Magic works in some manner—that much history confirms beyond question. Gifted men and women have happily devoted their lives to perfecting its practice. Ruling powers—religious and secular—have persistently held its practitioners suspect. What greater testimony can there be to the power of magic than the enduring love and fear it inspires?
To gauge how magic works, one can do no better than to turn to the strange, wondrous, and saddening career of Aleister Crowley—the magus and Beast par excellence for our times.
CHAPTER ONE
The Strange Transformation of One Edward Alexander (“Alick”) Crowley, a Pious Christian Boy of the Late Victorian Upper Class, Into Aleister Crowley, Poet, Gent., and Magical Adept in Waiting (1875–98)
It was in the heart of a peaceful and prosperous England, in the town of Leamington in the county of Warwickshire, at the genteel address of 30 Clarendon Square, between eleven and twelve P.M. on the night of October 12, 1875, with the astrological sign of Leo in the ascendant, that Emily Crowley bore a baby son, the firstborn heir to the fortune of her husband, Edward.
The son was given the name of his father and grandfather: Edward Crowley. The newborn’s middle name of Alexander was taken from a pious friend of the father, and in very early childhood it was explained to the boy that “Alexander” meant “helper of men,” a meaning that left an enduring impress.
In his autobiographical Confessions, Crowley sought to establish his place in the lineage of magi. One standard feature of the myth is the appearance of special physical features at birth. In the third person, Crowley describes his newborn self:
He bore on his body the three most distinguishing marks of a Buddha. He was tongue-tied, and on the second day of his incarnation a surgeon cut the fraenum linguae [a membrane attaching the underside of the tongue to the bottom of the mouth]. He had also the characteristic membrane, which necessitated an operation for phimosis [abnormal tightness of the foreskin which necessitated a late circumcision] some three lustres [fifteen years] later. Lastly, he had upon the center of his heart four hairs curling left to right in the exact form of a Swastika.
This self-portrait reveals both Crowley’s absorption with his lineage and, as well, the sort of shameless bluff that often lies concealed beneath his assured tone. Of his birth in the county of Warwickshire he wrote: “It has been remarked a strange coincidence that one small county should have given England her two greatest poets—for one must not forget Shakespeare (1550–1616).” In making the jibe (a tacit and wry acknowledgment of his own frustrated yearning for fame as a poet), Crowley casually ascribes the wrong birth year to the Bard, who was born in 1564.
In the Confessions, Crowley declares that he will tell the truth, but insists upon limitations: “The truth must be falsehood unless it be the whole truth; and the whole truth is partly inaccessible, partly unintelligible, partly incredible and partly unpublishable—that is, in any country where truth in itself is recognized as a dangerous explosive.”
With these caveats—which allow the memoirist an ample creative freedom—we may turn to the Confessions with both interest and caution. As to his birth characteristics, for example, it is untrue that being “tongue-tied” is one of the primary distinguishing marks of a Buddha. Indeed, Gautama, the Indian prince who became the Buddha, is described in the Buddha-Karita of Asvaghosha (whose first-century work remains the most revered biography within Buddhism), as having declared his mission eloquently at the very moment of his emergence from his mother’s womb: “‘I am born for supreme knowledge, for the welfare of the world,—thus this is my last birth,’—thus did he of lion birth, gazing at the four quarters, utter a voice full of auspicious meaning.” Not even Crowley dared to give himself so fine a speech at his own nativity.
If Crowley was imaginative in terms of his spiritual lineage, he was utterly sincere as to its significance to him. The same is true of his paternal lineage. The Crowleys, he asserted, were of Celtic origin, with branches in Ireland and Brittany. Family tradition had it that the Crowleys were strong supporters of fellow Welshman Henry Tudor, the Earl of Richmond who became Henry VII; the Welsh Crowleys fought for him at the Battle of Bosworth in 1485, and established themselves in England in the wake of his triumph.
The adult Crowley would draw from this Celtic ancestry as it suited him: for example, during World War I, he preferred to be Irish rather than English, for reasons to be examined in due course. But the more prosaic facts as to family finances and religion would exercise the most enduring influence.
