Living in Fernando Pessoa’s world

According to some reports, the last words of the occultist and self-described Great Beast 666 Aleister Crowley were, “I am perplexed.” Crowley, who was born in 1875 into a wealthy family of evangelical Christians, founded an ersatz religion he called Thelema, whose central injunction was: “Do what thou wilt is the whole of the law.” His interest in the occult seems to have begun while he was at Cambridge from 1895 to 1898. When he died in 1947, an impoverished heroin addict in a Hastings boarding house, the religion he had concocted had been embraced by the leading theorist of tank warfare, Major-General JFC Fuller; the American rocket scientist John W Parsons; and, for a time, the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Walter Duranty, who, as Moscow correspondent for the New York Times, helped cover up the man-made Soviet famine of 1932-33.

https://www.newstatesman.com/culture/books/2021/08/living-fernando-pessoa-s-world