CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Eccentrics in Exile
Poor and downtrodden, accused of murdering his best friend and favorite pupil, Crowley faced expulsion from his Abbey of Thelema at the Villa Santa Barbara. A petition signed by local villagers sorry to see Crowley go did nothing to undo the expulsion order. He wrote his will on April 30, leaving his possessions to Mudd, then pondered what to do tomorrow, when his deadline came to leave the country. Unsure where to go or what to do, he knew only that the Great Work had to continue. So, on May 1, he consulted the I Ching. It advised that he go to Tunis.
Leah, convinced that a detective was following them, accompanied Crowley while Norman, Ninette, and the children stayed behind, maintaining the Abbey until matters were rectified. They reached Tunis on May 2, and shortly thereafter ended up twenty-five miles northeast in Au Souffle du Zéphyr, the cheapest hotel in La Marsa. Crowley’s journal at this time records:
Another bad night: this time because a mouse ran across Leah’s face at 1:15 a.m. She started screaming and became violently hysterical. I copied her as faithfully as I could.
1
The image of Crowley shrieking hysterically with Leah is both funny and sad. They soon found themselves under a doctor’s care as their health suffered from stress. Meanwhile, the Sunday Express
triumphantly proclaimed:
The Beast Told Go:
Move by Fascisti against Crowley:
Week’s Notice.
2
Mars, rising above Luna, is rather threatening, but there are no close bad aspects either to the Sun or Moon, so probably there is not much to worry about. There is no big complex to make the child distinguished. She is likely to develop into a fairly ordinary little whore.
3
To the Thelemite who venerated the whore Babalon, this last sentence was not intended as derogatory. As Crowley stressed in closing the letter: “Ever yours with lots of love, Beast.” Elsewhere, he asked Mudd to “Tell Ninette that I love her very dearly and enjoyed her letter immensely.”
4
In another letter, Leah tried to keep morale up and family ties tight by adding, “Please tell Miss Lulette that Big Lion and Lala talk about her more than about anyone else.” Ninette similarly did her best to keep “Mama Lala” abreast of developments at the Abbey: Hansi had stripped someone’s tree of green apricots; Isabella had bedbugs in her crib; Lulette asked Beast to bring her back some chocolates; and Howard’s sagacity grew by leaps and bounds. In matters of the Great Work, she took on Salvatore, their drug connection, as a Probationer. Regarding her own practice of pranayama
, Ninette wrote, “I was doing it the other day outdoors whence Hansi came up. Lulette called to him, ‘shh, Hansi! Shummy’s doing polyoner.’ I had to stop and have a beneficial laugh.”
5
The MS though lively is censor proof. It can be represented artfully in prosepctuses as the Confessions of A.C. A great fuss can be made about mailing copies to subscribers in a plain wrapper and otherwise ensuring their delivery.… There should be no difficulty in selling outright 2000 at $10 a copy. Surplus subscriptions can be absorbed in a second Edition which can be in some way different from the first—either abridged or edited or in some way sufficiently altered. During the issuing of the prospectuses the Author will undertake some feat which will bring him great extra publicity.
6
Work also progressed at this time on a commentary to The Book of the Law
. Regarding this comment, Crowley wrote in 1946:
Remember always that Commentary was written 25 years ago, and in a peculiarly exalted state of mind which I can never regain; which is why I never dared touch it. Afraid even to read it!
7
On June 17 he began his commentary on “Liber LXV, or the Book of the Heart Girt with the Serpent.” Also at this time, he wrote “Eruption of Aetna”:
Have not I spoken, even I, Benito,
The big, the brave, the mighty Mussolini,
The ultra-modern Cæsar, with my ‘Veni
Vidi, Vici’?—let all the world agree, too!
Does a mere mountain think that it is free to
Stir up sedition? Shall such teeny-weeny
Volcanoes venture to display their spleeny
And socialist cant?—Subside, mosquito!
8
It was the first in a series of anti-Mussolini poems Crowley wrote in response to his expulsion, published later that year as Songs for Italy
.
Mudd had come to Tunis as early as June 20 to be closer to Crowley and help with the Great Work. Unable to afford separate lodgings, they shared a room, giving them ample time to talk. Mudd was so devoted a student and so dedicated an academician that he took reams of notes on everything they discussed. Among these were Crowley’s plans: he would summon Frank Bennett back to the Abbey, and he planned to contact Trotsky “to suggest that I be put in charge of a world-wide campaign to eradicate Christianity”;
9
neither Bennett nor Trotsky would come through.
On July 22, Mudd’s mathematician friend joined them. Edmund Hugo Saayman (1897–1971) was born at Orange Free State in southern Africa, attending Boys High School in Riversdale and Grey University College in Bloemfontein, where he earned his BS degree.
10
He arrived in the United Kingdom in October 1921
11
as a Rhodes Scholar attending New College, Oxford. Here, he was supervised by prominent English mathematician and number theorist G. H. Hardy (1877–1947).
12
After his summer holiday with Mudd, he would return to Oxford to marry Janet Stokes in 1924, receive his BA with a third class in maths in 1925 and his MA in 1927.
13
As a physics master at High Pavement School, Nottingham, and a part-time lecturer at Leicester University College, he would publish several influential papers in physics.
14
A few days later, Crowley moved into the luxurious Tunisia Palace on a Lesser Magical Retirement.
The books—even apart from the absurd new attribution proposed for the Paths—are so hopelessly bad in almost every way—English, style, sense, point of view, oh everything!—yet they may do good to the people they are written for.
16
September began on a sour note for Crowley, who wrote in his diary for the 2nd:
This a.m. read of the Bombardment of Corfu, killing some dozen or more Armenian children—refugees—in revenge for the murder of some Wop fools by some persons unknown some 1,500 miles away! What utter fools—as well as blackguards—statesmen are!
Spent all day writing 6 sonnets (& some other verse) on the atrocity.
On September 17, Crowley updated the Hag to include a chapter covering the Abbey and his expulsion.
All initiation must begin with an Act of Truth, a definite commitment which affirms and seals the faith of the Aspirant that success in the Great Work is of a higher value than any other conceivable good.… It is therefore an absolute rule in this work of establishing among men the kingdom of the Aeon of Heru-Ra-Ha, that every aspirant is required, right at the start, to make a crucial decision, to take an irrevocable step without receiving full information as to its significance and without security. The clinging to safety in one form or another is the mark of a Slave. To break it quite simply and completely is the only mode open to the aspirant of asserting the Kingly nature. This is the first necessity and the first ordeal is designed to accomplish it.
17
Crowley, Saayman, and Leah witnessed Mudd’s written Act of Truth:
Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law.
