Aleister Crowley's Hippie Movement

Aleister Crowley died in 1947 aged seventy-two. recently the Beatles, have added him to their escutcheon:

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Crowley stands between an Indian holy man (unnamed) and Mae West in a composite photograph of People we like' which decorates the sleeve of the Beatles' long-playing record, 'Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band.'[2]

Crowley was the head of two major magical organizations and of several minor ones; he was the author of a brilliant book called Magick, which is a manual for those who wish to practise this difficult and dangerous art[3]; and he was in the tradition of the great magicians of the past — Dr John Dee, Cagliostro, Count Saint-Germain, Eliphas Levi, Madame Blavatsky.

He was born in 1875. Two other events of significance to occultists happened in that year: the Theosophical Society was founded by Madame Blavatsky and others, and Eliphas Levi, the Cabbalist and mage, died.

Crowley made out that he was descended from Norman aristocrats, and mentioned the Breton family, de Querouaille, as if the name Crowley were a corruption of that name.

He claimed Louise de Keroualle, Duchess of Portsmouth, as one of his ancestors; also the sixteenth-century poet and preacher, Robert Crowley, on no evidence at all. It would have been more pertinent to tell us something of his grandparents, whom he studiously ignored. It so happened that his father, Edward Crowley, whom he called an engineer, was a brewer, and the family fortune came from 'Crowley ales', a fact which creeps into his autobiography in an oblique way.

By the time Aleister was born, his father was well advanced in middle age, and spent his time travelling about the countryside, preaching Plymouthism to anyone who would listen to him.

The Plymouth Brethren sect was founded about 1830 by John Nelson Darby, an Irish clergyman who was barrister before he went into the Church.

The Brethren believed that they ey were the only true Christians; they considered the idea of ordained ministers contrary to the teaching of Scripture; the Bible was literally true; Christ's Second Coming was imminent; the Elect would inherit the Kingdom of God. Out of this background emerged Aleister Crowley, the Beast 666.

At first, he was a devout little Plymouth Brother, taking turns with his parents and the servants in reading passages from the Bible

Plymouthism was the only true faith. He could not, he said, even conceive of the existence of people who were so foolish or so wicked as to doubt it.

In his childish ardour he thought of himself as a Christian knight, doing deeds of holiness and valour.

As he grew older his ideas took a strange turn. He had always preferred the sounds of the Hebrew names to the actual biblical narratives; now any description of torture or blood aroused his feelings tremendously.

He liked to imagine himself in agony and, in particular, degraded by, and suffering at the hands of, a woman whom he described as 'wicked, independent, courageous, ambitious, and so on'. He fell in love with the False Prophet, the Beast whose number is 666, and the Scarlet Woman.

And suddenly, after the death of his father — he was then eleven years old — he discovered that his sympathies were entirely on the side of the enemies of heaven. He had gone over to Satan, and did not know why. He was still searching for the reason when he came to write his autobiography at the age of forty-seven.

Crowley was a contemporary of Freud; he grew out of the matrix of Victorianism with its rosy view of the world, and its medieval ideal of beauty and of God.

He was one of many who helped to tear down the false, hypo-critical, self-righteous attitudes of the time.

His account of his early life in a Plymouth Brethren household is no less remarkable than Edmund Gosse's.[4] What, however, is peculiar in Crowley's case is not that he chose 'evil' but that, in his revolt against his parents and God, he set himself up in God's place.

"Why do you call yourself the Beast?" I asked him on the occasion of our first meeting.

"My mother called me the Beast," he replied to my surprise.

He went to Malvern and Tonbridge public schools; his health broke down at Tonbridge, due partly to having 'caught the clap from a prostitute in Glasgow' (as he wrote in the margin of his own copy of The World's Tragedy, privately published, 191o, his first attempt at autobiography).

He published his first book of verse while an undergraduate at Trinity College: Aceldama, A Place to Bury Strangers in.

A Philosophical Poem. By a Gentleman of the University of Cambridge, 1898. It carried this odd preface which foreshadowed his future interests and the ambiguous direction he was going in:

It was a windy night, that memorable seventh night of December, when this philosophy was born in me.

How the grave old professor wondered at my ravings ! I had called at his house, for he was a valued friend of mine, and I felt strange thoughts and emotions shake within me. Ah! how I raved! I called to him to trample me, he would not. We passed together into the stormy night.

I was on horseback, how I galloped round him in my phrenzy, till he became the prey of real physical fear !

How I shrieked out I know not what strange words ! And the poor good old man tried all he could to calm me; he thought I was mad ! The fool ! I was in the death struggle with self: God and Satan fought for my soul those three long hours. God conquered — now I have only one doubt left — which of the twain was God?

Mountaineering was another of his passions. He climbed in the Lake District, on Beachy Head and in Switzerland; and he was a master of that esoteric game called chess who can ever get to the bottom of chess? — had played in two matches against Oxford and won his chess half-Blue.

He had taken to wearing pure silk shirts and great floppy bow-knotted ties; on his fingers were rings of semi-precious stones. An atmosphere of luxury, studiousness and harsh effort pervaded his rooms at Cambridge. Books covered the walls to the ceiling and filled four revolving walnut bookcases. They were largely on science and philosophy, with a modest collection of Greek and Latin classics, and a sprinkling of French and Russian novels. On one shelf shone the black and gold of The Arabian Nights of Richard Burton; below was the flat canvas and square label of the Keimscott Chaucer. Valuable first editions of the British poets stood beside extravagantly bound volumes issued by Isidor Liseux. Over the door hung an ice-axe with worn-down spike and ragged shaft, and in the corner was a canvas bag containing a salmon rod. Leaded Staunton chessmen were in their mahogany box upon a card-table scattered with poker chips.

The 'Gentleman of the University of Cambridge' was prolific: he had quickly followed Aceldama with The Tale of Archais, then Jephthah, A Tragedy; the pseudonym was borrowed from Shelley, whose The Necessity of Atheism, 1811, was by a Gentleman of the University of Oxford, During 1898 he was also responsible for a more pretentious production, White Stains, Mr Peter rryer considers the most disgusting piece of erotica in the English language; it bears on the title-page the name of Crowley's pious uncle, George Archibald Bishop, 'A Neuropatli of the Second Empire' and is now a rare book. Crowley prefaced the work with a statement which expressed his contempt: "The Editor hopes that Mental Pathologists, for whose eyes alone this treatise is destined, will spare no precautions to prevent it falling into other hands." He had inherited a fortune — the size of which he exaggerated — and could afford these extravagant jests.

He thought of entering the Foreign Office, but decided against it: he wanted to be someone really great, whose name would be remembered as long as life lasted on this planet; he was unlikely to achieve this in the Diplomatic Service by devotion to duty.

