Aleister Crowley Page 11

  Crowley and Neuburg resumed their march the next day, this time walking across open desert (so far there had been roads), ignoring warnings from officials about brigands. As they marched towards Biskra, they continued to ‘call’ the aethyrs. At the Royal Hotel in Biskra, too exhausted to write, Crowley dictated a letter to Captain Fuller, referring several times to ‘dear, kind Victor’, but also mentioning that he was having an awful job keeping Neuburg away from Arab boys for whose brown bottoms he had a ‘frightful lust.’ This is one of the few indications that Neuburg, like Crowley, was bisexual.

  The episode of the fourteenth call had brought Crowley a profound insight, which was to dominate the rest of his life: the recognition that sex was one of the most effective ways of ‘focusing the mind’, and that therefore it could be used as an aid to magic. It may have been this insight that decided Crowley to break his vow to the Golden Dawn, and publish their secret rituals in the third issue of The Equinox. This was too much for Mathers, who hurried to London and filed an injunction to prevent publication. To Crowley's rage, a judge confirmed the injunction. Crowley promptly appealed, and also consecrated an Abra-Melin talisman to aquire the affection of a judge. It seems to have worked; at least, the appeal was successful, and the third volume of The Equinox contained the forbidden material.

  But all this cost money, and Crowley was beginning to run out—even his chief disciple Neuburg was not a bottomless well. In May 1910, he was struck by an interesting idea. At the home of a Commander Marston in Dorset (the commander was obsessed with tom-toms, which he believed had an aphrodisiac effect on women) Victor Neuburg went into a trance, in the course of which he performed a ritual dance. (He also correctly prophesied that there would be two wars over the next few years, one involving Turkey, one involving Germany, and that the wars would bring about the ruination of both countries.) Marston suggested that the dances deserved to be performed publicly, and Crowley scented the idea of making money. A few weeks later, a performance was given at Crowley's flat in Victoria Street—this was to be a ‘dummy run.’ Crowley had recently acquired himself a new mistress, a half-Maori violinist named Leila Waddell, whose playing, according to Crowley, was ‘coarse, crude, with no touch of sublety.’ She was to play while Neuburg danced, and Crowley read his own poetry. Crowley had devised seven ‘rites.’ A young woman named Ethel Archer, whose verse had been submitted to The Equinox, later described that evening to Jean Overton Fuller. She and the rest of the audience sat on cushions on the floor, and were given a ‘loving cup’ that tasted like rotten apples, but which contained some drug which soon made them ‘high’ (the effect lasted for a week). Then Neuburg danced, while Leila played; Crowley claims she played like a master, and astounded the critics. After an impressive dance in which he whirled like a dervish, Neuburg collapsed on the polished floor. A highly favourable review appeared in the Sketch.

  Now convinced that this was a paying proposition, Crowley decided to hire Caxton Hall, and charge five guineas for a series of ‘Rites of Eleusis’ that would take place on seven consecutive Wednesdays. Each evening would be dedicated to a rite based on one of the seven planets.

  Crowley's description of the rite of Saturn sounds highly impressive, with symbolic dances taking place behind veils, while a voice recites verses from James Thomson's City of Dreadful Night complaining about the meaninglessness of life and advocating suicide. But this time the press was less favourable—notably, Horatio Bottomley's John Bull and a scandal sheet called The Looking Glass. The critic of The Looking Glass described how he was admitted by a ‘rather dirty looking person attired in a sort of imitation Eastern robe’ (probably Neuburg, who was notoriously averse to washing.) Then ghostly figures appeared on the stage, and a man who looked as if he had come out of a Turkish bath. The figure of ‘the Master’ appears, and the ghostly figures beg him to tell them if there is a God. The stage is plunged in darkness, and after a while, the Master returns and declares that there is no God, and that everyone should do as they like and make the most of this life. The writer then went on to hint that sexual irregularities probably took place in the darkness, and backed up his speculation by offering a potted history of Crowley. It referred to his association with a ‘rascally Buddhist monk’ named Alan Bennett, with whom Crowley had indulged in ‘unmentionable immoralities’, then went on to mention George Cecil Jones, and to imply that he had also had homosexual relations with Crowley. It seems likely that this scandalous gossip originated with Mathers.

