Books: Wickedest Man in the World

THE GREAT BEAST (316 pp.)—John Symonds—Roy ($4.50).

“I thought that I knew of every conceivable form of wickedness,” said a judge to a London jury in summing up a libel case in 1934. “I thought that everything which was vicious and bad had been produced at one time or another before me. I have learned in this case that we can always learn something more … I have never heard such dreadful, horrible, blasphemous and abominable stuff as that which has been produced by the man who describes himself to you as the greatest living poet.”

The poet in question was Aleister Crowley, 58, born the son of well-to-do evangelical parents. His parents had lived their own lives as active Christian laymen, and done their best to make him follow their example. They had given him the baptismal name of Edward Alexander, but he preferred others. Perhaps his favorite name for himself (adopted from the book of Revelation) was “The Beast whose number is 666.” When he died, at 72, he was popularly known as “The Worst Man in Britain” and “The Wickedest Man in the World.” His literary executor, John Symonds, has now written a sympathetic biography.

316 Devils. Many a son has reacted to parental righteousness by going wrong. But Aleister Crowley is one of the few who deliberately devoted a lifetime to creating a “religion” out of every vice in the catalogue. At 14, he seduced the kitchen maid while his mother was at church, and butchered a cat to see whether it had nine lives. These were mere preliminary excursions; he inherited a fortune from his pious father and went on to broader fields. At 23, he became Brother Perdurabo (“I will endure to the end”) of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn. The group was interested in communication with good or angelic spirits in the “beyond” (William Butler Yeats was also a member). Crowley branched out a bit; he promptly set up a “black magic” room, and once by his own count gathered 316 devils together.

Without her family’s knowledge, Crowley married Rose Kelly, sister of Painter Sir Gerald Kelly. They spent their honeymoon in Cairo, where they drove through the streets dressed in silks, diamonds and cloth of gold, and in Ceylon, where, for a while, Rose thought she was a flying bat and was found by her admiring husband hanging from a beam, naked, upside down and unhurt.

Dirty Snowdrops. Crowley insisted that in all his acts he was directed by “The Secret Chiefs,” i.e., the top brass of the spirit world. These chummy spooks now informed him that “a New Epoch had begun for mankind and that Aleister Crowley had been chosen to initiate it.” Crowley took orders from the Egyptian god Horus, with his wife (now known as Ouarda the Seer) acting as interpreter. The Book of the Law (the bible of the New Epoch) was then dictated to him.

The Book’s first rule is: “There is no law beyond Do What Thou Wilt”—and this Crowley proceeded to do. One of his first acts of freedom was to set “Beelzebub and his 49 servitors” after the leader of the Order of the Golden Dawn. Another was his baking of sacred “Cakes of Light … to breed lust” in all who ate them. To this period, too, belongs the slim volume of pornographic poems entitled Snowdrops from a Curate’s Garden.

Final Hymn. Most sons would by now have felt that they had revenged themselves sufficiently on paternal piety. But not Crowley. “I want none of your faint approval or faint dispraise,” he wrote, “I want blasphemy, murder, rape, revolution, anything, bad or good, but strong.” When World War I began, he left Ouarda in an insane asylum and hurried to the U.S., where he spent the early war years writing pro-German propaganda for George Sylvester Viereck’s The Fatherland.

At war’s end, a “Chinese oracle” ordered Crowley and his handful of disciples to Sicily. Here, Crowley, his ears pierced and hung with rings, “painted and wrote . . . smoked opium, sniffed snow . . . ate grass (hashish), and [took] laudanum, veronal, and anhalonium.” He also tried to referee the frequent battles which took place among his concubines.

In his last years, he was a shadow of a man, half-crazy and exhausted by drugs and debauchery, and his wickedness had degenerated into absurdity. But he still had a few followers. He was cremated at Brighton. Over his beflowered coffin a disciple loudly chanted The Beast’s erotic Hymn to Pan. The chairman of Brighton’s crematorium committee was not impressed by the innovation. Said he, perhaps unconsciously voicing the thoughts of a generation of Englishmen: “We shall take all necessary steps to prevent such an incident occurring again.”