The problem of what he should do with his life was solved by reading The Book of Black Magic and of Pacts. In the preface to this work, the author, Arthur Edward Waite, referred to certain occult sanctuaries run by a body of initiates who dispense Truth and Wisdom to the worthy postulant. Crowley wrote to Waite, asking for more information. Waite replied, telling him to read Eckartshausen's The Cloud upon the Sanctuary. Eckartshausen confirmed what Waite had hinted at: behind the exterior church is an interior church, the most hidden of all communities, a Secret Sanctuary which preserves all the mysteries of God and nature. It was formed immediately after the fall of man. It is the hidden assembly of the Elect.

In Zermatt during 1898, Crowley met a certain Julian L. Baker, and growing friendly with Mr Baker he told him about his search for the Brotherhood of Initiates who jealously guard the perfect knowledge of God, nature and humanity. Mr Baker offered to help, and when they returned to England he introduced Crowley to George Cecil Jones who was a member of a magical organization called the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn. Jones could perhaps help Crowley to find the Secret Sanctuary. Jones introduced him to MacGregor Mathers, the head of the Golden Dawn and at the turn of the century the most talented magician in the West. He was the Master Crowley was looking for.

Crowley began his career of magic as a Neophyte in the Golden Dawn, which was the First or Outer Order of the Great White Brotherhood;[5] he quickly rose to the highest grade that of Philosophus) in the Outer Order. He discovered that he had a remarkable aptitude for magic; this he later ascribed to his previous incarnations. He caught glimpses of these incarnations during his deep yoga meditations on 'Oesopus Island' in America during 1918. Not only had he been Eliphas Levi — there was just enough time for Levi's liberated spirit to have descended into the womb of Mrs Crowley — but also the great magician Cagliostro in the incarnation before that; and John Dee's skryer, Edward Kelly, before Cagliostro, and the vicious, pleasure-loving Pope Alexander VI before him. (This last-mentioned incarnation would explain Crowley's insatiable curiosity about every aspect of sex.)

He left Cambridge without sitting for a degree, set himself up in a flat in Chancery Lane, and called himself Count Vladimir Svareff. In separate rooms in his Chancery Lane flat he made two temples — one white, one black. They represented the twin pillars of the Light and the Dark, jachin and Boaz.

The white temple was lined with six large looking-glasses to throw back the forces of the invocations (so that nothing of the force was lost) the black temple was empty except for a human skeleton and a large cupboard, in which stood an altar supported by the figure of an ebony Negro standing on his hands.

And both rooms had their magic circle, triangle, and pentagrams inscribed on the floor. In addition to being the Head of the Golden Dawn, Mathers was the Head of the Second Order in the Great White Brotherhood, a Rosicrucian order called the Order of the Red Rose and the Golden Cross.

It was not long before Crowley was hammering on the door of the Second Order.

There was yet another order within the Great White Brotherhood, the top order; it bore the name of the Silver Star or A∴ A∴ (Argenteum Astrum). This contained three exalted grades — Master of the Temple, Magus, and Ipsissimus — to none of which Mathers had attained. And for the very good reason that they were on the other side of the Abyss; only the most stalwart and enlightened of Aspirants can cross the Abyss.

But by whose authority did this mystical organization, this Great White Brotherhood, exist? It obviously could not exist solely by the authority of its members; it would then have been no different from an ordinary Masonic Fraternity. The answer to this important question is that the authority of the First and Second Orders, i.e. the Golden Dawn, and the Red Rose and Golden Cross, resided in the Secret Chiefs, the upper and inner circle of the Great White Brotherhood.

Madame Blavatsky had come up against the same problem. She was merely an intellectual and a medium; by herself she could do little. The siddhis, or feats, she performed, to the amazement of Anglo-Indian society of the 188os, were made possible by the magical current which sustained her and which was derived from her Secret Chiefs, Koot Hoomi and Morya, who lived in the vastness of Tibet. She first met a Secret Chief or, to use her term, a Hidden Master, beside the Serpentine in Hyde Park one moonlit night during 1851, the year of the Great Exhibition.

In 1886 a Secret Chief of the grade of Master of the Temple (living Germany under the guise of Fraulein Anna Sprengel) gave Mathers and colleagues a charter to establish the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn. And after the Golden Dawn had been split from top to bottom and Mathers' authority was being disputed, his leadership of the First and Second or was confirmed by three Secret Chiefs whom he met in the Bois de Boulogne or so he said. Crowley disbelieved him, swore that Deo Duce Cornice Ferro ("With God as my Leader and the Sword as my Companion") to mention one of Mathers' magical names, had only banged into three evil spirits. But saying this did not help Crowley.

The only actual magic which Mathers performed, apart from employing elementals in attacks on Crowley, was to still a storm; it is not surprising therefore that Crowley, who was far more ambitious, should have quarrelled with him, and struck out on his own, taking with him, of course, all the weapons in Mathers' armoury he could lay his hands on. Crowley also quarrelled with the rank and file of the Order, and with W. B. Yeats, whom he accused of being jealous of his superior talent as a poet, and was virtually expelled from the Order.

The most important of these weapons was the Rosicrucian system of the Great White Brotherhood, and the magic of Abra-Melin which Mathers had brought to light and published. The first was the party apparatus, the second the philosophy and driving force. Crowley therefore took from Mathers everything, except a following, necessary for a successful career as a magician.

If you wish to perform the operation of conjuring up your Holy Guardian Angel, says the Egyptian Mage, Abra-Melin, you must first of all construct an oratory in a secluded place. Where should Crowley construct his oratory? His flat in Chancery Lane was far too noisy. In search of a suitable spot, he wandered about the Lake District and into Scotland, and in August 1899 he found Boleskine House near the village of Foyers. Loch Ness lay before it and a hill behind it; it was remote; the view was magnificent; it was ideal for the practice of Abra-Melin magic.

The full title of the manuscript which Mathers had found in the Biblio-theque de l'Arsenai in Paris, translated (from the French) and published, is The Book of the Sacred Magic of Abra-Melin the Mage, as delivered by Abraham the Jew unto his son Lamech, A.D. 1458. There is no general ritual in this work as in other grimoires; there is only a list of several hundred spirits (angels and demons) to be evoked, and talismans to be used for such magical purpose as raising or quelling storms, finding hidden treasure, inflaming lust between persons of the magician's choosing. The spirit inquestions after it has been ceremonially evoked, vitalizes the talisman which has been duly con-secrated. The whole system is only possible after the aspirant has established communion with his Holy Guardian Angel, i.e. his True Self. It is the Holy Guardian Angel who imparts the method to be employed for this or that purpose. The book of the sacred magic of Abra-Melin (or Abramelin, or Abrahamelin, or Abramelim) is therefore sealed with seven seals. Everything depends upon the H. G. A., and his intercession is impossible without six months' intense ceremonial purification. In other words, Abra-Melin magic is a kind of yoga, producing psychic transformation. Crowley described it as the one startling exception to all the puerile nonsense written on the subject.

