MAN'S CONQUEST

February 1959

LOVE CULTS—U.S.A.

BRIDES OF THE BEAST.

Whipped into a frenzy during one of Crowley's

meetings, woman swears obedience as she waves

Bible and holds flaming bottle near her face.

Smiling triumphantly, the girl sat on the tufted cushion stripped to the waist and beamed as she watched the men staring greedily at her bosom.

"I'm the luckiest woman on earth!" she boasted as she sniffed the erotic incense that thickened the air. "Look! Here on my chest! Here is his mark!"

Burned into her flesh with a red hot Japanese dagger was a strange emblem—a cross in the center of three concentric circles.

When Aleister Crowley was 6, he hung his pet kitten over

an open gas jet, set it afire, stabbed it and declared that

he was a God. At 21, he decreed that sex cured all ills—and

then set out to prove it. Crowley filed two front teeth to

needle points and bit young girls on the wrist when pretending

to kiss their hands.

"The Mark of the Beast!" the shapely brunette giggled wildly." "I am the Scarlet Woman and he is my unearthly lover—The Great Beast!"

The half-naked and almost insane temptress was a Bronx singing teacher named Leah Faesi, curvy mistress of one of the most evil and depraved creatures ever to crawl across this planet. He was a sorcerer, sex maniac, pervert, drug addict, masochist and devil worshipper. They called him Mr. Satan. Almost every woman who became involved with him—either went raving mad or killed herself. His name was Aleister Crowley and during the half century between 1898 and 1947, he was internationally loathed and dreaded as "The Wickedest Man Alive."

This grotesque freak, who really believed that he was a God, that sex could cure any illness, and that he was in touch with evil spirits, was a religious crank and an intellectual genius. He was also a fabulous lover who seduced and abandoned dozens of women, whose sexual desires were so enormous that he'd make love to a famous opera singer three times in one afternoon and then hustle down the street to buy the services of two teen-aged prostitutes at a dollar each. He was incredible, impossible, irresistible.

Crowley was born in Leamington, England, on October 12, 1875. He was a brilliant child who read rapidly when he was four and played splendid chess at six. He far outstripped all his classmates at school, doing a week's homework in an hour so he'd have time to continue his "scientific experiments." One of his gory investigations was whether a cat really has nine lives. Young Crowley, not yet 10, caught a tabby and fed it food loaded with arsenic. Then he methodically chloroformed it, hung it above the open gas jet, stabbed it, cut its throat, smashed its skull, set it on fire, drowned it and dropped it out a fourth floor window onto the cobblestones. He beamed when he reported that he'd been successful in snuffing out all of the cat's nine lives.

Crowley showed signs of being obsessed with pain by the time he was eight, and not only did he enjoy hurting smaller children but he often begged older boys, "Be cruel to me, please! Hit me! Kick me!" Neither his father, a retired brewer who'd become a fanatical missionary for an obscure sect, not his mother, a semi-hysterical crank who went around quoting terrible predictions from the Bible, paid much attention to the overwhelming evidence that they were raising a four-star menace. There can't be much doubt that the parents' behavior, coupled with the frequent frenzies of an uncle who was a religious fanatic, helped young Crowley down Nightmare Alley.

His father died when the boy was 10, and a year later "The Great Beast" was born. A wave of homosexuality swept the fancy boarding school where Crowley was identified as the ringleader. When pulled before the headmaster and ordered to confess, the highly imaginative Crowley wasn't quite sure what he was supposed to admit so he started telling of an extraordinary variety of crimes. The principal kept beating him mercilessly with a cane—day after day—until the blood ran, flogging the boy to make him confess the crime. By the fourth day, the strange boy was telling about imaginary robberies and murders in an attempt to stop the whipping.

Having lashed the boy raw with no effect, the headmaster angrily expelled him from school and sent him home with a letter to his mother. That weird lady went into a fit when she read it, screaming "You're not a human being at all! You're the Great Beast prophesized in Revelations!"

Delighted by this awful new title, young Crowley raced to the family Bible to read about the Great Beast who did great wonders and deceived mortals with his miracles and whose number was 666. He was particularly intrigued by the fact that the Beast put his mark on his followers, among them a Scarlet Woman who was his staff prostitute. From that day on, Aleister Crowley signed all his letters "The Great Beast" or "666" and began to worship Satan. He had a gory wild time that lasted for 50 years and extended over four continents.

