ALSO BY GARY LACHMAN
Turn Off Your Mind: The Mystic Sixties and the Dark Side of the Age of Aquarius
A Secret History of Consciousness
A Dark Muse: A History of the Occult
In Search of P. D. Ouspensky: The Genius in the Shadow of Gurdjieff
The Dedalus Occult Reader: The Garden of Hermetic Dreams
Rudolf Steiner: An Introduction to His Life and Work
Politics and the Occult: The Left, the Right, and the Radically Unseen
The Dedalus Book of Literary Suicides: Dead Letters
Jung the Mystic: The Esoteric Dimensions of Carl Jungs Life and Teachings
The Quest for Hermes Trismegistus: From Ancient Egypt to the Modern World
Swedenborg: An Introduction to His Life and Ideas
Madame Blavatsky: The Mother of Modern Spirituality
WRITTEN AS GARY VALENTINE
New York Rocker: My Life in the Blank Generation, with Blondie, Iggy Pop, and Others, 19741981
JEREMY P. TARCHER/PENGUIN
Published by the Penguin Group
Penguin Group (USA) LLC
375 Hudson Street
New York, New York 10014
USA Canada UK Ireland Australia New Zealand India South Africa China
penguin.com
A Penguin Random House Company
Copyright 2014 by Gary Lachman
Penguin supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin to continue to publish books for every reader.
Most Tarcher/Penguin books are available at special quantity discounts for bulk purchase for sales promotions, premiums, fund-raising, and educational needs. Special books or book excerpts also can be created to fit specific needs. For details, write: Special.Markets@us.penguingroup.com.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Lachman, Gary.
Aleister Crowley : magick, rock and roll, and the wickedest man in the world / Gary Lachman.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-698-14653-2
1. Crowley, Aleister, 18751947. 2. Crowley, Aleister, 18751947Influence. 3. OccultistsEnglandBiography. 4. MagiciansEnglandBiography. 5. Authors, English20th centuryBiography. 6. Popular cultureHistory20th century. 7. Rock musicHistory and criticism. I. Title.
PR6005.R7Z78 2014 2014003608
828'.91209dc23
[B]
Version_1
For Paul Newman, 19452013
A wicked critic who knew his Crowley well
I have always appeared to my contemporaries as a very extraordinary individual obsessed by fantastic passions.
A LEISTER C ROWLEY
It was sex that rotted him. It was sex, sex, sex, sex, sex all the way with Crowley. He was a sex maniac.
V ITTORIA C REMERS
CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION
THE BEAST ON THE BOWERY
I first came across the name Aleister Crowley, the twentieth centurys most infamous magician and self-styled Great Beast 666, in 1975, when I was nineteen and playing in a rock and roll band in New York City. I was living in a run-down loft space on the Bowery with the bands guitarist and singer, not far from CBGB, the club that a year or so later became famous as the birthplace of punk rock. My bandmates had a kitschy interest in the occult, which manifested in the pentagrams, voodoo trinkets, skulls, crossbones, swastikas, crucifixes, talismans, and other magical bric-a-brac that jostled for space with photographs of the Velvet Underground, posters for the Ramones, and Rolling Stones album covers on the bare brick walls. We had an eerie statue of a nun standing in front of a fireplace, which was itself covered in occult insignia. A cross was painted on the nuns forehead and rosary beads hung from her hand. Tibetan tantric paintings, one of which depicted a monk being eaten by his fellows, hung on the walls, and an old doll that Chris, the guitarist, had found in the trash and had transformed into a voodoo ornament was perched over the drum kit. Debbie, the singer, was interested in UFOs, and after rehearsals she often consulted the I Ching about the next band move.
We shared the space with an eccentric artist, an older hipster who had a dangerous passion for the Hells Angels and often dressed in biker gear. Like myself, he was a fan of H. P. Lovecraft and the Weird Tales set, but he was also interested in magic, and he often painted his own version of the tarot deck, modeling his images on Crowleys then-rare Thoth Tarot. He also gave impromptu tarot readings, and I was struck by the seriousness with which he treated the cards. I could tell that for him they were more than just an eccentric form of entertainment, that they presented something more like a philosophy of life. He related the tarot to other things like art and music, and to people I had read, such as Jung and Nietzsche. But the person he mentioned most was Crowley. He held up Crowley as a model of what a magical life should be like, and at one point he introduced me to someone who claimed to be an illegitimate son of Crowleys. I cant remember who this was, or what we talked about, and I never discovered if he really was Crowleys son or not.
The artist read from The Diary of a Drug Fiend, Crowleys sensational novel about heroin and cocaine addiction, which was also an advertisement for his ill-fated Abbey of Thelema in Sicily, where initiates learned how to do their true will. Like practically everyone else at the time, I was interested in drugs, and the cover of the book, with a sheik of sorts luxuriating in an opium-induced Oriental repose, certainly caught my eye. I had seen the book in the window of the old St. Marks Bookshop on St. Marks Place, just up from the famous Gem Spa, and I wondered when I would have enough cash to buy a copy.
Chris had an apartment that he sublet to Tommy Ramone, the Ramones first drummer and, sadly, the only member of the original group still alive. One afternoon we headed to his place and while Chris and Tommy talked, I checked out the bookshelves. Two books I borrowed that day changed my life. One was The Occult by Colin Wilson; the other was Crowleys other novel Moonchild. The Occult made a powerful impression on me. Aside from a taste for 1940s horror films, I had no interest in the occult or magic, and my knowledge of mysticism was limited to what I had read in Alan Watts and Hermann Hesse. Wilson took the occult seriously, and connected it to philosophy, science, literature, and psychology. Wilsons ideas about consciousness had a lasting effect on me, but at the time what struck me most was his chapter on Crowley, and the sections about the poet W. B. Yeats and the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn. I didnt know it then but Moonchild was a roman clef, depicting in an often nasty way some members of the Golden Dawn. Yeats, for example, against whom Crowley held a particularly spiteful grudge, comes in for an especially vile treatment.
After that I was hooked. I picked up The