Lion of Light: Hazardous to Your Dogma

Forgot to mention Seabrook below, he's another of Crowley's mostly-unreliable mid-century biographers.

Lion of Light: Foreword to Scott Michaelsen's Portable Darkness (pg. 187-193) 

 Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law. 

I’m really happy that the order of Oz’s and my  responses to Wilson’s pieces on Crowley landed me with the forward to Portable Darkness. Not because I have anything particularly profound to share, but simply because this piece is important to me; it was one of the first pieces I read on The Great Beast that seemed promising and inspired me to continue deciphering the shadow-language of occultism. In many ways, the Lion of Light has been a walk down memory lane, a collection of works I had sought out or found in my hands but that had never before been concentrated in the same place. I cannot properly express how impressed I am with this collection: as I have said before, and will most likely say again, I wish I had had this collection when I was a novitiate. 

That said, even as someone who has spent years immersed in this milieu, there are still some mysteries in Wilson’s forward. I have never been able to identify the Wheatley story that chronicles the death of MacAleister and the elder Crowley’s institutionalization. I will admit I still haven’t read most of Wheatley’s fiction aside from The Devil Rides Out. He was prolific and much of his work is out of print; Wheatley helped shape that peculiar British tradition of being a man who was fascinated by the occult but drew a hard moral line between study and practice. His heroes are usually those who have only righteously dabbled instead of committing themselves towards black magic and are only interested in countering the diabolic machinations of actual practitioners. Wheatley also shamelessly capitalized on the occult revival of the 60s by releasing the curated collection of occult fiction “The Dennis Wheatley Library of the Occult.” I have a copy of Crowley’s Moonchild released under that imprint, so that shows how truly dangerous and evil Wheatley thought Crowley’s writing was. That, or he wasn’t afraid to unleash the dark energies of the Great Beast upon an unsuspecting public. Robert Irwin’s exceptional Satan Wants Me, set during the aforementioned revival, contains a humorous portrait of Wheatley, something that one suspects is inspired by Irwin’s own life experience. The hapless protagonist has found out that his involvement with a magical lodge has resulted in all-too-real consequences and writes to Wheatley for advice; the old author replies with a stodgy missive that scolds him for drug use, provides a facile and overblown warning about dabbling with magic and then encourages the protagonist to buy his latest book. Irwin’s autobiographical Memoirs of a Dervish has a few real life instances of the “luminaries” of mid-Century occult scholarship acting rather unimpressively. 

Wheatley’s novel was adapted into a fantastically lurid Hammer Studios film, released as The Devil’s Bride in America, that stars Christopher Lee as the virtuous Duc de Richlieu and Charles Grey as the Crowley-inspired Mocata. I highly recommend it. 

What was more troubling to me for years is that I never ran across the story of MacAleister’s unfortunate fate anywhere else, and I would relish reading the repetition of such a stone-faced canard. I love Crowley’s various fictionalized versions, deeply. That isn’t to say that I disbelieve Wilson- there was a mild boom of paperback and zines during the 60s that specialized in crude, inaccurate accounts of magical practice and demoniacal cults. Bereft of much literary merit, few of these publications were preserved. Once, a bookseller who knew my tastes well invited me into his backroom where he revealed a box of such titles, gathered from an estate sale. Although very broadminded, I think the salacious titles and cover art made him wary of putting the books on his shelves. I flipped through the lot, but could find very little of any use. Perhaps I should have purchased the collection for further perusal, but I only selected a couple of the titles with the most risque covers which I promptly lost between loaning them out and various moves. I think Uncle Al appreciated most of his caricatures, or at the very least took them in his stride. It is through these fictionalizations that we can best appreciate the dark dynamic of Crowley that Wilson writes about before trying to disabuse the reader of it in his foreword. 

I have never, to my satisfaction, identified the six biographies that Wilson was writing about in particular. There were more than six biographical accounts of Crowley published by the time of this foreword, and with the widened lens provided by the Internet, I cannot confidently guess at which ones would have flown across Wilson’s radar during this time period. One can assume that at least some of the hostile biographies would have been The Great Beast by John Symonds and Francis X. King’s The Magical World of Aleister Crowley; perhaps a third would have been Daniel P. Mannix’s The Beast: The Scandalous Life of Aleister Crowley. I would imagine at least one of the “sympathetic” biographies would have been Regardie’s The Eye in the Triangle with the other perhaps being Gerald Suster’s biography or Charles Cammell’s (father of Performance co-director Donald Cammell) Aleister Crowley: The Man, The Mage, the Poet. These are some of the inconsequential questions that have bothered me throughout the years. Lord knows we have more than enough Crowley biographies today, but I would like to reconstruct where Wilson’s knowledge was partially derived from. 

On a related note, I have never ran across the utterly charming bit of verse that Wilson profers as “the quickest introduction to the real Aleister Crowley”:

By all sorts of monkey tricks
They make my name mean 666; 

Well, I will deserve it if I can:
It is the number of a Man. 

I’ve had this down by heart--it isn’t hard--since first reading this piece so many years ago; I love it, but haven’t found it in Crowley’s writings. Perhaps it is derived from his diaries, which I haven’t read all of and will admit that I didn’t read particularly carefully when I did dip into them. I’m hoping one of our astute readers might be able to point me in the right direction. I’ve raised a lot of questions here, and would appreciate anybody’s ideas or attempts at answers. I do think that some valuable insight is gained herein as towards Wilson's attitude towards Crowley and all his foibles later in his writing career.

Finally, a word on “Portable” anthologies. The Viking Library was famous for its “Portable” titles and I typically disdained them. Perhaps I had prematurely, through some temporal fluke, taken Crowley’s own words to heart that I wouldn’t read until years later; in his autohagiography, Crowley writes that his understanding of literature was so expansive because he read all of the works of an author, not just a few titles, while discussing Coleridge. I disdained the Portable Library as something beneath me and fell into the trap of believing that it is better to read nothing rather than excerpts. This arrogance cost me a few years of understanding. It was Portable Darkness that introduced me to a lot of the more lucid parts of Crowley’s corpus; I first read excerpts from Magick Without Tears and Eight Lectures on Yoga in that compendium. It would also be in The Portable Joyce that I would first read any part of Finnegans Wake. So, I recommend reading something over reading nothing. Portable Darkness was not part of the Viking line of books, but it did capitalize upon the trends. Aside from the fact that Scott Michaelson didn’t seem to believe in any of the practical bits in Crowley’s writing, it is a very good anthology and our editor does display his good taste by including most of the poems, sans commentaries, of Wilson’s beloved The Book of Lies. This was also the book wherein I first read Liber AL and a few of the very best of the Holy Books of Thelema. If the collection had included Liber E and Liber O, I would say it is a near-perfect introduction. Even without those foundational texts, it is still a great introduction, replete with further reading recommendations, "marvellous commentaries" and compiled by someone who recognized Crowley’s philosophical and literary merit. 

Love is the law, love under will.

A.C.