Aleister Crowley Read Free Page A

the new literature on him claimed? Was he a misunderstood genius, a maligned philosophical warrior fighting for mankind’s spiritual liberation? Was he so ahead of his time that only a handful of followers could appreciate his message? Did he really bring to humanity a sacred scripture, revealed to him by an alien intelligence that, at least according to him, was so beyond our human mind as to be practically incomprehensible? And was he the prophet of a world religion,
thelema
(Greek for “will”), that presaged an orgiastic new age, in which a free mankind would celebrate light, life, liberty, and love, the coming era of “the crowned and conquering child”?
    My own belief is no. As odd as it sounds, Crowley, I think, really didn’t know his own true will and spent a lifetime pursuing a phantom. He was a man of great talent, frequent brilliance, and occasional genius who wasted himself in an adolescent rage against authority and a justification of every whim of his insatiable ego. Crowley’s life is full of tragedies but this may be the most tragic thing of all. The Chinese philosopher Mencius said that the great man follows the part of himself that is great, the little man follows the part of himself that is little. Crowley had equal parts of both, and it was the part of him that was great that inspired loyalty in followers and friends and fueled him when faced with failure and defeat. But when it came down to the wire, more times than not, Crowley followed the part of himself that was little. As his friend Louis Wilkinson said, he was “a great man manqué,” something that in rare moments of insight, Crowley himself recognized. 9 Crowley could master the arts of magick, could discipline himself to the rigors of meditation and yoga, and could face the elements with a fortitude most of us could not muster. But when it came to the most difficult challenge of all, his relations with other human beings, Crowley invariably took the line of least resistance, opting for the easy tactic of putting the blame for his own shortcomings onto someone else. He may not have been “the wickedest man in the world,” as
John Bull
, a British tabloid of the 1920s, dubbed him, but it seems he often tried to fit that bill. Crowley could climb Himalayas of the earth and mind, but as most people familiar with his life discover, he fell perilously short at the Great Work of being human.
    If this was all there was to Crowley, there would be little reasonto study him. Egotists are not rare, and all of us fall short of what we could be. It is the
other
side of Crowley that makes him interesting, that side interested in exploring the unknown regions of ourselves. He had a vague insight that humanity sells itself short, and that we could all be so much
more
. It was this that first drew me to him. It is also this that raises questions. How Crowley went about discovering that
more
warrants criticism.
He is, I believe, a kind of “test case” for a philosophy of life that has become the default alternative to the bland “normality” he did everything he could to outrage. It is a philosophy and ethic that, for sake of a better term, I call “liberationist.” Its message is that if we can only rid ourselves of all repression, all inhibitions, all hang-ups, all authority, then the Golden Age will miraculously appear. It is an antinomian philosophy (“against the norms”) that reaches for some ethos “beyond good and evil.” Crowley is not its only representative; he has a place in a pantheon of characters that includes the Marquis de Sade, Arthur Rimbaud, Georges Bataille, Charles Manson, Jim Morrison, Kurt Cobain, and countless other individuals who wanted to “let it all hang out,” to “break on through to the other side” and “transgress.” But he is the one who took it to its extreme, and by doing so, showed that
it doesn’t work
. I believe we owe him a debt of thanks for this.
    Crowley
did
have insight into the hidden