Aleister Crowley

[trailhound]

 Figured since some people wanted to talk about AC i would make a thread for it.  


The Great Beast – Aleister Crowley

by Robert Anton Wilson

 

O – The Fool

All ways are lawful to innocence. Pure folly is the key to initiation.          – The Book of Thoth

 

   Crowley: Pronounced with a crow so it rhymes with holy: Edward Alexander Crowley, b. 1875 d. 1947, known as Aleister Crowley, known also as Sir Aleister Crowley, Saint Aleister Crowley (of the Gnostic Catholic Church), Frater Perdurabo, Frater Ou Mh, To Mega Therion, Count McGregor, Count Vladimir Svareff, Chao Khan, Mahatma Guru Sri Paramahansa Shivaji, Baphomet, and Ipsissimus; obviously, a case of the ontological fidgets - couldn't make up his mind who he really was; chiefly known as The Beast 666 or The Great Beast; friends and disciples celebrated his funeral with a Black Mass: or so the newspapers said.

 

   Actually it was a Gnostic Catholic Mass (even John Symonds, Crowley's most hostile biographer, admits that at most it could be called a Grey Mass, not a Black Mass - observe the racist and Christian-chauvinist implications in this terminology, but it was certainly not an orthodox R.C. or Anglican mass, I mean, cripes, the priestess took off her clothes in one part of it, buck naked, and they call that a Mass, gloriosky!

 

   So the town council had a meeting - this was the Ridge, in Hastings, England, 1947, not 1347 - and they passed an ordinance that no such heathen rites would ever be tolerated in any funeral services in their town, not never; I sort of picture them in the kitch Alpine-Balkan garb of Universal Studios' classic monster epics, and I see Aleister himself, in his coffin, wearing nothing less spectacular than the old black cape of Bela Lugosi: fangs showing beneath his sensual lips: but his eyes closed in deep and divine Samadhi.

 

   Because that's the sort of images that come to mind when Aleister Crowley is mentioned: this damnable man who identified himself with the Great Beast in St. John's Revelations in an age when the supernatural is umbilically connected with Universal Studios, Hearst Sunday Supplement I-walked-with-a-zombie-in-my-maidenform-bra gushings and, God's socks, Today's Astrology ("Listen, Scoorpio: This month you must look before you leap and remember that prudence is wiser than rashness:  Don't trust that Taurus female in you office" - I repeat: God's socks and spats); this divine man who became the Logos when Logos was just a word to pencil into Double-Crostics on rainy Sundays; this damnable and divine paradox of a Crowley!

 

   Listen, some critic (I forgot who) wrote of Lugosi "acting with total sincerity and a kind of demented cornball poetry" and the words, like the old crimson-lined black cape, seem tailored equally well for the shoulders of Master Therion, To Mega Therion, the Great Beast, Aleister Crowley.  This is the final degradation:  this avatar of anarchy, this epitome of rebellion, this incarnation of inconsistency, this man Crowley whom his contemporaries called "The King of Depravity," The Wickedest Man in the World," "A Cannibal at Large," "A Man We'd Like to Hang," "A Human Beast"; and, with some anti-climax, "A Pro-German and Revolutionary."

 

   Now, to us, he is quaint.  Worse:  he is Camp.  Worse yet:  he is corny.

 

   We don't even believe his boast that he performed human sacrifice 150 times a year, starting in 1912.

 

None of these cordial titles was invented by myself.  All were used, in Crowley's life-time, by the newspaper John Bull, in it's heroic and nigh-interminable campaign to save England from the Beast's pernicious influence.  See P.R. Stephenson, The Legend of Aleister Crowley.

 

 

I -- The Magician

The True Self is the meaning of the True Will: know Thyself through Thy Way.

– The Book of Thoth

 

   For there is no clear way, even on the most superficial level of the gross external data, to say what Edward Alexander Crowley (who called himself Aleister: and other names) really was trying to do with his life and communicate to his fellows.