Crowley made his oratory in a room facing north and began the operation at once. After some months of concentrated effort, he partially succeeded. He says that a host of demons were attracted, some of which materialized; they caused a great deal of disturbance and damage among tradespeople and others in the neighbourhood. But he did not obtain complete success in the operation — that is, knowledge of and conversatiou with his Holy Guardian Angel or True Self — till a few years later.

He married, produced a child and more volumes of poetry and erotica. He hurried off to Mexico and, with his friend Oscar Eckenstein, climbed Ixtaccihuatl and Popocatapetl. A year later, in 1902, he joined Eckenstein's expedition to Chogo Ri: at that time all the great peaks in the Himalayas were unconquered and had hardly been attempted. Eckenstein, who was of German-Jewish extraction, devised a new type of crampons, or climbing irons, which enabled mountaineers to dispense with the laborious work of cutting steps in the ice. He was seventeen years older than Crowley. In a letter written in 1924 to Harry Doughty, Crowley summed up Eckenstein as a climber: 'Eckenstein, provided he could get three fingers on something that could be described by a man far advanced in hashish as a ledge, would be smoking his pipe on that ledge a few seconds later, and none of us could tell how he had done it.' Crowley had great affection for Oscar Eckenstein.

Eckenstein, as far as I know, did not record his opinion of Crowley as a climber, but we have the view of Dr Tom George Longstaff, President of the Alpine Club from 1947 to 1949. Crowley was 'a fine climber, if an uncon-ventional one. I have seen him go up the dangerous and difficult right (true) side of the great ice fall of the Mer de Glace below the Geant alone, just for a promenade. Probably the first and perhaps the only time this mad, dangerous and difficult route had been taken.'[6] Crowley's own brief account of this climb, in which Dr Longstaff is mentioned, is in Chapter 25 of the present work.

In 1904, the Abra-Melin Operation flowered and Crowley's Holy Guardian Angel, Aiwass, appeared — not, however, to enter into conversation with him, but to dictate The Book of the Law. He treated this profoundly significant event in a very quiet way, as if he did not quite believe it; he merely announced to a few friends and acquaintances, like Arnold Bennett, that the old world of Christianity had collapsed, and that a "New Aeon" for mankind had begun.

Crowley has written a great deal about The Book of the Law in these Confessions. This was unavoidable, for the Book is the heart of his creed and the turning point of his career. Without the Law of Thelema (which is embodied in the Book), he would just have been a minor Eliphas Levi or MacGregor Mathers, one of the many who studied the mysteries and practiced the magic of Abra-Melin or the Enochian system John Dee or some other magical system. The Book was the force which enabled him to cross the Abyss, and to go on to become a Magus proclaim his word,[7] as Allah and Buddha proclaimed theirs.

If we are to believe him, he crossed the Abyss in 1909 and appeared won the ap other side with the grade of Master of the Temple, that is to saycentre,hehaodf united his consciousness with the universal consciousness, shifted the gravity from himself to God. Thus he had found the Secret Sanctuary of the Saints or the abode of the Secret Chiefs, and become one of them; he had succeeded in his quest. His poetry and exploits on mountains are insignificant beside this. He could dash off a successful kind of music-hall song, like 'La Gitana', and evocative verses for magic rituals like his 'Hymn to Pan', which he thought 'the most powerful enchantment ever written' — it certainly has a spell-binding quality about it; but he lacked the equipment for the higher flights of poetry. And he failed to climb Kangchenjunga, was driven back by the demon who protects the Five Sacred Peaks (the local name for Kang-chenjunga) and who claimed as victims Alexis Pache, a thirty-one-year-old lieutenant in the Swiss Cavalry, and four coolies.

The personality of Aleister Crowley was a riddle to Charles Richard Cammell, one of Crowley's biographers. 'Explain me the riddle of this man!'[8] To Arthur Gauntlett, who analysed Crowley's character from his horoscope, he is 'one of the most enigmatic personalities of our time'.[9] The sphinx with the face of Aleister Crowley propounds this riddle: 'Why did I drive away my friends and followers? Why did I behave so vilely?' The answer is to be found in some of the versicles in The Book of the Law. 'Bind nothing! Let there be no difference made among you between any one thing & any other thing ... The word of Sin is Restriction ... There is no law ibeyond Do what thou wilt." The many roles which Crowley chose for himself shows that he had taken this precept literally. He did not make any difference or distinction between one thing or another; that is to say he was not restricted; that is to say he was not contained within any particular borders. On the contrary, he was driven into anything that touched his fancy. Thus, he was an English gentleman — he was always reminding us of that — a Scottish peer, a contrary, Russian nobleman, a Persian prince, Alastor, the Spirit of Solitude, Parama-hansa (the divine Swan), the Wanderer of the Waste, God, and, above all, the Beast 666 who proclaimed for all mankind his word of Do What Thou Wilt. He had a guise for every mood. On no account live within your own skin.

Above the grade of Magus is the top grade of all, that of Ipsissimus, who is free from all limitations whatsoever, including good and evil, someone hardly to be described. Crowley, for whom nothing was too difficult, was not going to be restrained from assuming this grade too. In the opinion of certain occultists, that is where he made a false step. The suggestion is, of course, that he illegally assumed this most exalted grade and that it choked him.

The Ape of Thoth[10] found him unbearable after he had become the Ipsissimus, and shortly afterwards wrote about him in her magical diary that it was 'damn hard' to think of 'the rottenest kind of creature' as a Word (i.e. thelema).

The momentous Ipsissimus event took place in the spring of 1921 when Crowley was forty-five. He was at his abbey at Cefalu, Sicily, across the door of which were painted the words DO WHAT THOU WILT. He had run out of money, was laden with the responsibility of two mistresses and several children. For a while he did not know which way to turn in spite of being a Master of every kind of Magick. But the gods had not deserted him. In a flash of intuition, which came upon him with shattering force, he penetrated the ultimate mystery. This is the meaning of Crowley's 'godhead', but strictly speaking he had reached the stage earlier in his career. As Ipsissimus he was beyond the gods, beyond all mental concepts. That is why, I suppose, he had to steel himself for the deed, to acknowledge that he, even he, known among men as Aleister Crowley, was by insight and initiation the Ipsissimus. It is not surprising that he wrote in his diary (The Magical Record of the Beast 666) , am mortally afraid to do so. I fear I might be called upon to do some insane act to prove my power to act without attachment.' Nevertheless, he entered the temple, followed by the Ape of Thoth. Of the actual ceremony he says nothing, and at the conclusion, only 'As a God goes, I go.' And he left the temple as naked as he had entered it, no longer a saint Saint Aleister Crowley of the Gnostic church — but a god. His Confessions, which he began to write and dictate shortly afterwards, should not therefore have been called an autohagiography but an autotheography.

