According to some reports, the last words of the occultist and self-described Great Beast 666 Aleister Crowley were, “I am perplexed.” Crowley, who was born in 1875 into a wealthy family of evangelical Christians, founded an ersatz religion he called Thelema, whose central injunction was: “Do what thou wilt is the whole of the law.” His interest in the occult seems to have begun while he was at Cambridge from 1895 to 1898. When he died in 1947, an impoverished heroin addict in a Hastings boarding house, the religion he had concocted had been embraced by the leading theorist of tank warfare, Major-General JFC Fuller; the American rocket scientist John W Parsons; and, for a time, the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Walter Duranty, who, as Moscow correspondent for the New York Times, helped cover up the man-made Soviet famine of 1932-33.
A succession of improbable exploits, Crowley’s life is best understood as an exercise in self-advertisement. His supposed magical powers were legends he persuaded others, and probably himself, to accept as true. In September 1930 he staged a fake suicide in Portugal. Richard Zenith describes this episode as being “a publicity stunt, an attempt to revive the flagging Aleister Crowley brand”. It was also a ploy to impress a lover, one of many Crowley tried to recruit in order to practise the “sex magick” that was at the heart of his new religion.
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