Revelation of the Beast

A well-worn Bible, open at the Book of Revelation, Chapter 13. A finger tracks the words as a man’s voice sonorously intones: "And I stood upon the sand of the sea, and saw a Beast rise up out of the sea, having seven heads and ten horns, and upon his horns ten crowns, and upon his heads the name of blasphemy…". Visible past the Bible is a four-year-old boy sitting on the floor. His eyes wide, his face displays one part sullenness toward the Bible-reader, one part fascination as he imagines the scene. "…Here is wisdom. Let him that hath understanding count the number of the Beast; for it is the number of a man; and his number is six hundred, sixty and six." The boy counts to six on his fingers, jumps as the Bible slams shut. The reader’s finger waves at the boy, the voice harsh: "That is your lesson for this day, son. Think on the Word of the Lord! Your mother told me that you were quite beastly again today, Alick, so – an extra hour of prayer for you. Now go to your room." "Yes, father", Alick mutters. Later, the boy is kneeling on a hard wooden floor, hands clasped, eyes squeezed shut in concentration. He whispers: "Dear God, make me big and strong. I want to play whenever I please. God, make me so big that mother and father can’t stop me. I want to be as big as the great Beast." He rocks back and forth as if in trance, chanting over and over, "My number is six hundred sixty and six…" A woman, his mother, appears behind him in the doorway, listens for a moment, covers her gaping mouth in horror.

(Series of photos of Crowley.) Edward Alexander Crowley, born 1875, went by many names during his life. As a child, Alick. At twenty he adopted "Aleister", the Gaelic form of Alexander. Depending on his whim he might announce himself as Count Svareff, a Russian nobleman; or Prince Chioa Khan, a Persian potentate; or Perdurabo the Prophet; or the Laird of Boleskine, gentleman of the Scottish highlands. But through his life he was most fond of being called The Great Beast, an identity he embraced in childhood. He was born into a family of Plymouth Brethren, a strict fundamentalist Christian sect in Leamington, England. A brilliant, difficult child, he struggled against his dour upbringing, convincing himself that he was the arch-enemy of Christian civilization, an attitude that would mark him for life. (Frontal portrait of Crowley, "666" on forehead.)

Aleister Crowley was more than just a rebel, however. An intense curiosity and sharp intellect drove him to probe as deeply as he could into the nature of things. He had no reverence for authority, but great respect for direct experience. We see Alick Crowley at ten, standing in front of his class at school. Beside him on a table, a bread-box. "For my assignment, I decided to test the claim that cats have nine lives. First, I trapped a cat. Then I performed the following steps. I poisoned it, gassed it, hanged it, stabbed it, cut its throat, smashed its skull, burned it, drowned it and threw it out the window." He pulls from the box a scorched, dripping clump of bloody fur. "The operation was successful." Pandemonium in the classroom as students retch and swoon. The teacher stares at him, covers her gaping mouth in horror.

By young adulthood, Crowley had discovered one of his lifelong passions: ritual magic. At 23 he made contact with a most unusual group in London. They called themselves the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn. The Order, which included famous writers like William Butler Yeats and Arthur Machen, was devoted to the practice of magic. Not stage magic. The real thing. The members of the Golden Dawn believed that by practicing certain complicated rituals they could conjure up visions from the world of spirits. But more; through these ceremonies, they felt they could attain spiritual transformation, a sort of magical enlightenment. (Illustrate with symbols from magic texts, photos of Golden Dawn paraphernalia, depictions of spirits.) Crowley threw himself into the study of ritual magic, progressing quickly through the ranks of the Golden Dawn. His disregard for moderation and manners alarmed some of the senior members, including Yeats. But in magic Crowley had found a way to stir up and explore the depths of his mind – and in these depths, swimming with exotic visions and weird impulses, he believed lay the keys to universal knowledge and power. In 1904, Crowley’s magical experiments bore their first strange fruit.

He was in Cairo at the time, studying the lore of ancient Egypt in the ruins and museums. By bribing some guards he even managed to spend a night in the King’s Chamber at the heart of the Great Pyramid (the walls glowed so brightly with a mystical light, he reported, that he could snuff his candle and still read clearly the text of the ritual he was performing.) He called to the old gods to send him wisdom. One day, Crowley believed, they returned his call. During a ceremony in his hotel room, a voice spoke from behind him, announcing "the opening of the company of heaven". For an hour the mysterious voice continued; Crowley wrote everything down. The same thing happened the next day, and the next. Who was the speaker? The magician thought it was the divine Aiwass, emissary of the Egyptian deity Harpokrates. (His symbols here from Egyptian art: the god Horus as a hawk-headed child; winged sun disc.) Psychiatrists might disagree.