I call upon them by the Power of the Act of Truth done by me shortly after the Winter Solstice of the Eighteenth Year of the Aeon, when I renounced my career and my material possessions without reservation, that I might devote my energies wholly to the Great Work, that is, to the Establishment of the Law of Thelema as given by Aiwass through The Beast 666 (the man Aleister Crowley) in the Book of the Law
(Liber Al s[ub] f[igura] XXXI) as in the MS which I have seen, and which I here declare to command by allegiance, in loyal cooperation with The Beast its Prophet.
I hereby acknowledge that most if not all men when in the condition known as ‘being in love’ become temporarily unable to use their normal judgment.
The Beast and Alostrael have told me that I, being by my own admission ‘in love’ with Alostrael, have become, and am now unable to reason correctly, and to devote my energies to the Great Work.
The Beast furthermore officially lays it upon me as a Probationer of A
A
to take this present Oath, by virtue of the clause in my Obligation pertinent to the matter.
Albeit unable to admit the justice of their view, I am resolved to adhere to the letter of my Oath, and to trust their statement that I am at present incapable of deciding rightly for myself in this matter.
I hereby solemnly pledge myself to extirpate once and for all the consciousness of the tendency to perceive the sensation of my being ‘in love’ with Alostrael.
And I conjure the Lords of Initiation by the Password of the present Equinox, the Word [IHI AUD] that this Oath be of power to establish in me the Magical Light and to make me wholly master of my animal and emotional impulses.
Wherein if I fail, may the light of my body be darkened, and the virtue of manhood abide no more with me.
Love is the law, love under will.
18
Mudd signed the form, and the witnesses endorsed it. While Crowley had originally planned to send Mudd away on a soul-searching retirement, he noted improvement in Mudd’s disposition later that same day: “I am much less anxious as to the issue than I was when I wrote the Act of Truth for him.”
19
Mudd nevertheless decided to take eight days to meditate and learn by example from Crowley’s autobiography. “Well,” Mudd, with downcast eyes, said to Leah, “goodbye. Look after yourself and the Beast, won’t you?”
She nodded. “Love is the law …”
“Love under will.”
Leah clenched Mudd tightly, pressed her lips against his, and said, “I love you.” She repeated it twice.
Mudd was a wretchedly frozen clod, feeling more awkward and unattractive than ever. Deep inside, his soul cried out, You’re a damned good comrade, and that’s all that matters
. But tongue-tied, he only repeated himself lamely like a stuck record. “Love under will.”
“You will
come back to us, won’t you, and work together again?”
He hoped so, but was unsure. “Well, anyhow, we will
work.” With that, he left.
20
Contemplating his love for Leah, his oath to forget her, and their parting words that could have been so much more, he wept. Rather than clear his mind of the Scarlet Woman, it made him love her more than ever.
Portrait of Norman Mudd by Aleister Crowley. (photo credit 16.1)
Applying logic to the problem, he produced a solution: The Book of the Law
, their moral guidebook, demanded that the Scarlet Woman be loud and adulterous. This meant Leah had to be married: not to Beast, her lover, but to Mudd. Thus, having sex with Beast would make her an adulteress. Crowley, of course, rejected the idea, responding, “Adultery does not imply marriage, no more than whoredom implies commerce.”
21
By the end of October, Mudd’s fixation moved from Leah to The Book of the Law
, and he and Beast corresponded freely on the subject. He viewed AC’s role as Beast logically, asking what he should have done upon receiving the book. What were its instructions? How were the tenets of Thelema to be disseminated? Mudd believed The Book of the Law
was never intended for the masses, Aiwass calling it the law of princes and kings: “Therefore the kings of the earth shall be Kings for ever: the slaves shall serve.”
22
Thus, Crowley had erred in publishing The Book of the Law
, Mudd telling him, “You have assumed that you were free to ‘broadcast’ CCXX [The Book of the Law]
even to force it on the attention of the General Public.”
23
Crowley’s real task, Mudd believed, was to put The Book of the Law
into the hands of politicians, to train world leaders in Thelema and magick, and to amass the wealth necessary to put over the
Great Work. Furthermore, Mudd noted that after nearly twenty years, many explicit instructions in the text had not been carried out: writing the comment, abstructing the Stele, and selecting an island. Thus, Crowley had so seriously fumbled The Book of the Law
’s clear instructions that the Secret Chiefs were now punishing him with misfortune.
Although Crowley seriously considered Mudd’s observations, agreeing with most and encouraging further comment, he disagreed on several points. According to The Book of the Law
, for instance, anyone could be a king. It referred to one’s spiritual, not political, nobility. In order to control Mudd’s excited exegeses, Crowley recorded, “I should warn Fra
O.P.V. once and for all that he is dangerously excited mentally and will become definitely insane (legally speaking) unless he can control and slow down his chittam
[Sanskrit, mind, mental activities].”
24
During this contentious exchange, Crowley penned what has become known as the “Short Comment”:
The study of this Book is forbidden. It is wise to destroy this copy after the first reading.
Whosoever disregards this does so at his own risk and peril. These are most dire.
Those who discuss the contents of this Book are to be shunned by all, as centres of pestilence.
All questions of the Law are to be decided only by appeal to my writings, each for himself.
There is no law beyond Do what thou wilt.
Crowley ascribed so much importance to this brief text that he included it in subsequent editions of The Book of the Law
. Regardless of whether one interprets it as a tool of convenience or an inspired text, it silenced Mudd.
25
In late October, AC and Leah hired a boy named Mohammed and drove to Nefta, where they rented a camel and set off into the desert. They were on a magical retirement, seeking new inspiration or direction. They walked at night and slept through the day, planning on a month of it. However, all three took ill and returned to a Nefta hotel. Waiting for them they found Mudd, who had pawned the ring Crowley had given him in order to get to Tunis.
Setbacks aside, the trip proved valuable. While staying at the Hotel du Djerid, Crowley wrote the Djeridensis Comment, or Commentary D, to The Book of the Law;
it was one of his major analyses of the text. Meanwhile, Leah experienced a series of visions that Crowley believed demonstrated direct communication with the Secret Chiefs. Her first vision began at 10:30 p.m. after taking laudanum. Without prompting from Crowley, she saw a street lined with houses, and the geomantic symbol Via
(the way or path) appeared in a white cresence. Crowley reached for his ephemeris, noting the moon’s rising in Cancer. Via, he recalled, corresponded to water, Cancer, and the moon. The day, Monday, was even named for the moon. “Repeat Gayatri
26
while I write this up,” he instructed, and reached for his diary to scribble these observations.
