City of the Beast The London of Aleister Crowley

Presented by: London Fortean Society

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0	LONDON: The Miller
P	Tuesday 5th July, 2022
N	7:30pm

Event information

Philip Baker combines biography and pyschogeography to trace Aleister Crowley's life in London.

“I dreamed I was paying a visit to London. It was a vivid, long, coherent, detailed affair of several days, with so much incident that it would make a good-sized volume.”
Aleister Crowley

Crowley had a love-hate relationship with London, but the city was where he spent much of his adult life, and it was the capital of the culture that created him: Crowley was a post-decadent with deviant Victorian roots in the cultural ferment of the 1890s and the magical revival of the Golden Dawn.

Not a walking guide, although many routes could be pieced together from its pages, this is a biography by sites. A fusion of life-writing with psychogeography, steeped in London's social history from Victoria to the Blitz, it draws extensively on unpublished material and offers an exceptionally intimate picture of the Great Beast.

Phil’s book, City of the Beast The London of Aleister Crowley, follows Crowley as he searches for prostitutes in Hyde Park and Pimlico, drinks absinthe and eats Chinese food in Soho, and find himself down on his luck in Paddington Green—and never quite losing sight of the illumination that drove him: “the abiding rapture,” he wrote in his diary, “which makes a 'bus in the street sound like an angel choir!”

'City of the Beast The London of Aleister Crowley' will be available on the night.

Phil Baker’s other books include 'The Dedalus Book of Absinthe', a biography of Dennis Wheatley, 'The Devil is a Gentleman', 'Austin Osman Spare: The Life & Legend of London's Lost Artist' and critical works on Samuel Beckett and William Burroughs. He lives in London.