Aleister Crowley Read online

  What is interesting about this comment is that it makes it clear that Crowley had a powerful compulsion to teach. This is something that is easy to forget as we read about his life, with its scandals and broken friendships and seductions. In fact, this is the trap into which most of Crowley's biographers have fallen, from Symonds onwards. Crowley's life becomes merely an outrageous story, a kind of moral fable about selfishness and depravity, like Bunyan's Mr Badman. And, as the present writer can testify, it is practically impossible to avoid being sucked into this particular whirlpool, if only because Crowley's life presents such an ideal opportunity for telling a good story. Yet the moment the reader turns to one of Crowley's own books—like his dictionary of ceremonial magic 777, written at about this time—it is to realise that, whatever Crowley's faults as a human being, he was undoubtedly totally serious about magic and mysticism. And that moreover, from his own point of view, there was a great deal of justification for some of his more ‘disgraceful’ actions. He writes:

  Fortunately we have learnt to combine these ideas [of mysticism and magic], not in the mutual toleration of subcontraries, but in the affirmation of contraries, that transcending of the laws of intellect which is madness in the ordinary man, genius in the Overman who had arrived to strike off more fetters from our understanding…

  And quite suddenly, in a flash, it becomes possible to grasp Crowley's own vision of the world, and to see what he was aiming at. He felt that he had seen, and directly experienced, a Dionysian vision of ‘beyond good and evil.’ Nietzsche had seen the same vision, and horrified his contemporaries by denouncing Christianity and writing in praise of war. Nietzsche had once been overtaken by a storm in a mountain hut where a shepherd was slaughtering a goat, and the smell of blood and the bleating of the goat had combined with the crash of the thunder and the beating of the rain, so that he had written: ‘Will, pure will, without the troubles and perplexities of intellect—how happy! how free!’ But when such a vision is expressed logically, in a work like A Genealogy of Morals, with its denunciation of the weak, it becomes ugly and frightening. Crowley saw himself as Nietzsche's true heir—after all, Nietzsche had only died in 1900—and was determined not to be driven insane by that paradoxical vision. He found himself surrounded by people who did not even begin to understand the vision, in whose eyes he was merely a rather vulgar and unpleasant exhibitionist. So kicking his mother-in-law downstairs was more than a burst of bad temper; it was a symbolic gesture, like Rastignac shaking his fist in Paris and exclaiming: ‘It's between the two of us now.’

  While Crowley was quite determined to live out his life according to his Nietzschean vision, he also recognized that it would probably involve a lifetime of misunderstanding and hostility. In his own eyes, this made him a kind of martyr. And this is precisely how Charles Cammell and Israel Regardie and Kenneth Grant have seen him. Admittedly, they manage to present Crowley in this light by concentrating upon his magical aims and glossing over the scandal. But it at least has the effect of presenting the other side of the picture, and showing Crowley as he saw himself. The reader who really wants to understand Crowley will have to practise the difficult exercise of switching from one point of view to the other.

  Crowley himself was determined to master this art. This is why, on his return from Morocco, he wrote a series of hymns to the Virgin Mary. He explains:

  I simply tried to see the world through the eyes of a devout Catholic, very much as I had done with the decadent poet in White Stains…

  And the comment that follows gives us a glimpse of the real calibre of Crowley's mind:

  I did not see why I should be confined to one life. How can one hope to understand the world if one persists in regarding it from the conning tower of one's own personality? One can increase one's knowledge and nature by travelling and reading: but that does not tell one how things look to other people. It is all very well to visit St Peter's and the Vatican, but what would be really interesting would be to know how they look to the Pope. The greatness of a poet consists, to a considerable extent, in his ability to see the world through another man's eyes…

  If Crowley had developed this aspect of himself, he would certainly have become one of the great writers of the twentieth century; it was precisely this kind of restless intellectual exploration that turned Yeats into one of the greater poets of the age. Crowley, unfortunately, lacked this passionate obsession with ideas for their own sake.

