In 1920 Crowley went to Sicily and established the Abbey of Thelema at Cefalu with the current Scarlet Woman: a woman named Leah Hirsig, whom he had met in America. It was hand-to-mouth communal living with a fluctuating crew of about half a dozen, including children and visiting disciples.
While in Sicily Crowley became an Ipsissimus,1 an old Golden Dawn word preserved in popular culture in Dennis Wheatley's occult thrillers The Devil Rides Out and To The Devil – A Daughter. It is the highest grade in the Golden Dawn/A∴A∴ system. Having left Christ and Mohammed behind at the Magus stage, he was now “wholly free from all limitations soever… The Ipsissimus is pre-eminently the Master of all modes of existence… [with] no relation as such with any Being… and no consciousness of any kind involving duality.”
Crowley seems to be the only human being who has ever officially attained this grade, albeit self-conferred. He had also lucked in with Leah Hirsig (“Alostrael”) , an extraordinary woman in her own right, but whom a High Court judge might describe as depraved: she was happy to shit on him, have sex with a goat, and sexually abuse her children. Crowley's prolix, cocaine-fuelled paeans to her in his Magickal Record crank fin-de-siècle decadence up to a rarely seen voltage: she is “the fiend, Satan-Alostrael”, with “Her Satan-secret Asp-brew in Her Cup's Blood (Filth, Madness, Poison, Inchantment, Putrefaction)”; “She's of sound Satan-stock… the stuff of my ideal, fiend-whore…”.
And I the Worm have trailed my slug-slow slime across Her Breasts; so that Her mother-mood is turned and Her breasts itch with lust of Incest. She hath given Her two-year bastard boy to Her lewd lover's whim of sodomy, hath taught him speech and act, things infinitely abhorred, with Her own beastly carcass. She hath tongued Her five-month girl, and asked its father to deflower it… Then Her blood's grown icy hard and cold with hate; and her eyes gleam as Her ears ring with a chime of wedding bells, dirty words, or vibrate, cat-gut fashion, to the thin shrieks of a young child that Her Beast-God-Slave-Mate is torturing for Her pleasure – ay! and his own, since of Her Cup he drank, and of Her soul he breathed.
He loved it all. He rolled each drop of filth around His tongue. All this because He loved Her. He loved Her as nor God nor Man nor Beast nor Devil has loved. All this because She loved him as he Her; because She was of his bone marrow, and his flesh nerve, and of his blood the spirochaetes…2
Sounds romantic, I hear you say. But at the same time “there She lies, the lazy lump of nastiness, no more to me than my cut toenails… I don't love Her; it's her lust for evil, for our Lord, for me…”
Remembering her in Paris, he wrote “I have made my Scarlet Woman, perfect beyond all praise, from a dull ugly school-teacher, ignorant, tired, old and common. Only three years and three months – behold a peerless Proctophile,3 a Priestess of Passion, prehensile to the Phallus of Pan… her faith, her courage, her candour unmatched in the world… No deed but we dared it and did it! No sorrow but we suffered it. No filth and no venom but we made it our meat and drink…”
Trying to have sex with a goat (after which Crowley cut its throat) seems innocuous enough compared to other activity in the paean above, which doesn't sound either allegorical or pure fantasy. The “lewd lover” with the whim of sodomy is Crowley himself, and the two-year bastard boy is Leah's son Hans (“Hansi”) from a previous relationship, whom he describes elsewhere as “my darling little brother and concubine Dionysus Ganymede”; Ganymede is a reference to the Greek myth of Zeus, in the form of an eagle, carrying off the boy Ganymede to be his catamite, as in the slightly queasy painting by Rembrandt. The five-month girl is their daughter Anne Lea (“Poupée”), who was about six months old at the time of Crowley writing.
Whatever happened, it wasn't all fiendish exultation at the Abbey. Both parents were devastated a couple of months later when Poupée died. She was always a sickly child, and as her health worsened – two or three months before the screed above – Crowley had been distraught, “howling like a mad creature all day. I want my epitaph to be ‘Half a woman made with half a god.’” 4
In 1922 Crowley returned from Cefalu, and after almost lodging in Russell Square (not an area he liked; he mentions staying in “a horrible hotel in Russell Square thronged with hustling hooligans of the middle classes”) Gwen Otter encouraged him to look down the King's Road, where he found new digs at 31 Wellington Square.
Crowley was now out of money and tried to sell some journalistic pieces such as ‘The Crisis in Freemasonry’ and ‘The Jewish Problem Re-Stated’, but he hit a more saleable subject with drugs. Writing as an expert in curing drug addiction – which was ironic, because it was in Cefalu that his own use of cocaine and heroin had become uncontrollable – he wrote ‘The Drug Panic’ as “A London Physician” and ‘The Great Drug Delusion’ as “A New York Specialist”.
Crowley failed to sell a book idea to the literary publisher Grant Richards, creator of the World's Classics series, who didn't want either his autobiography or a book on drugs, but recommended he try the more popular firms of Hutchinson or Collins. And so it was that Crowley went to Collins, then at 48 Pall Mall, where J.D. Beresford gave him a £60 advance for the book which became Diary of a Drug Fiend.
Over four weeks, at 31 Wellington Square, Crowley dictated the 121,000 word book to Leah – taking longhand dictation, a feat in itself – at well over four thousand words a day. Characteristically high-minded in tone, it presents the Abbey of Thelema as a radical clinic where drug addicts can be cured by the book's Crowley figure ‘King Lamus’.
Beresford was surprised to see Crowley reappear so soon, manuscript in hand, but he was impressed and gave him a further £120 advance for an autobiography.
As for Wellington Square, Crowley was drawn to 31 for numerological reasons (31 is the “secret key” to The Book of the Law) and it is very pleasant: he took “a large front room on the first floor, with French windows opening upon a balcony which overlooked the spirit-soothing oasis of the square: the small green oblong with its ancient trees.” Still addicted to heroin, he writes to disciple Jane Wolfe in Cefalu that he has taken a room in “a nice quiet house where I shall be able to work”, asking her to send on his white flannel trousers and striped flannel jacket, and to “sew up 10 grammes of the Hero's Bride in small flat packets” into the jacket lining.
Wellington Square was also an address of James Bond, where it appears as the plane-tree-filled square in Moonraker.