Allow me to be frank at the commencement; my character, born on October 12, 1875, as Edward Alexander Crowley; later to be known as Aleister Crowley, the noted writer, yogi, but above all occultist—the most highlighted feature of his life—hence deemed “Practitioner of ‘black magick’ and blood sacrifice” by the New York Times, “Wickedest man in Britain” by the Daily Express, and through which he attained, according to the Sunday Express “The lowest depths that human depravity can reach,” is not a character to be instantaneously exalted without scrutiny and instances of appall.
Likely to be seen as a lunatic, drug addict, sexually depraved man, or a faggot by the end of this; or perhaps understood by others as a man who was unquestionably entrenched in the practice of free will, dedicated to the atypical, and a most detestable figure—in all auspicious implications of the word. One surely wonders as to how such a figure ends on a list commemorating those inspirational to the youth... but I digress.
Aleister Crowley while at Trinity College, Cambridge—a feat that alone should distinguish him as character—came to harrowingly denounce the Church of England, and by extension the family tradition of being involved in an exclusive faction of the Plymouth Brethren, a conservative Evangelical Christian sect. “If one would take the bible seriously one would go mad. But to take the bible seriously one must already be mad.” Later he would pursue a path of occult and mysticism; came later to conclusively see worldly pursuits as useless, published the the Thelema, and to partake in several other eccentric affairs I shan’t divulge in now.
What Crowley has taught me, and why I have chosen him for an assignment which according to many would exclude figures such as himself, is that abstract concept that there isn’t one exclusive line or path life goes by, and which one person follows. Just because two things aren’t compatible—his reputation and the conventional basis of this assignment, for example—doesn’t necessarily mean they have to be. And that one could in all instances shift roads and be one moment an individual, and the next moment follow interests perceived characteristically as pertaining to another, but which suit his current requisites.
Now naturally these shifts (or erasing the lines) to things often so unalike carry varying consequences in the minds of others perceiving your virulent following of a philosophy which makes personality and relation to others inessential and dispensable. But a character to undergo such an individualized trajectory of life should likely not care much for such response, and whose foremost judiciousness has likely already provided required adjustment until the succeeding metamorphosis.
So what I in fact adopt from Crowley is this insouciance, if not outright apathy towards the way life is expected to take, and that—no matter how many perceptions you unfurl, people you displease, or how many fists to the faces of those on tenterhooks you deliver—ones life is merely a toy in a big game where it matters no wit whether you do or commit to one thing, or turn around and proceed with the exact opposite; be it so regarding religion, morals, or anything else we’d presume untarnishable; to be in all senses a strict (if not brutal) realist; one which understands with what little knowledge the world is actually run, and someone who sees exploiting a particular situation is neither wrong or good, but just necessary. It may be perceived as mere egoism, but even this is subjective.
Crowly shows that the tinkering on fear one has in going against the current is lost by pushing with unremitting consistency towards the borders—if not depths—of “being,” and observing of the functions of the world we’re often too busy for and ignore. It’s in the clasping of these immaculate virgin understandings which we restrain ourselves in, and in defilement of these representations of a misunderstood and made-to-be-subjugating world that we truly gain borderless perceptions.
What you should adopt from Crowley—without making it seem like I’m somehow making this some pamphlet-esque work paying homage to teenage insubordination—is for one to seek to define oneself from the “common sphere,” which (quote Rorschach from Watchmen) “reads like an abattoir of retarded children”, and to in this case come into contact, if not recognition at least, of the starless tracts of being human, found at the rims of social tolerability.
"Out beyond the ideas of good-doing and wrong-doing there is a field. I will meet you there." —Jalal as-Din Rumi
— Pierluigi Mancinelli
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