Gary Lachman - Aleister Crowley: Magick, Rock and Roll, and the Wickedest Man in the World

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 TheDiary of a Drug Fiend