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    Early Writings of Aleister Crowley
    Early Writings of Aleister Crowley
    Early Writings of Aleister Crowley
    Ebook63 pages55 minutes

    Early Writings of Aleister Crowley

    By Aleister Crowley

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    Included in this volume are the series of articles Crowley penned for Vanity Fair during the Great War. Subject matter ranges from ‘On The Management of Blondes’ to Japanese verse, Polo and various other arcane matters. All delivered with the same non-PC, inimitable devil-may-care wit one expects from ‘The Wickedest Man Alive.’
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherEnhanced Media Publishing
    Release dateNov 5, 2016
    ISBN9781365509490
    Early Writings of Aleister Crowley
    Author

    Aleister Crowley

    Aleister Crowley (1875-1947) was an English poet, painter, occultist, magician, and mountaineer. Born into wealth, he rejected his family’s Christian beliefs and developed a passion for Western esotericism. At Trinity College, Cambridge, Crowley gained a reputation as a poet whose work appeared in such publications as The Granta and Cambridge Magazine. An avid mountaineer, he made the first unguided ascent of the Mönch in the Swiss Alps. Around this time, he first began identifying as bisexual and carried on relationships with prostitutes, which led to his contracting syphilis. In 1897, he briefly dated fellow student Herbert Charles Pollitt, whose unease with Crowley’s esotericism would lead to their breakup. The following year, Crowley joined the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, a secret occult society to which many of the era’s leading artists belonged, including Bram Stoker, W. B. Yeats, Arthur Machen, and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. Between 1900 and 1903, he traveled to Mexico, India, Japan, and Paris. In these formative years, Crowley studied Hinduism, wrote the poems that would form The Sword of Song (1904), attempted to climb K2, and became acquainted with such artists as Auguste Rodin and W. Somerset Maugham. A 1904 trip to Egypt inspired him to develop Thelema, a philosophical and religious group he would lead for the remainder of his life. He would claim that The Book of the Law (1909), his most important literary work and the central sacred text of Thelema, was delivered to him personally in Cairo by the entity Aiwass. During the First World War, Crowley allegedly worked as a double agent for the British intelligence services while pretending to support the pro-German movement in the United States. The last decades of his life were spent largely in exile due to persecution in the press and by the states of Britain and Italy for his bohemian lifestyle and open bisexuality.

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      Book preview

      Early Writings of Aleister Crowley - Aleister Crowley

      Early Writings of Aleister Crowley

      By

      Aleister Crowley

      Enhanced Media

      2016

      Early Writings of Aleister Crowley were first published in Vanity Fair magazine between June 1915 and July 1917. The articles are in the public domain.

      Enhanced Media Publishing

      Los Angeles, CA.

      First Printing: 2016.

      Bernard Shaw on Self-Effacement by Another Irishman (Aleister Crowley)

      Vanity Fair, June 1915, Vol. 4 No. 5.

      ––––––––

      SHAW’S telegram said that the interview would take place in a tavern, just off Piccadilly Circus. When I got there Shaw had the room entirely to himself.

      He was half concealed in a huge chair in front of the fireplace. His feet, spread wide apart, rested high up on the mantelshelf. His spine was dug deep into the seat of the chair.

      I edged quietly up to a nearby table and looked him over carefully. He was every inch a Brill Brothers production.

      Well, he said, I’m going to give you an interview without charging you royalties. In my time I’ve talked on every subject of interest to man or beast. Given the topic or opinion, I have always waited to hear what the world at large says about it; then I know I’m right. The world at large is always wrong. It’s the Irishman’s knack of always being against everything that keeps him right. Do you see? says he. I immolate myself, I efface myself in behalf of what the world does not believe. That’s bound to be the truth.

      That sounds to me, says I, like one of those newfangled plays where the program says that the last act begins twenty years before the previous act ends.

      Never mind them. My plays don’t, says he. I’m telling you. With the humility of a martyr one rushes for pen and ink. grabs off a column on the first page of the London Times telling the world what ails it. Then an ungrateful world answers back—whereupon it becomes necessary to tell the truth to the world again—and perhaps again—and so on until one has written enough to fill out an octavo volume at 50 per cent on the gross sales in England—100 per cent. in America.

      How’s the humility business been since the war started, says I.

      Bad; very bad, says Shaw, releasing his feet from the mantelshelf. It’s a cruel war—I’ve been shoved off the first page of every newspaper that has any kind of a decent circulation.

      No! says I.

      Yes! says he.

      I’M telling you, says he, I’ll never forgive the Kaiser so long as I live, though naturally I’m for him in this war—I have to be—everybody else is against him. But he has every right to expect I could make as big a noise as he—with no army to support me. To get any space at all now, I have to hustle around canonizing the Kaiser; but just as I have a masterly article finished and delivered, Winston Churchill begins talking—which is always a signal for a German submarine to torpedo a British dreadnought. War isn’t hell; it is getting space in the newspapers during war-time that’s hell.

      War for newspaper space is never really war, says I, until your copy gets pushed into the back pages among the advertisements. did you ever watch it go? Seen it sink way down among a lot of advertisements of things you never heard of. But when your bright thoughts get placed side by side with a white spaced advertisement that reads, ‘TAKEN BY A FRIEND,’ you’re gone.

      How do you mean, I’m gone, says he.

      You’re gone, says I, because getting on that page makes you out THE FRIEND. You’ll be billed for that space.

      Not me, says he; anyway, that isn’t the real peril, says he. "The chief danger is in not being answered. Silence isn’t golden—it’s the bankruptcy proceedings

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