The Beast on the Bowery
- garylachman8
- 9 hours ago
- 12 min read
This is an excerpt from Touched By The Presence: From Blondie's Bowery and Rock and Roll to Magic and the Occult, released in November in the US and January in the UK, in which I first learn of Aleister Crowley while living with Debbie Harry and Chris Stein in the Blondie loft on the Bowery.
A hippie girl I had a crush on introduced me to Hesse, and a progressive high school teacher led me to Nietzsche. The individual responsible for opening my way to magic was a flamboyant gay biker artist with a dangerous fancy for the Hell’s Angels and a serious interest in the notorious Aleister Crowley. His name was Benton and I met him when we moved into the loft. He had the lease on the building – in so far as there was such a thing – and lived on the second floor. We were renting the first – the shops took up the ground floor – and for a time the top floor was vacant. After a while the fashion designer Stephen Sprouse took that space. What I remember most about him is a fondness for psychedelic drugs.
Chris had a kitschy interest in the occult which Debbie shared. In the Thompson Street flat, pentagrams, voodoo dolls, vampire fangs, black candles and other magical bric-a-brac competed for wall space with photographs of the Ramones, the Dolls and other rock iconography. This décor would soon be repeated in the loft. Among other things, it would sport a statue of a nun with an upside down cross on her forehead, a series of Tibetan tankas, one of which depicted a dead Buddhist monk being eaten by his fellows, and a fireplace decorated with assorted magical insignia. It was all fun, one of Chris’ eccentricities, like his penchant for Nazi memorabilia – odd for a Jew – and Japanese Godzilla toys, rather like my love of Weird Tales and old horror films.
But Benton was much more serious about magic. He gave impromptu readings of Crowley’s then still rare Thoth Tarot deck, and based some paintings on some of the trumps; I even sat for one of these. He had read Lovecraft and was a Conan fan. He had read Jung and Nietzsche; at one point he gave me a copy of Walter Kaufmann’s translation of The Birth of Tragedy Out of the Spirit of Music, with a drawing of fist bursting through crossed thunderbolts he had made on the title page. We’d smoke grass and he would read from Crowley’s Diary of a Drug Fiend. He even introduced me to someone who claimed to be Crowley’s son; whether he really was or not I never learned. Sitting in Benton’s room, listening to music, we would talk about Crowley’s ideas, about magic and art and how they were part of the same work of getting in touch with your ‘true will’, which was what magic was all about. This sounded close enough to the efforts to get in touch with my ‘true self’ I had been making since I read Demian for me to pay attention.
Benton was gay. I had made it clear early on that I wasn’t, and he never pressed the point. But like Debbie and Chris he was older and if they were like surrogate parents, I guess he could be seen as a surrogate uncle. Like Chris, he too was a Capricorn – they both had birthdays around mine - which may explain why we got along. He was a true individual. Thin as a rail, leather-jacketed, tall, with long blonde hair like a lion’s mane, a smoky Southern voice that suggested the actress Lauren Bacall and an unmistakable laugh, his maxim for life, “learn to love it,” has proved helpful more than once.[*]
Benton had learned to love much, a great deal of it aspects of life that most of us would understandably avoid. His penchant for the Hell’s Angels led him to submit to their rigorous and malodourous initiation rituals. He and a boyfriend would go unwashed for days, and then take to wearing clothes that they had pissed on. (As mentioned, urine and its odour were a central fact of the place. Not only did Debbie’s cats make their contribution, for a while, Benton himself collected his in Coke bottles.) His passion unfortunately led to him introducing himself to the Hell’s Angels who occupied nearby East Third Street, where their motorcycles lined the block. I’m not sure what he said to them, but he returned from the meeting severely beaten and bruised. That may in fact have been what he was after. If so, they obliged. He passed away a few years ago. I had not seen him for a long time and was saddened when I heard the news.
The mid-1970s were a good time to become interested in the occult, especially if you were in New York. The ‘occult revival of the 1960s’, the subject of my first book, had led to a boom in occult publishing that would continue throughout that decade and into the next. Eventually the occult would establish itself, along with ‘mind body and spirit’, as a bankable genre and ‘diversify’ into related areas, such as the spiritual and magical gear – crystals, incense, herbs, oils, etc. – that a decade or so later I would be selling at the Bodhi Tree, while earning a degree in philosophy.
