Aleister Crowley: Magick, Rock and Roll, and the Wickedest Man in the World Read online

  By 1980 I had outgrown Crowley, but not magic, the occult, or esotericism. If anything, my interest in these had increased. I moved back to New York and it was there that I left the Crowley group, and that my interest in esotericism turned elsewhere.3 It was also there that my musical career ended. My own band, the Know (the name came from my interest in Gnosticism), hadn’t secured a recording contract, and in 1981 I played guitar with Iggy Pop on two North American tours. Afterward I discovered that, hard to believe, I was tired of sex, drugs, and rock and roll and for a time was adrift.4 In 1982 I moved back to LA and began the slow, sometimes painful transformation from pop star to normal person.

  It wasn’t until a decade later that I started writing articles and book reviews for Gnosis magazine and other journals. In 1996 I moved to London, and in 2001 my first book, Turn Off Your Mind, an “occult history” of the 1960s, came out. Crowley is a kind of éminence grise throughout the book, his influence permeating much of the mystic decade, and I also wrote a short essay on him for a later book, A Dark Muse, about the occult and literature. In London’s occult milieu I met many people interested in Crowley. In 2008 I wrote an article on Crowley for Fortean Times, spelling out my criticisms.5 In 2009 I was asked to host the Occulture Festival, a revue of occult and magical performances, mostly of a Crowleyan nature. In the same year, I wrote a long essay on Kenneth Anger, a filmmaker deeply influenced by Crowley, for the British Film Institute’s DVD box set of his films, and interviewed Anger onstage at London’s National Film Theatre. And in 2011 and 2012 with some musician friends, I performed a live sound track to Rex Ingram’s 1926 silent film The Magician, which is based on Somerset Maugham’s novel of the same name, and which features a black magician modeled on Crowley. I also gave lectures in London and Trondheim, Norway, on Crowley’s impact on horror films, and contributed an essay about him for a book about his last days.6 So although I was no longer a fan of the Beast, I still moved in his circles, so to speak.

  It was while researching my essay for the book about Crowley’s last days that I noticed that something had changed in the way he was being perceived. Over the years an academic interest in the occult had sprung up and I was surprised to discover there was such a thing as “Crowley studies,” with conferences and symposiums dedicated to the Beast. In fact, I gave a talk at one of these, sponsored by the O.T.O.7 Crowley was becoming respectable, at least in academic circles, a complete change from how he was perceived when I first read him. Even as prestigious a publisher as the Oxford University Press had published a collection of academic articles on the Beast—ironic, as in 1930 Crowley had been banned from giving a lecture at Oxford.8 Several new biographies had appeared, all of which seemed aimed at rehabilitating Crowley, at least at exonerating him of the worst stains on his reputation. Their basic message was that the Devil is not as black as he is painted, and at least one of them runs a close second to Crowley’s own “hagiography” (biography of a saint), the Confessions, in singing his praises and celebrating him as one of the most important thinkers and mystics of the twentieth century.

  I wondered: was I missing something? I had by then written about several major figures in the esoteric world, critical studies of Rudolf Steiner, Madame Blavatsky, P. D. Ouspensky, and C. G. Jung. Although popular and influential, none of them had made the same impact on “youth culture” as Crowley had—none, that is, had found themselves a posthumous life as a pop icon as the Beast had clearly become. Today, the image of Crowley with shaven head and bulging eyes that the Beatles put on the cover of Sgt. Pepper’s is almost as familiar as that of Marilyn Monroe or Che Guevara. One can almost see Crowley as the subject of one of Andy Warhol’s famous celebrity prints, and T-shirts with Crowley’s image are almost as familiar as those with the Ramones. Why had Crowley found a secure place in pop iconography, when other spiritual teachers from the mystic decade—like Jung and Blavatsky—had not? After all, it was in that milieu that I first discovered him. And why was the general attitude toward him changing? Was Crowley really the victim of the yellow press, of rumor and downright falsehood, as much of the new literature on him claimed? Was he a misunderstood genius, a maligned philosophical warrior fighting for mankind’s spiritual liberation? Was he so ahead of his time that only a handful of followers could appreciate his message? Did he really bring to humanity a sacred scripture, revealed to him by an alien intelligence that, at least according to him, was so beyond our human mind as to be practically incomprehensible? And was he the prophet of a world religion, thelema (Greek for “will”), that presaged an orgiastic new age, in which a free mankind would celebrate light, life, liberty, and love, the coming era of “the crowned and conquering child”?

