Lawrence Sutin has written two excellent biographies, both of which appear in my list of all time faves (which will be posted soon, perhaps?), Divine Invasions: a Life of Philip K. Dick, and Do What Thou Wilt: A Life of Aleister Crowley, which Erowid has recently reviewed. Crowley, writes Justin Case, was not only:
…a pioneer in the exploration of consciousness through Eastern mysticism (yoga, meditation, etc.) and Western occult practices and the synergistic combination of these techniques, but he was also a pioneer in the use of certain psychoactive substances. He used these substances to intensify his occult and mystical practices and he used mystical and occult practices to direct his experiences with psychoactive substances. He was doing this in the beginning of the 20th century, no less, blazing his own trail into territories that had not been visited in Western civilization since the Renaissance. As Gerald Suster has written in his much shorter biography The Legacy of the Beast, “Crowley was advocating the method of psychological introspection and he appealed to men of science to become pioneers in the exploration of consciousness, gathering their data from experimentation on themselves with the techniques of Magick and Yoga and also through the carefully observed use of drugs.” Suster points out that this appeal was largely ignored until the 1960s when Timothy Leary, Richard Alpert, Robert S. de Ropp, John Lilly, Robert Anton Wilson and others proceeded to experiment fearlessly and record their results and hypotheses.
[read the whole review: here.]
