Aleister Crowley (1875-1947), the self-styled “Great Beast” or “Beast 666”, was the notorious occultist, painter, and counter-cultural icon, who figures in the Peter Blake collage on the cover of the Beatles’ Sergeant Pepper. Crowley had a love-hate relationship with London, “dear, vile London”, but it was where he spent much of his adult life, and it was the capital of the culture that created him.

In this talk, Phil Baker will follow Crowley’s tracks through the metropolis to create a biography by sites, revealing a man, an era, and a city. Using a fusion of Crowley’s life-writing with psychogeography, steeped in London’s social history from late-Victorian decadence to the Blitz, Baker will draw extensively on unpublished material and offer an exceptionally intimate picture of the Beast and the women he knew.

While safely ensconced in Soho’s Century Club we will follow Crowley searching for prostitutes in Hyde Park and Pimlico, drinking absinthe in Dean Street’s French House, and finding himself badly down on his luck in bygone Paddington Green – but never quite losing sight of the illumination that drove him: “the abiding rapture,” he wrote in his diary, “which makes a ‘bus in the street sound like an angel choir!”