Crowley was heir to the luxurious life that the British Empire could offer to its fortunate upper class. Father Edward came from a wealthy Quaker family. His own father Edward, Crowley’s grandfather, made his fortune as a brewer, establishing a number of public houses that sold Crowley Ale and sandwiches. Edward, who had no necessity to make a living, became a self-appointed preacher of the word of God—and a formative role model.
Wealth affected the spirituality of both father and son. It is a truism that class affects character. But in Victorian England class distinctions were severe enough—even for the white domestic population—to create what would now be called a “third world” level of poverty and despair amongst the lower classes. As historian E. J. Hobsbawm observed, “In the 1870s eleven- to twelve-year–old boys from the upper-class public schools were on average five inches taller than boys from industrial schools, and at all teen-ages three inches taller than the sons of artisans.” Fellow historian Barbara Tuchman described the ruling class of the 1890s (the decade in which Crowley came into manhood and family fortune): “Fed upon privilege, the patricians flourished. Five at least of the leading ministers in [Conservative Prime Minister] Lord Salisbury’s Government were over six feet tall, far above the normal stature of the time. Of the nineteen members of the Cabinet, all but two lived to be over seventy, seven exceeded eighty, and two exceeded ninety at a time when the average life expectancy of a male at birth was forty-four and of a man who had reached twenty-one was sixty-two. On their diet of privilege they acquired a certain quality which Lady Warwick could define only in the words, ‘They have an air!’” These stark realities enable one to appreciate the extreme importance to Crowley—through all the magical transformations of his psyche—of his status as an English gentleman.
Religion was the second great influence that flowed through his family. His parents were devoted to an intensely sectarian creed, that of the Plymouth Brethren. Plainly, Crowley grew to despise the Brethren as he came of age. Yet his new religion of Thelema recapitulates the Brethren worldview in several vital respects. The paradoxical truth is that Crowley was an astonishing emulator of the creed he professed to hate.
The Brethren sect was founded in the late 1820s by John Nelson Darby, an Irish-born Anglican priest who became vehemently disenchanted with the Church of England. Darby had come to see all churchly institutions as unjustified by Scripture and hence as false custodians of the teachings of Christ. The name Plymouth Brethren emerged from the early influence of the meetings at Providence Chapel in Plymouth. By 1848, there were roughly six thousand Brethren adherents in Britain. From the first, the movement attracted primarily educated members of the upper classes, such as Edward Crowley. Its lure consisted, in large measure, in the pared-down simplicity of its three central precepts: (1) An insistence on the literal truth of Scripture (as embodied strictly in the King James Translation); (2) Elimination of all priestly authority—all worshippers were equal at Brethren meetings, and free to speak as the Holy Spirit moved them; and (3) An imminentist belief in the Second Coming so strong that, as Crowley later observed, “preparations for a distant future—such as signing a lease or insuring one’s life—might be held to imply lack of confidence in the promise, “‘Behold, I come quickly.’”
It was in this highly charged atmosphere—set between the fervid expectation of Christ’s coming and the vigilant shunning of Satan—that Crowley the boy was raised. When one compares the structure of Brethren beliefs with t
hose of the new religion of Thelema established by Crowley, the parallels are fundamental and unmistakable. Such was the impress that the earnest and dedicated Edward, and the fond but fearful Emily, made upon their son.
* * *
It was on behalf of the Brethren cause that Edward Crowley became a lay preacher. But it was Emily who enforced the ways of the Brethren at home, and it is to her that we shall turn first.
Emily Crowley, who first bestowed upon her son the epithet of “Beast,” was born Emily Bertha Bishop. Little is known of her early years. Crowley tells us that she was raised in a Devon and Somerset family, had an oriental appearance that won her the nickname of “the little Chinese girl” during her school days, and had a talent for water-color painting. Beyond this, his judgments upon her were uniformly severe. Crowley wrote of how, in his late teen-age, he saved his mother (whom he heard crying out from a distance, by way of what he termed inexplicable “psychic phenomena”) from slipping down a precipice. This action he described as a “regrettable incident of impulsive humanitarianism.” At the heart of Crowley’s complaints was his conviction that Emily had been ruined by her religious beliefs. Upon marrying Edward Crowley in 1874, Emily had converted to the Plymouth Brethren creed. Crowley felt keenly the barriers she posed to his childhood reading:
My intellectual avidity was enormous, yet I was absolutely cut off from literature.[ … ] David Copperfield was barred because of Little Em’ly, for she was a naughty girl; besides, Emily was my mother’s name, and to read the book might diminish my respect for her. One of my tutors brought down The Bab Ballads [by W. S. Gilbert], one of which begins:
Emily Jane was a nursery maid.
