50 
WESTMINSTER ABBEY
A past life

While they were living in Berlin, Bertha Busch stabbed Crowley with a carving knife just below the shoulder. He lost a good deal of blood, and it made him sufficiently aware of his own mortality to draw up a will on 22 December 1931, in which he wanted his body to be embalmed in Egyptian fashion or, failing that, his ashes interred in an urn placed either at Boleskine, or Cefalu, or Westminster Abbey. The Abbey – a joke, since burial there is not at the wish of the deceased – is about a desire to be recognised as a truly great poet, interred in Poets’ Corner with the likes of Shakespeare.

Westminster Abbey had already figured in his longer story. When he recovered his previous incarnations, he remembered being Eliphas Levi (1810-1875), the French occultist who played a major role in the 19thC occult revival. Levi visited London in 1854, where he met with Bulwer-Lytton and other students of the esoteric, and one day he found a note at his lodgings. It contained half of a card cut in two, with half of the Seal of Solomon, and a scrap of paper which read “Tomorrow, at three o’clock, before Westminster Abbey, the other half of this card will be presented you”.

Levi stood there holding his half card as nonchalantly as possible, and saw a carriage standing before the Abbey. A servant beckoned him to the carriage, where he met a woman in black, with a veil, who showed him the other half. Unveiling, she told him (“with a very strong English accent” – she was evidently speaking French) that she knew he had been asked for magical demonstrations before, and had declined. “Perhaps you have not the necessary things,” she said; “I will show you a complete magic cabinet.” Swearing him to secrecy, she showed him a collection of magical instruments and robes, ”even lent me some curious books that I needed” and wanted him to carry out a full necromantic evocation of a dead spirit. They agreed to evoke Apollonius of Tyana, a first-century Greek, and ask him two questions, “of which one concerned myself and the other interested this lady.”

The ‘cabinet’ for the evocation was in a small tower of her house, with four concave mirrors. There was a sort of altar with a marble slab, on which was a little brazier, and there was another brazier on a tripod in front of Levi, who held a sword and a ritual to be read. Levi felt he had invoked the clear shade of a man, larger than life-size and not looking as Levi had expected, before he passed out. The shade had not spoken, “but it seemed that the questions which I wished to ask it answered themselves in my mind. To that of the lady an interior voice replied in me, “Dead!” (it concerned a man of whom she wished to have some intelligence). As to myself I wished to know if reconciliation and pardon would be possible between two persons, of whom I thought, and the same interior echo answered pitilessly, “Dead!”

The effect of all this made a deep impression on Levi, who writes that after it, “I was no longer the same man…”

There is a coda to Crowley and Westminster Abbey in the 1940s, during the war, by which time he was a slightly comic figure in Britain. William Joyce, “Lord Haw-Haw”, regularly broadcast wireless propaganda at England from Berlin. In his distinctive hectoring tones, he said that prayers and church services were clearly failing to help the British cause – so perhaps Crowley should be invited to celebrate a Black Mass at Westminster Abbey.