He did not reveal this Ipsissimus attainment to anyone. We know of it from his Magical Record. In Magick, privately published, 1929, page 301, there is only this hint of it: "I, The Beast 666, lift up my voice and swear that I myself have been brought hither by mine Angel ... Also He made me a Magus ... Yea, he wrought also in me a Work of Wonder beyond this, but in this matter I am sworn to hold my peace."

Under the complicated overlay, one can discern a relatively simple pattern. Other people have no ego, and are just weak, but Crowley made a religion out of his weakness, out of being ego-less. I know that ego-lessnesisis; condition which Indian philosophy regards as the supreme state, and towards which the Sadhaka strives, but in Crowley's case it is the point from which he begins, not the goal of his endeavours.[11] Besides, he was not an Oriental; he had all the restlessness of the European. Indeed, he rushed in where angels, let alone Sadhakas, fear to tread. He did not, he tells us in Section 58 of the present work, deliberately cross the Abyss; he was hurled across it. He lacked an inhibitory counterforce, he was always hurling himself into magical and other adventures.

But whatever view one takes of The Book of the Law, it was not written by Crowley with tongue in cheek. Until the day he died, he believed it was a piece of inspired writing ; he was merely the vehicle of its transmission. The year was 1904; the place, Cairo. He was on holiday with his wife, Rose. It was she who told him that Horus wanted to speak to him. He was surprised, for she knew nothing of Egyptian mythology. 'Who is Horus?' he asked. She pointed out the hawk-headed god in the museum. 'They are waiting for you,' she said. She then told him how to get in touch with Horus, what ritual to use. He raised an eyebrow; he had been performing magic rituals continually for the previous six years. But he did as she said, went barefoot and clad in his magical robe into the room which he had consecrated as a temple and performed the invocatory ceremony. In a trance-like condition he heard a voice not the voice of Horus but of one who introduced himself as Aiwass, the Messenger. Crowley had his Swan fountain pen with him; he began to write.

The cosmology of he Book of the Law is explained by Crowley thus: there have been, as far as we know, two aeons in the history of the world. The first, that of Isis, is the aeon of the woman; hence matriarchy, the worship of the Great Mother and so on. About 500 B.C. this aeon was succeeded by the aeon of Osiris, that is, the aeon of the man, the father, hence the paternal religions of suffering and death — Judaism, Buddhism, Christianity and Mohammedanism. This aeon came to an end in 1904 when Aleister Crowley received The Book of the Law, and the new aeon, that of Horus, the child, was born. In this aeon the emphasis is on the true self or will, not on anything external such as gods and priests. The choice of Egyptian names for the aeons is purely arbitrary.

The Book of the Law is a collection of sentiments of a rebellious kind, on the whole remarkably similar to the sentiments Crowley himself expressed.

He wrote a vast comment on the Book; it is unpublished. The brief com-ment which he did publish contains this curious statement: 'The study of this Book is forbidden ... Those who discuss the contents of this Book are to be shunned by all as centres of pestilence.' Norman Mudd, Professor of Applied Mathematics of Grey University College, Bloemfontein, 'guide, philosopher, and friend' of the Beast, was foolish enough to ignore this warning and was overtaken by disaster. (See note on page 925, and Section 96.)

For a man who was having visions on frequent occasions, he was remark-ably unintrospective. He drew no deductions from the series of Enochian visions he experienced in the North African desert with his chela, the poet Victor Neuburg.[12] These so-called visions present situations of hopelessness and despair, and others of an inflated, or compensatory, kind. The gates of heaven and hell are thrown wide open, wonders and horrors are revealed, withdrawn, and the slayer is back where he started. The style is that of the Old Testament, but the numinous quality of visions seems to me to be absent. From the point of view of ordinary consciousness, the wheel did not go round; there was no metabolism. Crowley had no personal problems to solve and no mundane ambitions. Instead the scene is enlivened by the appearance of the demon Choronzon, the epitome of all disharmony and confusion, whom Crowley had conjured up in the form of a naked savage; he rushed upon Newburg and smote him (see Section 66).

Crowley began to write his Confessions in a mood of optimism, but he concluded them with uncertainty and sadness. The Italian government had reacted to the attacks on his character in the Sunday Express by ordering him to leave Italy, and he dictated the last section in exile from his abbey. Another blow quickly followed: Collins, who had brought out his novel, The Diary of a Drug Fiend, decided to publish nothing more by Meister Crowley, although they had given him an advance of 12s on the autohagiography. He was forty-eight years of age, and the outlook was bleak. It did not remain so for long. A new Scarlet Woman (Dorothy Olsen) appeared, and he discarded the exhausted Ape of Thoth; he also found a new set of followers in Germany, and during 1925 he went to Thuringia to preach the Law of Thelema.

In 1929, a small firm of m o publishers called the Mandrake Press published the first two volumes of the autohagiography in a projected series of six volumes. It bore the title:

THE SPIRIT OF SOLITUDE
An Autohagiography
Subsequently re-Antichristened
THE CONFESSIONS OF
ALEISTER CROWLEY

The Mandrake Press also brought out a small volume of three of Crowley's stories, The Stratagem, and his magical novel, Moonchild.

The third volume of the autohagiography reached the stage of galleys but was never published. Crowley quarrelled with the directors of the Mandrake Press. The firm was then taken over by Crowley's friends and followers, and promptly went out of business.

This is the text of all six volumes, after some redundancies have been removed: Crowley dictated the work to the Ape of Thoth while unden influence of heroin, which made him at times a little verbose.

At the beginning of 1945, the Prophet of the New Acon went to live in boarding-house in Hastings. 'Netherwood' was a large Victorian mandos standing in wooded grounds in that part of the outskirts of the town called The Ridge. He had published privately several more works since the failure of the Mandrake Press, notably The Equinox of the Gods, 1937, in which The Book of the Law is presented as the new religion for mankind; three patriotic war-time broadsheets with his photograph in Arab headdress; and The Book of Thoth, 1944, a reorientation of the tarot in the light of his philosophy. The rest of his autohagiography was still unpublished; he had lost the galleys of the third volume and the typescripts of the remaining three volumes were scattered among his papers. On my suggestion, he collected them together and gave them to a typist. One copy (bound in four parts) he sent to me. In his reply to my letter of thanks, he wrote, 'You were a little light-hearted in asking me to make sure of these volumes of the Hag not being lost to the world. It cost me as near forty pounds as makes no difference.' His odd dress and sweet smell, his magic ring with the hieroglyphic inscription, Ankh-f-n-Khonsu, 'his life is in Khonsu' (the moon god of Thebes), his magic wand, resting in the corner of the rather seedy room in which he ended his days, all added to his haunted presence. He had spent his whole life in struggling through the Abyss or, if you will, in exploring the Unconscious with the aid of every known stimulant and magic ritual; and in his old age he had come to look like what he claimed to be - a Secret Chief. On the wall, I remember, was a painting, badly drawn but effective, of himself as "The Beast 666", an idealized self-portrait. (He had covered the walls of his bedroom - La Chambre des Cauchemars - at his abbey with magical paintings which the vulgar thought obscene.)

