Do What I Wilt.

• Author: Doherty, Brian
• Position: Review

The individualist authoritarianism of Aleister Crowley

The British author, mountain climber, and mystic Aleister Crowley (1875-1947) is long dead. But his afterlife as a pop icon continues. Crowley is beloved by subcultures ranging from heavy metal devotees (Ozzy Osbourne wrote a song about him, Jimmy Page bought his old house) to magicians (Crowley designed a popular Tarot deck, and wrote some of the more enduring modern instructional and philosophical manuals on ritual magic, or "magick" in his pet spelling).

He was the inspiration for W. Somerset Maugham's 1906 novel The Magician and has appeared, either as himself or in a loosely fictionalized disguise, in works by writers ranging from Anthony Powell to Robert Anton Wilson. He is one of the select figures on the cover of that founding document of the Aquarian Age, the Beatles' Sgt. Peppers Lonely Hearts Club Band. More recently, he is the subject of the new biography, Do What Thou Wilt: A Life of Aleister Crowley (St. Martin's), by Lawrence Sutin.

Crowley was arguably the biggest star to arise from late Victorian England's fascination with the occult. His self-created reputation as the "wickedest man on Earth" guaranteed him inches of coverage in British newspapers and scandal sheets all through the first half of the 20th century. But his most enduring legacy is his oft-quoted statement of what Crowley called the Law of Thelema, Greek for will: "Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law/ Love is the law, love under will."

This credo is boldly libertarian, denying the authority of law to circumscribe individual freedom in any way. (To be sure, it lacks the usual proviso of "as long as you don't directly harm other people or their property.") Crowley thought that when the world finally heeded him, a new age would dawn, freed from the stifling, repressive bonds of ancient tyranny and Christian morality. While Crowley claimed his signature phrase was dictated to him via a disembodied entity called Aiwass, it can be traced back to both Rabelais (whose Abbey of Thelema in Gargantua and Pantagruel had a similar slogan) and St. Augustine (who wrote, "Love, and do what thou wilt").

How did this grandly liberatory notion play out politically for Crowley? Like many of his modernist contemporaries--T.S. Eliot Ezra Pound, and Wyndham Lewis, to name a few--Crowley melded a taste for breaking from tradition in the name of individual expression with an equally enthusiastic admiration for...