Long-haired disciple uses Crowley's special prayers to cure sick

woman. Ritual is also supposed to bring wealth and injure enemies

While bust practicing curses and spells he learned from old books on witchcraft, the adolescent Crowley hoped to use these supernatural powers to get revenge on his nagging mother and uncle. The hocus-pocus didn't work, so at 15 he started having relations regularly with a buxom Irish housemaid in his puritan mother's bed three afternoons a week. While the girl was panting and writhing, Crowley was smiling in his double triumph.

At 20 he entered Cambridge University, where he found his sexual appetites so out of control that he could barely go a single day without seducing some woman, Barmaid, professor's wife, shop clerk, teenage student, all these females were the same to the odd man who admitted that he needed their flesh the way an alcoholic requires liquor. He was good looking, about 5'10" and weighed 190. Crowley did quite well with the women on charm alone until he inherited $200,000 on reaching 21, and after that he hired or seduced eight or 10 women every week.

The university bored him, so he quite to concentrate on sex, magic and mountain climbing. He joined a secret cult called the Order of the Golden Dawn, but was annoyed to find that it wasn't evil enough and really didn't succeed with its naïve attempts at black magic. Crowley found most of the Golden Dawn gang idiots, but he got along well with an intensely demon-daffy young drug addict named Allan Bennett. Soon they were sharing an apartment in London and practicing spells together, "feeding" blood and live birds to a human skeleton in the hope that they could bring it to life. They burned incense, painted "magical" symbols on the floor, drank heavily and took frequent injections of narcotics as they staggered around their "temple" in black robes. They were so out of their minds that they started believing they really were seeing devils.

Amply supplied with funds, Crowley kept a steady stream of the cheapest gutter tarts moving in and out of his steaming bed and he let Bennett use them too. Finally Bennett was worn out by the whole crazy life and fled to Ceylon to become a Buddhist monk. Crowley bought an estate in Scotland, [Boleskine] announced that he was the "Laird of Boleskine" and built a strange temple in the living room of the manor house so he could continue his friendship with the demons he knew so well.

Within three months, the whole town of Boleskine was on the verge of hysterics. Crowley's pack of savage dogs guarding the temple had everybody nervous. Furthermore, his teetotal ling lodgekeeper became a roaring drunk and a lady fortune teller imported from London went mad and set herself up as the local prostitute. One of the gardeners, reduced to gibbering insanity, cheerfully attempted to murder Crowley.

After a few years of dabbling with the Order of the Golden Dawn, Crowley decided to tour the world setting up branched of his own supernatural cult. His first stop was Mexico City, where he casually set up light housekeeping with an internationally famous opera star who left her husband for him. After three weeks of almost constant relations left the lady happy but exhausted, Crowley started bringing home a series of grimy young women who'd do anything you wanted for a few cents. When they started doing these things on the dining room table, the opera star departed sobbing.

Worshippers of "The Great Beast" approach one of his sacred temples

Girls eventually made a long pilgrimage to see Crowley himself.

Crowley moved on to San Francisco, elated by his success in winning more than 90 converts in Mexico City. The sober citizens by the Golden Gate gave the erotic cultists such a loud horselaugh that Crowley soon grabbed a boat for Japan. En route, in Hawaii, he met a shapely young woman whose rich husband sent her to the islands because the weather was good for their young son. After three sexual explosions with Crowley, she abandoned her child and followed the slimy sorcerer to Tokyo, where they spent a month in bed. Then Crowley returned the favor by abandoning her and sailing off to Ceylon. He amused himself on the way by turning out reams of magnificent but pornographic poetry.

After a brief reunion with Buddhist Bennett in Ceylon, the mad magician failed to peddle his cult in both India and Egypt and returned to Paris. Here he succeeded in attracting attention by such simple methods as ordering all his meals backwards from dessert to soup, by shaving 90 percent of his head, and by waltzing around town in a black cloak while waving a cane topped by a baby's skull. He added another refinement by filing two of his front teeth to needle-points and biting young women in the wrist when he pretended to kiss their hands.

