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    The Writings of the Great Beast - Some Short Stories by Aleister Crowley (Fantasy and Horror Classics)
    The Writings of the Great Beast - Some Short Stories by Aleister Crowley (Fantasy and Horror Classics)
    The Writings of the Great Beast - Some Short Stories by Aleister Crowley (Fantasy and Horror Classics)
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    The Writings of the Great Beast - Some Short Stories by Aleister Crowley (Fantasy and Horror Classics)

    By Aleister Crowley

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    Aleister Crowley is probably the most famous occultist in history. However, despite being best-known for longer works such as The Book of Law (1904), Crowley was a talented writer of short stories, many of which excellently distil his core ideas. A collection of short stories penned by Aleister Crowley the self proclaimed 'Great beast' and master of occult and magical rites.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherRead Books Ltd.
    Release dateDec 3, 2014
    ISBN9781447480235
    The Writings of the Great Beast - Some Short Stories by Aleister Crowley (Fantasy and Horror Classics)
    Author

    Aleister Crowley

    Aleister Crowley (1875-1947) was an English poet, painter, occultist, magician, and mountaineer. Born into wealth, he rejected his family’s Christian beliefs and developed a passion for Western esotericism. At Trinity College, Cambridge, Crowley gained a reputation as a poet whose work appeared in such publications as The Granta and Cambridge Magazine. An avid mountaineer, he made the first unguided ascent of the Mönch in the Swiss Alps. Around this time, he first began identifying as bisexual and carried on relationships with prostitutes, which led to his contracting syphilis. In 1897, he briefly dated fellow student Herbert Charles Pollitt, whose unease with Crowley’s esotericism would lead to their breakup. The following year, Crowley joined the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, a secret occult society to which many of the era’s leading artists belonged, including Bram Stoker, W. B. Yeats, Arthur Machen, and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. Between 1900 and 1903, he traveled to Mexico, India, Japan, and Paris. In these formative years, Crowley studied Hinduism, wrote the poems that would form The Sword of Song (1904), attempted to climb K2, and became acquainted with such artists as Auguste Rodin and W. Somerset Maugham. A 1904 trip to Egypt inspired him to develop Thelema, a philosophical and religious group he would lead for the remainder of his life. He would claim that The Book of the Law (1909), his most important literary work and the central sacred text of Thelema, was delivered to him personally in Cairo by the entity Aiwass. During the First World War, Crowley allegedly worked as a double agent for the British intelligence services while pretending to support the pro-German movement in the United States. The last decades of his life were spent largely in exile due to persecution in the press and by the states of Britain and Italy for his bohemian lifestyle and open bisexuality.

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      The Writings of the Great Beast - Some Short Stories by Aleister Crowley (Fantasy and Horror Classics) - Aleister Crowley

      Introduction

      to

      The Writings of the Great Beast: Some Short Stories

      by Aleister Crowley

      So much has been written about Aleister Crowley, and so much of it born out of sensationalism and speculation, that one hesitates to pen a single more word on the man and his work. Whatever the merits of ‘The Great Beast’ as a thinker and writer, his voluminous body of writing has been almost totally overshadowed by the even more voluminous body of biographies, anecdotes and parodies which surround him. To confuse matters even further, Crowley’s public legend is a highly polarising one: To the British tabloid press, he was the wickedest man in the world, guilty of an array of horrors ranging from coprophilia to child abuse. At the same time, in a 2002 BBC poll of the ‘100 Greatest Britons’, Crowley placed 73rd, ahead of Geoffrey Chaucer and Sir Walter Raleigh.

      In this light, this collection will concern itself with the biographical details of Crowley’s life only as far as is necessary in order to contextualize and illuminate his writings. He was undoubtedly a fascinating man – by turns a rock-climber, chess master, classicist, poet, astrologer, traveller, magician, and even British spy – but proper, extensive treatments of his colourful life are available at great length elsewhere. Instead, The Writings of the Great Beast will deal as directly and as objectively as it can with a section of Crowley’s oeuvre that has over time been somewhat ignored: his short fiction.

      Despite being better-known for his lengthy tomes on the topics of Thelema (his spiritual-religious philosophy) and magick, Crowley was writing prose and poetry years before he published any non-fiction. While studying English literature at Trinity College, Cambridge, Crowley was a prolific producer of verse. His earliest notable publication, White Stains – a work of poetic erotica which had to be published pseudonymously in Amsterdam in order to avoid the British authorities branding it obscene – appeared in 1898. In November of this same year, at the age of 23, Crowley joined the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn. A magical order active in Great Britain during the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the Dawn has been credited with being of the largest single influences on 20th-century Western occultism, and it was Crowley’s experiences as a member of the order that provided the inspiration for a number of his future short stories.

      In 1907, following a less-than-amiable split with the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, Crowley co-founded the magical order A A . Two years later, he began to publish The Equinox, a series of biannual publications in book form that served (and, in fact, continue to serve) as the official organ of the A A . Billed as The Review of Scientific Illuminism, The Equinox was the publication in which Crowley published much of his early short fiction. More broadly, it was the springboard for his (somewhat half-hearted) attempt at serious fiction-writing. Indeed, it was between the founding of The Equinox in 1909 and the outbreak of World War I in 1914 that Crowley produced virtually all of the short fiction which appeared during his lifetime.

      It is fitting, then, that the first story in this collection – ‘At The Fork of the Roads’ – was first published in Vol. I, #1 of The Equinox, in the spring of 1909. In his Confessions of Aleister Crowley, the ‘Great Beast’ called the tale a true and fascinating story of one of my early magical experiences, and – unsurprisingly – it relates to a personal feud Crowley became involved in while a member of the Golden Dawn.

      As biographers of Crowley’s such as Richard Kaczynski have uncovered, the central events of ‘At The Fork of the Roads’ mirror an incident that took place in the summer of 1899, when Crowley was visited by Irish poet and artist Althea Gyles. Gyles was a close friend of the famous Irish poet W. B. Yeats, and had drawn the covers for a number of his early poetry collections. Yeats and Crowley, meanwhile, as fellow members of the Golden Dawn, were bitter enemies. According to Crowley, at the close of Gyles’ 1899 visit, after a short discussion of clairvoyance, she scratched him with her brooch as she left his house. The next day, again according to Crowley, she admitted to him that Yeats was attempting to use black magic to destroy him.

      Upon knowing these facts, the curiously personal-sounding language used to condemn the absent yet dastardly ‘Will Bute’ comes into focus: . . . the long lank melancholy unwashed poet . . . Will Bute was not only a poetaster but a dabbler in magic, and black jealousy of a younger man and a far finer poet gnawed at his petty part. Over the course of Crowley’s life, these sorts of carefully crafted criticisms of thinly veiled acquaintances would become an almost constant feature in his fiction.

      ‘The Dream Circean’ appeared in Vol. I, #2 of The Equinox, during the fall of 1909. The tale is set in Paris – a city Crowley visited frequently, and lived in for at least two extended periods, including during the twenties – and concerns itself in part with painting, another of his part-time pursuits. In his Confessions of Aleister Crowley, Crowley declared that the story was written at a times when he was incurably sad about Rose. Rose Edith Kelly, who Crowley married in 1903, was at this time – Christmas of 1908 – suffering heavily from alcoholism and related dementia, and Crowley had recently fled her company

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