The Films of Aleister Crowley?

I spent a large chunk of my reading time in the previous decade pouring over, meditating on, trying to decipher the works of Aleister Crowley. Not much of a black-clad goth, where in the circles that I knew of Crowley’s works were passed around freely along with the absinthe and whippets, but came to him from my heady on the couch readings of Timothy Leary and Robert Anton Wilson who praised him as a pioneer of consciousness and willed brain change, also a sexual debauch and record-setting mountain climber to boot. Of course I had to find his books and see what was up.

It was a little harder to find his books back then in my obscure burg – unlike now in the age of Amazon and big box stores that put the Library of Alexandria to shame – but I slowly pierced together a collection through endless searching and unlikely coincidences, finding the books in the haphazard unsorted stacks of bookstores owned by screaming ex-football players, in sweet and light New Age bookstores (where I once went in and asked the shop keep if they had any Timothy Leary books. “What does he write about?” “Uh, drugs.” “How to quit them?” “No, how to use them.”), in bargain shelves stacked beside picture books of cats and World War Two airplanes. And a wide spectrum of Crowley’s books are needed in order to decipher the works, as they referential and interrelated, where the key to understanding the meaning of some of Crowley’s terms would be found not in the one you were reading, but in another book, for example.

I always thought the life of A.C. would have made a great movie. Reading over his journals or biographies it was like he had a dozen or so incarnations jammed into one. Easy riches and grinding penury, a prophet of the New Aeon and an adolescent jerk, hated and persecuted by whatever nation he lived in yet admired by some of the brightest lights of the times. Never getting around to writing the screenplay myself, there have been occasional murmurings over the years, but nothing that has bore fruit.

So I found it a bit odd that I came across almost a half-dozen films about Crowley in production at the moment or about to be released. (Christ, even Iron Maiden frontman
Bruce Dickinson is producing one.) Why that is happening all of a sudden is hard to discern. Maybe some kind of morphic resonance going on between the creators? A perfect character to make a film about in an age where the contents of the pockets or purses of your average kid out clubbing on the weekend rivals Crowley’s drug chest at his most debauched peak? The increased availability of Crowley’s works in the last few decades? The occult revival? The coming of 2012? It’s so hard to tell …

Anyway, here are four movie trailers of upcoming Crowley flicks, some promising, some less so, some that might actually see the light of day, some that most likely will not.