THE BEAST HIMSELF
There is an element of exhibitionism in all magicians; after all, the desire to perform magic is fundamentally a desire to impress other people. In Crowley, it so outweighed his other qualities that most of his contemporaries dismissed him as a publicity seeker. And since the English have a peculiar horror of immodesty, he came to be regarded as the embodiment of every anti-English vice. Seven years after his death – in 1954 – the Finchley Public Library declined to purchase a copy of John Symonds’s biography of Crowley, or even to try to borrow it from another branch. The friend of mine who tried to order it was told that libraries are intended to circulate literature, and that by no stretch of imagination could Crowley be associated with literature.
It cannot be denied that the librarian had a point: Crowley was a mountebank. In spite of this, he deserves serious consideration. for he was a magician in the original sense – a mage rather than an ‘occultist’ or ‘spiritualist’. His character was flawed and complex, but his career certainly followed the parabolic course of rise and downfall that seems typical of magicians.
He was born Edward Alexander Crowley on October 12, 1875, the year that saw the death of Levi and Vintras, and the creation of the Theosophical Society. His father, Edward Crowley, had made his fortune from Crowley’s Ales, and retired to devote his life to preaching the doctrines of the Plymouth Brethren. They lived in Leamington, a still, peaceful town not far from Stratford-on-Avon; ‘… a strange coincidence’, he remarked later, ‘that one small county should have given England her two greatest poets – for one must not forget Shakespeare.’ In his autobiography, which he calls The Confessions of Aleister Crowley, he makes it clear that much of his later ‘diabolism’ was a revolt against the religion of his childhood. Like Huysmans’s diabolists, he associated sex with sin. He wrote later: ‘My sexual life was very intense … Love was a challenge to Christianity. It was a degradation and a damnation.’ He also remarks contemptuously of the members of the Golden Dawn: ‘They were not protagonists in the spiritual warfare against restriction, against the oppressors of the human soul, the blasphemers who denied the supremacy of the will of man’ – a phrase that brings to mind the doctrines of Saint-Martin. It was his mother, he said, who first said that she thought he was the Beast from the Book of Revelation, whose number is 666.
This makes it sound as if his childhood was repressed and embittered. In fact, his autobiography makes clear that he had affectionate and indulgent parents, and was rather a spoilt little boy. Boys tend to imitate their fathers, and his father, he says, was a born leader of men, so his spirit grew unchecked. His father died when he was eleven, and his natural wildness increased. He seems to have been the kind of schoolboy who smokes in lavatories and loves breaking his sister’s toys. At the age of eleven he went to a private school for the sons of Brethren at Cambridge, and it was here that the spirit of revolt seems to have been sown in him. It happened immediately after his father’s death – up till this time he had been happy enough there – so presumably he was suffering from some kind of emotional shock. More important, he was approaching puberty, and he was always powerfully attracted by sex. His mother was so puritanical that she violently quarrelled with Crowley’s cousin Agnes because she had a copy of a book by Zola in her house (moreover, a perfectly harmless one, Dr. Pascal). So when a servant girl showed an interest in him, Crowley lost no time in getting her into his mother’s bedroom and possessing her on the bed. The motivation here is clear enough. He was fourteen at the time. His career almost came to a premature end on Guy Fawkes night, 1891, when he tried to light a ten-pound home-made firework, and was unconscious for ninety-six hours. He went to public school at Malvern in the following year, then on to Oxford, where he lived lavishly and published his own poems. He discovered rock climbing, and for many years this was to satisfy his adventurous temperament. He was not a good poet because he lacked verbal discipline; a few lines of one of his poems will give an idea of his qualities:
I sate upon the mossy promontory
Where the cascade cleft not his mother rock,
But swept in whirlwind lightning foam and glory
Vast circling with unwearying luminous shock
To lure and lock
Marvellous eddies in its wild caress …
There is a certain impressionistic power; but it has no originality; it might have been written eighty years earlier. Perhaps everything came too easily: he had charm and wealth, he was a born mountaineer, a fluent poet, a successful lover; so his occasional setbacks produced a torrent of rage and self-justification instead of an effort at self-discipline.
In his late teens he came across Mathers’s Kabbalah Unveiled (which is, in fact, basically a translation of the Zohar taken from a Kabbalist called Rosenroth), which fascinated him precisely because it was all so incomprehensible. Next came A. E. Waite’s compilation on ceremonial magic, The Book of Black Magic and of Pacts. Waite was later a member of the Golden Dawn, and Crowley refers to him with typical unfairness: ‘The author was a pompous, ignorant and affected dipsomaniac from America, and he treated his subject with the vulgarity of Jerome K. Jerome, and the beery, leering frivolity of a red-nosed music-hall comedian …’ There follows a passage that illustrates what was wrong with Crowley as a stylist: ‘[Waite] is not only the most ponderously platitudinous and priggishly prosaic of pretentiously pompous pork butchers of the language, but the most voluminously voluble. I cannot dig over the dreary deserts of his drivel in search of the passage which made me write to him …’ (Confessions, p. 127). It is true that Waite is an appalling stylist, but he is never as bad as this. (Readers of Symons’s Quest for Corvo will recognise a style of invective much like Rolfe’s.)
Apart from Swinburnian poetry, Crowley also produced a cycle of poems about a sexual psychopath who ends as a murderer (White Stains) and a sadistic, pornographic short novel called Snowdrops from a Curate’s Garden, which shows close affinities with Sade, psychologically as well as stylistically.
Through a student of chemistry, Crowley was introduced to an ‘alchemist’ named George Cecil Jones, and through Jones to the order of the Golden Dawn. He was disappointed by the mediocrity of most of the members, and found the ceremonies commonplace. Nevertheless, he was admitted, and given the name Brother Perdurabo (one who endures to the end). He was of the lowest of the society’s ten grades, and began working hard to rise in rank.
The oddest fact of all is that Crowley was a born magician. Perhaps the explosion that almost killed him at sixteen had awakened his faculties – like Peter Hurkos’s fall from a ladder. He possessed a remarkable sense of direction that made him compare himself to Shetland ponies that can find their way through bogs and mists. These instinctive, animal faculties – ‘jungle sensitiveness’ – were strongly developed in him. He mentions that he can never remember mountains he has climbed, yet can recognise every pebble if asked to repeat the climb – ‘… my limbs possess a consciousness of their own which is infallible’. Hostile critics have dismissed his ‘magic’ as wishful thinking; he was a romantic who wanted to believe in magic as Yeats wanted to believe in fairies; as Huysmans said, ‘to find compensation for the horror of daily life, the squalor of existence, the excremental filthiness of the loathsome age we live in’.