I think he was telling the simple truth when he wrote that he immediately stopped a quarrel among Arabs in a coffee house in Algeria by striding into the scrimmage, rapidly drawing sigils in the air with his magic ring - a star sapphire stone, held in position by a band of two interlaced gold serpents - while intoning in Arabic a chapter of the Koran. With his shaven head and hypnotic eyes, he made a strong, and in some cases a lasting, impression on many people.

He was erudite in all subjects relating to magic-or magick as he preferred to spell it. He used the I Ching for probing the future long before that work became popular in intellectual circles in the West. His greatest merit, perhaps, was to make the bridge between Tantrism and the Western esoteric tradition, and thus bring together Western and Eastern magical techniques. He lived through the night, not the day.

JOHN SYMONDS
Hampstead
August 1968

Footnotes:

[1] They were so-called "Gnostic Masses", such as his 'Mass of the Phoenix' and his 'Gnostic Catholic Mass'. Because of their sexual component, they might be considered Gray, but not "Black Masses".

[2] Daily Express, May 19th, 1967.

[3] Magick (or to give it its full title Magick in Theory and Practice) is difficult to understand. It is ail city within a city, and the key to the gate of the inner city is not supplied with the book; it can be got only after a study of all Crowley's works, especially his unpublished works.

[4] Father and Son (Heinemann, 1907).

[5] Whether this Brotherhood was Eckartshausen's hidden assembly of sages, no one, as far as I know, has said, but the implication is that they were the same.

[6] This My Voyage (Murray, 1950).

[7] Crowley's word was thelema the Greek for will, best understood in the phrase Do What Thou Wilt, or in the words of The Book of the Law, There is no law beyond Do what thou wilt.

[8] Aleister Crowley. The Man: the Mage: the Poet (The Richards Press, 1951)

[9] "Aleister Crowley (A Study of an Enigma)", in Astrology. The Astrologer's Quarterly, June 1965.

[10] Leah Hirsig, Crowley's scribe, who during the Cefalu period held the office of the Scarlet Woman.

[11] In the language of psychology, he lacked integration; he was in the grip of unconscious forces.

[12] The Vision and the Voice, Thelema Publishing Company, Barstow, California, circa 1949. This work was originally published in Crowley's periodical, The Equinox, vol. I, no V. 1911.

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unicursal hexagram
PART ONE
TOWARDS THE GOLDEN DAWN

unicursal hexagram
Prelude

‘Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law.’[2] Not only to this autohagiography — as he amusedly insists on calling it — of Aleister Crowley, but to every form of biography, biology, even chemistry, these words are key.

‘Every man and every woman is a star.’[3] What can we know about a star? By the telescope, a faint phantasm of its optical value. By the spectroscope, a hint of its composition. By the telescope, and our mathematics, its course. In this last case we may legitimately argue from the known to the unknown: by our measure of the brief visible curve, we can calculate whence it has come and whither it will go. Experience justifies our assumptions.

Considerations of this sort are essential to any serious attempt at biography. An infant is not — as our grandmothers thought — an arbitrary jest flung into the world by a cynical deity, to be saved or damned as predestination or freewill required. We know now that ‘that, that is, is’, as the old hermit of Prague that never saw pen and ink very wittily said to a niece of King Gorboduc.

Nothing can ever be created or destroyed; and therefore the ‘life’ of any individual must be comparable to that brief visible curve, and the object of writing it to divine by the proper measurements the remainder of its career.

The writer of any biography must ask, in the deepest sense, who is he? This questions ‘who art thou?’ is the first which is put to any candidate for initiation. Also, it is the last. What so-and-so is, did and suffered: these are merely clues to that great problem. So then the earliest memories of any autohagiographer will be immensely valuable; their very incoherence will be an infallible guide. For, as Freud has shown, we remember (in the main) what we wish to remember, and forget what is painful. There is thus great danger of deception as to the ‘facts’ of the case; but our memories indicate with uncanny accuracy what is our true will. And, as above made manifest, it is this true will which shows the nature of our proper motion.

In writing the life of the average man, there is this fundamental difficulty, that the performance is futile and meaningless, even from the standpoint of the matter-of-fact philosopher; there is, that is to say, no artistic unity. In the case of Aleister Crowley no such Boyg appeared on the hillside; for he himself regards his career as a definitely dramatic composition. It comes to a climax on April 8th, 9th and 10th, 1904 E.V.[4] The slightest incident in the History of the whole universe appears to him as a preparation for that event; and his subsequent life is merely the aftermath of that crisis.

On the other hand, however, there is the circumstance that his time has been spent in three very distinct manners: the Secret Way of the Initiate, the Path of Poetry and Philosophy, and the Open Sea of Romance and Adventure. It is indeed not unusual to find the first two, or the last two, elements in the molecule of a man: Byron exemplifies this, and Poe that. But is is rare indeed for so strenuous and out-of-doors a life to be associated with such profound devotion to the arts of the quietist; and in this particular instance all three careers are so full that posterity might well be excused for surmising that not one but several individuals were combined in a legend, or even for taking the next step and saying: This Aleister Crowley was not a man, or even a number of men; he is obviously a solar myth. Nor could he himself deny such an impeachment too brutally; for already, before he has attained the prime of life, his name is associated with fables not less fantastic than those which have thrown doubt upon the historicity of the Buddha. It should be the true will of this book to make plain the truth about the man. Yet here again there is a lion in the way. The truth must be falsehood unless it be the whole truth; and the whole truth is partly inaccessible, partly unintelligible, partly incredible and partly unpublishable — that is, in any country where truth in itself is recognized as a dangerous explosive.

A further difficulty is introduced by the nature of the mind, and especially of the memory, of the man himself. We shall come to incidents which show that he is doubtful about clearly remembered circumstances, whether they belong to ‘real life’ or to dreams, and even that he has utterly forgotten things which no normal man could forget. He has, moreover, so completely overcome the illusion of time (in the sense used by the philosophers, from Lao Tzu and Plotinus to Kant and Whitehead) that he often finds it impossible to disentangle events as a sequence. He has so thoroughly referred phenomena to a single standard that they have lost their individual significance, just as when one has understood the word ‘cat’, the letters c a t have lost their own value and become mere arbitrary elements of an idea. Further: on reviewing one’s life in perspective the astronomical sequence ceases to be significant. Events rearrange themselves in an order outside time and space, just as in a picture there is no way of distinguishing at what point on the canvas the artist began to paint. Alas! it is impossible to make this a satisfactory book; hurrah! that furnishes the necessary stimulus; it becomes worth while to do it, and by Styx! it shall be done.

