UKC

In this Audio Podcast, playwright John Burns introduces Aleister Crowley, a hugely successful climber in the late 1800's and - a complete mad man.

"Aleister Crowley was one of the most controversial men of the 20th century, he was a mountaineer, a poet and a chess grand master but he is most remembered as the world's greatest expert on the occult, a man whose magical powers have no equal..."

Read more at http://www.ukclimbing.com/news/item.php?id=52868

In reply to UKC News:

"It's worth noting that these climbs are now graded VS and HVS and it took many years (70ish!) for them to get a second ascent!"

They ain't graded anything anymore, they've collapsed! Still amazing effort nonetheless.

In reply to Southern Man: Can you imagine going up there back then!

These are on the Devil's Chimney thing down there then are they? Or is it another collapse?

Anyhow - what a nutter!

Jack

http://gdl.cdlr.strath.ac.uk/smcj/smcj017/smcj01707.htm

Here are the topos writen by the man himself

In reply to Tom_Harding:

Good find Tom!

In reply to Jack Geldard - Editor - UKC:


According to the topo that Tom found, they are different areas of the cliff then, still I had a good walk the full length and I'm pretty sure they're gone.

Happy to be proved wrong though

http://www.bgs.ac.uk/science/landUseAndDevelopment/images/landslides/beachy...

good photo from the same angle as the topo

In reply to Tom_Harding:

http://www.bgs.ac.uk/landslides/BeachyHead.html

If you scroll down it says it disappeared April 2001

Hi,

Seem to remember 'Climber and Rambler' did a full article on his routes etc back in the early or mid 80's (showing my age)...I think Mick Fowler did some exploring of these lines ?

Karl

In reply to Southern Man:

For your own safety (and probably mine unless you know someone else stupid enough) please stop looking at photos of Beachy Head, it isn't a good idea!

In reply to UKC News:
Had no idea he was a climber.

Researched him a bit after listenting to Mr.Crowley from Ozzy ^^.

Good stuff.

In reply to UKC News:

I don't know where you got the idea from that Crowley was a chess grandmaster. He may well have claimed to be - he claimed lots of things - but he certainly wasn't. Indeed I'm not at all sure he wasn't dead before the title was invented.

jcm

In reply to UKC News:

I came across a plaque commerating where he was supposed to have jumped in the sea. I can't remember if it was a faked suicide or something. Anyway it was near Cascais I think, i.e near Lisbon in Portugal.

In reply to johncoxmysteriously: From Wiki:

"A third hobby of his was chess, and he joined the university's chess club, where, he later stated, he beat the president in his first year and practiced two hours a day towards becoming a champion—"My one serious worldly ambition had been to become the champion of the world at chess." He also related having beaten famous chess players Joseph Henry Blackburne and Henry Bird and was on his way to becoming a master chess player, till he visited an important 1897 tournament in Berlin where "I saw the masters — one, shabby, snuffy and blear-eyed; another, in badly fitting would-be respectable shoddy; a third, a mere parody of humanity, and so on for the rest. These were the people to whose ranks I was seeking admission. 'There, but for the grace of God, goes Aleister Crowley,' I exclaimed to myself with disgust, and there and then I registered a vow never to play another serious game of chess.""

In reply to UKC News: One of the most controversial men of the 20th century, really, after Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot, Mao, Nixon, Bomber Harris, Castro, Che, Arrafat, a bunch of israeli's, the south african's, mugabe, north koreans, the odd jap nutter etc

Let's be frank he was a minor bit aprt player on the fringes who just wanted to be famous, he's as important as the bloke who gives me a copy of Metro on the way to work.

In reply to Mike Peacock:

Well even according to that he wasn't a grandmaster and by his own account gave the game up 15 years before the title was invented.

He was also a notorious fantasist. He might have beaten Blackburne and Bird, but I'd prefer to read it in their memoirs rather than his before I believe it.

jcm

In reply to UKC News:

I've had the distinct pleasure of staying at Boleskine House on many occasions. I disagree that Crowley was "a complete mad man".