  It was also in 1907 that Crowley decided that, since the Golden Dawn refused to accept him as its natural leader, he would form his own magical order to supersede it. He called it the Silver Star—the Argenteum Astrum, or A.A. In the early days there were only two other members: the ‘alchemist’ George Cecil Jones, and Captain Fuller. Crowley proceeded to write a series of ‘scriptures’ for his order, such as the Liber Cordis Cincti Serpente (Book of the Heart girdled by a Serpent) and Liber vel Lapidus Lazuli. They were not, he explained, dictated by his guardian angel, nor of his composition, but somewhere between the two.

  Speaking of his decision to restore magic to its original purity, Crowley again has a passage that allows us a glimpse into his basic insights. He is speaking of the ‘ordeals’ that the neophyte has to pass through to become an adept, and his determination to re-establish their essence:

  I was at first ignorant enough of Magick to imagine that this could be done by the simple process of replacing sham formalities by real ones. I proposed, for example, to test people's courage by putting them in actual contact with the four elements, and so on, as was apparently done in ancient Egypt; but experience soon taught me that an ordeal, however severe, is not much use in genuine initiation. A man can always more or less brace himself to meet a situation when he knows that he is on trial…

  But Crowley reached the interesting conclusion that all this was unnecessary; once a probationer had taken the oath ‘to perform the Great Work, which is to obtain the knowledge of the nature and powers of my own being’, he seemed to ‘rouse automatically the supreme hostility of every force, internal or external, in his sphere’—in other words, that he would set into motion certain forces that would subject him to the ‘ordeals.’ This is a passage of central importance, for it reveals that Crowley's interest in magic was based upon an intuitive conviction that there are certain unknown laws of being which shape human existence, and that these laws cannot be cheated. (Jung's idea of ‘synchronicity’ is based upon the same intuitive insight.) Crowley's own ultimate failure seems to suggest that, in spite of this knowledge, he was unable to resist the temptation to cheat—that is, to take ‘short cuts.’

  Soon the Silver Star acquired another neophyte, a strange-looking youth named Victor Benjamin Neuburg. Jean Overton Fuller describes him as he was some years later:

  He was all head, the body being a slight affair as to its skeletal structure…Rich brown locks grew from above a broad forehead surmounting finely chiselled, aristocratic Jewish features. But it was his eyes that were everything. They were in shadow from his brows and additonally screened by deeply hooded lids, but opened to disclose an astonishing quality of forget-me-not or celestial blue…

  Crowley heard about him through Captain Fuller, and called on him in his rooms at Trinity when he happened to be in Cambridge. Crowley describes him as a mass of neuroses with ‘lips that were three times too large for him.’ But Neuburg was full of ‘exquisitely subtle humour’, well read, and ‘one of the best natured people that ever trod the planet.’ Neuburg had tried practising mediumship, and Crowley instantly divined that he had an extraordinary capacity for Magick. Neuburg was captivated by Crowley, and an unsuccessful attempt by the Dean of Trinity to ban Crowley from the college only strengthened his loyalty. When Crowley, tired of trying to keep Rose off the bottle, retreated to Paris, Neuburg went with him. Crowley made him the butt of a number of cruel practical jokes, including getting him paralytically drunk on Pernod, and persuading him to get engaged to an artist's model who was Crowley's own mistress. (Neu
burg was shattered and miserable when Crowley told him the truth.) Then, in an attempt to force Neuburg into some kind of contact with the real world, Crowley dragged him on a walking tour through Spain where, because they were so badly dressed, they were mistaken for brigands.

  Crowley also invited Neuburg up to Boleskine for a ‘magical retirement.’ In fact, Neuburg soon learned the Kabbalistic technique of ‘rising on the planes’, imagining one's astral body to be rising into the air and entering the astral realms. Neuburg attained remarkable proficiency in a fairly short time, confirming Crowley's suspicion that he was naturally gifted in Magick. In one of his earliest experiences, he encountered the angel Gabriel, clad in white, with green spots on his wings, and with a Maltese cross on his head. On another occasion he had a ‘bad trip’ and encountered a red giant against whom he was powerless, and who cut Neuburg to pieces and chased him back to his body. Crowley taught him the ‘Harpocrates formula’, through which he slew the red giant.