 

   Witness: here is an Englishman (never forget that: an Englishman, and bloody English at times he could be) who in the stodgiest year, of the dreariest decade of the age we call Victoria, commits technical High Treason, joins the Carlists, accepts a knighthood from Don Carlos himself, denounces as illegitimate all the knighthoods granted by "the Hanoverian usurper" (he also called her a "dumpy German hausfrau" - poor Vicky), yes, and then for years and decades afterward continues, with owl-like obstinacy, with superlative stubbornness, with ham heroism, with promethean pigheadedness, to sign himself "Sir Aleister" -  a red flag in the face of John Bull.

 

   But more: the same romantic reactionary, the same very parfet bogus knight, hears that the French authorities, scandalized by the heroic size of the genital on Epstein's statue of Oscar Wilde, have covered it with a butterfly - and, bien bueno, you guessed it, there he is, at twilight with hammer and chisel, sworn enemy of the Philistines, removing the butterfly and restoring the statue to its pristine purity - but why by all the pot-bellied gods in China, why did he turn that gesture into a joke by walking, the same night, into London's stuffiest restaurant, wearing the same butterfly over the crotch of his own trousers?

 

   A Harlequin, then, we might pronounce him, ultimately: the archetypal Batty Bard superimposed upon the classic Eccentric Englishman?  And with a touch of the Sardonic Sodomist - for didn't he smuggle homosexual jokes (hidden in puns, codes, acrostics and notarikons) into his various volumes of mystical poetry?

 

   Didn't it even turn out that his great literary "discovery" the Bagh-I-Muattar [The Scented Garden] was not a discovery at all but an invention - all of it, all, all! from the pious but pederastic Persian original, through the ingenious but innocent English major who translated it (and died heroically in the Boer War), up to the high Anglican clergyman who wrote the Introduction saluting its sanctity but shivering at its salacity - all, all from his own cunning and creative cranium?

 

   Yes: and he even published one volume, White Stains (Krafft-Ebing in verse) with a poker-faced prologue pronouncing that "The Editor hopes the Mental Pathologists, for whose eyes alone this treatise is destined, will spare no precaution to prevent it falling into other hands" - and, hot damn, arranged that the author's name on the title-page would be given as "George Archibald," a pious uncle whom he detested.

 

   Sophomore pranks?  Yes, but in 1912, at the age of 37, he was still at the same game: that was the year he managed to sell Hail Mary, a volume of versatile verses celebrating the Virgin, to London's leading Catholic publishers, Burns and Oates: and he even waited until it was favorably reviewed in the Catholic press ("a plenteous and varied feast for the lovers of tuneful verse," enthused the Catholic Times) before revealing that the real author was not a cloistered nun or an uncommonly talented Bishop, but himself, Satan's Servant, the Great Beast, the Demon Crowley.

 

   But grok in its fullness this fact: he really did it.  You or I might conceive such a jest, but he carried it out: writing the pious verses with just the proper tone of sugary sanctimoniousness to actually sell to a Papist publisher and get cordial reviews in the Romish press - as if Baudelaire had forced himself to write a whole volume of Edgar Guest:  And just for the sake of a horse-laugh?

 

   To understand this conundrum of a Crowley we will have to Dig.

 

 

II -- The High Priestess

Purity is to live only to the Highest: and the Highest is All; be thou as Artemis to Pan.

–  The Book of Thoth

 

   These jokes sometimes seem to have an obscure point, and one is uneasily suspicious that there might be Hamlet-like method in this madness. Even the alternate identities can be considered more than games: They might be Zen counter-games. Here's the Beast's own explanation of the time he became Count Vladimir Svareff, from The Confessions of Aleister Crowley: An Autohagiography.

 

   "I wanted to increase my knowledge of mankind. I knew how people treated a young man from Cambridge. I had thoroughly appreciated the servility of tradesmen, although I was too generous and too ignorant to realize the extent of their dishonesty and rapacity. Now I wanted to see how people would behave to a Russian nobleman. I must say here that I repeatedly used this method of disguise - it has been amazingly useful in multiplying my points of view about humanity. Even the most broad-minded people are necessarily narrow in this one respect. They may know how all sorts of people treat them, but they cannot know, except at second hand, how those same people treat others."

