St Martin's Griffin, 2000, 483pp, $17.95 ISBN 0-312-28897-2
After completing DIVINE INVASIONS, his biography of Philip K. Dick Lawrence Sutin spent ten years researching the life of Aleister Crowley and gave the resulting book one of Crowley's best known mottoes as a title. There have been biographies of Crowley before, as well as his own autobiographical writings, and he has featured in the works of modern commentators such as Colin Wilson, too. Whether it was Sutin's intention or not, DO WHAT THEY WILT leads to only one conclusion - at best Crowley's life was one of intense self-delusion, that would be best described as pathetic if he had not made so many other people miserable along the way. At worst, he lead many people close to criminality. Oddly, however, Crowley was never a Satanist, and never claimed to have taken the left-hand path in magick - in fact, he rejected that, though he never claimed to be a white magician either.
Crowley came from a wealthy brewing family, though they belonged to one of the minor separatist Christian sects. It was his small acts of childhood rebellion that lead his mother to call him "The Great Beast", a title he took to heart and started to live up to in his teens. He went to Cambridge University but never took a degree. He took up mountaineering but fell out with the mountaineering establishment, so that he never obtained reasonable subventions for his expeditions, and equally he was never able to use his successes to re-enter academia (say, as a geologist). While young he published his controversial first book of poetry WHITE STAINS, but even more significantly he had decided that magick was real and he joined the Order of the Golden Dawn. Very soon his egotism lead to his leading himself through all the levels of its art, attempting to take over the group, and had the final consequence of destroying the Order (though the sensible members such as W B Yeats had already got out).
And basically that's it -after 1900, when he was twenty-five, Crowley did no more than repeat himself until he died in a nursing home in Brighton in December 1947. He travelled around the world, he took lovers of both sexes, and in the last third of his life he was a heroin addict. His magickal operations produced nothing - at least, the evidence is that it produced no change in Crowley if magick is subjective, and it produced no change in Crowley's circumstances (or his relatives, friends and acquaintances) if magick is objective.
The interest in Crowley for the SF community, apart from the general one, is two-fold. Crowley attempted to create his own successors to the Golden Dawn and the only one that sustained itself was in California in the 1930s, where a central figure was Jack Parsons (the rocket engineer friend to Robert Heinlein, Anthony Boucher and perhaps acquaintance of Ray Bradbury) and Parsons' houseguest Ron L. Hubbard (who subsequently ran away with Parsons' wife). Crowley had spent all his inheritance by the time of the First World War (which he passed in New York City writing propaganda for the Germans, definitely for the money, and perhaps with the intention of subverting their other propaganda by the ridiculousness of his own. At least, he was not prosecuted after the War), and in the 'Thirties his main income was donations from California. (Sutin does not say what happened after Parsons died when his house in Pasadena blew up - presumably Crowley still received some donations from fans and former followers. His heroin, I assume, was prescribed by a doctor on the local Poor Law Board - he would not have needed an illegal supply.) At any rate, this means that a large proportion of golden age SF authors moved in an environment where Crowley was held in esteem by their common friends even if the authors were not believers themselves.
The second connection with SF is, of course, through the still common, and now perhaps growing, ideas that magick is real and has physical powers. If the producers of the American syndicated shows in which teenage girls manage to meet beasts with strange eyes and tendencies to throw household furniture about read Sutin's biography they might reconsider the glamour and consequences of magick. Unlike a stage conjuror who makes cards, coins, doves and rabbits disappear, the best that Crowley could do was to lose his wealth and his happiness. There may be magic in the world of fantasy, but the results of magick are not fantastic.