Aleister Crowley

"The Great Beast," , a leader of Rosicrucian Freemasonry and darling of the "Quatuor Coronati" Masonic branch of British Intelligence, whose career encompassed five decades of activity in Britain, the European Continent, and North America.

The fashionable pornographers of the "Gay Nineties" through the "Roaring Twenties"—such heroes of today's "counterculture" as D.H. Lawrence, H.G. Wells, Aldous Huxley, the Virginia novelist James Branch Cabell, and the leading promoter of Friedrich Nietszche, H.L. Mencken, were all in Crowley's orbit. Beyond his immediate following, the chic Brits, and the American forerunners of the "Beat" and "Hippie" eras—who, much like Emerson, preferred the seedy nightlife of Paris and the Caribbean to their hometowns in places like Missouri or Idaho—all knew Crowley or his cult.

They all had friends who had visited his "Abbey of Thelema," to join in the "sex magic," the animal sacrifices and blood-drinking, and the opium and heroin use, which would, eventually, cost Crowley his respectability, but would build the legacy which his admirers among today's establishment entertainment figures, including Mick Jagger and Sir Paul McCartney, have emulated.

This wider circle included Ernest Hemingway; F. Scott Fitzgerald; Edmund Wilson of Princeton University and The New Republic; John Peale Bishop of Princeton, who went from being a Beat poet in the twenties to war-time propagandist for Co-ordinator for Inter-American Affairs Nelson Rockefeller; William Butler Yeats' one-time house-boy, Ezra Pound, who became a propagandist for Mussolini, but remains a darling of both the supposedly patriotic neo-Conservatives as well as the doped-up counterculture; T.S. Eliot; Gertrude Stein; Sylvia Beach; and Isadora Duncan.

This short excerpt is from Stanley Ezrol's 2001, Seduced from Victory: How the Lost Corpse Subverts the American Intellectual Tradition.