Aleister Crowley in Tunisia, 1923. (photo credit 16.2)
“Okay, shoot!” he prompted when ready, and she continued to describe a horseman wearing jeweled armor and riding a white steed. Crowley equated him with the Knight of Cups, one of the watery tarot cards. Next, she saw two turtles drawing a boat, which reminded her of Lohengrin. Invoking the moon, she saw a woman hidden behind a lyre and fountain. The fountain, Crowley noted, represented the Two of Cups—the aspect of Venus in Cancer—but the woman’s countenance was too bright to describe. When he asked, “What is her name?” the woman opened her hand—actually a bird’s claw—and dropped a crystal ball. Although unspoken, the word implied by her was NiLZA
. Using the Hebrew Nun, English i, Latin L, Arabic Z, and Greek A, Crowley tallied the word to ninety, for the watery Queen of Cups tarot card.
Leah finally vibrated the magical word Thelema
to get a clearer image, but the image went up in sparks and flame like a sun. Unintelligible images flooded her vision until she insisted, “I want to hear, not see!” Into her mind popped the response from Liber AL
ii.9, “but there is that which remains.” She descended a valley into an elaborate chapel wherein a peacock, a symbol of the Knight of Cups, was worshiped. Its name was PIRA
. Crowley tallied the name to 291 (denoting a torrent of water, and the Angel of Aquarius, the water bearer). Leah, who was quick on her feet at gematria, suggested the spelling APIRA, which yielded 292, a number of the moon.
Finally, Leah encountered a white man, cast in blue light, and knew she had reached the ruler of this vision. “Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law,” she greeted. He responded by slaying Pira with a dorge
, and the temple burst into an uproar. His name, in Greek, was FAB, and his number, 503,
was that of the chalice; appropriate since the chapel reminded Leah of the Sangraal. After he proved his knowledge and attainment, Crowley instructed her, “Enough for now. Return.”
Planted firmly in this reality, Leah and Crowley analyzed the recurrent watery images of her vision, in harmony with the planetary position of the Moon (itself a symbol of water) in the aqueous sign of Cancer the crab. As they spoke, the clouds opened and dumped torrents of rain on Nefta.
Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law.
Witness my hand: TO MEGA THERION 666 9°=2° A
A
LOGOS AIONOS THELEMA 93
27
Alas, the summons scared off everyone but Windram’s student Adam Gray Murray. He arrived at the Abbey on November 20 with a donation of two hundred lire. “Hip-hip-hoorah,” lonely Ninette wrote excitedly to Mudd. “Murray has arrived from South Africa. He is a dear. He meets all requirements for being the most enjoyable companion I could wish for. I hope he remains right here with me and you never get a glimpse of him.”
28
Meanwhile, Crowley described his financial dilemma to American book collector and patron of the arts Montgomery Evans II (1901–1954):
I have been living literally from hand to mouth for I don’t know how long. This fact is well known to my enemies who do not scruple to attack my honour and my property in every base way, knowing that I cannot take the proper legal action. If we had a business partner with a few thousand dollars, I and my secretary could put everything on a sound basis very quickly, and incidentally vindicate my reputation against the creatures who have been vile enough to publish all sorts of idiotic falsehoods about me.
29
Thus the Thelemites, congregating at the end of 1923, parted ways in an attempt to salvage their life’s work.
Crowley sailed to Marseilles, where he stayed at the Hotel de Blois and, on January 2, 1924, met Frank Harris—the business partner alluded to above—for lunch in Nice. Harris was happy to see Crowley, and together they planned to purchase the Paris Evening Telegram
. Both saw it as a handy means to a profit, and Crowley hoped that owning his own press would empower him to clear his name. Alas, neither one could amass their half of the necessary capital.
When Leah recovered from another illness and arrived in Cefalù, she finally met Mimi, who was now “shamelessly fat.”
30
Another new, but slightly older, resident of the Abbey was Arturo Sabatini, a poor boy who hated his home and hung around at the Abbey, hoping to join them. His eyes were damaged during the war, and he had spent his pension of two hundred lire a month to buy sweet wine and cigarettes for Ninette. He was pleasing company, and when she was lonely, Ninette would let him stay the night. Leah soon began instructing him, while Ninette practiced sex magick with him.
Finally, there was Murray, the Abbey’s newest arrival and oldest member. His attitudes clashed with Leah’s, prompting him to say, “She said she was divinely appointed by the Gods to teach me, but a woman cannot teach a man.” At long last, however, Leah felt optimistic, glad to be back at Cefalù:
There is no ‘back home.’ Though I had furniture, cut-glass, a salary, and a very good housekeeper in the form of my mother, I never knew about home till I came here. I have no personal possessions here—not even a lock on my door—and all sorts of people blow in and stay a while, people with whom I seem to have nothing in common—no privacy in the ordinary sense of the word—yet I am free as a bird and not a libertine! …
Even if I had been deserted, neglected, abused, doped, etc. ad infinitum, in this awful ‘Hell Hole of Devil Worshippers’ I should have started a pennant stand in Paris rather than to have gone back to my raised (?) salary as a music supervisor!
31
Mudd remained in Tunis, trying unsuccessfully to raise money for passage to London, where he hoped to resolve the problem with Chiswick Press’s stock of Crowley books and to publish “positive truth” in response to the Sunday Express
libels. Feeling hopeless about his situation, he found a stamped postcard and wrote to Crowley, “Beloved Father, I haven’t eaten in thirty-six hours, and I am completely indifferent whether I eat again.” Crowley reported he was “in bed with a bitch,” causing Mudd to shudder at the irony of his unrequited love for Leah. Faced with overwhelming monetary problems, his crusade in England to clear Crowley’s name went on indefinite hold.
Crowley called on Gurdjieff on February 10, 1924, but the master was out; so he settled for a stimulating dinner with his right-hand man, former British Intelligence officer Major Frank Pinder. Crowley considered Pinder “a hell of a fine fellow” and recorded the visit in his diary:
Gurdjieff, their prophet, seems a tip-top man. Heard more sense and insight than I’ve done for years. Pinder dines at 7:30. Oracle for my visit was “There are few men: there are enough.” Later, a really wonderful evening with Pinder. Gurdjieff clearly a very advanced adept. My chief quarrels are over sex (I doubt whether Pinder understands G’s true position) and their punishments, e.g., depriving the offender of a meal or making him stand half an hour with his arms out. Childish and morally valueless.
33
Years later, Crowley would meet Gurdjieff disciple C. Stanley Nott (1887–1978) and, through this connection, come to meet the mystic. In his account, Nott reported that Crowley arrived and told the boys stories of how he was teaching his own son to be a devil, while Gurdjieff kept a close eye on him.
34
In Yorke’s version, “they sniffed around one another like dogs.”
