| ALEISTEIR CROWLEY | ||||
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- Magician and Author
Born in October 1875, he was brought up in an overtly zealous home of a rigid Protestant sect who referred to Catholic and Anglican Churches as 'synagogues of Satan'. His parents had the belief that most of mankind was doomed by a just God to roast in hell fire for all eternity. When his father died in 1887 Aleister became the sole object of all his mother's fanatical venom. She would often accuse him of being the actual' Great Beast' of the book of Revelation, whose number was 666. Crowley did all he could to live up to this image through the greatest part of his life. At times he may well have believed he was the biblical beast. Crowley was educated at two schools, Tonbridge and Malvern. At the latter he attempted to investigate the legend of a cat having nine lives by scientific experiment. "I caught a cat and having administered a large dose of arsenic, I chloroformed it, hung it above the gas jet, stabbed it, cut its throat, smashed its skull, and when it had been pretty thoroughly burnt, drowned it and threw it out of the window that the fall might remove the ninth life. The operation was successful. I was genuinely sorry for the animal; I simply forced myself to carry out the experiment in the interests of pure science". After a time at Trinity College, Cambridge, he left, without a degree, took a flat, named himself Count Vladimir, (the first of many aliases), and persued his occult studies on a full-time basis. Crowley became a member of the sacred order of the Golden Dawn, where met many other students of the occult, who among other things beleived in Karma. Crowley insisted he was the reincarnation of many infamous figures, including Eliphas Levi, who died on the day Crowley was born. Levi was a 19th century French writer and a ritual magician. Also Pope Alexander VI, renowned for his love of physical pleasures; Edward Kelly, the notorious assistant of magician John Dee; Cagliostro, an 18th century magician, and Crowley believed that he had been an Egyptian priest of the 26th dynasty. He was a prolific writer, particularly of poetry, but he is most remembered for his work 'The Book of the Law'. He stated that he wrote the book by sitting for one hour on three consecutive days with a pen and paper in front of him. He believed that the gods dictated to him, in voices audable only to their chosen prophet, the gospel of the new age that was about to dawn. The principle of the book was 'Do what thou wilt', which, to be fair to Crowley, is not quite the same as 'Do what you like'. He claimed that it meant "find the way of life that is in accordance with your inmost nature and the live it to the full." This, he believed, would be the Bible of the new age- all other old religions including Christanity would pass away and be replaced by a new faith of 'force and fire'. He referred to the originator of the book as 'Our Lord God the Devil'. By 1910, instead of Crowley mastering the book, it had mastered him; he was to devote his life to spreading the message of the book and believed himself its messiah. The book's control led him to study every word of its text with the same fanatical devotion that his zealous parents had to the Bible. Whenever in need of guidance, he would open it at random and take the sentence his finger touched upon as a direct message from the gods. The book itself tends to give weakness because its phraseology is so vague that conflicting readings tend to give different views and contradictions. In 1919 Crowley formed 'The Abbey of Thelema', which was situated in a slightly derelict Sicilian farmhouse, the inmates of which devoted themselves to the practices of the faith. When a young Oxford graduate, Raoul Loveday, a disciple of Crowley, died while at the Abbey, his wife began a campaign against Crowley, which was taken up eagerly by the British press, who had known of his sexual orgies and animal sacrifices. This led to the closure of the Abbey. The Sicilian authorities then deported him. Friend Alan Burnett-Rae declared Crowley's interests in life were a perverse sort of mysticism and sex. "As to the first it seemed simply to consist of a cult of blasphemy in which he saw himself as a type of Anti-Christ. In fact, his instinct about life was to be anti-any thing that most people do. How ever, therefore, most people act, he would attempt to do the reverse. Having met Crowley several times, Dennis Wheatley's impression of him was as a "fascinating conversationalist who had an intellect of the first order". He told one of Crowley's friends that he was convinced Crowley could not harm a rabbit. The reply was that this was all after the Paris affair where attempted to raise PAN. With his twelve Disciples he took over a hotel for the weekend. A big upper room was cleared. With his principal disciple, MacAleisteir (son of Aleisteir), he was to perform a ceremony, while the other eleven remained downstairs. He told the eleven that, whatever noises they might hear, in no circumstances were they to enter the room before morning. In the night they did hear shouting and banging in the room upstairs, but obeyed their orders not to go up. In the morning they went up and as there was no reply to their calls they broke the door down. They found MacAleisteir dead and Crowley stripped of his magician's robes; a naked gibbering idiot crouching in a corner. Before he was fit to go about again, he spent four months in a lunatic asylum. The historian H. Bridgeman summed up Aleisteir Crowley as a "Poet, mountaineer and drug addict. He was reviled by the press for his notorious black magic masses and his orgies. His two marriages ended unhappily and five of his mistresses committed suicide, but to his followers, who still exist, he was a Messiah." He devoted his life to his self-formulated system. But it may well have all been a delusion. It is said that his last words, uttered in a seedy boarding house in Hastings, 1947, were "I am perplexed".
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Aleisteir
Crowley, the writer and mystic, was denounced in the 1920's as 'the
wickedest man in the world'. A number of individuals who make their lives a
study of black magic came from over-religious backgrounds. This drives them
to rebel against their upbringing to such an extent that they are sent to
completely opposite extremes. This was to be so of Crowley.