skepticlawyer

Continuing my professional interest in evil…

Without Aleister Crowley, those well meaning people who press cheap tracts on the dangers of the occult into your hands would have to find other ways to waste their Saturday nights. Crowley is a staple - no, a star - of tractdom. Almost inevitably, his famous shaven-headed visage (lifted off the cover to the Sergeant Pepper album) will be featured. Often it’s on the front page, always accompanied by a sensational biography, sometimes enclosed within a Satanic pentagram. Just for effect, you understand.

My first encounter with Aleister Crowley came via a tract.

This tract - shoved at me in the Queen Street Mall when pedestrianisation was still a novelty - depicted Crowley as the founder of Satanism in its modern form. He was - and I quote - ‘far cleverer and ultimately more influential than American Satanist Anton LaVey‘. There were lurid details about Satanic rituals in the US. Lots of stuff on animal (and human) sacrifice. Oh, and suburban witches who lace Hallowe’en candies with shards of glass or arsenic powder and watch behind closed doors for childish trick-or-treaters. Backmasking got a good run (if I remember rightly, Blue Oyster Cult and Queen were major offenders). All accompanied by illustrations that looked as though they’d been done by talented under tens.

Make no mistake - in the gospel according to tractdom - Aleister Crowley was bad, bad, bad. Actually, no. Make that evil, evil, evil. All of which makes Lawrence Sutin’s lucidly written biography Do What Thou Wilt: A Life of Aleister Crowley very welcome. Sutin effectively cuts through the thickets of legend - both for and against - that have sprung up around Crowley’s reputation. The mental shorthand surrounding the name ‘Aleister Crowley’ includes the quotations ‘do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law’ and ‘every man and every woman is a star’; his belief that he was ‘the Great Beast’ of Revelation; his contention that he was a major religious prophet; endless stories of his sexual adventurism. A few - their views informed by an interest in the occult - will also know that he founded a religion still widely practised today, albeit in attenuated form.

Sutin scotches the allegation that Crowley carried out human sacrifice, dispenses with persistent legends linking him to the foundation of the modern Wicca movement and patiently teases fact from fiction in Somerset Maugham’s The Magician - a particularly rich vein of Crowley-lore. According to Sutin, ‘Maugham admitted that he drew the evil Oliver Haddo “in a manner more striking in appearance, more sinister and more ruthless than Crowley ever was”.’ What sets this biography apart from earlier attempts (there have been several) to delineate the self-styled ‘Prophet of the New Aeon’ is Sutin’s admirable refusal to be either credulous or utterly disbelieving. He takes Crowley seriously as a thinker and religious scholar without for a moment expecting sceptical readers (like this one) to accept any of his spiritual ideas.

Nonetheless, Sutin never whitewashes his subject. Crowley emerges from Do What Thou Wilt as bigoted and arrogant. However - and this is where the book is especially good - so were most of his contemporaries. Sutin points out that ‘Crowley embodied many of the worst John Bull prejudices of his time’ but was also ‘a genuine opponent of puritanical humbug.’ Crowley’s racism and devotion to Social Darwinism are all too easy to deride, Sutin argues, until one remembers that at the time (1900 - 1925, when Crowley wrote his major works) both were government policy in many European nations and in the US (not to mention Australia). Do What Thou Wilt shows that Crowley’s belated but bona fide acceptance of his bisexuality - and his very public belief that homosexuals have an equal place in spiritual life - were striking when one considers attitudes at the time. Sutin also draws attention to his verse - little known outside a small circle - some of which ‘belongs in any respectable anthology of gay poetry’. Do What Thou Wilt serves not only to demythologise and explicate Crowley the would be religious leader. It also contextualises him superbly.

His relations (often strained) with contemporaries like poet William Butler Yeats, founder of the International Buddhist Society Allan Bennett and publisher P R ‘Inky’ Stephensen - among others - are elucidated. The detail is fascinating. Yeats despised Crowley but belonged to the same occult society - the Golden Dawn - for many years. Like Crowley, Yeats plundered the society’s rituals for poetic imagery. Unlike Crowley, he moved swiftly beyond occultism to develop a poetic voice distinctly his own. Crowley and Bennett were close friends, and for a time both pursued a common interest in Buddhism. Bennett followed the dharma with great seriousness, however - he took vows in a Burmese Buddhist monastery - and later dismissed most of Crowley’s work. ‘No Buddhist would consider it worthwhile to pass from the crystalline clearness of his own religion to this involved obscurity,’ he wrote of Crowley’s esoteric compendium 777. ‘Some of the language is extremely undignified.’

As editorial director of Mandrake Press, oddball Australian litterateur P R ‘Inky’ Stephensen was for a time Crowley’s strongest supporter. According to Sutin, his publication of Crowley’s massive autobiography, Confessions, was a major contribution to Mandrake’s subsequent bankruptcy.

‘People believe the funniest things’ runs the old saw: Crowley is a monument to our ability to ingest daft ideas. Without books like Sutin’s, however, we are apt to forget the ecstatic nature of religious conviction and slide into an unthinking scepticism. Do What Thou Wilt - with its scrupulous examination of Crowley’s ideas and milieux - adds to our understanding of the nature of belief. Crowley once said that ‘Magick is the Science and Art of Causing Change to occur in conformity with Will’. I suspect biography is the Science and Art of Causing Interest to occur in combination with Accuracy. Do What Thou Wilt is an incisive and rigorous account. Of course no biographer ever has the last word. I’m sure, however, that Lawrence Sutin has written the final biography of Aleister Crowley, the Great Beast.