Diary of a Drug Fiend
and Other Works
by Aleister Crowley
This text reflects the time in which it was written and the author's own views, not those of the publisher.
Contents
Introduction
Diary of a Drug Fiend
Moonchild
Household Gods
The Book Of Lies
The Book of The Law
White Stains
“do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law”
Introduction
Aleister Crowley (1875–1947) was a living contradiction. A shameless self-publicist, he revelled in shocking polite society and living up to his image as “the wickedest man in the world”. And yet, for all his baiting of those he despised and goading of those he considered his intellectual inferiors, he professed and exhibited a profound understanding of practical magic which few occultists of his era could equal. Furthermore, he possessed the courage to venture beyond the visualization exercises and Masonic/Rosicrucian rituals practised by his contemporaries in order to cross “the abyss”, the symbolic chasm between the Conscious and Unconscious, and explore the realms of the inner and upper worlds.
His knowledge of practical “magick” (his spelling), and his understanding of the other realms and realities described in the texts collected between these covers, reveals that he was not a man to be satisfied with speculative theories and assumptions. He craved direct personal experience of the Mysteries as the Western esoteric tradition was known at that time, and he risked his life, and some might say his sanity, in pursuit of the secrets of life and death that can only be glimpsed during heightened states of awareness.
He was largely responsible for making the process and practices of ceremonial magic accessible to succeeding generations, whose secrets had been concealed between the covers of arcane grimoires since the Middle Ages. He also redefined magic for the modern age in stating, “Magick is the Science and Art of causing Change to occur in conformity with Will.” [Magick In Theory and Practice] It is a definition that is universally accepted to this day.
Crowley’s uncompromising character was formed during his comparatively privileged childhood. He was born Edward Alexander Crowley in the Warwickshire town of Leamington Spa on 12 October 1875. The only child of strict, puritanical parents, he was the focus of their attention and yet grew to despise his mother, Emily, a religious hysteric whom he later described as a “brainless bigot”. His father, Edward, died in March 1887 when Aleister was entering his teens, leaving the adolescent unchecked by paternal influence and free to practise his new-found philosophy of amoral self-indulgence.
The death of Crowley’s father drove his mother to seek succour in religion, her zeal serving to compound his belief that religious mania was a form of insanity. It was his mother who reviled him as “The Beast of Revelation” after she caught him seducing their maid. He was just 14 at the time, if his account is to be believed, but it is impossible to distinguish fact from fiction when it comes to the Crowley myth, for so much of it was of his own making.
Sex, his mother warned him, was the devil’s creation and he would be eternally damned if he succumbed to temptation. Absolving herself of responsibility, she sent him off to boarding school, first at Malvern then at Tonbridge in Kent, where he explored his burgeoning bisexuality and wrote reams of morbidly pornographic poetry. As no self-respecting British publisher was willing to publish the poems, Crowley paid to have them printed abroad, as he was to do with several later works included in this present collection, ensuring that the first editions became highly valued and sought after collector’s items.
Fortunately, he had the means to indulge his passions, having inherited a small fortune from the family brewery business, Crowley’s Alton Ales, which he spent freely during his early years as a Cambridge undergraduate. He entered Cambridge in 1895, having finished his public school education in July the previous year at Eastbourne College.
At Cambridge, he discovered occultism, devouring A. E. Waite’s The Book of Black Magic and Of Pacts and MacGregor Mathers’ translation of The Kabbalah Unveiled in a single sitting, or so he claimed. Both books had a profound influence on Crowley’s own writings, although characteristically he later dismissed them as “pretentious”. Success in magic as in all things, he believed, depended on the ability to “awaken one’s creative genius” by visualizing what one wished for and then bringing it into being.
One of his earliest attempts at ceremonial magic saw him cursing a Cambridge professor who had refused to allow his headstrong student to stage a bawdy play. According to Crowley, he gathered a group of fellow scholars on the night of the full moon to witness the ritual which involved sticking pins into a wax effigy of the academic. However, one of his fellow students lost his nerve and tried to seize the doll. The pin stuck in its foot and the next day the master tripped on the stairs and broke his ankle. Crowley’s development as a magician was swift and remarkable, due mainly to his unwavering self-belief and his single-minded desire to attain recognition as an adept.
In November 1898, he paid the 10 shilling membership fee and was accepted into the outer circle of the most fashionable fraternity of practising occultists in Victorian England, the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn. The Order boasted several eminent members of the establishment, among them the visionary poet W. B. Yeats, who later described Crowley as “an unspeakable person”, and senior member Allan Bennett who would be influential in introducing Buddhism to Britain. Bennett became Crowley’s mentor and live-in private tutor in a luxury flat they shared in Chancery Lane, London. It was Bennett who introduced Crowley to the use of drugs in ceremonial rites and who in vain tried to persuade his pupil to follow his ascetic regime. But Crowley refused to moderate his behaviour to the consternation of the elder members who found his egotism intolerable and who disapproved of his open bisexuality.