  It must not be assumed that these descriptions are lies or fantasies; innumerable practitioners of magic have experienced them, and there is such a basic similarity in all their descriptions that it must be assumed that there is an objective component in the experience. If we assume that what happens is entirely ‘psychological’, and has nothing to do with spiritual entities, then at least the experience is some kind of exploration of an inner landscape which is common to all of us. The easy assumption—that Crowley and other Golden Dawn members were simply playing a game of self-deception—is ultimately untenable. When we realise that Crowley was responsible for introducing Neuburg to these amazing realms of self-exploration, it becomes possible to understand why Neuburg regarded his guru with a kind of adoration. But there was clearly another bond: that Crowley was inclined to sadism, while Neuburg had masochistic tendencies. One evening, Crowley accused Neuburg of lingering among the Qlipoth, the harlots of the astral plane, and ‘corrected’ him by giving him thirty-two strokes with a gorse switch, drawing blood. ‘He is apparently a homosexual sadist’, wrote Neuburg in his magical diary1 ‘for…he performed the ceremony with obvious satisfaction.’

  Crowley also beat Neuburg on the buttocks with stinging nettles; and since all this seemed to fail to make Neuburg suffer, he began to make coarse anti-semitic remarks. This upset Neuburg. ‘It is the very limit of meanness to grouse at a man because of his race.’ He describes Crowley as ‘a cad of the lowest type.’ And at the end of the ten day retirement, Crowley made Neuburg sleep for the next ten nights on a bed of prickly furze (another name for gorse), in a freezing cold room—Jean Overton Fuller believes that this is how Neuburg contracted the tuberculosis that finally killed him in 1940, at the age of fifty-seven. At the end of this twenty day ordeal, Crowley told Neuburg he had passed his probation, and would be admitted to the lowest neophyte grade (known as 10 = 1.) During this period at Boleskine, Neuburg met Rose, who was obviously far gone in dipsomania—Crowley claims she was drinking a minimum of a bottle of whisky a day. Crowley goes to some length in the autobiography to insist that he was still deeply in love with her (he described their marriage as one long sexual debauch), and that their divorce in 1909—to achieve which he supplied her with evidence of adultery—was really for her benefit.

  After the magical retirement, Neuberg accompanied Crowley back to London, and helped him prepare the second volume of The Equinox, a ‘review of scientific illuminism’, a ‘periodical’ (actually, a series of bulky volumes running to over four hundred pages each) which Crowley proposed to publish twice a year, at the spring and autumn equinoxes. They contain a mixture of verse, plays and, ‘magical scriptures’, and are generally regarded as Crowley's major literary (and magical) legacy. Volume two appeared a few days after the autumn equinox of 1909. After this, Crowley and Neuburg went off to North Africa for yet another magical retirement.

  The retirement was to be devoted to ‘Enochian magic’—a form of magic revealed to the Elizabethan occultist Dr John Dee through the mediumship of his ‘scryer’ (or seer) Edward Kelley. A series of invocations, or ‘calls’, were dictated to Dee and Kelley in an unknown language called Enochian, which sounds like gibberish: ‘Madariatza das perifa Liil cabisa micaolazoda saanire caosago…’; their purpose was to summon up demons. Nineteen of these Calls or Keyes were dictated, and the nineteenth is designed to allow the magician access to thirty ‘Aires’ or aethyrs—these being spiritual planes or dimensions of consciousness. In Mexico in 1900, Crowley had explored the last two of these Aires through the use of the nineteenth invocation; now he set out to explore the remaining twenty-eight. If we can believe Crowley's own account of this ‘magical working’, contained in a document called The Vision and the Voice, he achieved a series of strange visions of angels, demons and other spirit entities. In the fifteenth Aire, Crowley was told that he had now been promoted to the grade of a Master of the Temple—the experience he had longed for ever since reading The Cloud Upon the Sanctuary; it meant that he himself was now one of the Secret Chiefs.

