Crowley always attracted lost souls, and one of the saddest was Norman Mudd. Mudd came from modest origins in Manchester, where his father was a teacher; he won a scholarship to study mathematics at Cambridge, and was for a while a university lecturer in South Africa. Tom Driberg remembers him as a dim, grey figure who would come up at parties and say “You won't remember me – my name is Mudd.” Unlucky in name, unprepossessing in appearance, Mudd had also lost an eye to a gonorrhoeal infection, making Crowley think he might be one of the four deformed men foretold in a vision during the Paris Working.
Mudd (as Omnia Pro Veritate) was one of Crowley's most ardent disciples, Renfield to Crowley's Count. Encountering Crowley and Thelema, he “understood for the first time what life was or might be”, threw up his career, and went to Cefalu, where he presented Crowley with his savings and fell in love with Leah Hirsig. For a while Crowley held him in high esteem, listening to his mathematical insights into The Book of the Law. He also gave him the task of being his PR man and challenging the Beaverbrook Press.1
Returning from Cefalu to do this, Mudd found lodgings at number 27 Redburn Street, not far from Gwen Otter, back in the days when Chelsea was a cheap, Bohemian, and slightly off-the-beaten-track district. It is now hard to imagine Chelsea as shabby and disregarded, but in 1945 Graham Greene wrote in a letter “I should hate to live in Chelsea. So dirty and the real fume of creepy evil.”
Sadly, Crowley tired of Mudd, writing to Germer “to me he is just a religious maniac.” Mudd went from being an esteemed magical comrade to “the basest and grossest of all types of men I have ever seen… It's the horribly amorphous mollusc quality in Mudd which gives him the nightmare quality which appals so irresistibly. ‘Hoglike abortion’ 2 is rather rough on hogs and their abortions. They have organic form at their worst. Mudd is ‘a nearly liquid mass of loathsome – of detestable putrescence’…” 3
Meanwhile Leah Hirsig, a highly intelligent and in some respects phenomenal woman, was growing disenchanted with Crowley. For a while she remained loyal to the cause, if not the man, and as the twenties went on she endured absolute poverty (she had to sell the dead Raoul Loveday's shoes for bread); drudgery as a restaurant washer-up and coal-heaver; possibly prostitution (biographers differ on this); and a relationship with Norman Mudd. They were having sex when she asked him what his name was, and he answered “Omnia Pro Veritate”. She recorded in her diary that she'd had sex “with a man who does not know who he is but is commonly called Norman Mudd.”
Hirsig's attempts to break free of Crowley's influence – not ‘morally’, but just in terms of breaking out of the force field of someone who is always right and always has the last word – make extraordinary reading. Long after Crowley had lost interest, in the autumn of 1930 she was driven to revoke all former bonds, oaths and loyalties in occult-legalistic terms with a ceremony and symbol Ẍ, combined with “lygs”. Lygs were seemingly a form of sarcasm or transcendental irony (“I define the term Lyg to be a common noun meaning a proposition which I offer to the cognizance of another – some supposed intelligence other than myself – as if I believed the proposition whereas in fact I disbelieve it”). Mudd helped her draft this, and the final letter was in his handwriting.
Mudd, as well, eventually wanted nothing more to do with Crowley. In 1934, now in his mid-forties, he moved from the Rowton House hostel for homeless men at 220 Arlington Road, Camden, and went to the Channel Islands, lodging briefly at a hotel in Guernsey. While there he went down to the beach, fastened his trouser ankles with bicycle clips, and then filled his trousers with stones before walking into the sea to die.
His body was found on 16 June 1934. Crowley's quip on Mudd's suicide was “I feel sure he must have left a long, elaborate, mathematical proof as to why he had to do this.”