Perdurabo: The Life of Aleister Crowley, Revised and Expanded Edition

“I shall kill myself and I shall kill you, too, if you don’t marry me,” Raoul Loveday insisted, thus becoming Betty May’s third husband in the summer of 1922. ¹ They were wed at the registry office in Oxford, where the groom was a student. Raoul was nervous, fumbled the wedding band, and dropped it on the floor. A photo of the newlyweds, taken in the gardens of St. John’s College, featured above Raoul’s head the apparition of a young man lying horizontally in slumber or death. All in all, it was an ominous affair.

Born Charles Frederick Loveday (1900–1923)—he would adopt the name “Raoul” while a student at Oxford—he was a frail youth with an unhealthy pallor. Born in Rangoon on July 3, 1900, he was one of two children to Royal Navy officer George Loveday (born c. 1859) and his wife, Amelia Ann Lewendon (b. 1859). ² Sickly since birth, malaria struck Raoul as a child while still living in Rangoon. They later moved to South London, raising their family at 112 Barry Road in East Dulwich. ³

On Aug. 2, 1918, at age eighteen, he enlisted in the Inns of Court Officers Training Corps. Nicknamed “The Devil’s Own,” the Inns of Court were a volunteer battalion, part of the London Territorial Force based in Berkhamsted, Hertfordshire, from September 1914 to June 1919. ⁴ From there, Loveday attended St. John’s College, Oxford, where he studied history, played football (Raymond Greene said “he was very good”), wrote poetry, and became interested in the occult. ⁵ Betty May reported that his poetry had attracted critical attention, but Greene deemed it “remarkably bad.” ⁶ One example appears in the journal Oxford Poetry:

Sing now of London

At fall of dusk;

A summer dragonfly—

Crept from the husk.

Dragonfly, on whose wing

Run golden wires;

So, down a street pavement,

Lamps throw their fires.

Dragonfly, whose wing is pricked

By many a spark;

Electric eyes of taxis

Bright through the dark.

Dragonfly, whose life is

Cold and brief as dew,

Drone now for London dusk,

Soon dead too. ⁷

Loveday was also an early member of Oxford’s Hypocrites Club, whose later members included writers Evelyn Waugh (1903–1966), Anthony Powell (1905–2000), and Terence Lucy Greenidge (1902–1970). Originally the least fashionable of Oxford’s clubs—devoted to the discussion of philosophy—it soon developed a raucous reputation. According to Evelyn Waugh, it was “notorious not only for drunkenness but for flamboyance of dress and manner which was in some cases patently homosexual.” ⁸ Loveday was in fact the club’s secretary; ⁹ after one late night of drinking, he returned to Oxford after hours and tried to climb back into the college, managing only to impale himself on the gate railing, where he hung upside down by his thigh and nearly bled to death before help arrived. His extracurricular activities distracted the youth from his studies so much that he was nearly sent down from St. John’s; to everyone’s surprise, he managed a first class in history, graduating in 1922. ¹⁰

Betty May has been described by her friends as “A bad girl with a beautiful face and a good heart.” ¹¹ Crowley uncharitably called her “a half-crazy whore, who had been twice married and once divorced.” ¹² Born in Limehouse as Betty Marlow Golding, ¹³ she grew up in poverty. She worked as an artist’s model for a time, sitting for Augustus John, Jacob Kramer, and Jacob Epstein. ¹⁴ Enjoying some celebrity, she moved to Paris, became a heavy drug user, and claims to have been known among Apache robbers as the “Tiger Woman,” a name that stuck when she returned to England. Her first husband, an addict, left her a widow, and the second divorced her over her own cocaine addiction before she was able to cure herself. ¹⁵ Although she reports that she met Raoul at the Harlequin, a Soho pub where she sang, Raoul’s sister gave a less romantic account: he attended an undergraduate’s party where all the men present placed their names in a hat to decide by lottery who would marry Betty May. “Unlucky Raoul was the one,” she lamented. ¹⁶ In any event, they married three weeks later, in September.

