Aleister Crowley: The Beast in Berlin: Art, Sex, and Magick in the Weimar Republic by Tobias Churton

Author:Tobias Churton [Churton, Tobias]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Biography/Occult History
ISBN: 9781620552575
Publisher: Inner Traditions/Bear & Company
Published: 2014-06-16T00:00:00+00:00

THE ARTIST IN THE BEAST

Emily Bertha Crowley died in Eastbourne, England, on 14 April 1917 while her only son was far away at her half-brother William’s son’s citrus farm in Titusville, Florida. Crowley was back in New York when the news reached him, anticipated by a dream two days earlier that left him extremely distressed. He had never got close to his mother, but her actual death left him feeling helpless and lonely. So much of his attitude had conspired to goad her religious rectitude; what was the point now?

It was I think Emily’s death that initiated an unexpected development in the poet, for by the end of 1918 Aleister Crowley was painting with a will. We can but guess as to whether he had pondered his mother’s now vanished, sensual, artistic side, or whether he recalled a painting she had made of Lawrence and Birdie Bishop’s Florida farm on a visit long ago. Was it that, without thinking at all, Crowley took on the mantle of his unfulfilled mother’s unfulfilled talent and found in it, through his endurance of countless empty days and nights in America, a link to her and to his, seldom plummeted, deepest feelings? Crowley was a master of words, but there are some feelings words cannot express.

The earliest photograph of Crowley painting was taken at Decatur, Georgia. His idiosyncratic little tuft of hair, an erection on his shaven head, looks like an additional brush atop his bulky, muscular frame. His weary face encapsulates the spirit of solitude that was his.

In some respects it is surprising it took Crowley so long to pick up pallet, easel, and brush. He had been introduced to decadent artistic circles when, in 1897, he had become undergraduate lover to Trinity College Cambridge graduate Herbert Charles Pollitt (1871–1942), known as “Jerome,” a connoisseur, dancer, and actor for whom Pollitt’s close friend Aubrey Beardsley (1872–98) had designed a personalized book plate in 1895–96, while contributing his famed artwork for the Yellow Book magazine.

When Crowley published his own decadent poetry book White Stains (1898), he followed Beardsley’s example and employed the services of principal decadent publisher, Leonard Smithers (1861–1907). Smithers found an Amsterdam printer for Crowley’s outrageous verses.

In his last year at Cambridge (1898), Crowley became close friends with Gerald Festus Kelly (1879–1972), a young man who knew he wanted to paint. Crowley was impressed by Kelly’s artistic seriousness and through all his worldwide travels of 1900–1902 kept in touch as the younger man graduated from Cambridge and, inspired by James McNeill Whistler, went to Paris to become an artist—a career that in Crowley’s view ground to a halt in 1930 when Kelly accepted election as a Fellow of the Royal Academy, London, with all the respectability that position could muster, including being the British Royal Family’s favorite artist. Having become respectable, Kelly lost Crowley’s respect absolutely.

But it had not always been like that. In early November 1902, fresh in body but feverish in spirit after an audacious but failed attempt on K2 in the Karakorams, Crowley entered Montparnasse, Paris—the first time since 1899.

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