Aleister Crowley Read online

  Other titles by Colin Wilson available in this series:

  RUDOLPH STEINER: The Man and his Vision

  G.I.GURDJIEFF: The War Against Sleep

  C.G.JUNG: Lord of the Underworld

  The Strange Life of P.D.OUSPENSKY

  ALEISTER CROWLEY

  The Nature of the Beast

  by

  Colin Wilson

  Originally published by The Aquarian Press 1987

  This edition published 2005 by

  Aeon Books Ltd

  London W5

  www.aeonbooks.co.uk

  © Colin Wilson

  The moral right of the author has been asserted

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, without permission in writing from the publisher.

  British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

  A C.I.P. is available for this book from the British Library

  ISBN 1 904658 27 X

  Printed and bound in Great Britain

  Contents

  Acknowledgements

  One Does Magic Work?

  Two The Reluctant Christian

  Three Raising Hell

  Four The Chosen of the Gods

  Five The Master and the Disciples

  Six The Magic Wand

  Seven The Abbey of Do-What-You-Will

  Eight Paradise Lost

  Epilogue

  Select Bibliography

  Index

  Acknowledgements

  THIS BOOK is heavily indebted to many friends: to Israel Regardie, Gerald and Angela Yorke, Roger Staples, Stephen Skinner, Neville Drury, Francis King, Dolores Ashcroft-Nowicki and Robert Turner, all of whom know far more about magic than I do. And, like all the previous writers on Crowley, I owe a major debt to my friend John Symonds; there is a tendency among modern Crowley disciples to denigrate The Great Beast for its attitude of genial scepticism; yet it is hard to imagine how it could ever be replaced as the standard biography. I also owe many insights to the books of Kenneth Grant, particularly to his Typhonian trilogy. Finally, I owe my wife a debt of gratitude for reading and correcting the typescript.

  CW

  One

  Does Magic Work?

  I WAS in my early twenties when I first heard the name of Aleister Crowley; it was not long after the publication of John Symonds’ biography The Great Beast. A friend who had asked the Finchley public library to obtain the book for him was told indignantly that nothing would induce them to spend the ratepayer's money on such vicious rubbish; the library even declined to try and borrow a copy through the inter-loan system. I was intrigued; what had Crowley done that he should be regarded as an untouchable by a London librarian? So when I found a copy in the Holborn library, I read it straight through in a weekend. On the whole, I must admit, I found Crowley irritating; he made me think of Shaw's comment about Mrs Patrick Campbell: ‘an ego like a raging tooth’. His life read like a moral fable on the dangers of exhibitionism.

  One thing puzzled me: the attitude of the biographer to his subject. Symonds seems to take the sensible view that Crowley's magic was a lot of self-deceiving nonsense. How then should one understand the following passage:

  Conjuring up Abra-Melin demons is a ticklish business. Crowley successfully raised them—‘the lodge and the terrace’, [he wrote], ‘soon became peopled with shadowy shapes,’—but he was unable to control them, for Oriens, Paimon, Ariton, Amaimon and their hundred and eleven servitors escaped from the lodge, entered the house and wrought the following havoc: his coachman, hitherto a teetotaler, fell into delirium tremens; a clairvoyant whom he had brought from London returned there and became a prostitute; his housekeeper, unable to bear the eeriness of the place, vanished, and a madness settled upon one of the workmen employed on the estate and he tried to kill the noble Lord Boleskine [one of Crowley's aliases.] Even the butcher down in the village came in for his quota of bad luck through Crowley's casually jotting down on one of his bills the names of two demons, viz. Elerion and Mabakiel, which mean respectively laughter and lamentation. Conjointly these two words signify ‘unlooked for sorrow suddenly descending upon happiness’. In the butcher's case, alas, it was only too true, for while cutting up a joint for a customer he accidentally severed the femoral artery and promptly died.

  Symonds’ tone of light irony implies that he thinks this was all Crowley's imagination; in which case, what really did happen? And what really happened in that Cairo Hotel room on 8 April 1904, when a voice began to speak out of the air, and dictated to Crowley The Book of the Law? Symonds avoids the question with the comment: ‘To enter, however, into the theological side of Crowleyanity is beyond the scope of this biography’.

