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THE PICTURE POST London, England 3 December 1955
Crowley, the Beast—concluded.
WHERE DOES THE DEVIL GET YOU?
PROFESSOR KINSEY, the world-famous American sexologist, gives his professional view on Aleister Crowley.
JENNY NICHOLSON Sums up this false Messiah.
Aleister Crowley, 'The King of Depravity', is popularly believed to have been exactly as Mr. Justice Swift described him in court, after he had heard evidence of the life led by Crowley and his disciples in the Abbey of Thelema at Cefalù, in Sicily
"I thought I knew every conceivable form of wickedness. I thought everything which was vicious and bad had been produced at one time or another before me. I have learnt, in this case, that we can always learn something more, if we live long enough. I have never heard such dreadful, horrible, blasphemous, and abominable stuff as that which has been produced by the man who describes himself to you as the greatest living poet."
And why, since Crowley deliberately advertised himself as a demon—shaved his head, or grew his hair like horns, and talked satanically—should anyone have bothered to disagree with Mr. Justice Swift? His disciples, irritated and anxious asked "Why the devil do you do it A.C.?" "To keep the fools away," said Crowley.
Naturally, as any fool but Crowley should have guessed, it attracted the fools, and embarrassed serious students of magic.
As a matter of fact, Crowley was not always as diabolical as he painted himself on the doors of the Abbey at Cefalù. He once cured a woman of drink; and he married Maria de Miramar, against all advice of his friends, because he considered it was his fault that she had been expelled from France, and would not have been allowed into Britain unless she came as his wife. But, as in magic, good and bad are inextricably mixed up. Crowley made a point of never being nice without being nasty and vice versa. In a book of devout hymns to the Virgin Mary there was, for bad measure, one which was a complicated anagramic blasphemy.
"By the pricking of my thumbs, something wicked this way comes."—Crowley.
Even his best friends, when he blackguarded and sued them (he once issued a writ to his literary-agent friend for £15,000 which he claimed he would have gained, if his friend had handled his literary affairs properly), had often to remind themselves what a good companion (and cook) he was—how freely the good talk and brandy flowed—how physically courageous he was—how genuinely he was adored by his women, and his children. His sons Dionysus [Hansi] and Hermes [Howard Shumway] always began their otherwise ordinary, childish letters to him "Dear Beast."
To the normal public he was antisocial. He was bad about paying his debts. He was a drug addict, and a megalomaniac. It was natural that they should assume that if he dedicated himself to Magic it was bound to be black. True Black Magic can only be conducted by a renegade priest. All correct magical communications are through the archangels.
"If you conjure up a devil without first invoking a guardian angel—if you conjure up an evil spirit without a good agency—you can't control it, and you deserve all you get—like sticking pins in an effigy," one of England's few authorities on magic explained. It is possible that Crowley got his magic wrong, and his guardian angel, Aiwass, was really a demon. Certainly the Christian view would be that Crowley was satanically inspired.
A painting of Crowley on his death bed.
"Blot out mankind and give the beasts a chance. Nature may find in their inheritance Some semblance of a race less infinitely base."
Last week, Dr. Kinsey, the famous sexologist, examined the sex-magic oil paintings with which Crowley had covered his abbey walls and doors, and from which Kenneth Anger, the young American film-maker, has painstakingly removed the whitewash slapped on thirty-seven years ago by the order of the Italian police. Dr. Kinsey claimed he knew "Nothing about the magic side of it. But I am interested in the sex. I have interviewed several people who knew Crowley when he was in America and I have his books in my library. The amazing thing is that Crowley lived a life that would not normally have been tolerated in the most primitive parts of darkest Africa. He thought he could get away with blatant sex practices and in fact he did get away with them for many years.
"My name is Aleister Crowley I'm master of Magick Unholy . . ." A demon discovered by Anger on the wall of the 'Chamber of Horrors'—Crowley's bedroom at the Abbey of Cefalù, which he painted to induce hypnosis.
But an erudite article on Crowley claims, "Crowley, with his aptitude for sex, his knowledge of magical tradition and technique, and his acquaintance with the East, had worked out for himself the secret of sexual magic. Believing it had died out in the West, he was proud of rediscovering it. His paintings in the abbey were merely tactics for his students. He like shocking people.
Crowley wrote the first dictionary of magical terms—the first comprehensive guide to yoga, and a major contribution to the techniques of magic called "Magick in Theory and Practice". And he was taken seriously until he attempted to make a religion out of a symposium of various western and oriental forms of magic. Then he quarreled with most of his friends and admirers, because they would not take his religion of Thelema seriously. For all serious magicians are agreed that magic is inferior to religion. "Any recognized religious symbols," they tell you, "such as the sign of the Cross, are proof against it."
"Women should be brought round to the back door, like milk." Cefalù, 1922. Two Crowley disciples—a star of the silent films [Jane Wolfe], with Leah [Leah Hirsig], Crowley's favorite 'Scarlet Woman'.
Crowley was a false Messiah. In 1917 he had founded his new religion based on the Book of the Law (dictated to him by Aiwass) after ceremoniously killing Christianity. He had no disciples of any caliber for his religion in his lifetime. None has yet appeared; and it is unlikely that any will. He tried to become spiritual advisor to Stalin, to Hitler (who quotes from the Book of the Law in his conversations with Rauschning on the subject of white and black magic), to the British War Office, Henry Ford and King George V. He tried to 'benefit' mankind with his law 'Do What Thou Wilt'.
Visiting cards used by Aleister Crowley and Leah while at Cefalù.
The devil generally gets the false Messiahs. Ronald Matthews, in his English Messiahs, records the end of "Nayler on his tragic ride through the autumn downpour; Joanna dying, racked by doubts, in the glare of publicity; Brothers thundering of 'divine vengeance' from behind the madhouse bars; Tom leading his deluded followers to imprisonment and death; Prince and Smyth-Pigott founding, in the Somerset hills, a new ark, to save a remnant of mankind." And Crowley ended his days in a Hastings boarding house, taking heroin on the National Health (for his asthma). His funeral wasn't at all as he had romantically willed it. "I direct my executor to take the necessary steps to ensure my body is embalmed in the ancient Egyptian fashion . . . my body to be dressed in white Tau robe with Abramelin red and gold tunic and girdle, and the crown and wand. Also the big red sword. Bury all magical jewels with me."
"And I rave and I rape, and I rip and I rend." Dr. Kinsey takes a scientific view of Crowley's Sex-Magic paintings, which are too shocking to publish.
His urn to be placed "either on (a) the broad ledge of the cliff behind Boleskin [Boleskine] House, Scotland, (b) the top of the rock at Cefalù, Sicily, about the Bath of Diana, or in (c) Westminster Abbey." He was actually, cremated in the dismal non-denominational chapel in the Brighton cemetery (his ashes were forwarded later to disciples in America). A congregation of scandalized newspapermen, and amused old friends, attended the macabre service. The sound of someone quoting from the Book of the Law, and declaiming Crowley's Hymn to Pan—ricocheted off the tombstones in the dreary Brighton graveyard, and echoed through the Christian world:
"And I rave; and I rape and I rip and I rend Everlasting world without end . . ." |
