The Writings of the Great Beast - Some Short Stories by Aleister Crowley (Fantasy and Horror Classics)

Aleister Crowley

• Publisher: Fantasy and Horror Classics
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781447405900
• eBook ISBN: 9781447480235

Enter the shadow world of the 20th century's most infamous occultist.

This chilling collection unveils the rare short fiction of Aleister Crowley (1875-1947), the self-proclaimed "Great Beast 666," whose life and work were devoted to exploring the darkest corners of human consciousness and forbidden knowledge.

Crowley's fiction is not merely horror; it is a dangerous literature of initiation, designed to unsettle, challenge, and lead the reader down the treacherous path of his magical philosophy, Thelema. The stories are steeped in authentic magical lore, esoteric philosophy, and a profound, often unsettling, understanding of human will.

This collection contains some of his most potent and evocative short works:

• An Experiment in Necromancy: A terrifying descent into the black art of raising the dead and the horrific price of forbidden power.

• The Black Lodge: An intense journey into the dark side of spiritual aspiration and the perilous tests that await the unwary initiate.

• At the Fork of the Roads: A fable of destiny, choice, and the moment a soul is irrevocably set upon a path of damnation or enlightenment.

• The Dream Cicean and The Initiation: Tales that blur the line between dreams and ritual, showing how the mind is both the temple and the proving ground for the mystical aspirant.

A profound and genuinely unsettling literary artifact, The Writings of the Great Beast offers a direct, unvarnished look into the terrifying realities--or delusions--of one of history's most controversial figures.

The Dream Circean

I

Perched at the junction of two of the steepest little streets in Montmartre shines the ‘Lapin Agile,’ a tiny window filled with gleaming bottles, thrilled through by the light behind, a little terrace with tables, chairs and shrubs, and two dark doors.

Roderic Mason came striding up the steepness of the Rue St. Vincent, his pipe gripped hard in his jaw; for the hill is too abrupt for lounging. On the terrace he stretched himself, twirled round half a dozen times like a dervish, pocketed his pipe, and went stooping through the open doorway.

Grand old Frédéric was there, in his vast corduroys and sou’wester hat, a ’cello in his hand.

His trim grey beard was a shade whiter than when Roderic had last patronized the ‘Lapin,’ five years before; but the kindly, gay, triumphant eyes were nowise dimmed by time. He knew Roderic at a glance, and gave his left hand carelessly, as if he had been gone but yesterday. Time ambles easily for the owner of such an eyrie, his life content with wine and song and simple happiness.

It is in such as Frédéric that the hope of the world lies. You could not bribe Frédéric with a motor-car to grind in an office and help to starve and enslave his fellows. The bloated, short-of-breath, bedizened magnates of commerce and finance are not life, but a disease. The monster hotel is not hospitality, but imprisonment. Civilization is a madness; and while there are men like Frédéric there is a hope that it will pass. Woe to the earth when Bumble and Rockefeller and their victims are the sole economic types of man!

Roderic sat down on his favourite bench against the wall, and took stock of things.

How well he remembered the immense Christ at the end of the room, a figure conceived by a giant of old time, one might have thought, and now covered with a dry, green lichenous rot, so that the limbs were swollen and distorted. It gave an incredibly strong impression of loathsome disease, entirely overpowering the intention of picturing inflicted pain.

Roderic, who, far from being a good man, was actually a Freethinker, thought it a grimly apt symbol of the religion of our day.

On His right stood a plaster Muse, with a lvre, the effect being decidedly improved by someone who had affixed a comic mask with a grinning mouth and a long pink nose; on His left a stone plaque of Lakshmi, the Hindu Venus, a really very fine piece of work, clean and dignified, in a way the one sanity in the room, except for an exquisite pencil sketch of a child, done with all the delicacy and strength of Whistler. The rest of the decoration was a delicious mixture of the grotesque and the obscene. Sketches, pastels, cuts, cartoons, oils, all the media of art, had been exhausted in a noble attempt to flagellate impurity—impurity of thought, line, colour, all we symbolize by womanhood.

Hence the grotesque obscenity in nowise suggested Jewry; but gave a wholesome reaction of life and youth against artificiality and money-lust.

As it chanced, there was nobody of importance in the ‘Lapin.’ Frédéric, with his hearty voice and his virile roll, more of a dance than a walk, easily dominated the company.

Yet there was at least one really remarkable figure in the pleasant gloom of the little cabaret.

A man sat there, timid, pathetic, one would say a man often rebuffed. He was nigh seventy years of age, maybe; he looked older. For him time had not moved at all, apparently; for he wore the dress of a beau of the Second Empire.

Exquisitely, too, he wore it. Sitting back in his dark corner, the figure would have gained had it been suddenly transplanted to the glare of a state ball and the steps of a throne.

Merrily Frédéric trolled out an easy, simple song with the perfect art—how different from the laborious inefficiency of the Opera!—and came over to Roderic to see that his coffee was to his liking.

‘Changes, Frédéric,!’ he said, a little sadly. ‘Where is Madeleine la Vache?’

‘At Lourcine.’

‘Mimi l’Engeuleuse?’

‘At Clamart.’

‘The Scotch Count, who always spoke like a hanging judge?’

‘Went to Scotland—he could get no more whisky here on credit.’

‘His wife?’

‘Poor girl! poor girl!’

‘Ah! it was bound to happen. And Bubu Tire-Cravat?’

Frédéric brought the edge of his hand down smartly on the table, with a laugh.

‘He had made so many widows, it was only fair he should marry one!’ commented the Englishman. And Pea-shooter Charley?’

‘Don’t know. I think he is in prison in England.’

‘Well, well; it saddens. “Where are the snows of yesteryear?” I must have an absinthe; I feel old.’