 

   And the Hail Mary caper has its own sane-insane raison d'etre:

 

   "I must not be thought exactly insincere, though I had certainly no shadow of belief in any of the Christian dogmas... I simply wanted to see the world through the eyes of a devout Catholic, very much as I had done with the decadent poet of White Stains, the Persian mystic of Bagh-i-Muattar, and so on... I did not see why I should be confined to one life. How can one hope to understand the world if one persists in regarding it from the conning tower of ones own "personality?"

 

   Just so: the procedure is even scientific these days (Role-Playing, you know) and is a central part of Psychodrama and Group Dynamics. "You have to go out of your mind before you can come to your senses," as Tim Leary (or Fritz Perls) once said. Sure: you can even become Jesus and Satan at the same time:  Ask Charles the Son of Man.

 

   For Artemis, the goddess of nature, is eternally virgin: she only surrended once, and then to Pan: and this is a clue to the Beast's purpose in his bloody sacrifices.

 

 

III -- The Empress

This is the Harmony of the Universe, that Love unites the Will to create with the Understanding of that Creation.

                                                                                                –  The Book of Thoth

 

   The infant Gargantua was sent to a school run by the Plymouth Brethren, the narrowly Fundamentalist sect to which his parents belonged.  He commends the school in these cordial words from his essay "A Boyhood in Hell":

 

   "May the maiden that passes it be barren and the pregnant woman that beholdeth it abort!  May the birds of the air refuse to fly over it!  May it stand as a curse, as a fear, as a hate, among men.  May the wicked dwell therein!  May the light of the sun be withheld therefrom and the light of the moon not lighten it!  May it become the home of the shells of the dead and may the demons of the pit inhabit it!  May it be accursed, accursed - accursed for ever and ever.'

 

   One gathers that the boy Alick was not happy there.  In fact, the climax of his miseries came when somebody told the Headmasters that he had seen young Crowley drunk on hard liquor.  Our anti-hero was put on a diet of bread and waters and placed in coventry (i.e., nobody, student or teacher, was allowed to talk to him), without being told what offense he committed; this Christian punishment (for his own good, of course) lasted one full year – at which point his health collapsed and a relative not totally committed to Plymouth Brethren theology insisted that he be removed from that environment before it killed him.

 

   This incident is a favorite with the Beast's unsympathetic critics; they harp on it gleefully, to convey that they are not the sort of religious bigots who would torture a child in this fashion; and they also use it to explain his subsequent antipathy to anything bearing the names or coming under the auspices, of "Jesus" or "Christ."

 

   It was this school, they say, which warped his mind and turned him to the service of the devil; a nice theory for parlor analysts or term papers, but it has the defect of not being quite true.  The King of Depravity never did embrace Satan, as we shall see, and he kept a very nice mind full of delicate distinctions and discriminations; of this experience he himself says, "I did not hate Jesus and God; I hated the Jesus and God of the people I hated."

 

   cont...   http://www.rawilsonfans.com/articles/GreatBeast.htm

[trailhound]

Aleister Crowley

Probably the most notorious magician of his period, if not of all time, Aleister Crowley has had far more influence after his death than at any time during his over-indulged life. His reputation as a drug fiend and evil man aside, his early writings show a keen intellect, and a good sense of humour in the more staid climate of his era. What follows is a brief summary of his life.

Born Edward Alexander Crowley, on the 12th of October 1875 in Leamington Spa, Warwickshire. Crowley was brought up in the strict ruling of the Plymouth Brethren. His rebellion against his upbringing, and the fact that his mother identified him with the Great Beast of the Revelation, was something that would steer his life on the course of overindulgence and theatrical evil.

Crowley's father died in 1887, and Crowley was sent to live with his mother's brother, an alleged viscous bully called Tom Bishop, during that time he attended a school run by the Plymouth Brethren. Crowley's childhood was a very unhappy one; he later described his experiences saying that it was only his iron will that got him through the whole experience.