  My own belief is no. As odd as it sounds, Crowley, I think, really didn’t know his own true will and spent a lifetime pursuing a phantom. He was a man of great talent, frequent brilliance, and occasional genius who wasted himself in an adolescent rage against authority and a justification of every whim of his insatiable ego. Crowley’s life is full of tragedies but this may be the most tragic thing of all. The Chinese philosopher Mencius said that the great man follows the part of himself that is great, the little man follows the part of himself that is little. Crowley had equal parts of both, and it was the part of him that was great that inspired loyalty in followers and friends and fueled him when faced with failure and defeat. But when it came down to the wire, more times than not, Crowley followed the part of himself that was little. As his friend Louis Wilkinson said, he was “a great man manqué,” something that in rare moments of insight, Crowley himself recognized.9 Crowley could master the arts of magick, could discipline himself to the rigors of meditation and yoga, and could face the elements with a fortitude most of us could not muster. But when it came to the most difficult challenge of all, his relations with other human beings, Crowley invariably took the line of least resistance, opting for the easy tactic of putting the blame for his own shortcomings onto someone else. He may not have been “the wickedest man in the world,” as John Bull, a British tabloid of the 1920s, dubbed him, but it seems he often tried to fit that bill. Crowley could climb Himalayas of the earth and mind, but as most people familiar with his life discover, he fell perilously short at the Great Work of being human.

  If this was all there was to Crowley, there would be little reason to study him. Egotists are not rare, and all of us fall short of what we could be. It is the other side of Crowley that makes him interesting, that side interested in exploring the unknown regions of ourselves. He had a vague insight that humanity sells itself short, and that we could all be so much more. It was this that first drew me to him. It is also this that raises questions. How Crowley went about discovering that more warrants criticism. He is, I believe, a kind of “test case” for a philosophy of life that has become the default alternative to the bland “normality” he did everything he could to outrage. It is a philosophy and ethic that, for sake of a better term, I call “liberationist.” Its message is that if we can only rid ourselves of all repression, all inhibitions, all hang-ups, all authority, then the Golden Age will miraculously appear. It is an antinomian philosophy (“against the norms”) that reaches for some ethos “beyond good and evil.” Crowley is not its only representative; he has a place in a pantheon of characters that includes the Marquis de Sade, Arthur Rimbaud, Georges Bataille, Charles Manson, Jim Morrison, Kurt Cobain, and countless other individuals who wanted to “let it all hang out,” to “break on through to the other side” and “transgress.” But he is the one who took it to its extreme, and by doing so, showed that it doesn’t work. I believe we owe him a debt of thanks for this.

  Crowley did have insight into the hidden powers of the mind and into that strange other reality he called “magick,” and in his own tumultuous way, he tried to awaken the sleeping godhead inside himself and in others. How successful he was is debatable. To my mind Crowley is more of a symptom than a prophet, and an object lesson in how not to find one’s “true will,” whatever tha
t ambiguous phrase may mean. In this critical look at the Great Beast, I will try to show why this is so.

  ONE

  THE UNFORGIVABLE SIN

  In recent years visitors to London’s National Portrait Gallery may have wondered about a painting that was added to its collection in 2003. There amid portraits of Winston Churchill, Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, Frederick Delius, Ralph Vaughan Williams, Ernest Shackleton, Ernest Rutherford, and other important British figures is a striking canvas whose bright colors and unusual subject jump out at the viewer. The portrait shows its subject in a yogic pose, the fingers of both hands curled in a chin mudra, a meditative gesture designed to aid in pranayama, a breathing technique to gather the vital force, or prana, in the body. A bright red robe drapes over the figure, his dark hair and eyebrows contrasting strongly with the golden-yellow backdrop, and a single black forelock offers a faint suggestion of a horn. Not much is known about the artist, Leon Engers Kennedy, but like his subject he was interested in mysticism, magic, and the stranger side of life. The portrait was done in New York in 1917, during the subject’s difficult years in America, and a look at the biographical note tells us that he was a writer, mountaineer, and occultist. He also had a taste for adopting names, at different times calling himself the Master Therion, the Great Beast 666, and Baphomet.

