August 13 2000 BOOKS: BIOGRAPHY He had a devil of a time A MAGICK LIFE: A Biography of Aleister Crowley by Martin Booth Hodder £20 pp507 ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- ---- BRYAN APPLEYARD © Aleister Crowley "was a fake," wrote Somerset Maugham, "but not entirely a fake . . . " The hero of Maugham's novel The Magician is Crowley, concealed only by the name of Oliver Haddo. G K Chesterton thought he was a genuine poet, but W B Yeats loathed him, both as a magician and as a man. He inspired Dennis Wheatley's occult novels and he was Scorpio Murtlock in Anthony Powell's A Dance to the Music of Time. He may also have been the model for the villain Le Chiffre in Ian Fleming's Casino Royale. Love him or hate him, the literary imagination could not ignore him. Crowley's mother, a fiercely religious woman who thought that Brunel's ship The Great Eastern was a new Tower of Babel, called him "the beast". He scorned the Plymouth Brethren religiosity of both his parents and embraced Satanic revolt, deciding at an early age that he was indeed The Great Beast 666, whose coming was forecast in the Book of Revelation. The remainder of his life was a mad succession of rituals, invocations, bisexual excess, bankruptcy, weirdly fascinated women, hopeless men and an unknown number of casually conceived children. There was also a torrent of mostly terrible prose and poetry. In the 1930s, when he became involved in some crazy litigation, the British courts concluded that it was impossible to libel Crowley, his life having been so ludicrously extravagant and wicked. The casualties of his beasthood were numerous. He acquired, drugged, abused, and often loved, but then always cruelly dumped, a succession of "Scarlet Women". He did much the same with men, one of whom, Norman Mudd, was so devastated by the experience that he killed himself on Guernsey by walking into the sea with the legs of his trousers filled with stones held in place by bicycle clips. They don't make trousers like that any more - or, come to that, cycle clips. Something wicked: Aleister Crowley was a man hell-bent on transcendence © Crowley's guardian angel was Aiwass, a messenger of the Devil. Under his tutelage, he wrote the Book of the Law, a prose poem announcing a new age, The Aeon of Horus, beginning in 1904. The law was the Law of Thelema, whose principal doctrine was, "Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law." He was also an adept of the Abramelin Operation (the purifying of the magician through the invocation of various angels and demons), he had the ability to make himself invisible and, through the power of his mind, he could make men fall over in the street. Many are said to have died as a result of his sorcery, and the tabloid press knew him as the most evil man in the world. As a direct result he was hounded out of Italy by Mussolini. On the bright side, he does seem to have advised the British government on the use of the occult against the Nazis, advice that may have had something to do with the defection of Rudolf Hess. If none of this makes sense, then that is because it doesn't make sense.Crowley was a florid enigma whose cult status to the hippie generation of the 1960s served only to intensify the multiple confusions of his life. Compulsively lying and exaggerating himself, he was succeeded by at least two generations of Crowleyite fantasists. Martin Booth has now appeared on the scene to set things straight; to present "the facts of his remarkable life, stripping away the myth and leaving the reader to decide whether Crowley was a sage and a seer, a charlatan and a very clever con man, a character with a true occult ability - however that may be defined - or simply an opportunist and a fake . . . " His book is a fine, fair and gripping piece of work that places Crowley before the reader in all his bizarre immensity. This was a man hell-bent on transcendence. He was a world-class mountaineer, coming close to being the first man to conquer Kanchenjunga, and a fine chess player. Occasionally, insists Booth, he wrote very well indeed. He used drugs in doses that would have killed others - becoming seriously addicted to heroin - and he pursued sex with both men and women with a demonic intensity. He was successful in this even in later life when, fat and bald, he seldom washed and had numerous missing teeth. Truly this man had powers of some kind.But of what kind? Booth reports the results of Crowley's rituals in matter-of- fact terms. Occasionally, he indicates scepticism, but, on the whole, he simply records the claims of Crowley and the testimony of those present. This is fair enough; we cannot honestly know whether those claims were fantasies or that testimony the result of drugs or coercion. All we can know is that Crowley made believers out of many sane and intelligent people. That belief, as Booth insists, was not the vulgar Satanism of which he was so often accused and nor was his Law of Thelema the simple invitation to excess that the hippies took it to be. In fact, Crowley was, in his weird way, a moralist. The Abramelin Operation was a way of placing himself on the side of the forces of light. And his restless energy in the pursuit of magic does seem to have sprung from an essentially noble belief in human potential that was a direct response to the neurotic narrowness of his upbringing. Crowley may have been mad and dangerous to know, but he was not, in the last analysis, as bad as he seems. In sudden flashes, he also betrays a degree of vulnerable self-knowledge. Legend has it that his last words, as he lay dying of chronic bronchitis in 1947, were, "I am perplexed." Hearsay, says Booth. In fact, the last words of Crowley's that anybody heard were, "Sometimes, I hate myself." As he died, the curtains of the room billowed inwards. His ashes were interred beneath a tree in the garden of an old friend in New Jersey. When the man subsequently went to dig them up to take them with him to California, the urn had vanished. Available at the price of £17 inc p&p on 0870 165 8585 Websites: www.lsi.usp.br/usp/rod/magick/aleister_crowley.html Hear recorded sound files of Crowley reciting poetry and Enochian calls Books: The Confessions of Aleister Crowley: An Autobiography (Arkana £25) His own account of how he became the 'Great Beast' Next page: Biography - A woman of simple faith <A HREF="http://www.ctrl.org/">www.ctrl.org</A> DECLARATION & DISCLAIMER ========== CTRL is a discussion & informational exchange list. Proselytizing propagandic screeds are unwelcomed. Substance—not soap-boxing—please! These are sordid matters and 'conspiracy theory'—with its many half-truths, mis- directions and outright frauds—is used politically by different groups with major and minor effects spread throughout the spectrum of time and thought. That being said, CTRLgives no endorsement to the validity of posts, and always suggests to readers; be wary of what you read. CTRL gives no credence to Holocaust denial and nazi's need not apply. Let us please be civil and as always, Caveat Lector. ======================================================================== Archives Available at: http://peach.ease.lsoft.com/archives/ctrl.html <A HREF="http://peach.ease.lsoft.com/archives/ctrl.html">Archives of [EMAIL PROTECTED]</A> http:[EMAIL PROTECTED]/ <A HREF="http:[EMAIL PROTECTED]/">ctrl</A> ======================================================================== To subscribe to Conspiracy Theory Research List[CTRL] send email: SUBSCRIBE CTRL [to:] [EMAIL PROTECTED] To UNsubscribe to Conspiracy Theory Research List[CTRL] send email: SIGNOFF CTRL [to:] [EMAIL PROTECTED] Om
