by Gary Lachman
Much of the inspiration for The Matrix and films like it came from the growing fascination—some might say obsession—with the Internet, “virtual reality,” and the “cyberworld” that has by now become as ubiquitous and indispensable as television, an earlier “false” reality. Today we all live with a sense of reality not being quite what it seems. Rightly or wrongly we have—at least in the West—grown suspicious of every authority; to borrow a phrase from the philosopher Paul Ricouer, we live under the “hermeneutics of suspicion,” and the once firm footing for our beliefs is now little more than thin ice. This sense of ontological disorientation has reached contemporary pop. Innocuous acts like the Jonas Brothers and celebrities like Peaches Geldof (daughter of Bob Geldof of the punk-era Boomtown Rats) sport thelemic emblems: a recent photograph revealed that Peaches had an O.T.O. tattoo and she sang the group’s praises on Twitter; while Kevin Jonas irritated some fundamentalists by wearing a Crowley T-shirt.27 Crowley’s image has turned up in the fashion world, too; actress and model Taylor Momsen was caught by a paparazzo with the Beast all over her.28 This does not mean that these celebrities are Satanists, black magicians, or are really “into the occult,” although Geldof has earlier spoken of her interest in Scientology. (Her remark that Crowley’s books are “super interesting” may suggest the depth she has reached in her esoteric exploration.) What it does mean is that we live in a world flooded with images, whose meanings most of us are ignorant of; as David Tibet said, Crowley provided striking images for people with no imagination. But there are somewhat more serious signs that the Beast is still on the prowl.
In an interview about his video “Run This Town” (2009), the rapper Jay-Z wears a hoodie emblazoned with “Do What Thou Wilt.” If this isn’t bad enough, the video itself is said to be rife with thelemic, occult, and other esoteric symbolism, mostly of a Masonic, Illuminati bent; that the singer Rihanna holds a torch aloft in the video is supposed to be representative of Lucifer, the fallen angel and “light-bringer.”29 Along with other biblical baddies, Lucifer is a Gnostic hero, rejecting the authoritarian rule of Jehovah. The video takes place in a postapocalyptic landscape; the atmosphere is threatening, suggesting that order is giving way to chaos, that the old world is crumbling and a new, more violent one is emerging—perhaps Crowley’s era of “force and fire”?—that the elite will dominate. Jay-Z is also making a mark—of the Beast?—in the fashion world, with an esoteric fashion line, Rocawear, that sports a medley of Masonic symbols: pentagrams, pyramids, “All-Seeing Eyes,” which also turn up in his videos and in live performances. The “devil’s horns” sign, made by clenching the thumb and middle fingers and extended the fore and little fingers, has become very popular, and figures like Rihanna and Eminem have more or less branded it. Jay-Z’s video “On to the Next One” (2010) even contains a brief flash of the Templar deity Baphomet, the androgynous goat-headed idol now associated with Satan and one of Crowley’s pseudonyms—although Eliphas Levi, the nineteenth-century occultist who designed the image, receives no royalties or credit.
The association of Crowleyan motifs with rap may seem far-fetched, but Crowley himself was into bling, spending freely—usually other people’s money—on rings, tie pins, cuff links, and other solid signifiers of power. Does this mean that Jay-Z is really an agent of the Illuminati, a late-eighteenth-century breakaway Masonic group upon whom more conspiracy theories have been hung than I care to relate? More likely he is, as Mick Jagger was in the late 1960s, an astute tactician, cannily addressing a felt appetite for some elite knowledge and vocabulary, available only to those “in the know,” and rediscovering that occult imagery has a strange appeal to rebellious youth, eager to shock anyone they can. Another performer, the R&B singer Ciara, has also added to the occult brew; in her video for “Keep On Lookin’” (2013) she sports a jacket emblazoned with “XIV Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn” on the back and boots to match; other singers, like Kanye West and Ke$ha, apparently share her hermetic interests.30 Rather than providing evidence of a rap occult conspiracy, more likely these celebs feel the need to keep up with one another.
Another recent antinomian pop manifestation comes from Lady Gaga. Her video “Judas” (2011) is a good example of Gnostic pop. In it, Jesus and his disciples are a motorcycle gang. Lady Gaga as Mary Magdalene dumps Jesus for Judas and rides off with him on his motorcycle; I suspect Kenneth Anger would be well pleased with seeing his occult-biker imagery making the scene once again. For Gnostics, Judas was a hero, and he is for Lady Gaga, too. In the video Jesus is shown healing the sick, helping the poor, and performing other Christian acts, while Judas drinks and paws women. Some suggest this is a symbol for Crowley’s coming age of Horus, which rejects Christianity and encourages hedonistic thrills. The fact that Lady Gaga’s eyes are made up to look like “eyes of Horus” has convinced some that, like Jay-Z, she is in some way an agent of forces that are out to undermine morality and decency and inaugurate a new age of lust and depravity—at least from their eyes.