  The portrait is of Aleister Crowley although the curators, no doubt sticklers for accuracy, have him down as “Edward Alexander (‘Aleister’) Crowley,” a name that on some occasions, usually legal ones, he did, in fact, use. When I visited the gallery not too long ago for the first time in some years and came upon Crowley’s image, the same one used as the frontispiece for Vol. III No. I of his magical magazine The Equinox (the “blue Equinox” as it is called), I was surprised that it was there, and at first couldn’t believe it. The National Portrait Gallery was established in 1856 with the idea of collecting portraits of “famous British men and women.” But surely Crowley wasn’t just famous. He was infamous. A black magician, drug addict, sexual pervert, traitor, and all-around troublemaker—Crowley, famous? That the curators of a gallery designed to house Britain’s best and brightest should include the “wickedest man in the world” struck me as odd, almost aberrant. It was as if they had discovered a portrait of Jack the Ripper and decided to hang that, too.

  Crowley was no Ripper, although there is more than a little suspicion that he was responsible for some deaths, and Crowley himself went out of his way to suggest this. Yet during the height of Crowley’s infamy, in the 1920s and ’30s, the idea that his portrait could hang in the same room as the painter Roger Fry, the socialite Lady Ottoline Morrell, and the biologist Julian Huxley (brother of Aldous Huxley) as an example of a famous Briton would have been unthinkable. He was indeed “A Man We’d Like to Hang,” as an article in the newspaper John Bull, which had a peculiar hatred of Crowley, called him, but certainly not in that way.1 More likely Crowley’s portrait would have found a place on Scotland Yard’s “most wanted” list, if John Bull and the other scandal sheets that “exposed” his exploits had it their way. Nevertheless, I had to chuckle. Although Crowley did practically everything he could to disgust and infuriate the British society he loathed with an often tedious obstinancy, he also always wanted its acceptance, and to be taken for what he never quite was: an English gentleman. I wondered, assuming he still existed in some sentient form in the cosmos—he was a great believer in reincarnation and claimed quite a few prestigious names for his past lives—musn’t he be chuckling, too, seeing that he had finally been accepted into the club that for the longest time wouldn’t have him as a member?

  If we have any doubt that the Great Beast is finding a new place for himself in British history, we have only to look at the 2002 BBC Poll of the Top 100 Britons. Crowley came in at number 73, beating out J.R.R. Tolkien, Johnny Rotten, Chaucer, and Sir Walter Raleigh, among others. Crowley is in danger of becoming just another English eccentric, which is how the British public usually neutralizes some challenge to its complacency.2 When I mentioned this to a friend, he added that the next step is to be deemed a national treasure. With Crowley’s image hanging among the portraits of many other national treasures, it looks like he is indeed on his way.

