When Crowley became serious about the Golden Dawn, he left the Hotel Cecil and took rooms at 67-69 Chancery Lane, within ‘New Stone Buildings’ towards the north western corner with High Holborn.
Crowley had fitted this flat out with two temples, one for white magic and one for black: the white magic room was lined with eight-foot mirrors, and the one for black magic – in a sort of cupboard – had “an altar supported by the figure of Negro standing on his hands… the presiding genius of this place was a human skeleton,1 which I fed from time to time with blood, small birds and the like. The idea was to give it life, but I never got further than causing the bones to become covered with a viscous slime.” (This was done “with the idea of creating a material and living demon servant”.)
Bennett's words about the Goetia may have startled Crowley, because he had been dabbling with Goetia and more specifically with the magic of Abramelin (a system for contacting one's Holy Guardian Angel, from a manuscript Mathers had found in the Bibliothèque Nationale; Mathers's edition of the book had just been published by Watkins in 1898). As well as the HGA it involves subsidiary demons, and it has a bad reputation in magical circles. One night, says Crowley, he and Jones were working on magic and went out to eat: coming back, they saw a black cat on the stairs (“not a real cat, either”) and opened the door to find the temple – or cupboard – door open and the altar upset. More than that, “Round and round the big library tramped the devils all the evening, an endless procession; 316 of them we counted, described, named, and put down in a book. It was the most awesome and ghastly experience I had known.”
Or in a variant account, “As we went out, we noticed semi-solid shadows on the stairs; the whole atmosphere was vibrating with the forces which we had been using. (We were trying to condense them into sensible images.) When we came back… the temple door was wide open, the furniture disarranged and some of the symbols flung about in the room. We restored order and then observed that semi-materialised beings were marching around the main room in almost unending procession.” It is possible that Bennett knew what Crowley had been dabbling with not because evil was showing in his face, or aura, but because Jones had told him; they knew each other.
Bennett was another chemist (he worked for the firm of Dr Bernard Dyer, Analytical and Consulting Chemist, at 17 Great Tower Street EC3). Crowley got to know Bennett at Chancery Lane and found him to be one of the most remarkable men he had ever met. He had been brought up a Catholic by his mother, who had died slowly from ulcerated tuberculosis of the throat when Bennett was about ten, contributing to his horror of the flesh. Bennett later abandoned the occult for Buddhism, becoming an important early British Buddhist, but for now his passion was magic, and he taught it to Crowley, going through the invocation of gods, the evocation of spirits and demons, and the consecration of talismans. As Crowley puts it, at Chancery Lane “We made talismans that got on the job, and stayed on the job.”