35
A more colorful conclusion is relayed by Webb: as Crowley prepared to leave that Sunday evening, Gurdjieff ascended the staircase to the second floor halfway, turned, and asked, “Mister, now you go?” The Beast, heading toward the door, stopped, faced him, and replied that he was, in fact, leaving. “You have been a guest? And now you are no longer guest?” Crowley agreed with both statements. Gurdjieff, released from the constraints of hospitality, grew red with the rage he had kept pent inside the entire weekend. “You filthy!” he spat. “You dirty inside! Never again you set foot in my house.” Gurdjieff’s histrionic tirade rambled on as a puzzled Crowley continued on his way.
36
None of Crowley’s diaries or letters, however, mention this incident; neither do Gurdjieff’s.
Dear Beast,
My first tooth has come out. I am sending it to you. It is Lulette who is writing it. Thank you for my box of candies.
Beast, I love you. Soon I will come to you. Love to you, A.
Lulu P.
38
At one period it was necessary for me to ascend from the most tenuous regions of pure air through a series of vast caverns so devised that nothing human could possibly pass through them into the regions of pure fire. To accomplish this it was necessary that I should be exhausted physically to the utmost point compatible with continued life.
39
While he left few details on the nature of his ordeal, his letters show that Crowley was sick from nervous prostration and recovering from two operations. He was so ill that, back at the Abbey, Ninette and Arturo performed a sex magick ritual to hasten his recovery. He was also having dark moments of self-doubt. At one point, he asked Mudd, “Have I ever done anything of any value, or am I a mere trifler, existing by a series of shifts of one kind or another. A wastrel, a coward, man of straw?” Amused by the question, Mudd answered by quoting The Book of the Law
—“thou hast no right but to do thy will. Do that, and no other shall say nay”—to which Crowley responded, “You have probably saved my life.”
40
At this time, he also pondered his continuing drug use. “Was the whole of my trouble really due to withdrawal of heroin, and my rapid recovery to cautious restocking?”
41
Recognizing that he required the drug medically because of his asthma, he conceded there was also a psychosomatic component to his condition. “My general conclusion on this part of the problem is that drugs are fundamentally useless—and treacherous, the Lord knows! They are just Emergency Rations.… the Asthmatic is in fact a Malade Imaginaire
[imaginary invalid] in a certain sense.”
42
Regardless, Crowley described his initiation:
At this time he lay sick unto death. He was entirely alone; for They [i.e. the Secret Chiefs] would not even permit the presence of those few whom They had themselves appointed to aid him in this final initiation [Leah, Ninette, Mudd]. In this last ordeal the earthly part of him was dissolved in water; the water was vaporized into air; the air was rarefied utterly, until he was free to make the last effort, and to pass into the vast caverns of the Threshold which guards the Realm of Fire. Now naught human may come through those immensities. So in that Fire he was consumed wholly, and as pure Spirit alone did he return, little by little, during the months that followed, into the body and mind that had perished in that great ordeal of which he can say no more than: I died.
43
While the manner in which he was rarefied and destroyed by each of the four elements is indescribable, Crowley recorded its result in his diary:
I am beginning to realize faintly of how many and gross deceits I have been cleansed in my ascent into the Sphere of Fire. In particular, the ‘invincible Love’ which Frater O.P.V. discovered in me is now quite ‘unassuaged of purpose’ and ‘delivered from the lust of result’ flowing forth freely ‘under will’ as it should; now therefore on its waters there shall
bloom deathless the Lotus of Purity whereupon Hoor-paar-kraat may stand and glow with Silence.…
Now am I wholly entered within the Sphere of Fire, the Empyrean; and no other shall say nay.
It has been a terrible ordeal.
44
But Crowley, in his estimation, survived to become his very own self, the Ipsissimus, looking on the world from the Crown of the Tree of Life.
However, she also brought news that they risked losing the Abbey unless they paid the rent. Thus Crowley called in debts and friendships, even going so far as to contact George Cecil Jones’s representative about obtaining an advance against future payments of the trust fund from his mother’s death. Meanwhile, Leah wrote instructions for Frank Bennett to cable whatever money he had saved for his voyage to the Abbey per Crowley’s earlier summons.
Meanwhile, Crowley, in his mission to rehabilitate his name, wrote An Open Letter to Lord Beaverbrook
. It was the desperate gesture of a man who was now too impecunious to travel to London, let alone hire a solicitor. As he remarked bitterly to Holman Hunt—who worked for Crowley’s solicitors Parker, Garrett & Co
46
—“The Sunday Express
made sure that I was penniless before printing its lies.”
47
He sent Mudd to take the essay to the Sunday Express
and circulate it to London’s literati. Although Mudd was poor and dressed in rags, Crowley felt the apparent ruin of a good man by the Sunday Express
would only help their case. Mudd soon wound up living in Chelsea. His room at 27 Redburn Street was uncomfortable, “a poor sort of affair.”
48
He was working with Jane Wolfe, who’d been in London since March 1923, and for a time became her lover. When Murray joined them, they sold their clothes to raise money for food and rent.
With money coming in from various sources and the I Ching promising a great change, Crowley and Leah anticipated the end of April. Over the years, May was always a big month: they conceived Poupée in 1919; Crowley’s unborn son was conceived a year later; in 1921, Crowley took his Ipsissimus oath; Collins contracted The Diary of a Drug Fiend
in 1922; and in 1923, Italy
expelled Crowley. Just as things were looking up, they received a notice of eviction from 50 rue Vavin.
Although in the past Bourcier had allowed Crowley to stay at 50 rue Vavin on credit, he had sold the establishment. The new owner honored no such arrangement; on May 1, he ejected Crowley and Leah from the hotel and kept their luggage in lieu of payment. Crowley angrily cursed the hotel for interfering with the Great Work. Holed up at 6 rue Jolia, they spoke to police and lawyers for several days. By May 8, they had retrieved most of their luggage, and the cursed hotel at 50 rue Vavin soon went bankrupt.
Soon afterward, Crowley met Argentinian artist Xul Solar (1887–1963). Oscar Agustín Alejandro Schulz Solari was a painter, poet, and visionary known for weaving mystical elements from kabbalah, astrology, tarot, I Ching, and Crowley into his works. His close friend, Argentinian writer Jorgé Luis Borges, called him “our William Blake.”
49
Having spent the last dozen years studying modernist art in Europe, Solar was still early in his career when he arrived in Paris on April 29, 1924, to exhibit three pieces at the Musée Galliera as part of a show organized by La Maison de l’Amérique Latine and the Académie Internationale des Beaux-Arts. He also used this opportunity to track down Crowley, whom he had been seeking as a teacher for some time. Solar found him in Chelles on May 14, and the following day Crowley accepted him as a student, noting in his diary, “Xul Solar Signed Oath in Silence Diary.”
50
Playing chess with AC later that evening, Solar remarked that “his True Will is to unify South America on Spiritual lines.”
