Dear Brenda-

here's a few bits from a earlier piece I did which should

give some idea of the threads in Crowley's life - he is the
very opposite of an anti-puritan censor. Before writing it
for you, I want to know you think it might have
possibilities -Aleister Crowley (1875-1947) is this
centuries greatest magical adept and one of the most
profound and sustaining influences on the current
magical renaissance. He was a sexual prophet,
pornographer decadent and libertine, who taught that the
mysteries of sexuality were central to humanity's spiritual
development. His blatant bisexuality and extreme radical
lifestyle earned him a black reputation with the legal and
cultural establishment of his day. It is only almost fifty
years after his death that his name is recorded in the
Dictionary of National Bibliography (Missing Persons,
Oxford University Press 1992) and in the Oxford
Dictionary of Quotations, which still calls which whilst
labelling him as a diabolist, records his one precept : Do
what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law.

Perhaps it was the reek of sulphur that prevented the

authorities from clamping down hard on his unorthodox
sexual adventures and he was lucky to escape the fate
that destroyed his contemporary Oscar Wilde.

Arguable the most important and creative love in

Crowley's life was Victor Neuburg, the English poet and
impresario who discovered Dylan Thomas amongst other
new poets of his day. Crowley walked into Neuburg's
rooms at Trinity College, Cambridge. Crowley explained
his call by saying he had read some of Neuburg's poems
in the Agnostic Journal, and realized that Neuburg had
some knowledge of magical states of consciousness.
Crowley proposed that Neuburg should be his brother-
disciple, which Neuburg accepted. Crowley was thirty-one
years old and rather handsome. He was a practicing bi-
sexual and the two men became lovers as well as
brothers. Crowley was Neuburg's first lover of either sex,
and their affair was very passionate. Neuburg's Triumph
of Pan, goes some way to give the flavour of their
 2

relationship; it abounds in Homo-eroticism of a kind that

has been compared to Verlaine.
For instance in 'The Romance of Olivia Vane' the lines:

Sweet wizard, in whose footsteps I have trod

Unto the shrine of the most obscene god, and
Let me once more feel thy strong hand to be
Making the magic signs upon me! Stand,
Stand in the light, and let mine eyes drink in
The glorious vision of the death of sin!(1)

Crowley's reply is to be found in his awe-inspiring Hymn

To Pan, regarded by Crowley as the most powerful
enchantment ever written. It was first published in The
Equinox volume one number four on 21st March 1919, a
few months after the break-up of Crowley's relationship
with Neuburg. However, it was actually written in the
summer of 1913, when Crowley was in Moscow. It was the
climax of the Rites of Eleusis and acted as a preface to
the original edition of Magick, a fact clouded by the RKP
edition which kicks off with an poem about Crowley's
austere and often wrongheaded brand of yoga. Timothy
D'Arch Smith has demonstrated beyond doubt that the
way Crowley published his books was significant even
down to details of paper stock and colour(2). We are
meant then to take the Hymn to Pan as a paradigm of
Magick.

My feeling is that many magicians would rather not face

up to fact that some of the most influential magical work
of the twentieth century was actually homosexual sex-
Magick. I include in this Crowley himself, whose cruelty
and spitefulness towards Victor Neuburg, seems inspired
at least in part by his own residual guilt. But in the end,
long after Neuburg had given Crowley his marching
orders, Crowley seems to have come to some realization
as to what he had thrown away. In 1927, years after the
expulsion from Cefalu, and the viscous press campaign
against Crowley, and widespread blacklisting of both
1
 This book too has been recently reprinted by Skoob2, 
London, UK. 
2
 Timothy D'Arch Smith, Books of the Beast, 2nd Edition 
(Mandrake 1990) 

2
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writers, he appeared at Victor Neuburg's Sussex home,

and banging his stick on the ground shouted 'I want
Victor'.

In November 1909 Victor Neuburg and Crowley went on

holiday in Algeria, walking into the desert from Alba. They
took with them a copy of Calls for the Thirty Aethyrs, the
famous Enochian text of John Dee, with the intention of
making the calls in the desert. Israel Regardie in his
introduction to the magical record of this time, published
as The Vision And The Voice(3), implies that Crowley had
this manuscript with him purely by accident. It seems
more likely that Crowley had deliberately brought his
Enochian notebook for the purpose of repeating his
earlier experiment. Neuburg and Crowley were picking up
the thread of those two Elizabethan magi Kelly and Dee; I
wonder how many other magicians would have the
courage to have done so. It could be said that it was at
this moment that Crowley and Neuburg rediscovered
sexual Magick, albeit in this Homo-erotic guise. They
climbed mount Dal'leh Addin in order to call the 14th
Aethyr. On their descent Crowley received an instruction
to return to the summit and make a circle of small stones,
tracing words of power in the sand. In the centre they
built an altar and placing themselves "in the sight of the
sun" Neuburg made love to Crowley. This was a public
sacrifice to the God Pan. The footnote to this passage of
the magical record of these events, says this was by the
XI degree OTO. Regardie, who wrote this footnote is very
coy about it, saying that Crowley 'constantly sought to
glorify and excuse [it] at the same time. Nonetheless, it
must be reiterated that Crowley's concept of a fully
attained adept was that he was epicene.'(4) Bisexual
would be a better term than 'epicene', the implication
being that the magician pursues the goal of androgyny or
fusion of the sex within. It would be wrong to suppose
that Crowley was a bisexual because he viewed it as a
way of achieving an androgynous state, after all he and
Neuburg, and other male lovers had been happily
screwing long before the spiritual possibilities dawned on
3
 Aleister Crowley, The Vision And The Voice, (Sangreal 
1972),
4
 p134fn.

3
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him. However this was a secret side of himself, the

'decadent', sensualist one.

The public sacrifice of himself to Pan in the full Light of

the sun, marks a turning point. It was in fact regarded by
Crowley as an initiation into the grade 8=3 (5) Magister
Templi, in which one has to resolve the dualistic conflict of
the spiritual and the physical. From then on an abyss had
been crossed between the personal and the spiritual. The
alienation of the sexual from the spiritual disappears.
That old antagonism of Golden Dawn type Magick for the
sensual, is ditched along with Temperance. Soon after this
Crowley performed a public act of masturbation in front of
his London followers. Those ignorant of the esoteric side
of Crowley's nature have wrongly interpreted this act as
pure exhibitionism. This ideal of unifying the spiritual with
the sexual is one with a long and noble history. It lies at
the heart of Hindu Tantra and also forms the basis of
modern psychotherapy, especially that of Wilhelm Reich.
Of course this is a process easier said than done. Most of
us have to work very hard, as indeed did Crowley to
decondition ourselves. To sum up: one possible
interpretation of the magical ordeal of crossing the abyss
and assuming the grade 8=3 is the reconciliation sex and
spirit. The command 'to interpret all events as dealings of
the gods with the soul' makes sense in terms of viewing
one's sexuality as divine. The genitals are to be viewed as
emblems of the gods themselves, to be venerated in the
same way Hindu tantriks worship the phallus or cunt of
their gods. +++

31 Aug 1993

 Its worth reflecting on the numerological signifance of 
5

8=3. Eight the number of Binah = Babalon, Hekate 
counterpart to the (P)androgynous 3 = Pan. 8+3 = 11, the 
number of magick and of the operaton that brings both 
numbers together.