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I’m indebted to Steve Jackson of Vancouver, who visited the www.vancouverhistory.ca site and informed me that between October 16 and October 21, 1915 Aleister Crowley (also known as ‘The Great Beast’) visited Vancouver.
Crowley, then 40, was famed for his practice of “magick,” and his dissolute lifestyle, outrageous opinions, consumption of hallucinogenic drugs, etc., etc. He was accompanied to Vancouver, Steve tells me, by his mistress, Jeanne Robert Foster and her ailing, and unsuspecting, husband. They visited Crowley’s “son” (the title was a kind of spiritual honorarium; they weren’t related) Charles Stansfield Jones, who lived in Vancouver and sometimes in Deep Cove.
Jones was a prominent figure in the Ordo Templi Orientis lodge in North America. “He was a long-term resident of Vancouver and Deep Cove,” Steve continues, “and continues to be an important name in the field of magic and the occult . . . He mentored Malcolm Lowry. One source claims that Jones was arrested while attempting to conduct a magical ceremony in the nude in downtown Vancouver.” More than one source claims that Lowry was influenced by Jones to some extent in the writing of his novel, Under the Volcano.

Labels: LITERATURE, MYSTICS

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