This misses the point. What Crowley realised instinctively was that magic is somehow connected with the human will, with man’s true will, the deep instinctive will. Man is a passive creature because he lives too much in rational consciousness and the trivial worries of everyday. Crowley, with his animal instinct and his powerful sexual urge, glimpsed the truth expressed in Nietzsche’s phrase ‘There is so much that has not yet been said or thought’. This should be borne in mind as a counterbalance to the natural tendency to dismiss him as a mountebank. If an ordinary, rational person tried to perform a magical ceremony, he would be thinking all the time: This is absurd; it cannot work. And it wouldn’t. In moments of crisis or excitement, man ‘completes his partial mind’, and somehow knows in advance that a certain venture will be successful. William James remarks that a man can play a game for years with a high level of technical perfection, and then one day, in a moment of excitement, something clicks, and the game begins to play him; suddenly, he cannot do a thing wrong. Crowley states all this clearly in the important twentieth chapter of his autobiography, of which the following are the key passages:
I soon learned that the physical conditions of a magical phenomenon were like those of any other; but even when this misunderstanding has been removed, success depends upon one’s ability to awaken the creative genius which is the inalienable heirloom of every son of man, but which few indeed are able to assimilate to their conscious existence, or even, in ninety nine cases out of a hundred, to detect … The basis of the [misunderstandings] is that there is a real apodictic correlation between the various elements of the operation, such as the formal manifestations of the spirit, his name and sigil, the form of the temple, weapons, gestures and incantations. These facts prevent one from suspecting the real subtlety involved in the hypothesis. This is so profound that it seems almost true to say that even the crudest Magick eludes consciousness altogether, so that when one is able to do it, one does it without conscious comprehension, very much as one makes a good stroke at cricket or billiards. One cannot give an intellectual explanation of the rough working involved … In other words, Magick in this sense is an art rather than a science.
Here Crowley is very close to Paracelsus. His meaning is not always quite clear, but the total drift is plain. Magic is to do with a subconscious process, and the actual ceremonies and rituals are not ‘apodictically related’ to it, as treading on a rake is apodictically related to it hitting you on the head. It is interesting that he should use the word ‘apodictically’, later used by Edmund Husserl to mean ‘beyond all question’; for Husserl was the first to grasp clearly that all conscious processes are ‘intentional’ and that therefore man’s vision of himself as a passive creature in an active universe is false. His consciousness is so far removed from the power house that drives him that he can no longer hear its roaring, and makes the mistake of believing that consciousness is flat, passive, mirror-like.
Let me try to state this as plainly as possible. If a child whips a top, he is aware of the immediate relation between his whipping and the spinning of the top; if he stops whipping, the top slows down. Man has become so complicated that he is unaware of the relation between his will-power and the spinning of the top called consciousness, and minor discouragements tend to get so out of proportion that he forgets to whip it. Crowley had some intuitive sense of the powers of his hidden will, what Paracelsus meant by imagination, and he turned to magic with an instinct rather than an intellectual impulse. With much the same obscure feeling of potential power, Hitler turned to mob-oratory and Rasputin turned to faith-healing. Madame Blavatsky also possessed it to a remarkable extent, without possessing the self-discipline to go with it. The same is true of Crowley, to an even greater degree. But he cannot be understood without recognising that he did possess it.
When he became an ally of Mathers in Paris, Mathers sent him to London to try to regain control of the order of the Golden Dawn. Crowley had his own grudge against them: they had refused to allow him to ascend to a higher grade. The result was the dissolution of the Golden Dawn, and legal problems.
Yeats wrote irritably to Lady Gregory: ‘Fortunately [Crowley] has any number of false names, and has signed the summons in one of them. He is also wanted for debt …’ He added that they had refused to grant Crowley a higher grade because ‘we did not think that a mystical society was intended to be a reformatory’. This view of Crowley is by no means unjustified. He shared with Mathers a curious weakness: the desire to pose as an aristocrat. Mathers was given to dressing in kilts and calling himself the Chevalier MacGregor or the Comte de Glenstrae. Crowley took a flat in Chancery Lane shortly after joining the Golden Dawn, cultivated a Russian accent and called himself Count Vladimir Svareff. He explains in his autobiography that he did this in the interests of psychological observation; he had observed that his wealth gained him a certain respect from tradesmen, and he now wanted to see how much lower they would bow to a Russian nobleman. When he moved to a house on the shores of Loch Ness, he called himself Lord Boleskine, or the Laird of Boleskin, and imitated Mathers in adopting a kilt. Here he concentrated upon the magic of Abra-Melin the Mage, whose ultimate aim is to establish contact with one’s Guardian Angel. Crowley states that he and Jones (the alchemist) had succeeded in materialising the helmeted head and left leg of a healing spirit called Buer in London, and that on another occasion an army of semi-materialised demons spent the night marching around his room. In Scotland the lodge and terrace of Boleskin House became peopled with shadowy shapes, the lodgekeeper went mad and tried to kill his wife and children, and the room became so dark while Crowley was trying to copy magic symbols that he would have to work by artificial light, even when the sun was blazing outside.
After the quarrel with Yeats – who, according to Crowley, was ‘full of black, bilious rage’ because Crowley was a greater poet – the Laird of Boleskin went to Mexico, where his concentrated effort almost succeeded in making his image vanish in the mirror. This in itself makes quite clear what Crowley was out to do: to discover new horizons of the will. This raises the question: But in that case, why did he need magic, if his effects were produced by the will? And the answer underlines the central point of this book. The will cannot operate in vacuo – at least, except in certain moments of pure self-awareness. It needs a whole scaffolding of drama, of conviction, of purpose. When a patriot talks about his country, he does not mean the view out of the bathroom window, although that is certainly a part of his country. In order to get that patriotic glow, he needs to think of the Union Jack or Old Glory, and accompany it with some definite image of green fields or some battlefield of the past. When Crowley sat alone in his room in Mexico City, it was not enough to stare in the mirror and will; he had to think of the great ‘secret doctrine’ of magic, and see himself as the lonely ‘outsider’ with his sights fixed on the stars, and a quite definite aim: to establish contact with this Guardian Angel, as Abra-Melin the Mage had done before him. For the same reason, he picked up a prostitute because of the ‘insatiable intensity of passion that blazed from her evil inscrutable eyes’ that had ‘tortured her worn face into a whirlpool of seductive sin’. Since the unfortunate woman lived in a slum, she was probably merely half-starved, but the image of the ‘scarlet woman’ was important to define Crowley’s self-image clearly – the Nietzschean explorer, marching away from the warm camp fires of humankind into the cold outer wastes of the mysterious universe. And since he liked to dramatise himself as the Beast from Revelation, then a half-starved hag – no doubt a good Catholic and an affectionate mother – had to be the Whore of Babylon. But the point to observe is that it worked. With all his absurd Swinburnian gestures, he succeeded in capturing the fluid will and preventing it from ebbing into the sand of forgetfulness and self-depreciation. That was the aim.
‘Meanwhile my magical condition was making me curiously uncomfortable. I was succeeding beyond all my expectations. In the dry pure air of Mexico, with its spiritual energy unexhausted and uncontaminated as it is in cities, it was astonishingly easy to produce satisfactory results. But my very success somehow disheartened me. I was getting what I thought I wanted and the attainment itself taught me that I wanted something entirely different. What that might be it did not say. My distress became acute …’ He sent out an ‘urgent call for help from the Masters’, and a week later received a letter from George Jones that contained exactly what he needed. It can be seen that his ‘quest’ differed from that of any Christian or Eastern mystic only in mere form; he was on the same journey outward. Instead of the Upanishads or The Cloud of Unknowing, he studied the Kabbalah with its notion of the universe as ten spheres connected by twenty-two paths. The sceptic may shrug, but is this more absurd than believing that Jesus died for Adam’s sin, or that Mohammed is the prophet of God? The ‘results’ produced by a religion are not based upon the apodictic truth of its dogmas, but the dogmas are indispensable to the results, and the results are real.
