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A biography of Aleister Crowley, creator of the Thelema rite of ceremonial magic, dubbed by the British press: the most evil man in the world.
He was born in 1875; his father was a Plymouth Brethren preacher who died when Aleister was 11. The boy was eventually inherit sufficient money not to need to work, but he spent his fortune pursuing his dreams: mountaineering (he attempted Kanchenjunga), poetry (almost all through paid-for publishing) and magic. Throughout his life he had sex, sometimes under the guise of sexual magic, with both male and female partners, fathering at least three daughters, two of whom died very young, and a son. His publications included erotic verse and books of magic. He founded the religion of Thelema whose motto was 'Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law' and set up a temple on Sicily where he would instruct disciples until he was banished by Mussolini's police.
In some ways, the man's life is summarised on page 2: “A spoiled scion of a wealthy Victorian family, who embodied many of the worst John Bull racial and social prejudices of his upper class contemporaries, a blisteringly arrogant opportunist who took financial and psychological advantage of his admirers, an unadmiring and even vicious judge of most of his contemporaries, a sensualist who relished sex in all forms, a hubristic experiment in drugs who was addicted to heroin for the last twenty-five years of his life.”
The problem with writing a biography of a man like this is that the reader quickly becomes wearied of the details of yet another sexual partner, yet another magical rite, and yet another publication. Oh, he's fallen out with somebody else. The book itself didn't make things better by the use of long chapters whose contents were sometimes so diverse that I wondered whether they had a theme, other than covering another few years of Crowley's life.
Perhaps the most interesting thing was the long list of people I would have thought respectable who participated in magical rites (and sometimes had sex) with him. He was involved with the mystical order of the Golden Dawn, of which Yeats was also a member. One of his big mates Allan Bennett (another one) went on to become a Buddhist monk and edited the journal of the International Buddhist society. Frederick Charles Fuller was “one of the premier military theorists of all time” yet befriended Crowley for four years (though he was eecentric, later joining the British Union of Fascists, and attending Hitler’s 50th birthday celebrations in April 1939). Victor Neuberg, disciple and gay partner, later became a literary reviewer and discovered Dylan Thomas. Other acquaintances included Dennis Wheatley, Dion Fortune, Tom Driberg and Somerset Maugham (who based his novel 'The Magician' on Crowley.
The most shocking moment came when he was the leader of the Kanchenjunga expedition and three climbers, together with three porters mutinied and left camp. On the descent they triggered an avalanche which buried and killed one of the climbers and all three porters. The next day Crowley left the mountain, passing the ongoing rescue attempts without offering his help, and returned to England. The letters he wrote to the papers to justify himself led to widespread condemnation and the end of his mountaineering career.
He died in a guesthouse in Hastings.
There is one mistake, I think. The Book of Four, published as a square, was priced at four groats. Sutin mistakenly equates this to a shilling but a groat was 4d and therefore 4 groats = 1/4d.
Selected quotes:
- “I reached a point where my physical reflection in a mirror became faint and flickering. It gave very much the effect of the interrupted images of the cinematograph in its early days. ... “the real secret of invisibility is not concerned with the laws of optics at all; the trick is to prevent people noticing you when they would normally do so.” (Ch 3)
- “The assignment of a governing true will to an entire gender seems to contradict the sense of self-discovery that lies at the heart of Thelema.” (132)
- “The aged god Saturn can only counsel despair; Jupiter is impotent; Mars is beset by lust and lacking in wisdom; Apollo the Sun is slain because he cannot harmonize the good and even natures that battle within him; Venus lovingly mourns Apollo but her sorrow lacks redemptive force; Mercury possesses the seeds of magical wisdom, but he can no longer server psychopomp to humankind.” (Ch 6)
- “The psychological task of concluding his ‘Autohagiography’ ... must have been severe. he had lost both his Abbey and his reputation and no longer had a publisher for the massive work on which he laboured. The tone of the ‘Confessions’ reveals none of this - throughout, it is all but unremitting in its braggadocio.” (Ch 9)
- “Magick is the Science and Art of Causing Change to occur in conformity with Will.” (Ch 9)
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