Nicholas Lezard

Aleister Crowley was even more beastly than we’d imagined

His magick and grandiose, self-awarded titles were a lot of nonsense, but his sexual adventures had a very dark side, Phil Baker reveals

If only he’d been merely ridiculous – Aleister Crowley in the early 1920s. [Getty Images] 
issue 20 August 2022

I have never had much time for Aleister Crowley. Magic(k) is nonsense; the mystical societies he founded were simply pretexts for him to take as many drugs and have as much sex as he could. And he was a second-rate writer at best. When the novelist Arthur Calder-Marshall said he had gone ‘from Great Beast to Great Bore’, I thought it a fair summing-up.

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