Aleister Crowley, prophet of sex magick and self-styled “Beast 666”, had a starring role in the occult revival of the late 1960s and early 1970s, appearing on the cover of the Beatles’ Sergeant Pepper and inspiring the urbanely evil character of Mocata in Hammer’s 1968 film The Devil Rides Out.
This talk will consider the real life of Crowley, a late decadent rooted in the Victorian deviance of the 1890s, and his transformation in the work of Dennis Wheatley, the massively bestselling popular novelist whose black magic novels created a strangely seductive and luxurious image of Satanism.
In reality Wheatley was more interested in politics than magic, and his original Devil Rides Out had a 1934 propaganda subtext of friendship with Nazi Germany, deftly elided from Richard Matheson’s screenplay, while Crowley’s Nietzschean creed of “Thelema” was – to borrow the title of Leni Riefenstahl’s 1935 film – his own “Triumph of the Will”. Considering Crowley’s public persona and Hammer’s much-loved film, this talk will suggest that in both cases the real horror lurks offstage.
Phil Baker is a writer of criticism and non-fiction, and his books include The Devil is a Gentleman: the life and times of Dennis Wheatley (Dedalus, 2009), William S. Burroughs (Reaktion Books, 2010), and a groundbreaking study of the obscure cult artist Austin Osman Spare (Strange Attractor, 2011/2023), of which Alan Moore has said ‘Phil Baker has established himself as among the very best contemporary biographers… What Baker has accomplished here is little short of marvellous.’
