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The perfumed cesspit
Crowley’s ‘dear vile London’ was peopled with a bohemian demi-monde of artists, writers, courtesans, catamites, actresses, ragged ragtime girls, acolytes, wizards, swamis and more, says Nina Antonia
City of the Beast
The London of Aleister Crowley
Phil Baker
Strange Attractor Press 2022
Pb, 280pp, £21, ISBN 9781913689322
Like a literary showman, author Phil Baker pulls back a heavy scarlet curtain embroidered with occult symbols to present the London of Aleister Crowley’s decadent æon. For Crowley, a man of privilege with a handsome inheritance, the city was a playground of delight, vice, mystery and Magick, peopled with a bohemian demi-monde; artists, writers, courtesans, catamites, actresses, ragged ragtime girls, acolytes, wizards, swamis, army men gone astray and society hostesses.
Secondhand book shops teemed with affordable antiquarian treasures whilst opium, cocaine and magical elixirs to order could be purchased at Crowley’s most frequented pharmacy, Lowe’s: “My favourite rendezvous was a little chemist’s shop in Stafford Street managed by a man named EP Whineray, one of the most remarkable and fascinating men that I have ever met. He knew all the secrets of London.”
Crowley’s character develops as we follow his adventures as a bon-viveur and black magician who craved infamy and found it. His legacy includes not entirely flattering pen-portraits in the novels of Somerset Maugham (The Magician) and Antony Powell (A Dance to the Music of Time). Dispensing with the usual hagiography that has since sprung up around “The Beast 666”, Powell described Crowley as a “sinister if gifted buffoon”.
The son of fervent Plymouth Brethren, Crowley’s self-created belief system which he called Magick was reactionary: if Jesus said turn the other cheek, The Beast suggests that both cheeks be slapped. Though Crowley was a serious student of the black arts, his manifesto The Book of the Law could only have been written by a person of wealth with deeply conservative roots, hence he simply turns Christianity on its head: “Stamp down the wretched and the weak, this is the law of the strong.” He was an educated upper class male in the late Victorian era; life was his for the taking and he grabbed it with both pudgy hands. Needless to say, The Beast could wolf down the hottest curries without breaking into a sweat; such are the perks of being a Black Magician. Though I dislike Crowley as a person, is hugely entertaining and meticulously researched, pleasing to both the beginner in Crowleyanity and those more familiar with “The King of Depravity” as one tabloid was to label him.
