The Deaths and Afterlife of Aleister Crowley - Exclusive extract!

Today I host an exclusive extract from The Deaths and Afterlife of Aleister Crowley, by Ian Thornton and published by Unbound Digital:

The Blurb:

Aleister Crowley, also known as the Great Beast, is one of the most reviled men in history. Satanist, cult leader, debauched novelist and poet, his legacy has been harshly contested for decades.

Crowley supposedly died in 1947, but in Ian Thornton’s new novel, set in the present day, the Great Beast is alive and well and living in Shangri-la. Now over 130 years old, thanks to the magical air of his mystical location, he looks back on his life and decides it is time to set the record straight.

For Crowley was not the evil man he is often portrayed as. This was just a cover to hide his real mission, to save the twentieth century from destroying itself and to set humanity on the road to freedom and liberty.

The Death and Afterlife of Aleister Crowley is an epic novel that will make you see this notorious figure in a completely new light, as he encounters an impressive cast of real-life characters including Timothy Leary, The Beatles, Princess Margaret, Orson Welles and Alfred Hitchcock.

The Extract:

One

The Father, The Son & The Ghost Love is the only principle that makes life tolerable. – Aleister Crowley

I sit in an ancient amphitheatre cut into the slopes of the valley, weeping willows below and above, a stone wall of pungent, bloomed white gardenia to our right, a meadow of daisies and horseflies to the left as this man looks out across his adopted and quite beloved homeland. The morning is unreasonably beautiful. It would be a shame to leave this sanc- tuary, especially given that the odds of returning are so slim. 
I breathe in deeply and gratefully, while I observe with immeasurable fondness the humble decency of this, the most unchallenged, the most unchallengeable and surely the finest spot on the planet. Shangri-La. 
On the flanks are sweeping stone terraces dotted with some young children of touching and eviscerating beauty. Behind me on the hillside, higher up, are many more rows, reaching to even more rarefied air. This crucible possesses a soothing tran- quillity and palpable serenity. It is used for their Buddhist ceremonies, for performances and song by young and old. I have many happy memories here. 
The knowledge, smiles and serenity of all of those here lend weight to Buddhism. A logical mind rightfully struggles with reincarnation, but one finds it easy to forgive them. 
Adorned in my sack-cloth simplicity, I look at the skies and tell three young lasses of shaven head, who eye me with rever- ence as they pass, ‘The taking of pleasure in such minutiae might only be achieved by a man who is at peace with his world. Remember, we are the blue-lidded daughters of Sunset; we are the naked brilliance of the voluptuous night-sky.’ 
They giggle and shuffle off. 
I digress! Let us speak vastly important nonsense and then let us visit those depraved and vulgar young goats of mine. 