He certainly had his moments of madness and in fact seemed to have long periods where his actions would seem mad to others. Much of this was quite calculated and had not a single association with madness.

He was in fact often capable of genius as can be seen in some of his writings.

"Complete" is a very all-encompassing word and entirely inaccurate in this instance.

In reply to Mac Ghille Aindrais:
I rather suspect he was not mad but rebelling as well as mentally and emotionally scarred after having been brought up in the Exclusive Brethren

Let’s face it we are talking about Victorian Britain, the root of many of our most endearing and not so endearing suppressive British values...rebellion, bohemian, call it what you want...he was an extreme self publicising British eccentric of his day, a time when laudanum and opium were legal and freak shows were the norm, nowadays he would just be called alternative...hat’s off to Alister. Lewis Carroll. William Quilliam, William Martin, Charles Waterton…etc, etc… the man was a product of the age as much as he was a product of his own mind.

In reply to Southern Man:
>

The collapse was in 2001

http://www.independent.co.uk/environment/cold-wet-winter-blamed-for-cliff-c...

In reply to UKC News:

I doubt he was remotely close to "completely mad". Perhaps he was a little like Salvador Dali who stated "the sole difference between myself and a madman is the fact that I am not mad!"

His writings on climbing give us an insight into how little things have changed many respects. Taking the piss out of buddies by sandbagging them on boulder problems is ancient. Crowley was up to it. Here's a passage that I found a number of years ago on John Gill's quirky website (www.johngill.net):

Bottom half of this:

http://www128.pair.com/r3d4k7/ACrowley.html

Cheers, Karl

Do What Thou Wilt

In reply to UKC News:
A good effort--but I'm interested to hear what your sources are. It seems to me that the Confessions of Aleister Crowley (proven to be heavily biased and not entirely factually correct) is your sole source, and has been taken more or less at face value...

(FWIW I'm another author working on a piece with Crowley as a character, but my book is entirely fictional and uses Crowley's early life simply as a starting point).

In reply to UKC News:

Some of my favourite Aleister Crowley quotes:

“I can imagine myself on my death-bed, spent utterly with lust to touch the next world, like a boy asking for his first kiss from a woman.”

“I slept with faith and found a corpse in my arms on awakening; I drank and danced all night with doubt and found her a virgin in the morning.”

“I was asked to memorise what I did not understand; and, my memory being so good, it refused to be insulted in that manner.”

“Roughly speaking, any man with energy and enthusiasm ought to be able to bring at least a dozen others round to his opinion in the course of a year no matter how absurd that opinion might be. We see every day in politics, in business, in social life, large masses of people brought to embrace the most revolutionary ideas, sometimes within a few days. It is all a question of getting hold of them in the right way and working on their weak points.”

“Destiny is an absolutely definite and inexorable ruler. Physical ability and moral determination count for nothing. It is impossible to perform the simplest act when the gods say ''no.'' I have no idea how they bring pressure to bear on such occasions; I only know that it is irresistible.”

“The ordinary man looking at a mountain is like an illiterate person confronted with a Greek manuscript.”

In reply to Karl Bromelow:
hilarious!
People began the urge the chaplain to try his hand. He didn't like it at all; but he came to me and said he would go if I would be very careful to manage the rope so that he did not look ridiculous, because of the respect due to his cloth. I promised him that I would attend to the matter with the utmost conscientiousness. I admitted that I had purposely made fun of some of the others, but that in his case I would tie the rope properly; not under his arms but just above the hips.