Crowley soon came of age, and at 21 made a final split from his family. He became an undergraduate reading moral science at Cambridge University. Crowley seemed set for life; he had inherited his father's fortune, and was mixing with people who were soon to become high movers in society.

While at Cambridge he wrote poetry and started mountaineering, gaining a respectable reputation in both pursuits. He was a driven and courageous mountaineer, undertaking ambitious adventures in the Himalayas, his one problem being an inability to stand weakness in others. With regard to his poetry his pornographic and demonic prose was more notorious than critically acclaimed, but he managed to get much of his work published at home and abroad.

The real turning point in Crowley's life came on November 18th 1889, when he was initiated into the Golden Dawn, the most influential occult group in Britain. He took the name Frater Perdurabo, which means I will endure.

He was not well liked by the majority of the members of the Golden Dawn. W. B. Yeats, the Irish poet called him "An unspeakable mad person" which paints a fairly colourful picture. During his time in the Golden Dawn he lived with a fellow member called Allan Bennet in a London flat. Here they experimented with magic rituals in two purpose built temples, and if Crowley is to be believed they had some startling results, including the manifestation of a host of supernatural beings and poltergiest activity. Crowley left the Golden Dawn after a supposed magical battle with MacGregor Mathers, who was ousted from the core in 1900 after accusing one of the founders of forging the documents on which the group was based.

In 1900 at the age of 25 Crowley moved into Boleskine House on the shores of Loch Ness in Scotland. His main aim was to find a quite place where he could continue his magical training. At Boleskine he is said to have summoned demons, held the black mass, and to have taken part in sexual orgies, charges later levelled at him while in Italy twenty years later.

In his autobiography he describes how the spirits he summoned got out of hand, causing one housemaid to leave, and a workman to go mad. He also insinuates he was indirectly responsible for a local butcher accidentally severing an artery and bleeding to death. Crowley had written the names of some demons on a bill from the butcher's shop. Whatever the truth Crowley revelled in controversy all his life and was not above fuelling dark rumours about his activities.

In 1902 his mountaineering exploits led him to attempt Chogo Ri in the Himalayas with Oscar Eckenstein. They spent 63 days surviving on the Baltero Glacier, and Crowley claimed to have climbed alone to a height of 22,000 feet, until he was driven back by severe weather conditions.

In 1903 he married Rose Kelly, his first wife, and one of the many women in Crowley's life to end up broken and mad from the overindulgence of Crowley's world.

In 1904 while on a trip to Cairo, his wife Rose, who was a medium, was inexplicably drawn to an exhibit with the number 666. Later an intelligence named Aiwas dictated the Book of Law through Rose, which contains the famous 'Do what thou wilt shall be the whole law'. To Crowley the communion and trip were a sign and key into a new age, the age of Horus, and Crowley was to be its Messiah.

In 1905 Crowley's mountaineering pursuits once again beckoned. He set off to conquer Kangchenjunga, which is the world's third highest peak. There was great controversy during this abortive adventure; Crowley was accused of beating porters, and leaving men to die alone in an avalanche. There was also a slight mutiny within the camp. The trip added another black mark to his already growing reputation as an evil man.

In 1907 he formed the Argentinum Astrum or the Order of the Silver Star, A.A. for short. This was his own magical society allowing him complete control, he plundered much of the Golden Dawn's system of rituals adding to them his own brand of sexual magic.

During 1909 he started the magazine Equinox, in which he published some of the Golden Dawn's second order secrets. He also divorced his wife Rose in the same year. She was a hopeless alcoholic by this time, probably through Crowley laying the blame on her for his daughter's death. She ended up in a lunatic asylum shortly afterwards.

In 1912 he visited Germany and met with Theodor Reuss, who was the head of the ten year old Ordo Templi Orientis. He was appointed the head of the British O.T.O, which was heavily influenced by erotic magic. He took the magnificent title of 'Supreme and Holy King of Ireland, Iona and all other Britons within the Sanctuary of the Gnosis'.

