The Beast Of The Apocalypse

A life-long pursuit of perversion had left poet Aleister Crowley with little more than a nice line in magic robes, a series of pretentious Tarot designs....and a carefully nurtured reputation as a degenerate monster. Now he had the nerve to sue for libel--only to find that he was on trial.

It takes alot to shock a judge, but Mr. Justice Swift had heard enough, For a moment his face bore the shadow of a man who had stared into the very abyss of Hell and seen its abominations. When he spoke, the revulsion was easily disconcernible behind the clipped, legal tones.

"I have been over 40 years engaged in the administration of the law in one capacity or another," he said. "I thought that everything which was vicious and bad had been produced at one time or another before me. I have learnt in this case that we can always learn something if we live long enough. I have never heard such dreadful, horrible, blashemous and abominable stuff as that which has been produced by the man who describes himself to you as the greatest living poet.."

The court muttered in approval. They, too, had glazed into the Pit. They had smelt the pitch and sulphur, heard the cries of the damned and seen the monsterous regiment of demons rise gibbering from the nightmare world beyond the grave. For four days it had seemed that the Devil himself had been in the courtroom. And in a way, he had; though the man who had conjured up these frightful visions looked more like an English country gentleman than a messenger of Satan.

He was balding and thickset, and wore a tweed suit. Yet there something about his face....not so much the puffy, debauched features as the eyes. The left eye was slightly larger than the right. They stared blankly, as if seeing some private, inner vision, and their colour was a strange yellow-brown, like the pages of some aged and dangerous manuscript.

They were the eyes of a necromancer, a high priest of the Black Arts. They were the eyes of the Satanist dubbed by the Press "The Wickedest Man in the World". They were the eyes of the self-styled Beast of the Apocalypse, the Demon Who Bears the Name 666, who in the 13th chapter of Revelation "came out of the sea, having ten horns and seven heads, and on his horns ten diadems, and upon his heads names of blashemies......And he opened his mouth for blashemies against God." They were the eyes of Aleister Crowley, poet, prophet, degenerate, drug-addict, sex-maniac and mystic.

At 60, Aleister Crowley, the Beast 666, Frater Perdurabo, Prince Chioa Khan, the Master Therion and Prophet Baphomet, had drained the cup of evil to the dregs. "I have exposed myself to delight in dirty and disgusting debauches, and to devour human excrement and flesh."

Demoniacal

This was the demonical figure who stood before Mr. Justice Swift in the High Court in London on April 14, 1934, awaiting the verdict of the jury. And yet Aleister Crowley was not on trial. After a lifetime of deprivity, he was claiming damages for libel. For once, the Devil had failed to look after his own. Crowley was short of money, and a defamatory reference to his putrid life in a recent book had seemed like a gift from Hell. That was not the only reason for the lawsuit, however; he had entered the courtroom hoping to vindicate his name, to strike a blow against mealy-mouthed convention, even to propagate his morally-bankrupt creed. "Do what thou wilt shallbe the whole of the Law" was the message Crowley had preached to a jury almost sick with disgust. They were about to deliver their unique verdict....

It was Crowley's mother--an almost repressively religious woman--who had given him the name of the Beast when she realized that she had spawned a monster. At the tender age of 1 he had dedicated himself to a life of evil which was later to embrace every excess, from sexual perversions to live sacrifces. His first victim was the family cat. He was eager to discover whether it had nine lives. "I administered a large dose of arsenic," he recalled in his Confessions.

"I chloroformed it, hanged it above the gas jet, stabbed it, cut its throat, smashed its skull and, when it had been pretty thoroughly burnt, drowned it and threw it out of the window that the fall might remove the ninth life. The operation was successful. I was genuinely sorry for the animal; I simply forced myself to carry out the experiment in the interest of pure science."His voracious appetite for women started when he was 14, when he seduced the kitchen-maid on his mother's bed while the family were at church. From then on, he enjoyed an endless succession of whores and mistresses. Women were fascinated by his animal vitality and hyptnotic eyes. A titled woman who stopped to look in a shop window in Piccadilly was overcome by the reflection of his eyes as he stood behind her. They had never met before, yet the woman immediately booked into a hotel with him for 10 days.

Crowley claimed to wear a scret aphrodisiac called "The Perfume of Immortality", which he rubbed into his scalp. It was made up of musk, ambergris and civet, and women found it irresistible, as did horses--theywhinnied after him in the street. Men, however, often remarked on his "sweet, slightly nauseous odour".

Any woman was fuel for Crowley's blazing lust. They should, he said, be "brought round to the back door like the milk". There was certainly danger and excitement when Crowley was around, but his women paid dearly for their thrills. He drove both his wives into lunatic asylums and abandoned every one of his mistresses to either the bottle, the hypodermic syringe or the streets.

Sex was the most powerful element in Crowley's form of Black Magic, which might explain why he failed his degree at Cambridge University. By then, he had become obsessed with the occult; he embraced one sect after another, starting with the "Heremetic Order of the Golden Dawn", in which he was re-named Frater Perdurabo. It was only one of a series of preposterous titles he adopted. For each one, he invented a bizzare costume and hairstyle, culminating in a "horn" of waxed hair, which made him look more like an overweight unicorn than the "Great God Pan'.