Loveday had discovered Crowley through reading The Oxford Book of Mystical Verse and struck up a correspondence with the poet. ¹⁷ That fall, in 1922, he met Betty Bickers, wife of Sheridan Bickers, at the Harlequin. When she learned that Raoul had been studying The Equinox for two years, she told him Crowley was staying with her at 31 Wellington Square, teaching her magick and giving lectures on Thelema. To Raoul’s delight, she arranged a meeting. Betty May, who had been unimpressed with Crowley when she met him at the Café Royal in 1914, refused to accompany Raoul on the visit. So he went alone, and never came home that night. Nor the next.

A scraping at her third-story bedroom window woke Betty May out of a sound sleep. Switching on her light, she walked to the window, pulled aside the curtain, and nearly cried out when she saw a face pressed up against the glass. Then she recognized the eyes that pleaded to her. They were Raoul’s. Betty threw open the window to find her husband, covered with soot and stinking of ether, hanging from a drainpipe thirty feet off the ground. She grabbed his arms, pulled him inside, and undressed him. Although he passed out before he could answer any of her questions, answers were unnecessary. Raoul had obviously spent three days with Crowley, who had exposed her husband to the vices that had wrecked her previous marriages. Seduced by the romance of Betty’s bohemian days, Raoul was eager to experience the wild life that she now shunned. Crowley pointed the way for him. Raoul became devoted to mysticism and, even though he had a £1,000 a year job lined up, lost his ambition for anything but magick. Betty’s fears came true when she answered her door one day to a portly, middle-aged bald man with a bottle of wine. “Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law,” he said.

The Beast smiled and politely kissed Betty’s stiff hand. He offered her the bottle and explained, “I’ve come to dinner.”

She turned around to find Raoul simultaneously beaming at the Master and looking sheepishly at his wife. Fury boiled over her face in the form of a furrowed brow and tautly pressed lips. She grabbed her hat and coat and, passing AC in the doorway, fired off one last shot. “I shan’t cook any meal for you .”

She was scarcely two steps away when Crowley replied, “The day will come when you will cook all my meals for me.”

Contrary to the preceding account of drain-climbing and menacing meals—drawn from Betty May’s memoirs ¹⁸ —Crowley paints a strikingly different picture of the couple. From his perspective, Betty wasn’t living the clean life that her memoirs claim she was, and the indulgent lifestyle to which she was exposing Raoul appalled Crowley. Recognizing the youth’s capacity for magick, AC wished to groom him as his successor, and so he invited the Lovedays to Cefalù:

I hope you will come p.d.q. and bring Betty. I honestly tell you that the best hope for your married life is to get out of the sordid atmosphere of ‘Bohemian’ London.…

Does it surprise you that the notoriously wicked A.C. should write thus? If so, you have not understood that he is a man of brutal commonsense and a loyal friend. So come and live in the open air amid the beauty of Nature.… Beak Street and Fitzroy Street are horrors unthinkable even in Rome; and Rome is a cesspool compared with Cefalù.

The society of Scholars, of free women and of delightful children will indeed be a great change for Betty; but it is what she needs most. There is in her not only a charming woman, but a good one; and she will develop unsuspected glories, given a proper environment. In London she has not one single decent influence, except your own; and however deeply and truly she may love you, she won’t be able to resist “la nostalgie de la boue” for ever. ¹⁹

Raoul accepted enthusiastically, promising to join him later that month, and Crowley returned to the Abbey on November 4.

In November, The Diary of a Drug Fiend appeared in bookstores. The press responded cooly to the book, the Times Literary Supplement calling it “a phantasmagoria of ecstasies, despairs, and above all verbiage,” and the New York Times Book Review deeming it nothing more than a tract on Thelema. ²⁰ Few copies sold, and the book would ordinarily have vanished into obscurity had James Douglas of the Sunday Express not seen it. A proponent of the suppression of James Joyce’s Ulysses , he dubbed Crowley’s novel “A Book for Burning” in his November 19 article.

I have therefore determined … to do my best to secure the immediate extirpation of The Diary of a Drug Fiend (Collins, 7/6 net) by Aleister Crowley. It is a novel describing the orgies of vice practised by a group of moral degenerates who stimulate their degraded lusts by doses of cocaine and heroin. Although there is an attempt to pretend that the book is merely a study of the depravation caused by cocaine, in reality it is an ecstatic eulogy of the drug and of its effects upon the body and the mind. A cocaine trafficker would welcome it as a recruiting agent which would bring him thousands of new victims.

He called for the immediate suppression of this repulsive, blasphemous, obscene book.