In 1915 he moved to New York in the U.S.A, and spent the following years of the First World War writing anti British propaganda for the Germans. This was another black mark for the man the British press were soon to dub 'The Wickedest Man in the World'.

In 1916 he rose to the rank of Magus by crucifying a toad after he had baptised it Jesus Christ. The German branch of the OTO also severed links with the British chapter at this time, many of the German members were wary of Crowley, and there was also the fact that Germany was at war with Britain.

In 1920 he went to Cefalu with his current scarlet woman Leah Hirsig, and formed the Abbey of Thelema in a converted Villa. It was the resulting press coverage from his time here that gained him worldwide notoriety. He was accused of conducting sexual orgies, the black mass and animal sacrifices as well as all forms of diabolical magic. The real disaster came when one of the members of the Abbey, an Oxford Graduate called Raoul Loveday, died of enteritis at the Abbey. His wife accused Crowley of poisoning him by making him drink the blood of a cat during one of their ceremonies, and her campaign against him in London fuelled the increasingly bad press.

While reports were undoubtedly exaggerated, there is no smoke without fire, and by 1923 the Italian government had had enough of his apparent diabolical activities and expelled him. As always Crowley revelled in the accusations, and did not deny any of the allegations.

The expulsion from Italy was the beginning of an overall downturn for Crowley, he still travelled widely but his band of followers dwindled, and he never really gained the same influence over a large audience until after his death. He did however take control of the OTO, Theodor Reus retired in 1923 and named Crowley as his successor. There was some disagreement about the decision amongst members, but he was finally confirmed as leader in 1924. He continued as head until a 1946, when he relinquished control to Kenneth Grant.

In 1929 much of what now forms 'Magick in Theory and Practice' was published, 1929 also saw the publishing of one of his best occult novels 'Moonchild'.

In 1934 Crowley was declared bankrupt after losing a court case in which he tried to sue the actress Nina Hamnett for calling him a Black Magician. The evidence against him must have been overwhelming, and it is difficult to see why he ever took the case to court.

As old age beckoned he retired to Hastings, where he was still in communication with some of the leading lights on the occult scene at that time, including Gerald Gardner, Montague Summers and Isreal Regardie. He was not above commenting on the practices of others, and wrote vehemently about R.L Hubbard and Jack Parsons trying to raise a moonchild in the U.S.A. He also continued working on his interpretation of the Tarot 'The Book of Thoth', which was published in 1944.

Crowley died in Hastings on the 1st of December 1947 aged 72 years, he was still a heavy heroin user at this time, taking a dosage that would have killed at least five people.

The resurgence of interest in Crowley took off in the 1960s, a time of occult revival and freethinking in the western world. His work is still of value today and his books, although heavy going in some places, are intelligently written and form the beginnings of a psychological approach to magical practice.

Crowley drawing Copyright of Daniel Parkinson

[Sasha]

Now that's a sense of humor right?  Super satanist Aleister Crowley aka The Great Beast 666 for President 2012, hugging up on a kid wearing a T-shirt with a US Flag shaped like the lower 48,... this picture says so much.

[TonkaTim]

Now that's a sense of humor right?  Super satanist Aleister Crowley aka The Great Beast 666 for President 2012, hugging up on a kid wearing a T-shirt with a US Flag shaped like the lower 48,... this picture says so much.

This blog post http://crowbama.tumblr.com/ says he has investigated & claims that photo is legit.

[Sasha]

Pretty legit it seems.

The author's analysis of Aleister Crowley leaves alot out.  But, the T-Shirt does seem confirmed.

[egypt]

I thought depictions of America, like an American Flag for kids was not acceptable and kids were arrested at school for wearing one. 

I have no doubt it's true about the Crowley worhip.  Is there proof Obama has attended Bohemian Grove?

[Sasha]

Bush, McCain & Obama To Visit Bohemian Grove?
http://www.prisonplanet.com/bush-mccain-obama-to-visit-bohemian-grove.html