A Face in the Crowd
In 1967 the Beatles put Aleister Crowley’s face on the cover of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, in a crowd of some sixty cut-out figures they called the people they admired.
He is upper left, one face among sixty, worth putting in a collage. The designers pruned the more provocative names off the submitted lists; Crowley stayed where others were cut. The cover records an admiration and nothing past it — they liked him enough to include him, which is the shallowest thing a culture can do with a man, and the most common. This is where Crowley mostly lives in popular music: a face in the crowd.
Then the ones who said his name. A few years later David Bowie sang, in his own lyric on Hunky Dory, “I’m closer to the Golden Dawn / Immersed in Crowley’s uniform” — a name-check inside a song he called surrealism, from an occult period he later disowned as a drug-fuelled phase. In 1980 Ozzy Osbourne released “Mr. Crowley,” and the lyric is a question, not a prayer — “Mr. Crowley, what went on in your head?” — its co-writer Bob Daisley putting it flatly: “I wanted to look at the darkness and question Aleister Crowley.” Iron Maiden took Crowley’s title Moonchild and his imagery, and their singer Bruce Dickinson supplied the disclaimer himself: “Are Iron Maiden satanists? No, we’re not.” Each of them put Crowley’s name on the record, and each held him at arm’s length — one disowning the phase, one interrogating the man, one denying the creed.
The furthest anyone took it, while still on the record only taking it that far, was Jimmy Page. Led Zeppelin’s guitarist bought Boleskine House, Crowley’s old estate on Loch Ness; opened an occult bookshop in Kensington whose first title was a facsimile of Crowley’s Goetia; and collected the man’s manuscripts and robes. He put real money and real years into it. And even so, what he left on the record is a collection and a homage — Kenneth Anger, a fellow Crowley collector who fell out with him, called Page a “dabbler.” Whether he practised or merely owned is the one question here the record genuinely cannot close. (The story that “Stairway to Heaven” hides Satanic messages played backward is not his; it comes from a 1982 television broadcast and the era’s panic, and reaches him from outside.)
Only one figure here crosses from owning Crowley to practising something built on him. Genesis P-Orridge, of Throbbing Gristle and Psychic TV, founded Thee Temple ov Psychick Youth in 1981 — an operating magical order that drew openly on Crowley’s writing. He said as much himself, in the first person, and hid none of it. And it was an eclectic belief: the practice was chaos magic, Crowley one source among Austin Osman Spare and the cut-up methods of Burroughs and Gysin, all of it assembled by P-Orridge into a system of his own. He believed, and he practised — a magic drawn off Crowley among many and inherited from none.
The most recent turn is the emptiest and the most accused. In the 2009 video for “Run This Town,” Jay-Z wears a hooded sweatshirt reading “Do What Thou Wilt” — Crowley’s founding maxim, a century out of Cairo, worn as streetwear. He has never explained it. Into that silence a whole industry has read a plot: that Jay-Z and the music business run a Crowleyan mind-control program on their listeners — a thesis with named authors, Mark Dice’s Illuminati in the Music Industry and the Vigilant Citizen website, and no source beneath it. Elsewhere a claim this large has at least a serious historian standing behind some careful version of it; this one has no one but its accusers. There is a slogan on a hoodie, and there is a conspiracy the silence invited, and between them nothing the record will carry.
So a century of popular music has quoted Crowley constantly — his face, his house, his titles, his maxim, his name — and quoted him almost entirely as style. One man among all of them practised a magic that drew on him, and even that was an eclectic borrowing. Nowhere in the whole loud archive is the initiation the devotees imagine or the program the accusers do. The idiom traveled the way idioms travel through a culture: an image people liked the look of, picked up, wore, and mostly set back down. Crowley got famous. He did not get a lineage, and he did not get an army.
Grounded in. The reference nodes underneath — hover to read each.