51
Solar had read The Equinox
and translated Book Four
, so Crowley had high hopes that he would produce translations of the Holy Books and help to establish OTO in Argentina. Having tested his astral visions and liked what he saw, AC tasked his new student with recording astral visions for each of the sixty-four I Ching hexagrams. In a letter to Solar five years later, Crowley reminded him, “By the way, you owe me a complete set of visions for the 64 Yi symbols. Your record as the best seer I ever tested still stands today, and I should like to have a set of visions as a model.”
52
Solar eventually did produce these visions as San Signos
(Holy Signs), written in his invented language of Neo-criollo; only a few of these visions have ever been published. Solar returned to Buenos Aires shortly after meeting Crowley, becoming prominent among the South American avant garde in the 1920s.
53
Early that June, when Crowley apprised Frank Harris of his plans with the Open Letter
, Harris advised Crowley to hire a good solicitor. If he agreed to split the profit with his counsel, Harris claimed, Crowley could sue Lord Beaverbrook for libel and receive $20,000 in damages. More than ever, AC felt the need to retaliate.
He hired Herbert Clarke of rue St. Honoré to print three thousand copies of the fifteen-page An Open Letter to Lord Beaverbrook
, a document that called for full public investigation of the outrageous attack on one of England’s most prolific contemporary poets. With Jane’s help, Mudd sent copies with cover letters
to friends and important people, including members of the House of Lords, Scotland Yard, the British press, George Bernard Shaw, Arnold Bennett, writer Miguel de Unamuno (1864–1936), and anarchist Emma Goldman (1869–1940). In his naive enthusiasm, Mudd even asked the Bureau of Investigation for a letter of recommendation for Crowley’s espionage work during the Great War; the U.S. government, of course, sent no such document.
54
Responses to the Open Letter
were mixed. Augustus John promised his support, and philosopher Bertrand Russell wrote:
I received your letter and one from Dr. Crowley. The latter seems to show that he is in a position to establish the falsehood of the libel … If you can put any wide-read newspaper to print a letter … asserting that the Sunday Express
lied on this occasion, it would bring an action against the editor of the newspaper in question. Probably this is strategically the best way to goad the Sunday Express
into action. For this purpose, you must find the right editor … I know nothing about Dr. Crowley, but should be glad to see the Beaverbrook press shown up.
Bernard Shaw, knowing nothing of the matter, would not support Crowley. “I replied that no such proposition was ever made,” AC wrote. “He was asked to fight for the decency of public controversy.” Emma Goldman wrote helplessly:
I regret I am too poor to be a help to anybody just now. Neither can I lend my name as support to any undertaking until I myself am on my feet.
Similarly, Philip Heseltine (a.k.a. Peter Warlock, 1894–1930) wrote to Mudd, “I am very sorry to hear that Crowley is at present in such straitened circumstances. I very much regret that, financially at any rate, I can do nothing to help him, being in perhaps as bad a case myself.” Even those with money proved unsupportive. Otto Kahn, for instance, responded simply: “I regret to learn of the situation which Mr. Crowley describes, but as I leave for New York tomorrow morning, I am sorry that it will be impossible for me to see you during my present stay in Europe.” Austin Harrison simply dismissed Crowley as a “moral wreck from the abuse of heroin.” Most discouraging was the reply Mudd received from his father:
Your letter and enclosure reached us last evening and both mother and I are deeply concerned and very despondent about the whole affair. We hope you are quite sure of your facts, for the events referred to seem to relate to the period of your absence from this country when you were thousands of miles away from your hero and therefore not fully cognizant of his doings. If you are relying mainly on his word, I am afraid you are trusting on a very broken reed. You know we never liked him and have not the slightest sympathy with his cause. We have always looked on him as your evil genius right from your Cambridge days, and are terribly afraid that he will blight your whole life.
55
In the end, the lukewarm response to the letter and Mudd’s own poverty rendered impotent this plan to salvage Crowley’s name. It was the beginning of the collapse of everything the Thelemites held dear.
Back at Cefalù, Ninette’s sex magick with Arturo resulted in her pregnancy. Announcing it to Leah, she wrote, “I am the prospective mother of a kicking healthy bastard, who should show its sex barring accident during the month of March. I hope this will be a painful shock to no one, in spite of the warning I received once of not to indulge in my natural pastime; I promise to let up a bit after this one.”
56
Meanwhile, fearing the Baron would make good on his threats to evict the Thelemites from the Abbey, she and Murray pawned the Abbey’s furniture. They placed Crowley’s books, manuscripts, paintings, and diaries in the care of a Palermo gentleman named Aguel, who began shipping them to Mudd via the American Express Company. After the first box reached London safely, Mudd eagerly requested shipment of the remaining dozen cases, postage due. These Aguel sent aboard the SS Suein Jarl
. Alas, His Majesty’s Customs inspected the cases and found some questionable Crowley pieces, including the patently obscene “Leah Sublime,” his “A Book of Photographs,” and thirty-three copies of the homosexual Bagh-i-Muattar
. On July 8, Customs sent Mudd a “Notice of seizure of goods prohibited to be imported under Section 42 of the Customs Consolidation Act 1876.” They confiscated all twelve boxes. Mudd received the bad news on July 17 and went into a panic: what would Beast do when he found out? On July 24, his nerves frazzled, Mudd took a rest cure from the Great Work.
When Crowley finally found out, he noted with displeasure, “Some lunatic directly inspired by the High Gods sent all my private papers and books to England! The Customs House has had a continuous spasm of Priapism ever since.”
57
Writing to Inspector Draper of Scotland Yard, he claimed his research was clinical, intended for mental pathologists. Customs disagreed. When Leah headed for London to help, she experienced considerable difficulty:
I was refused entrance to England (though I was already seated in the train for London, having passed Customs and Immigrations inspections) for a rat-faced person stage-whispered “Aleister Crowley” to a tall sandy Immigration clerk who asked me to descend myself and accompany him. Not finding A.C. or even C. on my person or in my baggage they announced after 3 hours or more … that they had received telephone orders to send me back.
58
In the end—March 1926—Customs would destroy the crates containing Crowley’s confiscated Cefalù diaries, manuscripts, and rare books. This at least is what has been reported in a number of sources. However, the story does not end there. Two years hence Crowley would write to his new disciple, Gerald Yorke, “The trouble about the Cefalù diaries—and all other MSS—is that any day now there may be nothing to edit! … There are 3 cases still unopened and 10 or 11 more still to come from Italy.” And, three weeks thereafter, he would write to this same pupil, “The cases have come (from Italy).” Finally, on Christmas Day of 1928, he wrote to Yorke,
My marginal note was not intended to affirm that any given manuscripts have not been seized. It is in fact probable that duplicates of these diaries were in the cases, but I don’t care in the least about this. What I meant by my note was that these particular manuscripts had not been destroyed.… I am delighted with your report about the Customs. It is deliciously characteristic that they should preserve just those portions which they suppose to be obscene, and destroy the rest. What other portion would they understand?
