Crowley continued his magical work with George Cecil Jones, and while staying with him in Surrey achieved the crowning of the Abramelin system, contact with his Holy Guardian Angel. Jones now insisted that Crowley, having ascended the Outer Order in the Great Queen Street days, and then been initiated into the Second Order by Mathers in Paris (and ascended through that to his own satisfaction), had now jumped from the Second Order – becoming a “Babe of the Abyss” and crossing it – to the mysterious Third Order. He was now a Magister Templi, a Master of the Temple, required to put all worldly things behind him including his dead child, and vowing to interpret everything that happened to him as the direct dealing of god with his soul.
A further responsibility of a Magister Templi was to found a temple, and this was what Jones was inspiring Crowley to do, but they needed a third man. This was Captain – later to be Major-General – J.F.C. Fuller, an admirer of Crowley's writing. Crowley had offered a £100 prize for the best essay on his work, which Fuller had won (he was the only entrant). Crowley then managed not to produce the prize money, but Fuller's admiration was undimmed, and the two men had met (with Rose) at the Hotel Cecil. Fuller was a steely intellect and a visionary of warfare, particularly tank combat and blitzkrieg tactics. He would attend German manoeuvres as a guest in 1935, and was one of only two Englishmen invited to Hitler's fiftieth birthday celebrations in 1939. Meanwhile he wrote books on yoga and the Kabbalah.
Fuller lived at 80 Overstrand Mansions, Prince of Wales Drive, Battersea, and after they fell out Crowley lampooned him as “The Bismarck of Battersea” (where after “abyss after abyss” of Hell, we reach “The ledge labelled ‘Battersea’, supreme word of malignity in the tongue of the pit”). But for now he was the great Crowley enthusiast, publishing his prize essay as The Star in the West (1907) and coining the word “Crowleyanity” for the new religion he hoped would supplant Christianity. This was the man Jones and Crowley needed: the three of them became the founding members of a new magical order, the discreetly named A∴A∴ (generally thought to mean the Argenteum Astrum or Silver Star).
Compared to the Golden Dawn's mixture of artistic talent and Masonic-mystical burghers, the A∴A∴ was less high-minded: esoteric historian R.A. Gilbert describes the A∴A∴ members as “self-centred moral pygmies”, and overall they were less distinguished. Along with just a couple of higher-powered magical members, notably Fuller and Charles Stansfeld Jones, members included novelist Ethel Archer, salonist Gwen Otter, poet Victor Neuburg, psychic researcher Everard Feilding, model Nina Hamnett, and the palmist Cheiro.
Crowley had a short spell living in Coram Street, Holborn, but in the early days of the A∴A∴ he took a flat, five flights up at 124 Victoria Street, which also served as the A∴A∴ temple. It was next door to the Victoria Palace Theatre (on the theatre's left; or on the right, if you're looking from the road) and only demolished recently.1
A∴A∴ members would dance around an altar in the flat, which Gwen Otter described as having “the most sinister atmosphere I have ever known”. One night, as Crowley tells it, there was dancing with the room dimly lit and heavy with incense, when several participants felt an extra person was present; “there was one too many.” The spell was broken when someone grabbed for the light: “No stranger was to be seen… We all agreed about the appearance of the visitor. We had all been impressed with the same feeling that he did not belong to the human species.” In the best traditions of occult fiction, the identity of this visitor is not spelled out.
There is a fictionalised description of Victoria Street in Ethel Archer's 1932 novel The Hieroglyph, based on Crowley as she'd known him around 1910: “A room, she reflected, betrays the character of its owner and occupant, and this was far from being a common one… the semi-ecclesiastical austerity side by side with evidences of strange perversity and barbarity.” The bare floor is painted black, with a leopard skin rug before the fireplace. A large stuffed crocodile grins from the corner of the room. From the ceiling hangs a “wonderful silver lamp or censer” and above the mantelpiece is a Byzantine crucifix, while on the mantelpiece itself are several images of Buddha, together with Chinese and Egyptian gods. On the wall is a scarlet silk hanging embroidered with gold letters, “the spoil of a Tibetan temple.” On the bookshelves are first editions of Verlaine, Baudelaire, Swinburne, and Wilde, with some Rodin busts on top of the bookcases, and on the wall beside the fireplace are “drawings by Beardsley and Osman Spare.”