  Two or three years later, not long after the publication of my first book The Outsider, I came upon Charles Richard Cammell's book Aleister Crowley, The Man, the Mage, the Poet and, as I read this, I found it hard to believe that he and Symonds were talking about the same man. Cammell came across Crowley's poetry in the early 1930s, and immediately became convinced that Crowley was a poet of genius. When he read Crowley's autobiography, The Confessions, he had no doubt that it deserved to rank with Cellini, Rousseau, and Casanova. In London, Cammell was introduced to Crowley—who was now sixty—and they became friends. The friendship was cemented when Cammell went to dinner and ate one of Crowley's hottest curries—washed down with vodka—without turning a hair. Crowley had a sadistic sense of humour, and loved nothing more than to see his guests rush to the bathroom to wash down a mouthful of his curry with pints of cold water; when Cammell asked for a second helping and a refill of vodka, ‘Crowley was conquered…He owned later that I had defeated him over that curry.’

  Yet Cammell also seems to beg the question of Crowley's magical powers. Describing Crowley's conjuration of the Abra-Melin demons, he also quotes Crowley's own statement that the house became filled with shadowy shapes. But Cammell adds the interesting comment that he believes Crowley's later bad luck—his lifetime of near-poverty and literary failure—was due to his breaking of the sacred oath he took in the Abra-Melin ritual—an oath to use his powers only for good and to submit himself to the divine will. ‘To me Crowley appears thenceforth to have been a man accursed: he lost all sense of good and evil, he lost his love, his fortune, his honour, his magical powers, even in large part his poetic genius…’

  Not long after reading Cammell's book I met him at the opening of a painting exhibition in Chelsea—a gentle, bearded man who was startled when I told him that I had recently acquired my own copy of his book from New York; he was unaware that it had been pirated. As we stood in the crowd, with glasses in hand, it was difficult to speak seriously about Crowley; but Cammell confirmed that he regarded Crowley as a great misunderstood genius, an ‘outsider’, and that he thought Symonds’ book was little more than a gross libel. Cammell died not long after our meeting, so I had no chance to learn more about Crowley from him at first hand.

  In the late 1960s, I wrote my own account of Crowley in a book called The Occult, and a year or two later, entered into correspondence with another Crowley disciple, Francis Israel Regardie. Regardie—who made himself a bad reputation among ‘occultists’ by publishing the secret rituals of the Golden Dawn society—also detested the Symonds biography and was not greatly pleased with my own chapter on Crowley. But when I read Regardie's book on Crowley, The Eye in the Triangle, I found it hard to understand his loyalty. Regardie had become a Crowley enthusiast in 1926, at the age of 19, when he read Crowley's classic on yoga Book Four, and wrote to Crowley; the result was an invitation to join Crowley in Paris as his secretary. Within a few months—as a result of the intervention of Regardie's sister—they were officially
expelled from the country. Regardie finally drifted to London and joined the magical society of the Golden Dawn. After Crowley, he found this insipid and resigned, then hastened the collapse of the society by publishing their rituals. He began to write his own books on magic, heavily influenced by Jung. And when he sent one of these to Crowley, the master replied to the disciple with some sharp criticisms. Regardie admitted later that he should have accepted the rebukes; instead, he wrote Crowley a silly letter beginning:

  Darling Alice [an insulting diminutive of Crowley's Christian name, and a sly reference to his bisexuality]. You really are a contemptible bitch…

  Crowley made no reply, but circulated an anonymous letter about Regardie that seethed with venom:

  Israel Regudy was born in the neighbourhood of Mile End Road, in one of the vilest slums in London…Apart from his inferiority complex, he was found to be suffering from severe chronic constipation and measures were taken to cure him of this, and also his ingrained habit of onanism. The cure in the latter case was successful, but Regudy abused his freedom by going under some railway arches and acquiring an intractable gonorrhoea…

  Regardie actually prints this letter in full in The Eye in the Triangle, and adds:

  It took me a long time to forgive him for this disgusting bit of self-projection. It is only within the last few years that my admiration for him as a great mystic has triumphed over my resentment and bitterness, enabling me to put aside my contempt for the nasty, petty, vicious louse that occasionally he was on the level of practical human relations…

  So it seemed that, in spite of his indignation about Symonds’ ‘libel’, Regardie was in basic agreement with its view of Crowley's character. And I have to confess that I found myself wondering whether Regardie's decision to ‘forgive’ Crowley was not simply a piece of opportunism. After all, there had been a Crowley revival in the 1960s; the Beatles had even included his portrait among their culture-heroes on the cover of their Sergeant Pepper record. Regardie set himself up as Crowley's chief American disciple, and republished many of his books, no doubt (since Crowley left no family) greatly to his own profit.

