Ritualist

A British newspaper called him the wickedest man in the world, and he was delighted, because he had spent twenty years arranging it. He was a professional occultist who founded his own religion, wrote its scripture, appointed himself its prophet, and built a body of ritual and doctrine so thoroughly documented that people are still practising it a century later. He was also, at various points, a serious mountaineer, a chess player of real strength, a competent poet, a heroin addict, and a man who ran through an inherited fortune large enough to have kept an ordinary gentleman for life. He was expelled from Italy by Mussolini's government. He was refused burial rites in England. He is on the cover of a Beatles album.

The work itself was disciplined and unromantic, which is the part that surprises people. He kept meticulous magical diaries — dates, times, conditions, results — because he insisted that occultism be conducted as an experimental science with a written record, and he trained himself in yoga and meditation with the same insistence on documentation. He ran a house on a Sicilian hillside as a religious commune, and it ended when a young follower died there of a fever and the press printed everything they could imagine about the rest. Before any of that he attempted the world's ninth-highest mountain in 1902 and then, in 1905, led an expedition on Kanchenjunga — the third-highest — where a mutiny and an avalanche killed several men, and Crowley, camped above them, declined to descend and help. He wrote about it afterwards without apology. He climbed higher than any European had at that point in the Himalaya.

He was made by his childhood, exactly. His father was a wealthy brewer turned preacher in a small, strict Christian sect; the household was governed by scripture read aloud daily and by the certainty that almost everything outside it was damnation. His father died when he was eleven. His mother, unable to manage him, called him the Beast of Revelation — actually called her own son that, as a rebuke. He took the name, kept it, and used it for the rest of his life. He inherited the brewery money at twenty-one and never worked again.

He died at a boarding house in Hastings in 1947, addicted, broke, and mostly forgotten, with perhaps a dozen people at the cremation. Within twenty years he had become a fixture of the counterculture and the founding figure of modern Western occultism, and every serious ritual magician since has had to deal with him one way or another.

Forget the scandal sheets and the wickedest man in the world. Remember only this: he wrote down everything he did, in order, with the date beside it, because he believed the record was the only thing that made an act real.