The twenty-fifth chapter of the Confessions, in which all this is described, leaves no doubt of Crowley’s sincerity, or of the reality of his misery; he was not driven by exhibitionism, but by an obscure craving for reality. Oddly enough, it was his old mountaineering companion Eckenstein who was able to show him the next step. He advised him to give up magic, and simply develop a power of immense concentration. He saw immediately that Crowley’s trouble was still the fluidity of his will and sense of identity. And it is to Crowley’s credit that he immediately followed Eckenstein’s prescription and spent months in what amounted to yogic training.
There followed more mountain climbing – up Popocatepetl – travels to San Francisco, then Ceylon, and a love affair with a married woman that resulted in a book Alice, An Adultery. In Ceylon he found his close friend Allan Bennett, a student of Buddhism and colleague from Golden Dawn days; Crowley’s generosity had been responsible for sending Bennett to Ceylon. Bennett was later the founder of the British Buddhist movement, and he was one of the few people of whom Crowley was consistently fond. He spent months teaching Crowley all he knew of Eastern mysticism; after his months of thought control under Eckenstein, it came as a revelation. It is extremely interesting that Crowley, speaking of this period, emphasises the importance of a scientific approach to mysticism. ‘A single unanalysed idea is likely to … send him astray.’ And he makes a vitally important point that reveals that his insight was genuine: the fundamental principle of yoga ‘is how to stop thinking … The numerous practices of yoga are simply dodges to help one to acquire the knack of slowing down the current of thought, and ultimately stopping it altogether.’ We return to the concept I have emphasised throughout this book; of stillness, of preventing the energies from flowing away like water down a drain.
Bennett had been a private tutor to the solicitor-general in Ceylon; he now decided that it was time to renounce the world and become a Buddhist monk. Crowley went off and hunted big game, penetrated a secret shrine at Madura, explored the Irrawaddy River in a canoe and finally visited Bennett in his monastery, where, he claims, he saw Bennett floating in the air and being blown about like a leaf.
Crowley, now in his mid-twenties, was still basically a rich playboy and sportsman. In 1902 he was one of a party that attempted to reach the summit of Chogo Ri (or K.2), the world’s second highest mountain, in the Karakoram range of India; but bad weather and illness frustrated the expedition.
Back in Paris, he called on Mathers, hoping that his new accomplishments would win Mathers’s respect; but Mathers was not in the least interested in yoga, and only admired himself. Their relations became several degrees colder. Crowley became something of a figure among artistic circles in Paris, and Maugham portrays him in The Magician, one of his least successful novels.
He returned to Boleskin, and became friendly with a young painter, Gerald Kelly (who later became Sir Gerald Kelly, president of the Royal Academy). At Kelly’s family home, Strathpeffer, he met Kelly’s unstable sister Rose, a girl with a pretty face and a weak mouth. Already a widow, she had involved herself with a number of men who all wanted to marry her, and had encouraged them all. Crowley’s quirky sense of humour suggested the solution: marry him, and leave the marriage unconsummated. She could have his name, and be free of her admirers. They were married by a lawyer the next morning. But Crowley was not a man to pass up the opportunity of performing his ‘sexual magic’ on another woman. Besides, there was an element of masochism in Rose that appealed to the touch of sadism in him. Their decision to keep the marriage platonic lasted only a few hours. The rage of Gerald Kelly and Rose’s other relations delighted Crowley, who loved drama of any sort. He took Rose back to Boleskin – and had to quickly cancel an arrangement whereby a red-headed tart he had picked up should become his housekeeper – and then to Paris, Cairo (where they spent a night in the Great Pyramid) and Ceylon. It was here that Crowley shot a bat, which fell on his wife’s head and dug its claws into her hair; that night, Rose had a nightmare that she was a bat, and clung to the frame of the mosquito net over the bed, howling; when he tried to detach her she spat, scratched and bit. Crowley described it as ‘the finest case of obsession that I had ever had the good fortune to observe’.
It should now be fairly clear what was wrong with Crowley, and why he, like other magicians, carried inside him the seed of his own downfall. The self-centred child who disliked his mother (he describes her as ‘a brainless bigot’) had almost no capacity for natural affection. It is this that makes him a ‘monster’. He liked Bennett and Eckenstein because they impressed him, not because they touched any chord of affection. In Mexico he came close to disinterested study of a subject that might have raised his whole personality to a higher level; but life was too easy – it was too much of a temptation to indulge the schoolboy in himself. In Boleskin he had written to a society for the suppression of vice complaining that prostitution was conspicuous in Foyers. They sent a man to investigate, and finally wrote saying they could not find any sign of prostitution in the small Scottish town; Crowley then wrote back, ‘Conspicuous by its absence, you fools.’ His marriage to Rose was fundamentally another schoolboy prank. The serious part of him was not getting a chance to develop. In Cairo, when he and Rose returned there, he dressed himself in robes and called himself Prince Chioa Khan, declaring that an Eastern sultan had given him the rank. He told Rose’s parents that any letter not addressed to Princess Chioa Khan would be returned. When her mother addressed an envelope to the ‘princess’, but added an exclamation mark, Crowley returned it to her unopened. He could be extremely exasperating when he wanted.
There now occurred the event that Crowley thought the most important of his life. Rose was pregnant, and Crowley’s attempts to invoke ‘sylphs’ (spirits of air) for her benefit put her into a peculiar mood. The most sensible explanation is that she had received the imprint of Crowley’s personality so deeply that she found herself in telepathic contact with him and expressed notions that floated around in his subconscious. She told him that he had offended Horus, of whom, he says, she knew nothing. In a museum she showed him a statue of Ra-Hoor-Khuit, one of the forms of Horus, and he was impressed to find that the number of the exhibit was the number of the Beast in Revelation, 666. Rose (whom he now called Ouarda) now began to instruct him on how to invoke Horus; the ritual did not seem to make sense, but he tried it. The result, he assures his readers, was a complete success. Not only did he hear from Horus, but from his own Guardian Angel, whom he had been trying to invoke for so many years. His name was Aiwass. Horus told him that a new epoch was beginning (and many occultists would agree with this – Strindberg was saying much the same thing at the same time). Then Crowley was ordered to take his Swan fountain pen and write. A musical voice from the corner of the room then dictated The Book of the Law to him, assuring him that this book would solve all religious problems and would be translated into many languages. It goes further than any previous scriptures, Crowley says, in proving conclusively the existence of God, or at least, of intelligence higher than man’s, with whom man can communicate.
What is one to think of all this? The Book of the Law, with its fundamental assertion ‘Do what thou wilt’ (borrowed from Rabelais and William Blake), seems to be an attempt to write a semi-biblical text like Thus Spake Zarathustra, and the style is rather like Oscar Wilde’s biblical-pastiche prose poems: ‘Be goodly therefore; dress ye all in fine apparel; eat rich foods and drink sweet wines and wines that foam! Also, take your fill and will of love as ye will, when, where and with whom ye will …’ This is quite plainly Crowley, the man with a hangover from the Christianity of his childhood, speaking, and sounding rather like his contemporary Gide in Les Nourritures Terrestres written seven years earlier. On the other hand, there can be no doubt whatever that Crowley himself attached enormous importance to the work. It was his own Koran, and he was the chosen prophet. All great religions, he says, can be expressed in a single word: in Buddhism, Anatta; in Islam, Allah. In Crowleyanity the word was Thelema, the name of the abbey (‘Do what you will’) in Rabelais. And for the rest of his life, Crowley began all his letters with the assertion ‘Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law’. The epoch of Gods and demons is over; the new epoch opens in which man must cease to think of himself as a mere creature, and stand firmly on his own feet. This would be humanism, except that humanism, while placing man on his own feet, sees him as ‘human, all too human’, the thinking reed. Crowley sees him as a potential god, gradually coming to understand his own powers. It must be admitted that the conception is profound. It is true that Saint-Martin had expressed it more than a hundred years earlier, and Shaw would express it again in Back to Methuselah twenty years later; but it reveals Crowley as a great deal more than a brainless charlatan. He had created a fundamentally Nietzschean morality: ‘We should not protect the weak and vicious from the results of their own inferiority’; ‘To pity another man is to insult him.’ As to sin: ‘Strong and successful men always express themselves fully, and when they are sufficiently strong no harm comes of it to themselves or others.’ There is nothing original about Crowley’s book; Shaw’s Man and Superman, written at the same time, is a greater work in every way. But it is still Crowley’s major achievement, and when he had finished it, he may well have felt that he had at last produced his masterpiece, a work that towered above his plays and poems, and that it was worth devoting his life to making it known.
