Drunk Occult History: Aleister Crowley Part 1, With Lengthy Digressions

Yeah, this is going to take a while. Fucking Crowley is the elephant in the room of Drunk Occult History, insofar as he’s seriously occult, seriously historical, and, I suspect, was often seriously drunk.

This is a dude who presented himself as the Antichrist, and whose personal mythology a lot of other people seem to have bought without too much question. Like, half of the historical fantasy books I’ve read mention Crowley as SUPER EVIL and involved with UNSPEAKABLE RITES OMG OMG. Which, okay, from reading Arthur Machen etc, I get the impression that “unspeakable rites” to the Victorians means “a moderately intense college party” to the rest of us, in general (like, there is probably some nudity and HOLY SHIT maybe oral and how the hell did a society that produced the Pearl have this many vapors in its other writing? Nobody knows) so there’s that, but in general…I mean, in a more enlightened time, dude would probably be playing bass in a reasonably popular metal band, is my point.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying Crowley was a good person. I’m not saying he was in the same moral county as a good person, or even an okay one. All biographical sources say that the guy was a complete dick, as we will see, either in this post or a subsequent one because there’s…a lot going on here.

Crowley is also a lesson in what happens when you raise your kids really strictly. His folks were members of the Exclusive Brethren, which is a subset of the Plymouth Brethren (and which has a whole bunch of sects itself, because 19th-century Protestants really needed hobbies). Just going by the name you know there’s some shit going on there, because first of all, as everyone in the US knows, “Plymouth” is not a name associated with fun times and chill people.

Second, if I may digress–and I may, because this is Drunk Occult History, not Well-Organized Occult History–I’m gonna go ahead and say that any post-1800s group that uses family relationships for its name is an unmarked van and a rock-and-roll-based mythology away from being a cult. (I’ll give the Masons and similar folks a pass because of possible language change since they were founded.) Like, Alison over at Ask a Manager says that when your interviewer describes the workplace as “just like a family” it’s a bad sign. (“What, you mean we see each other three times a year in the company of a lot of Scotch? Because if so, I’m in.”) Same here.  “Brotherhood” or “Sisterhood” isn’t nearly as bad as “Children” or “Family”–those two are absolutely Phenobarbital and Applesauce Or At Least Selling Flowers in Airports And Also Probably Aliens Somewhere red flags–but at the very least, there’s a lot of unpaid labor expected there, likely a lot of unearned loyalty demanded, and a definite option on Severely Weird Bullshit.

“Brethren” is about midway up the scale of familial-naming dubiousness, especially in the 1800s, when it was definitely a Trying To Be Olde-Tymey thing. Couple that with Plymouth and right away your image is “thinks sugar on oatmeal is the height of decadence.” And that, as far as I can tell, is correct: the various Brethren are still around, and seem like Amish-lite-but-without-the-rumspringa-and-fresh-produce thing. Can’t go to the movies, can’t eat in restaurants, showing skin above the knee is a daring thing the kids today do, etc. They’re also Rapture-y people, possibly the original ones, because of course they are.

So these were Crowley’s parents, which makes a lot of the rest of his life pretty unsurprising. He also had the obligatory Mommy Issues, according to Wikipedia, which says his mom called him “the Beast 666” as a nickname, AS YOU DO. Seriously, people, I’m not even remotely a parent, and even I know that’s how you get cult leaders. Or Carrie. (Also that seems like a lot of effort just to emotionally abuse your kid, like, maybe pick a derogatory nickname that’s easier to say at least? Or doesn’t require the child to be familiar with Revelations-adjacent numerology?)

In this case, Crowley grew up and said fuck that noise–quite literally. Like, dude managed to pick up two of the big three pre-HIV diseases before leaving Cambridge, which probably didn’t help his thought processes any in those pre-penicillin days. Lots of women. Lots of men. Lots of…everything. (The guy was, generally speaking, A Lot.) One of his collections of poetry–yes, he wrote poetry, and a lot of it, because of course he did–was called “White Stains” and refers to exaaaactly what you think. There’s a poem in there about sharing his mistress with a Great Dane. There’s also one about a goat.

Dude was, really, exactly the sort of person you’d expect to write goat sex poems Because He Could. He got into Nietzsche, which I guess was at least back before every other performatively disaffected young man did that, so way to set another fucking obnoxious trend, Edward Alexander. He was misogynist as all hell, q.v. mommy issues, also q.v. Victorian age, used anti-Semitic slurs to Jewish friends, and once left a bunch of other mountain climbers to die while he hung around inside his tent.

Total edgelord asshole, in other words.

Not great about responsibility either. Granted, that’s not a word I associate with “edgelord asshole” anyhow, but…so Crowley’s dad died when he was eleven, which was very sad and doubtless contributed to his manifold Issues, and he got the equivalent of two million dollars, which is a wonderful thing to give a rebellious eleven-year-old like what the actual fuck Victorians? In fifteen years, he’d spent it all.

Travel costs a lot, prostitutes require cash, Crowley took apparently just all of the drugs available in addition to everything else, unfuckingsurprisingly, but most importantly, self-publishing poetry about goat sex actually costs more than it brings in. So, as it turns out, does self-publishing a whole bunch of occult weirdness.

But we will get to that.