59
While an early shipment of Crowley’s material was seized and destroyed in 1925, it appears a substantial amount survived.
Leah returned to Crowley in Paris after her abortive London trip, and Mudd and Murray soon joined the ailing couple. Finances forced them all to share a room at the Hotel du Maine, with Murray sleeping on the floor. “We are in desperate straits,” Leah reported to Montgomery Evans.
60
A day later, Crowley collapsed. “My legs assumed independent control of the situation,” he noted. “I had a very amusing time watching them try to kick the bedstand to pieces.”
61
Poverty had placed Crowley in a state of involuntary heroin withdrawal, breaking the habit that his Will merely curtailed.
Mudd and Murray fared no better on their return to London: they often went hungry, and Jane was evicted for not paying her rent. In order to get by, Murray soon began pocketing A
A
donations sent from American disciples Frater Achad and Max Schneider (of whom more will follow).
One last crisis completed the tragedy: after Leah’s sister Alma visited her and her eccentric lover that August, she proceeded to Cefalù, planning to take Hansi into her custody. Alma Hirsig Bliss (b. 1875) was an artist specializing in miniatures. Loving art from a young age, she attended the Peter-Cooper Institute and spent a year at the Art League. While studying in Paris, she discovered her medium—miniatures—for which she became well known.
62
Examples of her works are kept at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and the Smithsonian American Art Museum.
63
Sometime after 1920 she married New Yorker Louis E. Bliss, who died shortly thereafter in June 1923.
64
In July 1924 she sailed aboard the SS Minnekahda
, arriving in Plymouth, England, on the 12th,
65
proceeding from there to visit her sister and the Abbey.
Forewarned, Crowley instructed Ninette, “Should Alma come to Cefalù, she is not to be admitted to the Abbey, or allowed to talk to the children. Don’t parley with her: throw her out quick!” Alma arrived the same day as the letter, but Ninette nevertheless let Alma in. By September 13 she had snuck off with Hansi. She returned to New York via Southampton, arriving with Hansi in October;
66
the next year, an illustrated feature on Alma pictured “her adopted child” beside one of him “as he appeared when his home was in Italy.”
67
Dorothy Olsen (b. 1892). (photo credit 16.3)
That day, Crowley and Dorothy sailed for the Majestic Hotel, Tunis. There they began “a magical operation of the very highest class”
70
in which Crowley wrote “To Man,” otherwise known as “The Mediterranean Manifesto”:
TO MAN
Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law.
And mine Hour being now upon me, I proclaim my Law.
The Word of the Law is 
. [Thelema
]
Given in the midst of the Mediterranean Sea
An XX Sol in 3 Libra die Jovis
by me 
[To Mega Therion
]
[Logos of the Aeon of Thelema]
Crowley printed this broadsheet to distribute as the new World Teacher, hoping to use the TS’s announcement of a coming messiah to fuel his own work.
On September 24, she wrote her will, leaving her possessions to Mudd, with a few exceptions: to Jane, the bravest woman she knew, Leah left her blue cape; to Ninette, she left custody of Hansi; and her little red purse went to Lulette. She also left instructions for Mudd “to prosecute the swine who are responsible for my death,” namely Lord Beaverbrook, Alma Bliss, and H. Roy (the latest landlord to seize Crowley’s things for nonpayment of rent). The next day she telegrammed news of her impending death to her good friend Aimée Gouraud, who rushed to her side with food and reassurances. Despite her despair, Leah stressed, particularly to Aimée, that she did not blame Crowley:
Understand that you are not to think that A.C. deserted me. He did not. He liberated me. I die, not as you imagine through neglect by him but in service to the Work which we united to do. He and I are One, nay are None.
When you see him you will understand.
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On September 26, still convinced she was dying, Leah wrote a tender au revoir
to the man to whom she was hopelessly devoted:
My beloved Beast,
93.
I am going to die tonight. There is very little I can say for now that the conspiracy of Silence is at an end, your monkey takes on the silence.
I have always loved you, as you have me. That is why you have never failed me as I have never failed you. We have both misunderstood often but we always found that misunderstanding did not matter for it lead to understanding in our case, always at the right time. Only gods know what time means.
You will not grieve over my death. You will rejoice, God that you are. Remember that Alostrael, Babalon … the Scarlet Woman, lives forever. Leah Hirsig died but then I never knew her …
I am yours, you are mine
93 93/93
Babalon
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Her only regret was that the Beast was so far away while she was on her death bed. On September 28, she wrote in her diary:
I should have liked, as a human creature, to have died in the arms of The Beast 666, who, as will be noted in my very first diary (commencing Mar 21, 1919) was and is my lover, my mate, my father, my child and everything else that Woman needs in Man.
73
Unable to pay rent, she lost her room, wandering rain-drenched Paris and finally collapsing in the hallway of her hotel as onlookers speculated whether she was ill or merely drugged; a jeering crowd gathered until the police arrived.
Death was all that remained for her. She felt she had fulfilled the prophecy of The Book of the Law
, which warned that the Scarlet Woman would be “cast out from men: as a shrinking and despised harlot shall she crawl through dusk wet streets, and die cold and an-hungered.”
74
She hoped to die on a Monday because in that same scripture, it is written “he is ever a sun, and she a moon.”
75
When Monday, September 29, came, she did not die; however, a telegram from Ninette devastated her with news that Alma Bliss, with help from the American consul in Palermo, had fled to America with Hansi. “Alma Bliss,” Leah complained, “has communicated with both the governess and myself as though she had done a wonderful deed. She is quite crazy.”
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The next day, Mudd, having given up in his campaign with the Open Letter
, joined her in Paris. Good old Mudd
, she thought: he’s always there when you need him
. On October 3, she placed the Seal of Babalon on his penis; two days later, they celebrated their informal Thelemic wedding, feasting on tea, bread, ham, grapes, and figs. They consummated the marriage on October 7 with an act of sex magick.
“Who is your best girl?” Leah asked as they made love.
“You,” he replied.
“What is thy will?”
He recalled the purpose of this act. “To help establish the Law of Thelema.”
“Who are you?” she asked pointedly.
“Omnia Pro Veritate.” This answer disappointed Leah. When next they made love, Leah described it in her diary: “With a man who does not know who he is but is commonly called Norman Mudd.”
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Mudd soon returned to London, unable to scrounge up any further money or arrive at any other means of support. On November 19 he signed himself into the Metropolitan Asylums Board home for the homeless poor. He gave his age as thirty-five and his occupation as literary agent.