Back in Paris, Crowley wrote Mathers a letter declaring that the Secret Chiefs had appointed him head of the order. ‘I did not expect or receive an answer. I declared war on Mathers accordingly.’ He insists in his autobiography that he himself did not understand The Book of the Law, hated parts of it, and only slowly recognised it for the immense revelation it was.
At Boleskin again, he prepared a collected edition of his works in three volumes, and he later offered a large money prize for the best essay on his works. He was pathetically anxious to be accepted as a major writer. Malevolent magical currents swept from Paris – Mathers was obviously out to get him – and killed off his dogs, and caused a workman to go berserk and attack Rose. Crowley invoked forty-nine demons, which Rose apparently saw, and sent them off to torment Mathers. Rose bore him a small daughter, whom he called Nuit Ma Ahathoor Hecate Sappho Jezebel Lilith.
The next major event was another mountaineering expedition, this time to Kanchenjunga. The briefest way to deal with this is to quote the account given by Showell Styles in his history of mountaineering On Top of the World:
In 1905, a small expedition took up the challenge [of Kanchenjunga] … Three competent Swiss climbers and one Italian – Guillarmod, Reymond, Pache, and De Righi – chose as their leader an Englishman, a skilled mountaineer named Aleister Crowley. Crowley was perhaps the most extraordinary character who ever took to the mountain sport. He was ostentatiously careless and inhuman in all he did, styled himself ‘the Great Beast of the Apocalypse’, and practised Black Magic and Satanism. The party advanced up the Glacier and reached a height of 20,400 feet on the face below the main peak and to the west of it; and here, at Camp VII, the Swiss called a conference at which Crowley was formally deposed from leadership because of his sadistically cruel treatment of the porters. Crowley refused to accept this. The expedition was then called off, and all except Crowley started down for the lower camps. There was a slip which set off an avalanche. All of them were swept down and buried under the snow. Guillarmod succeeded in freeing himself and digging out De Righi, while Reymond (who had escaped the worst of the fall) came to his aid. Together they dug feverishly to try to rescue the deeply buried Pache and the three porters who were engulfed with him, at intervals shouting to Crowley to come and help them. But Pache was dead, and the porters too.
Crowley had heard the frantic calls for help but had not troubled to come out of his tent. That evening he wrote a letter, later printed in an English newspaper, commenting that he ‘was not over-anxious in the circumstances to render help. A mountain accident of this kind is one of the things for which I have no sympathy whatever.’ Next morning he climbed down, keeping well clear of his late companions who were toiling to recover the bodies, and proceeded to Darjeeling by himself. As a Satanist, it seems, he was doing rather well.
And Kanchenjunga remained unattempted for another quarter of a century.
Styles’s account is inaccurate in only one minor detail; Reymond stayed with Crowley, but went to the rescue of the others when they shouted.
In Calcutta, Crowley describes how he was attacked in the street by a gang of pickpockets, but that, far from feeling afraid, he felt like a ‘leopard’, the master of the situation. He managed to fire his revolver with perfect calm, and then ‘made himself invisible’. He explains that this is not literally true; it was simply that he possessed some odd power of causing a blank spot in the minds of people looking at him – like a conjuror. (Strindberg, we have seen, believed he also possessed this power.)
The next day Rose and the child arrived, and Crowley admits, ‘I was no longer influenced by love for them, no longer interested in protecting them …’ He took them to China, where he smoked opium, and ‘got his own back’ on some rebellious coolies by underpaying them and escaping down-river with his rifle pointed at them. After four months of this, he instructed Rose to return to England by way of India, to pick up the luggage in Calcutta, while he returned by way of New York. On arrival back in Liverpool he heard that the baby had died of typhoid in Rangoon.
Rose produced another baby not long after – Lola Zaza – who almost died of bronchitis soon after her birth. Crowley took the opportunity to order his mother-in-law out of the sick-room, and assisted the hag ‘down the stairs with my boot lest she should misinterpret my meaning’. But the marriage to Rose was virtually over; Rose had become a dipsomaniac, and later went insane. This was a pattern that was to recur with people who became too intimate with Crowley.
His first disciple was a ‘classic case of persecution mania’ named Lord Tankerville, whom he calls Coke in the autobiography. With Tankerville he travelled in Morocco and Spain – Tankerville presumably paying, for Crowley’s fortune was beginning to run out – but Tankerville ended their association with the remark: ‘I’m sick of your teaching – teaching – teaching – as if you were God Almighty and I were a poor bloody shit in the street.’ But he soon found another disciple, Victor Neuberg, a poet. He published more poetry, a book praising himself called The Star in the West (a fulsome account of Crowleyanity by a soldier, J. F. C. Fuller, later a majorgeneral), which won the £100 prize for the best essay on his works, and a bi-annual journal of magic called The Equinox. Crowley also decided to start his own magical society, which he called the Silver Star or A:A, and made use of the rituals from the Golden Dawn. He knighted himself, explaining that he had acquired the title in Spain for services to the Carlist cause, and shaved his huge domed head. Rose was now going insane and he divorced her. Symonds says that Crowley often entertained mistresses in their home, and occasionally hung her upside down by her heels in the wardrobe.
In 1910 he discovered the use of mescalin, and devised a series of seven rites. which he called the Rites of Eleusis, and hired Caxton Hall for their performance on seven successive Wednesdays. Admission was five guineas, and the aim was, he said, to induce religious ecstasy. His latest mistress, an Austrian violinist called Leila Waddell, accompanied the group on the violin. John Bull reviewed them with hostility, and another magazine, The Looking Glass, devoted several issues to attacking Crowley. It was the beginning of the persecution that was to last for the rest of his life. It cannot be maintained that it was undeserved. His life was becoming a series of mere events, like the lives of all the other magicians we have considered. Mathers tried to prevent the publication of the third issue of The Equinox because it contained a full description of the secret rites of the Golden Dawn, which Crowley had taken an oath never to reveal. The judge found in favour of Mathers. Crowley performed some magic from the book of Abra-Melin, and appealed; this time he won, and duly published the secrets.