My mother threw the book out of the house and very nearly threw him after it.
With a trace of sympathy, Crowley allowed that “her powerful natural instincts were destroyed by religion [ … ] Yet there was always a struggle; she was really distressed, almost daily, at finding herself obliged by her religion to perform acts on the most senseless atrocity.”
This element of reluctant understanding bespeaks a more subtle degree of feeling for his mother than Crowley ever expressed directly in his writings. The Confessions contain one scene that testifies particularly strongly to this. At roughly age sixteen, Crowley explained, the repressive atmosphere of his home made him “prepared to go out of my way to perform any act which might serve as a magical affirmation of my revolt.” This “magical affirmation” proved to be sexual intercourse with the family parlor maid. “And I had her on my mother’s very bed!” Crowley was an admirer of Freud and aware of the theory of the Oedipal complex. One need not insist on the truth of that complex to find it odd that Crowley failed to consider—at least in his writings—how it might apply to exultant sex on his mother’s bed.
For all of Crowley’s bluster against her in the Confessions, there remained a difficult love and even spiritual kinship between them. Emily, it would seem, was not quite so hidebound a bigot as Crowley would have us believe, nor was he quite so thankless a son. We are compelled to go abruptly forward in time to find testimony in support of these assertions. The English poet Ethel Archer, who was a close friend of Crowley’s in the years prior to World War One, wrote a novel, The Hieroglyph (1932), in which the main protagonist, occultist Vladimir Svaroff, is (by Archer’s own testimony) modeled entirely upon her memories of Crowley in that period. Here is an account of a meeting between mother and son circa 1910: “To hear Vladimir being chided by his mother like a very small and naughty boy, and to see him calmly accepting the situation, was both humorous and quaint.[ … ] That Madame Svaroff adored her son there could be no question; that she equally believed him to be entirely given over to the Evil One was beyond question likewise. She prayed for him without ceasing, but she refused to have in her rooms a single article of his personal belongings—even his pipe and a few books being banished to the attics.” Archer’s narrator goes on to insist, surprisingly, that Madame Svaroff possessed, along with her piety, an admirable sense of humor, “and in this trait one could see the unmistakable likeness of mother to son.”
Beyond the humor, there was tenderness outright. There survives a letter by Emily dated December 12, 1912—the same period as the fictionalized events of The Hieroglyph. Referring to Crowley as “Alec” (Crowley himself spelled his childhood nickname “Alick”), Emily writes, with more pathos than asperity: “I very much wish that he would treat his mother better & give her a little more of his company.” She goes on to note with approval that her son is following the advice of her lawyer with respect to investments—hardly a sign of intransigent filial rebellion.
And yet, there is the stark fact that it was Emily Crowley who bestowed upon her son the sobriquet that would dominate his own inner identity: that of the Beast. How could a mother love her son and yet see him as the Adversary? Crowley offers his own explanation. “In a way, my mother was insane, in the sense that all people are who have watertight compartments to the brain, and hold with equal passion incompatible ideas, and hold them apart lest their meeting should destroy both.[ … ] But my mother believed that I was actually Anti-christ of the Apocalypse and also her poor lost erring son who might yet repent and be redeemed by the Precious Blood.” Crowley never tells us if there was a specific incident in his childhood that inspired this maternal belief, but he does confide that, at a very early age, he himself was drawn to the figure of the Beast. Crowley (again writing of himself in the third person) takes pains to argue that this identification was nothing out of the ordinary for a child whose only allowable reading was the Holy Scripture. Its most bloodcurdling prophecies served as his fairy tales—deliciously forbidden fantasies:
The Elders and the harps seemed tame. He preferred the Dragon, the False Prophet, the Beast and the Scarlet Woman, as being more exciting. He reveled in the descriptions of torment. One may suspect, moreover, a strain of congenital masochism. He liked to imagine himself in agony; in particular, he liked to identify himself with the Beast whose number is the number of a man, six hundred and three score six. One can only conjecture that it was the mystery of the number which determined this childish choice.