  Now, as I began to read the Crowley works that were now being republished, I came to understand why Regardie and Cammell admired him so much. Crowley has a clear, logical intellect and he can write with Shavian clarity. The Eight Lectures on Yoga, for example, have a breezy vitality, and reveal a mind of remarkable range; he is as comfortable talking about science and mathematics as about mysticism and poetry. When he was in a ‘magical retirement’ in a cottage in New Hampshire in 1916, he had with him a copy of Shaw's Androcles and the Lion, whose long introduction on Christianity is one of Shaw's most important works. Crowley found he disagreed with much of it, and wrote a commentary on it called The Gospel According to St Bernard Shaw.1 He wrote it without thought of publication, and it is one of the best commentaries on Shaw ever written. It has remarkable penetration—its criticisms of Shaw's socialism are practically unanswerable—and is full of Crowley's typical humour:

  There is no such thing as self-denial. Self-denial is merely the self-indulgence of self-denying people. There is an old, old story of an old, old woman, very benighted, who had not heard of Christianity till the Scripture reader came and read her the story of the Crucifixion, at which she wept copiously; but she soon dried her tears, remarking, ‘After all, it was ‘is ‘obby.’

  Works like these soon convinced me that Crowley was far more than a self-advertiser. But that still left the major question unanswered: What about the magic? Surely that had to be total nonsense?

  On this matter I also found myself changing my opinion. In The Occult, I had taken it for granted that witchcraft was basically an absurd superstition. So, for example, when I presented the case of the North Berwick witches, executed in 1591 for raising a storm in which they tried to drown James I, I had no doubt that this was basically a case of hysteria and superstitious credulity. Yet elsewhere in the book, I accept evidence that African witch doctors can perform authentic ‘magic’. My friend Negley Farson had described to me how he had seen witch doctors conjure rain out of a clear sky. Another friend, Martin Delany, described how the local Nigerian witch doctor assured his company that the torrential rain, which had lasted for five weeks, would stop for two hours for a garden party. The rain stopped immediately before the party was due to start, and the sun blazed out of a clear sky; it started again immediately after the party finished.

  Why should I have taken it for granted that Scottish witches would be unable to exercise control over the weather? In fact, there was strong evidence that the Berwick witches possessed real powers. There was a point during the examination when the king himself decided it was all superstitious nonsense; whereupon one of the chief accused, Agnes Sampson, whispered in his ear something he had said to his bride on her wedding night; no one but the king and his bride could have known about it. The king changed his mind about the witches. Another of the accused, John Fian, had been secretary to the Earl of Bothwell, who had a reputation as a dabbler in black magic; and Bothwell had good reason to intrigue against his cousin the king. When the king was sailing back from Norway with his bride, a tremendous storm had almost sunk the ship, and it was this storm that the witches had confessed to raising, with Fian's help. One writer on the case asserts that Fian's confession was forced upon him by the horrible torture of the boot, which crushed his leg; yet twenty-four hours later, Fian escaped and made his way home; clearly, he was not so badly injured…When I re-read the case, I had to admit that, if we once allow the supposition that the Berwick witches possessed the same powers as African witch doctors, then it was conceivable that they were guilty as charged—and as, indeed, they confessed.

  But how could a ‘witch’ influence the weather? My own supposition—which, I have to admit, left me vaguely unsatisfied—was that it was some form of ‘mind over matter.’ Dr Rolf Alexander's book The Power of the Mind, has a series of photographs that purport to show how, on 12 September 1964, at Orillia, Ontario, Alexander concentrated on a group of clouds, and dissipated them within eight minutes; other clouds around remain unaffected. He used ‘psychokinesis’—‘mind over matter.’ But that, admittedly, is a long way from causing a full-scale storm.