But he had passed the high point of his life. From now on, although he lived until 1947, it was all downhill. The promise had gone, and the pattern was set: magical ceremonies, mistresses, frantic attempts to raise money, newspaper attacks on him and attempts to justify himself in print. In 1912 he met the German adept Theodor Reuss, who accused him of giving away occult secrets. The secret Crowley had given away in one of his books (called Liber 333, The Book of Lies) was that sex could be used magically. Reuss was a member of the Ordo Templis Orientis, which has been mentioned in an earlier chapter. Reuss ended by authorising Crowley to set up his own branch of the order, and Crowley set about performing sexual magic with diligence, sodomising Victor Neuberg in Paris in 1913 as part of a magical ceremony. He also practised sexual magic with a companion of Isadora Duncan’s, Mary D’Este Sturges, and they rented a villa in Italy for that purpose. He also took a troop of chorus girls to Moscow – they were called the Ragged Ragtime Girls – and had a violent affair with another ‘starving leopardess’ of a girl, who needed to be beaten to obtain satisfaction. Crowley claims it was his first relationship of this sort, but it was not the last. Physical sadism was another taste he acquired. He opened a Satanic Temple in a studio in Fulham Road, and an American journalist described the number of aristocratic female disciples who frequented it. Crowley had now filed his two canine teeth to a sharp point, and when he met women, was inclined to give them the ‘serpent’s kiss’, biting the wrist, or occasionally the throat, with the fangs. Symonds also mentions that he had a habit of defecating on carpets, and explaining that his ordure was sacred, like that of the Dalai Lama.
The Great War caught him in Switzerland, now aged thirty-nine. He claims that he tried to persuade the British government to employ him, and was refused. He decided to go to America. After a year of various unsuccessful magical activities, he thought up a new role – the anti-British Irishman. He was not, of course, Irish; he had never even been to Ireland. But this did not matter. He made a speech to the waves at the foot of the Statue of Liberty and tore up his British passport, or what he claimed was his British passport. After this, he began to write virulent anti-British propaganda for a newspaper called The Fatherland (subtitled Fair Play for Germany and Austria-Hungary). In his autobiography he triumphantly explains the reason for this: he was trying to help Britain by making his propaganda so absurd that it would provoke the opposite effect.
Admiral Sir Guy Gaunt, then head of Naval Intelligence in America, undoubtedly put his finger on the real motive when he wrote to John Symonds: ‘I think you describe [Crowley] exactly when you refer to him as a “small-time traitor”. As regards his activities, I think they were largely due to a frantic desire for advertisement – for he was very anxious to keep his name before the public somehow …’
But this does not completely explain it. There was also Crowley’s increasing disgust with England, the country in which he felt an exile, that refused him recognition on any terms.
Crowley describes his period in America as a period of poverty and humiliation. Humiliated or not, he seems to have managed to live fairly well. A report in a New York paper, The Evening World (quoted by Symonds), describes a fairly luxurious studio in Washington Square. It must be remembered that Crowley was always fairly expert at getting money from disciples. An American writer on witchcraft, William Seabrook, who was introduced to Crowley by Frank Harris, says that Crowley had a cult with followers and disciples. He also says of their ceremonies: ‘They were Holy Grail stuff, mostly. Some of their invocations were quite beautiful.’
Seabrook, who had met Gurdjieff and noted the tremendous power he seemed to exude, remarked that Crowley was also a man of power. And this should be borne in mind as a counterbalance to Symonds’s accurate but overcrowded account, which gives the impression that Crowley had reached a kind of dead end. What always distinguished Crowley from the disciples who came and went was a remarkable inner strength. It was this that preserved him from the disaster that overtook so many of them. He would eat and drink until he became bloated, and then deliberately starve himself down to a healthy weight again. Seabrook tells an amusing story of how Crowley one day announced that it was time he went off to spend forty days and nights in the wilderness. Seabrook and some other friends decided to stake Crowley, who was broke. They also found him a canoe and a tent. When they went to see him off, they discovered that he had spent every penny of the money on huge tins of red paint and ropes. He told them that, like Elijah, he would be fed by the ravens. Crowley spent the forty days and nights painting in huge red letters on the cliffs south of Kingston the inscriptions: EVERY MAN AND WOMAN IS A STAR and (inevitably) DO WHAT THOU WILT SHALL BE THE WHOLE OF THE LAW. He was fed by neighbouring farmers, who presented him periodically with eggs, milk and sweet corn. He returned to New York looking healthy and cheerful.
Seabrook goes on to tell one of the oddest stories about Crowley’s powers. When Crowley said he had gained greater power through his vigil, Seabrook asked for a demonstration. Crowley took him along Fifth Avenue, and on a fairly deserted stretch of pavement, fell into step with a man, walking behind him and imitating his walk. Suddenly Crowley buckled at the knees, squatted for a split second on his haunches, then shot up again; the man in front of him also buckled and collapsed on the pavement. They helped him to his feet, and he looked around in a puzzled manner for the banana skin.*
The incident makes Crowley sound like Till Eulenspiegel; it seems typical that he should demonstrate his power by making a respectable banker fall down.
Towards the end of his American period, Crowley discovered yet another ‘scarlet woman’. A woman named Renata Faesi called on him with her younger sister Leah, a thin girl with a broad mouth, sharp teeth and flat breasts. Apparently ‘something clicked’ as soon as they saw one another, and Crowley seized her and began to kiss her violently, to Renata’s astonishment. ‘It was sheer instinct,’ says Crowley. Fairly soon he was taking off her clothes to paint her in the nude – the painting was a ghoulish object called Dead Souls – and in due course Leah Hirsig, also called The Ape of Thoth and Alostrael, became pregnant.
In December 1919, Crowley returned to London. But he was not happy in England. He now suffered from asthma and bronchitis every winter, and periodic indulgence in all kinds of drugs, from mescalin and hashish to cocaine, heroin and opium, had lowered his physical resistance to the English cold and damp. His former pupil Victor Neuberg had married and settled down, but he remained obsessed by Crowley for the rest of his life.* Crowley had cursed him when they separated before the war, and Neuberg had been a nervous wreck for a long time afterwards. (He still attributed his ill health to Crowley’s curse.) There was no one else in London from whom Crowley could get money. Fortunately, at this critical juncture, he received a legacy of £3,000. (He had spent the £30,000 left him by his mother years before.) He decided to make for warmer climes, and after some preliminary wandering, Crowley and Leah Hirsig chose a farmhouse at Cefalù in Sicily. They were also accompanied by a nursemaid, Ninette Shumway (who had quickly become Crowley’s mistress), Ninette’s two-year-old son and by the two children Crowley had by Leah, a boy called Dionysus and a newly born girl, Anne Leah, whom he called Poupée. Crowley, now in his mid-forties, seems to have developed a few normal human feelings. He wrote in his diary: ‘I love Alostrael [Leah]; she is all my comfort, my support, my soul’s desire, my life’s reward …’ (He was certainly passionately fond of the Poupée, whose health had been feeble from the beginning.)
At first, life at the farmhouse, which he called the Abbey of Theleme, was idyllic, with bathes in the sea and long hours of meditation and sex magic. Crowley covered the walls with paintings of people having sex in every position, and painted his studio – which he called the Chamber of Nightmares – with demons. He was convinced that an adept could only become free of the need for drugs by taking them freely and mastering the need for them; so piles of cocaine were left around for anyone to take like snuff, while heroin was supplied by a trader from the mainland. But the jealousy of his two scarlet women tended to spoil things. Symonds describes a typical scene:
On the day the sun entered the sign of Taurus, i.e. the 20th April [1920], The Beast celebrated this event by an act of sexmagic in which both his loves participated. In the middle of this, a violent quarrel broke out between Sisters Alostrael and Cypris [Leah and Ninette], and the latter, bursting into tears, snatched up a thin cloak to cover her nakedness and ran out into the rain and the darkness. The Beast wandered over the mountainside looking for her, afraid she had fallen over the precipice. After calling her name for an hour (her little son Hermes helped by yelling from the Abbey window), he found her and dragged her back. Meanwhile Alostrael had been at the brandy and was now drunk. She greeted Sister Cypris with a curse and the fighting began again. With difficulty Crowley persuaded Concubine Number Two to go to bed. Then Alostrael, as if to have the last word, began to vomit and throw a fit.
