City of the Beast

The London of Aleister Crowley

Phil Baker, Timothy D'arch Smith

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English

Massachusetts Inst of Tec
01 November 2022

Occult studies

"A work that combines biography and pyschogeography to trace Aleister Crowley's life in London.

""I dreamed I was paying a visit to London,"" Aleister Crowley wrote in Italy, continuing, ""It was a vivid, long, coherent, detailed affair of several days, with so much incident that it would make a good-sized volume."" 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with psychogeography, steeped in London's social history from Victoria to the Blitz, it draws extensively on unpublished material and offers an exceptionally intimate picture of the Great Beast. We follow 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!"""

By: Phil Baker, Timothy D'arch Smith
Imprint: Massachusetts Inst of Tec
Country of Publication: United Kingdom
Dimensions: Height: 203mm, Width: 133mm,
Weight: 367g
ISBN: 9781913689322
ISBN 10: 1913689328
Pages: 280
Publication Date: 01 November 2022
Audience: General/trade , ELT Advanced
Format: Paperback
Publisher's Status: Active

Phil Baker is a writer based in London. His books include The Devil is a Gentleman- The Life and Times of Dennis Wheatley, and Austin Osman Spare- The Life and Legend of London's Lost Artist, of which Alan Moore has said Phil Baker has established himself as among the very best contemporary biographers... What he has accomplished here is little short of marvelous.