Raising Hell: A Concise History of the Black Arts and Those Who Dared to Practice Them by Robert Masello

Raising Hell: A Concise History of the Black Arts and Those Who Dared to Practice Them by Robert Masello

Author:Robert Masello [Masello, Robert]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Open Road Media
Published: 2014-06-30T23:00:00+00:00


THE GREAT BEAST

The Order of the Golden Dawn had no more celebrated convert—or, in the end, destructive renegade—than Aleister Crowley, the man who styled himself the Great Beast, after the fearsome, horned creature described as arising from the sea in the Bible’s book of Revelation.

To make matters even worse, Crowley claimed it was his mother who first gave him the nickname.

It’s not hard to see where she came by it.

Raised in a wealthy and pious family (after making a fortune in the ale business, his father had become a preacher for the Plymouth Brethren), Crowley turned against organized religion—and Christianity in particular—at an early age. And he did it with a vengeance. His father died in 1886, when Crowley was eleven, and this seems to have put the nail in the coffin of his faith, as it were. Young Aleister, who’d been subject to daily Bible readings at home, turned toward the dark figures of Christian lore, toward Satan, “the Scarlet Woman,” and the beast whose number is 666. And his unholy devotion never again wavered.

After a more traditional education at Trinity College, Cambridge, Crowley turned to the Order of the Golden Dawn for the information he really sought. In 1898, he formally joined up, and dubbed himself Perdurabo, a title that meant “I will endure to the end.” Over the course of his life, Crowley would take on many more names and aliases—Count Vladimir Svareff, Prince Chioa Khan, Lord Boleskin—and use each one until he became bored with it or until it no longer proved of use. What all these titles were designed to do was make him sound more impressive, moneyed, and mysterious than he actually was.

At first, his membership in the order went reasonably well. He professed to be bowled over by an ancient text that the leader of the order, MacGregor Mathers, claimed to have translated. Entitled The Book of the Sacred Magic of Abra-Melin the Mage, "as delivered by Abraham the Jew unto his son Lamech, A.D. 1458,” it impressed Crowley as a manual of magic unlike any of the others he’d already perused and, generally, scorned. Among other things it suggested that a long period of purification must be undergone, in a far-off and secluded place, before the Holy Guardian Angel could be summoned and seen. Crowley scoured the Lake District and Scotland, looking for just the right place, before alighting on Boleskin House, on the shores of Loch Ness.

There, he went about the elaborate rituals the book prescribed, but no matter how many times he tried to invoke the Guardian Angel, he was unsuccessful. By his own account, however, he did manage to conjure up a horde of demons. The entire house, Crowley complained, began to be haunted by strange, dark shapes, and his workroom, where he would spend hours writing down magical formulas, grew so dark, even in the middle of the sunniest day, that he had to keep the lights on around the clock. The groundskeeper lost his mind and tried to murder his own family.



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