Aleister Crowley in Paris

Exploring occultist, magician, poet, painter, and writer Aleister Crowleys longstanding and intimate association with Paris, Tobias Churton provides the first detailed account of Crowleys activities in the City of Light. Using previously unpublished letters and diaries, Churton explores how Crowley was initiated into the Golden Dawns Inner Order in Paris in 1900 and how, in 1902, he relocated to Montparnasse. Soon engaged to Anglo-Irish artist Eileen Gray, Crowley pontificates and parties with English, American, and French artists gathered around sculptor Auguste Rodin: all keen to exhibit at Pariss famed Salon dAutomne. In 1904--still dressed as Prince Chioa Khan and recently returned from his Book of the Law experience in Cairo--Crowley dines with novelist Arnold Bennett at Paillards. In 1908 Crowley is back in Paris to prove its possible to attain Samadhi (or knowledge and conversation of the Holy Guardian Angel) while living a modern life in a busy metropolis. In 1913 he organizes a demonstration for artistic and sexual freedom at Oscar Wildes tomb. Until war spoils all in 1914, Paris is Crowleys playground. The author details how, after returning from America in 1920, and though based at his Abbey of Thelema in Sicily, Crowley cant leave Paris alone. When Mussolini expels him from Italy, Paris becomes home from 1924 until 1929. Churton reveals Crowleys part in the jazz-age explosion of modernism, as the lover of photographer Berenice Abbott, and many others, and how he enjoyed camaraderie with Man Ray, Nancy Cunard, Andr Gide, and Aime Crocker. The author explores Crowleys adventures in Tunisia, Algeria, the Riviera, his battle with heroin addiction, his relationship with daughter Astarte Lulu--raised at Cefal--and finally, a high-level ministerial conspiracy to get him out of Paris. Reconstructing Crowleys heyday in the last decade and a half of Frances Belle poque and the roaring Twenties, this book illuminates Crowleys place within the artistic, literary, and spiritual ferment of the great City of Light.