‘You are half my years,’ answered Frédéric. ‘But come! If yesteryear be past, it is this year now. And all these distinguished persons who are gone, together are not worth one silver shoe-buckle of yonder—’ Frédéric nodded towards the old beau.

‘True, I never knew him; yet he looks as if he had sat there since Sedan. Who is he?’

‘We do not know his name, monsieur,’ said Frédéric softly, a little awed; ‘but I think he was a duke, a prince—I cannot say what. He is more than that—he is unique. He is—le Revenant de la Rue des Quatre Vents!’

‘The Ghost of the Street of the Four Winds,’ Roderic was immensely taken by the title; a thousand fantastic bases for the sobriquet jumped into his brain. Was the Rue des Quatre Vents haunted by a ghost in his image? There are no ghosts in practical Paris. But of all the ideas which came to him, not one was half so strange as the simple and natural story which he was later to hear.

‘Come,’ said Frédéric. ‘I will present you to him.’

‘Monseigneur,’ he said, as Roderic stood before him, ready to make his little bow, let me present Monsieur Mason, an Englishman.’

The old fellow took no notice. Said Frédéric in his ear: ‘Monsieur lives on the Boulevard St. Germain, and loves to paint the streets.’

The old man rose with alacrity, smiled, bowed, was enchanted to meet one of the gallant allies whose courage had—he spoke glibly of the Alma, Inkerman, Sebastopol.

The little comedy had not been lost on Roderic. Wondering, he sat down beside the old nobleman.

What spell had Frédéric wrought of so potent a complexion?

‘Sir,’ he said, ‘the gallantry of the French troops at the Malakoff was beyond all praise; it will live for ever in history.’

To another he might have spoken of the entente cordiale; to this man he dared not.

Had not his brain perhaps stopped in the sixties?

Had the catastrophe of ’70 broken his heart?

Roderic must walk warily.

But the conversation did not take the expected turn. The old gentleman elegantly, wittily, almost gaily, chattered of art, of music, of the changed appearance of Paris. Here, at any rate, he was au courant des affaires.

Yet as Roderic, puzzled and pleased, finished his absinthe he said more seriously than he had yet spoken: ‘I hear that monsieur is a great painter’ (Roderic modestly waved aside the adjective), ‘has painted many pictures of Paris. Indeed, as I think of it, I seem to remember a large picture of St. Sulpice at the Salon of eight years ago—no, seven years ago.’

Roderic stared in surprise. How should any one—such a man, of all men—remember his daub, a thing he himself had long forgotten? The oldster read his thought. ‘There was one corner of that picture which interested me deeply, deeply,’ he said. ‘I called to see you; you had gone—none knew where. I am indeed glad to have met you at last. Perhaps you would be good enough to show me your pictures—you have other pictures of Paris? I am interested in Paris—in Paris itself—in the stones and bricks of it. Might I—if you have nothing better to do—come to your studio now, and see them?’

‘I’m afraid the light—’ began Roderic. It was now ten o’clock.

‘That is nothing,’ returned the other. ‘I have my own criteria of excellence. A match-glimmer serves me.’

There was only one explanation of all this. The man must be an architect, perhaps ruined in the mad speculations of the Empire, so well described by Zola in La Curée.

‘At your service, sir,’ he said, and rose. The old fellow was surely eccentric; but equally he was not dangerous. He was rich, or he would not be wearing a diamond worth every penny of two thousand pounds, as Roderic, no bad judge, made out. There might be profit, and there would assuredly be pleasure.

They waved, the one an airy, the other a courteous, goodnight to grand old Frédéric, and went out.

The old man was nimble as a kitten; he had all the suppleness of youth; and together they ran rapidly down to the boulevard, where, hailing a fiacre, they jumped in and clattered down towards the Seine.

Roderic sat well back in the carriage, a little lost in thought. But the old man sat upright, and peered eagerly about him. Once he stopped the cab suddenly at a house with a low railing in front of it, well set back from the street, jumped out, examined it minutely, and then, with a sigh and a shake of the head, came back, a little wearier, a little older.

They crossed the Seine, rattled up the Rue Bonaparte, and stopped at the door of Roderic’s studio.

II

‘Ah, well, said the old man, as he concluded his examination of the pictures, ‘What I seek is not here. If it will not weary you, I will tell you a story. Perhaps, although you have not painted it, you have seen it. Perhaps—bah! I am seventy years of age, and a fool to the end.

‘Listen, my young friend! I was not always seventy years of age, and that of which I have to tell you happened when I was twenty-two.

‘In those days I was very rich, and very happy. I had never loved; I cared for nobody. My parents were both dead long since. A year of freedom from the control of my good old guardian, the Duc de Castelnaudary (God rest his soul!), had left me yet taintless as a flower. I had that chivalrous devotion to woman which perhaps never really existed at any time save for rare individuals.

‘Such a one is ripe for adventure, and since, as your great poet has said, “Circumstance bows before those who never miss a chance,” it was perhaps only a matter of time before I met with one.

‘Indeed (I will tell you, for it will help you to understand my story), I once found myself in an extremely absurd position through my fantastic trust in the impeccability of woman.

‘It was rather late one night, and I was walking home through a deserted street, when two brutal-looking ruffians came towards me, between them a young and beautiful girl, her face flushed with shame, and screaming in pain; for the savages had each firm hold of one arm, and were forcing her at a rapid pace—to what vile den?

‘My fist in the face of one and my foot in the stomach of the other! They sprawled in the road, and, disdaining them, I turned my back and offered my arm to the girl. She, in an ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction
• An Experiment in Necromancy
• At the Fork of the Roads
• The Black Lodge
• The Dream Circean
• The Initiation
• A Short Biography of Aleister Crowley