Aleister Crowley - Biography
Okay, if we’re going to generalize, we can say the sound of rock ‘n’ roll probably originates in the looming shadow of Will Dockery’s plantation, Dockery Farms, alongside the Sunflower River, in an isolated corner of the Mississippi Delta. I mean, who knows for sure, but Jimmy Page would probably go along with that. But there’s more to rock ‘n’ roll than a sound. There are requisite intangibles. Rock ‘n’ roll is Mick Jagger, prancing and strutting in the cape as Omega Man, taunting you, daring you to guess his name. It’s Page with strung-out showman’s flair, stabbing at the Gibson double-neck with a violin bow, grinding out the chords to “Kashmir” and “Stairway to Heaven.” It’s Diamond Dave with his elaborate series of secret gestures and mid-song hand signals that allowed his roadies to fish barely-legal girls out of the audience and deposit them in the backstage dressing room to await the post-concert bacchanal. It’s Marilyn Manson, making Dave’s backstage antics seem like a church social. It’s Jeff Beck’s favorite party trick. (It’s too raunchy to describe; let’s just say, he was very… flexible.) It’s Slayer, hailing Satan and scaring your parents within an inch of their lives. It’s Lou Reed, glowering from the stage as some sort of methamphetamine-crazed Gestapo vampire. It’s Maryanne Faithful and the white rug and the chocolate bar. It’s cocaine. Lots and lots of cocaine. Rock ‘n’ roll is bad attitudes, and sexual deviancy, drug abuse, booze, fame – as much as can possibly be had – and theatrics, and more sex, and more drugs, and more shock value, and more, more, more, more, more. So if we’re going to postulate that rock ‘n’ roll got its sound beneath the malevolent gaze and oblivious ears of Old Man Dockery, we might as well agree that it got its stance from the original bad-boy celebrity, Aleister Crowley. “Do What Thou Wilt Shall Be the Whole of the Law.” That was Crowley’s motto, and what rock ‘n’ roll degenerate doesn’t subscribe to that?
Crowley was a world-class celebrity in his day, and he had a keen ability to self-promote to rival that of any Hollywood star or NBA player. He was born in 1875, to wealth; by the time he was at university, he had developed considerable skills as a mountaineer, a flair for writing poetry, a taste for prostitutes, and a distaste for Christianity. He also enjoyed being buggered. After a homosexual encounter triggered a mystical experience, he plunged deep into studies on the occult and developed an acute interest in alchemy. He also joined a secret society, Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, in which he practiced tarot divination, astral travel, and the practice of magick. He traveled around the world, conducting esoteric investigations, practicing yoga, et cetera. He was the first European to attempt to reach the summit of K2 in China/Pakistan. While in Egypt, the ancient Egyptian god Horus communicated with him; Crowley transcribed the voice in his head for three days. The result was The Book of the Law, which would become the sacred text for Crowley’s own occult religion, Thelema. He also used another secret society as a conduit for initiates, the Ordo Templi Orientis.
So, to make a long story short, there are more books, and ritual invocations, and secret ceremonies, and chaos magick, and Gnostic masses, and personal demons, and sex magick, and sex rituals, and mystical cosmologies, and more sex magick, and the term that some people toss around is “devil worship,” and through it all, Crowley is a consummate showman, and he becomes notorious and is denounced in the media as the “wickedest man in world,” and Crowley writes at length about his use of “laudanum, opium, cocaine, hashish, marijuana, alcohol, ether, mescaline, morphine, and heroin.” Of course, the Beatles put him on the cover of Sgt. Pepper’s and Jimmy Page from Led Zeppelin becomes obsessed with Crowley, to the point where he buys Crowley’s former estate, and Ozzy Osbourne writes a song called “Mister Crowley,” and it eventually becomes de rigueur for heavy metal acts to name-check him, and over six decades after his death, his name is still enough to stir up a minor panic. The song remains the same. Jimmy Page would probably go along with that, too.