  Captain Fuller was thoroughly upset—after all, he had written a book about Crowley, and would now have to live down the imputation of being another homosexual. It was true that he was married, but then, so were Crowley and Jones. To Fuller's annoyance, Crowley declined to sue The Looking Glass. But Jones decided to go ahead on his own. The result was disaster, The Looking Glass insisted that it had not claimed that Jones was a homosexual, but argued that anyone who was closely associated with Crowley had no reputation to lose. A certain Dr Berridge, a friend of Mathers, appeared as a witness, and claimed that he had once asked Crowley if he knew that people thought he was a sodomite, and that Crowley had failed to deny it. Evidence of Crowley's indecent sense of humour was produced in court—such as the Latin marginal notes to an essay whose initial letters spelt piss, cunt, arse and quim. This finally convinced the jury that Jones had no case; they found that the allegation that he was a homosexual was true in substance and in fact. Captain Fuller was so upset that he broke off his friendship with Crowley. Recruitment to the Silver Star, which had been progressing healthily, now began to fall off. For the first time, the general public became aware of Crowley as a man of sinister reputation. For years Crowley had been out to shock and outrage the English, with absolutely no effect. One senses from his poetry and short stories that he often felt that any kind of notoriety was preferable to total lack of recognition. It must have been a startling experience to realise that his message was suddenly getting across, and that the notoriety was not an unmixed blessing. From now on for the rest of his life, Crowley would be unable to escape a reputation for wickedness.

  For the moment, however, he was unaware of the disadvantages of being regarded as unspeakable. When he heard that Epstein's monument to Oscar Wilde in Père-Lachaise had been covered over with a tarpaulin because the statue's penis offended the guardian of the cemetery, he launched a campaign to defy the puritans. Having distributed pamplets asking the public to come and support him at midday on 5 November, he hid in the cemetery until the gates were closed, then sawed through the cords holding the tarpaulin, and attached thin wires so that a good tug from behind a nearby tree would unveil the statue. In due course, the crowds arrived, but the soldiers Crowley had been expecting to find on guard were absent. The French authorities had decided not to expose themselves to ridicule, and Crowley's unveiling of the statue was an anticlimax. Later, when he discovered that the penis had again been hidden from sight (this time by a bronze butterfly) he sneaked into the cemetery and stole it, then walked into the Café Royal in London wearing it as a codpiece, ‘to the delight of the assembled multitude.’ His craving for publicity was like an unquenchable thirst.

  After this episode, Crowley and Neuburg returned to his ‘beloved Sahara.’ It was their intention to practise more Enochian magic and gain visions of the sixteen sub-elements, but Crowley found that, magically speaking, he was simply not on form, and gave up. He concluded that magic depends not on the conscious will, but on the ‘true will’, which may or may not be favourably disposed.

  On 11 October 1911, Crowley attended a party at the Savoy given by the dancer Isadora Duncan for the birthday of her close friend Mary d'Esté Sturges, ‘a magnificent specimen of mingled Irish and Italian blood’, exactly the sort of extraordinary woman who always attracted Crowley. Crowley had recently learned that his ex-wife had been certified insane from ‘alcoholic dementia’, and was ready for a fresh adventure. Mary seems to have put up a certain token resistance, but when Crowley turned up at h
er Paris flat a few weeks later, she surrendered and accompanied him to Switzerland. Mary Sturges knew nothing whatever of magic. Retiring to bed one night after heavy drinking and some vigorous sex, Crowley was awakened by Mary, who seemed to be hysterical, and raved about some vision she had just experienced. She had seen a man called Ab-ul-Diz, who had spoken to her of matters she did not understand. Crowley finally recognized that Ab-ul-Diz was speaking in the language of magic symbolism, and that he knew Crowley's occult name, Perdurabo. (Crowley insists that Mary had never heard it.) Finally, Ab-ul-Diz announced that he would reappear in precisely one week, and took his leave. A week later, in the Palace Hotel in St Moritz, Ab-ul-Diz again appeared to Mary, and another magical conversation ensued. Mary was told that her magical name was Virakam; but otherwise, the exchange was frustrating and disappointing. But at least it seemed clear that, like Rose and Victor Neuburg, she was a natural ‘scryer.’ Subsequent encounters with Ab-ul-Diz led Crowley to believe that he was being ordered to go to Italy, and there write a book on magic. When he asked how he would recognize the place, a message flashed into his consciousness: ‘You will recognize it beyond the possibility of doubt or error’, and he saw a picture of a house on a hillside, with two Persian nut trees outside. And many days later, as they passed an overgrown lane in the car, Mary suddenly ordered the chauffeur to drive down it. When it seemed they could go no further, they found the villa with the nut trees. It was under repair, and the foreman told them it was not to let. But he proved to be mistaken; the owner allowed them to rent it for a small sum, and they moved in. And there Crowley dictated and Mary transcribed the work known as Book Four, one of Crowley's best and clearest expositions of the principles of yoga and his magical ideas.

