Crowley's magical education leaped ahead in the second half of 1898. Climbing in the alps with Eckenstein, he was in a beer hall one night when he fell into conversation with a man about alchemy, and it became clear the man knew more than he did. He introduced himself as Julian Baker, a chemist who lived in Basingstoke and had an interest in brewing (he went on to spend most his working life at the Stag Brewery, Pimlico). Influenced by Eckartshausen, Crowley was looking for the Sanctuary of Saints, and wondered if Baker could show him the way. Was Baker a ‘Master’? No, he said, but he could introduce him to someone who was, back in London.
Crowley became sick, returning to London to convalesce. He took a room at the Hotel Cecil, an enormous building on the Strand at number 80, where he holed up to write drama and poetry while reading up on the occult.
In due course, in October 1898, Baker introduced him to the ‘Master’. This man was George Cecil Jones, known as Cecil, another analytical chemist.1 Jones had been brought up by his mother since his father, a bank accountant suffering from depression, had cut his throat at the bank one day when Jones was five. Jones and Baker were lifelong friends since their schooldays at City of London School, and Jones would go on to marry Baker's sister. Unknown to Crowley both men were members of the great Victorian magical society, The Order of the Golden Dawn.
Among the books that Jones recommended was The Book of the Sacred Magic of Abramelin, published earlier that year by Watkins. Crowley had great respect for Jones, and later asked him that if he should die, then Jones was to embalm his body and entomb it in a secret place. Jones and Baker also taught him the basics of ‘astral projection’, which led to extraordinary visions. One night in November, in his room at the Hotel Cecil with Baker, Crowley saw a “Feminine Hermes on cubic stone of white light – intense auto-brilliance of this”; she gave them a caduceus, and then they were in a scene with a lakeside and water, until finally they returned, back down to the hotel: “I take B.'s hand and we sail through sky above Cecil.”
The Hotel Cecil was a convenient if expensive base for writing and reading during this quiet but pivotal time in Crowley's life. It was the largest hotel in Europe, with 800 rooms (about three times larger than the nearby Savoy). Originally it stretched from the Strand down to the river – the riverside end was demolished to make way for Shell-Mex House – and the Strand frontage survives, now with shops in it. The grand entrance is still architecturally much as Crowley would have known it.
The Strand itself, now rather miscellaneous and characterless, was the great exciting thoroughfare of Victorian London (hence the title of the magazine The Strand, where Sherlock Holmes appeared; it had more theatres than any other street in London, and there was a popular Edwardian song, ‘Let's All Go Down the Strand’). At night it was also associated with public drunkenness, which shocked foreign visitors, and with other deviant behaviour: there were notices in several pub windows (not intended humorously) saying “Beware of Sods”, meaning sodomites. At number 417 was a decadent watering-hole, the oddly named Bun Shop, well-known to Smithers and the rest. Crowley was very familiar with the Strand – he describes an easy mountain climb by saying that even average climbers “could make as certain of strolling to the top as if it were the Strand” – and Crowley-related sites include the Savoy, Simpson's, the Tivoli Theatre, Dowie and Marshall bootmakers at 455, where he bought alpine and other boots (now a modern bank), Milliken and Lawley at 165, where he bought a skeleton, and unfortunately, the Royal Courts of Justice at number 60. As a man with romantic Jacobite leanings, he would also have known the statue of royal martyr Charles I, as celebrated in Lionel Johnson's poem ‘By the statue of King Charles at Charing Cross’ (this statue is the official centre of London, from where distances are measured).
In his novel Moonchild Crowley describes Charing Cross – the western end of the Strand and the train station – as the centre of London. London, he says, should have been painted by Goya: “The city is monstrous and misshapen; its mystery is not a brooding, but a conspiracy. And these truths are evident above all to one who recognizes that London's heart is Charing Cross.”