Black Record of Aleister Crowley

Preying on the Debased

His Abbey

Profligacy and Vice in Sicily

The article reviewed the controversial aspects of his past: the suggestive titles of books (such as The Honourable Adulterers ), his Rites of Eleusis, and his pro-German propaganda. It summed up Crowley’s literary record as “blasphemy, filth, and nonsense,” calling his books “either incomprehensible or disgusting—generally both. His language is the language of a pervert, and his ideas are negligible.” Adding to the controversy was that a portrait of Crowley, by Ukrainian expatriate artist Jacob Kramer (1892–1962), was currently on display at the Goupil Galleries. At the request of a Chelsea hostess, he agreed to do Crowley’s portrait; but after meeting his subject, Kramer avoided working on it until, after much prodding, he produced it in a single sitting.

The article also gave “details” of Crowley’s orgies, which they claim involved smelly cakes made with goat’s blood. “Suffice it to say that they are horrible beyond the misgivings of decent people.” The article then described the inhabitants of the Abbey:

Three women he keeps there permanently for his orgies. All of them he brought from America two or three years ago. One is a French-American governess, one an ex-schoolmistress, and one a cinema actress from Los Angeles.

Whenever he needs money, and cannot get it from fresh victims, he sends them on the streets of Palermo or Naples to earn it for him. He served once a prison sentence in America for procuring young girls for a similar purpose.

The French-American governess has two children (of which he is the father), who live in the midst of the debauchery. The children of the schoolmistress by him are dead. ²¹

Butts, seeing her lover and herself painted unflatteringly as the protagonists of The Diary of a Drug Fiend , provided anonymous information to the Sunday Express as a means of striking back at Crowley. Butts also fictionalized details of Crowley’s abortive ritual with Leah and the goat: in her version, Leah and the goat did copulate, and Crowley, at the moment the goat climaxed, slit its throat, spilling blood over Leah’s back. When the Scarlet Woman stood and looked helpless, asking “What should I do now?,” Butts, cool and collected, reputedly lit a cigarette and jibed, “If I were you, I’d take a bath.” Aside from an uncharacteristic portrait of Leah as a lost sheep, it also raised the question of how an observer knows when a goat is climaxing. According to Butts’s journal, she was not even present for the ritual; ²² she repeated it to the Sunday Express as hearsay and injected herself into the story as an observer to deliver the punch line. Regardless, the story circulated widely and passed unchallenged as fact. ²³ Ironically, before the controversy over The Diary of a Drug Fiend finally died down, Butts’s first book, Speed the Plough and Other Stories (1923), would be listed alongside Crowley’s in John Bull ’s article “Books We’d Like to Burn.” ²⁴

Crowley chalked up James Douglas’s initial review to the inanity peculiar to the Sunday Express , but the November 26 attack was pure libel. Alas, he was now so broke that he managed to return to Cefalù only through a £20 advance from Austin Harrison; initiating libel proceedings was financially impossible, particularly as defending the infamous Aleister Crowley would require a great barrister indeed. However, he planned to send Jane Wolfe, accused of being a prostitute, to London, thinking she would stand a better chance of winning damages. Even a small settlement would allow Crowley to prepare his own large and expensive lawsuit.

By the time the book was released in America the following summer, the press there remarked “Aleister Crowley has written a new book which is said to have made a bigger sensation in London than Jurgen did in America.” ²⁵

An ad for the American edition of The Diary of a Drug Fiend . (photo credit 15.4)

Despite—or perhaps because of—the controversy, Éditions Kemplen of Paris wrote to Crowley on April 2, 1924, proposing a French translation. The press, however, was short-lived, and this edition never appeared. ²⁶

En route to the Abbey, the Lovedays broke camp in Paris to visit Nina Hamnett. When the artist learned that Raoul was heading for Cefalù to be Crowley’s secretary, she became concerned. Raoul had been very ill, his handsome face still corpse-like, and she believed the Mediterranean heat, mosquitoes, and food would delay his recovery. “If you go to Cefalù now, you’ll die,” she insisted, urging him to recuperate first. But Raoul pressed on, determined to find his destiny at the Abbey of Thelema.