It would be absurd to apologize for the form of of this book. Excuses are always nauseating. I do not believe for a moment that it would have turned out any better if it had been written in the most favourable circumstances. I mention merely as a matter of general interest the actual difficulties attending the composition.

From the start my position was precarious. I was practically penniless, I had been betrayed in the most shameless and senseless way by practically everyone with whom I was in business relations, I had no means of access to any of the normal conveniences which are considered essential to people engaged in such tasks. On the top of this there sprang up a sudden whirlwind of wanton treachery and brainless persecution,[5] so imbecile yet so violent as to throw even quite sensible people off their base. I ignored this and carried on, but almost immediately both I and one of my principal assistants were stricken down with lingering illness. I carried on. My assistant died[1]. I carried on. His death was the signal for a fresh outburst of venomous falsehoods. I carried on. The agitation resulted in my being exiled from Italy; through no accusation of any kind was, or could be, alleged against me. That meant that I was torn away from even the most elementary conveniences for writing this book. I carried on. At the moment of writing this paragraph everything in connection with the book is entirely in the air. I am carrying on.

But apart from any of this, I have felt throughout an essential difficulty with regard to the form of the book. The subject is too big to be susceptible of organic structure unless I make a deliberate effort of will and a strict arbitrary selection. It would, as a matter of fact, be easy for me to choose any one of fifty meanings for my life, and illustrate it by carefully chosen facts. Any such method would be open to the criticism which is always ready to devastate any form of idealism. I myself feel that it would be unfair and, what is more, untrue. The alternative has been to make the incidents as full as possible, to state them as they occurred, entirely regardless of any possible bearing upon any possible spiritual significance. This method involves a certain faith in life itself, that it will declare its own meaning and apportion the relative importance of every set of incidents automatically. In other words, it is to assert the theory that the destiny is a supreme artist, which is notoriously not the case on any accepted definition of art. And yet — a mountain! What a mass of heterogeneous accidents determine its shape! Yet, in the case of a fine mountain, who denies the beauty and even the significance of its form?

In the later years of my life, as I have attained to some understanding of the unity behind the diverse phenomena of experience, and as the natural restriction of elasticity which comes with age has gained ground, it has become progressively easier to group events about a central purpose. But this only means that the principle of selection has been changed. In my early years the actual seasons, climates and occupations determined the sections of my life. My spiritual activities fit into those frames, whereas, more recently, the converse is the case. My physical environment fits into my spiritual preoccupation. This change would be sufficient by itself to ensure the theoretical impossibility of editing a life like mine on any consistent principle.

I find myself obliged, for these and many other reasons, to abandon altogether any idea of conceiving an artistic structure for the work or formulating an artistic purpose. All that I can do is to describe everything that I remember, as best I can, as if it were, in itself, the centre of interest. I must trust nature so to order matters that, in the multiplicity of the material, the proper proportion will somehow appear automatically, just as in the operations of pure chance or inexorable law a unity ennobled by strength and beautified by harmony arises inscrutably out of the chaotic concatenation of circumstances. At least one claim may be made; nothing has been invented, nothing suppressed, nothing altered and nothing ‘yellowed up’. I believe that truth is not only stranger than fiction, but more interesting. And I have no motive for deception, because I don't give a damn for the whole human race — ‘you’re nothing but a pack of cards.’

Footnotes:

[1] WEH Note: Raoul Loveday[6], who died at the Abbey of Thelema after drinking from a polluted stream. See: Part 6 of this work for the rest.

Editor's notes:

[2] [ED Note:] Crowley's invariable salutation; it echoes Rabelais's Fay ce que voudras, but it carries a serious implication. See The Book of the Law.

[3] [ED Note:] The constructive side of the thelemic doctrine. Each individual, like a star in orbit, has his own path or true will.

[4] [ED Note:] Era Vulgari: Crowley's term for Anno Domini, the Christian era which, according to him, came to an end in 1904.

[5] [ED Note:] Crowley is here referring to articles which appeared in the press during 1922–3, following the publication of his novel, The Diary of a Drug Fiend (Collins, 1922).

[6] [ED Note:] Frater Aud or Raoul Loveday.

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unicursal hexagram
Towards the Golden Dawn
Chapter 1.

Edward Crowley[1], the wealthy scion of a race of Quakers, was the father of a son born at 30 Clarendon Square, Leamington, Warwichshire[1], on the 12th day of October[3] 1875 E.V. between eleven and twelve at night. Leo was just rising at the time, as nearly as can be ascertained. The branch of the family of Crowley to which this man belonged has been settled in England since Tudor times: in the days of Bad Queen Bess there was a Bishop Crowley, who wrote epigrams in the style of Marital. One of them — the only one I know — runs thus:

The bawds of the stews be all turnèd out:
But I think they inhabit all England throughout.

(I cannot find the modern book which quotes this as a footnote and have not been able to trace the original volume.)

The Crowleys, are, however, of Celtic origin; the name O'Crowley is common in south-west Ireland, and the Breton family of de Quérouaille — which gave England a Duchess of Portsmouth — or de Kerval is of the same stock. Legend will have it that the then head of the family came to England with the Earl of Richmond and helped to make him king on Bosworth Field.

Edward Crowley was educated as an engineer, but never practised his profession[4]. He was devoted to religion and became a follower of John Nelson Darby, the founder of the “Plymouth Brethren”. The fact reveals a stern logician; for the sect is characterized by refusal to compromise; it insists on the literal interpretation of the Bible as the exact words of the Holy Ghost[5].

He married (in 1874, one may assume) Emily Bertha Bishop, of a Devon and Somerset family. Her father had died and her brother Tom Bond Bishop had come to London to work in the Civil Service. The important points about the woman are that her schoolmates called her “the little Chinese girl”, that she painted in water-colour with admirable taste destroyed by academic training, and that her powerful natural instincts were suppressed by religion to the point that she became, after her husband's death, a brainless bigot of the most narrow, logical and inhuman type. Yet there was always a struggle; she was really distressed, almost daily, at finding herself obliged by her religion to perform acts of the most senseless atrocity.

Her firstborn son, the aforesaid, was remarkable from the moment of his arrival. He bore on his body the three most important distinguishing marks of a Buddha. He was tongue-tied, and on the second day of his incarnation a surgeon cut the fraenum linguae. He had also the characteristic membrane, which necessitated an operation for phimosis some three lustres[6] later.[12] Lastly, he had upon the centre of his heart four hairs curling from left to right in the exact form of a Swastika[7].

