Aleister Crowley (1875-1947)
"We must conquer life by living it to the full,
and then we can go to meet death with a certain prestige."
On this day, December 1st, in the year of our late Lord 1947, the self-styled Great Beast and wickedest man in the world, Aleister Crowley, died, at a guest house in the seaside town of Hastings on the English south coast, of myocardial degeneration (aggravated by pleurisy and chronic bronchitis), aged 72.
One suspects that financial hardship and heroin addiction didn't much help matters, healthwise, either. But there you go: and besides, isn't it better to die poor but still chasing the dragon, than rich and with your feet up, hoping for a peaceful end after a quiet, uneventful life ...?
To be honest, Crowley's magickal writings don't particularly excite my interest. But I do admire his outrageous nonconformity and the fact that he subscribed to the view that it is better to be a spectacular failure in this life, than any kind of benign success; and better to be hated than loved.*
Crowley's funeral was held at a Brighton crematorium on the afternoon of Friday, December 5th. Around a dozen people attended, and various excerpts from his works, including The Book of the Law (1909) - the sacred text of Thelema - were read.
Naturally, the death of England's most notorious occultist generated press interest and some of the tabloids insisted on describing Crowley as a Satanist and his funeral service (somewhat absurdly) as a Black Mass.
His ashes were sent to his successor, the German occultist Karl Germer, new head of the OTO (Ordo Templi Orientis) in the United States, who buried them, rather quaintly, in his garden in Hampton, New Jersey.
And may he rest in Holy Chaos ...
* Note: Malcolm McLaren, born a year before Crowley died, would also subscribe to this philosophy of spectacular failure and often mentioned the latter in conversation. McLaren also possessed a silver ring with occult markings that had once been owned by the Great Beast, but threw it into the ocean one day having become convinced that it was bringing him bad luck (or at least that is what he told me when I asked him why he had stopped wearing it). Paul Gorman mentions this ring in his excellent biography, The Life and Times of Malcolm McLaren, (Constable, 2020), p. 416.