On Sunday night, November 26—the day the Sunday Express launched its front-page assault on Crowley—the Lovedays arrived at the Abbey. Their first act as visitors was to read and sign the Oath of Affiliates, stating that they agreed to live by the Abbey’s rules:

I, willing to abide within the Abbey of Thelema, make Oath and sign: that I do utterly deny, abjure and condemn all allegiance soever to all gods and men, accepting the Law of Thelema as my sole Law:

that I affirm The Book of the Law to be the Word of Truth and the Rule of Life:

that I dedicate myself utterly and without stint my body and soul to the Great Work which is to proclaim and execute the Law of Thelema:

that I will accept unquestionably and irrevocably the conditions of life in the Abbey of Thelema, and uphold its ordinances and customs (as declared in the Books LII, CI, CXCIV) and maintain the authority of the Scarlet Woman and of her Lord the Beast 666. ²⁷

With the waiver signed, Beast formally accepted them as visitors to the Abbey. Given the Sunday Express articles, Raoul sent a reassuring note home:

Dear Mum and Dad,

Another line just to let you know how happy and comfortable we both are. Also to let you know that the articles in the Sunday Express , about the man in an annexe of whose house we are staying, are absolute lies, and written by an enemy. He was in the Secret Service in America; and had to pretend to be pro-German: hence they have a good opportunity to attack. An answer has been sent showing that every word is untrue. He has been as nice to us as anyone could be; and Robinson Smith is his friend. I thought I’d just send you this so that you could contradict it and needn’t worry. Best wishes.

Your loving son,
Fred ²⁸

All the things you have read in the Sunday Express are absolutely untrue. Crowley is quite nice and this house is well conducted. I give you my word of honour and we are very happy and we are looking much better and feeling it. We get up at 7.30 and go to bed at 8 o’clock so you see what a healthy life we are really leading but when we come back you will see for yourself how well we look. I hope you are all well and not worrying a little bit. ²⁹

In all, they sent eight letters to Raoul’s parents, assuring them over and again that the Sunday Express was lying about Crowley.

Raoul loved the Abbey from the first morning he awoke to the sound of tom-toms and praises to the rising sun. “I cannot express my feeling of exaltation as I stood there inhaling the sweet morning air.” ³⁰ He climbed rocks and performed the rituals he had been studying, now under the tutelage of the Master. According to Betty May,

Raoul spent most of the days playing chess with the ‘Beast’ in his study, or poring over books on magic. There were various magical incantations, including the killing of a cat because it was an ‘evil spirit,’ and the ‘Beast’ would, on state occasions, appear for some ceremony clad in gorgeous robes and wielding a word or colored wand. ³¹

He soon became an A

Probationer, taking the magical name of Frater Aud (the magical light, whence the term odic force ). Raoul quickly ascended to the position of being Crowley’s favorite pupil ever. Neuburg, for all his manifesting mediumship, and Achad, despite discovering the Key, had both strayed from the Path; but Raoul was a brilliant and devoted student, and AC felt they had a powerful magical current in full swing.

Betty, however, reacted unfavorably to life at the Abbey, and made life miserable for everyone by refusing to cooperate with the rules. At one point, she got so fed up with holding a basin for Crowley as he ate that she dumped the water over his head; amidst the breathless silence that followed, Beast simply continued his meal nonchalantly. In another incident, Betty pulled a gun on him. Crowley admired her pluck and spirit, and he responded as the insidious jester that was so much a part of him: one day at dinner, he announced that they would sacrifice Betty at dawn. After the color drained from her face, she saw Raoul chuckling at the comment. She was so frightened that she sneaked away from the Abbey that night, and Raoul had to find her and assure her it was just a joke. In time, Betty warmed up to Beast. Particularly memorable was the day they both climbed the Rock of Cephaloedium. Betty was surprised at the deftness and agility of this fat forty-seven-year-old man, and comforted by his gentle reassurance: “Remember, it is I who will get hurt first.”

One day, he suggested the Lovedays take a break from the Abbey’s rigors and get some fresh air and exercise. Thus he sent them hiking to the monastery thirteen miles away. On the return trip, they stopped by a spring to rest. Parched, Raoul dipped his hand into the water. “Raoul,” his wife interrupted, “remember what Beast said about drinking the water?” He had advised against it. Frater Aud shrugged his shoulders, cupped water in his hands, and drank. He sighed deeply and, seeing Betty’s surprise at his disregard for his Master’s directions, explained, “If I didn’t have a drink, I should have died.”