Having scored mightily in Paris, Crowley scuttled on to London where he tried his occult act on the wealthy Sir Gerald Kelly. Sir Gerald wasn't sold, but his curvy and moody sister Rose [Rose Kelly] bought the whole routine and eloped with the fast-moving fiend to Egypt. After a macabre honeymoon that began with a wedding night in the burial chamber of a pyramid, Rose became pregnant and obsessed with the idea that she was a giant bat. The thought that Rose was pregnant thrilled Crowley for he had a great idea of how to provide for his child's future. He got a bowl of fresh blood and started putting curses on his wife to make sure that the baby would be born a monster.

As usual, his preposterous chants failed completely and a normal healthy daughter resulted. Disappointed, Crowley promptly left for India to climb a few mountains. He was later joined in Calcutta by his weary wife and child, whom he invited to accompany him on a walk to China. The coolies mutinied. Crowley smoked 20 pipes of opium a day and Rose fell sick. He merrily left her with the baby in a remote Chinese village and hiked on to Shanghai. There he learned that his daughter had died and the British consul had shipped a mentally and physically ruined Rose back to his estate at Boleskine. Rose was three months pregnant with a second child.

Crowley returned to Scotland with wonderful news of his fabulous new "sex magic" a week after his second daughter, Lola Zaza, was born. This new magic consisted of a series of rather unusual sex acts that would bring wealthy, cure sickness and injure your enemies. Dozens of hot-blooded women hurried to Boleskine to take part in these extraordinary acts with The Great Beast, weird performances that Crowley sometimes forced his wife to watch stark naked and hanging by her heels.

Rose took to booze, polished off 150 bottles of Scotch in three months and was inevitably carted off to the local insane asylum where she died a few years later. Crowley kept busy writing, alternately, obscene poetry and beautiful religious hymns. He also poured his energies into spreading sex magic and the cult of "Crowleyanity," especially among girls with good figures, weak minds and large bank accounts. There has never been a shortage of cranks, and between 1908 and 1914 branches of Crowley's weird faith erupted in a dozen countries on both sides of the Atlantic.

His U.S. operation proved profitable, with hundreds of fanatics building a temple in the mountains near Palomar, California, where they worshipped the depraved Englishman as a God.

Wearing Buddhist robes, Crowley (left) attracted hundreds of

fanatical followers to temple (right) near Palomar, Calif.

Crowley saw World War I as a quick way to get some cash from the anti-British Irish-Americans, so he rushed to New York to write pro-German articles and make phony speeches for an independent Ireland. The local Irishmen didn't get excited, but a superbly built Bronx singing teacher, Leah Faesi, [Leah Hirsig] was so bewitched by the traveling devil-doctor that she immediately became his mistress. She wallowed joyfully in his sex-magic, squealed with delight when he announced that she was his official Scarlet Woman and purred insanely as he branded his ensign between her beautifully shaped mammaries.

At the end of the war, The Great Beast and the Scarlet Woman boarded a boat for Europe. En route, Crowley conducted a few experiments with a swivel-hipped blonde named Ninette Shumway who proved to be a real wizard at sex magic. Leah Faesi was Concubine No. 1 and Miss Shumway became Concubine No. 2, and they remained the stars in Crowley's carnal circus for years. At one time he was operating with 14 mistresses, including a 17-year-old Ethiopian nymphomaniac, and he kept them all numbered to avoid confusion.

Crowley and his two right-hand women went to Sicily where he bought an old villa outside the small town of Cefalu. This was to be his cult's world headquarters. He painted all the walls of the house with detailed pornographic pictures, hung crystal balls and swords on the walls, and filled all the ash trays and candy dishes with narcotics. When the local peasants began to grumble menacingly about storming the sin center, Crowley thoughtfully placed 30 loaded revolvers around the house for his cultists to use in defending the holy temple.

Within a few months, the villa housed a strange collection of occult cranks from all over the world. There was a Hollywood actress [Jane Wolfe], a famous lady writer who thrived on sex, a chronically drunken U.S. merchant sailor, [C. F. Russell] a mathematics professor [Norman Mudd] from Cambridge University and a dozen assorted wealthy girls looking for thrills. In addition, there was an effeminate young Londoner named Raoul Loveday and his hard-boiled wife, Betty [Betty May]. She was an ex-nude model and self-cured drug addict and she suspected that Crowley was having a homosexual affair with her husband. She didn't think The Great Beast was anything more than a sex maniac and a fraud, and she warned her idiotically naïve husband to stay away from the narcotics Crowley kept urging on him.

