The Un-Magickal Record of the Great Beast 666

Volume One
SEX - DRUGS - PROPHETIC ROLES

Introduced by Sandy Robertson
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PART ONE - EDITORIAL

A – Occult Pulp Faction – Introduction by Sandy Robertson
B – New Sinister Revelations of the Ipsissimus of Infamy
C – The Great Beast is dead.  Long live the Great Beast
D – Tabloid Gematria and red-top Kabbalah for the masses
E – The Joy of 666
F – Anarchy in the Crowley
G – It's the end of the world as we know it, and I feel fine
H – Competition Page – Where's AL D'oh!
.I – Who are you calling a cult?

"Like many researchers, students, aficionados and recreational users of Aleister Crowley, I struggle to reconcile my admiration of the man with his reprehensible lifestyle. Consequentially, my attempts to equate Crowley's exploits with his (apparently serious) claims to be ‘an instrument of the gods' are repeatedly confounded. Despite spending a significant amount of time in consideration of this conundrum, I never came close to divining a means of merging two such seemingly divergent strands. Then, during the compilation of this project, I ‘became aware' of a mechanism by which Crowley could simultaneously fulfil the roles of 'Prophet of a New Aeon' AND 'the wickedest man in the world'. At that moment, I glimpsed the outline of a brilliant and quite possibly divinely engineered double-agenda in which Aleister Crowley was fated from birth to be remembered as 'the wickedest man in the world'. Indeed, the closer Crowley came to a physical embodiment of his god-apportioned mandate, the more likely he was to fulfil his own prophesy and become not just the herald of a New Aeon, but also its catalyst. Aleister Crowley was not merely the Prophet of a New Aeon, he actually caused it!"

In recent years, the guardians of Aleister Crowley's legacy have mounted a sustained, and often quite subtle, campaign to transform a debauched Victorian lunatic into a lucrative cash-cow. Hauling Crowley in from the marginalised periphery of history's 'sin bin' towards a mass-market audience has required more makeovers than Cher's tits - Layer upon layer of superfluous evil sucked away as the wickedest man in the world slowly dwindled to a mere "unsettling writer of fiction." For reasons outlined in this publication, it is my belief that the ongoing process of encasing the Great Beast within a sugar-coated and unsettlingly glossy shell is akin to throwing away the baby, soap, flannel, plug, bath and mother away with the water. Whitewashing over Crowley's most unpalatable traits and repressing others altogether may sell a few more books and ease the nagging doubts of aficionados, but locking these skeletons in a secure closet is, surely, a tragic example of veiling Crowley's vices behind virtuous words -“Vices” that, as Crowley notes in Liber AL (II, 52), “are my service.” Crowley himself repeatedly emphasised the vital importance of confronting one's demons. Yet, the very people responsible for promulgating his ideology have themselves fallen, perhaps irretrievably, into this fatal trap. Until individuals and groups muster courage enough to accept Crowley as a whole, warts and all, and integrate even the most unpalatable facets into the equation, they will never glimpse the essential simplicity and genius of Crowley's divinely inspired and twin-pronged master plan.

Between 1875 and 1947, the totality of history passed through the eye of a needle that was Aleister Crowley. A thousand years from now, as Mankind basks in the sunshine of Crowleyanity, social and economic historians will trace the cataclysmic fall of the great empire of Western Capitalism back to one man - An extraordinary man who, alone, defined the formless discontent permeating his world. A man who marshaled this chaotic energy and empowered its source with a single ‘thought-tool' of sufficient potency to tear down the vast edifice of an empire set in stone for approximately 13,000 years. A man who changed the world with four words - A man named Aleister Crowley.

Richard T. Cole

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PART TWO - FEATURES

A compendium of thirty-three facsimile reproductions of rare articles relating to Aleister Crowley, 'The Great Beast 666,' as appeared in various mainstream magazines between 1939 and 1982. Most of these titles are extinct and in many cases their respective publishers are no longer trading. The specific editions in which these articles were first published are seldom offered for sale and, such is the current interest in Aleister Crowley, are almost inevitably accompanied by a prohibitively high asking price.

Features include - AUCTIONS RECORD (1972) - BOOK & MAG. COL (2008) - SMITH'S WEEKLY (1924) - TRUE (1939) – SENSATION (1939) - EVERYBODY'S WEEKLY (1949) - FATE (1949) - SCI. FI. QUARTERLY (1953) – ACTION (1953) –PUNCH (1955) - PICTURE POST (1955) - PEOPLE (1956) – TRUE (1956) - REAL ACTION FOR MEN (1957) – STAG (1959) - AMERICAN BOOK COL. (1961) – ADAM (1964) - REAL (1966) – JAGUAR (1966) – PENTHOUSE (1967) – FORUM (1970) -  ZODIAC MONTHLY (1970) – PREDICTION (1970) – STRANGE (1971) - THE REALIST (1971) - HIGH TIMES (1978) – UNEXPLAINED (1980) – SOUNDS (1982)