Winter hit the Abbey hard in January 1923. The air was cool, the sky constantly overcast, and the concrete walls and floor of the Abbey were icy slabs. No sooner had Leah recovered than the “Cefalù plague” struck Crowley down with emphysema, asthma, and bronchitis. Shortly thereafter, Raoul suffered a recurrence of his childhood malaria, but nevertheless continued the Great Work, going on astral journeys and reporting his visions.

When February came around and neither Crowley nor Raoul improved, they called Dr. Maggio, president of the district hospital. He diagnosed Raoul with a liver infection. Although the doctor represented the best possible care, Crowley, not placing his faith entirely in the hands of Aesculapians, calculated Raoul’s horoscope and its progressions; his face turned grim as he looked at the aspects. “It looks as if you might die on the 16th of February at 4:00.”

On February 10, matters at the Abbey became tense, and a fight broke out between Betty and Ninette. The Tiger Woman had called Shummy a slob and refused to work with her. The others appeared, Crowley siding with Betty, Leah defending Ninette, and Jane listening silently. In the end, Crowley suggested that, with everyone sick lately, discipline had slipped and that they must all try harder to live together and pursue higher goals.

Things erupted again the next day. Although Beast had banned newspapers from the Abbey—encouraging students to read literature, philosophy, and magic in the Abbey library instead—he agreed to rethink his policy and discuss it with Betty. When she failed to meet him as scheduled, he came to Raoul’s room and, in order to get her attention, snatched the London paper from her hands. Betty reacted violently, first screaming and cursing, then grabbing anything that wasn’t nailed down and throwing it at the Master Therion. His suggestions that they step outside of the sick room and speak civilly only met with more flying crockery. When Crowley resorted to restraining her, she swung and kicked at him defiantly. Finally Raoul, barely strong enough to stand, staggered between them and persuaded Betty to calm down.

That evening, Betty packed her bags and left the Abbey, dropping into the mail a note that Raoul had written to his parents earlier that day:

Forgive me for not having written before but I have had a very sharp bout of malaria which has left behind it a persistent diarrhoea. I have had this for about ten days now and it has left me as weak as water. As you see I have had to get Betty to write this letter for me. The doctor here is giving me various things but I do not seem to be making much headway. I trust, however, that by the time you get this letter I shall be quite well. Betty, herself, has been unable to keep anything in her stomach for the last week but I think she is just on the turn now. I believe that the air or the water or something here, perhaps the place, does not agree with me. If I can earn enough without having to spend it on the doctor or on the other million extras which surround one in a foreign country if one wants any comfort, if I can do this I think I shall come back.

Dear Mrs. Loveday,

Raoul doesn’t know I am writing and I hope you will not tell him anything I have written on this page to you. I really think Raoul is very very ill and if he doesn’t come home soon he will be too weak to be moved. ³²

Betty went to Palermo, where she lodged a complaint against Crowley with the British consul. As it turns out, His Majesty’s Consul for the Compartimento of Sicily and the Sicilian Islands was Reginald Gambier MacBean (1859–1942), ³³ a Theosophist and Co-Mason who became the Italian Grand Master of the Ancient and Primitive Rite of Memphis-Mizraim in July 1921. Although Spence suggests that this fact may have worked in Crowley’s favor, ³⁴ it may actually have done quite the opposite: after John Yarker died in 1913, Crowley opposed the participation of Theosophist and Co-Mason James Ingall Wedgwood in the election of Yarker’s successor as Sovereign Grand Master General of the Rite, ³⁵ an act that would not have endeared Crowley to those closely allied camps. Furthermore—given AC’s claim to have distilled the Memphis-Mizraim ceremonies into its rituals—OTO would have been viewed as spurious by the Ancient and Primitive Rite. Indeed, in his history of the Rite, MacBean wrote that he revived Memphis-Mizraim in Italy in order “to prevent a spurious revival of the Memphis Rite with political aims in Italy, which would have compromised the regular Obedience of the Memphis Rite in Palermo.” ³⁶ Thus, Betty’s complaint could have set into motion, or contributed to, a disastrous chain of events for AC

The next day, February 12, Leah found Betty and gave her a romantic note from Raoul, wherein he begged his wife to return to his side. As she read the note, her anger dissolved. She dropped the charges and returned with Leah.