If peace-loving hippies, violence-loving punks, death-loving goths, devil-loving heavy metallers, noise-loving performance artists, and bling-loving rappers can all be into Crowley, what does that tell us? That Crowley’s philosophy is ecumenical enough to appeal to practically everyone? Or that at bottom the appeal is very simple: it is the appeal of the forbidden, the shocking, the transgressive? My guess is number 2.
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AS YOU MIGHT SUSPECT, most of the concern about the dangers of the new pop occultism comes from Christian fundamentalists. But the odd thing is that, while researching this material on the Internet, I was struck by the similarity between the “satanic” Web sites and the fundamentalist ones. Both used striking imagery, both exaggerated the power and importance of “the occult,” and both pandered to a taste for sensationalism, a kind of “spiritual pornography,” aimed at titillating base emotions: fear, greed, egoism, power. Often I had to check to see which one I was looking at. Both cater to the belief that there is something dangerous about the occult, Crowley, esotericism, and the Gnostic belief in a “false world.” I would agree with this, but not for the reasons fundamentalists give. I don’t think listening to Jay-Z or Lady Gaga is going to lure anyone into Satan’s clutches. The danger, I think, is the very one that David Tibet pointed out decades ago: that Crowley and others like him provide powerful imagery that can be easily taken up and used by people who lack the imagination to create their own imagery or to understand what such imagery means and can do. Earlier I mentioned the philosopher Jean Gebser, who speaks of a “magical structure of consciousness.” This ancient level of the psyche is still active in us; anyone who has ever felt “carried away” at a rock concert or other large group experience feels it. William Burroughs wasn’t joking when he said that rock taps into the sources of magical energy, and that this can be dangerous. The danger is not so much in the energy itself—it is, we can say, neutral—as in our ability to understand it. It is no surprise that magic in some way—Crowley’s variety or otherwise—still appeals to “youth culture” and finds its way into its music. Magic and the music industry make use of much of the same materials—imagery, special effects (light shows), illusion, trance—and both reach down below the conscious mind to the deeper, older, more visceral levels of ourselves. Both also cater to that adolescent appetite to be someone “special,” to stand out, to be noticed, to belong to the elite and to have an effect on the people around you. Crowley often claimed that he could make himself invisible, yet he did everything he could to draw attention to himself. If he were around today, he would no doubt turn up on chat shows, be tweeting regularly, and make guest appearances on YouTube.
That Crowley has been appropriated by today’s celebrities is a pop version of the fact that his portrait hangs in London’s National Portrait Gallery. In one sense this neutralizes him and his philosophy: if the Jonas Brothers are into Crowley, how dangerous can he be? But in another sense such neutralizing has its own pitfalls. It suggests that we have beco
me inured to the kind of character Crowley was, and accustomed to his lifestyle, his “excess in all directions.” Does this mean that Crowley was right, and that the new age he prophesized has arrived? Not really. What it means, I think, is that Crowley was a kind of pre-echo of our own moral and spiritual vacuum. For better or worse, we do find ourselves in an antinomian world, beyond good and evil, in which practically anything goes and we are urged to give into our impulses and “just do it.” If nothing else, giving in to impulse is good for business. But we all live in a world with constant distractions, constant allurements to have, do, or be “more”—we have so lost touch with life that we have to “capture” it on our cellphones, as if it were a wild creature on the loose, and display our trophies on social networks. We are very far from Pascal’s suggestion that we sit quietly in a room.
But if Crowley was right, and this is the era of the “crowned and conquering child,” I can only hope that he grows up soon.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Many people helped make this book possible. I would like to thank Mark Pilkington, Dr. Petra Lange-Berndt, and the other members of the Congress for Curious People for their invaluable assistance, as well as Jill Kraye and Philip Young of the Warburg Institute, for making their Crowley archive available to me. Phil Baker was of inestimable aid in providing research material, as was Suzanne Treister, and Mike Jay and Paul Sieveking answered some key questions in record time. James Hamilton generously allowed me to importune him with endless ponderings on thelema and its relation to rock and roll, and Anja Flode Bjorlo’s insights proved crucial. My good friend Lisa Persky, for whom I wrote “(I’m Always Touched by Your) Presence, Dear,” also provided much-needed support. Once again, I would like to thank the staff of the British Library and the London Library for their tireless efforts. My sons, Maximilian and Joshua, pointed me in several good directions, as did their mother, Ruth Jones. My friends John Browner, Lisa Yarger, and their daughter, Greta, were once again generous in Munich, where part of this book was written. And I would especially like to thank Benton Quinn for introducing me to Crowley’s tarot deck so many years ago.
NOTES
INTRODUCTION: THE BEAST ON THE BOWERY
1.There is debate over what the initials A...A... “really” stand for and, typically, Crowley did little to clarify the issue; he enjoyed making things mysterious and overcomplicated for his readers. Although Argentium Astrum or Silver Star is most commonly accepted, some have offered Atlantean Adepts. This is what Crowley’s early biographer and friend Charles Richard Cammell said Crowley himself had told him the initials stood for. Silver Star, however, is what I always believed the initials stood for and that is how they will be referred to here.
