Did you know the first man to reach the North Pole was not the first man to reach the North Pole? That the Loch Ness Monster was no more than a toy submarine purchased from Woolworth’s? Are you familiar with the janitor who wrote and illustrated the world’s longest book, with the surrealist who saved countless lives at a concentration camp, with the composer who created an entire imaginary world on tiny index cards?

IMPOSSIBLE LIVES (70,000 words) tells the odd and astonishing stories of a wild collection of eccentric figures who saw the nineteenth century Western intellectual tradition crumble as the twentieth century emerge from its ruins. From the famous to the infamous, the celebrated to the obscure, these lapidary biographies of some fifty marvelous, magnificent outsiders together comprise a humorous, ironic, furious indictment of a time not so different from our own, fusing a highly opinionated narrative voice with the veracity of history.

A hybrid work of creative nonfiction chronicling the birth and development of modernity through the cockeyed lens of the mavericks who populated its margins, IMPOSSIBLE LIVES will appeal to readers who have enjoyed such books as Benjamin Labatut’s When We Cease to Understand the World, Maria Popova’s Traversal, Paul Collins’s Banvard’s Folly, Olga Tokarczuk’s Flights, and W. G. Sebald’s The Rings of Saturn.

We have gone beyond what we have words for, wrote Friedrich Nietzsche in Twilight of the Idols. Already by 1845 the Fox sisters had heard the spirit rappings which began the craze for Spiritualism that would electrify the nineteenth century before washing out, exhausted, at its close. Meanwhile, so-called magician Éliphas Lévi peddled his lies, claiming a secret doctrine exists behind the veil of all the hieratic and mystical allegories of ancient doctrines, behind the darkness and strange ordeals of all initiations, under the sea of all sacred writings, in the ruins of old Nineveh or Thebes, on the crumbling stones of old temples and on the blackened visage of the Assyrian or Egyptian sphinx, in the monstrous or marvelous paintings which interpret to the faithful of India the inspired pages of the Vedas, in the cryptic emblems of our old books on alchemy, in the ceremonies practiced at reception by all secret societies, there are found indications of a doctrine which is everywhere the same and everywhere carefully concealed. 

The year was 1875. Helena Petrovna Blavatsky, who had survived the explosion of the steamship Eumonia, swimming to safety as limbs and heads fell into the sea all around her, invented Theosophy, a combination of Eastern and Western mysticism as dictated by spirits in Isis Unveiled. Éliphas Lévi died. And the Great Beast was born. In Leamington, a suburb of Stratford-on-Avon. A strange coincidence, the Beast once remarked, that one small county should have given England her two greatest poets—for one must not forget Shakespeare. It was Crowley’s mother who first compared him to the Beast of the Book of Revelation, whose number is 666. Eventually they would call him the Wickedest Man in the World.

1891. Guy Fawkes night. The child christened Aleister Crowley lit a ten-pound firework he had filled himself with gunpowder. Ninety-six hours later he rose from unconsciousness the Beast with the ability to do magic. His sense of direction was impeccable; he compared his abilities to the instinctive faculties of Shetland ponies. There is a real apodictic correlation, he wrote in his autobiography, between the various elements of the operation of magic, such as the formal manifestations of the spirit, his name and sigil, the form of the temple, weapons, gestures and incantations. This is so profound that it seems almost true to say that even the crudest Magick eludes consciousness altogether. Apodictic, in the same sense phenomenologist Edmund Husserl would claim that all conscious processes are intentional, and that man’s sense of himself as a passive observer in an active world is entirely false. 

A brilliant mountaineer, Crowley climbed the small hills and dales of England, the ragged rocks of Scotland. In Mexico, he climbed the smoking volcano Popocatépetl. He even attempted to climb K2 in the Karakorams, the second-highest mountain on Earth, sometimes called the savage mountain, sometimes called Chogori, or Lamba Pahar, or Dapsang, all of which simply mean Big Mountain, and failed due to weather, weather and illness; weather, illness, and the difficulty of the climb, now considered the most difficult summit in the world. In 1905 he led a team attempting to conquer Kanchenjunga in the Himalayas, the third-highest mountain in the world. At 20,000 feet, the sadistic Crowley was removed from the team’s leadership by unanimous vote, and when the magician declined to be removed, the remainder of his party began to descend the mountain. Moments later, they triggered an avalanche. Five were buried. Four were furiously dug out of the snow; the fifth perished. They called and begged Crowley to come assist them. He remained in his tent. I was not over-anxious in the circumstances to render help, he stated plainly to the newspapers. A mountain accident of this kind is one of the things for which I have no sympathy whatever.

He began to write, not Magickal texts at first, but turgid poetry, and extreme, pornographic stories and novels. Despite Crowley’s complaint that occultist Arthur Edward Waite, of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, is not only the most ponderously platitudinous and priggishly prosaic of pretentiously pompous pork butchers of the language, but the most voluminously voluble, it was the Beast whose work was truly insufferable, full of immense, clotted prose. Clouds, he wrote, they are without water; carried about of winds; trees whose fruit withereth, without fruit, twice dead, plucked up by the roots; raging waves of the sea, foaming out their own shame; wandering stars, to whom is reserved the blackness of darkness forever…

His first mature book, White Stains, rewrites Richard von Krafft-Ebbing’s Psychopathia Sexualis as a series of poems—the title refers, of course, to semen; and the later Snowdrops from a Curate’s Garden includes such marvelously titled stories as The Cocksucker’s Crime, or the Cunt of the Countess, The Futile Fuck Stick, Juggling with Joy-Jelly, and Tupping a Tombstone. When, back in London in 1922, he began to imbibe mescalin, and hashish, and opium, and cocaine, and heroin, to avoid bankruptcy he composed the famous The Diary of a Drug Fiend, ostensibly fiction, albeit beginning with the announcement: This is a true story. It has been rewritten only so far as was necessary to conceal personalities. Yet in contradistinction to Thomas De Quincey’s phantasmagoric visions described in Confessions of an English Opium-Eater, Crowley prefers to take the opportunity to explicate his theory of Thelema—love is the law, law under will—and his subsequent mastery of True Will. By following True Will one will achieve fulfillment: the Great Work. One achieves True Will by practice of Magick, the Gnostic Mass, and other esoteric practices, many of which would be elucidated by later followers, adding such mystical concepts as the Babalon Working, the Typhonian Order, the English Qaballa, and Maat Magick.