Crowley tried hard to convince his womenfolk that possessiveness was an evil, and that they had to rise above such triviality, but they were unconvinced. However, they continued to submit to magical ceremonies – for example, Leah allowed herself to be possessed by a goat, whose throat was then cut as a sacrifice. An American film star, Elizabeth Fox, announced her imminent arrival, and Crowley looked forward to possessing her; however, she proved to be a disappointment – Crowley likened himself to the girl who went out to meet a dark, distinguished gentleman and found it was a one-eyed negro. The mathematician J. N. W. Sullivan arrived with his wife, Sylvia, and liked Crowley; they talked all night. Sylvia liked Crowley too; he managed to get her to stay on twenty-four hours after her husband left, and they practised sex magic together.
But life at the Abbey was becoming too complicated with personal clashes and quarrels. The child Poupée died after a long illness, and Crowley was genuinely shattered. A young American, an ex-naval officer named Godwin, arrived, and Crowley named him Brother Fiat Lux. But the strain of life in the Abbey proved too much for him. Another disciple, an Australian businessman named Frank Bennett, arrived, and Crowley asked Fiat Lux to let Bennett have his room. The result was tantrums and violence; Fiat Lux returned to America with less sanity than he left with.* On the other hand, he was triumphantly successful with Frank Bennett, who, like the young Crowley, had been the victim of a repressive upbringing. When Crowley explained that the sexual organs were the image of God, and that the best way to free the hidden powers of the subconscious mind is through sexual magic, the revelation was so startling that Bennett rushed to the sea and swam frantically. After more discussion that night, he walked barefoot in the mountains, then, after a day of bewilderment, went into a trance-like state of pure delight as he began to grasp this idea of the importance of allowing the subconscious to express itself. This was not, of course, Crowley’s problem; in fact, Crowley’s problem was the reverse of this – his subconscious was always bursting uninvited into consciousness, producing his exalted states and visions of the masters. Crowley’s problem was self-discipline.
At all events, Bennett’s clear recognition that his ordinary self-consciousness was only half the picture, that his subconscious self was equally a reality, acted as some kind of release that plunged him into ecstasy, and he went back to Australia full of the gospel of the Beast.
As to Crowley, the problem of self-discipline was becoming increasingly oppressive. The doses of heroin he took would have killed a normal man. Periodically he forced himself to take the ‘cold turkey cure’, simply depriving himself of the drug for days, and on the first occasion, after a long period of intense depression and misery, again began to paint and write with the old excitement. But he usually went back to drugs, apparently determined to learn to take them or leave them as he wanted. The result was long periods of lassitude and increasing insomnia, which had troubled him for years. Besides, he had spent the £3,000 legacy, and was broke again. In Cefalù there were no rich disciples to borrow from; on the contrary, a steady stream of visitors needed feeding.
J. N. W. Sullivan suggested that he write his memoirs; Crowley approached Collins, and got a £60 advance on a book called Diary of a Drug Fiend, then dashed off the novel at top speed. It was a remarkable achievement, even if not well organised enough to be a good novel. It is about an aristocratic couple who become slaves of heroin, then meet Crowley, retire to his Abbey, and are miraculously cured and ‘saved’. The book appeared in 1922, and was violently attacked by James Douglas in the Sunday Express. Douglas revealed that the Abbey was a real place, and denounced Crowley as a seducer of youth. Crowley was not entirely displeased at this eruption of publicity; but the book was allowed to go out of print, and Collins changed their mind about publishing Crowley’s autobiography – or ‘autohagiography’, as he preferred to call it – even though they had given him an advance of £120.
In London, Crowley met an excitable and slightly unbalanced young man named Raoul Loveday, an Oxford graduate, who was married to a pretty model. Loveday had read Crowley’s works, and within hours he was an enthusiastic disciple. When Crowley returned to Cefalù, Loveday and his wife, Betty May, followed, even though her misgivings were strong. Betty May hated Thelema; she hated the inadequate food, the lack of lavatories, the obscene paintings and, above all, her husband’s total infatuation for the Beast.
Loveday’s stay at Thelema was to last just over three months and be terminated by death. Both he and Crowley were ill with some kind of liver complaint much of the time – probably hepatitis, due to bad water. In February 1923, Crowley decided that a cat was to be sacrificed. He hated cats, and this one had scratched him deeply when he tried to throw it out of the room. When he found it in the scullery again, he made the sign of the pentagram over it with his magic staff, and ordered it to stay there until the hour of the sacrifice. Crowley’s power was working. The cat became transfixed. Betty May carried it away, but it came back to the same place, and sat petrified, refusing food.
Loveday was selected to perform the sacrifice. The cat was placed on the altar; incense was burnt; magical invocations went on for two hours. At the end of this time, Loveday slashed the cat’s throat with a knife; but the blow was too light, and it rushed around the room howling. It was caught again, etherised, and then Loveday was made to gulp down a cup of its blood. He subsequently collapsed and took to his bed. Crowley consulted his horoscope, and observed that he might die on February 16 at four o’clock.
Violent quarrels with Betty May followed; she left the Abbey in a fury after calling Ninette a whore, but came back the next day at her husband’s request. On the 16th, at the time Crowley had predicted, Loveday died. Betty May now recalled that when they had married, he had dropped the ring as he was about to put it on her finger – a bad omen; and in a photograph of the two of them, taken at St. John’s College, Oxford, there was the ghostly outline of a young man whose arms were stretched above his head – the exact position in which Loveday died.
Back in England, Betty May talked to the Sunday Express, and the British public was shocked and delighted with more revelations of the Beast’s immorality. John Bull also joined in the attacks. By the time these appeared, Crowley himself had been laid low by the same illness as Loveday, and was semi-conscious for three weeks before he began a slow recovery. But the adverse publicity had its effect on the new ruler of Italy, Mussolini; shortly afterwards, Crowley was ordered to vacate the Abbey of Thelema and get out of the country.
Now an ex-disciple reappeared in his life: Norman Mudd, an ugly young man who had known Crowley as long ago as 1907 at Cambridge. Mudd had been introduced to Crowley through Neuberg. But when Crowley’s unsavoury reputation and pornographic books got him banned from the college where he had been a student, their friendship went into cold storage. Mudd became a professor of mathematics in South Africa, but, like Neuberg, he could not forget Crowley. Now, when Crowley was being attacked by the British press, he appeared at the Abbey of Thelema, presented his life’s savings to Crowley and begged to be taken back as a disciple.
Crowley moved to Tunis, hoping that the Italian government would change its mind. Leah went with him, and also, presumably, their five-year-old boy, who now smoked cigarettes all day long and declared that he would become the Beast when his father died. Ninette had borne Crowley another daughter, and Crowley’s horoscope for her ended ‘She is likely to develop into a fairly ordinary little whore’. Norman Mudd joined them, and he and Leah became lovers. Crowley didn’t mind; Leah was supposed to be the Whore of Babylon. Now in her forties, she was looking haggard and old. Crowley was too preoccupied trying to shake off his illness. His drug addiction was impossible to shake off, and he had to accept it. He spent days moping in the hotel, trying to write volume one of the ‘hag’ – the autohagiography. He had acquired a small Negro boy, with whom he performed acts of sex magic. Crowley’s homosexuality began as an act of defiance of convention rather than of actual preference, but it seems to have become another habit.
