Aleister Crowley in England

The Return of the Great Beast

Tobias Churton

Inner Traditions 2022

Hb, 384pp, £25, ISBN 9781644112311

In the summer of 1932, Aleister Crowley – magician, gnostic poet and the “wickedest man in the world” – returned to London after his sojourn among the Berlin art scene. He arrived beset with financial problems and declining health, and would remain in England until his death in 1947.

Tobias Churton’s latest book documents these last 15 years of the Great Beast’s life, drawing extensively from diaries and personal correspondence, and completes an extended biography that includes

Aleister Crowley in America (2018),

Aleister Crowley in

India (2020), and the earlier Aleister

Crowley – The

Beast in Berlin (2014). Such detailed treatment inevitably comes at the expense of the strong narrative structure of a more conventional biography, and readers unfamiliar with Crowley’s life should begin elsewhere; but for the initiated, Churton conjures up an immersive juxtaposition of esoteric enlightenment and unpaid rent, trips to the cinema, reflections upon fascism and the dawning of a New Aeon, chess matches, sex rituals, internecine squabbles over occult hierarchy and advice on how to cook a good curry.

Highlights include Crowley’s notorious 1934 libel case against the artist Nina Hamnett, whose autobiography accused him of practising black magic in Sicily during the 1920s. Crowley had hoped for a quick pay-out, but soon found himself – and some of his more pornographic publications – on trial. Transcripts from the case give a flavour of his insouciance and wit, if not perhaps his legal acumen. Less convincing is the evidence for Crowley’s intelligence work during the Second World War, his own diary recording the repeated refusals by the Security Services to accept his assistance. No one seemed to remember his previous propaganda efforts during the First World War, no matter how often he wrote to remind them of it.

And Crowley’s claim to have first promulgated the “V for Victory” slogan depends more upon an analysis of its esoteric significance than it does on any concrete evidence of authorship.

Crowley spent his final years at Netherwood in East Sussex, managing his chronic asthma with ever greater quantities of heroin. Recollections from visitors including EM Butler and Gerald Gardner testify pointedly to his physical decline; while correspondence with Jack Parsons in Pasadena – who was to conduct his infamous “Babylon Workings” with L Ron Hubbard in 1946 – simultaneously documents the splintering of Crowley’s Church of Thelema.

This may be a book for Crowley aficionados, but it is also an intimate (and sometimes tragic) portrait of an imperfect and idiosyncratic individual determined to the very end to live as if what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law. Paul Dicken

★★★★