They really don’t make freaks like they used to. The occult magician Aleister Crowley has to be the number one nutter par excellence. Born in 1875, Crowley was an English magician and occultist, who started his own religion called Thelema with his own brand of magick -yes that’s magic with a “k”-. Crowley was also an artist, mountaineer, heroin addict, excellent chess player, writer, poet, and leader of a sex cult – otherwise known as “the wickedest man in the world”. Aleister killed his first cat aged 11, and was linked throughout his life to rumours of infanticide and cannibalism. He caught gonnorhoea before he even got to university (not bad), though it was while studying English literature at Trinity College, Cambridge, that he started fantasizing about blood and torture, and being degraded by a ‘Scarlet Woman’. Crowley was openly bisexual, and would often brand his lovers with magic symbols on their chest.
In his book Revelations, Crowley describes how Leah Faesi, one of his models and subsequent lover, posed for one of his paintings. Having asked him to paint her as “a dead soul”, Crowley conducted a ceremony, where he uncovered Leah’s breast and with a Chinese dagger branded her with the Mark of the Beast – the cross within the circle. Thus was born the Ape of Thoth, which was the magical title Leah Faesi adopted, spending whole days stark naked so everyone could see the sign. Crowley was also pretty big on pederasty, which he liked to incorporate into his poetry. His performance art often involved a combination of chanting and dancing, with hallucinogenic drugs, incense and music. One such performance piece was the Rites of Eleusius, where he used the English poet and occultist Victor Neuberg to dance amid a background of incantation and incense. Crowley also liked to wear a talisman around his neck called Segelah, which was smeared with dried semen and menstrual blood. Nice. But enough about the man, I’ll let his poetry do the talking: “Stab your demoniac smile to my brain,/ Soak me in cognac, cunt and cocaine”.