Leah, meanwhile, remained in France, finding temporary work washing dishes, peeling potatoes, and carrying coals in a Montparnasse restaurant for thirteen hours a day, waiting for Beast and Astrid to pay her passage to Tunis.
Although Crowley constantly sent as much money as he could to the Abbey, finances were worse than ever. They had neither coffee nor red meat, and only the kind heart of the milkman kept milk coming. She was again behind on the rent, and la Calce threatened to evict her January 1. Desperate, she tried selling Raoul’s shoes to raise money for the milkman or to buy coal.
Arturo, who had by now left home and moved into the Abbey, did his best to help; however, his pension came irregularly, and boils on his thumb and foot made it difficult for him to work. At one point they quarreled so bitterly about money that Ninette finally threw him out.
After ten days, Arturo returned penitently with fresh bread, kerosene, coffee, tea, and sugar. He had played his last six cents on a lottery, won, and spent it on her. “Santa Claus never was so thoughtful,” she bubbled to Leah:
God, what good these little things did me. That was a change, and my spirits bounced up like a balloon, and the boy did enjoy our delight.… Dear me, Lala, do you know what that coffee and French bread tasted like? Months without coffee. This insipid bread and milk has become intolerable. I drank it with as reverent a feeling as if it had been ambrosia sent down by the Gods.… Perhaps I am crazy, Lala, but I feel happy.
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The man she loved, and the woman she once loathed as her fiercest competitor, she missed dearly. “I need but one satisfaction,” she wrote again, “i.e., a little Lala to laugh out loud with, and to swap stories about the last eight months. When will we see you again? … Don’t write such beautifully neat, good-looking pages next time you write, Lala, but be sociable and fill every bit of your paper with nonsense. Chat if you have no special anxiety on your mind.”
79
Shortly thereafter, an intense trance engulfed Crowley, who recorded his vision, incorporating “To Man,” in The Heart of the Master
.
81
When Dorothy became pregnant, Crowley summoned Leah to assist in her convalescence. The former Scarlet Woman—herself pregnant by a new student named George Barron—dutifully bought a third-class ticket and hurried to their side, much to Dorothy’s displeasure. Crowley recorded one late-night episode in his diary:
A single drink of rum (on top of a good deal of mental worry during the day) was enough to induce in Dorothy Olsen an attack of acute mania. Lying in bed, close cuddled, I nearly asleep, she suddenly started to scratch my face without the least warning, with a spat of the filthiest incoherent abuse of me and everyone connected with me.
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Leah’s services became unnecessary, however, for Dorothy miscarried, and they all returned to Paris.
Leah found herself alone again, but friends like Gérard Aumont, Aimée Gouraud, and George Barron helped her keep her head together. Her will to die subsided in favor of a new vitality as she came to terms with life with and without Crowley. Giving herself over to anger, she wrote to Sir Aleister Crowley, “The Sir means as little to me as ‘Lord’ Beaverbrook—Aleister is a mere wish phantasm.… You are no more a Magus than you are a cunt. You seem to disregard all Holy Books etc. in your sexual stupidity.”
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In the end, she discovered the detachment to distinguish between Crowley the prophet—a vehicle of the divine word that she most fervently accepted—and Crowley the man, who was capable of inexplicable coldness. “I do in the main consider him merely a Word, but it’s damn hard when one has to have ‘human’ dealings with what appears to be the rottenest kind of creature, to think of it as an Idea.”
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Meanwhile at Cefalù, Ninette’s next child, Richard, was born; while la Calce did not evict her on January 1 as threatened, the possibility loomed constantly. As Leah wrote, “Ninette is threatened with expatriation: where that is to I am sure I don’t know. Is she American or French? Evidently her birth certificate and passport are among the Customs’ spoils. Great collection, that!”
85
Bringing them together was the Conference of Grand Masters being held in the secluded twelfth-century German city of Weida, Thuringia. Heinrich Tränker (1880–1956), head of OTO’s German branch as Frater Recnartus and founder of his own organization the Collegium Pansophicum (or Pansophical Lodge), was hosting this convocation of chiefs of major occult organizations for the summer solstice. The only snag in the plan was that OTO currently had no leader: Reuss, the Outer Head of the Order, had died in 1923, and the remaining administrative heads (X°) needed to elect a new Frater Superior. Crowley reasonably expected the honor would fall to him: not only had he students acting as X° in America, Africa, and Australia, but Tränker had a vision of Crowley leading OTO, which convinced him that Baphomet was the intended
successor. In response to Tränker’s vision, Crowley had American student Max Schneider translate The Book of the Law
into German and send it ahead. When Tränker read the manuscript, he concluded it was demonically inspired; yet before he could condemn it too strongly, another vision cleared up everything and restored his faith. In a letter to Tränker, Crowley wrote, “Frater Peregrinus [Reuss] in the last letters that we exchanged definitely designated me to succeed him.”
86
Similarly, he wrote to C. S. Jones:
I now feel at liberty to inform you that in the O.H.O.’s [Outer Head of the Order] last letter to me he invited me to become his successor as O.H.O. and Frater Superior of the Order and my reply definitely accepted. I cannot give the exact dates of these letters, and cannot be sure that he died before receiving my reply.
87
No records survive to document Reuss’s nomination of Crowley, but one observer noted, “The only fact that we know is that Reuss died and the above two elected AC as O.H.O.”
88
On June 21, Crowley arrived at the home of the man who paid their fares to Germany. Frater Saturnus, known in the mundane world as Karl Germer (1885–1962), was Tränker’s personal secretary. University educated, he received first- and second-class Iron Crosses during the Great War for “special services,” probably spying. Germer and Tränker were both members of the Pansophical Society. In 1923, Germer sold his Vienna property and founded the publishing house Pansophia Verlag in Munich. Tränker was general editor, Pansophist Otto Wilhelm Barth
89
oversaw sales, and Germer did translations and put up the capital. By the end of 1924, Germer began thinking about publishing Crowley translations exclusively, although he had never met him.
Soon thereafter, Crowley met the remaining Grand Masters. Albin Grau (1884–1942), known by the magical name Pacitus, had been Master of the Chair in Tränker’s Pansophical Lodge, the first Grand Master of Fraternitas Saturni, and a member of Crowley’s A
A
. A painter, he worked as a set designer, art director, and costume designer on UFA Studios silent films such as Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau’s (1888–1931) classic unauthorized Dracula adaptation, Nosferatu—Eine Symphonie des Grauens
(Nosferatu—A Symphony of Horror
, 1922).
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Other films utilizing Grau’s talents included The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari
(1919), Dr. Mabuse the Gambler
(1922), Warning Shadows
(1922), and The Nibelungs
(1924).