Crowley was unapologetic. He soon despaired of learning the ageless secrets from his elders on finding that the membership was composed largely of former freemasons who were as dogmatic in their rituals as any organized religion or private club. They in turn resisted his persistent demands to be initiated into the inner Second Order to which he believed himself entitled and in 1904 in a fit of pique he disregarded the oath of secrecy he had sworn before the brotherhood and dragged the Order’s leader S. L. MacGregor Mathers into open court to the amusement of the tabloid press and their scandal-hungry readers. The resulting publicity led to the dissolution of the Golden Dawn to the revulsion of his former associates, who never forgave him for going against the central tenet of their magical craft, which required initiates “To Know, To Dare, To Will and To Remain Silent”.
A year after joining the Golden Dawn, Crowley had purchased the Scottish estate Boleskine House on the shore of Loch Lomand and declared himself “Laird of Boleskine”. He intended to make it his private sanctuary where he could perform ceremonial magic far from prying eyes. But he was too restless to settle and was soon on his travels, journeying to Mexico, Ceylon, Burma and India, where he studied Yoga and in 1902 attempted an ascent of K2 (Kanchenjunga), the world’s third-highest mountain in the company of the eminent climber Oscar Eckenstein.
From Nepal, he made his way to Paris where he established himself as a painter, becoming acquainted with sculptor Auguste Rodin and befriending Gerald Kelly, a future President of the Royal Academy
. On returning to Boleskine, he became enamoured of Kelly’s recently widowed sister Rose, an emotionally unstable young woman whose family was intent on arranging a second marriage of convenience. She begged Crowley to help her and he agreed to elope with her. They were married on 12 August, 1903. During their honeymoon in Cairo, Rose demonstrated an unexpected ability as a medium, channelling the text of what would comprise the first three chapters of The Book of the Law in April 1904.
Crowley claimed it had been partly dictated by the Egyptian God Horus and the remainder by his own guardian angel Aiwass. It was to form the basis of his new religion, Thelema, but this found few converts at the time. It became a cult text during the occult revival of the late 1960s when its appeal to “take your fill and will of love as ye will, when and with whom ye will” was adopted by the hippies who interpreted it as an endorsement of Free Love. For this reason, Crowley appears on the cover of The Beatles’ Sgt Pepper album along with Gandhi and W. C. Fields among others. A decade later in the cynical 1970s, it was adopted as the credo of the Church of Satan, which saw its advocacy of self-gratification and disregard for the sufferings of one’s fellow man as a validation of their own nihilistic philosophy.
But Rose’s usefulness was short-lived and she became an alcoholic after she had given birth to their “magical child”, which died in infancy. A second child survived, but Crowley had no interest in her, cruelly predicting that the little girl, Lola Zaza (1907–1990), would become an “ordinary little whore”. He had her mother committed to an asylum in 1911, two years after he divorced her. Rose died there in 1932.
Relieved of any responsibility he might have felt towards his wife and child, Crowley was free to pursue “The Great Work” which he had begun during his third year in Cambridge and which he defined as the process of “becoming a Spiritual Being free from the constraints, accidents and deceptions of material existence”. [Magick In Theory and Practice]
His wilful disregard for those he considered had outlived their usefulness was, however, no hindrance to his progress as a magician. He soon attracted a circle of slavishly devoted admirers who were seduced by his charismatic personality and an ideology which centred on the psychic energy generated during the sexual act.
Crowley was not the only modern magician to advocate the harnessing of one’s vital life force for magical purposes. He shared this conviction with the German Ordo Templis Orientis, who in 1912 were incensed to see their secret rites and doctrine published in Crowley’s privately printed periodical The Equinox and The Book of Lies (1912 or 1913). The dispute was settled out of the public gaze, with Crowley being granted permission to set up a branch of the OTO in Britain, which provided an official endorsement of his magical activities and helped to attract new devotees.
The Book of Lies is arguably the most mystifying, exasperating and ultimately rewarding magical text he wrote. Essentially an initiation manual for “Babes of the Abyss”, it consists of 93 single page “chapters” containing secrets and insights into the nature of reality which only reveal themselves with intense study and contemplation: Zen-like koans which frustrate and fascinate in equal measure but promise to reveal universal truths depending on how hard the reader is prepared to work at untangling the wilfully obscure cryptic clues.
When war was declared in 1914, Crowley decamped for America where he remained for five years, spreading anti-British propaganda to spite the country which had refused to recognize his peculiar genius. In exile, he penned his most accomplished and compelling novel Moonchild (1917), which centres on the struggle within a sect of white and black magicians for the soul of a young girl destined to give birth to the avatar of a new age. All of the major characters are thinly disguised portraits of his friends and adversaries, while Crowley himself appears as the girl’s seducer, white magician Cyril Grey. Its chief purpose was to disseminate its author’s occult philosophy, though for a fuller understanding of the book it is necessary to have a working knowledge of Crowley’s theories and a familiarity with esoteric concepts. It failed to find a publisher and remained among Crowley’s manuscripts until 1929, when small press publisher Mandrake Press offered to issue it. When they floundered, Crowley stepped in to self-finance its publication, but it did not sell and Mandrake Press folded the following year.
