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As Related by Ian Coster
from
INKY WAY ANNUAL, BOOK II World's Press News, circa 1948
[circa May 1933]
He may have been pulling my leg. As we sat in a London restaurant he took a pot of brown unguent out of his pocket and solemnly anointed hair and eyebrows. "Try some," he said, "it makes women fall in love with you. You'll see that when I go out even the horses will follow me along the Strand."
He told me that it was a secret preparation made from animal glands. In his brown knickerbocker suit he looked like a retired civil servant up for a day in town. He passed the pot to me as if it were a snuffbox. The stuff smelt pretty bad. I refused, so that I am unable to recommend it. And I do not remember that we caused any stampede of horse-drawn vehicles in the Strand afterwards. Still, I may have passed up a chance to be a Fleet Street Barrymore.
My courteous host was Aleister Crowley, who called himself the Master Therion and The Beast 666. Other people called him names too. James Douglas wrote that he was "a master of wickedness." Horatio Bottomley called him a dirty degenerate and a cannibal. Mr. Justice Swift commented on his works, "Never have I heard such dreadful, blasphemous stuff as that produced by a man describing himself as the greatest living poet."
His common tag was "the worst man in London" and even his friends considered him a Black Magician. The only black things I discovered about him were his pipe and his tobacco, which would have choked a navvy. His eyes were dark and alert in a podgy, pallid face. He was 5'11" but he looked shorter.
We met because I was to be the "ghost" of the Beast. When I heard, way back in the early 30's, that he was back and hard-up I put up the idea of "Why not the worst man on himself?" to Harry Lane (father of that ornament to journalism and letters, Margaret), the editor of the Sunday Dispatch, at the usual conference.
After several abortive conferences with Crowley I went back to Lane and said, "It's all off. He qualifies everything; he makes Black Magic as tame as a kid's party."
Lane said, "Listen, this was your idea! We run the first article next week."
So I was stuck with it.
I went back to the Beast. One of the troubles was his refusal, or inability, to get down to plain journalism in which one might say "On Thursday night I called up Lucifer, according to the rules of incantation, and he jumped into the room in a cloud of smoke and said, 'You want me, pal?' He was plainly dressed in red and he carried his forked tail neatly over his arm."
Crowley, a literary stylist, disliked the bald statements I was trying to wring out of him. I wanted facts not flourishes. We hammered it out. I nailed him down to some facts, that he was born in Leamington, Warwickshire in 1875, his father having been a colleague of Darby, founder of the Plymouth Brethren, and that at birth he had "the four distinguishing marks of a Buddha," the most astonishing being four hairs, curling from left to right in swastika-form over the heart. This allowed him to say, "Before Hitler was, I am."
We made a fairly readable attempt, I hope, to follow his footsteps along The Path, following his initiation into the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn. There was better stuff about his Temple in Chancery Lane, how its acacia, golden-topped altar was overthrown by malicious demons. But I could not pin him down to a description of the demons. Were they hoofed and horned? No, they were "shapes with half-human faces."
When we'd threshed out the articles we became friendly. He came to a party I gave and surprised guests by telling them their birth months by looking at their faces. But his powers failed over phone numbers; he had to ask the girls for those. With his autobiography in print I began to see his good points; he had a nice sense of humour; he had written a brilliant short story, praised by Joseph Conrad; he had been a mountaineer; he could order a first-rate dinner; he knew James Stephens.
He put up a case for magic. He described it as "the science and art of causing change to occur in conformity with will." The gramaphone was a magic box to the Zulus. An Englishman of the 90's would have laughed at the idea of hearing the U.S. President by turning a knob. The magic of today was the science of tomorrow. But he never did the simplest trick in my presence, such as turning salt into pepper. This was easy, he said, but why expend vital powers on a silly trick?
One day he came to see me about writing a chess column and a thunderstorm burst over London, with fine forked lightning. Just to ease over the question of a chess column (which the editor didn't want) I said, "It's a pity that somebody'll get killed today. Mind, it isn't the lightning's fault; it just can't get to earth without hitting somebody in London."
Crowley's dark eyes turned on me. He looked horrified. "You don't mean that?" he said. "I do," I replied, "and I'll bet somebody gets killed today, even money." The Beast 666, the Master Therion said, "I'll take you," and went out. One or two people were killed. The next day I received a letter from him with a shilling wrapped in it. He had written "Here is your shilling of blood money. You are the Black Magician."
And I was so hard up by the Thursday that I spent the shilling which, surely, must have held some great magical power.
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