The Great Beast (Do What Thou Wilt- Lawrence Sutin)

Name: hogsflesh

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Product:	Do What Thou Wilt- Lawrence Sutin
Date:	07/11/02 (244 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Bonfire night was good

Disadvantages: The first Ashes Test is going badly

(Wrong category again - I'll try and get it changed when we can add new items again. This is a review of a different biography of Aleister Crowley, 'Do What Thou Wilt' by Lawrence Sutin, Griffin Trade Paperbacks; ISBN: 0312288972.)

I recently had a dream where I walked into a pub and found Aleister Crowley and Madame Blavatsky sitting around a table using numerological charts to calculate the real names of all the angels in Heaven. Shortly afterwards I decided to read this book. Coincidence? I think not!

This is a recent biography of Crowley, a man with a great fondness for giving himself lots of often-meaningless titles, most famously The Great Beast 666. Crowley's one of those odd characters that most people have heard of but few actually know about in any great detail. Most people think of him as an early Twentieth Century satanist with a shaved head and a fondness for drugs and buggery.

That's not entirely true (apart from the bits about the shaved head, drugs and buggery, which are true). Crowley was an upper class Englishman whose parents were devout Plymouth Brethren who reacted against his upbringing by joining the Golden Dawn and getting into magic (or magick, as he spelled it). He eventually founded his own religion based on allegedly ancient magickal practices passed on to him by divine beings in mystical visions. (He was not, or not exclusively, a black magician or satanist, and seems to have genuinely believed what he preached). He wrote voluminous amounts about magick, along with poetry, pornography, novels and pro-German propaganda during the Great War. He was also, for a time, a fairly committed mountaineer who tried to climb some of the toughest mountains in the world. He had many lovers of both sexes, turning them into his disciples and fleecing them of any money they had. He spent years addicted to heroin and cocaine. He was an establishment hate figure and was frequently lambasted in the popular pre
ss. He complained about this, and occasionally attempted to sue for defamation, but ultimately he was as responsible for his reputation as anyone, delighting in the effect he had on people. He was even expelled from Mussolini's Italy. Ken Russell really should have made a film about him.

This biography is very good. It takes a generally sympathetic view of Crowley (while admitting that he could behave abominably) without necessarily taking him completely seriously. The other major biography I've read, 'The Great Beast' by John Symonds, took a different approach and generally treated Crowley as a kind of music hall rogue. Sutin doesn't include as many funny anecdotes as Symonds, so if you want to read about Crowley turning his acolytes into camels and such like, read Symonds instead.

Sutin writes very well (his chapter titles are great, too), and the book cracks along nicely, never getting too bogged down by the necessarily complicated magickal stuff. Sutin certainly believes that Crowley took magick immensely seriously, and his occult organisation, the O.T.O., still exists, albeit without many members. The book isn't an apology for Crowley - he could be fairly nasty, and was both racist and misogynistic (treating his long-suffering lovers and wives - his 'scarlet women' - appallingly). Sutin tells us everything, letting Crowley's good and bad points speak for themselves. He often emerges as almost likeable.

He was a mess of contradictions. In spite of his frequent pomposity he did have a nice streak of self-parody in him. While he wanted to be taken seriously, he was a bit too fond of silly publicity stunts that undermined his credibility. And while he would quite happily create enough scandal to keep the tabloid press happy for decades, deep down he yearned for acceptance by the society he professed to despise. That's part what makes him so fascinating. Of the books on Crowley that I've read, Su
tin's comes closest to capturing and explaining the contradictions.

Crowley's legacy has endured. His version of the Tarot deck is, I believe, still widely used. He still has followers practising his religion. Sutin claims that several Crowleyian ideas found their way into modern Wiccan rites (I'm not really in a position to judge whether that's true or not). Sutin also believes that Crowley was a much more important poet and artist than he's generally given credit for. He also makes the point that Crowley was a pioneer in the field of explicitly gay literature, and believes he deserves greater recognition as such. It certainly seems that old Aleister was happier with his male lovers than his female ones. Sutin even tries to resurrect Crowley's reputation as a mountaineer, believing that he deserves a far more honourable place in mountaineering history than he's been given.

Crowley's main cultural legacy doesn't really lie in his own work, though. It lies in what other people have made of him. He was the blueprint for villains in works by Somerset Maugham, MR James, Ian Fleming and Dennis Wheatley, amongst others. They all got him wrong (deliberately), turning him into a penny-dreadful satanist, but that's the image most people have of him anyway, and that's the image that will live on, I suspect. The only accurate portrayal of Crowley that I know of is in Anthony Powell's 'Dance to the Music of Time', where he appears as a cranky old pauper hanging around in dodgy hotels on the South Coast waiting to die. My favourite Crowley-based character is Mocata, the evil magician played by Charles Grey in Hammer's 'The Devil Ride Out'. If the real-life Crowley had been that suave he'd have done a lot better than he did.

Whether or not you share Crowley's peculiar and complex religious beliefs (I don't, personally) he's still an interesting figure, and has great ente
rtainment value. In the BBC's irritating Top 100 British People of All Time he came 77th, so someone out there still thinks he's important (mind you, Michael Crawford came 17th, so something went seriously wrong with that list). If you want to know about Crowley then this would definitely be the book to start with, it being the most even-handed that I've read.

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