He was baptised by the names of Edward Alexander, the latter being the surname of an old friend of this father's, deeply beloved by him for the holiness of his life — by Plymouth Brethren standards, one may suppose. It seems probable that the boy was deeply impressed by being told, at what age (before six) does not appear, that Alexander means “helper of men”. He is still giving himself passionately to the task, despite the intellectual cynicism inseparable from intelligence after one has reached forty.

But the extraordinary fact connected with this baptismal ceremony is this. As the Plymouth Brethren practise infant baptism by immersion, it must have taken place in the first three months of his life. Yet he has a perfectly clear visual recollection of the scene. It took place in a bathroom on the first floor of the house in which he was born. He remembers the shape of the room, the disposal of its appointments, the little group of “brethren” surrounding him, and the surprise of finding himself, dressed in a long white garment, being suddenly dipped and lifted from the water. He has also a clear auditory remembrance of words spoken solemnly over him; though they meant nothing, he was impressed by the peculiar tone. It is not impossible that this gave him an all but unconquerable dislike for for the cold plunge, and at the same time a vivid passion for ceremonial speech. These two qualities have played highly important parts in his development.

This baptism, by the way, though it never worried him, provided a peril to the soul of another. When his wife's conduct compelled him to insist upon her divorcing him — a formality as meaningless as their marriage — and she became insane shortly afterward, an eminent masochist named Colonel Gormley, R.A.M.C. (dead previously, then and since) lay in wait for her at the asylum gates to marry her. The trouble was that he included among his intellectual lacunae a devotion to the Romish superstition. He feared damnation if he married a divorceuse dipsomaniac with non-parva-partial dementia. The poor mollusc asked Crowley for details of his baptism. He wrote back that he had been baptised “in the name of the Holy Trinity”.

It now appeared that, had these actual words been used, he was a pagan, his marriage void, Lola Zaza a bastard and his wife a light o'love!

Crowley tried to help the wretched worm; but, alas, he remembered too well the formula: “I baptise thee Edward Alexander in the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost.” So the gallant colonel had to fork out for a dispensation from Rome. Crowley himself squandered a lot of cash in one way or another. But he never fell so far as to waste a farthing on the three-card trick, or the three-God trick.

He has also the clearest visualization of some of the people who surrounded him in the first six years of his life, which were spent in Leamington and the neighborhood, which he has never revisited. In particular, there was an orange-coloured old lady named Miss Carey who used to bring him oranges. His first memory of speech is his remark. “Ca'ey, onange”[8]; this, however, is remembered because he was told of it later. But he is in full conscious memory of the dining-room of the house, its furniture and pictures, with their arrangement. He also remembers various country walks, one especially through green fields, in which a perambulator figures. The main street of Leamington, and the Leam with its weir — he has loved weirs ever since — Guy's Cliffe at Warwick, and the Castle with its terrace and the white peacocks: all these are as clear as if he had seen them last week. He recalls no other room in the house except his own bedroom, and that only because he “came to himself” one night to find a fire lighted, a steam kettle going, a strange woman present, an atmosphere of anxiety and a feeling of fever; for he had an attack of bronchitis.

He remembers his first governess, Miss Arkell, a grey-haired lady with traces of beard upon her large flat face and a black dress of what he calls bombasine, though to this hour he does not know what bombasine may be, and thinks that the dress was of alpaca or even, it may be of smooth hard silk.

And he remembers the first indication that his mind was of a logical and scientific order.

Ladies will now kindly skip a page, while I lay the facts before a select audience of lawyers, doctors and ministers of religion.

The Misses Cowper consisted of Sister Susan and Sister Emma; the one large, rosy and dry, like an overgrown radish; the other small, pink and moist, rather like Tenniel's Mock Turtle. Both were Plymouth Sister old maids. They were very repulsive to the boy, who has never since liked calf's head, though partial to similar dishes, or been able to hear the names Susan or Emma without disgust.

One day he said something to his mother which elicited from her the curious anatomical assertion: “Ladies have no legs.” Shortly afterwards, when the Misses Cowper were at dinner with the family, he disappeared from his chair. There must have been some slight commotion on deck, leading to the question of his whereabouts. But at that moment a still small voice came from beneath the table: “Mamma! Mamma! Sister Susan and Sister Emma are not ladies!”

This deduction was perfectly genuine: but in the following incident the cynical may perhaps trace the root of a certain sardonic humour. The child was wont to indicate his views, when silence seemed discretion, by facial gestures. Several people were rash enough to tell him not to make grimaces, as he “might be struck like that”. He would reply, with an air of enlightenment after long meditation: “So that accounts for it.”

All children born into a family whose social and economic conditions are settled are bound to take them for granted as universal. It is only when they meet with incompatible facts that they begin to wonder whether they are suited to their original environment. In this particular case the most trifling incidents of life were necessarily interpreted as part of a prearranged plan, like the beginning of Candide.

The underlying theory of life which was assumed in the household showed itself constantly in practice. It is strange that less than fifty years later, this theory should seem such fantastic folly as to require a detailed account.

The universe was created by God 4004 B.C. The Bible, authorized version, was literally true, having been dictated by the Holy Ghost himself to scribes incapable of even clerical errors. King James' translators enjoyed an equal immunity. It was considered unusual — and therefore in doubtful taste — to appeal to the original texts. All other versions were regarded as inferior; the Revised Version in particular savoured of heresy. John Nelson Darby, the founder of the Plymouth Brethren, being a very famous biblical scholar, had been invited to sit on the committee and had refused on the ground that some of the other scholars were atheists.

The second coming of the Lord Jesus was confidently expected to occur at any moment[9]. So imminent was it that preparations for a distant future — such as signing a lease or insuring one's life — might he held to imply lack of confidence of the promise, “Behold I come quickly.”

A pathetically tragic incident — some years later — illustrates the reality of this absurdity. To modern educated people it must seem unthinkable that so fantastic a superstition could be such a hellish obsession in such recent times and such familiar places.

One fine summer morning, at Redhill, the boy — now eight or nine — got tired of playing by himself in the garden. He came back to the house. It was strangely still and he got frightened. By some odd chance everybody was either out or upstairs. But he jumped to the conclusion that “the Lord had come”, and that he had been left behind“. It was an understood thing that there was no hope for people in this position. Apart from the Second Advent, it was always possible to be saved up the very moment of death; but once the saints had been called up, the day of grace was finally over. Various alarums and excursions would take place as per the Apocalypse, and then would come the millennium, when Satan would be chained for a thousand years and Christ reign for that period over the Jews regathered in Jerusalem. The position of these Jews is not quite clear. They were not saved in the same sense as Christians had been, yet they were not damned. The millennium seems to have been thought of as a fulfilment of god's promise to Abraham; but apparently it had nothing to do with “eternal life”. However, even this modified beatitude as not open to Gentiles who had rejected Christ.