It was open war between Betty and Crowley for possession of Raoul Loveday. She was not only his wife, but she had a figure that would stun any male. Crowley was practicing his own magic with Raoul, a process that involved getting the young husband to perform many interesting and complicated sex acts with several of the concubines. These women, most of whom were both nymphomaniacs and drug addicts, were always set to go a few rounds to help "cure" Raoul of his peculiar interest in his own wife. Raoul, on the other hand, was losing strength rapidly from the constant dope and sex Crowley forced on him. In addition, he was losing quite a bit of blood under the rule that if any cult member used the word "I" he was to slash himself immediately with a razor.

Betty was growing unnerved by the creepy way the concubines stalked about the house and by the shocking pictures on the walls of the Chamber of Horrors. One evening she watched The Great Beast cut the guts out of a sheep in a weird ritual and she nearly vomited her dinner in revulsion. The next day she almost fainted when she heard Crowley say "Tonight we will sacrifice Betty!" Not waiting for the details, she ran for the hills and stayed in the brush for 21 hours. "What's the matter Betty?" the grinning "God" teased her when she returned, "Can't you take a joke?"

The next week Crowley decided to sacrifice a cat, a quaint process that involved cutting the animals' head off and making groggy Raoul drink its blood. Raoul, an obvious sissy, fainted. The next day Betty tried to blast The Great Beast with one of the guns and he returned the favor by booting her, literally, out of the "Abbey." "Get out of here and don't come back, you cynical slut!" he thundered.

Betty returned a few days later when she heard that Raoul was seriously ill, but the efforts of the local doctor failed and her husband died within a week. She went back to write a scorching series of articles that created such a scandal that the Sicilian authorities ordered Crowley to get out now. The Great Beast sailed for Tunis with Leah, Scarlet Woman and Concubine No. 1. He was how a helpless heroin addict, and tried to raise money for narcotics by "instructing" wealthy students of the occult and by offering to turn communist.

Both failed, so The Great Beast and his Concubine No. 1 scraped together their last few dollars for two tickets to Paris. Here he met a rich socialite named Dorothy Olsen, with whom he practiced his ever-lovin' sex magic so profitably that she became his 3rd mistress and supplied plenty of cash. To keep this wealthy 48-year-old woman happy, he made her the official Scarlet Woman and abandoned poor Leah. She'd lost her looks to drugs and tuberculosis, abandoned her U.S. citizenship at Crowley's request and born him two children out of wedlock. She took to washing dishes in a cheap restaurant 3,000 miles from home.

While Crowley and the new Scarlet Woman were living it up in North Africa on her money, Leah was rescued by one of Crowley's disciples who'd taught math at Cambridge. This poor devil drowned himself, however, and Leah was never heard of again. Crowley ran through all of Dorothy Olsen's money in a year and left her pregnant, an alcoholic and a drug addict. He returned to France where he married a Nicaraguan girl named Maria Ferrari [Maria de Miramar], whom he left when she turned to liquor and heroin. He skipped off to Portugal with an American lady painter. Surprisingly, she too became pregnant, went insane and killed herself. By this time, Maria was raving and gibbering in England that she was a daughter of the royal family and the king was forcing her to commit incest with the Prince of Wales.

Inventing sex perfumes, hormone rejuvenators for old men and a killer-diller of an aphrodisiac, Crowley barely met the high price of his drug addiction through gifts from his sects all over the world. He retired to a small boarding house in the country where streams of his followers visited regularly, but by the late 1930's he was rapidly losing his public appeal. An Austrian paper hanger—just as insane and depraved—had come to power in Germany and grabbed the title of "The Wickedest Man Alive."

Still working stubbornly on his magic spells and demons, Aleister Crowley died in bed at the age of 72 on December 1, 1947. Brilliant, brooding, bestial and brutal, this talented but perverted man is still respected by some literary critics and students of the occult. Psychiatrists agree that he was a genius, but disagree on what it was that made him a sex maniac and The Great Beast who ruined thousands of lives.