Oliver Haddo

Aleister Crowley had the honour of leing parodied, albeit negatively, by three well-known contemporary authors: W Somerset Maugham, to whom he was Oliver Haddo in "The Magician;" Dennis Wheatley, who portrayed him as Mocata in "The Devil Rides Out;" and M R James, who cast Crowley as the karcist Karswell in "Casting The Runes."

In every case, Crowley was savagely demonised as a lecherous, hateful, spiteful, petty charlatan and a sexually-deviant monster.

Bear in mind that Crowley was open about his bisexuality, at a time when it was considered illegal, may you burn in hell Queen Victoria, but that was enough in those pre-Wolfenden days to give authors licence to paint him as a literal and metaphorical anthropomorphised Satan on Earth.

And that was how I felt in this morning's dream.

The venue was a hotel carvery, like the one on the ground floor of the Manchester Hilton, which I had the pleasure of visiting in '16.

In my dream, which was set at a convention, I was picking my breakfast from the carvery's breakfast buffet, and I noticed things like the women staring at me, then looking away with a cocked snoot if I glanced in their direction; a young man coming up to the young woman right in front of me in the queue, whispering and pointing at me, causing the woman to turn around, gasp, and abandon her tray; and a father loudly ordering his kids to stand behind him.

In the end, I ate alone, feeling like Oliver Haddo and Aleister and Boris Balkan from The Ninth Gate, feeling people staring at me as if I were smoking a cigar indoors or wearing a gimp suit or something. They all felt like people who had, perhaps deliberately, misinterpreted everything I stood for in life and turned it around, so I looked like the manifestation of all of their petty evils and prejudices.

But could I tell them that they were wrong, and they could all go fuck themselves? I guess I'll never know, because the alarm went off right at the worst part of the dream.