w w w . h a a r e t z d a i l y . c o m
 

 

CEFALU - On the cover of the album "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band," there is a photomontage of many figures surrounding the Beatles.

In the top row, second from the left, next to Mae West, is the figure of Aleister Crowley, the English mystic, artist, poet and philosopher, occultist and, some say, serious psychopath.

 

Those who looked for hints in the record that link the Beatles to the cult of Satan noted the opening lines of the theme song, "It was 20 years ago today." It was argued that the subject of the song was the death of Aleister Crowley, exactly 20 years earlier, on December 1, 1947. The Satanic clue-hunters were not deterred by the fact that the album had already been released on June 1, 1967. But apparently what really led to Crowley's appearance on the album cover was what also led the raters at the BBC to select him three years ago as one of the most influential Britons of the 20th century. Crowley was a very colorful person, who not only articulated exciting philosophical-hedonist principles, but also took the trouble to live them intensely.

 

In 1920 he brought his gospel to conservative Sicily. In the enchanted city of Cefalu, which was built at the foot of a cliff on the northern coast of Sicily, he established the Thelema Abbey. The name of the institution is derived from a Greek word meaning "will," and Crowley indeed preached the rule of the free will. His philosophy boils down to his most famous sentence: "Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law." This sentence, in the English of Cambridge (where he only completed his undergraduate studies), ultimately won him an entry in the Encyclopedia Britannica.

 

Life at Thelema was not monastic in the usual sense. According to rumors that spread, inside Crowley's villa there were homosexual relations, orgies, the use of every possible drug and satanic rites. Crowley himself was largely responsible for the glorification of his monstrous image, but in the Europe of the 1920s, the way from rumors based on bisexual relations to "proof" of cannibalism and the drinking of animal blood was short.

 

On the walls of his home, Crowley painted sensational scenes: Alongside quotations from his works appeared couples having sexual intercourse, a woman coupling with a goat and all kinds of monsters and creatures that came straight from hell.

 

In 1923, Crowley was expelled from Italy. Some of his biographers say that Benito Mussolini signed the deportation order. The deportation was preceded by many scandals that were reported in newspapers in England. Crowley was described as the wickedest man in the world, a sorcerer in whose temple of lust horrible things take place, among them sacrifices of babies. In 1923, a young man was found dead in Crowley's home.

Apparently he had died of a severe intestinal infection, but his wife claimed that he died from drinking cat's blood at the climax of a black magic rite. This was enough for the Italians to deport him.

 

In Cefalu - a medieval town that has preserved its unique character - Crowley had the possibility of establishing his home and performing his eccentric rites. Even though he was perhaps one of the most influential Britons of the century, in southern Italy he earned no special respect.

At the tourism office in Cefalu they said that Crowley's house has been locked for many years, in effect ever since he was expelled from the island. However, the official pulled out a book about Crowley containing articles that were collected about six years ago when an international conference on the man and his ideas was held in the city. There is no point in taking the trouble to try to get to the house itself, they said at the tourism office, but if you insist, the easiest way is to go around the cliff and ask someone at the cemetery.

 

Two young fellows who were standing in the flower shop at the entrance to the cemetery had never heard of Thelema or of Crowley. "Do you mean the crazy Englishman's house?" one of them finally asked. The two argued between themselves about where the house is located, and then got on a motorcycle and told us to follow them.

 

They stopped in a dilapidated part of town, at a place where it looks like stolen cars are stripped at night. In a thicket of bushes, a private house was suddenly visible. Only the roof had been visible from the road, its tiles broken. "You really shouldn't stay," said the two. "The police arrest anyone found loitering near this house." For a moment it seemed as though they were debating whether to join the visit to the house, then they turned around and rode away.

 

It is not difficult to reach the house from the path, on which blocks of stone with figures of naked people carved on them are strewn - sculptures that someone has removed from Crowley's house. The windows are boarded up - apparently ever since Crowley left, 80 years ago - but the house has been broken into again and again. Now there were two wide-open windows, the glass smashed.