Crowley deserted his little party – Mudd, Leah, the Negro boy – and went to France. He lunched with Frank Harris in Nice, and Harris managed to raise 500 francs for Crowley to get to Paris, although Harris himself was broke and at a loose end. (Crowley recorded in his diary that Harris was insane, and referred to My Life and Loves as the autobiography of a flea.) Mudd and Leah meanwhile starved in Tunis. In Paris, Crowley staggered around, dazed with drugs. Perhaps one of the most shocking sentences in Symonds’s The Great Beast reads: ‘He had tried everything and now at the age of fifty, when he could only proclaim the law of Thelema, he realised that what he really wanted was a job, some congenial work …’ He was thrown out of the hotel where he was living on credit.
Leah and Mudd somehow managed to get to Paris, where Mudd was pressed into writing a pamphlet defending the Beast: an open letter to Lord Beaverbrook, proprietor of the newspaper that had caused all the trouble. Mudd staggered to London, where he took refuge overnight in the Metropolitan Asylum for the Homeless Poor. Crowley and Leah moved to Chelles-sur-Marne for a few months. But Crowley was getting tired of his scarlet woman, who seemed to lack his own incredible ability to survive under any conditions. When a rich American lady named Dorothy Olsen fell under his fascination, Crowley appointed her his new scarlet woman, and deserted Leah. Leah’s sister had gone to Cefalù and taken away the child Dionysus, now six, to America; Leah, instead of being grateful, was furious and hysterical. Mudd returned to her, and they starved in Paris while Crowley and his new mistress travelled towards the sun in North Africa. Crowley usually managed to fall on his feet.
Both Leah and Norman Mudd became extremely bitter about the Beast, although it is not quite clear why. There was nothing to stop them finding work and continuing life together. But Crowley’s defection seemed to break something inside both of them. It was not the end yet, although Leah became a prostitute for a while, and later a waitress. As to Mudd, although he was dirty, unshaven and in a state of moral collapse, his chief worry was still that Crowley might be unfaithful to The Book of the Law. Even Crowley’s new love ran out of money after a few months of supporting him in the style to which he was accustomed, and had to write to American friends to borrow money. But Crowley was now recovering his powers, and his luck was taking a turn for the better. Theodor Reuss, the head of the German order of the O.T.O. (Ordo Templi Orientis), had died, and his successor, a Herr Traenker, turned to Crowley as one of the elect. Admittedly, the German branch was shocked to read The Book of the Law, with its Swinburnian anti-nomianism. All the same, the Germans paid Crowley’s maor debts in Paris, and even paid the fares of Crowley, Dorothy, Leah and Norman Mudd to Gera, in Thuringia. Leah and Mudd remained in Germany after Crowley left. Both of them came to hate Crowley, and Leah wrote him a letter renouncing her vows of obedience. What eventually happened to her is not known, except that she had another baby by another member of Crowley’s order. (Ninette, still back in Cefalù, had also had another baby by a local peasant.) As to Mudd, nothing much is known of him except that he committed suicide by drowning in Guernsey, in the Channel Islands, in 1934, clipping the bottoms of his trousers with bicycle clips and then filling them with rocks before he walked into the sea. Crowley had come to reject his most faithful disciple by then; he had written to Leah earlier: ‘I shall be very glad when the 42nd misfortune from that one-eyed man is over.’
Crowley was now definitely past his peak, at least as a magician. As a public figure he was notorious – ‘the wickedest man in the world’ – but this was hardly an advantage. It meant that no prosperous publisher would touch the Confessions, and when a small press (with the magical name Mandrake) brought out the first volume, their salesmen were unable to get orders from bookshops. Not only was Crowley ordered out of France in 1929, but his two chief disciples, an American secretary (known as the Serpent) and his latest mistress, Maria Teresa de Miramar, were not even allowed to enter Britain, and were turned back at Tilbury. It was to get Teresa into Britain that Crowley took the startling step of marrying her on August 16, 1929, in Leipzig. He was due to lecture in Oxford early in 1930, but was banned. He tried to present an exhibition of his paintings, at a house he rented in Langham Place, but another attack on him in John Bull made the owner cancel the lease. The marriage with Maria quickly turned into a cat-and-dog fight and dissolved, but there were always plenty of other women eager to become his scarlet woman. The latest was a German girl called the Monster, Hanni F___, who was only nineteen. They went to Lisbon together. (‘God once tried to wake up Lisbon – with an earthquake; he gave it up as a bad job.’) But Hanni suddenly began to get a feeling of claustrophobia; the magic depressed her; she deserted Crowley and returned, to Lisbon, leaving for Berlin the next morning, with a certain amount of help from the American consul. To be deserted was a shattering experience for the Beast; he pursued her to Berlin and a reconciliation took place. Before leaving, he left a suicide note at the top of Hell’s Mouth, a high cliff, and pinned it down with his cigarette case. The result was a flattering uproar in the world’s press; it would certainly have been a neat ending to the story if the world’s wickedest man had killed himself. But after lying low in Berlin for a few days, he attended the opening of an exhibition of his paintings. Hanni F___ was presumably with him; at all events they were reconciled, and she had now become a satisfactory magical assistant. Crowley asserts that she became a skilled ‘scryer’ and saw the Devil looking at her out of the crystal. Their sex magic was successful to the extent of making her pregnant. Eventually, she left him, taking his Book of Lies; with his usual vengefulness, Crowley remarked: ‘I’m glad I can brand her as a thief.’ He had also persuaded her to write a letter to the helpful American consul in Lisbon implying that she meant to accuse him of raping her; schoolboy humour and schoolboy malice were the dominant traits of his non-magical personality.
His wife, Maria, went insane and was interned in Colney Hatch. Symonds states that Hanni F___ also went insane. But it would, perhaps, be unfair to reach the conclusion that anyone who got mixed up with Crowley went insane. The explanation is a great deal simpler. Whatever else one can say against Crowley, he was certainly a powerful, dominant personality, and he attracted weaklings, as all strong people do. But Crowley himself was weak to the extent of needing the admiration of these weaklings, instead of avoiding them, as The Book of the Law suggests. They wasted his time, but he had nothing better to do with it. Hanni was neurotic from the beginning, and this is why she attracted him. The same is true of Dorothy Olsen, of Maria de Miramar, of his first wife Rose, of Leah Hirsig – in fact, of every woman of whom we have any detailed record. He liked the kind of woman with whom he could fight. His next mistress, whom Symonds calls Gertrude S., stabbed him with a carving knife on one occasion. When Gerald Hamilton (Isherwood’s Mr. Norris) was staying with Crowley in Berlin, he came in one day to find Gertrude tied up on the floor, with a note beside her saying that she was not to be released. On another ocasion he found Gertrude naked on the floor and Crowley asleep. When he asked Crowley if she was ill, Crowley said, ‘What, hasn’t that bitch gone to bed yet,’ and dealt her a tremendous kick that started another bout of scratching and screaming. These bouts usually ended when the local doctor was called in and administered a sedative. Crowley liked masochistic women.