2.See Gary Valentine, New York Rocker: My Life in the Blank Generation (New York: Thunder’s Mouth Press, 2006), 209–12. Gary Valentine was my name during my years in rock and roll.
3.See the afterword to my book In Search of P. D. Ouspensky (Wheaton, IL: Quest Books, 2006), 283–93, for an account of my time in the Gurdjieff “work.”
4.See Valentine, New York Rocker, 232–53. I did in fact have a brief return to music in the late ’90s, playing for a time with Blondie again in the early days of their reunion. See Ibid., 254–67.
5.Gary Lachman, “The Wickedest Man in the World,” in Fortean Times 231 (January 2008).
6.See “The Mark of the Beast” in Antony Clayton, Gary Lachman, Andy Sharp, et al., Netherwood: Last Resort of Aleister Crowley (London: Accumulator Press, 2012), 45–59.
7.http://www.lashtal.com/portal/news/thelema/1475-1474-old-news.html.
8.Aleister Crowley and Western Esotericism, ed. Henrik Bogdan and Martin P. Starr (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012).
9.Louis Wilkinson, Seven Friends, Introduction by Oliver Marlow (Oxford: Mandrake Press, 1992), 58.
ONE: THE UNFORGIVABLE SIN
1.John Bull, “A Man We’d Like to Hang,” May 16, 1923.
2.In fact, he is seen as one already. See Henry Hemming, In Search of the English Eccentric (London: John Murray, 2009), 289–90.
3.Quoted in John Symonds, The Great Beast (London: Mayflower, 1973), 111, and Richard Kaczynski, Perdurabo: The Life of Aleister Crowley (Berkeley, CA: North Atlantic Books, 2010), 151.
4.Symonds, The Great Beast, 54.
5.Wilkinson, Seven Friends, 61.
6.Lawrence Sutin, Do What Thou Wilt: A Life of Aleister Crowley (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2002), 3; Tobias Churton, Aleister Crowley: The Biography (London: Watkins, 2011), 10.
7.Sutin, 11.
8.http://www.facebook.com/thelema.page/posts/10151439162831359. I can’t help but mention that I recognized the resonances between the Nike slogan and a philosophy reminiscent of Crowley’s early on. See Gary Lachman, Turn Off Your Mind (New York: Disinformation Books, 2003), 357–58.
9.Mrs. Grundy is a character in Thomas Morton’s play Speed the Plough (1789) and in English and European literature represents an extremely conventional and priggish person.
10.Aleister Crowley, Magick in Theory and Practice (New York: Dover Publications, 1976), xi.
11.Wilkinson, Seven Friends, 59.
12.Crowley, The Confessions, 35.
13.Richard Spence, Secret Agent 666: Aleister Crowley, British Intelligence and the Occult (Los Angeles: Feral House, 2008), 15.
14.Sutin, Do What Thou Wilt, 22.
15.Crowley, The Confessions, 40.
16.Ibid., 36.
17.Ibid., 98.
18.Quoted in Symonds, The Great Beast, 239.
19.Crowley, The Confessions, 53. Crowley wrote the early part of his Confessions in the third person, an affectation designed to emphasize the fact that he did not become himself until the death of his father.
20.Ibid.
21.See my Jung the Mystic (New York: Tarcher/Penguin, 2010), 144–45.
22.Crowley, The Confessions, 44–45.
23.See my The Dedalus Book of Literary Suicides: Dead Letters (Sawtry, Cambs: Dedalus, 2008), 162–67.
24.Ibid., 47.
25.The Italian Count Cesare Mattei (1809–96) developed a theory involving the therapeutic properties of electricity. Though widely popular, it was denounced by the medical authorities of the time.
26.Sir James Paget (1814–99) was a distinguished surgeon and is considered one of the founders of modern medical pathology.
27.Crowley, The Confessions, 53.
28.Ibid., 67.
29.Ibid.
30.Ibid., 66.
31.Ibid., 81.
32.Ibid., 67.
33.Ibid.
34.Ibid., 75.
35.Ibid.
36.Ibid., 387–88.
37.Colin Wilson, Aleister Crowley: The Nature of the Beast (Wellingborough, Northamptonshire: Aquarian Press, 1987), 31.
38.Symonds, The Great Beast, 26.
39.Eckenstein is remembered today as the inventor of the Eckenstein crampon, talonlike grips attached to boots that allow easy movement on ice and frozen surfaces.
40.Crowley, The Confessions, 105.
41.Ibid., 106.
42.Quoted in Churton, Aleister Crowley, 271.
43.Crowley, The Confessions, 78.
44.Ibid., 82.
45.Ibid., 86.
46.Ibid., 87.
47.Ibid., 108.