Aleister Crowley Read Free

of sex, drugs, and rock and roll and for a time was adrift. 4 In 1982 I moved back to LA and began the slow, sometimes painful transformation from pop star to normal person.
    It wasn’t until a decade later that I started writing articles and book reviews for
Gnosis
magazine and other journals. In 1996 I moved to London, and in 2001 my first book,
Turn Off Your Mind
, an “occult history” of the 1960s, came out. Crowley is a kind of éminence grise
throughout the book, his influence permeating much of the mystic decade, and I also wrote a short essay on him for a later book,
A Dark Muse
, about the occult and literature. In London’s occult milieu I met many people interested in Crowley. In 2008 I wrotean article on Crowley for
Fortean Times
, spelling out my criticisms. 5 In 2009 I was asked to host the Occulture Festival, a revue of occult and magical performances, mostly of a Crowleyan nature. In the same year, I wrote a long essay on Kenneth Anger, a filmmaker deeply influenced by Crowley, for the British Film Institute’s DVD box set of his films, and interviewed Anger onstage at London’s National Film Theatre. And in 2011 and 2012 with some musician friends, I performed a live sound track to Rex Ingram’s 1926 silent film
The Magician
, which is based on Somerset Maugham’s novel of the same name, and which features a black magician modeled on Crowley. I also gave lectures in London and Trondheim, Norway, on Crowley’s impact on horror films, and contributed an essay about him for a book about his last days. 6 So although I was no longer a fan of the Beast, I still moved in his circles, so to speak.
    It was while researching my essay for the book about Crowley’s last days that I noticed that something had changed in the way he was being perceived. Over the years an academic interest in the occult had sprung up and I was surprised to discover there was such a thing as “Crowley studies,” with conferences and symposiums dedicated to the Beast. In fact, I gave a talk at one of these, sponsored by the O.T.O. 7 Crowley was becoming respectable, at least in academic circles, a complete change from how he was perceived when I first read him. Even as prestigious a publisher as the Oxford University Press had published a collection of academic articles on the Beast—ironic, as in 1930 Crowley had been banned from giving a lecture at Oxford. 8 Several new biographies had appeared, all of which seemed aimed at rehabilitating Crowley, at least at exonerating him of the worst stains on his reputation. Their basic message was that theDevil is not as black as he is painted, and at least one of them runs a close second to Crowley’s own “hagiography” (biography of a saint), the
Confessions
, in singing his praises and celebrating him as one of the most important thinkers and mystics of the twentieth century.
    I wondered: was I missing something? I had by then written about several major figures in the esoteric world, critical studies of Rudolf Steiner, Madame Blavatsky, P. D. Ouspensky, and C. G. Jung. Although popular and influential, none of them had made the same impact on “youth culture” as Crowley had—none, that is, had found themselves a posthumous life as a pop icon as the Beast had clearly become. Today, the image of Crowley with shaven head and bulging eyes that the Beatles put on the cover of
Sgt. Pepper’s
is almost as familiar as that of Marilyn Monroe or Che Guevara. One can almost see Crowley as the subject of one of Andy Warhol’s famous celebrity prints, and T-shirts with Crowley’s image are almost as familiar as those with the Ramones. Why had Crowley found a secure place in pop iconography, when other spiritual teachers from the mystic decade—like Jung and Blavatsky—had not? After all, it was in that milieu that I first discovered him. And why was the general attitude toward him changing? Was Crowley really the victim of the yellow press, of rumor and downright falsehood, as much of