GARY
LACHMAN
Himalayas
of Earth and Mind
Colin
Wilson’s little book on the notorious Aleister Crowley will be disliked by
Crowleyites for the same reason his biography of Gurdjieff, The
War Against Sleep, is not a favourite among those in the ‘the Work’.
In both books he paints a less than uncritical portrait of his subject.
Thelemites will more than likely find The
Nature of the Beast an even more blasphemous text and avoid it, since Wilson
is convinced of Gurdjieff’s genius, while for him Crowley’s escapades form a
moral tale of a brilliant failure.
One hopes this prognosis is
incorrect; Wilson’s book is a very readable, unbiased account and analysis of
the bad boy of magick’s life and work, and should be read by anyone interested
in magick or occultism and the adventures of an extraordinary man.
Wilson’s thesis is that although
Crowley was a man of power, naturally psychic and aware of the great energies
within, he did little to master those energies, and allowed himself every
indulgence and whim of an adolescent ego. Unlike
other writers on Crowley, the truth of magick is not a problem for Wilson;
instead he concentrates on Crowley’s philosophical and psychological
developments and forms, in the book’s epilogue, an important analysis of
Crowley’s dictum, “Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law.”
This, he sees, is the key to Crowley’s greatness as well as his
failure.
Some readers may find Wilson’s
approach too reductive. He argues that Crowley’s upbringing by a fundamentalist
Christian sect is responsible for the later law of
Thelema. They may also not
agree with his hints that the Great Beast may have a better go of it as a
scientist or explorer rather than a fin-de-siecle
poet and adept. For readers who
take Crowley at his own estimation - the avatar of the word of the aeon - this
is understandable. It is also
understandable that Wilson does not see him in this way.
Nevertheless, he takes Crowley seriously and makes it clear he cannot be
understood as a charlatan or sensationalist.
Wilson’s insights into the Master Therion’s weakness are important in
that they give us insight into human strength.
Crowley mastered the difficult arts
of magick and mysticism, climbed Himalayas of earth and mind, and got his name
in as many papers as he could. But
he failed at the most difficult operation of all: being human.
Wilson argues that Crowley’s
childhood in the repressive embrace of strict fundamentalism is responsible for
his later inability to form normal affectionate relations with women, who were
for him always Scarlet Women, or nothing at all.
It is paradoxical that his philosophy of ‘love under will’ allowed
his to express his own unmet need for love only through the guise of blasphemous
lust. He took his “fill and will of love” as he willed,
“when, where and with whom” he willed, and left behind a legacy of broken
women, abandoned when the magical current went dry.
He could contact the Secret Chiefs and converse with his Holy Guardian
Angel, but it seemed impossible for him to reach a mere mortal human being.
Power
Versus Freedom
It
is somewhat discouraging that Crowley’s biggest readers today are found in the
head-banging youth of the heavy metal community.
Discouraging, but not surprising. The
Dionysian pandemonium of a rock concert, like its predecessors at Nuremberg and
among the Bacchae,is the kind of thing Crowley relished.
Here one can do one’s “own true will”, which, more times than not,
for today’s thelemites, means doing what they like. Crowley’s fascination with the dark powers held in check by
the rational ego resembles the National Socialist rhetoric or ‘blood and
soil’. Yet, as Wilson tells us,
his sexual proclivities are very reminiscent of Wilhelm Reich’s theories, of
which we know the Nazis were not fond. Crowley’s
was a paradoxical mind, wanting power over others, but at the same time
promulgating a philosophy of absolute freedom.
It remains a matter of speculation if he ever wondered if doing his
“own true will” interfered with anyone else’s - although theoretically, at least, true wills, being passive, were supposed
not to collide.
While Gurdjieff never used his
‘powers’ for his own benefit, Crowley had no qualms about throwing his
considerable magical weight around. He
did not, like the equally adept Rudolf Steiner, have an objective
interest in the wider reaches of consciousness.
And it is even more difficult to think of the aged Crowley, injecting
enough heroin to kill an elephant, as the incarnation of the new age.
But the subtler points of his thought, his more than occasional brilliance, deserve something more than the hero worship of commentators like Robert Anton Wilson, whose estimation of Crowley’s worth simply can’t be taken seriously, once we recognise that he, like Crowley, is out to shock our ‘repressed’, ‘bourgeois’ sensibilities. Bernard Shaw said we should judge a man by his greatness and, almost in spite of himself, Crowley had an element of this. If we forget for a moment that he was a moral imbecile, we recognize that, in his own obscure way, Crowley had a deep insight into man’s ultimate freedom. Throughout The Nature of the Beast, Wilson is at pains to make this clear, and for this reason his book is a much-needed reassessment of an all too legendary figure.
The Abraxas Booklist