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  THAT CROWLEY was an egotist and mistreated the people in his life—was, indeed, wicked—are not the most important aspects of his career. Other less interesting characters have done the same without having Crowley’s flashes of genius, although, to be sure, Crowley’s ignominy was considerable. Yet for all his inexcusable behavior, Crowley was not “evil,” in the sense that, say, Sherlock Holmes’s adversary, Professor Moriarty, was, or the black magicians of the many occult horror films that Crowley inspired were. Crowley was not evil, only insensitive, selfish, and driven by a hunger he seemed unable to satisfy and an incorrigible need to be distracted. He seems an embodiment of the religious thinker Blaise Pascal’s remark that “All human evil comes from a single cause, man’s inability to sit still in a room.” Crowley never sat still in a room, or anywhere else. One of the most telling remarks Crowley ever made was in a letter he wrote in 1905 to his then friend and soon to be brother-in-law, the artist Gerald Kelly. In the midst of a complaint about wasting the last five years of his life on “weakness, miscalled politeness, tact, discretion, care for the feeling of others”—a mistake he would not make again—and a rejection of Christianity, rationalism, Buddhism, and “all the lumber of the centuries,” Crowley speaks of a “positive and primeval fact, Magic”—he had not yet added the k—with which he will build “a new Heaven and a new Earth.” “I want none of your faint approval or faint dispraise,” he told Kelly. “I want blasphemy, murder, rape, revolution, anything good or bad, but strong.”3 Crowley needed “strong” things. Nothing could touch him unless it was “strong.” Crowley had to have a lot of sex and it had to be wild; the women he had it with had to be seething with “forbidden lust” of the kind associated with the Marquis de Sade or the poet Baudelaire, and the men he had it with had to humiliate him and bend him to their will. He had to have a lot of drugs; famously, by the end of his life he was taking enough heroin to kill a room full of nonusers. He had to have a lot of drink; he was known to hold an eye-watering amount of liquor. And he had to have a lot of experiences. Crowley’s life was one long hunt for “experiences.” As his biographer and critic John Symonds remarked, Crowley “needed some strong or horrific experience to get ‘turned on.’”4 Most people, as Symonds remarks, are “turned on”—become interested in something—by sitting at home, reading a book, listening to music, or watching a film. That is, most people embody some form of Pascal’s “sitting still in a room.” Crowley’s need for constant “strong” stimulation suggests that he lacked imagination and that his mind, formidable as it was, was curiously literal. Crowley seems, I think, to have suffered from a kind of autism. I don’t necessarily mean in some pathological sense, but he seemed to lack the kind of nuanced, “tacit knowing” that most of us enjoy and that allows us to grasp the essence or meaning of some idea or experience, without having to go to extremes or into precise detail in order to “get it.” Crowley only got it by going to extremes. In fact, as his friend Louis Wilkinson, who shared with Crowley some of his worst traits, remarked, Crowley’s “cult, his mania, one might say, was for excess in all directions.”5 Crowley was not evil, but his need for excess, for “strong” things, more times than not, was a source of suffering for those around him.

  It may be this characteristic that leads some of Crowley’s recent biographers to remark that his credo of “Do what thou wilt,” “so redolent, seemingly, of license and anarchy, dark deeds and darker dreams, terrifies on first impact, as does Crowley the man,” and that one must feel “terror, a sense of evil, creepiness or disgust” at the mention of his name.6 This seems a bit extreme itself. With the possible exception of some fundamentalist Christians, I can’t think of anyone who is afraid of Crowley anymore, let alone terrified, or who is so conventional or represse
d that they will “experience visceral disgust at the thought of sexual emissions as sacred components of worship,” as Crowley and those who practiced his sex magick thought of them.7 We live in an “anything goes” society, whose central maxim, “Just Do It,” has been embraced by some contemporary Crowleyans.8 A great deal of what Crowley got up to is today par for the course, and the extreme behavior he indulged in is, more or less, commonplace. But the important question is: does one have to be frightened of thelema, the name of Crowley’s religion of excess, in order to question it? It strikes me that in order to portray Crowley as some liberator of an uptight mankind—as some of his champions do—our “fear” of the shocking truths he was sent to reveal must be puffed up, and a kind of straw Mr. Conventional must be erected, who trembles at the thought of anyone doing their “true will.” Such imaginary Mrs. Grundys are, in fact, necessary for a philosophy of “transgression.”9 They are the windmills against which such radical behavior tilts. It needs them to rebel against; without them, it collapses, its “acts of liberation” deflating to mere personal predilections, its “transgressions” indicating little more than that the people engaging in them have a taste for such things. But no such persons exist, only people who wonder if the kind of life Crowley led is really worth living. I have never been afraid of my or anyone else’s “true will,” and I have lived in both the magical and rock and roll milieus that provide fertile soil for those who are pursuing theirs. This is why I can be critical of Crowley and the liberationist philosophy he embodied—thelema is only one expression of it; it is not a distinctive new creed—and not be dismissed as someone terrified of it. I have been there, done it, and seen it from the inside. I am not a thelemaphobe, to coin a word. I merely find it wrongheaded.