Eugen Grosche (1888–1964) ran an antiquarian and occult bookstore in Berlin. Grosche’s mother had been housekeeper of Berlin’s TS, and when Tränker supplanted Rudolf Steiner as secretary in 1921, he also tapped Grosche to establish a Berlin lodge of the Pansophical Society. This he did under the magical name Gregor A. Gregorius.
Dr. Henri Clemens Birven (1883–1969), despite an apparently French ancestry, was born in Aachen, Germany. Although he studied philosophy in Berlin—even writing a dissertation on Kant—professionally he lectured on
electrical engineering. Finding himself a prisoner of Russia during the Great War, he escaped through China and ultimately returned to Berlin, where he taught at the Humboldtschule Tegel, one of Berlin’s top secondary schools. By 1927 he would begin publishing the occult journal Hain der Isis
(Veil of Isis), which would include some of Crowley’s writings.
Martha Küntzel (1857–1941), occultist and devoted student of Thelema, was known affectionately to Crowley as “Little Sister.” Küntzel and her lover, Pansophical Lodge and OTO member Otto Gebhardi, had been involved in the TS. However, the Law of Thelema proved to be Küntzel’s path, which she followed with the utmost devotion.
Germer’s friend Oskar Hopfer was a Thuringian publisher and technical artist who helped Crowley devise a new 777
, which placed correspondences on the appropriate sphere or path of a drawing of the Tree of Life in favor of a tabular listing. He was probably also the one to publish Ein Zeugnis der Suchenden
, or “The Testament of a Seeker.” Penned by Crowley with help from Mudd and Tränker, it was another anti-Theosophical broadsheet that proclaimed the Master Therion to be the new World Teacher.
These eight—Tränker, Germer, Grau, Grosche, Birven, Küntzel, Hopfer, and Crowley—made up the conference, which ironically took place in the nation from which, a year previously, anthroposophist and former OTO member Rudolph Steiner was driven by Nazi persecution. The conference’s unfolding revolved around the Masters’ mixed feelings about Crowley. While Germer, Tränker, Küntzel, and Grosche hailed him eagerly, his irresponsible references to the IX° in his writings angered the others; Grau disliked The Book of the Law
and renounced Ein Zeugnis
. A debate split the Masters on this issue, and a heated and bitter argument between Crowley and Tränker drove the wedge deeper. In the end, Grau, Hopfer, and Birven sided with Tränker, who, as cosignatory of Ein Zeugnis
, repudiated the document. Mudd appealed to Grau’s A
A
membership in an effort to win his support, but the politics proved terminal. The Masters split into three camps: those who sided with Tränker in rejecting Crowley’s teachings; moderates like Grosche, who regarded Crowley a teacher and incorporated Thelema into his philosophy but nevertheless rejected him as OHO; and finally, Karl Germer and the others, who accepted Crowley as Frater Superior.
The schism destroyed the Pansophical Lodge, which would ritually close and dissolve on Maundy Thursday 1926; neither Tränker nor Grau were heard from again. On May 8, 1926, Grosche founded the Fraternitas Saturni, a magical brotherhood that accepted Thelema but remained independent of the Master Therion. A third of the Pansophists flocked to this new organization, which in 1928 began publishing its own magical papers and the journal Saturn Gnosis
. With the subsequent collapse of Pansophia Verlag, in 1927 Germer would establish a press devoted to Crowley’s writings: Thelema Verlag.
The differences of opinion that split OTO into different factions that summer soon split apart the magical family Crowley had built around himself.
That August of 1925, the subtle conflict between Crowley and C. S. Jones came to a head. Although Jones had endorsed Crowley as OHO, Crowley found his increasingly unorthodox books on the kabbalah intolerable. When Jones was unable to account for book sales in Detroit, Crowley grew suspicious, suspended Jones’s officer status in OTO, and placed Max Schneider in charge of his personal stock. Schneider arrived in Detroit to find two trunks of Crowley’s rariora gone. The difference between them—Jones protesting his innocence, and Crowley believing himself robbed—would never be resolved. Not until the 1950s would it be discovered that the books were not stolen by Achad but lost track of in a Detroit warehouse.
Jones continued on his own eccentric path. Around 1930 he became Mahaguru (head) of an organization called the Universal Brotherhood, which he had joined after moving to Chicago. Around this same time, he converted to Catholicism in an effort to introduce English papists to Thelema. Finally, in his paper The Teachings of the New Aeon
, he attacked Crowley and Thelema:
The Beast may be considered as his own worst enemy, but Aiwaz is quite evidently the enemy of mankind, and should be recognized as such, if this new system, deliberately calculated to bring about the self-destruction of the human race, is to be rightly evaluated.
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His expulsion from OTO followed shortly thereafter.
Leah and Mudd left Weida to live with Martha Küntzel and Otto Gebhardi in their small abode. On December 4, 1925, Leah gave birth to Barron’s son. Although the father had left her high and dry, she was indifferent, naming the baby Al after the god name that was the key to The Book of the Law
. His nickname was Bubby. Although Alostrael lived up to Thelemic principles, Crowley grew distrustful of her and her self-determined title of Babalon. He finally eliminated her by instructing all OTO members to shun her as a “center of pestilence” per the Short Comment to Liber AL
. Disgusted, Leah renounced both the Beast and her title on December 26, 1929. She returned to America to be with Alma and Hansi and to resume her job as a schoolteacher. She died at Meringen, Switzerland, on February 22, 1975.
Mudd’s story is even more bizarre. Late in 1925 he concluded Crowley had completely failed his commission from the Secret Chiefs and was no better than a false prophet. Mudd declared himself, as the only person to understand The Book of the Law
, the World Teacher. Küntzel called him a saboteur and threw him out of her house. Crowley would eventually banish him from the order. Mudd returned to his father on the Isle of Man and on February 24, 1926, formally withdrew his signature from Ein Zeugnis der Suchenden
. In a 1927 letter to Jane Wolfe, he wrote, “I have dropped all interest in anything that calls itself magick and any kind of work that insists on a capital W.”
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On September 6, 1930, he and Leah sent Crowley a letter renouncing their magical
oaths; then he faded from the scene altogether. On May 6, 1934, at about age forty-five, he took a room at 220 Arling Road in Guernsey, an English Channel Island. A month later, he bicycle-clipped his pant-cuffs, filled his trousers and pockets with stones, and waded into the English Channel. The hotel proprietor reported Mudd missing on June 16, and the police recovered his body from Portlet Bay around noon that same day. “I feel sure that he must have left a long, elaborate mathematical proof as to why he had to do this,” Crowley later remarked.
93
One of the greatest and eeriest ironies of Crowley’s corpus is that The Winged Beetle
(1910), published just after Mudd first entered Crowley’s circle, contains a poem dedicated to him; it is titled “The Swimmer.”