Crowley was still searching for teachers and gurus, and a man called T.C. Crawford had recently written a book entitled A Real Mahatma: A Personal Study, published in 1906 by the oriental booksellers Luzac, opposite the British Museum. This was about Mahatma Sri Agamya Guru Paramahamsa, then visiting Britain. In November 1906 Crowley sent him a note, “If you are the one I seek this will suffice”, and they met. Crowley's first impressions were very favourable, but he became disenchanted, and by the time he read the Mahatma's own book, Sri Brahma Dara: “Shower from the Highest” (Luzac, 1905) he noted errors.
The guru held court at 7 Margaret Street and 60 South Audley Street, and it was here that relations worsened, until on Sunday 13 October 1907 they had a row: “a far from silent interview with Mahatma at the weekly meeting” as Crowley called it in his diary (‘silent interviews’ being part of the guru's practice). The guru was a famously ferocious and angry man, and consequently known as the Tiger Mahatma.
Crowley knew another ferocious man, Captain Fuller, who also had a good working knowledge of yoga – he went on to publish a book on it in 1933, cross referencing it with kabbalistic and magical ideas1 – and was not impressed by the Mahatma's writings. Crowley asked him to go along to a Sunday meeting, which he did on the 17 November, listening with disdain until the guru shouted “You pig-faced man! You dirty fellow, you come here to take away my disciples. Crowley send this pig-one, eh?” Fuller walked calmly to the door and let himself out, pausing only to put his head back round the door again and say in Hindi “Shut up! You are the child of a pig!”
“Fuller at 60,” Crowley wrote in his diary: “M[ahatma] threatens to murder him.” Fuller wrote the episode up in The Equinox, with an eye to comic effect, as ‘Half Hours with Famous Mahatmas’ by “Sam Hardy” (‘samadhi’). As for the guru, he came to grief the following year, when he was arrested for indecently assaulting two female disciples at his new headquarters in Goldhurst Road, Hampstead, and sentenced to four months hard labour.