![]() ![]() His contemporaries excoriated him as rumors of his escapades reached a wider public through reported court cases and salacious articles in the general press. Just the same-from his early days in the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn to the present day-Crowley has been denounced by magicians as everything ranging from an evil genius to a magical fraud. Offshoots of Crowley's Magical Order and practitioners of his Magick are to be found throughout the Western world. In the magical world that he made his own, the name Aleister Crowley evokes admiration, even reverence. This was a gifted man born into privilege who scorned convention and ultimately destroyed himself in his relentless search for impossible truths. Viewed differently, Crowley assumes tragic-heroic status. The Crowley life story is almost the stuff of Victorian melodrama: the good man gone bad, betrayer of women and men alike, corrupter of innocence, dark angel and self-proclaimed Antichrist. It is this episode in the desert-sublime and terrifying as an experience, profound in its effects, and illuminating in what it reveals of the engagement of advanced magical practice with personal selfhood-that constitutes the focus of this chapter. In this case, the ceremonies combined the performance of advanced ritual magic with homosexual acts. It was at Crowley's instigation that the two men began to make their way, first by tram and then by foot, into the North African desert to the southwest of Algiers and it was Crowley's decision to perform there a series of magical ceremonies that prefigured his elaboration of the techniques of sex magic, or, as he was later to call it, Magick. As such, Neuburg had taken a vow of obedience to Crowley as his Master and affectionately dubbed "holy guru," and had already learned that in much that related to his life, Crowley's word was now law. He was Crowley's chela, a novice initiate of the Magical Order of the Silver Star, which Crowley had founded two years earlier. There was, however, another highly significant factor in Neuburg's quiescence. Junior in years, dreamy and mystical by nature, and in awe of a man whom he both loved and admired, Neuburg was inclined to acquiesce without demur in Crowley's various projects. Neuburg probably had little say in the matter. Crowley, widely traveled and an experienced mountaineer and big-game hunter, loved North Africa and had personal reasons for wanting to be out of England. ![]() The stated purpose of the trip was pleasure. Aleister Crowley, later to be dubbed "the wickedest man in the world," was in his early thirties his companion, Victor Neuburg, had only recently graduated from Cambridge. ![]() In late 1909, two Englishmen, scions of the comfortable middle classes, undertook a journey to Algiers. ![]()
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