Crowley’s Magick took occasional physical forms. In London, he materialized the helmet and leg of a spirit called Buer. At Boleskin House at Loch Ness, the housekeeper went mad, the house filled with dark shadows, and darkness became so general inside he had to work by lamplight, despite the sun shining brightly upon the haunted lake. In Mexico, his magical condition made him curiously uncomfortable. He was succeeding beyond all expectations. At one point he was even able to gradually make his image disappear from a mirror. Later, on Fifth Avenue in New York City, he once followed an ordinary businessman down the sidewalk, intently copying his every movement as he strode down the boulevard. Then, suddenly, Crowley collapsed to the ground. Simultaneously, the businessman fell. Sprawled on the pavement, confused, the businessman looked confusedly around as the Beast basked in his profound Magickal powers.

In Mexico City the Beast discovered his first Whore of Babylon, a literal prostitute, on the streets. After Mexico City, San Francisco. After San Francisco, Ceylon, where he met up with former member of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, the Buddhist priest Allan Bennett, who taught Crowley the mysticism of the East. The numerous practices of yoga, he learned, are simply dodges to help one to acquire the knack of slowing down the current of thought and ultimately stopping it altogether. After Ceylon, where he bedded another married woman, Crowley traveled to Paris, before returning to Boleskin House, where he married Rose Kelly, a strange, quiet girl, whose masochism neatly matched the Beast’s sadism. Then to Cairo, where they fucked inside the Great Pyramid, then Ceylon again, where a bat, shot by Crowley, entangled itself in Rose’s hair, convincing her she had become a bat. The finest case of obsession that I have ever had the good fortune to observe, noted the Beast. Not long after, she gave birth to a daughter. They named her Nuit Ma Ahathoor Hecate Sappho Jezebel Lilith. His second child, Lola Zaza, nearly died, and Rose went insane. Then Lilith, Poupée, his doll, died, and her death shattered Crowley. At least for a little while.

Morocco, Spain, more mistresses. He seduced one woman after another, practicing sexual magic and masturbatory rites such as the Karezza, organized in Crowey’s demonic Choronzon Club, where initiates would attempt intercourse without orgasmic release. Filing his canines to points, the Beast began to provide what he called the Serpent’s Kiss, where he would bite women on the wrist or the throat with his sharpened fangs. He shit on carpets and called his shit sacred. In America, he ate until bloated and fasted until thin again. In Berlin, he attempted a hostile takeover of the Ordo Templi Orientis and failed. And in London during the war was rejected by Naval Intelligence, despite associations with such notoriously conspiratorial—and grotesquely antisemitic—figures such as Roald Dahl and Ian Fleming. 

The Beast took on many forms. In Chancery Lane, he affected a Russian accent and called himself Count Vladimir Svareff. Shortly thereafter, when he moved to the monster-strewn shores of Loch Ness, renamed himself the Laird of Boleskin. In Cairo, he was Chioa Khan, and there the Egyptian god Horus revealed to him his guardian angel, Aiwass; it was Aiwass who dictated The Book of the Law to the Beast, where Crowley first formulated his famous phrase Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law. He wrote it in book after book, in huge red letters on mountainsides. And he lived it. It was an instruction not far from Augustine’s Dilige et quod vis fac—love, and what you will, do. Crowley’s concatenation of Christianity, ancient Egyptian religions, and occult mysteries was a heady brew that attracted all sorts, especially weaker figures drawn to the Beast’s strong, vicious personality.

His acolytes surrounded him like flies on holy shit and just as quickly dropped like flies. His followers obsessively worshipped the Beast before drifting away, going mad, or dying off, one by one, often by suicide. The mathematician and fervent disciple Norman Mudd filled his pants with stones and, like Virginia Woolf, walked into the sea, precisely as predicted—or insisted upon—by Crowley. Hanni the scryer, who saw the Devil in a crystal ball, went insane. Dorothy Olson, Maria Teresa Ferrari de Miramar, and Leah Hirsig were all said to be unstable, although to what extent that was simply misogyny cannot now be firmly established. A mistress known only as Gertrude stabbed Crowley with a carving knife, which was probably no more than he deserved, whereupon Crowley tied her up, leaving her prone on the floor with a note saying she must never be released. Even the Beast himself, despairing at one point of life, clipped a suicide note of his own to a lighter atop the cliffs of Hell’s Mouth, before thinking better of it. He sodomized young men, not because he was homosexual, but because the deviancy was to him so delicious. Eventually, like everything else, it became tiresome and rote. Now penniless from his vast profligacy, Crowley traveled to admirers’ home and spent thousands of dollars and pounds on women, drink, cigars, and only the most expensive and delicate victuals. 

One day, flooded with pleurisy and heart failure, the Beast dropped dead of a little bronchitis. They held a Black Mass at which Crowley’s earthly remains were cremated. His ashes were buried in a backyard in New Jersey.