As far as magic is concerned, the rest of Crowley’s life is an anticlimax. The major event of the thirties was the law case against his old friend Nina Hamnett. Crowley developed a belated taste for litigation when he saw a copy of his novel Moonchild displayed in a shop window with a note stating that his first novel (Diary of a Drug Fiend) had been withdrawn after the Sunday Express attack. This happened to be untrue; it had simply gone out of print. Crowley sued the bookseller, and got £50. This apparently gave him the idea of suing Nina Hamnett, a Soho character who had referred to him as a black magician in her autobiography, Laughing Torso. She had raised the idea only to dismiss it, mentioning also a rumour that a baby had disappeared at Thelema. Crowley knew Nina Hamnett had no money, but her publisher, Constable and Co., certainly had, and they would have to pay. So he set a law case in motion. Whether he expected to succeed is a matter for speculation; his counsel warned him that if the prosecution got hold of a copy of White Stains he wouldn’t stand a chance. (Snowdrops from a Curate’s Garden would have been more to the point, a piece of wildly humorous pornography in the manner of Apollinaire’s Debauched Hospodar.) None of his friends were willing to appear for the defence. And when a number of witnesses had described Crowley’s magical activities, the judge (Mr. Justice Swift) stopped the case, declaring that he had ‘never heard such dreadful, horrible, blasphemous and abominable stuff as that which has been produced by the man who describes himself … as the greatest living poet’. The jury found against him, and he was bankrupted. This was less serious than it sounds, since he had no assets anyway. The publicity was (naturally) tremendous, and this may have been all Crowley wanted.
The case reveals that Mudd was right to fear that Crowley might become fundamentally unfaithful to The Book of the Law. For Crowley’s life had at least been an admirably consistent protest against ‘the Protestant ethic’ and bourgeois hypocrisy. Since it had been his lifelong aim to shock people like Mr. Justice Swift and his jury, it was somewhat inconsistent to hope to arouse their moral indignation on his behalf.
It is difficult to think of Crowley as pathetic; but this is the word that summarises the Crowley John Symonds knew in his last years. Symonds met him after the war, when he was living in a boarding house called Netherwood at the Ridge, Hastings. The photograph of him at this period shows a thin old gentleman dressed in tweeds, smoking a pipe and looking like any retired colonel. He was more interested in heroin than food, which explains the loss of weight. Symonds says that he sometimes took as much as eleven grains a day, when the normal dose would be one-eighth of a grain. All sense of direction had gone. He was a bored old man who found the lonely evenings frightening. Perhaps this is the final comment on Crowley. Such ‘powers’ as he possessed came naturally; they were due to an overactive subconscious mind. But he never developed any real inner strength: the strength to be creative. And for the last quarter of a century of his life, he was a drug addict and an alcoholic. Louis Singer told me a typical story of Crowley’s later years. He asked a friend, Eileen Bigland, if he could stay with her, because he had to do some writing. Each day she went into the nearby town to do her shopping. Rather to her surprise, Crowley asked to come with her; he would wander off on his own, and meet her in a café when she had finished. At the end of two weeks he left. Mrs. Bigland’s daughter reported that the lavatory cistern was making an odd noise, and when investigated, it proved to contain fourteen empty gin bottles, one for each day of his stay. Her wine merchant later confirmed that Crowley had called in every day and collected a bottle of gin, which was booked to her account. Throughout his life, Crowley had no hesitation about imposing on friends and taking whatever he wanted. The irate wife of one of his disciples pointed out to him in a letter that he had spent £15,000 of her money in expensive cigars, cognac, cocktails, taxis, dinners and mistresses, and concluded ‘God Almighty himself would not be as arrogant as you have been, and that is one of the causes of all your troubles’. The analysis is accurate. From the beginning to the end of his life, Crowley possessed a rather silly arrogance, a lofty, theatrical view of his own value that seems to derive from Oscar Wilde and the aesthetics of the nineties. This explains why he could turn on faithful disciples like Norman Mudd and Leah Hirsig, totally convinced that some action of theirs had forfeited their right to his divine condescension.
But there was, equally, a positive side to Crowley. This emerges in Seabrook’s account of Elizabeth Fox’s experience at Thelema. She was the ‘film star’ who somehow avoided becoming Crowley’s mistress. Seabrook says that before she came to Cefalù she was in a depressed condition due to too much night life and bath-tub gin. Crowley dismayed her by telling her that she must begin with a month’s solitary meditation in a lean-to shelter on the cliff-top. When she objected, he pointed out that there was a boat leaving the next day. To comply, she had to meditate naked, except for a woollen burnoose that could be utilised on chilly days. The shelter was completely empty; the latrine was a lime pit outside the ‘tent’, ‘She would have, said Master Therion, the sun, moon, stars, sky, sea, the universe to read and play with.’ At night, a child would quietly deposit a loaf of bread, bunch of grapes and a pitcher of water beside her.
She decided to give it a try. The first days confirmed her fears. Sun, moon and sea are all very well, but if you feel bored, they are boring. For the first days she felt nervous and resentful. By the nineteenth day, her chief sensation was boredom. And then, quite suddenly, she began to feel ‘perfect calm, deep joy, renewal of strength and courage’.
There is nothing strange in all this, although few people know it. The mind must be made to stop running like a wrist-watch. It must be persuaded to relax and sit still. Its hidden fountain of strength must be persuaded to flow. This is the secret of the Hindu ascetics who sit still for years. It is not a penance, but a continuous trickle of deep delight. What is more, this is an automatic process. Our subconscious robot will adjust to any conditions if it is given long enough. It adjusts to stillness, so that the stillness ceases to cause boredom. For you have boredom when nothing is happening inside you. And nothing happens inside you when the outside world keeps the mind distracted. If the outside world is stilled for long enough, the inner power-house begins to work. This is a matter that must be discussed at length in considering the greatest magician of the twentieth century, George Gurdjieff. But Crowley knew about it. This was why he spent his forty days and nights up the Hudson. It is a pity that he had forgotten all about the secret when he most needed it, at the end of his life.
Even after death Crowley succeeded in creating an uproar. In his seventy-second year, he began to run down, and the bronchitis was more troublesome than usual; he died on December 5, 1947. Louis Wilkinson, the novelist (and close friend of the family magicians the Powys brothers), read aloud his Hymn to Pan at the funeral service; it is as gleefully and shamelessly phallic as one might expect of Crowley. The Brighton Council stated that it would take all steps to see that such an incident was never repeated.
* I have used this incident in my novel The Sex Diary of Gerard Sorme, in which Crowley is one of the central characters.
* See The Magical Dilemma of Victor Neuberg, by Jean Overton Fuller (London, 1965).
* In Ritual Magic in England, Francis King reveals that Godwin returned to America, and founded the Choronzon Club in 1931 – Choronzon being a demon. Godwin rejected Crowley’s practice of ‘magical masturbation’ and replaced it with what he called Dianism, and what is usually called the Karezza, sexual intercourse continued indefinitely without orgasm. (It had been ‘invented’, as far as America was concerned, by J. H. Noyes, founder of the Oneida Community.) The aim of the Karezza is to produce long-drawn-out ecstasy or intoxication. Francis King says that Godwin is still operative on the West Coast. Another Crowley disciple, Jack Parsons (who founded Cal. Tech.), apparently ran the Amencan O.T.O. from a huge house in Pasadena, mixing magic with nuclear physics, and attracting official misgiving. Ron Hubbard, the founder of Dianetics, has described how he was sent in to investigate by Naval Intelligence and caused the group to disperse.