Drunk Occult History RETURNS!

There’s a plague! I’m in rural PA with my parents–who have let me drive their car, which is a sign of the goddamn End Times–for the foreseeable future! I may have panic-bought carrot seeds! It’s time to think about Aleister Crowley some more!

Dude followed the Golden Dawn thing with a world tour, in which he hit Mexico and Hawaii and San Francisco, went over to India and caught malaria to finish up his disease collection plus claimed to have achieved a state of enlightenment because of course he did, fucked around with Enochian and a number of poems about women he wanted to bang, and then ended up in Paris, where he married a friend’s sister, Rose, seriously pissing off said friend.

I’m not sure who to side with here. On the one hand, I’m not crazy about fraternal overprotectiveness. On the other, Aleister Crowley is not the sort of person anyone should marry. On the third, maybe don’t be friends with people you wouldn’t be okay with your siblings dating? On the fourth, maybe dude wanted Crowley himself, which would also be not the best judgment ever.

(To be fair, Crowley as a young man was much hotter than the standard picture in which he looks like Lex Luthor, or a very surly egg. Wiki has a photo of him in ceremonial clothes in 1912, and…I would, yeah. Especially with a good supply of penicillin.)

Crowley and Rose started their honeymoon by telling a Cairo hotel they were royalty, which is about #4 on the Most Aleister Crowley Ways to Spend Your Fucking Honeymoon. #1, of course, is Claiming To Be Contacted By Ancient Egyptian Gods, which, yes, apparently Horus just hangs around waiting for some rando drug-addled Englishman to show up so he can reveal Mystic Truths. The Egyptian underworld does not have a lot of Scrabble games, one assumes.

Presumably inspired by Horus–British occultism had a real Thing about Egyptian gods back then, and it makes it very difficult to deal with canon Golden Dawn stuff for those of us who have unfortunate Internet-inspired associations with animal-headed people–or at least a disembodied voice, Crowley spent three days writing The Book of the Law.

A lot of the book in question is…the sort of book dudes conveniently hear mystical voices telling them to write. A new age (excuse me, Aeon) is coming! Someone needs to lead it! Guess who has the lofty yet burdensome duty? Look, the disembodied voice says so, do you want to hurt its feeling? It’s a VERY SENSITIVE disembodied voice, okay? Don’t fuck with the voice.

There was apparently A Whole Thing where the voice also told Crowley to steal a stele (sorry) from a museum and fortify an island and Crowley was like “look you might be a disembodied voice and I might be a syphilitic Edwardian jackass but I have standards dammit please do fuck off,” so he sent copies around, then locked the book away and ignored it.

We are going to stop here and have a moment of silence for Crowley actually having a lick of sense. I think the next one is in 1946 and involves L. Ron Hubbard watching people jerk off.