Aleister Crowley And The British Invasion Part Two

So we left off, on part one of this post, with me tripping out in my apartment in Baltimore, while I was in music school. In a completely random act, I had reached over to my roommate’s bookshelf and grabbed the little book with the red cover, called the Book Of The Law.

This book had been dictated to Mr. Crowley by a higher dimensional being that was his ‘Higher Self.’ His Higher Self was using his lady, his Scarlet Woman to speak through. (Quite the via, if you think about it.)

In the broadest of brushstrokes, the book tells about the coming of a new aeon as well as giving a very optimistic account of the potential state of man that could be reached.

I read all this that night, in my state at the time, and understood most of it. In short, this was one of the transformational points in my lifetime.

Allow me to explain; by the age of sixteen or so, I had turned my back on conventional religion. My small circle of friends and I, at that time, half jokingly and half seriously established a cult of Bacchus and we mocked and attacked mainstream religion whenever that opportunity presented itself.

Flash-forwards to Peabody and Baltimore and so many new experiences presented questions for which there seemed to be no answers.

I embraced the Masonic teachings and the Cabbala as they filled that void. I read the writings of Crowley and his peers and I saw this influence on the pop music of the sixties.

I still hadn’t put the connection completely together, although that certainly did look an awful lot like Crowley on the cover of Sargent Pepper’s. What would Crowley be doing on the cover of Sgt. Pepper’s?

I also began to think that surely, given the ideas about mankind’s true and ultimate nature, other people in the past must have had these realizations as well.

Well, this brings us to the exposé known as The Magic Flute by Mozart and as this is a topic that deserves its own blog post, we are going to leave it here for now.

Aleister Crowley And The British Invasion

Aleister Crowley was an author, mystic and ‘drug cultist’ in the early part of the nineteen hundreds. He lived decidedly outside the mores of society and his lifestyle choices were occasionally a source of infamy among those who knew him. For example, his personal secretary later wrote that Crowley regularly consumed enough heroin to kill a room full of men, yet he lived into his eighties.

 There are probably as many opinions about the man as there are people who knew him or know of him.

Opinions aside, it is my opinion that Crowley was the culmination of a great conflict that went on within the masonic lodge, probably since the days of ancient Egypt. The crux of this conflict was, should the inner teachings of the masonic lodge remain a secret and only know to a few or should they be shared with the world at large.

Crowley was on the side of sharing them and he disseminated these teachings within the masonic order, which he founded. Later his secretary published the inner teachings, thus bringing an end to this conflict, although those who wish to suppress it are probably still around.

Crowley had disciples and followers, more so perhaps, after his death. Just how far did his influence extend?

Let us take up the following story about the band Led Zeppelin, who took up residence in Crowley’s Bolskine House. The ‘Vintage News’has a rather interesting article about Page trying to get the other band members do perform the same Magickal ritual that Crowley had and claims that this resulted in a curse for Page.

The ritual in question was the central ritual for the masonic order, which had as its purpose, the invocation of the ‘Higher Self,’ a ritual that takes much study and preparation, including a forty-day long fast.

Supposedly Crowley himself gave up on it half way through but it still worked. Crowley’s ‘Higher Self’ dictated a book to him through the medium of his ‘Scarlet Woman.’ The book is called the Book Of The Law.

Then we come to the cover of The Beatle’s Sargent Pepper’s album, where Crowley appears second from the left in the back row and we also find, in the song ‘A Day In The Life Of A Fool,’ the line ‘having read the book.’

Long after all of this but way before I knew about any of it, I was tripping in the living room of my apartment in Baltimore, where I was attending a classical music conservatory. I idly and purely on a whim, reached over a grabbed The Book Of The Law off of my roommate’s bookshelf, not having the slightest idea what it was.

I began to read it. This was one the most surprising things that ever happened in my life because I understood most of it.

I was yet to realize that I had made the connection between this book and the pop music of the sixties.