 1.1 Holy 
You have all seen me before. There I am on the cover of Sergeant Pepper, back row, second from the far left between Sri Yukteswar Giri and Mae West. My fine boy John knew precisely who the puppeteer of that frazzled century was. 
There was surely a time when I would have boasted that you are only here because of my intentional nudges on the axis of the twentieth century, as I squeezed and fondled her centre of gravity. Those days of bluster are largely over. I shall instead approach the claim from a more modest position. Without my meddling as part of British Intelligence, some- times intentional, sometimes utterly cack-handed, it is perhaps possible none of us would be here. I only bring this up as, since I may or may not have interfered with history that allowed the very specific conditions for this, our world to be, we might as well get the pronunciation of my name right. Crowley. It rhymes with Holy.
 And it was not always Aleister. As a boy, I was Alick, though when I barrelled into this realm, on October the twelfth 1875, I The Father, The Son & The Ghost 9 was to be baptised, under the Lord’s font water, Alexander Edward Crowley.
 I was born in one of those sturdy town houses in Clarendon Square, number thirty, in the Cotswolds town of Royal Leamington Spa, where the miraculous waters from font, tap or stream, allegedly healed and cured as if one were in the presence of a Christ. That Nazarene and I would have been marvellous chums; I so adored Him as a boy. I wonder whether I would have been dumbstruck, like the sodden auto- graph hunter at the stage door, had we met? Perhaps I might have been, for the minutest of moments, and long before even He would have chance to peer into my eyes of coal black in search of a soul. My father spoke of Him with much reverence and respect, but also with the proximity of a mind- ful and nurturing elder brother, who would shield us from any harm, as the days of pristine youth sparkled and the midges danced at dusk, until the final strides of another ambrosial day tripped over a gnarled, tangerine sun. 
Or at least, that is how I recall them. Though these early years will always suffer from the patchiness of a childhood memory, it is naturally occurring in the atomic structure of the life story. Please bear this in mind as we hone in on the adult days, where I am able to tell you the exact slant of a morning shadow with the precision of a sundial. Some details shall always be meticulous, however. Papa, for example. 
My father was Edward, a tall, handsome, lithe, dark-eyed brute with fine teeth and cheekbones like spanners in a sock. He carried a married tang of light oak from his subtle cologne and a stark, almost medical, soap. He was in his forties when I arrived. He was already retired. He had inherited a vast for- tune from his family’s shares in a London brewery, Crowley’s Alton Ales. The rhythmic and perpetual soaking to the back teeth of pie-eyed and staggering swathes of the population of 10 The Deaths and Afterlife of Aleister Crowley London in his family’s underwhelming booze allowed my dear father to do the great Lord’s work at his leisure, though Papa chose to do it quite tirelessly. We went from village to village with gusto, as we spread the joy of our Gospel. I was a plump little boy, so father was convinced the exercise and the fresh air were good for me. 
We relished the different accents that the countryside would bring. If Professor Higgins in Shaw’s Pygmalion could locate the birthplace or current street of residence of a chap outside a West End theatre, then Father was equally as capable with the wretches and bumpkins of the Midlands, the Cotswolds and the eastern edges of the West Country. When he dozed after a meagre lunch under Gloucestershire or Warwickshire trees, I read the Bible, Longfellow’s ‘Excelsior’ or Martin Rattler Adventures of a Boy in the Forests of Brazil by R. M. Ballantyne. He taught me, as a school would have, but with- out the harshness of those vicious martinets in charge. 

Father had been born into the Quakers. As a young man he left them over a minor difference of opinion in the Scriptures. He became a Plymouth Brethren until he then splintered from the main corps of that lot as well. The differences become minute at this stage, and barely worth considering, but for the record, 2 Corinthians was the bone of contention. His interpretation was at the core of his disagreement with the Plymouths. The issue was with whom one was permitted to eat. Father believed we should be allowed to dine with the poor, the uneducated, the unfortunates and the lepers; the Plymouths did not. We were now to be known as the Exclusive Brethren. 

I would mimic such strops and such splintering with my own religious pursuits many decades later. Our lengthy and daily exertion of saving souls, from hamlet to village to town, aided the maintenance of Father’s fine The Father, The Son & The Ghost 11 physique, but only seemed to aggravate my fat ankles and force my chubby toad neck to sweat like a squeezed teabag. When we were not marching in search of the next door upon which to rap or seeking some poor soul trimming his lawn or awaiting his tennis partner in the park, he would be preaching and I would be stood erect by his side, not permitted to slouch or shuffle from foot to foot. I listened to the word of God. In my heavy black suit cut of the same cloth as his, and with the same heavy application of starch on my upright collar, I believed myself to be the happiest and freest boy in England. I did not see the inside of a school until I was eight years old.

 I was a hard-boiled and applied lad, fascinated by the truth of evidence and proof, though this was still submerged by the wonder I saw in my old man and in the Scriptures. Once as we traipsed through a field to the next village, my father advised I circumnavigate a clump of over-green and erect nettles. I pushed him on why I ought to be so concerned.

 ‘Will you learn by experience or will you take my word for it?’ 

‘Learn by experience, of course, Father,’ I said before I dived in.