Early in The Devil Rides Out, the Duke de Richleau has to convince his friend Rex of the reality of the occult, starting with hypnotism, then the will to good or evil, and then “the invisible influence which is all about us”: “A very eminent mental specialist who holds a high position in our asylums wrote a book with that title [i.e. The Invisible Influence] and I have not yet asked you to believe a tenth of what he vouches for.”
This man was Dr Alexander Cannon, and Crowley had met him in unexpected circumstances. When he returned from Berlin in July 1932, one of his first calls was Colney Hatch, the gigantic mental hospital up at Friern Barnet, to see Maria de Miramar. Colney Hatch had 2,500 patients and the longest corridor in Britain, and for many years it was a London byword for lunacy (“Eccentric?”, says Bertie Wooster, in one of P.G. Wodehouse's comic novels, “She could step straight into Colney Hatch, and no questions asked.”)1
Not otherwise interested in visiting, Crowley seems to have needed Maria to sign something, perhaps a statement admitting adultery. He took Billie (Bertha Busch) along. Bill had a habit of making scenes and shouting obscenities in public: “So showed her two other ladies doing it,” he writes. “One specialized in ‘fucking old piss-hole’ the other ‘fucking old shit-bag.’ Edifying.”
The psychiatrist they met there was none other than Cannon. Crowley found him “very nice”, although he noted a “bee in his bonnet about hypnosis”. Hypnosis was just the tip of the iceberg: Cannon also had a bee in his bonnet about levitation, which he claimed to practise, levitating himself and his native porters across a chasm in Tibet. He had already published Hypnotism, Suggestion and Faith Healing (Heinemann 1932) but with The Invisible Influence: A Story of the Mystic Orient With Great Truths Which Can Never Die (Rider, 1934) he went too far for his employers. He was asked to resign, later developing a lucrative private practice on Harley Street and being consulted by Edward VIII. He proceeded to publish other books including Sleeping Through Space: Revealing the Amazing Secrets of How to Get What You Want and Keep Well (1938) and he cultivated an impressive personal manner: he liked to be known as “His Excellency Doctor Sir Alexander Cannon” (among other things; he was also “Fifth Master of the Great White Lodge of the Himalayas”). He later lived in a castle-like mansion, on the Isle of Man, and affected a cloak with high wing-collars.
Cannon held magical teas, where he would lecture and demonstrate hypnosis, at what was then the Mayfair Hotel; this was at number 7 Down Street, not far from what is now Down Street's ‘ghost’ tube station. Crowley – who had meanwhile decided Cannon was a charlatan – went along to one of these teas on Sunday 13 May 1934. Cannon tried to levitate a girl named Kyra (a daughter of Nijinsky) by hypnotising her with a light in her eyes. She failed to rise but went into a trance where she was clearly distressed, with spasms and convulsions, and members of the audience shouted at Cannon to stop.
Along with Crowley, who heckled Cannon about something unrelated, another member of the audience was West Indian occultist Rollo Ahmed, who became the star of the afternoon: he said he would levitate himself instead of Kyra (this also failed, but he had stolen the show). Crowley wrote in his diary “Rollo Ahmed… V. good”; Cannon was “bowled out… completely.”