They summoned Dr. Maggio again when Raoul took a turn for the worse on February 14. This time, he revised his diagnosis as acute enteritis, an intestinal illness common in the Mediterranean: in 1905 this disease killed Crowley’s first daughter, Lilith, and incapacitated and nearly killed J. F. C. Fuller; at the Abbey, everyone suffered intestinal distress almost constantly. The diagnosis caused the Lovedays to recall the day they stopped at the spring where Raoul drank the water despite Crowley’s warnings.

Raoul’s condition worsened, so on February 16, Beast and Betty went into town to fetch Dr. Maggio. Returning to the Abbey up the mountain path, Betty fainted from exhaustion. Crowley knelt and gently revived her. When she was able to stand, he helped her to her feet and announced, “We will make adoration.” She nodded quietly, and Crowley turned to face the sunset.

Hail unto Thee who art Tum in Thy setting, even unto Thee who art Tum in Thy joy, who travellest over the Heavens in Thy bark at the Down-going of the Sun.

Tahuti standeth in His splendour at the prow, and Ra-Hoor abideth at the helm.

Hail unto thee from the Abodes of Day!

As he spoke the passage from “Liber Resh,” Betty noticed tears streaming down his cheeks, and she understood the words were also a prayer for Raoul.

They marched solemnly back toward the Abbey until Leah met them on the path, as grim-faced as they. Betty grew concerned. “Is he worse?”

Raoul had died at 4 o’clock, just as Crowley had predicted. Betty found him in bed, laying with his head canted on his arms, just like the deathly apparition in their wedding picture. Dr. Maggio ascribed the cause of death to paralysis of the heart, and assured everyone that, even if they’d called him when Raoul first got sick, he was so weak that the outcome would not have changed.

Within an hour of death, Raoul’s body was placed in a coffin; local law required that the body be disposed of within twenty-four hours. So Crowley spent the night reciting over the clay and rapping with his wand on the side of the box to prepare for his hasty burial. In the morning, Crowley donned his long white silk robe and the star sapphire ring he had worn in Bou-Sâada with Neuburg. On his breast hung a topaz Rosy Cross, and on his head was a cornet inscribed with the name of the northern archangel Uriel. For Crowley, this was the only funeral over which he had ever presided, and the first funeral he had attended since his father died back in 1887.

A mule-driven cart carried the coffin to the local Catholic cemetery as the local monks watched the solemn procession of the Master Therion and his acolytes. Howard, dressed in a blue silk robe and crowned with a wreath of flowers, ran ahead excitedly. The mourners found him at the cemetery, running in circles and announcing, “We’re going to bury Raoul!” AC, Leah, Ninette, Jane, and Betty, all robed, gathered round the bier. Crowley struck his Tibetan bell and conducted a Thelemic service, reciting the “Quia Patris” from his play The Ship; it had always been a poem of great import to Crowley, and he worked it into many rituals, including the Gnostic Mass and the Paris Working. Today, it was for Raoul’s funeral:

Thou, who art I, beyond all I am,

Who hast no nature and no name,

Who art, when all but thou are gone,

Thou, centre and secret of the Sun … ³⁷

In the end, the words that best summed up the tragedy of Raoul’s premature death were from Dr. Faustus: “ ’Tis magic, magic that hath ravished me.” ³⁸

Since Raoul was not a Catholic, he could not be interred in the cemetery; however, a piece of unconsecrated ground outside was made available. The Lovedays would later have their son’s body exhumed and shipped to England.

The funeral concluded, Crowley staggered back to the Abbey, exhausted and sick. He collapsed in bed, where he remained for three weeks with a fever of 102 degrees. Betty, meanwhile, returned to Palermo and awaited funds from London for her passage home. From Palermo, Betty sent Crowley a friendly note, beginning and ending with the Thelemic salutations, referring to him as “Beast,” and promising to visit again if possible. ³⁹

