The few years after the Blythe Road confrontation were the most extraordinary of Crowley's life, spent largely abroad and burning through an inheritance. After visiting Mathers again in Paris, he then went to Mexico via New York, and his Victorian-Edwardian travels include Ceylon, Burma, India, Vietnam, Hong Kong (where he visited Elaine Simpson, now married, and found her using her Golden Dawn robes in a fancy dress contest), China, Japan, and Tangier. With Eckenstein he climbed Popocatepetl volcano in Mexico, where he rejoiced over the death of Queen Victoria, and he made two unsuccessful attempts on the Himalayan mountain Kanchenjunga, the second badly mishandled with four deaths and the ruin of his reputation in mountaineering circles.
He studied yoga, meditation and Buddhism with Allan Bennett, and magically he practised Abramelin magic, Enochian magic (after Dr John Dee's late renaissance attempts to communicate with angels in their own language), and published an edition of Mathers's manuscript of The Goetia.
In Scotland he met Rose Kelly, the unstable sister of his friend Sir Gerald Kelly the painter, and married her. While honeymooning in Cairo, travelling as Prince and Princess Chioia Khan (with Rose also known as Ouarda the Seer) he made contact with an entity named Aiwass, who dictated the text that became known as The Book of The Law, a Nietzschean screed that trampled on other religions in general and Christian values in particular (“With my Hawk's head I peck at the eyes of Jesus as he hangs upon the cross”; “I flap my wings in the face of Mohammed and blind him”; “…I spit on your crapulous creeds.”) Crowley always insisted that he hadn't written it himself, taking dictation from a voice that seemed to be coming from behind his left shoulder while he wrote; it wasn't an ‘inspired’ or ‘automatic’ writing, coming from his unconscious, but the work of an external entity, a disembodied intelligence he variously identified with his Holy Guardian Angel, with Set, an Egyptian adversarial ‘bad’ god prefiguring Satan, and even straightforwardly with Satan himself. The 1904 revelations also involved a long-dead Egyptian priest, Ankh-f-n-Khonsu (whose stele – a painted plaque – was catalogued as item 666 in Cairo Museum), and whose reincarnation Crowley came to believe he was (“in the 26th Dynasty… I was Ankh-f-n-khonsu and brought about the Aeon of Osiris to replace that of Isis”.)
The Book of the Law became the foundation of Crowley's new religion, and he considered it the greatest event of his life. It combines the style of fin-de-siècle decadence – “To worship me take wine and strange drugs whereof I will tell my prophet, & be drunk thereof!” – with a belief that might is right, and the joy of strength: “The kings of the earth shall be Kings forever: the slaves shall serve”; “We have nothing with the outcast and the unfit: let them die in their misery. For they feel not. Compassion is the vice of kings: stamp down the wretched and the weak: this is the law of the strong: this is our law and the joy of the world.” It embodies the essence that British writer Cyril Connolly crystallised when he wrote that Crowley “bridges the gap between Wilde and Hitler.”
Crowley and Rose had a daughter born at Boleskine, Nuit Ma Ahathoor Hecate Sappho Jezebel Lilith Crowley (Lilith for short), and continued to travel, but while journeying back through China alone – he'd sent Rose home separately with the infant – Crowley felt he didn't love them, and that they were a distraction from his destiny. Reaching Liverpool, he found that the baby had meanwhile died in Rangoon; Crowley's friend and early bibliographer Louis Duncombe-Jewell said the unfortunate child must have succumbed to “acute nomenclature”.
Crowley and Rose were unhappy, but in October 1906 they moved to 106 St. Mary's Mansions, an upmarket Victorian mansion block in St. Mary's Terrace, Paddington, and in December Rose had another daughter, Lola Zaza Crowley. Crowley loved Rose in his fashion and wrote pornographic poetry to amuse her, but their marriage was tense. He was unfaithful (Lola seems to have been named after his mistress);1 by his own account he kicked his mother-in-law downstairs and threw her out when she visited them here; and he continued to experiment alone with hashish and tincture of peyote (with characteristic introspection he was able to relate his mescaline colour visions to having earlier looked at an opal matrix in a jeweller's window on New Bond Street, possibly Hunt and Roskell at 156). He also continued his deferential magical association with George Cecil Jones, asking permission to take a vow of silence and being instructed more specifically to cut his arm with a razor whenever he unthinkingly answered a question. Rose thought this was ridiculous and hated it.
Rose was unhappy and drinking heavily – leading to a spell in a Leicestershire sanatorium for alcoholics – and on the weekend of 23-24 March 1907 Crowley moved out. While living there he also wrote the ‘Proem’ to his play The World's Tragedy (the tragedy is Christianity), leading to his inscrutable reference to it a couple of years later as something “which was written long ago when I lived, as will be obvious from the style, in Paddington.”