Having decided to spend last night getting lost on the way back to my own house from the train station, I am in the perfect headspace for More Drunk Occult History! Mildly Hungover and Sleepless Occult History, in this case, but you can’t be picky at these prices.
By now we’re up to 1914, when Crowley has just had a breakup with extra cursing. Maybe it took, because he’s basically broke, so naturally he goes to the Alps. Wiki says “During this time, the First World War broke out,” in case you were raised on Mars. Crowley goes over to the US–on the Lusitania, weirdly enough.He lands in New York and stays there, writing freelance columns for Vanity Fair and doing bespoke astrology *and* messing around with sex magic, and getting paid for two out of the three. First of all, not gonna lie, #lifegoals, and second…okay I read a lot of Wodehouse short stories, a subset of which involve Bertie Wooster’s friends trying various weird ways of making it in New York, and it seems like there’s crossover potential. Or maybe my brain has melted. It’s very hot here, again.Then he becomes a spy, which has a long and semi-lustrious history of entanglement with the occult, pretending to be pro-German because he’s suddenly Irish. Some people claim that he was behind telling Germany to blow up the Lusitania for Spy Reasons, which seems like a fairly ruthless dick move and also the sort of thing he’d do.Crowley’s Sex and Drugs on the West Coast Tour commences. Unsurprisingly, this includes Santa Cruz, LA, San Francisco, and Seattle; somewhat more surprisingly, it also involves Detroit and Vancouver. He goes back to New York, knocks someone up, goes to someone else’s cabin in New Hampshire, does a shitload of drugs, and decides that his new shiny magical name is “Master Therion.”If I ever feel really organized, I will go through these blog posts and note how many different names Crowley gave himself.So then “Master Therion” bounces around cities, sleeping on friends’ couches and being mixed up with “Scarlet Women” and unsuccessful magazines, boldly forging a path that every cis man who ever listened to Nirvana would follow eighty-some years later. During this time, he contacts a being called “Lam” or “the Lama” who…may have been an alien? Or maybe a self-portrait wherein Crowley was exaggerating the dimensions of his head to show how Very Very Smart he was and was also kind of a shit-tastic portrait artist? Like, I have no great abilities there, but the pictures I’ve seen are all Fourth Page of a DeviantArt search. Or he may just have been fucking with people? Or all of the above?Also the ritual that resulted in talking to “Lam,” may or may not have opened a portal to other dimensions and that’s why we have alien sightings today? Seriously: occult blogs are a trip, alien blogs are a trip, if you start getting into the combination it is…probably best enjoyed with some recreational chemicals.So okay. At this point–which is not even to Later Life in the Wiki–I invite you to guess what Our Putative Hero did next.Those who picked “went on another physical and probably chemical trip” (this one on an island in New York somewhere) “accessed some sort of mystical identity” (in this case about four past lives, including a pope) “then went back to the city and found *another* woman to whom he totally had a Very Deep Magickkkkkkal Connection You Guys” (oh my God if the Quilting Society of Women Who Fucked Aleister Crowley wasn’t a thing in the 1930s it should have been) (I mean also men, obvs, but the parade of Thelemic Soulmate Chicks is…a whole thing) “and started YET ANOTHER FUCKING ZINE,” please send me shipping and handling for your prize.I mean I honestly can’t even be mad at Crowley for this stuff. Generally an asshat though he may have been, and forgive him for the “magick” wankery though I never will…dude, if I could make an entire living bouncing from retreat to self-indulgent editorial and fucking my way through a major city in the process? I am there, y’all.