“I don’t charge Crowley with causing Raoul’s death,” she would reflect. “That would be silly.” ⁴⁰ However, by the time Betty reached London and met reporters at the dock, venom replaced her amity. The Sunday Express paid her £80 for a story, and Betty May gave them a good one. A cat, she said, had wandered into the Abbey and Crowley caught it. During one of his rituals, he instructed Raoul to slit its throat, but the acolyte slipped and sliced its neck without killing it. The cat escaped and ran about the room, spitting blood everywhere and breaking the protective magic circle around them. Crowley finally caught and anesthetized the cat, permitting Raoul to finish the job. Leah, meanwhile, caught the blood in a chalice and gave it to Raoul to drink. He did, and it is from this rite, overseen by Crowley, that her husband died. Although Crowley denied this story, his friend Gerald Yorke conceded in later years that the sacrifice had indeed occurred, but emphasized that it was unrelated to Loveday’s cause of death. ⁴¹

P. R. Stephensen, who would later become Crowley’s friend and publisher, called the stories that filled newspapers for the next two months a campaign of vilification unparalleled in the history of journalism. It began in the February 25, 1923, Sunday Express with a headline splashed across the front page:

New Sinister Revelations of Aleister Crowley.

Varsity Lad’s Death.

Enticed to “Abbey”

Deradful Ordeal of a Young Wife.

Crowley’s Plans.

The article described Raoul, without naming him, as “a boy of twenty-two.” His wife—the thrice married, cocaine-addicted pub singer whose bandit friends named her the “Tiger Woman”—became a naive and defenseless maiden whose idyllic marriage was destroyed by the manipulations of the depraved Aleister Crowley at his Abbey of iniquity. The abominations published in the Sunday Express , she said, only hinted at the real horrors that occurred at the Abbey. Betty’s warning that Crowley planned to sue the Sunday Express for £5,000 over the libels printed in their attack on The Diary of a Drug Fiend —met with cocksureness:

The “Sunday Express” promises Crowley that it intends to pursue its investigations with the utmost ruthlessness, and that next Sunday it will endeavour to supply him with considerable further material on which to base any action which he may care to bring.

An artist’s conception of Betty May’s account of a cat being sacrificed at the Abbey. (photo credit 15.5)

While the Sunday Express followed the article with an interview with Betty May on March 4, John Bull commandeered the bandwagon. In the following weeks, its lurid stories featured headlines that would be at home on any tabloid:

A Wizard of Wickedness (March 17).

The Wickedest Man in the World (March 24).

King of Depravity Arrives (April 11).

A Man We’d Like to Hang (May 19).

The paper claimed Crowley was actually in London and called for his arrest. It reported that as a mountaineer, Crowley had at one time run low on provisions and chopped up two of his coolies for food. It called him “one of the most shameless degenerates who ever boasted of his British birth.” ⁴² These attacks generated so much interest that even American newspapers picked up the story of Raoul’s death.

When the onslaught began, Crowley was still too sick to care. Jane, however, arrived in London on February 28. Seeking legal counsel to sue the Sunday Express , she learned that she could not sue for defamation because the article did not mention her name. Before long, an undercover reporter from John Bull tracked down this “unscrupulous harpy” and interviewed “the elusive and dangerous Jane Wolfe.” The result was “We Trap the Temptress,” ⁴³ an article disclosing how Jane was seeking new students for the Abbey, along with other equally horrible truths.

Among those shocked by the news of Raoul’s death was dramatist and producer Lance Sieveking (1896–1972). He had just written his novel The Psychology of Flying and was in his second year at Cambridge. Like other students, he and his friends absorbed themselves in the newspaper accounts, trying to name Crowley’s “nameless rites” and imagine his “unimaginable horrors.” Ultimately, all they managed was to revolt each other with images far more twisted than any Crowley or the press could suggest. Then, around Easter, students and perfect strangers began asking him, “I say, do tell me about Aleister Crowley. Is he really as bad as they say?” Sieveking denied knowing Crowley, to the disbelief of his interrogators. This mystified him until he discovered The Diary of a Drug Fiend contained the line, “I suppose every one has read The Psychology of Flying by L. de Giberne Sieveking” on page 24. Although the passage explained the connection, he found the remaining text incomprehensible. It would be years before he thought of Crowley again.

Raoul’s death robbed Crowley of a friend, student, magical son, and secretary. While there was no replacing him, he still needed a secretary. Thus he summoned Norman Mudd, one of his most devoted and stalwart students.