 

The house is completely dark. After Crowley was deported, some of the walls were painted with whitewash, but over the years layers of it have peeled off and the pictures beneath them have been exposed. A look inside shows that some of the pictures have been destroyed by water seeping into the house. The walls are full of a mixture of smeared colors, red, black and blue - within which it is possible to make out human figures and the remains of inscriptions. Crowley's heritage has not been preserved in Cefalu.

 

Crowley was born in Leamington Spa, England in 1875 and grew up in a strict Christian family. He was quick to rebel. After his father's death, he changed his name from Edward to Aleister, so as not to have the same name as his father, and declared that he hated the hypocrisy in the Christian religious establishment. His shocked mother called him "the Beast," referring to the creature in the Book of Revelations in the New Testament. Crowley quite liked the nickname. He adopted it, with the addition of the number 666, for the worst possible luck.

 

With money he inherited from his father he began to travel around the world. In Stockholm he experienced a revelation of his own, about which he later wrote. He had quite a good sense of the mysterious, and in 1899 he chose to buy a house in Scotland, on the bank of Loch Ness, near the mythical monster. He engaged in what he called "magick," to distinguish himself from the magic of ordinary magicians.

 

Crowley did not stay there very long. He traveled to, among other places, Mexico, Ceylon, Burma and India, and even tried to climb in the Himalayas. He spent a long time in the United States and Canada. In his youth, he had already joined the mystical order of the Golden Dawn. Another member of this order was the poet William Butler Yeats, whom years later Crowley called "the fellow with the dirty fingernails."

 

Crowley joined various cults, among them the Ordo Templi Orientis - an order in which he advanced rapidly, because of his charismatic personality, or perhaps because he was, as he claimed, the devil's messenger on earth. He published many books, including poems dedicated to Lucifer and Dionysus. His dozens of books, among them "Confessions" and "The Book of Lies" have since then engaged hundreds of doctoral candidates, who compare his ideas to those of Yeats, Friedrich Nietzsche, Sjorn Kierkegaard and Carl Jung. In 1904, during a visit to the pyramids in Egypt, he experienced another revelation when "The Book of Laws" was dictated to him by a supernatural being.

 

He preached uninhibited sexual activity yet had three long-term relationships with women. The newspapers of his time stated that Crowley pushed his wives into alcoholism and addiction to hard drugs, but apparently his mad personality attracted types who were not especially stable even before he began to corrupt them.

 

Even after he was expelled from Italy, Crowley continued to cause scandals. He lost a libel suit he filed in England against one of the newspapers that had regularly defamed him. The vilification by the judges was, it seems, even harsher than what had been written in the newspaper. Crowley went bankrupt, but he did not despair. Some time later he staged his suicide, in the aftermath of which he could come to life again; he brought about his expulsion from France; and finally developed a medication for eternal life, among the ingredients of which was his semen. His admirers were probably not surprised by its original formula - many years earlier, Crowley had claimed that, like the Dalai Lama, his excrement was a sacred product.

 

Crowley died in 1947 and his body was cremated in the city of Brighton, in a chaotic ceremony. In the minutes of the city council it is dryly noted that the council would "take all necessary steps to prevent such an incident occuring again."

 

In contrast to the many books that have been written about him, only few documentary films have been made about Crowley. Several years ago, the BBC made a film about him called "The Other Loch Ness Monster." According to reports in The Guardian, director Kenneth Anger was given a budget of $50 million to produce a film that would reconstruct the ritual Crowley conducted in 1910. Anger seemed to be the right person for the job. His previous film, from 1980, was called "Lucifer Rising."

 

In the world of magic and the occult Crowley has never died. His writings are committed to memory by those who want to enter the world of the occult in its various hues - white magic and black magic.

 

Quite a number of crazies have relied on his image over time: About three years ago, 12-year-old Diego Piniero was murdered in Covent Garden in London. The police defined the murderer who was caught on the scene as "obsessed with Aleister Crowley." He had even changed his name in a legal proceeding years earlier. And thus, at the beginning of the 21st century, Edward Crowley was tried in Britain for murder.

 

 

By David Rapp