  Stories of Crowley's own powers suggest that his magic was also some hidden ‘mind force.’ His friend Oliver Marlow Wilkinson described how, when Crowley was in the room, a man began behaving like a dog—begged, barked, whined, and scratched at the door. Wilkinson's mother had seen Crowley cause another man to act like a dog. This, of course, sounds like some form of hypnosis. But the American writer William Seabrook has a story of how Crowley demonstrated his magical powers on Fifth Avenue. On a deserted stretch of pavement, Crowley fell into step behind a man and imitated his walk. Then, suddenly, Crowley buckled at the knees and squatted for a moment on his haunches; the man collapsed on to the pavement. As they helped him to his feet, he looked around in a puzzled manner for the banana skin.

  This is clearly not hypnosis, but it sounds like some curious form of telepathy—of the establishment of a ‘sympathy’ between Crowley and his victim. In the 19th century, hypnotists were much intrigued by a phenomenon they called ‘community of sensation.’ When a good hypnotic subject was placed in a trance, he would wince if the hypnotist stuck a pin in his own hand, and snatch his hand away if the hypnotist held his own hand above a candle flame; he would smile if the hypnotist tasted sugar, and grimace if he tasted salt. It sounded as if Crowley was using some variant of this principle.

  It can be seen that, like most members of the Society for Psychical Research, I was inclined to look for explanations of the ‘paranormal’ in terms of scientific principles that we do not yet understand. And one of my best efforts in this direction concerned that strange phenomenon known as the poltergeist, or rattling ghost. Poltergeists are one of the best-attested phenomena in the whole range of psychical research. Hundreds—probably thousands—of cases have been observed by trained o
bservers. But the Society for Psychical Research soon noticed that in nearly every case, there is a child or an adolescent in the house, and that when this person is not present, the phenomena—dancing furniture, banging noises, objects flying through the air—stop happening. And Freud's theory of the unconscious mind provided a more-or-less scientific theory to explain the phenomena: that they are not the work of disembodied spirits, but of violent tensions in this unknown region of the mind. Jung coined the term ‘extériorisation phenomena’ to describe it, and tells the story of how, when he was arguing with Freud about the ‘occult’, and Freud was being contemptuously sceptical, he—Jung—experienced a burning sensation in his diaphragm, and there was a sudden loud bang from the bookcase. Jung said: ‘That is an example of exteriorization phenomena.’ ‘Bosh!’ said Freud. ‘It is not bosh, and to prove it, there will be another bang in a moment.’ And a second loud detonation sounded in the bookcase. Freud was rather shaken. If Jung was correct in believing that he somehow caused the bangs, this seems to be a fairly conclusive proof that poltergeists are actually a mischievous aspect of the unconscious mind.

  But that still fails to explain how the unconscious mind causes objects to fly through the air—or how the ‘ghosts’ can converse in a code of raps, or even through human-sounding voices. Parapsychologists refer to poltergeist phenomena as ‘spontaneous psychokinesis’, but this also begs the question. There is strong evidence that some gifted subjects can move tiny objects—such as postage stamps and compass needles—by concentrating on them, but they are hardly in the same class as the poltergeist, which has been known to move a Landrover for several hundred yards.

  It was not until I began researching a book on the poltergeist that I engaged in a systematic study of poltergeist phenomena through the ages. One thing immediately became obvious: that when communication has been established with the ‘entity’, it invariably claims to be some kind of spirit. And Guy Playfair, who had spent many years studying poltergeists at first hand in Brazil, told me that he had no doubt that most poltergeists are spirits. On the day after speaking to him, I went to interview a family in Pontefract who had been ‘haunted’ by a highly destructive poltergeist—it had smashed every breakable object in the house—which claimed to be the ghost of a monk who had been hanged on a gallows at the spot. The more I studied this case, and others like it, the more I became convinced that Playfair was right. By the time I began to write Poltergeist! there was not a shred of doubt in my mind: poltergeists are exactly what they claim to be, disembodied spirits. I found this conclusion thoroughly embarrassing; I would far rather have clung to the more respectable ‘spontaneous psychokinesis’ theory. But honesty compelled me to admit that it simply fails to explain the facts as completely as the spirit theory.