  Most of these explorations had been conducted during the periods of rest between tramps across the desert of Morocco. Neuburg, who had now received the name Omnia Vincam (‘I shall conquer all’) had been made to shave his head, except for two tufts of hair on his forehead, dyed red and twisted into the shape of demonic horns. On December 3, 1909, Crowley and Neuburg climbed Mount Dal'leh Addin, near the village of Bou-Saada, and Crowley tried to enter the fourteenth plane or Aire. But there was some obstruction—he only encountered layer after layer of blackness. Crowley decided to call it a day, and they proceeded to descend the mountain. Then Crowley was seized by a sudden inspiration. He and Neuburg went back to the mountain top, and proceeded to practise an act of buggery, in which Crowley was the passive partner; they dedicated it to the god Pan. (In the autobiography, Crowley only says euphemistically that he ‘sacrificed himself’.) After this, Crowley staggered back to Bou-Saada in a semi-mystical state in which ‘all impressions were indistinguishable.’ When he came to himself, on his bed, he found himself changed. ‘I did not merely admit that I did not exist, and that all my ideas were illusions, inane and insane. I felt these facts as facts.’ And when, later that evening, he tried the invocation again, the veils of blackness were drawn aside, and he was admitted into a circle of stones, which he soon recognized to be veiled Masters. The angel told him that he had spent his life trying to achieve fame, power and pleasure, and that now he had become one of these Masters, who were as lifeless as stones. In a sense, Crowley had died. (Jean Overton Fuller comments that when Crowley decided he had transcended the condition of ordinary men, he ‘ceased to be completely sane.’)

  The next three Aires brought more revelations about the nature and duty of a Master. On 6 December, it was time for a magical task involving some difficulty and danger. Crowley had to cross a symbolic abyss between ordinary men and the Secret Chiefs and, in order to do this, he had to invoke the demon of the Abyss, Choronzon. For this purpose they wandered around Bou-Saada until they found a valley floored with fine sand. They constructed a circle of rocks, and nearby drew a triangle, killing a pigeon at each angle and sprinkling its blood. Protective ‘names of power’ were traced in the sand. Neuburg sat within the inner circle, while Crowley, who was to act as a kind of ‘medium’ for Choronzon, sat outside, within the triangle. According to Francis King, such an act is unique in the history of magic. Then Crowley repeated the invocation, and Neuburg repeated a magical oath. Things then quickly began to happen, although the various accounts leave some doubt about precisely what it was. A voice that sounded like Crowley's cried: ‘Zazas, zasas. Nasatanda zazas!’, the words with which Adam is supposed to have opened the gates of Hell. Then Choronzon appeared, and began to utter blasphemies. After this, Neuburg began hallucinating, and thought Crowley had changed into a beautiful woman he had known in Paris. She proceeded to tempt Neuburg, who resisted. Meanwhile Crowley, who was wearing a black robe and a kind of Ku Klux Klan hood, called out: ‘I think that's all t
here is.’ He was mistaken. The courtesan offered to lay her head at Neuburg's feet in token of submission, an offer he again refused. Then she turned into an old man, then into a snake. After this, Neuburg saw Crowley himself crawling towards him, begging for water; knowing this was another delusion caused by Choronzon, he refused. Neuburg then conjured the demon, in the name of the most high, to declare his nature; Choronzon replied that he didn't give a damn for the most high, but admitted that he was Master of the Triangle. Neuburg, becoming nervous, asked protection from Aiwas, but Choronzon replied that he knew Aiwas, and that ‘all their dealings with him are but a cloak for thy filthy sorceries.’ Neuburg was trying to write all this down—for Crowley was apparently in a trance—but as he did so, the demon succeeded in blotting out a small part of the magic circle with sand, and suddenly leapt inside, in the form of a naked man (presumably Crowley was still sitting in his yoga position within the triangle) and grappled with Neuburg. It tried to bite his throat, and Neuburg tried to stab it with a magical dagger. Eventually, he drove Choronzon out of the circle, and repaired the break with his dagger. The courtesan returned, but was again rejected. Choronzon begged to leave the triangle to get his clothes, but was refused. After trying unsuccessfully to make Neuburg admit that magic was all nonsense, the demon gave up, and ‘was no more manifest.’ Finally, Crowley wrote the word ‘Babalon’ in the sand with his ring. The tenth invocation was over. He and Neuburg then lit a huge fire to purify the place, and destroyed the circle and the triangle.

  Crowley's note to the account states that he ‘spoke…in spite of himself, remembering afterwards scarcely a word of his speeches’, which seems to make it quite clear that Choronzon spoke through his mouth. This would seem to suggest that the naked man who wrestled with Neuburg was again Crowley himself. But this fails to explain Neuburg's other hallucinations. It seems fairly clear that something extraordinary took place on that afternoon of 6 December 1909.