By then I would be fairly well versed in the western occult tradition and have a working familiarity with much of the eastern tradition. But in the summer of 1975, as a 19 year old college dropout wannabe poet turned proto-punk rocker, it was all a fascinating and seductive terra incognita that I was anxious to learn everything about. In bookshops like Weiser’s on Broadway near Cooper-Union, the largest occult bookshop in town, I could do just that. Along with the Strand and Barnes and Noble, it became a frequent haunt of mine. Weiser’s published occult titles, too, and in second hand shops I began to look for their trademark Egyptian ankh on book spines as I had for Ace Books’ “Science Fiction Classic” tag or Lancer’s purple edged pages.
But the occult had become so popular, that most bookshops had fairly well sized sections on everything from flying saucers to witchcraft, and well stocked “cut out” bins. Publishers had brought out cheap editions of classic works that were out of copyright, so even with the little money I was earning from our shows, I could afford to buy copies of A. E. Waite’s Book of Black Magic and Pacts, or MacGregor Mathers translation of The Sacred Magic of Abramelin the Mage, or Sax Rohmer’s – whose Fu Manchu pulp novels I had enjoyed – The Romance of Sorcery, all put out by Causeway Books. Causeway’s head, Felix Morrow, had already established a reputation in the field with University Books, with whose titles – R. M. Bucke’s Cosmic Consciousness, Lewis Spence’s Encyclopaedia of Occultism, Montague Summer’s works on witchcraft and satanism, and many others - I would soon become acquainted. There seemed a whole vast reservoir of hidden, lost, and forgotten knowledge opening up before me, and I was ready to plunge in headfirst. But I wouldn’t have learned of any of this, or be willing to take that leap, if it wasn’t for that first introduction to Crowley.
It shouldn’t be surprising that I came upon Crowley while playing in a rock band. Almost a decade earlier, the most famous people in the world had put him on the cover of their most famous album. This, of course, was the Beatles, who put Crowley – along with C. G. Jung and Aldous Huxley– among “the people we like” on the cover of Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts’ Club Band. I knew the album – I had listened to it religiously at one point – but until moving to the Bowery, didn’t know a thing about Crowley. I soon began to find out.
After listening to Benton read from it a few times, I found a copy Diary of a Drug Fiend, Crowley’s idealised portrait of his ‘abbey of Thelema’ in Sicily, read it and enjoyed it. The fact that it was about drugs was enough to make it interesting, but his romanticised picture of his abbey where one could discover one’s true will was for my late-teen mind exciting. Later I learned that Crowley’s abbey was as squalid as some of the places I had lived in. But then, the idea of finding my true will against a backdrop of green hills and sea, with an assortment of drugs available for the taking, seemed appealing. The two lovers who, hooked on drugs, are cured by finding their true will at the Abbey – ironically, Crowley wrote the book while under the influence of cocaine - suggested that the pursuit of magic could lead to a happy ending. It didn’t for Crowley or for many of the people who knew him, but again, this was something I would learn only later.
Diary of a Drug Fiend is not a good novel, but it is a good read. The next work of Crowley’s that came my way was something different. Crowley considered Magick in Theory and Practice, privately published for subscribers in Paris in 1929, his magnum opus. It may be, but it is not as immediately accessible as an earlier work on magick, Book Four (1912), which, along with his later Eight Lectures on Yoga (1938) is one of the clearest and most concise things Crowley ever wrote. (I should point out that Crowley used the archaic spelling of ‘magick’ with a k to differentiate the royal art from common prestidigitation.)
Crowley could be as clear and direct as his older contemporary Bernard Shaw, and often as funny. But he could also be verbose – especially when writing under the influence of any number of drugs – and his lack of a critical sense when it came to his own writing, allowed him to indulge himself in ways a good editor would have deleted immediately. This can most easily be seen in his poetry. Crowley was always too aware of himself to be a good poet, but it is also evident in his prose. One of Crowley’s worst traits is a taste for mystification and riddles, which is exacerbated by his unfounded belief that his readers are completely familiar with all of his work.
This was my experience when the 1960 Castle Books reprint of the original 1929 Paris edition of Magick and Theory and Practice came into my hands. How it got there, I don’t remember. What I do remember is a feeling that could be described as one part ‘strange excitement’ and one part ‘utter bafflement.’ The “Hymn to Pan” that opens the book is one of the few times when Crowley’s poetry rises above its usual highly derivative level; think Swinburne and you have the gist of most of Crowley’s verse, both in form and subject matter. It is powerfully evocative – his taste for alliteration serves him well for a change – and it contains some memorable lines (“With hoofs of steel I race on the rocks/From solstice stubborn to equinox”) It is a truly incantatory work.