Having thus arranged for the respect due to his cloth, I went to the top of the rock and sat sufficiently far back to be unable to see what was happening on the face. When he came off, as the rope was fastened so low, he turned upside down. I pretended to misunderstand and jerked him up and down for several minutes before finally hauling him up, purple in the face and covered with scratches. I had not failed in the respect due to his cloth. But quite a number of people were sufficiently lacking in taste to laugh at him

In reply to UKC News:
Thats a great link. I love his ethics

About Owen Glynne Jones . . . (circa 1893)
"Jones obtained the reputation of being the most brilliant rock climber of his time by persistent self-advertisement. He was never a first-rate climber, because he was never a safe climber. If a handhold was out of his reach he would jump at it, and he had met with several serious accidents before the final smash. But his reputation is founded principally on climbs which he did not make at all, in the proper sense of the word. He used to go out with a couple of photographers and have himself lowered up and down a climb repeatedly until he had learnt its peculiarities, and then make the "first ascent" before a crowd of admirers. Now the essential difficulty of negotiating a pitch of any length is that one has to waste any amount of time and strength while one is finding out where the holds are. There is no credit at all in repeating a climb.

Another trick of Jones' was to get his friends to make dates with other people to try various unclimbed places, and then to postpone the expedition on various pretexts until Jones had managed to negotiate it by the method above described.

This conduct seemed to me absolutely unsportsmenlike. To prostitute the mountains to personal vanity is in fact something rather worse."

In reply to Mac Ghille Aindrais:

I think he just liked doing the things you weren't supposed to do, and he enjoyed winding people up and shocking them.
His stories may well be 80% poetic licence but they are quite entertaining nonetheless.
I seem to remember him crapping in someone's house, and not in the toilet.
Believing he was invisible and shooting two potential muggers with one bullet.

In reply to UKC News: You can see my Play Aleister Crowley: A Passion for Evil at the edinburgh Fringe 6th to 28th (Not 22/23)

Visit play website at http://thebeastreturns.com

Play trailer on Youtube youtube.com/watch?v=XLioSRfqTQ4&

>When he came off, as the rope was fastened so low, he turned upside down. I >pretended to misunderstand and jerked him up and down for several minutes >before finally hauling him up, purple in the face and covered with >scratches. I had not failed in the respect due to his cloth. But quite a >number of people were sufficiently lacking in taste to laugh at him


The beast obviously had strength beyond the natural.

In reply to UKC News:

His comments on his Gnostic Mass are well worth considering.

"While dealing with this subject I may as well outline its scope completely. Human nature demands (in the case of most people) the satisfaction of the religious instinct, and, to very many, this may best be done by ceremonial means. I wished therefore to construct a ritual through which people might enter into ecstasy as they have always done under the influence of appropriate ritual. In recent years, there has been an increasing failure to attain this object, because the established cults shock their intellectual convictions and outrage their common sense. Thus their minds criticize their enthusiasm; they are unable to consummate the union of their individual souls with the universal soul as a bridegroom would be to consummate his marriage if his love were constantly reminded that its assumptions were intellectually absurd.

I resolved that my Ritual should celebrate the sublimity of the operation of universal forces without introducing disputable metaphysical theories. I would neither make nor imply any statement about nature which would not be endorsed by the most materialistic man of science. On the surface this may sound difficult; but in practice I found it perfectly simple to combine the most rigidly rational conceptions of phenomena with the most exalted and enthusiastic celebration of their sublimity."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liber_XV,_The_Gnostic_Mass

In reply to ericoides:

Even in his writings on magick he refers to climbing. It was clearly an important part of his life for him to draw on his experiences of it in such an analogy within writings that he considered so important:

From LIBER ABA (MAGICK) BOOK 4:

Now those who understand the growth of organisms are aware that evolution depends on adaptation to environment. If an animal which cannot swim is occasionally thrown into water, it may escape by some piece of good fortune, but if it is thrown into water continuously it will drown sooner or later, unless it learns to swim.

.....

Now a change in environment involves a repeated meeting of new conditions, and if you want to adapt yourself to any given set of conditions, the best thing you can do is to place yourself cautiously and persistently among them. That is the foundation of all education.

.....

The old-fashioned pedagogues were not all so stupid as some modern educators would have us think. The principle of the system was to strike the brain a series of constantly repeated blows until the proper reaction became normal to the organism.


