City of the Beast - The London of Aleister Crowley

A work that combines biography and pyschogeography to trace Aleister Crowley''s life in London.

"I dreamed I was paying a visit to London," Aleister Crowley wrote in Italy, continuing, "It was a vivid, long, coherent, detailed affair of several days, with so much incident that it would make a good-sized volume." Crowley had a love-hate relationship with London, but the city was where he spent much of his adult life, and it was the capital of the culture that created him: Crowley was a post-decadent with deviant Victorian roots in the cultural ferment of the 1890s and the magical revival of the Golden Dawn.

Not a walking guide, although many routes could be pieced together from its pages, this is a biography by sites. A fusion of life-writing with psychogeography, steeped in London''s social history from Victoria to the Blitz, it draws extensively on unpublished material and offers an exceptionally intimate picture of the Great Beast. We follow Crowley as he search