion of rank, causing a disruption and ultimately,
the expedition to be aborted. Everyone except Crowley started
down for the lower camps. A slip in the loose snow set off an
avalanche which buried all the crew except Crowley still mounted
above them.
A Swiss climber managing to free himself began yelling for help
while furiously working to dig out his colleagues. Crowley heard
the pleas for help, but did not trouble himself. That night he
wrote a letter, later published in a London newspaper, noting
that he was not "over-anxious in the circumstances to render
help. A mountain accident of this kind is one of the things for
which I have no sympathy whatever." Several died in the incident,
including all of the porters.
Perhaps the most famous of stories about the strange powers of
Aleister Crowley takes place in New York City. Strolling down
Fifth Avenue with an American writer who asked for a demonstration
of his powers, Crowley, after falling into step behind a distinguished
looking gentleman, suddenly dropped to his knees in a squat. A
split second later he shot up again. The knees of the man he had
been following suddenly buckled, and he toppled to the pavement.
Crowley and the writer helped the man to his feet who searched
about as if looking for a banana peel or something that could
have caused his fall.
No discussion of this man, considered by many in his time to
be the most wicked man on the face of the earth, would be complete
without mentioning his women and the satanic rituals of sex magic
he practised without inhibition for nearly fifty years.
He loved dramatic effect and had fashioned himself as the Beast
of 666 notoriety. Of course, his primary woman at any given time,
by inference, would wear the title and act the role of the Great
Whore of Babylon. While in Mexico City, after much quiet contemplation
and experiment, Crowley, now in his mid-twenties, was finally
completely convinced of his powers, and was ready to expand his
stable of friends and followers.
Returning to England he soon met Rose Kelly, an unevenly pretty
girl of weak mouth and backbone. He suggested she marry him at
once on the condition that they leave the marriage unconsummated.
This idyllic condition was made in order to convince her to affirm
the proposal, and it worked, although within hours of the ceremony,
Crowley would seduce the young female masochist, introducing her
with great flair into his new rites of sexual magic.
Many commentators have pointed to Crowley's lack of natural affection,
his hatred of his mother, his overwhelming self-absorption, his
propensity for boyish shenanigans, and the sadistic strain of
sexual dysfunction he displayed, as the marks of a truly confused
and shallow personality. But perhaps closer to the truth is that
Crowley's natural intelligence had been so suppressed and warped
by his early childhood that his own outrageous sense of humor
led him to take digs at, or defy, whatever standard he confronted,
less interested in forming a philosophy or lifestyle free from
contradiction than he was in retaining the satisfaction his private
joke gave to him, and him alone.
Crowley was at heart a jester and an actor, a satirical playwright
busy dramatizing the foibles the world of magic and showmanship
presented him. He wrote many volumes of magical instruction and
religious parable. His Book of the Law can be condensed
into the single epigraph "Do what thou wilt" echoing
a theme of Francois Rabelais some 350 years earlier. The importance
of this simple creed is stressed again and again by Crowley throughout
his life.
Until late in life he seemed to be able to manage his excesses
by sheer force of will. After a typical period of Crowleyesque
debauchery, he one day declared it was time for him to spend forty
days and forty nights in the wilderness. Being broke, some friends
staked him to a stash of money, a canoe, and a tent. Upon his
departure, to their surprise, they found that he'd spent every
dime on buckets of scarlet tinted paint and a few bundles of heavy
gauge rope.
Concerned for his welfare, Crowley asserted that, like Elijah,
the ravens would feed him, and he would want for nothing. In an
act vaguely suggestive of Christo, the geo-artist of our own time,
Crowley spent the entire holiday scaffolded to the cliffs south
of Kingston, New York, painting the words "EVERY MAN AND
WOMAN IS A STAR. DO WHAT THOU WILT IS THE WHOLE OF THE LAW"
in enormous scarlet letters. He said later that he did not go
hungry, but was made a gift of eggs, milk, and corn by neighboring
farmers. Completely restored, he'd rarely looked healthier or
more radiant than when he returned back to the city.
Crowley was always impersonating and assuming false identities,
usually but not always of a royal or ancient mystical nature.
He used many titles claiming they were bestowed by European or
Hindu aristocracy, but evidence in this regard has never been
recovered. He was quick to share his newly gained titles or pseudonyms
with his women of the moment, conferring the equivalent feminine
form upon them.
His wife Rose, after a few years with Crowley, seemed to have
discovered a few mystical powers within herself, and even began
to instruct him by telepathy and in ritual concerning the Egyptian
spirit Horus. Rose bore her husband a couple of children before
she trailed off into severe alcoholism and subsequent insanity.
Toward the end of their marriage, Crowley frequently entertained
a string of enchanted mistresses in their home, while Rose was
hung by her heels in the wardrobe. He later divorced her, as her
mental stability finally slipped away.
His prolific if somewhat unoriginal writings and mild fame were
easily counterbalanced by a series of conservative attacks on
the man and his lifestyle. Spending his way through his own inherited
fortune and several of his followers' financial graces, Crowley
finally developed a taste for civil suit litigation to help ease
his prevailing poor pockets, but was not very successful. The
absurd irony of using the conservative courts to help line his
pockets in an age of great contempt in the mainstream for such
foolishness as he himself indulged never seemed to restrict or
embarrass him.
But the parade of men and women who were starved for his dark
attentions hardly ceased. He continued to perform his sexual rites
with young society freaks of all stripes including a companion
of Isadora Duncan who needed to be beaten to achieve satisfaction.
After shaving his domed skull and sharpening his front canine
teeth to a bloodletting point, elaborate rituals employing sodomy,
defecation, and both physical and mental sadism punctuated his
devilish approach to the string of aristocratic female disciples
who traipsed to the Satanic Temple he founded.
As mentioned earlier, Crowley was never in lack of someone to
play his Great Whore. Just before the end of World War I, a pair
of homely sisters made visit. The younger one was named Leah.
Her thin gangly build, challenged by a wide mouth full of sharp
chalky teeth, immediately magnetized Crowley. He rushed over in
"pure instinct" (his own words), and began violently
smothering her with his own lips, grabbing violently at her flat
breasts.
The outrageous attention given her was not rebuked. She was soon
modeling nude for a heuristic painting Crowley dubbed "Dead
Souls". She became his next scarlet woman, and help move
Aleister into his next creative period: that of artist on canvas.
He filled the walls of the Abbey of Theleme in Italy, where they
convalesced, with paintings of couples en flagrante.
His philosophy became self-indulgent and unfettered. Facing his
own drug addiction, he countered with every ounce of intellectual
bamboozle he could muster, launching a personal spin on the fleshly
arts which dictated that skillful practitioners could only reject
the compulsion for drugs by taking them without restraint, thus
vanquishing the need for them. Having given the word, he spred
piles of cocaine around the abode, for anyone with the urge to
inhale.
Crowley, never to miss a step, was certainly a man of his times.
Funds became scarce but his name more prominent, so to help feed
the steady flow of visitors seeking out this spokesman of the
magical arts he tried to seduce money from publishers by offering
his memoirs, and an idea for a book he called the Diary of a
Drug Fiend, which might be said to anticipate the focus of several
books of that era, including the first writings of William S.
Burroughs, just a few years away. There were few takers.
Crowley died on December 5, 1947, after his lifelong peace of
mind had begun to give way to doubts, alcoholism, and unchecked
heroin addiction. His name is still synonymous with unbridled
or pure undiluted evil, although it is likely he was far less
evil than any number of military leaders of various stripes whose
names are celebrated as heroic. But such are the pitfalls of fame
and the human whimsy.
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