And I have to admit that the drawings, based on photographs, of a robed magician adopting various Egyptian “god forms,” ranging from that of Set, symbolizing Earth, to the risen Osiris- whom Set had slain but who was resurrected by Isis – reminded me of nothing so much as a caped figure from the comic books I had read. If Crowley is still aware of events on this plane – he died in 1947 – the fact that my innocent eye when first looking at these images thought of superheroes may gratify him, for he certainly thought of himself as a superman, although his reputation may suggest that he was more of a supervillain.
Then there was the stentorian announcement that “This book is for ALL”, followed by the equally bold declaration that “MAGICK is for ALL”. A mention of the Beast 666 – Crowley identified with that Biblical character – brought P’s obsessions back to mind, but it was clear that Crowley was not born-again, at least not in the Christian sense, although, as I later found out, he was brought up in a radically Christian fundamentalist family. But it was his definition of “magick” that grabbed me most of all. “Magick,” Crowley wrote, “is the Science and Art of causing Change to occur in conformity with Will.”
I had read quite a bit about the will in Nietzsche. I had read the collection of notes left behind after his death, The Will to Power, in the Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale translation and knew that the will was an important theme in Zarathustra and in Nietzsche’s notion of the ‘overman’. For Crowley to link it to magick and the idea that the will itself, if set in motion properly, can effect change in the world, was stunning and exciting. It suggested that I – and everyone else – may possess powers of which we are normally not aware, but which the practice of magick may waken. Again, the idea of the magician and the superman were not so far apart.
I read through the rest of the twenty-eight postulates about magick that Crowley presents in the introduction. In many ways Crowley had a mathematical mind and he liked to present his theses logically, step by step. He was a chess master, and as I say in my book about him, he would have made a much better scientist than he did a poet.[†] His argument was convincing and if I later became critical of the Beast, it was of his sociopathic personality and adolescent philosophy, not of his belief that we harbour within us abilities that lay dormant simply because we are unaware that we possess them, and so never make the effort to awaken them. This, in fact, became the central belief around which my occult studies, then just beginning, would revolve.
It was not far removed from Nietzsche’s notion of a new type of human, one strong enough to say “Yes!” to life, even in its most doubtful forms. And one passage at the end of the introduction seemed to echo what I had already heard from Hesse, Sartre, and Nietzsche – although, to be sure, the magical universe I was just entering was rather different from the absurd, meaningless one of the existentialists. Crowley summed up the core of his magick and of his religion of “Do what thou wilt,” which I would get to know better fairly soon, in a simple challenge. “One must find out for oneself, and make sure beyond doubt, who one is, what one is, why one is.” If this is done, all else will follow, for, as Crowley optimistically puts it, “A man who is doing his True Will has the inertia of the Universe to assist him.”
What young artist, first making his way into the world, convinced of his powers and eager to use them, would not find such a notion appealing? But when I turned to the rest of the book, to discover how I might go about getting the inertia of the Universe on my side, I met some obstructions. There were, to start, all the references to The Book of the Law, the founding text of Crowley’s religion, as well as to a number of other works of Crowley’s. I was of course ignorant of these and had no idea what they meant. Then there was a plunge headfirst into Qabalah, which I knew nothing about; even the spelling struck me as odd: shouldn’t there be a u after the Q? Later chapters, on ritual, the different ‘formulas’, such as that of the ‘Tetragrammaton’, which I later learned is Greek for “four letter word”, the word in question being the unpronounceable name of God, and those of the gods Isis, Apophis, and Osiris, of the Lady Babalon and the Beast (again!) and Black Magic, simply left me scratching my head and wondering what trap door I had inadvertently fallen through.
A great deal was in Latin and Greek and the numerology involved was numbing, my experience with math no help at all. I was heartened a bit when I reached the “Curriculum of the A. A.”; not Alcoholics Anonymous, but Crowley’s magical society, the Argenteum Astrum, or Silver Star, which I would soon learn more about. In the course on “General Reading” I found some things I had read, like the Upanishads, Tao Te Ching, and Dhammapada; my class in Eastern Religion coming in handy after all. But there was much there I didn’t know, especially all the references to Crowley’s other works. Magick may be for All, but I soon realised that if I was going to learn anything about it, it would take some work.
[*] [*] It helped when he, Clem and I were arrested for smoking marijuana in public by an off-duty policeman, who knocked me unconscious in the process. We wound up spending three nights in three different New York jails, among them The Tombs, in downtown. We were eventually released without charge; the officer had failed to produce his badge and identify himself.
[†] Gary Lachman Aleister Crowley: Magick, Rock and Roll, and the Wickedest Man in the World (New York: Tarcher/Penguin 2014)
Touched by the Presence is available for pre-order at Barnes and Noble, Books a Million, Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk and anywhere else you buy books.