Aleister Crowley Just Keeps Fucking Going

Hello! I am back, at least until the next occasion on which I forget how spacetime works, and in honor of St. Patrick’s day, I will continue my Drunk Occult History post series about an Englishman acting COMPLETELY BAZOO.

Also this here: https://twitter.com/Cavalorn/status/1371811859951681540?s=20 informed me that Yeats once kicked Crowley down a flight of stairs, and the entire threads are amazing. I would watch this TV show. Particularly if it was set to the same music as “Gossip Girl.” Particularly particularly if it was *narrated* like Gossip Girl.

Call me, Netflix. I’m cheap.

ANYHOW.

Crowley starts out the next section of his life by getting a divorce on the grounds of his own adultery. People are generally divided over whether or not this was him being vaguely noble and not wanting to cite his wife’s alcoholism, but I will admit that it was baller nonetheless. “Your Honor, I request a divorce on the grounds that, since my marriage, I have fucked everything in a three-mile radius of London, to say nothing of the general Versailles area. Yes, ‘bookcases too.’ I submit these pictures as Exhibit A, and speaking of submission, have a gander at Exhibits B, C, and E. I REST MY CASE GOOD DAY.”

This launches one of the more iconic phases of Crowley’s life, wherein he and a disciple wandered all around Algeria on an Enochian spiritual quest. Said quest involved:

The disciple, one Victor Neuberg, shaving his entire head except for two tufts of hair to be “horns,” plus wearing a collar and chain. Apparently Crowley told Bedouins Neuberg was “a captured djinn.” No word on whether the Bedouins told him to go back to Folsom Street.Invoking every single Enochian demon. For those who don’t know: there are a lot of Enochian demons, so this played out like an uncomfortably intense game of Pokemon in the middle of a desert. Crowley: not settling for the “buy a car and bang your secretary” version of midlife crisis.Reciting Quran verses every day, because…I was going to say because cultural appropriation was not a recognized thing yet, but to be honest Crowley was a semi-upper-class Victorian English cis guy, and probably would not have cared.

The finale of all this was a ritual to Choronzon, “The Dweller in the Abyss,” who’s supposedly exactly as fun as the name makes him sound. Crowley summoned that guy either into a circle or into himself, either the demon or possessed-Crowley or pretending-to-be-possessed-and-just-kind-of-an-asshole-Crowley attacked Neuberg, Crowley killed three pigeons and made sigils with their blood, Crowley and Neuberg definitely fucked, one or both of them probably took drugs.

The lesson here is that upper-class Victorians had a shit ton of free time, and I should definitely not feel bad about playing video games for multiple hours a day.

So eventually Crowley defeated Choronzon. We know, because he wrote “Babalon” in the sand with his ring, which was a prearranged sign that he’d won and all was cool. Sort of like a code phrase, or like a safeword, if Crowley would have been the kind of guy who respected safewords.

I mean on the one hand: sure, go out and wrestle with your inner-and-maybe-cosmic demons, seems very useful in a Jungian and maybe occult sense. On the other, stop abusing your assistant and using other people’s religions for your own purposes, plus I am inclined to think this was less about Crowley’s spiritual growth and more about him seriously committing to his “going house-to-house trying to shock people” phase.

It definitely contributed. See, while Crowley was mystical-kink-conning his way around Algeria, Mathers decided to sue him because The Equinox published Golden Dawn rituals.

Sidebar One: I guess Hubbard didn’t invent his Magically Litigious shtick out of whole cloth either.

Sidebar Two: The presiding judge was not the same one who earlier had to rule that the “sanctum” belonged to the people paying what we on the Material Plane know as “rent,” so now I’m pondering the scene wherein a bunch of judges are in a pub and one is drinking heavily and the others explain to some newcomer that Jenkins pulled a Golden Dawn case, poor lad.

Sidebar Three: Crowley’s lawyer was named “William Whateley.” I have read Lovecraft. I have Questions.

A more detailed explanation of the trial, in which indeed everyone seems to be cracking the hell up, is here. http://robincdouglas.blogspot.com/2019/04/aleister-crowley-in-court-case-of.html

As trials do, the whole thing got a bit of publicity. At least one picture of Crowley in the trademark Pyramid Hat (which has a badge on it with its *own* pyramid, which naturally has an eye in it) appeared in a paper at the time. I don’t know if this is the first public appearance of Pyramid Hat or not, but there we are.

Sidebar 4: I don’t *think* Pyramid Hat and Pyramid Head from Silent Hill are conceptually related, but you never know in this business.

So people read about the case in between news about That Kaiser Chap, Who Might be Up to No Good and, IDK, King Edward’s Fucking Sofas, and asked what the fuck, to which Crowley replied DAMN RIGHT WHAT THE FUCK MUAHAHAHA I AM THE KEEPER OF FORBIDDEN KNOWLEDGE HAIL SATAN EAT BABIES and a bunch of people bought into it instead of telling him that he’d killed pigeons and tripped out so maybe calm the hell down.

This led to the Rites of Artemis, which as far as I can tell was basically a Christmas pageant except a) with adults, b) with pagan gods, and c) with peyote-laced punch, all of which make it a pretty vast improvement. (Most Christmas pageants don’t even sell popcorn.) The public seemed to agree, so Crowley put on the Rites of Eleusis and succeeded in making many people wig right the hell out because of “‘blasphemy and erotic suggestion’.”    

I skimmed through aforesaid Rites and found, like, maybe two mentions of gay sex and otherwise the sort of symbolic theater that most of us sat through in college when we wanted to bang a drama major. (The poetry is a damn sight better than you get in either undergrad productions or paganism these days, but that’s a low bar.) But, you know, 1910, insert “libertine men, scarlet women, and RAGTIME!” line here.

The chief pearl clutcher seems to have been a guy named West de Wend Fenton, which was the sort of name you could give your kids in Edwardian England and not be the victim of justifiable patricide. He wrote a bunch of articles in his paper about how evil and blasphemous and eeeevil Crowley was, and how he and one of the other men in the rites were Like Totally Doing It You Guys, I Swear.

Crowley, who comes off best when dealing with this sort of person, just shrugged all “…’kay, I’ve fucked worse, probably including your mom.” The other guy alleged-to-be-banging guy sued, though, which given the social consequences of people thinking you were gay back then may have been justifiable, and at least kept everyone’s name in the papers and gave the judges something to do with their time.