• Investigates the tales of Crowley “raising Pan,” going mad, and working gay sex magick in Paris

• Uncovers Crowley’s involvement in the Belle Époque with sculptor Auguste Rodin and other artists and in the 1920s with Berenice Abbott, Nancy Cunard, Man Ray, André Gide, and Aimée Crocker

• Reveals Crowley’s “expulsion” from Paris in 1929 as a high-level conspiracy against Crowley

Exploring occultist, magician, poet, painter, and writer Aleister Crowley’s longstanding and intimate association with Paris, Tobias Churton provides the first detailed account of Crowley’s activities in the City of Light.

Using previously unpublished letters and diaries, Churton explores how Crowley was initiated into the Golden Dawn’s Inner Order in Paris in 1900 and how, in 1902, he relocated to Montparnasse. Soon engaged to Anglo-Irish artist Eileen Gray, Crowley pontificates and parties with English, American, and French artists gathered around sculptor Auguste Rodin: all keen to exhibit at Paris’s famed Salon d’Automne. In 1904--still dressed as “Prince Chioa Khan” and recently returned from his Book of the Law experience in Cairo--Crowley dines with novelist Arnold Bennett at Paillard’s. In 1908 Crowley is back in Paris to prove it’s possible to attain Samadhi (or “knowledge and conversation of the Holy Guardian Angel”) while living a modern life in a busy metropolis. In 1913 he organizes a demonstration for artistic and sexual freedom at Oscar Wilde’s tomb. Until war spoils all in 1914, Paris is Crowley’s playground.

The author details how, after returning from America in 1920, and though based at his “Abbey of Thelema” in Sicily, Crowley can’t leave Paris alone. When Mussolini expels him from Italy, Paris becomes home from 1924 until 1929. Churton reveals Crowley’s part in the jazz-age explosion of modernism, as the lover of photographer Berenice Abbott, and many others, and how he enjoyed camaraderie with Man Ray, Nancy Cunard, André Gide, and Aimée Crocker. The author explores Crowley’s adventures in Tunisia, Algeria, the Riviera, his battle with heroin addiction, his relationship with daughter Astarte Lulu--raised at Cefalù--and finally, a high-level ministerial conspiracy to get him out of Paris.

Reconstructing Crowley’s heyday in the last decade and a half of France’s Belle Époque and the “roaring Twenties,” this book illuminates Crowley’s place within the artistic, literary, and spiritual ferment of the great City of Light.

Tobias Churton is an authority on Gnosticism, Hermeticism, Freemasonry, and Rosicrucianism. Appointed Honorary Fellow of Exeter University in 2005, he is the author of many books, including Aleister Crowley in England and Aleister Crowley in America. He lives in the heart of England.

FOREWORD
by Frank van Lamoen

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

ONE
Sir Aleister Crowley Will Be Expelled from France Tomorrow

TWO
One Flame 1883-1898
Mathers in Paris
Mina Mathers and Annie Horniman

THREE
The Road to Auteuil 1898-1900

FOUR
Toward the City of Light
Gerald Kelly

FIVE
Paris, November 1902

SIX
Old Threads and New 1902-1903
Eileen Gray and Friends
The Star and the Garter
Nina Olivier

SEVEN
Where Soul and Spirit Slip 1903
To Nice

EIGHT
Rodin

NINE
Le Chat Blanc
The Upper Room
Maugham on Crowley

TEN
I Piped When You Danced
A Khan in the City of Light Return to Paris-Alone

ELEVEN
Adonai 1907-1908
Paris, 1908

TWELVE
John St. John, or Aleister Crowley’s Great Magical Retirement, 1908
The Thirteen Days

THIRTEEN
Ragged and Wilde 1909-1913
Covering Embarrassment

FOURTEEN
Fiery Arrows 1914
Dennis Wheatley and the Legend of Raising Pan in Paris

FIFTEEN
The Fool Is a Card 1920

SIXTEEN
Spiritual Poison 1921-1923

SEVENTEEN
I Died 1924

EIGHTEEN
Man Is a Gambler 1925-1927 284

NINETEEN
The Mortal Kiss 1928
Retirement--May 24-August 29, 1928

TWENTY
Refus de séjour 1929

TWENTY-ONE
The Last Time He Saw Paris 1929-1930
The Last Dash

NOTES

BIBLIOGRAPHY

INDEX