By war’s end, he had spent the last of the family fortune and was sponging off friends who soon tired of his unrelenting demands for funds and his boorish behaviour.
Determined to establish himself as an avatar of the New Age, he emigrated to Sicily in 1920 with his clique of admiring disciples and there established “The Abbey of Thelema” in an old farmhouse in Cefalu. It was there that he wrote his commentary on The Book of the Law and also the fevered, semi-biographical confession Diary of a Drug Fiend (1922).
Thelema was a sect over which he could be sure to exercise unchallenged authority, and assume the role he was born to play – the dark guru and messiah for the New Age of Horus, the age of cynicism, self-obsession and glorious excess, which he proclaimed would dawn in the latter half of the 20th century.
There was a lively atmosphere in Sicily to say the least, with his two mistresses, Leah Hirsig (whom he named “the Ape of Thoth”) and Ninette Shumway (his former housekeeper) often coming to blows to the evident amusement of their lover and spiritual guru. Their feud intensified when guests began to arrive at the “Abbey” and the male acolytes offered to share their wives with the master. Crowley had a talent for attracting self-destructive personalities to him, but he found himself powerless to prevent inevitable tragedy when one young disciple, Raoul Loveday, drank the blood of a sacrificed cat and died on 16 February 1923. The Abbey was immediately closed on the orders of Mussolini and its inhabitants deported. It was this incident which earned Crowley the title of “the wickedest man in the world”, a reputation he exploited for the last twenty years of his life.
Those years were blighted by an increasing dependency on drugs and alcohol and desperate attempts to fund his habits and fend off bankruptcy. Abandoning Leah and their 5-year-old chain-smoking son Dionysus in Tunis along with Ninette and an infant daughter he had sired, he headed for France. He had no scruples about leaving his nearest and dearest. His only obligation, he declared, was to himself and completion of the Great Work.
In Paris, he performed a rite that was to have been the consummation of his magical career – an invocation of Pan. But when he and his assistant failed to reappear the morning after the ceremony, his anxious followers broke down the door and found the assistant dead and Crowley cowering in a corner gibbering. He never recovered and retired to Hastings on Britain’s southeast coast where he lived in a seedy boarding house, a shadow of his former self and allegedly frightened of the dark. He died on 1 December 1947. His final words were “I am perplexed”.
A practising magician of my acquaintance once remarked that Crowley had put “just enough chocolate in his books to make them taste like chocolate cake” but also pitted them with traps to ensnare the uninitiated. Such tactics are not the work of a true teacher, but rather of one who jealously guards his secrets. But Crowley’s masterful generating of his own image has ensured that he continues to exert a profound and lasting effect on those seeking forbidden knowledge
But it is Crowley’s enduring and pervading influence on popular culture and specifically rock music, which has ensured his name lived on into the Age of Horus and beyond. Both Black Sabbath and Led Zeppelin, the two leviathans of Heavy Rock, paid homage to Crowley in song and even David Bowie, who professed no particular interest in the occult, name-checked Crowley in an early song ‘Quicksand’ (1970). Zeppelin guitarist Jimmy Page became so obsessed with Crowley that he bought Boleskine House and spent a fortune acquiring the largest collection of original Crowley manuscripts and first editions in private hands.
Crowley’s wilful disregard for the secrecy of the magical orders to which he belonged led to his estrangement from occult circles, but ha
d he not done so future generations would have been deprived of the texts which are collected here.
—Paul Roland
Diary of a Drug Fiend
TO ALOSTRAEL
Virgin Guardian of the Sangraal in
the Abbey of Thelema in “Telepylus”
and to
ASTARTE LULU PANTHEA
its youngest member, I dedicate this story
of its Herculean labours toward releasing
Mankind from every form of bondage.
Preface
This is a true story.
It has been rewritten only so far as was necessary to conceal personalities.
It is a terrible story; but it is also a story of hope and of beauty.
It reveals with startling clearness the abyss on which our civilisation trembles.
But the self-same Light illuminates the path of humanity: it is our own fault if we go over the brink.
This story is also true not only of one kind of human weakness, but (by analogy) of all kinds; and for all alike there is but one way of salvation.
As Glanvil says: Man is not subjected to the angels, nor even unto death utterly, save through the weakness of his own feeble will.
Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law.
—Aleister Crowley
Contents
Book I: Paradiso
I. A Knight Out
II. Over The Top!
III. Phaeton
IV. Au Pays De Cocaine
V. A Heroin Heroine
VI. The Glitter On The Snow
VII. The Wings Of The Oof-bird
VIII. Vedere Napoli E Poi – Pro Patria – Mori
IX. The Gatto Fritto
Diary of a Drug Fiend Page 1