Mudd had changed a great deal since Crowley last saw him on Trinity’s campus in 1910. After finishing his master’s degree, Mudd received two job offers, one at the National Physical Laboratory and another as a professor at Grey University College in Bloemfontein, South Africa. He chose the latter, hoping to leave the country, forget his college dealings with Crowley, and make a fresh start. He ran the Department of Applied Mathematics from 1911 to 1912, all the while experiencing fits of depression. In 1915 he lost an eye due to a gonorrheal infection. From 1916 to 1917 he ran the Department of Pure Mathematics and wrote a criticism of Einstein’s theory of relativity. He nevertheless remained unhappy. In 1920, a decade after he last saw AC, Mudd went on sabbatical to seek the only man who’d ever made him feel he had a purpose in life: Aleister Crowley. Sailing from South Africa, he arrived in Southampton on December 13, 1920, ⁴⁴ and began his quest. Finding the blue Equinox , he traveled to America, arriving aboard the Imperator on January 18, 1921. ⁴⁵ On reaching Detroit, he learned from the Thelemites there that, to his disappointment, AC had already returned to England, where Mudd thus returned on February 7, 1921. ⁴⁶ A letter to his colleague, Leo Marquard, reveals Mudd’s state of mind at this time. Beginning and ending his letter with the standard Thelemic salutations, Mudd wrote about the path of initiation:

The taking up of this Path is what is referred to variously as the Second Birth, or being Born of the Water of the Spirit, or (by Dante) the Vita Nuova, or (by the Egyptians) the Entrance on Light, or (by the Buddhists) The Noble Aryan Path, or (by the Alchemists) the Great Work, and so on. Also each of these groups possesses and communicates to aspirants a body of wisdom and a set of disciplines which guide and protect the beginner and prevent his task from being harder and more dangerous than is, in the nature of the case, unavoidable. Also, it is possible to investigate this Path in a purely scientific manner and to pursue the Work without committing oneself to any definite creed or philosophy . ⁴⁷

When he finally got hold of Crowley, he received an invitation to Cefalù. This coincided with an invitation to organize the school of astronomy for the University of South Africa. He turned down the job to visit the Abbey. ⁴⁸

Mudd would become Crowley’s biggest challenge: as an academician, he was accustomed to the logical rigors and proofs of mathematics, and refused to engage in any activity or initiation that compromised his objectivity. Nevertheless, he was Christian-reared and caught up in the passion of Crowley’s convictions, eager to understand and spread the Word of Thelema. He longed to dissect The Book of the Law and argue its philosophical and historical elements with AC. All Crowley wanted was a secretary.

Frater Omnia Pro Veritate (All for Truth), as Mudd was known in the A

, arrived the third week of April 1923. At the same time, two of Raoul’s friends, John Pigney and Claud Bosanquet, also came to the Abbey to determine for themselves the circumstances of their classmate’s death. The pair only stayed long enough to discover the facts and return home satisfied, if not disappointed, with the truth.

Raymond Greene (1901–1982) also came to Cefalù at this time. An acquaintance of Raoul’s, Greene and two of his schoolmates had devised a plan for Greene to go to Cefalù, assassinate Crowley, and flee to the south coast, where his friends would pick him up in a sailboat and take him to Morocco; from there, he would return home via Spain. Greene, however, doubted the stories about Crowley, and refused to participate in such a plan. What finally convinced him was a letter that he received from Crowley just before Easter:

Dear Sir,

Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law.

Forgive me if I suggest, from the little experience that I have in such matters, that when one is establishing a spy system it is rather important to prevent one’s principal plan coming directly into the hands of the person whom you want watched.

Love is the law, love under will.

Yours truly,
Aleister Crowley
Knight Guardian of the Sangraal ⁴⁹

Greene visited Italy that Easter, where Crowley met him in Naples to discuss drugs, sex, and libel. “Did Shelley bring libel actions?” AC asked. Before Greene could respond, he continued. “No. He came to Italy. Did Byron bring libel actions? No. He came to Italy. Did I bring libel actions?” By this time, Greene was able to follow the answer in his mind. Crowley received Greene warmly, and a visit to Cefalù left him reporting to Raoul’s mother that Crowley was well-liked in the community, the children seemed clean and healthy, and that he saw nothing suspicious about Raoul’s death.

Then, just as Crowley prepared to get back to business, the Office of the Commisario summoned him. Accompanied by Mudd and Leah, Crowley learned that he had one week to settle his affairs and leave the country. ⁵⁰

CHAPTER FIFTEEN Adonis

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

Adonis