  One midnight, as he finished dictating, Mary was astonished when Crowley's face began to change, as if he was becoming a number of different persons in succession. Then the room filled with golden light, and Crowley's chair seemed to float off the ground and become a throne. Moreover, Crowley seemed to be dead. Mary fainted.

  Book Four was intended to be in four parts; but after the second part, they quarelled—Mary seems to have possessed a violent temper—and rushed back to Paris. There she relented and telegraphed Crowley to join her, which he did. But there were more quarrels, and soon she showed unmistakable signs of becoming an alcoholic. According to Crowley, she then married a Turkish adventurer, who beat her, then deserted her. Crowley felt, in any case, that a magical partnership was out of the question. ‘Her own masterless passions could hardly have allowed her to pass unscathed through the ordeals which are always imposed upon those who undertake tasks of this importance.’ Crowley seems to have been a remarkably acute judge of other people's characters; it seems strange that he displayed so little insight into his own.

  * * *

  1. Quoted extensively by Jean Overton Fuller in The Magical Dilemma of Victor Neuburg (1965); the episode is also described at length in The Magical World of Aleister Crowley by Francis King (1977)

  Six

  The Magic Wand

  EVER SINCE his vision of the fourteenth aethyr at Bou-Saada, Crowley had been dimly aware that there was some unfathomed connection between the two major interests of his life: sex and magic. The insight that was trying to break through into his awareness was that if sex is to be more than a merely physical activity, it demands precisely the same kind of mental disciplines as magic. At the time Crowley was attempting to form his own magical society to supplant the Golden Dawn, a Russian man of genius was organizing his first groups of followers in Tiflis and Moscow. His name was George Gurdjieff, and his central realization was that the human mind is appallingly feeble and undeveloped compared to the human body. We think that our lives have purpose and continuity, but this is only because the body is relatively durable. The mind that controls it changes from moment to moment. Our only chance of achieving any kind of real continuity is to make tremendous and sustained efforts of will. Gurdjieff's work consisted of various disciplines to make this effort possible.

  By comparison, Crowley lacked profound insight into human nature; he wasted far too much time and moral energy fighting a rearguard action against the religion of his parents and grandparents. He never rid himself of the simplistic idea that the real aim of life is to enjoy oneself. Yet Crowley recognized instinctively that magic could offer some of the disciplines that his schooling had failed to instill. The way of the Kabbalah demands a high level of concentration and discipline of the imagination. Yet Crowley freely admits that he was too easily bored, and was always neglecting his magical disciplines. Like most of us, Crowley greatly preferred play to work. Tom Sawyer points out that work is what one is obliged to do and play is what one is not obliged to do. So as soon as Crowley committed himself to a discipline, the law of reverse effort impelled him to abandon it.

  Now if there was one thing that Crowley preferred above all others, it was sex. And sex, by definition, was play. Yet that experience on Mount Del'leh Addin offered Crowley a glimpse of an amazing truth. Sex is also a discipline of the imagination. A man who makes love while thinking of something else will not really enjoy it. Conversely, a man who has spent a long time pursuing the girl of his dreams will treat lovemaking as a sacred rite; he will concentrate so as not to lose a single drop of the experience. Sexual pleasure depends upon a certain vital energy, but the mind is the funnel through which this energy is poured. Again, when a man is in bed with a girl in the dark, he has lost most of the visual aids that enabled him to appreciate her; the ‘funnelling process’ must include a certain capacity for visualisation—again, the same capacity required by a student of the Kabbalah.

  What was slowly dawning on Crowley in the year 1911 was that sex could provide an easy and pleasant method of achieving ‘magical concentration.’ But at this stage it remained, as it were, in suspension, waiting for some event to crystallize it.