As Crowley pored over the words he had written, his excitement grew. He realized that his revelation marked a shift in the course of history. "The Book of the Law", as he dubbed it, taught that the period from about 500 B.C. onward was the Age of Osiris, Egyptian god of death, and was dominated by puritanical faiths – Buddhism, Christianity etc. But now a new age had dawned – the Aeon of Horus the child-god. Humanity was called to throw off the chains of inhibition, so to explore and enjoy the cosmos with utter freedom. Aiwass, whose style was uncannily like that of Crowley, called all to reject the ways of the dying age: "With my Hawk’s head I peck at the eyes of Jesus as he hangs upon the cross. I flap my wings in the face of Mohammed and blind him. With my claws I tear out the flesh of the Indian and the Buddhist, Mongol and Din…" And the form of the Edenic serpent beckons us to wild freedoms: "I am the Snake that giveth Knowledge & Delight and bright glory, and stir the hearts of men with drunkenness. To worship me take wine and strange drugs whereof I will tell my prophet, & be drunk thereof! They shall not harm ye at all. … Be strong, o man! Lust, enjoy all things of sense and rapture: fear not that any God shall deny thee for this." And who was "my prophet"? None other than Perdurabo himself. A new religion was born. He called it – Crowleyanity. To celebrate the event, Crowley baptized a frog, naming it Jesus. Then he crucified it.

Crowley had inherited enough money to travel for years, learning the secrets of the world’s occult traditions. The Book of the Law suggested to him that drugs and sex, within the context of magic, would be powerful means of expanding consciousness. To this end he dosed himself with cocaine, hashish, opium, laudanum, veronal, anhalonium and heroin. He studied the forbidden teachings of Indian tantric sects which employed the sexual gymnastics known as maithuna to transcend the limits of ordinary thought. (Hindu Tantric art here.)

Expelled from the Golden Dawn, Perdurabo founded his own magical order, the Argenteum Astrum ("Silver Star"). Initiates would learn the methods of Crowley’s sex-and-drugs-and-revelation world view. He toured Europe and North America, often causing scandal through his antics and publications (which ranged from rather stuffy Victorian-style poetry to raunchy porn). He became a staple target of the tabloid press, which picked up on his title of "The Great Beast" in their inflated headlines. (Display here.)

Crowley decided that the new faith of freedom needed a stable base of operations. He purchased a villa near the town of Cefalu in Sicily, and dedicated it as the Abbey of Thelema. (Thelema means "will" in Greek. For Crowley, the trained will of the magician is what allows him or her to cast off the shackles of convention and reach liberation.) (Does this villa still exist? I recall seeing a wooden sign from the place on display in the Atlantis Bookstore in London, England in 1975.)

Seekers from around the world spent time at the Abbey, joining in the magical orgies and psychedelic rites orchestrated by Crowley, who was calling himself the Master Therion. But when one of his visitors, Raoul Loveday, took sick and died after drinking the blood of a sacrificed cat, the press went ballistic. This caused the Mussolini government, which had banned secret societies for fear of subversion, to take notice. Crowley had to leave Italy in a hurry. He never returned to the Abbey of Thelema.

From his expulsion in 1923 until his death in 1947, Crowley wandered the earth proclaiming the law of Thelema to anyone who would listen. Ironically, this man who preached the power of the magical will had become addicted to heroin, a problem that would bedevil him to the end. In the eyes of some a pathetic, burned out figure, to others he was still the Master Therion. His teachings, obscure to most today, in fact had a profound effect on the century – several decades before the sixties, Crowley was the forefather of the psychedelic revolution and the sexual revolution. His teachings of freedom from inhibition, and occult rituals as means of expanding awareness, have resonated in many quarters of our culture as we enter the new millennium. Aleister Crowley’s heretical genius may have been hamstrung by his lifelong rebellion against the stultifying religion of his childhood and his recklessness with drugs, but the spirit of liberation he announced has indeed turned out to be one of the defining trends of the modern age.

A montage of images from late twentieth century popular culture, reflecting the primacy of sex, drugs, magic and freedom. Marilyn Manson, Black Sabbath, Led Zeppelin, Charlie Manson, Jimi Hendrix. The Beatles. The Beatles?!! The cover of the Sergeant Pepper album; pan through the dozens of figures surrounding the band, come to rest and expand on one of them. Sure enough – it’s Aleister Crowley, the Great Beast.