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The Strange World of Aleister Crowley

It's growing dark on the summit of Mt Omu, and a single lightbulb flickers into action, illuminating our cabana. At the counter, struggling to make himself understood by the woman serving bowls of hot ciorba, is a young German who is dressed very strangely indeed. My friend leans over to me. "He looks like he's in the Hitler Youth," she whispers. She's not wrong. Dressed in leather shorts, military jack-boots and with a thick canvas waterproof jacket, he looks like he's wearing period costume from the 1920s. He joins his table of friends at the back of the poorly illuminated room, and we notice that they're all dressed exactly the same. It's not just their clothes - all their equipment, from their drinking flasks and cooking pans to their fur-covered rucksacks, looks suitably vintage, as though it could have been stolen from a museum. The Hitler Youth is starting to look like a fairly sensible guess.

Later, when the dark has completely descended upon our cabana, the group - all male, all with short hair, all dressed identically, make their way out of the cabana into the darkness. "Are you scouts," my friend asks them as they pass us. "Not quite," they reply with a smile. The last one to leave, suitably tall and Aryan looking, is carrying a rolled up black flag. It looks as though we've run into a neo-Nazi walking party.

It's in the middle of the night, with the group of boys sleeping only a few metres to my right, when an odd thought occurs to me. Each of the boys had a black armband on their jackets bearing a particularly strange symbol - a golden sun rising over the mountains, depicted against a black background. The more I think about it, the more familiar it seems. It brings to mind an organisation that flourished at the start of the nineteenth century, an organisation whose most famous member was Aleister Crowely, an Englishman who was famously described as "The Wickedest Man In the World". Combining eastern mysticism, magic and self-proclaimed devil worship, the organisation, known as The Golden Dawn, also involved a heavy dose of proto-fascism. Suddenly, everything seemed to fit together: the turn of the century equipment, the Nazi stylings, the black flags, the night-time journeys on the top of a mountain in Transylvania. It seems as though I'm sharing a room with a group of German Satanists.

It's not just gullible Germans (the kind who believe everything that Hollywood tells them about Transylvania) who have been impressed by Aleister Crowley and the Golden Dawn. A turn of the century bohemian, Crowley, as crazy as he sounds, managed to impress a number of mainstream intellectuals, such as WB Yeats. He also made a large impression of a group of people who are slightly less difficult to impress - scores of Rock musicians have been fascinated by the man, with references to his name littering the Rock and Roll hall of fame.

Perhaps it was Crowley's life of decadence and excess that has been so attractive to the music world, since Rock and Roll has always been about creating a kind of fantasy land where the normal restraints that hold us back in everyday life no longer apply. A bisexual heroin addict who asked himself to be known as 'The Beast 666', Crowley can almost be seen as providing a blueprint for Rock and Roll hedonism, a particularly odd individual who is still a source of inspiration more than half a century after his death in 1947.

It's only to be expected that heavy metallers such as Ozzy Osbourne should be taken in by such a character. Ozzy, once famed for biting the heads off bats live on stage (now famous for laying bare his dysfunctional family to the public in the MTV series The Osbournes), wrote a song entitled 'Mr. Crowley' that paid homage to the man. Similarly, it should come as no surprise to learn that Marilyn Manson, idol for frustrated and disillusioned teens the world over, has acknowledged Crowley as one of his favourite author, and that quotes from Crowley's work can be found in his lyrics. Nothing shocking about this, nor about the fact that scores of Scandinavian heavy metal groups find time to develop a fascination with the man when they're not covering their faces in amusing amounts of make-up.

However, Crowley's influence also extends to more mainstream artists. His face can be found on the cover to the Beatles LP 'Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band' (you'll find him on the top row, next to Mae West). You'll also find his portrait on the cover of an album by a man whose innocent relations with young children have been put beyond doubt for once and for all - Michael Jackson. His 1991 LP 'Dangerous' features a drawing of Crowley, otherwise known as 'the founding father of modern satanism', on the cover. We all know that poor old Michael definitely isn't a paedophile, but has anybody thought about satanism? Keep your eyes out for another costly court case in the near future...

Perhaps most strangely of all, Alphaville wrote a song about Crowley's wife, and Led Zeppelin guitarist Jimmy Page was once the owner of Aleister Crowley's large estate on the shores of Loch Ness, Scotland, a location whose reputation for strange goings-on seems only appropriate for its equally odd former owner.

I'm still scanning the newspapers to see if there are records of any strange happenings around the Caraiman war memorial on that particular evening. I half expected to wake up to find 'Blair Witch Project' style symbols hung all around the iron cross and copies of 'Dangerous' and 'Sgt. Peppers' littering the floor. If you hear of any strange happenings, do let me know...