Despite a few quirks, Richard C McNeffenjoys a must-have for Crowley fiends
Aleister Crowley
The Beast in Britain
Gary Lachman & Michelle Merlin
Herb Lester Associates 2023
Folder & map, £12, ISBN 9781739897178
Aleister Crowley’s extravagantly nomadic life is a gift for mapmaker and psychogeographer alike. Continuing in the tradition of Phil Baker’s outstanding City of the Beast, which investigates Crowley’s London haunts and is cited as a reference, Gary Lachman provides an attractively produced and packaged map of Crowley’s Britain. Featuring such beastly watering holes as the Café Royal and the Fitzroy Tavern, the London section reveals the Streatham address where Crowley discovered masturbation and the square in Mayfair where he celebrated his last erection. A separate timeline lists 1941 as the dread year of dysfunction. Surprisingly, this gives Crowley’s death as 2 December 1947 when all other sources record his passing as the first of the month.
Lachman charts the Beast’s lairs from his Leamington Spa birthplace to the cemetery in Brighton where he was cremated. Illuminated by an accompanying commentary, the map features Boleskine House that haunts the shores of Loch Ness, Beachy Head, a favourite climbing spot, and Netherwood, the bohemian Hastings boarding house where Crowley spent his final years, now regrettably replaced by a close of new-build houses.
Other landmarks include Ashdown Forest where Crowley “is said to have performed rituals with Winston Churchill in order to fend off the Nazis”. This refers to the legendary Operation Mistletoe of 1940, with the Beast’s collaborator more usually identified as Ian Fleming wearing his Naval Intelligence hat, though as Lachman concedes: “Sadly, this remarkable act of patriotism remains uncorroborated.”
In writing of the Battle of Blythe Road, the Hammersmith temple of the Golden Dawn that a “masked and daggered” Crowley tried unsuccessfully to repossess in a magical duel with Yeats in 1900, Lachman writes: “Yeats – whom he considered a ‘quite unspeakable person’ – refused Crowley a desired initiation.”
Who is “unspeakable”?
Yeats? In fact, it was “weary Willie … that lank, dishevelled demonologist”, as Crowley called him, who described the Beast as “an unspeakable mad person”.
Nitpicking aside, there is a lot of appeal in this impressive project, making it a must-have for Crowley fiends. Now that Baker and Lachman have opened the geographical floodgates, a Crowley world atlas is clearly
