Aleister Crowley, Sexual Liberator

Dear Brendahere's a few bits from a earlier piece I did which should give some idea of the threads in Crowley's life - he is the very opposite of an anti-puritan censor. Before writing it for you, I want to know you think it might have possibilities -Aleister Crowley (1875-1947) is this centuries greatest magical adept and one of the most profound and sustaining influences on the current magical renaissance. He was a sexual prophet, pornographer decadent and libertine, who taught that the mysteries of sexuality were central to humanity's spiritual development. His blatant bisexuality and extreme radical lifestyle earned him a black reputation with the legal and cultural establishment of his day. It is only almost fifty years after his death that his name is recorded in the Dictionary of National Bibliography (Missing Persons, Oxford University Press 1992) and in the Oxford Dictionary of Quotations, which still calls which whilst labelling him as a diabolist, records his one precept : Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law. Perhaps it was the reek of sulphur that prevented the authorities from clamping down hard on his unorthodox sexual adventures and he was lucky to escape the fate that destroyed his contemporary Oscar Wilde. Arguable the most important and creative love in Crowley's life was Victor Neuburg, the English poet and impresario who discovered Dylan Thomas amongst other new poets of his day. Crowley walked into Neuburg's rooms at Trinity College, Cambridge. Crowley explained his call by saying he had read some of Neuburg's poems in the Agnostic Journal, and realized that Neuburg had some knowledge of magical states of consciousness. Crowley proposed that Neuburg should be his brotherdisciple, which Neuburg accepted. Crowley was thirty-one years old and rather handsome. He was a practicing bisexual and the two men became lovers as well as brothers. Crowley was Neuburg's first lover of either sex, and their affair was very passionate. Neuburg's Triumph of Pan, goes some way to give the flavour of their

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relationship; it abounds in Homo-eroticism of a kind that has been compared to Verlaine. For instance in 'The Romance of Olivia Vane' the lines: Sweet wizard, in whose footsteps I have trod Unto the shrine of the most obscene god, and Let me once more feel thy strong hand to be Making the magic signs upon me! Stand, Stand in the light, and let mine eyes drink in The glorious vision of the death of sin!(1) Crowley's reply is to be found in his awe-inspiring Hymn To Pan, regarded by Crowley as the most powerful enchantment ever written. It was first published in The Equinox volume one number four on 21st March 1919, a few months after the break-up of Crowley's relationship with Neuburg. However, it was actually written in the summer of 1913, when Crowley was in Moscow. It was the climax of the Rites of Eleusis and acted as a preface to the original edition of Magick, a fact clouded by the RKP edition which kicks off with an poem about Crowley's austere and often wrongheaded brand of yoga. Timothy D'Arch Smith has demonstrated beyond doubt that the way Crowley published his books was significant even down to details of paper stock and colour(2). We are meant then to take the Hymn to Pan as a paradigm of Magick. My feeling is that many magicians would rather not face up to fact that some of the most influential magical work of the twentieth century was actually homosexual sexMagick. I include in this Crowley himself, whose cruelty and spitefulness towards Victor Neuburg, seems inspired at least in part by his own residual guilt. But in the end, long after Neuburg had given Crowley his marching orders, Crowley seems to have come to some realization as to what he had thrown away. In 1927, years after the expulsion from Cefalu, and the viscous press campaign against Crowley, and widespread blacklisting of both  This book too has been recently reprinted by Skoob2,  London, UK.  2  Timothy D'Arch Smith, Books of the Beast, 2nd Edition  (Mandrake 1990)  1

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writers, he appeared at Victor Neuburg's Sussex home, and banging his stick on the ground shouted 'I want Victor'. In November 1909 Victor Neuburg and Crowley went on holiday in Algeria, walking into the desert from Alba. They took with them a copy of Calls for the Thirty Aethyrs, the famous Enochian text of John Dee, with the intention of making the calls in the desert. Israel Regardie in his introduction to the magical record of this time, published as The Vision And The Voice(3), implies that Crowley had this manuscript with him purely by accident. It seems more likely that Crowley had deliberately brought his Enochian notebook for the purpose of repeating his earlier experiment. Neuburg and Crowley were picking up the thread of those two Elizabethan magi Kelly and Dee; I wonder how many other magicians would have the courage to have done so. It could be said that it was at this moment that Crowley and Neuburg rediscovered sexual Magick, albeit in this Homo-erotic guise. They climbed mount Dal'leh Addin in order to call the 14th Aethyr. On their descent Crowley received an instruction to return to the summit and make a circle of small stones, tracing words of power in the sand. In the centre they built an altar and placing themselves "in the sight of the sun" Neuburg made love to Crowley. This was a public sacrifice to the God Pan. The footnote to this passage of the magical record of these events, says this was by the XI degree OTO. Regardie, who wrote this footnote is very coy about it, saying that Crowley 'constantly sought to glorify and excuse [it] at the same time. Nonetheless, it must be reiterated that Crowley's concept of a fully attained adept was that he was epicene.'(4) Bisexual would be a better term than 'epicene', the implication being that the magician pursues the goal of androgyny or fusion of the sex within. It would be wrong to suppose that Crowley was a bisexual because he viewed it as a way of achieving an androgynous state, after all he and Neuburg, and other male lovers had been happily screwing long before the spiritual possibilities dawned on  Aleister Crowley, The Vision And The Voice, (Sangreal  1972), 4  p134fn. 3

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him. However this was a secret side of himself, the 'decadent', sensualist one. The public sacrifice of himself to Pan in the full Light of the sun, marks a turning point. It was in fact regarded by Crowley as an initiation into the grade 8=3 (5) Magister Templi, in which one has to resolve the dualistic conflict of the spiritual and the physical. From then on an abyss had been crossed between the personal and the spiritual. The alienation of the sexual from the spiritual disappears. That old antagonism of Golden Dawn type Magick for the sensual, is ditched along with Temperance. Soon after this Crowley performed a public act of masturbation in front of his London followers. Those ignorant of the esoteric side of Crowley's nature have wrongly interpreted this act as pure exhibitionism. This ideal of unifying the spiritual with the sexual is one with a long and noble history. It lies at the heart of Hindu Tantra and also forms the basis of modern psychotherapy, especially that of Wilhelm Reich. Of course this is a process easier said than done. Most of us have to work very hard, as indeed did Crowley to decondition ourselves. To sum up: one possible interpretation of the magical ordeal of crossing the abyss and assuming the grade 8=3 is the reconciliation sex and spirit. The command 'to interpret all events as dealings of the gods with the soul' makes sense in terms of viewing one's sexuality as divine. The genitals are to be viewed as emblems of the gods themselves, to be venerated in the same way Hindu tantriks worship the phallus or cunt of their gods. +++ 31 Aug 1993

 Its worth reflecting on the numerological signifance of  8=3. Eight the number of Binah = Babalon, Hekate  counterpart to the (P)androgynous 3 = Pan. 8+3 = 11, the  number of magick and of the operaton that brings both  numbers together. 5

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