  This event occurred in the following year, when Crowley received an unexpected visit from a German named Theodore Reuss, who introduced himself as a high-ranking German Freemason and the head of a magical order called the OTO—the Ordo Templi Orientis, or Order of the Temple of the East. And, to Crowley's astonishment, Reuss accused him of betraying the secrets of the ninth grade of this order. Now it so happened that Crowley was a member of the OTO—he had joined it in the previous year. But then, Crowley was a kind of collector of secret societies, and he had joined it thinking it was simply another order of Freemasons (otherwise, why did it call itself a temple?). Crowley hastened to point out that he had not reached the ninth grade, and so could not betray its secrets. Reuss then reached out and took from Crowley's shelf his recent work The Book of Lies, and pointed to a section that opened: ‘Let the adept be armed with his magic rood and provided with his mystic rose.’ Reuss was obviously unaware that although ‘rood’ means rod in old English, it is generally used of a crucifix, and that this is what Crowley meant by it.1 Crowley had a flash of intuition, and realized that the ‘secrets’ of the ninth degree were sexual in nature. He and Reuss had a long conversation about magic and sex, and found themselves in close sympathy. And when Reuss left, he had allowed Crowley to found an English branch of the OTO. Crowley had to go to Berlin to be initiated; typically, he chose for himself that magical name Baphomet—the name of the demonic idol that the Knight Templars were accused of worshipping.

  The rituals of the OTO were not simply an excuse for sexual orgies. The order had been founded around the turn of the century by a rich German named Karl Kellner, and Reuss was his successor. (He seems to have been rather an odd character: a member of the German secret service, a journalist, a music hall singer, and a political agitator who tried to infiltrate the London Marxist organization.) Kellner had been heavily influenced by the branch of Hinduism known as Tantra, an attempt to achieve mystical union with the universe by regarding it as a continuous process of creation. This was blended with orthodox western magic, which is based upon the belief that the mind can exercise a direct i
nfluence on nature. One of the most widespread forms of magic, for example, is the charging of talismans with magical power—a talisman is a ‘charm’ designed to help its owner to achieve a certain end, such as wealth or sexual conquest or fame. A talisman would normally be ‘charged’ by the performance of a ritual of ceremonial magic. In the OTO, two ‘initiates’ would perform a ceremony culminating in a sexual act, concentrating on the aim of the magical operation, and end by anointing the talisman with a mixture of sperm and the secretions of the vagina, known as the ‘elixir’, or amrita.

  Crowley's discovery of sex magic was indisputably the major turning point of his life. It united his two central aims: to be a magician and to be a sexual athlete. There was undoubtedly another aspect of Tantrism that attracted him. In Tantric legends, most of its saints are initiated by a woman who is the ‘power holder.’ She might be a prostitute or a temple dancer, or some other form of ‘untouchable’, and one of the aims of uniting with her is to lose caste, to break all bonds with the everyday world. Crowley, with his strong masochistic tendencies, loved this idea of a female power holder, and it explains why, sexually speaking, his preference was for thoroughly experienced women like Rose, Leila Waddell and Mary Sturges.

  Crowley must have deeply impressed Reuss, for Reuss not only agreed to allow Crowley to set up an English branch of the OTO, but seems to have accepted the basic tenets of The Book of the Law. (After losing this for several years, Crowley had rediscovered it in his attic in 1909, and had since become increasingly convinced that it was the Bible of the new religion that would replace Christianity.) Crowley's first act on becoming head of the London OTO was to rewrite all its rituals in his own inimitable style.2 They are, of course, full of quotations from The Book of the Law, and laced with Crowleyan blasphemies, such as a section on the Black Mass in which Crowley attacks Roman Catholicism as ‘that base and materialistic cult’, and praises practitioners of the Black Mass because ‘at least they set up Man against the foul demon of Christians.’ When published in the German organ of the OTO, the Oriflame, Crowley's rituals caused some scandal among German members, and Reuss was heavily criticized. Even Reuss must have recognized by this time that Crowley was a man whose egocentricity knew no limits, and who would never be contented until he he had turned the OTO into an organization for the propagation of Crowleyanity. But before this could happen the First World War had broken out, and the problem was temporarily shelved.