The child was consequently very much relieved by the reappearance of some of the inmates of the house whom he could not imagine as having been lost eternally.

The lot of the saved, even on earth, was painted in the brightest colours. It was held that “all things work together for good to them that love God and are called according to His purpose”. Earthly life was regarded as an ordeal; this was a wicked world and the best thing that could happen to anyone was “to go to be with Christ, which is far better”. On the other hand, the unsaved went to the lake of fire and brimstone which burneth for ever and ever. Edward Crowley used to give away tracts to strangers, besides distributing them by thousands through the post; he was also constantly preaching to vast crowds, all over the country. It was, indeed, the only logical occupation for a humane man who believed that even the noblest and best of mankind were doomed to eternal punishment. One card — a great favourite, as being peculiarly deadly — was headed “Poor Anne's Last Words”; the gist of her remarks appears to have been “Lost, lost, lost!” She had been a servant in the house of Edward Crowley the elder, and her dying delirium had made a deep impression upon the son of the house.

By the way, Edward Crowley possessed the power, as per Higgins, the professor in Bernard Shaw's Pygmalion, of telling instantly from a man's speech what part of the country he lived in. It was his hobby to make walking tours through every part of England, evangelizing in every town and village as he passed. He would engage likely strangers in conversation, diagnose and prescribe for their spiritual diseases, inscribe them in his Address books, and correspond and send religious literature for years. At that time religion was the popular fad in England and few resented his ministrations. His widow continued the sending of tracts, etc. For years after his death.

As a preacher Edward Crowley was magnificently eloquent, speaking as he did from the heart. But, being a gentleman, he could not be a real revivalist, which means manipulating the hysteria of mob psychology.

Footnotes:

[1] “the younger” (1834-87).

[2] It has been remarked a strange coincidence that one small county should have given England her two greatest poets — for one must not forget Shakespeare (1550-1610).[10]

[3] Presumably this is nature's compensation for the horror which blasted mankind on that date in 1492.[11]

[4] His son elicited this fact by questioning; curious, considering the dates.

[5] On the strength of a text in the book itself: the logic is thus of a peculiar order.

[6] WEH Note: A lustre is a period of five years.

[7] There is also a notable tuft of hair upon the forehead, similar to the mound of flesh there situated in the Buddhist legends. And numerous minor marks.

[8] He has never been able to pronounce “R” properly — like a Chinese!

[9] Much was made of the two appearances of “Jesus” after the Ascension. In the first, to Stephen, he was standing, in the second, to Paul, seated, at the right hand of god. Ergo, on the first occasion he was still ready to return at once; on the second, he had made up his mind to let things take their course to the bitter end, as per the Apocalypse. No one saw anything funny, or blasphemous, or even futile, in this doctrine!

Editor's notes:

[10] [ED Note:] Shakespeare was born in 1564.

[11] [ED Note:] The allusion is to the discovery of America.

[12] [ED Note:] At the age of fifteen he was circumcised.

Aleister Crowley, a British occultist who has cast a strange shadow over music for more than 50 years

Artists including David Bowie, The Beatles and Led Zeppelin have shown an interest in Crowley, despite the self-proclaimed ‘Great Beast’ dying many years before the emergence of these iconic artists.

Practicing an amalgam of pseudo-religious rituals and acting on sexual mores which outraged the buttoned-down England of the early 20th century, the infamous author died a sickly, bankrupt drug addict on December 1, 1947.

Despite his pitiful death, this anarchist – who, in 1913’s Magick (Book 4), advocated for adding backmasked messages to records as a subliminal means of spreading his message – became a beacon for some of the biggest music stars of the 60s, 70s and beyond.

Here are just some of the times Aleister Crowley influenced rock’n’roll…

THE BEATLES

Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, one of the most famous album covers of all time, features the scowling Aleister Crowley in the top left row sitting snugly between an Indian guru and Mae West.

Crowley wasn’t the only questionable appearance on the Peter Blake-designed cover, with Adolf Hitler also nominated for inclusion before being removed during the shoot due to the possible offense his image would cause.

The inclusion of Crowley on the 1967 album sleeve captured a rising interest in Crowley during the 60s – as a free-love and drugs advocate, many in the hippie movement saw his teachings of “sex magick” as visionary.

John Lennon has been ear-marked as the Beatle who put forward Crowley for the cover slot.

RED HOT CHILI PEPPERS

Speaking of “sex magick”, it’s hard to hide the Aleister Crowley influence in the title of the classic 1991 Red Hot Chili Peppers album Blood Sugar Sex Magik.

Crowley first wrote about “sex magick” in his 1914 book Liber Ape, which found him adjusting the teachings of the occult order Ordo Templi Orientis to fit with his own philosophies.

While it’s unknown if the Chili Peppers ever dabbled in Crowley’s “sex magick” rituals to transcend reality and invoke new planes of creativity, RHCP John Frusciante took his interest in Crowley deeper than his colleagues.

A voracious reader of Crowley biographies and self-penned works, the guitarist’s 2004 Inside Of Emptiness album featured a number of songs inspired by Crowley texts.

Frusciante stated on his website that the tracks “Emptiness”, “I’m Around” and “666” all drew their lyrics from the English occultist.

LED ZEPPELIN

While Crowley’s influence on Led Zeppelin’s musical output goes little beyond a Led Zeppelin III LP run-out groove inscribed with the message “Do what thou wilt” (a Crowley citation), Led Zep guitarist Jimmy Page arguably remains rock’s biggest acolyte of ‘The Great Beast’. In the 1970s, the aptly-named Page invested a large amount of money in an occult bookshop (christened Equinox, after Crowley’s book series of the same name) and then took his fandom to a whole new level by purchasing Crowley’s former home Boleskine House on the banks of Scotland’s Loch Ness. Conspiracy theorists have suggested the ills which befell Led Zeppelin in the mid-70s after their imperial phase were due to Jimmy Page’s keen interest in the occult, but Page has long dismissed the media’s fascination with his Crowley phase. “It’s unfortunate that my studies of mysticism and Eastern and Western traditions of magic and Tantricism have all come under the umbrella of Crowley…” Page told Guitar World magazine in 2003. “It wasn’t unusual [in the sixties] to be interested in comparative religions and magic.”

DAVID BOWIE

As well as a photoshoot from the Hunky Dory era where David Bowie models a look similar to the Golden Dawn garb which Crowley donned at the turn of the century, the 1971 song “Quicksand” kicks off with the line “I’m closer to the Golden Dawn, immersed in Crowley’s uniform of imagery”. “My overriding interest was in Kabbalah and Crowleyism,” Bowie suggested in 1976, not long after the cocaine-fatigued star had expressed a fear the Devil lived in his LA swimming pool. “Th

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