Perhaps it was this fascination shown by her son that inspired Emily to dub him the Beast. But however this originated, it was no minor tease, coming as it did from a woman who believed in the literal truth of the Bible. To a remarkable extent, Emily foresaw and believed in the destiny of her son, however much she fought against it. If the bond between mother and son seems intact, even after the studied vitriol of the Confessions (written after her death), the secret of its strength lies in the mother’s knowing recognition of what her son might become.
* * *
There is a sharp dichotomy in Crowley’s feelings for his parents, stated with fervor in the Confessions: “His father was his hero and his friend, though, for some reason or other, there was no real conscious intimacy or understanding. He always disliked and despised his mother. There was a physical repulsion, and an intellectual and social scorn. He treated her almost as a servant.” As vehement as is Crowley’s contempt for Emily, the tribute to his father reads, in its hesitant way, as more troubling still. Hero worship can thrive as a distant emotion, but friendship without “intimacy or understanding” is a difficult friendship indeed. Nonetheless, the parallels between Crowley and his father are as striking as one could wish. The one key distinction—that the son reviled the faith his father devoted his life to preaching—seems, in retrospect, relatively unimportant when compared to the cognitive patterns that endured.
Edward Crowley was born in 1834 and, as previously mentioned, came into a fortune by way of his Quaker father’s brewery. Edward not only failed to enter the family business, he also rejected the family’s pietist faith, devoting himself instead to writing and preaching on behalf of the Brethren. Edward did not omit to teach the faith at home: by age four, young Crowley was a fluent reader of the Bible, which was studied daily in the home, just after breakfast. The theme of momento mor
i was an obsession for Edward. Crowley recalled accompanying his father on evangelizing tours in which they would go from village to village on foot:
He would notice somebody cheerfully engaged in some task and ask sympathetically its object. The victim would expand and say that he hoped for such and such a result. He was now in a trap. My father would say, ‘And then?’ By repeating this question, he would ferret out the ambition of his prey to be mayor of his town or what not, and still came the inexorable ‘And then?’ till the wretched individual thought to cut it short by saying as little as uncomfortably as possible. ‘Oh well, by that time I shall be ready to die.’ More solemnly than ever came the question, ‘And then?’ In this way my father would break down the entire chain of causes and bring his interlocutor to realize the entire vanity of human effort. The moral was, of course, ‘Get right with God.’
The reason for Crowley’s choice of magic as a lifework was to escape the mortal coil and to achieve something undying—like unto the Christian heaven of his father. He once wrote of the magical quest for divine union: “The adventure of the Great Work is the only one worth while; for all others are but interludes in the sinister farce of Life and Death, which limits all merely human endeavor.”
As befitted the notion of his father as hero, Crowley sought—in his Confessions—to make of him as great a paragon as possible, given his repugnant Brethren beliefs. How else could the Prophet of the New Aeon exonerate a father who so embodied the Old? Crowley stressed that Edward was, for all his misguided religion, a gentleman and a “natural” aristocrat. In Crowley’s view, this was evidenced by Edward’s pronounced leadership qualities, which shone forth amongst the Brethren. But Crowley inflated his father’s deeds in the way adoring sons do. Neither Brethren chroniclers nor outside scholarly researchers have adjudged Edward Crowley as a principal figure in the Brethren movement. Indeed, his name does not appear in the standard volumes on the sect. In Crowley’s eyes, however, Edward towered over his peers and “swayed thousands by his eloquence.” Given the small number of Brethren in Great Britain, and the cramped meeting room settings in which Edward typically preached, the claim of “thousands” lacks any credibility. In a further telling passage, Crowley describes his frustration in watching Edward “ostentatiously” avoid the assumption of authority with his fellow Brethren. Not even their puritanical shunning of the flesh galled Crowley so much as their failure to grant Edward his due. And Crowley was determined not to fall victim to his father’s fate:
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