There is no law beyond do what thou wilt; every man
and woman is a star; the word of sin is restriction.” For some, these three
short epigrams heralded the end of Christianity and the dawn of a new age. They
certainly provided successive generations of beats, hipsters, hippies, punks
and ravers, whether they knew it or not, with a manifesto of sorts.
The words come
from The Book of the Law, an obscure prose poem written 100 years ago by
Aleister Crowley, often described as the key to the notorious Magus’s vast
pantheon of writings. A multi-layered template of a magickal system, encompassing
Qabalah, single-point meditation, sex rituals, excessive drug use and a good
deal more, The Book of the Law made Crowley one of the 20th century’s hidden
prophets, a truly outrageous figure presiding over rock culture’s original
spirit of misrule.
… Yet the
hysterical press accounts of sex, drugs and sacrifice at his Abbey of Thelema,
in Sicily in the early 1920s, remain the core of the myth of Crowley as evil
incarnate. It was an image, along with his famously hypnotic stare, that led
Bond author Ian Fleming to model Blofeld on Crowley. They met when Fleming
worked in British intelligence during the war. That a man so publicly reviled
could still penetrate the corridors of power is a prime example of his unlikely
reach. Crowley was Fleming’s first choice for interrogating Rudolf Hess when
the occult-obsessed Nazi was captured in Scotland after a bizarre astrological
sting.
It was also
Crowley who gave Churchill his famous victory sign, a magickal gesture to
counteract the Nazi’s use of the swastika…In the 1940s, one of his closest
followers was a young Californian adept, Jack Parsons, one of the founding
fathers of the American space programme. His work at the fledgling Jet
Propulsion Laboratories lay the groundwork for the Apollo moon missions.
Rocket fuel,
space exploration and Crowley’s brand of ceremonial sex magick was a powerful
mix. Working with Parsons was none other than L Ron Hubbard, who later founded
the cult of Scientology, which now attracts so many Hollywood stars….
A hundred years on, Crowley remains one of those
figures often dismissed in public, but whose work is collected and studied in
private. His immediate following may have been small, but his influence on
modern culture is as pervasive as that of Freud or Jung. As an occultist, he
can justly claim to have made a lasting change on the world, refashioning the
occult with his famous dictum to combine the aim of religion with the method of
science.
TIM CUMMINGS, “Beyond Belief,” The Guardian, July
9, 2004.
