I was amused to see on a visit to Hastings last year for the literary festival, a sign in a pub named after its most infamous resident, Aleister Crowley, for a karaoke night wittily named (if memory serves) ‘Sing What Thou Wilt’. Apparently the arch-mage in a vindictive moment cursed the residents of this pleasant seaside town. It does have an odd atmosphere, it has to be said.
Gary Lachman bookends his biography of Crowley (‘Aleister Crowley: Magick, Rock and Roll, and the Wickedest Man in the World’, Tarcher/Penguin) with entertaining passages outlining the sometimes surprising links between rock music, popular culture and this very peculiar Englishman. The introduction concerns Lachman’s own time as a rocker in New York in the Seventies when he combined being a practising Thelemite (follower of Crowley) with playing in a band. He was living in a grubby loft in the Bowery with someone casually introduced as ‘Debbie, the singer’ and her boyfriend, ‘Chris, the guitarist’, both of whom had ‘a kitschy interest in the occult’. Yes, the band was Blondie.
Lachman eventually moved on to become a writer and scholar of the occult, and he’s the perfect choice for a biography that aims to cut through the murky myths that continue to swirl around its subject. Crowley frequently cuts a ridiculous figure in this book, but equally he comes across as phenomenally intelligent, unusually gifted and highly original. Inexplicable as it seems now, this rather unappetising fellow exerted a fascination over too many people to have been entirely a charlatan.
It’s a great story, from Crowley’s beginnings as a wealthy young man from a restrictive Christian sect, through successive incarnations as mountaineer, poet, chess master, drug fiend, seducer, chancer and creator of a new religion. There are some revolting moments – I’d like to think his exploits with a cat and a toad were metaphorical rather than actual – but other incidents boggle the mind. In Lachman’s hands, there’s also plenty of humour. Crowley was a practitioner of ‘sex magick’ (what the rest of us might just call having sex), and Lachman covers this aspect in amusingly deadpan fashion. ‘Working with’ Crowley becomes a euphemism, as does ‘opus’ and ‘opera’. A certain operation ‘per vas nefandum’ in which the fellow practitioner can be either male or female, was Crowley’s particular favourite, cropping up regularly in his magickal diary as ‘p.v.n’.
Lachman steers a steady course between debunking and respect, for Crowley’s true value may lie in the way he inspired so many artists, musicians and writers, from the Beatles (he appeared on the cover of ‘Sergeant Pepper’) to Somerset Maugham, Ian Fleming (who supposedly based his Bond villain Le Chiffre on Crowley) and a host of Heavy Metallers. Widen the circle to include Gnosticism and the influence extends to Jay-Z, Lady Gaga and the ‘Matrix’ franchise. And let’s not forget, Crowley created a pretty nice Tarot pack as well. As Lachman makes clear, however, there was a heavy price to be paid for having any but the most fleeting contact with the Great Beast, who left behind him a trail of shattered souls.