The same principle applies to the training of the body. The original exercises should be of a character to train the muscles generally to perform any kind of work, rather than to train them for some special kind of work, concentration of which will unfit them for other tasks by depriving them of the elasticity which is the proper condition of life.

Some few forms of exercise are exempt from these strictures. ROCK-CLIMBING, in particular, trains every muscle in an endless variety of ways. It moreover compels the learner to use his own judgment, to rely on himself, to develop resource, and to depend upon his own originality to attack each new problem that presents itself. This principle may be extended to all departments of the education of children. They should be put into contact with all kinds of truth, and allowed to make their own reflections thereon and reactions thereto, without the least attempt to bias their judgment. Magical pupils should be trained on similar lines. They should be made to work alone from the first, to cover the whole ground impartially, to devise their own experiments and draw their own conclusions.

In Magick and meditation this principle applies with tremendous force. It is quite useless to teach people how to perform magical operations, when it may be that such operations, when they have learned to do them, are not in accordance with their wills. What must be done is to drill the Aspirant in the hard routine of the elements of the Royal Art.

Cheers, Karl

In reply to UKC News:

Extract from my feature for September's Loose Screes

In researching the play I discovered a complex man whose early life as a mountaineer had been as controversial as his later life became when he turned increasingly you the occult. Hi achievements have been largely forgotten but Crowley was certainly one of the foremost mountaineers of his generation. He began climbing in his late teens as a way of escaping the brutality of Victorian public schools. Crowley had been a model pupil but on the death of his father when he was 11 the boy’s life changed forever and the loss of the man he idolised plunged him into dark despair. He became unruly and was expelled from a number of public schools finally being taught by a succession of tutors all of whom struggled to contain their rebellious charge.

In his late teens Crowley discovered a freedom in the outdoors and began his climbing career on the chalk cliffs of Beachy Head. There the friable rock shaped his climbing style and Crowley describes his technique as “One does not climb the cliffs. One hardly even crawls. Trickles or oozes would perhaps be the ideal verbs.” On Beachy Head Crowley pioneered a number of routes one of which he describes in this article he wrote for the SMC Journal.

“We ran up a grassy slope which hid the lower portion of this formidable obstacle, and a fine sight burst upon our astonished eyes. Behold the entire mass of Etheldreda's pinnacle [E.P.], with the cliff, here fissured with the magnificent "Cuillin crack" [C.C.], some 200 feet high, overhanging it, and the distant sea behind; above, a mass of fleecy clouds framing the picture, and gorgeously lit by the afternoon sun. The effect was superb. We stood for a moment entranced.”


Read the full article here http://thebeastreturns.com

In reply to John Burns:

John,

"....he turned increasingly you(?) the occult. Hi(?) achievements have been...."


Are you a professional writer? If you need a proofreader I am at your service. The home page of your website even spells Crowley two different ways. Now that is unforgivable, almost blasphemous!

Cheers, Karl

In reply to Karl Bromelow:

Hi Karl,

Thanks for that. i undoubtedly need a proof reader. Unfortunately i can't afford one. It's mainly because I have to do everything in a rush.

i'll check the website though.

John

In reply to John Burns:

No worries John, as they say in this neck of the bush.

Fascinating character Mr Crowley. Worthy material for your work. Good luck with the shows. Should I not have said that? Should I suggest you break a leg? I doubt you're too worried about such superstitions though considering the subject of your play.

Cheers, Karl

In reply to Only a hill:

Hi,

your book sounds interesting. The confessions is not my only source I've also used Laurence Sutin's excellent book and read a variety of other texts. I do agree one can't rely on the Confessions, much of what Crowley did is shrouded in half truths.

John

In reply to Karl Bromelow:

Don't forget Shakespeare spelt his own name several different ways and I hear that he has written a few half decent plays. His stuff is certainly better than my MS Word spellchecker's.

In reply to UKC News:

Book tickets for the play here

http://www.edfringe.com/search#q=show_performer%3Acrowley&fq=dates%3A%5...